149 | Lee Smolin on Time, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality
The challenge to a theoretical physicist pushing beyond our best current theories is that there are too many ways to go. What parts of the existing paradigm do you keep, which do you discard, and why ...
31 Touko 20211h 29min
148 | Henry Farrell on Democracy as a Problem-Solving Mechanism
Democracy posits the radical idea that political power and legitimacy should ultimately be found in all of the people, rather than a small group of experts or for that matter arbitrarily-chosen heredi...
24 Touko 20211h 26min
147 | Rachel Laudan on Cuisine, Culture, and Empire
For as much as people talk about food, a good case can be made that we don't give it the attention or respect it actually deserves. Food is central to human life, and how we go about the process of cr...
17 Touko 20211h 16min
AMA | May 2021
Welcome to the May 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of questio...
13 Touko 20212h 58min
146 | Emily Riehl on Topology, Categories, and the Future of Mathematics
"A way that math can make the world a better place is by making it a more interesting place to be a conscious being." So says mathematician Emily Riehl near the start of this episode, and it's a good ...
10 Touko 20211h 16min
145 | Niall Ferguson on Histories, Networks, and Catastrophes
The world has gone through a tough time with the COVID-19 pandemic. Every catastrophic event is unique, but there are certain commonalities to how such crises play out in our modern interconnected wor...
3 Touko 20211h 25min
144 | Solo: Are We Moving Beyond the Standard Model?
I've been a professional physicist since the 1980's, and not once over the course of my career has a particle-physics experiment produced a completely surprising new result. We've discovered particles...
26 Huhti 20211h 11min
143 | Julia Galef on Openness, Bias, and Rationality
Mom, apple pie, and rationality — all things that are unquestionably good, right? But rationality, as much as we might value it, is easier to aspire to than to achieve. And there are more than a few h...
19 Huhti 20211h 32min
