187 | Andrew Leigh on the Politics of Looming Disasters

187 | Andrew Leigh on the Politics of Looming Disasters

We're pretty well-calibrated when it comes to dealing with common, everyday-level setbacks. But our brains aren't naturally equipped for dealing with unlikely but world-catastrophic disasters. Yet such threats are real, both natural and human-induced. We need to collectively get better at anticipating and preparing for them, at the level of political action. Andrew Leigh is an academic and author who now serves in the Parliament of Australia. We discuss how to move the conversation about existential risks from the ivory tower to implementation in real policies.

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Andrew Leigh received his Ph.D. in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is a member of the Australian House of Representatives representing Fenner. He was previously a professor of economics at Australian National University, and has served as Shadow Assistant Minister for Treasury and Charities. His recent book is What's the Worst That Could Happen? Existential Risk and Extreme Politics.


Episoder(416)

255 | Michael Muthukrishna on Developing a Theory of Everyone

255 | Michael Muthukrishna on Developing a Theory of Everyone

A "Theory of Everything" is physicists' somewhat tongue-in-cheek phrase for a hypothetical model of all the fundamental physical interactions. Of course, even if we had such a theory, it would tell us...

30 Okt 20231h 17min

254 | William Egginton on Kant, Heisenberg, and Borges

254 | William Egginton on Kant, Heisenberg, and Borges

It can be tempting, when first introduced to a deep concept of physics like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, to draw grand philosophical conclusions about the impossibility of knowing anything prec...

23 Okt 20231h 6min

253 | David Deutsch on Science, Complexity, and Explanation

253 | David Deutsch on Science, Complexity, and Explanation

David Deutsch is one of the most creative scientific thinkers working today, who has as a goal to understand and explain the natural world as best we can. He was a pioneer in quantum computing, and ha...

16 Okt 20231h 42min

AMA | October 2023

AMA | October 2023

Welcome to the October 2023 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 Pat...

9 Okt 20232h 58min

252 | Hannah Ritchie on Keeping Hope for the Planet Alive

252 | Hannah Ritchie on Keeping Hope for the Planet Alive

Our planet and its environment are in bad shape, in all sorts of ways. Those of us who want to improve the situation face a dilemma. On the one hand, we have to be forceful and clear-headed about how ...

2 Okt 20231h 15min

251 | Rosemary Braun on Uncovering Patterns in Biological Complexity

251 | Rosemary Braun on Uncovering Patterns in Biological Complexity

Biological organisms are paradigmatic emergent systems. That atoms of which they are made mindlessly obey the local laws of physics; even cells and organs do their individual jobs without explicitly u...

25 Sep 20231h 11min

250 | Brendan Nyhan on Navigating the Information Ecosystem

250 | Brendan Nyhan on Navigating the Information Ecosystem

The modern world inundates us with both information and misinformation. What are the forces that conspire to make misinformation so prevalent? Can we combat the flow of misinformation, perhaps by lega...

18 Sep 202357min

249 | Peter Godfrey-Smith on Sentience and Octopus Minds

249 | Peter Godfrey-Smith on Sentience and Octopus Minds

The study of cognition and sentience would be greatly abetted by the discovery of intelligent alien beings, who presumably developed independently of life here on Earth. But we do have more than one d...

11 Sep 20231h 28min

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