

AMA | November 2020
Changing Views
- Sean Carroll changed his mind about the cosmological constant being zero after 1998.
- He also shifted from a scientistic view of morals and ethics, recognizing its fallacies.
Writing Tools
- Use LaTeX for publications with equations, it's the standard for scientific writing.
- For long-form writing without equations, try Scrivener; it's designed for book-length projects.
Alien Visits?
- Sean Carroll finds the idea of hidden alien visits implausible given their advanced technology.
- He emphasizes a Bayesian approach, current evidence favors no alien visits.



























As you have likely heard me mention before, I have an account on Patreon, where people can sign up to donate a dollar or two per episode of Mindscape. In return they get two tangible (if minor) benefits. First, they get to listen to the podcast without any ads. Second, once per month I do an Ask Me Anything episode, where patrons are allowed to ask any question they like, and I do my best to answer as many as I can.
Patreon supporters have kindly agreed to let these monthly AMA episodes be released to the general public (though they maintain the right actually ask the questions). I announced that I’d be doing this a while back, but with the cost structure I had with my podcast host it turned out to be prohibitively expensive for me. But now we’ve got that all figured out! So now, and hopefully going forward, these AMAs will be part of the regular podcast feed. They will be released sometime in the middle of each month, not as part of the usual Monday weekly series, so they won’t get numbers of their own.
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