#70 — Beauty and Terror

It's great to be with you virtually, Sam.

Yeah, yeah. We're actually rarely in the same place physically. We're often on the same email thread. But I guess I last saw you at the Asilamar AI conference.

That's right. Yeah, we were at that AI meeting together. That was last time. It's always pleasant, and it's always pleasant to think of things that may destroy humanity.

Yeah, the list is growing.

Exactly. Yeah. I'm chairman of the board of the Bolton, the atomic scientists, and we set the doomsday clock. But we had a symposium every year where we'd go into that. It used to be called the Doomsday symposium, which was always cheery. We changed the title?

Yeah, I actually want to get to that because I want to talk about some of the threats, but, yeah. So let's just start with the various games you're playing, because you're doing many different things. Obviously, you do science. You're a theoretical physicist, you're an educator. You run the origins project at Arizona State University. You write books. You have a new book out that we will touch on.

That's good.

Yes. There's definitely more that I want to talk about than is in your book. And I never like these conversations to act as surrogates for interested readers actually buying your book and reading it. So there's no way that the book will be redundant on the basis of what we talk about here.

Good.

And I encourage people to buy your book because you are a fine and clear writer and this is a very interesting book.

As you are anyway. Yes.

And all those recommendations were far more sincere than they may have sounded. But you write in the New Yorker, which is great. The New Yorker has been, frankly, fairly bad on science for a good long while, and it's really great to have your voice in there. You don't have to agree with me. I know you now are an employee of the New Yorker.

No, I think I'm surprised that I can get my voice. And to make it clear, I am only allowed online. I'm not allowed on the, all my pieces only appear online in the New Yorker. They don't appear in the hallowed, real hard copy.

I didn't even know that because I read everything like that online. Now.

I do, too, but I want to make it clear in case people thought I was somehow more eminent than I am.

Do you understand the basis of that.

Decision is that, frankly, I think part of it is that there's a different culture for the online editorials and work than there is in the magazine. I think I sympathize to some extent with what you say about science at the New Yorker, and I wish there could be more science in there because one of the things we may get to, and one of the things I push a lot because I believe in it, is that science is part of our culture and we have to integrate it more heavily. And that's part of the problems that we're experiencing now, in my opinion, politically, too. And so to the extent that New Yorker is kind of a magazine of culture, the fact that science, there are profiles of scientists periodically, but it's not treated as the same kind of, hey, interesting cultural aspect as movies or literature or whatever, so I wish it was.

Yeah, well, there's that problem. It's just that the problem of there not being enough science or science not being viewed as sexy or as culturally relevant as the humanities. But there's also just the problem of scientific error and anti science being propagated, which is surprised.

The errors are always surprising because one thing I found about the New Yorker, and we're probably jumping in away from where you want to go.

I'm happy to.

But one of the things I've found is that I write for them. They edit more heavily and fact check more carefully than any place I've ever written for. And so it is surprising in some sense that scientific error, I mean, pseudoscience and antiscience is different. I mean, they can have a slant, and that slant occurs a lot among certain people, especially in the humanities, for various reasons, which you might get into. So I can understand that. But it's sad when scientific error gets into.

Yeah, and then you also do debates, as I occasionally do with religious crackpots of one flavor or another. So this is just a question about how you divide your time, because it's not even clear to me how much each of these boats you're rowing in gets your weight. How would you describe what you do on a weekly or monthly basis?

Yeah, well, I wish I had a strategic plan and I did divide my time strategically. I don't. I tend to just sort of be doing something. First of all, I like to juggle lots of things, and I think it's basically because I'm, frankly lazy. I think if I'm not occupied, I tend to do nothing. But what I do is I tend to focus on one thing sometimes because I'm angry, I mean, sometimes because I get emotional about it, if I'm writing or agree to do a debate or stuff, and then I'll move to something else. If I'm excluding something, if I'm not doing science for a while, I kind of feel like a fraud. So I just try and balance it. But there's no real plan. I just do as many things as I can do, frankly, because I enjoy doing all of them. And that's really a point that I think is really important to stress that I do science like many scientists, not because I'm trying to save the world, but because I enjoy it. And the same reason I write and do other things, but also because in my own personal perspective, I think something is worth doing. If it takes time for something else, if I think it has some background importance, I think I do that. And to some extent, maybe it's a kind of guilt also, frankly, Sam, in the sense that the physics I do is very esoteric in general and quite abstract. And I think it's profoundly interesting because it addresses these fundamental questions about our existence. But from the perspective of touching daily the lives of people or in an immediate way improving their lives, it doesn't. And so I think part of the reason I get involved politically and socially is to some extent to make up for that aspect of my life, if you understand. I think that's why I jump around. But, yeah, a lot of hats and sometimes too many. There's no doubt about it, especially too much travel. But what I try and do is to go from one thing to another intensively. And I don't know if you've had this, but it's true. I did just finish a book. And I find after the book is done, as now I'm talking about it, I have no memory of writing it for the most part. And I wonder how the hell I did it.

Yeah.

Because I don't seem to have time for anything else, anything right now. I think book writing is kind of like having a baby in a way. If you remember what labor was all about and the whole thing, you probably wouldn't have a second one. And I think it's probably beneficial to forget the whole experience.

Yeah. My problem is that I do remember what labor was all about, and I keep pushing off my book deadline.

I've always thought you're wise, so there you go. I'm more impetuous, but anyway, so I'm lucky. And I guess the point is, I think probably because, again, to be quite honest and frank, I think a number of these things came over a long time of doing things with no notice for what I was doing. And so therefore, it's hard to turn down things that I think are useful or important, and I'm really working on that to try and turn down. So it's hard to say no. So I often say yes to too many things, and then I just end up having to do them.

Right. So what do you think about the utility of doing debates of the sort that we've both done? I don't know how recently you've done one. Do you think they're worth doing? Do you regret doing any of them?

I often regret them. Look, I think the debate format is a very