Change is scary. But sometimes it can all work out for the best. There's no guarantee of that, however, even when the change in question involves the introduction of a powerful new technology. Today's guest, Daron Acemoglu, is a political economist who has long thought about the relationship between economics and political institutions. In his most recent book (with Simon Johnson), Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, he looks at how technological innovations affect the economic lives of ordinary people. We talk about how such effects are often for the worse, at least to start out, until better institutions are able to eventually spread the benefits more broadly.

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Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/07/22/283-daron-acemoglu-on-technology-inequality-and-power/

Daron Acemoglu received a Ph.D. in economics from the London School of Economics. He is currently Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Econometric Society. Among his awards are the John Bates Clark Medal and the Nemmers Prize in Economics. In 2015, he was named the most cited economist of the past 10 years.

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The philosophy of mathematics would be so much easier if it weren't for infinity. The concept seems natural, but taking it seriously opens the door to counterintuitive results. As mathematician and philosopher Joel David Hamkins says in this conversation, when we say that the natural numbers are "0, 1, 2, 3, and so on," that "and so on" is hopelessly vague. We talk about different ways to think about the puzzles of infinity, how they might be resolved, and implications for mathematical realism.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/07/15/282-joel-david-hamkins-on-puzzles-of-reality-and-infinity/

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Joel David Hamkins received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently the John Cardinal O'Hara Professor of Logic at the University of Notre Dame. He is a pioneer of the idea of the set theory multiverse. He is the top-rated user by reputation score on MathOverflow. He is currently working on The Book of Infinity, to be published by MIT Press.

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Welcome to the July 2024 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 Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!

Blog post with questions and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/07/08/ama-july-2024/

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Just like with physics, in biology it is perfectly possible to do most respectable work without thinking much about philosophy, but there are unmistakably foundational questions where philosophy becomes crucial. When do we say that a collection of matter (or bits) is alive? When does it become an agent, capable of making decisions? What are the origins of morality and altruistic behavior? We talk with one of the world's leading experts, Samir Okasha, about the biggest issues in modern philosophy of biology.

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Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/07/01/281-samir-okasha-on-the-philosophy-of-agency-and-evolution/

Samir Okasha received his D.Phil. in Philosophy from the University of Oxford. He is currently Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the University of Bristol. He is a winner of the Lakatos Award for his book Evolution and the Levels of Selection, and is a Fellow of the British Academy.

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Which is more intelligent, ChatGPT or a 3-year old? Of course this depends on what we mean by "intelligence." A modern LLM is certainly able to answer all sorts of questions that require knowledge far past the capacity of a 3-year old, and even to perform synthetic tasks that seem remarkable to many human grown-ups. But is that really intelligence? François Chollet argues that it is not, and that LLMs are not ever going to be truly "intelligent" in the usual sense -- although other approaches to AI might get there.

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Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/06/24/280-francois-chollet-on-deep-learning-and-the-meaning-of-intelligence/

François Chollet received his Diplôme d'Ingénieur from École Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées, Paris. He is currently a Senior Staff Engineer at Google. He has been awarded the Global Swiss AI award for breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. He is the author of Deep Learning with Python, and developer of the Keras software library for neural networks. He is the creator of the ARC (Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus) Challenge.

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For those of us who are not dualists, the mind arises from our physical bodies -- mostly the brain, but the rest of the body has a role to play. And yet it remains tempting to treat the mind as a thing in itself, disconnected from how the body is doing. Ellen Langer is a psychologist who is one of the foremost researchers on the idea of mindfulness -- the cognitive skill of paying to one's thoughts, as well as to one's external environment. Her most recent book is The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. We talk about how our state of mind can effect the functions of our body, sometimes in surprising ways.

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Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/06/17/279-ellen-langer-on-mindfulness-and-the-body/

Ellen Langer received her Ph.D. in Social and Clinical Psychology from Yale University. She is currently a professor of psychology at Harvard University. She is also an artist with multiple gallery exhibitions. Among her awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Liberty Science Center Genius Award.

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We claim to love all of our children, friends, and students equally. But perhaps deep down you assign a ranking to them, from favorite to not-so-favorite. Ranking and quantifying people is an irresistible human tendency, and modern technology has made it ubiquitous. In this episode I talk with sociologist Kieran Healy, who has co-authored (with Marion Fourcade) the new book The Ordinal Society, about how our lives are measured and processed by the technological ecosystem around us. We discuss how this has changed how relate to ourselves and the wider world.

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Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/06/10/278-kieran-healy-on-the-technology-of-ranking-people/

Kieran Healy received his Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University. He is currently a professor of sociology at Duke University, and a member of the Kenan Institute for Ethics. As an undergraduate at University College Cork he won the Irish Times National Debating competition. He has a longstanding interest in data visualization.

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Welcome to the June 2024 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 Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Blog post with show notes, questions, and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/06/03/ama-jun-2024/

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.