I am mainly linking this for the Special Segment on Falsifiability in Science starting at 01:12:42 with a philosophy expert on it, which is really interesting. The rest of the podcast is interesting too and there is a great discussion on how AI Detection Tools for detecting AI Writing are extremely problematic and also discussion about a study on how kids use AI and how abstinence based responses/age gating don’t work.
This article is by the philosophy expert and makes the same essential points.
On their last episode (Episode #1095, aired July 4, 2026) they went back to basics and discussed the definition of “scientific skepticism.” Since this is the defining feature of the podcast — being scientific skeptics is what they do — you’d think this would be easy; but as they anticipated, and any philosopher (all the way back to Plato) knows, giving precise accurate definitions of even common concepts that everyone “thinks they know” usually turns out to be way more complicated than it would seem.
So, what is scientific skepticism? They rightly pointed out that it isn’t philosophical skepticism (i.e., the claim that knowledge is impossible). And it has nothing to do with being a “vaccine” or “climate change” skeptic. That is science denial, and the last thing a scientific skeptic does is deny science. They also rightly pointed out that it is an epistemology, or epistemological approach — a way of gaining knowledge. But they also suggested that scientific skepticism is distinct from science itself, and I don’t think that is exactly right … or, if it is, it’s not true in a way captured by the rogues’ conversation.
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Granted, some instrumentalists could have found the theories of some scientists, trying to make sense of the quantum world — like the pilot wave theory, the multiverse theory, and so on — too speculative and not scientific because there was no way to test them. So, I can kind of see how Steve would interpret the phrase the way he did. But it’s also worth pointing out that those instrumentalists misunderstand the nature of science. The role of science is not just to test hypotheses; that is the role of experiment, but experiment does not exhaust science. Science is inference to the best explanation, the comparison of hypotheses; and to compare hypotheses, they must be generated. That’s what those scientists, theorizing about what quantum mechanics means, were doing. That’s not unscientific; that’s the starting point of all scientific knowledge!
https://philpeople.org/profiles/511478/publication_attributions?app=96">Aja&page=2
Transcript not available yet.
https://www.sgutranscripts.org/wiki/SGU_Episode_1096
Episode #1096
News Items
Using AI To Detect AI Cheating
Teens Using AI Chatbots
NYT Article on Rapid Prompting Method
SETI Partly Explains Fermi
Quickie with Bob
https://phys.org/news/2026-06-scientists-molecular-evidence-liquid.html
Special Segment
What is “Falsifiability”
Science or Fiction
Item #1
An analysis of the scat of the California Gray Wolf finds a significant contribution of domesticated pets in their diet. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0351768
Item #2
A recent study finds that individual human neurons have significantly more computational information than rat neurons, which is likely one mechanism for increased human intelligence. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2533168123
Item #3
A new analysis finds that a bilaterally symmetrical species from the Ediacaran fauna shows signs of “handedness”, or one-sided preference. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-53857-x
Skeptical Quote of the Week.
“I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.” – Poul Anderson