Vikram Mansharamani on how to stop outsourcing your opinions and re-learn critical thinking

Hardly Working with Brent Orrell

This episode is a rebroadcast of one of our most popular episodes! We hope that bringing it back now will allow the content to find new listeners. Enjoy!

~Hunter Dixon (podcast producer, Hardly Working)

We live in times marked by the omnipresence of the internet and instantaneous access to the accumulated knowledge of humanity. This leads us into relying on quick, narrow answers to large, complex questions. Are we going too far in our reliance on experts and, in the process, forgetting how to think for ourselves?

Brent talks to Vikram Mansharamani, a lecturer at Harvard University and the author of “Think for Yourself: Restoring Common Sense in An Age of Experts and Artificial Intelligence”. They discuss the need to reduce our reliance on experts living in the silos of their own professional fields, the importance of a liberal arts education, and the importance of staying focused on your mission.