Sean Carroll

scientific rigorous contexts and therefore we overload the individual words.

So as long as the subset of people to whom you're talking knows what you're talking about, it's fine.

The place you can go wrong is when

experts start using words in their localized expert way of talking when they're talking to broader audiences who are not experts, even if they're experts in something else rather than the general public, then it can get very, very confusing.

And I think that it's just a tiny aspect of the broader issue that it's sometimes hard to talk to non-expert audiences.

And the reason why is because

When we're trained to be experts, we start thinking in a certain way, start talking in a certain way, and it becomes almost impossible to remember what it was like to not think and talk that way.

And so it's a real skill to be able to talk to audiences who don't know the jargon, even if the jargon is sort of non-threatening, like the word matter.

Matter is a great example of a thing, you know, unlike, let's say, Hilbert space.

When you say Hilbert space, everyone knows you're talking jargon, right?

So they're like, what does that mean?

The problem with words like matter is you can say it and people think they know what you mean, and maybe they don't really know what you mean.

And then it's the burden of the speaker to try to be as clear as possible.

Josh says, Christian List made a compelling case that your own compatibilist intuitions are philosophically defensible.

But I think former Mindscape guest Robert Sapolsky, who you helped with his quantum mechanics chapter, sits in more the hard incompatibilist camp alongside philosopher Derek Perenboom.

Given that List argues the whole levels of description framework dissolves the incompatibilist threat, do you think you've swayed Sapolsky's mind or is it time to get him and or Paraboom back on the show to defend their stances?

So it is not time to get anyone back on the show to defend their stances.

The point of Mindscape is not to have debates back and forth.

I'm glad to have people with different perspectives, but we don't have episodes that respond to other episodes.

That's just not how we work.