#66 - Daniel Simons: Why Smart People Get Fooled—and How to Know When You’re the One Who’s Wrong

Daniel Simons is a Psychology Professor at the University of Illinois whose work asks a deeply uncomfortable question: how much can you trust your own mind?Most of us think deception is something that happens to other people.But he argues that the mechanisms behind those failures are completely ordinary. - We trust people who feel familiar. - We scrutinize ideas we disagree with more than ideas we already believe. - We mistake confidence for accuracy. And once we commit strongly enough to an idea, we can become extremely good at explaining away evidence against it.Professor Simons has spent much of his career studying the ways perception, memory, and intuition can mislead us.We talk about scientific fraud, cults, replication, Theranos, tech hype, AGI, and why being wrong can sometimes be the most interesting outcome in science.Toward the end, the conversation turns to college and life. Simons argues that young people specialize too early. Try more things. Take the class outside your field. Get comfortable being pretty good at several things instead of needing to be the best at one.Because whether you’re choosing a major, evaluating a scientific claim, or deciding who to trust, the problem is often the same:You’re making a judgment from the small piece of the world you can see, while forgetting how much remains outside the frame.*EPISODE LINKS:*- Daniel Simons’s Website: https://www.dansimons.com/- Daniel Simons’s UIUC Website: https://psychology.illinois.edu/directory/profile/dsimons- Daniel Simons’s Wikipedia Page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Simons*BOOKS*- Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It: https://amzn.to/3SDw55g- The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us: https://amzn.to/4gJ9Wvp*What is the UIUC Talkshow?*Our goal with this show is to introduce you to the most interesting people with the most interesting ideas.*Learn more about Juan David & Aaryaman:*Aaryaman- Website: https://www.aaryamanpatel.com/ Juan David- Website: https://www.juandavidcampolargo.com/