Being rational necessarily involves engagement with probability. Given two possible courses of action, it can be rational to prefer the one that could possibly result in a worse outcome, if there's also a substantial probability for an even better outcome. But one's attitude toward risk -- averse, tolerant, or even seeking -- also matters. Do we work to avoid the worse possible outcome, even if there is potential for enormous reward? Nate Silver has long thought about probability and prediction,...
Aug 12, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep 285•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to the August 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy! Blog post with transcript: https:/...
Aug 05, 2024•4 hr 37 min•Transcript available on Metacast The human brain does a pretty amazing job of taking in a huge amount of data from multiple sensory modalities -- vision, hearing, smell, etc. -- and constructing a coherent picture of the world, constantly being updated in real time. (Although perhaps in discrete moments, rather than continuously, as we learn in this podcast...) We're a long way from completely understanding how that works, but amazing progress has been made in identifying specific parts of the brain with specific functions in t...
Jul 29, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep 284•Transcript available on Metacast Change is scary. But sometimes it can all work out for the best. There's no guarantee of that, however, even when the change in question involves the introduction of a powerful new technology. Today's guest, Daron Acemoglu, is a political economist who has long thought about the relationship between economics and political institutions. In his most recent book (with Simon Johnson), Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity , he looks at how technological...
Jul 22, 2024•1 hr 18 min•Ep 283•Transcript available on Metacast The philosophy of mathematics would be so much easier if it weren't for infinity. The concept seems natural, but taking it seriously opens the door to counterintuitive results. As mathematician and philosopher Joel David Hamkins says in this conversation, when we say that the natural numbers are "0, 1, 2, 3, and so on," that "and so on" is hopelessly vague. We talk about different ways to think about the puzzles of infinity, how they might be resolved, and implications for mathematical realism. ...
Jul 15, 2024•1 hr 18 min•Ep 282•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to the July 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy! Blog post with questions and transcr...
Jul 08, 2024•3 hr 22 min•Transcript available on Metacast Just like with physics, in biology it is perfectly possible to do most respectable work without thinking much about philosophy, but there are unmistakably foundational questions where philosophy becomes crucial. When do we say that a collection of matter (or bits) is alive? When does it become an agent, capable of making decisions? What are the origins of morality and altruistic behavior? We talk with one of the world's leading experts, Samir Okasha, about the biggest issues in modern philosophy...
Jul 01, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Ep 281•Transcript available on Metacast Which is more intelligent, ChatGPT or a 3-year old ? Of course this depends on what we mean by "intelligence." A modern LLM is certainly able to answer all sorts of questions that require knowledge far past the capacity of a 3-year old, and even to perform synthetic tasks that seem remarkable to many human grown-ups. But is that really intelligence? François Chollet argues that it is not, and that LLMs are not ever going to be truly "intelligent" in the usual sense -- although other approa...
Jun 24, 2024•2 hr 42 min•Ep 280•Transcript available on Metacast For those of us who are not dualists, the mind arises from our physical bodies -- mostly the brain, but the rest of the body has a role to play. And yet it remains tempting to treat the mind as a thing in itself, disconnected from how the body is doing. Ellen Langer is a psychologist who is one of the foremost researchers on the idea of mindfulness -- the cognitive skill of paying to one's thoughts, as well as to one's external environment. Her most recent book is The Mindful Body: Thinkin...
Jun 17, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Ep 279•Transcript available on Metacast We claim to love all of our children, friends, and students equally. But perhaps deep down you assign a ranking to them, from favorite to not-so-favorite. Ranking and quantifying people is an irresistible human tendency, and modern technology has made it ubiquitous. In this episode I talk with sociologist Kieran Healy, who has co-authored (with Marion Fourcade ) the new book The Ordinal Society , about how our lives are measured and processed by the technological ecosystem around us....
Jun 10, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep 278•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to the June 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy! S upport Mindscape on Patreon ...
Jun 03, 2024•4 hr 59 min•Transcript available on Metacast String theory, the current leading candidate for a theory of quantum gravity as well as other particles and forces, doesn't connect directly to the world we see. It's possible that there is a large landscape of possible states of theory, with the hope that one of them represents our universe. The existence of a landscape implies the existence of a corresponding swampland -- universes that are not compatible with string theory. I talk with Cumrun Vafa, a respec...
May 27, 2024•1 hr 22 min•Ep 277•Transcript available on Metacast The Earth's climate keeps changing, largely due to the effects of human activity, and we haven't been doing enough to slow things down. Indeed, over the past year, global temperatures have been higher than ever, and higher than most climate models have predicted. Many of you have probably seen plots like this . Today's guest, Gavin Schmidt, has been a leader in measuring the variations in Earth's climate, modeling its likely future trajectory, and working to get the word out. We talk about...
May 20, 2024•1 hr 20 min•Ep 276•Transcript available on Metacast Publication week! Say hello to Quanta and Fields , the second volume of the planned three-volume series The Biggest Ideas in the Universe . This volume covers quantum physics generally, but focuses especially on the wonders of quantum field theory. To celebrate, this solo podcast talks about some of the big ideas that make QFT so compelling: how quantized fields produce particles, how gauge symmetries lead to forces of nature, and how those forces can manifest in different phases, in...
