Interesting hour, as usual. I found myself in agreement with your guest on most issues, but a couple of comments caught my attention as potential points of disagreement.
While on the surface, holding anti-abortion, pro-gun rights positions might seem ideologically "orthogonal", I don't see the contradiction. Both positions are consistently "pro-life" when gun rights are properly understood as a mechanism for *defending* innocent life from those who might otherwise take it. Being opposed to late-term abortion and in favor of one's ability to defend their family from criminals is not inconsistent in the least. Both are pro (innocent) life.
Regarding charity, it seems as though the distinction between "welfare" and "charity" was blurred during the conversation. I'd like to propose that ongoing public financial support for a segment of society (a welfare entitlement) is inherently different from "charity", a term that I think should be reserved for one-time, or at least very infrequent, infusions of aid to people who need a temporary leg-up due to some adverse event beyond their control (like victims of natural disasters, for example).
Finally, the Lee Smolin recommendation on cosmology really caught me by surprise... I'm a bit familiar with this topic, but his ideas are very technical, extremely speculative (and not widely considered within the physics community). And one final point: I didn't quite understand why your guest kept noting that "physics is local". I'm not sure what he meant by that (and actually one of the main insights from quantum mechanics is that physics is in fact, non-local).
1. Orthogonal doesn’t mean contradictory, it means unrelated. Someone could just as easily make the case that restricting gun access is “pro-life”. Yet positions on these issue are strongly correlated, and I posit this is primarily due to partisanship.
2. I agree with what you are calling charity. Just a question of word choice.
3. QM does not establish nonlocality. Some interpretations are local. The no communication theorem proves that, even in interpretations with nonlocality, we can never use the nonlocality to transmit information, which is to say we can never use it to do anything. So the universe is practically local at minimum, and possibly in-principle local if you adopt the Everett interpretation.
(1) Understood, but I think the strong correlation is due to the positions being related ideologically; not due to partisanship - at least that's the case for myself and most people I know. If you want to take a more cynical view attributing the correlation to partisanship, it seems to me that the onus is on you to find data to demonstrate that.
(2) Thanks for clarifying.
(3) The "many worlds" (Everett) view represents a pretty unorthodox interpretation of QM. The conventional view is that nature is non-local as demonstrated by the observed violations of Bell's inequality. I agree that the non-locality doesn't permit the transfer of information faster than light (between two space-like separated events), but that's a separate issue unrelated to the reality of entanglement and what it has to say about locality.
Anyway, good stuff! At some point down the line it'd be good to hear your thoughts on AI the nature of consciousness.
Interesting hour, as usual. I found myself in agreement with your guest on most issues, but a couple of comments caught my attention as potential points of disagreement.
While on the surface, holding anti-abortion, pro-gun rights positions might seem ideologically "orthogonal", I don't see the contradiction. Both positions are consistently "pro-life" when gun rights are properly understood as a mechanism for *defending* innocent life from those who might otherwise take it. Being opposed to late-term abortion and in favor of one's ability to defend their family from criminals is not inconsistent in the least. Both are pro (innocent) life.
Regarding charity, it seems as though the distinction between "welfare" and "charity" was blurred during the conversation. I'd like to propose that ongoing public financial support for a segment of society (a welfare entitlement) is inherently different from "charity", a term that I think should be reserved for one-time, or at least very infrequent, infusions of aid to people who need a temporary leg-up due to some adverse event beyond their control (like victims of natural disasters, for example).
Finally, the Lee Smolin recommendation on cosmology really caught me by surprise... I'm a bit familiar with this topic, but his ideas are very technical, extremely speculative (and not widely considered within the physics community). And one final point: I didn't quite understand why your guest kept noting that "physics is local". I'm not sure what he meant by that (and actually one of the main insights from quantum mechanics is that physics is in fact, non-local).
1. Orthogonal doesn’t mean contradictory, it means unrelated. Someone could just as easily make the case that restricting gun access is “pro-life”. Yet positions on these issue are strongly correlated, and I posit this is primarily due to partisanship.
2. I agree with what you are calling charity. Just a question of word choice.
3. QM does not establish nonlocality. Some interpretations are local. The no communication theorem proves that, even in interpretations with nonlocality, we can never use the nonlocality to transmit information, which is to say we can never use it to do anything. So the universe is practically local at minimum, and possibly in-principle local if you adopt the Everett interpretation.
Thanks for responding. Some comments:
(1) Understood, but I think the strong correlation is due to the positions being related ideologically; not due to partisanship - at least that's the case for myself and most people I know. If you want to take a more cynical view attributing the correlation to partisanship, it seems to me that the onus is on you to find data to demonstrate that.
(2) Thanks for clarifying.
(3) The "many worlds" (Everett) view represents a pretty unorthodox interpretation of QM. The conventional view is that nature is non-local as demonstrated by the observed violations of Bell's inequality. I agree that the non-locality doesn't permit the transfer of information faster than light (between two space-like separated events), but that's a separate issue unrelated to the reality of entanglement and what it has to say about locality.
Anyway, good stuff! At some point down the line it'd be good to hear your thoughts on AI the nature of consciousness.