Sean Carroll

Like existential risk means literally eliminating human beings from the planet, right?

I can imagine planes crashing.

I can imagine people losing their bank accounts.

I can imagine all sorts of things like that.

I can imagine companies going under because they fire a bunch of employees thinking that they can effectively replace them with AI and realizing that that doesn't work quite that way.

But none of those is an existential threat.

We have plenty of existential threats that are just much bigger than that one, from nuclear weapons to even worse, biological worries.

So I would worry about those first.

Robert Ruxendrescu says, when talking about the top five players in NBA history, how do you personally classify them?

What matters?

Does team performance matter?

Do the number of championships matter?

Stats?

Should we look at offense and defense equally?

What would be your top five and why?

So, again, I'm going to give an unsatisfying answer.

I think that the project of talking about the top five players in NBA history is completely ridiculous, completely ill-formed.

It's just not a good question for all sorts of reasons.

I mean, mostly because the game changes, right?

Someone who might have been the most effective player in the 1950s is not going to be the most effective player in the 1980s, and that player is not going to be the most effective player now.