171 | Christopher Mims on Our Interconnected Industrial Ecology

Human beings like to divide themselves into groups, and then cooperate, socialize, and reproduce with members of their own group. But they're not very absolutist about it; groups tend to gradually (or...

10 Jan 20221h 13min

Are numbers real? What does that even mean? You can't kick a number. But you can talk about numbers in useful ways, and we use numbers to talk about the real world. There's surely a kind of reality th...

3 Jan 20221h 14min

As each December comes to a close, we wrap up another year of podcasts with the Mindscape Holiday Message. Nothing too profound, just some thoughts that wouldn't fit easily into a regular podcast. Thi...

20 Des 202159min

Welcome to the December 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 qu...

15 Des 20213h 37min

When it comes to thinking about quantum mechanics, there are levels. One level is shut-up-and-calculate: find a wave function, square it to get a probability. One level is foundational: dig deeply int...

13 Des 20211h 10min

We all know you can't derive "ought" from "is." But it's equally clear that "is" — how the world actual works — is going to matter for "ought" — our moral choices in the world. And an important part o...

6 Des 20211h 26min

We've talked about the very origin of life, but certain transitions along its subsequent history were incredibly important. Perhaps none more so than the transition from unicellular to multicellular o...

29 Nov 20211h 26min

Mathematics is often thought of as the pinnacle of crisp precision: the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle isn't "roughly" the sum of the squares of the other two sides, it's exactly that. B...

22 Nov 20211h 21min