Sean Carroll

Refusing to "trust the experts" is meant to be a brave, responsible position. But (as Carl explains in the thread) there is too much knowledge in the world. You have to trust *somebody*, much of the time. If you have no trust in experts, you end up trusting the idiots.

Calling out political extremists for being hypocritical (“they claim to value free speech, but actually try to censor speech they don’t like!”) is like calling out a football team for playing both offense and defense. They’re not trying to embody fixed standards, they’re just trying to win.

Let me try to explain why it's important to study the foundations of quantum mechanics. (1/n) (Have to do some breathing exercises, b/c to me it's blindingly obvious that "understanding the most important theory in physics" is something physicists should care about, but apparently opinions differ.)

Congrats to all! Mindscape listeners will know my JHU colleagues @hahrie.bsky.social and @himself.bsky.social. Wati Taylor and I were postdocs together and collaborated on papers about 2-d quantum gravity.

Pangram is surprisingly good. Teachers and graders should check it out. (And journal editors .) www.pangram.com

Agreed. This is an example where @jamellebouie.net's reading is enormous value-added to the (already pretty valuable) text.

A good essay on responsible AI use - a rare find in the wild - by @mbolotnikova.bsky.social. So much of it just comes down to enjoying and cherishing, rather than trying to replace, what your brain can do. www.vox.com/future-perfe...

Eh. It’s true that we do not know the limit of the knowable, but that’s exactly why we should never classify something as unknowable, only unknown. Maybe someone will figure it out tomorrow!

Achievement unlocked: using basement as a tornado shelter.

More interesting evidence for a twisty universe, in which photons from the microwave background gently corkscrew around as they travel to us. Nailing this down will be difficult but important.

Lives Well Lived: I hop on Peter Singer's podcast, co-hosted with Kasia de Lazari Radek. Rarely has a single podcast episode divided its time so effectively between quantum mechanics and the objectivity of morality. www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8OI...

Mindscape 363 | Chandra Sripada on How LLMs and Humans are Cognitive Cousins. Food for thought here, whether you are biological or silicon! #MindscapePodcast preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026...

"Quantum mechanics has developed to be our best theory of pretty much the entire physical world. Quantum mechanics also pretty much entails that we live in a multiverse, and that quantum-mechanical processes are constantly causing the world to branch into unfathomably many copies of itself."