Starts:

Friday April 11, 2025

    7:30 PM

Hi! I’m a new-ish club member (joined last September). I have a PhD in psychology and I write a Substack called Experimental History, where I write about the frontiers of psychology and science more generally. One of the joys of joining the Montauk Club has been meeting other folks interested in science and science communication: Byrd Pinkerton, who produces the podcast Unexplainable for Vox, and Uri Bram, who blogs about science at Atoms vs. Bits. We’d like to host an event we call Mad Science Talks, where we each tackle an issue at the very edges of human knowledge.

Byrd will talk about a journey to the center of the earth that went horribly awry but ended up laying the foundation for climate science. Uri will talk about the Chimp-Pig Hypothesis, which is a fringe theory in biology that’s almost certainly untrue, but raises critical questions about how we know what we know.

I’ll talk about the Mystery of the 300,000 Year Toilet: why did it take so long to invent the flush toilet, and everything else? We’ll round out the night with a few talks from some of our friends. One will explore the intersection of cybernetics (the science of control systems) and psychology, and the last one we’re still confirming––it might be about neuroscience or about how algorithms affect language.

We’re aiming to start at 7:30pm on Friday, April 11. Each talk will last a maximum of 15 minutes, with 5 min Q&A. We’ll then break for unstructured discussion among anyone who would like to hang out and talk more.

Please RSVP if you would like to join.