May 13, 2024•2 hr 12 min•Ep 275•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to the May 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy! Blog post with questions and transcri...
May 06, 2024•4 hr 35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Modern biology is advancing by leaps and bounds, not only in understanding how organisms work, but in learning how to modify them in interesting ways. One exciting frontier is the study of tiny "robots" created from living molecules and cells, rather than metal and plastic. Gizem Gumuskaya, who works with previous guest Michael Levin , has created anthrobots, a new kind of structure made from living human cells. We talk about how that works, what they can do, and what future developments m...
Apr 29, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep 274•Transcript available on Metacast Humanity itself might be the hardest thing for scientists to study fairly and accurately. Not only do we come to the subject with certain inevitable preconceptions, but it's hard to resist the temptation to find scientific justifications for the stories we'd like to tell about ourselves. In his new book, The Invention of Prehistory , Stefanos Geroulanos looks at the ways that we have used -- and continue to use -- supposedly-scientific tales of prehistoric humanity to bolster whatever cult...
Apr 22, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Ep 273•Transcript available on Metacast Science is enabled by the fact that the natural world exhibits predictability and regularity, at least to some extent. Scientists collect data about what happens in the world, then try to suggest "laws" that capture many phenomena in simple rules. A small irony is that, while we are looking for nice compact rules, there aren't really nice compact rules about how to go about doing that. Today's guest, Leslie Valiant, has been a pioneer in understanding how computers can and do learn things about ...
Apr 15, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep 272•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to the April 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy! Blog post with questions and transc...
Apr 08, 2024•3 hr 14 min•Transcript available on Metacast Einstein's theory of general relativity has been our best understanding of gravity for over a century, withstanding a variety of experimental challenges of ever-increasing precision. But we have to be open to the possibility that general relativity -- even at the classical level, aside from any questions of quantum gravity -- isn't the right theory of gravity. Such speculation is motivated by cosmology, where we have a good model of the universe but one with a number of loose ends. Claudia de Rh...
Apr 01, 2024•1 hr 22 min•Ep 271•Transcript available on Metacast Technology is changing the world, in good and bad ways. Artificial intelligence, internet connectivity, biological engineering, and climate change are dramatically altering the parameters of human life. What can we say about how this will extend into the future? Will the pace of change level off, or smoothly continue, or hit a singularity in a finite time? In this informal solo episode, I think through what I believe will be some of the major forces shaping how human life will change over the de...
Mar 25, 2024•2 hr 9 min•Ep 270•Transcript available on Metacast When it comes to social change, two questions immediately present themselves: What kind of change do we want to see happen? And, how do we bring it about? These questions are distinct but related; there's not much point in spending all of our time wanting change that won't possibly happen, or working for change that wouldn't actually be good. Addressing such issues lies at the intersection of philosophy, political science, and social dynamics. Sahar Heydari Fard looks at all of these issues thro...
Mar 18, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep 269•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to the March 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Big congrats this month to Ryan Funakoshi, winner of t...
Mar 11, 2024•4 hr 56 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the 1860s, James Clerk Maxwell argued that light was a wave of electric and magnetic fields. But it took over four decades for physicists to put together the theory of special relativity, which correctly describes the symmetries underlying Maxwell's theory. The delay came in part from the difficulty in accepting that light was a wave, but not a wave in any underlying "aether." Today our most basic view of fundamental physics is found in quantum field theory, which posits that ever...
Mar 04, 2024•2 hr 30 min•Ep 268•Transcript available on Metacast The twentieth century was something, wasn't it? Margaret Mead , as well as her onetime-husband Gregory Bateson , managed to play roles in several of its key developments: social anthropology and its impact on sex & gender mores, psychedelic drugs and their potential use for therapeutic purposes, and the origin of cybernetics, to name a few. Benjamin Breen discusses this impactful trajectory in his new book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled B...
Feb 26, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Ep 267•Transcript available on Metacast Evolution is sometimes described -- not precisely, but with some justification -- as being about the "survival of the fittest." But that idea doesn't work unless there is some way for one generation to pass down information about how best to survive. We now know that such information is passed down in a variety of ways: through our inherited genome, through epigenetic factors, and of course through cultural transmission. Chris Adami suggests that we update Dobzhansky's maxim "Nothing...
Feb 19, 2024•1 hr 20 min•Ep 266•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to the February 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy! Blog post with questions and tra...
Feb 12, 2024•3 hr 25 min•Transcript available on Metacast Universities and their students are constantly being encouraged to produce more graduates majoring in STEM fields -- science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. That's the kind of training that will get you a rewarding job, students are told, while at the policy level it is emphasized how STEM workers are needed to drive innovation and growth. In his new book Wasted Education , sociologist John Skrentny points out that the post-graduation trajectories of STEM graduates are more like...
Feb 05, 2024•1 hr 20 min•Ep 265•Transcript available on Metacast The radius of the Earth is over 6,000 kilometers, but the deepest we've ever dug below the surface is only about 12 km. Yet we have a quite reliable idea of the structure of the Earth's interior -- inner core, outer core, mantle, crust -- not to mention pretty good pictures of what's going on inside some other planets. How do we know those things, and what new things are we learning in the exoplanet era? I talk with astrophysicist and planetary scientist Sabine Stanley about how...
Jan 29, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Ep 264•Transcript available on Metacast 
