The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - August 19, 2026


On the Dangers of Lacking Critical Thinking Skills (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1035)


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

116.98

Word count

282

Sentence count

14

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hi, everybody. I woke up this morning. As always, I checked my messages and had this really angry message from a woman who was unbelievably irate at having to listen to my voice explaining the finding stemming from Margo Wilson and Martin Daly, two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology, wherein they explained that the biggest predictor of child abuse
00:00:29.980 in a home a hundredfold greater predicted than anything else is the presence of a step-parent.
00:00:39.680 And so she wrote to me because she could not believe that I could say something so insane
00:00:44.020 because she's a stepmother and she loves her stepdaughter and so on. You know, it really is
00:00:50.540 baffling that a functioning adult can make such a statistical inferencing error, such a basic
00:01:00.740 critical thinking error. Nearly all rapists are men. That statement holds true, even though most 0.98
00:01:10.000 men that you meet are not rapists. Nearly all pedophiles are men, even though most men you meet
00:01:18.780 are not pedophile. Men are taller than women and bigger than women, even though your Aunt Jenny
00:01:28.300 is taller and bigger than your Uncle Roscoe. So, a statement that holds true can hold, 0.99
00:01:39.460 can be true, can be veridical, even though it doesn't apply to your personal case.
00:01:47.160 Smoking causes lung cancer even though your grandfather Joe smoked until he was 100
00:01:55.720 and didn't get cancer.
00:01:58.620 This is why I always say there is nothing more dangerous in nature than a parasitized mind.
00:02:08.080 This is why I do the work that I do because I try to offer people a mind vaccine
00:02:15.840 so that they could navigate through the world more accurately
00:02:20.040 and with a better critical thinking hygiene.
00:02:23.900 Take care, everybody.