Sean Carroll

So the truth is, and this is a very tricky thing, and I'm not an expert in it, so I'm not going to get exactly all the details right, but...

Therefore, because helium is itself a bosonic thing that has constituents that are fermionic, the truth is that in some circumstances it acts like a boson, and in some circumstances if you push it too far, if you get out of the domain of applicability where you can treat the helium atom as a single degree of freedom, then the fermionic nature of its constituents becomes important, and you have to think about those.

And that's why helium does in fact take up space.

Laura says, there were multiple moments in your conversation with Alan Roth on morally contested markets when I was disappointed by the rigor and thoroughness of his answers to your questions.

And I wondered if you experienced something similar as the interviewer.

Small examples of this were his vague definition of market and failure to maintain the significant distinction between market and marketplace that he made early in the discussion, pointing out that what he actually designs is marketplaces.

The most important issue he did not adequately address was poverty.

It came up in almost every example of a morally contested market.

But even after you asked several questions about it, I wasn't satisfied and got the sense that you weren't either.

So I wouldn't say that I wasn't satisfied.

I think that, you know, we had to be careful when we're talking to somebody, especially someone in a different area or even someone in the same area but at a different level of expertise, higher expertise or lower expertise.

or even someone with the same exact expertise at the same level, but who's interested in different things.

We have to be careful to admit that people are interested in different things, okay?

So he was just not really into, you know, worrying about addressing poverty as an issue.

He was interested in these sort of economic, sort of moral slash economic questions about the nature of contested markets in their own rights, right?

For their own sake.

I think he would be very quick to admit that there would be cases where in reality, in society, maybe you have a situation where in an ideal marketplace, a certain set of transactions is perfectly allowed.

But because the marketplace is not ideal for all sorts of reasons, asymmetric information or...

asymmetric resources of other kinds, maybe it's sensible to have a law banning them.

I think that's fine.