Art of the Question
Claim This Podcastby Julius Moorman
Podcast Overview
<p>Conversations about science, technology, philosophy, psychology, self-improvement, media, and culture.</p>
Language
🇺🇲
Publishing Since
3/8/2026
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Recent Episodes
July 20, 2026
The Surprising Benefits of Gaming - Prof. Shawn Green - #38
<p>C. Shawn Green is a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who studies how people learn and how experience reshapes perception and cognition. As an undergraduate he joined a lab investigating how congenital deafness alters vision, and while testing his measures on a few avid gamer friends he found they scored far above where anyone should, a puzzle that became his senior thesis and launched a career. His work with Daphne Bavelier helped establish that fast paced action video games, particularly first person shooters, can sharpen visual attention, speed of processing, and the capacity to filter distraction. He has spent more than two decades separating hype from evidence, showing that not all games are the same and that the benefits track the specific demands a game places on the brain. His research now spans surgical training, aging and rehabilitation, and the idea that games can teach people to learn new skills faster. He directs the Learning and Transfer Lab and has been cited more than twenty thousand times.</p><p></p><p>Expect to learn how a testing error on three gamer friends started a whole field of research, why action games improve some cognitive skills but not others, what the correlational versus training study design reveals about causation, how many hours of play it takes to see real effects, why an hour a day beats marathon sessions, what makes the frustrating edge of difficulty the sweet spot for learning, how gaming experience transfers to surgery and piloting, whether games can protect against cognitive decline in aging, why virtual reality still struggles to prove its worth, what a healthy gaming protocol actually looks like, why treating video games as one category is the biggest mistake people make, and how games may teach the deeper skill of learning to learn.</p><p></p><p>Shawn Green online:</p><p>Google Scholar: search C. Shawn Green, University of Wisconsin</p><p>University profile: <a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="http://psych.wisc.edu" target="_blank">psych.wisc.edu</a></p><p>Lab: Learning and Transfer Lab, UW Madison</p><p></p><p>0:00 Are you a gamer</p><p>0:55 The congenital deafness lab</p><p>2:15 Friends scoring off the charts</p><p>5:07 When the field began</p><p>7:01 Correlational versus training studies</p><p>10:01 What the cognitive tests measure</p><p>12:09 Why only some skills improve</p><p>13:26 Sustained attention and new genres</p><p>15:36 The trouble with chess</p><p>19:16 How many hours it takes</p><p>22:19 The difficulty sweet spot</p><p>24:35 Gamers in the operating room</p><p>27:53 Bringing the science to work</p><p>32:41 Gaming and aging brains</p><p>40:38 The problem with VR</p><p>46:59 A healthy gaming protocol</p><p>51:08 Games are not a monolith</p><p>53:25 Learning to learn</p><p>59:04 GTA 6 and where to find Shawn</p>
July 16, 2026
The Ethics of Living With Robots - Prof. Sven Nyholm - #37
<p>Sven Nyholm is Professor of the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence at LMU Munich and a Principal Investigator at the Munich Center for Machine Learning. Before Munich he taught at Utrecht University and TU Eindhoven, where playing goalie against a soccer-playing RoboCup robot first pulled him toward the philosophy of human-robot interaction. He is co-editor of the journal Science and Engineering Ethics, and his books include Humans and Robots: Ethics, Agency, and Anthropomorphism and This is Technology Ethics: An Introduction. His latest book, The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, closes with what he calls the AI wager: the idea that society is betting on this technology to solve our problems while gambling with its future. In this conversation he draws on self-driving car fatalities, sex robots, AI companions, and the Richard Dawkins Claude story to think through what happens as machines move into everyday life.</p><p></p><p>Expect to learn how a game of robot soccer led Sven into robot ethics, why humans anthropomorphize even machines that look like trash cans, what separates pre-programmed factory robots from adaptive AI-powered ones, whether the trolley problem actually applies to self-driving cars, why a death caused by a robot can feel more tragic than one caused by a human, how responsibility and the inability to apologize sit at the center of machine harm, what the Dawkins Claude episode reveals about our hardwired agency detection, why sex robots and AI companions attract both disgust and sympathy, whether embodied robots or text chatbots trigger stronger anthropomorphizing, how frictionless sycophantic AI may erode critical thinking and relationships, what the laziness trap means for children learning with AI, and whether large language models are approaching a plateau.