Abstracting away from the specifics of any particular situation, it's interesting to ask whether it is ever worthwhile for a credible scientist to "debate" someone who is obviously wrong and/or argues in bad faith.

I think sometimes it is! (1/n) Yes, such debates are not ideal situations for finding truth. There are activities other than finding truth that might be worth pursuing. For example, inspiring people or making them think. Not even necessarily changing minds (which is hard), just introducing new thoughts. 2/n

The meltdown story of SBF/FTX is a crazy mix of crypto, fraud, and (somehow) effective altruism, about none of which I am truly an expert. But there does seem to be an overarching lesson: It is sometimes wise to temper your rationality.

gizmodo.com/sam-bankman-fr… I don't mean "be irrational." That wouldn't be very rational. We should strive to be as rational as possible. But we should be cautious not to be overly *trusting* of whatever conclusions our best rational thought leads us to. Because we make mistakes.

Okay, entanglement and spooky action at a distance. Let me give you my version of the best way to think about it. One's mileage, as ever, is permitted to vary. (1/n) The fundamental idea is that we shouldn't think of "two separate particles" as two separate particles. They are just one thing. But in a precise way that departs from our classical intuition. (2/n)

When talking about many-worlds quantum mechanics, I struggle with answering "Where does the energy come from to make extra worlds?" If you know the equations there's no worry -- energy is perfectly conserved. But it's hard to explain in words. So here is my latest attempt! (1/n) The basic point is this: there is a crucial difference between "the energy of the whole set of worlds" and "the energy you measure from within any world." Call them the "overall energy" and the "in-world energy." The overall energy is clearly, unambiguously constant. (2/n)

It was early 2019 when I did this podcast interview about the fall of the Roman Republic, with historian Edward Watts. Well before the Jan. 6 2021 attach on the US Capitol. But the parallels are pretty hard to miss.
preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/0… The Roman Republic had lasted for 500 years, and seemed invincible. But things had become a little ossified. Inequality grew. Tiberius Gracchus was an establishment politician whose career was faltering, so he pivoted to populism. Give land to the peasants.

Anti-free-will people have to stop leaning on determinism. It's perhaps the most wrong that an argument can be.

1) The world is not deterministic. Quantum mechanics exists. When there is hidden determinism (MWI, Bohm), it's hidden! Irrelevant to what people experience. (1/n) Determinism can be a good approximation for macroscopic dynamics sometimes. So what? Sometimes it's not. You don't want to base arguments about something as fundamental as free will or its absence on a principle that is just a good approximation sometimes. (2/n)

Mindscape 193 | Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert @Daniels on Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. This week our multiverse is a cinematic one. #MindscapePodcast
preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2022/0… Audio player: art19.com/shows/sean-car…

Brad provides an excuse to mention something interesting about quantum mechanics: why we observe some things and not others. I suspect even Sydney (my brilliant former teacher) didn't know the complete answer, since it's not completely known! And he doesn't mention decoherence.

https://twitter.com/delong/status/1510661063942938626

When you set up Schrödinger's Cat to be in a superposition of awake & asleep, then open the box, the miracle of quantum measurement is that you never *see* the cat in such a superposition. You only see definitely awake or definitely asleep. Why?

A good year for #MindscapePodcast! Here's a list of the topics covered in case you missed any.

128 Western psychology
129 Democracy threatened
130 Fundamental physics
131 Alien artifacts
132 Growth and form
133 Invisible realities
134 Behavior and the mind
135 Plato in China 136 Cyberspace sociology
137 Foundations of math
138 Sports analytics
139 Equality and ideology
140 Neuroscience of time
141 Networks and attention
142 Writing stories
143 Bias and rationality
144 Particle physics
145 History and catastrophes
146 Topology and category theory

It is not a remarkable use of rationality to find justifications for opinions we already have or which reassure us. More impressive would be to use rationality to reach conclusions that discomfit ourselves.
nytimes.com/2021/09/29/boo… Some folks like to celebrate the use of rationality to reach uncomfortable conclusions, but the discomfort usually seems to be for other people.

