Sean Carroll: The Worst Guru Yet?!?

Mar 2, 2024

This podcast discusses controversial physics figure Sean Carroll, his popular Mindscape podcast, challenges to orthodox beliefs, cultural topics, and the impact of large language models and AI advancements on society and ethics. The chapters cover unconventional desires, Western Buddhism, cognitive biases, AI evolution, and the divide between human and artificial intelligence.

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ANECDOTE

Vosh's Folder

A leftist streamer, Vosh, exposed his "to be sorted" folder with explicit content while streaming.
His defense for the horse porn was a desire to embody a "powerful stallion."

ANECDOTE

Vosh's Lolicon Defense

Vosh defended lolicon content in his folder by claiming he mistook it for "short stack, thick" goblins.
He attributed this to the presumed shared knowledge of goblin depictions in pornography.

INSIGHT

Western Buddhist Defensiveness

Western Buddhists often exhibit defensiveness when their interpretation of Buddhism is challenged.
They claim detachment but react strongly to critiques of Buddhist Modernism, suggesting an emotional attachment.

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Controversial physics firebrand Sean Carroll has cut a swathe through the otherwise meek and mild podcasting industry over the last few years. Known in the biz as the "bad boy" of science communication, he offends as much as he educ....

<< Record scratch >>

No, we can't back any of that up obviously, those are all actually lies. Let's start again.

Sean Carroll has worked as a research professor in theoretical physics and philosophy of science at Caltech and is presently an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He currently focuses on popular writing and public education on topics in physics and has appeared in several science documentaries.

Since 2018 Sean has hosted his podcast Mindscape, which focuses not only on science but also on "society, philosophy, culture, arts and ideas". Now, that's a broad scope and firmly places Sean in the realm of "public intellectual", and potentially within the scope of a "secular guru" (in the broader non-pejorative sense - don't start mashing your keyboard with angry e-mails just yet).

The fact is, Sean appears to have an excellent reputation for being responsible, reasonable and engaging, and his Mindscape podcast is wildly popular. But despite his mild-mannered presentation, Sean is quite happy to take on culture-war-adjacent topics such as promoting a naturalistic and physicalist atheist position against religious approaches. He's also prepared to stake out and defend non-orthodox positions, such as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, and countenance somewhat out-there ideas such as the holographic principle.

But we won't be covering his deep physics ideas in this episode... possibly because we're not smart enough. Rather, we'll look at a recent episode where Sean stretched his polymathic wings, in the finest tradition of a secular guru, and weighed in on AI and large-language models (LLMs).

Is Sean getting over his skis, falling face-first into a mound of powdery pseudo-profound bullshit or is he gliding gracefully down a black diamond with careful caveats and insightful reflections?

Also covered the stoic nature of Western Buddhists, the dangers of giving bad people credit, and the unifying nature of the Ukraine conflict.

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