</p><p></p><p>Sven Nyholm online:<br />Bluesky: <a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://bsky.app/profile/svennyholm.bsky.social" target="_blank">https://bsky.app/profile/svennyholm.bsky.social</a><br />LinkedIn: <a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sven-nyholm-5b8507167/" target="_blank">https://www.linkedin.com/in/sven-nyholm-5b8507167/</a><br />Book — The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: <a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.amazon.com/Ethics-Artificial-Intelligence-Philosophical-Introduction/dp/1647922674" target="_blank">https://www.amazon.com/Ethics-Artificial-Intelligence-Philosophical-Introduction/dp/1647922674</a><br />All his books (Amazon author page): <a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.amazon.com/stores/Sven-Nyholm/author/B0GTPB6JXB" target="_blank">https://www.amazon.com/stores/Sven-Nyholm/author/B0GTPB6JXB</a></p><p></p><p>0:00 Robots beyond the factory</p><p>0:43 From robot soccer to robot ethics</p><p>4:53 Anthropomorphizing and image recognition</p><p>7:18 Classic robots versus AI robots</p><p>11:59 The trolley problem and self-driving cars</p><p>13:50 From hypothetical to real fatalities</p><p>20:19 Why robot deaths feel more tragic</p><p>24:33 Responsibility and machines that cannot apologize</p><p>30:00 Darwinian buttons and the Dawkins Claude story</p><p>33:24 Humanoid robots entering the home</p><p>40:37 Sex robots and AI companionship</p><p>43:37 His documentary on AI relationships</p><p>46:03 Text versus embodied anthropomorphizing</p><p>51:53 Frictionless companions and critical thinking</p><p>56:44 Kicking robots and human empathy</p><p>1:01:09 Unhinged Grok and tuning personality</p><p>1:06:25 The AI wager and future outlook</p><p>1:11:59 Plateau of large language models</p><p>1:19:42 The laziness trap and learning</p>
July 13, 2026
How Men's Groups Cure Loneliness - Kian Nemzer - #36
<p>Kian is a recent graduate of LIU Global and the researcher behind a thesis on loneliness in men. Studying global studies, he was tasked with picking a global issue to research across his whole degree, and he chose loneliness because it was personal to him: he had experienced isolation in school and again later while changing careers and adopting a healthier lifestyle. Drawing on his own time in a men's group he joined at nineteen, he traveled to Bali to conduct three months of fieldwork, interviewing fifteen men who had participated in emotionally open men's groups for anywhere from one year to thirty. From over three hundred codes he distilled five findings, all pointing toward one conclusion: intentionally built men's groups are a viable, sustainable intervention for loneliness. In this conversation, his first ever podcast appearance, he walks through the research, the definition of loneliness, and what actually makes these spaces work.</p><p></p><p>Expect to learn why loneliness is defined as the gap between the connection you have and the connection you want, how you can feel lonely while surrounded by friends, why youth under eighteen report the most loneliness, what the research says about AI companions alleviating loneliness in the short term, how loneliness can be as harmful to your health as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, why Kian avoids the phrase male loneliness epidemic, how masculine norms around emotional stoicism keep men isolated, what the five findings from his fifteen interviews actually revealed, why a men's group needs structural safety and confidentiality to work, how vulnerable sharing transforms isolation into connection, what the three pillars of consistency, proximity, and intimacy mean in practice, how the PIES framework helps men figure out what to share, and whether everyone should try joining a men's group at least once.</p><p></p><p>Kian online:</p><p>YouTube: BeinKian</p><p>Short film: his film on his loneliness research is on his YouTube channel, with further links in the description</p><p></p><p>0:00 Why study loneliness in men</p><p>1:32 His own experience of loneliness</p><p>8:39 Defining loneliness</p><p>12:48 Connected yet more disconnected</p><p>16:41 AI companions and loneliness</p><p>20:16 The health effects of loneliness</p><p>22:13 The male loneliness epidemic term</p><p>25:42 Masculine norms and emotional stoicism</p><p>28:17 The study and Bali fieldwork</p><p>35:00 The interviews and main finding</p><p>39:09 Finding one: structural safety</p><p>43:46 Finding two: a male-only space</p><p>47:37 Finding three: isolation into connection</p><p>52:55 Findings four and five: belonging and solitude</p><p>59:01 Building a good men's group</p><p>1:03:49 The PIES framework</p><p>1:14:25 Should everyone try it</p><p>1:20:19 What's next for Kian</p>
38 total episodes available
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<p>Conversations about science, technology, philosophy, psychology, self-improvement, media, and culture.</p> - How often does this podcast release new episodes?
This podcast updates daily.
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