Ask Me Anything | April 2023

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2023

⏱️ 244 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Welcome to the April 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 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!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. This is the April
0:06.0	2023, ask me anything edition of Mindscape. And I thought I would start out by telling a somewhat
0:12.4	amusing story about last month's AMA episode, the March 2023 episode. You know, I start off
0:20.1	each episode with an introduction. If it's a regular podcast, I'll talk about the guest and the
0:25.2	topic. If it's an AMA, I'll just ramble on for a little bit, maybe with some information about
0:31.6	what I'm doing lately or whatever. So last month, I was getting, you know, still in the mode of
0:36.8	having moved to Baltimore, having moved to Johns Hopkins. There wasn't a lot of big news to talk
0:41.4	about. So I talked about the fact that we had had a very mild winter in Baltimore, almost no snow.
0:48.8	I've never lived in Baltimore over the winter before, but I have lived in Philadelphia. It's not
0:53.5	that different. And I use this to make a completely banal observation about human psychology.
0:59.9	You know, as we know, we are facing a crisis of global warming caused by human beings.
1:06.8	The climate is changing. This is going to be bad in various ways. Now, the fact that we'd had a
1:13.6	mild winter in Baltimore this one year is not strong evidence in favor of global warming. It is
1:19.9	some evidence. It's one little tiny data point, but you need a lot more data than that. It could
1:24.8	just be a random fluctuation. That's not a big deal. I was not by any means making the claim that
1:31.2	the fact that we hadn't had any snow in Baltimore is evidence for anthropogenic climate change.
1:36.9	I don't think we need more evidence for that. We just had a new IPCC report come out. It's
1:43.4	incredibly overwhelmingly strong. The evidence that climate change is real. It's being caused by
1:48.6	human beings. The effects will be disastrous. The point that I was making was one about human
1:54.0	psychology, namely that you can know intellectually that climate change is happening. And you can know
2:00.2	that it's bad and you can be in favor of all sorts of ameliorating programs and so forth. But when
2:05.9	your winter is warm, you think about it in a different way. It sort of hits home. Even if again,
	...

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