Dark matter exists -- an occasional reminder.

The first evidence for dark matter came from the dynamics of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. But these days that is not our *best* evidence. 1/n For galaxies and clusters, you can imagine modifying gravity instead of positing dark matter. Every physicist and astronomer knows this. It is not a radical new idea. A number of people have built explicit models, and hundreds of people have thought about the possibility.

Personal news: I'll be leaving Caltech at the end of the next academic year. Caltech is great, and I've known wonderful people there. They would be happy for me to stay (as far as I know!), but this specific position is no longer a good fit for me, so I've decided to move on. I honestly don't know where I will be next - there are possibilities, but various wave functions have not yet collapsed. But I'll still be writing physics papers and philosophy papers, hopefully doing real research in more interdisciplinary areas as well, from whatever perch.

Idea: space-opera show where the crew is constantly forced to choose between saving people they love and serving the greater good. They choose loved ones every time, like existing shows. Twist is that every time, disaster follows and thousands die. I mean, if the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, the few are going to get the short end of the stick from time to time, right? Let’s give that trolley problem some bite.

It just seems so *reasonable* to say "there might be some evidence, just let the process play out," whether the claim is "there was massive voter fraud" or "UFOs are alien visitors." But in many cases (like these) it's not reasonable at all. Background knowledge matters. Truth claims don't float out in a vacuum, each to be judged independently. We know something about elections and the strategies of certain actors; we know about technology, perception, and motivated reasoning. That knowledge should inform our priors.

Hugh Everett's birthday! Pioneer of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Let us celebrate by thinking about ontological extravagance. I will do so by way of analogy, because I have found that everyone loves analogies and nobody ever willfully misconstrues them.

https://twitter.com/mcnees/status/1326542986184847361

We look at the night sky and see photons arriving to us, emitted by distant stars. Let's contrast two different theories about how stars emit photons.

Most entertaining part of current mess are the folks saying *they’re* not crazy stolen-election conspiracy theorists, but shouldn’t we investigate the crazy claims seriously, because questions have been raised, right?

(Not entertaining at all, actually.) Hopefully it will count against the credibility of such folks going forward. The naughty pleasure of being an edgy contrarian can be much more gratifying than common sense and clear-eyed evaluation of the evidence.

Mindscape Episode 122 | David Eagleman on Tapping Into the Livewired Brain. #MindscapePodcast
preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/1… Audio player: art19.com/shows/sean-car…

My rough election-watching algorithm tomorrow:

* If either PA or FL are called for Biden, he'll win.

* If both PA and FL are called for Trump, he'll win.

* If they're both delayed, but Texas is called for Biden, he'll win.

Otherwise we're in for a long night/week/month. These are far from certainties (T could win both PA and FL but Biden somehow wins both Georgia and North Carolina, for example), but I think a decent calibration of expectations.

Mindscape 121 | Cornel West @CornelWest on What Democracy Is and Should Be. #MindscapePodcast
preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/1… Audio player: art19.com/shows/sean-car…

Roger Penrose won the Nobel Prize for showing that black holes are an almost-unavoidable prediction of classical general relativity. Let's take a peek into what that entailed. 1/n Einstein wrote down the equation for the dynamics of spacetime in 1915. It was complicated, and he was skeptical that it could be solved exactly. For his own investigation of e.g. the orbit of Mercury, he used approximation methods like any good physicist. 2/

I firmly believe that the best response to speech that one disagrees with is to offer better arguments in refutation, not to silence people. But an open letter like this one in Harper's is pretty unpersuasive, to the point of being anti-productive. (1/n)
harpers.org/a-letter-on-ju… In part that's due to the particular group of signatories. Several of them are people I enormously admire. But others have themselves been involved in attempts to silence people they disagree with. And none of them is exactly lacking ways to have their voices be heard. (2/n)