345 | Adam Elga on Being Rational in a Very Large Universe

Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the things we've talked about many times on the podcast is how you update your beliefs when new evidence comes in. That is to say, the process of Bayesian reasoning. Bayes's formula, of course, gives you a quantitative way of saying if I have some

prior credence for some claim being true and I very quantitatively measure some data and I can calculate the likelihood of that data being obtained under all sorts of different propositions being true. I can update my credences to get one that takes that data into account. We don't necessarily every time work in such a quantitative vein, but this process is basically what we do in science, right? In science we have different kinds of theories that propose to provide explanations for different kinds of phenomena, and we have different feelings, some theories are more likely than others. My favorite example is always is the dark matter, something like a weakly interacting massive particle, a WIMP, or something like an axion.

So these are two different particle physics candidates for the dark matter. They're both plausible. We don't have any idea which one is true or even if it's some other theory, but we have favorites, right? Where we don't give them equal probability because maybe it fits in better to other things we know. etc.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (95 minutes, 15,476 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.