Think like a physicist. Wonder like a human. Into the Impossible is where Cosmic Conversations happen — uniting Nobel Prize winners, iconoclasts, authors, and technologists to explore reality’s deepest questions. From AI to aliens, from biophysics to the brain, from the cosmos to the multiverse, Brian Keating, Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego covers it all.
If you’ve ever asked What’s out there? or What’s next?, this is where curiosity meets clarity.
Learn to think like this. 🎙 Full episodes, notes & more: briankeating.com/podcast
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Think like a physicist. Wonder like a human. Into the Impossible is where Cosmic Conversations happen — uniting Nobel Prize winners, iconoclasts, authors, and technologists to explore reality’s deepest questions. From AI to aliens, from biophysics to the brain, from the cosmos to the multiverse, Brian Keating, Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego covers it all.
If you’ve ever asked What’s out there? or What’s next?, this is where curiosity meets clarity.
Learn to think like this. 🎙 Full episodes, notes & more: briankeating.com/podcast
Steven Pinker on Cancel Culture, Common Knowledge & AI
Into the Impossible With Brian Keating
50 minutes
1 week ago
Steven Pinker on Cancel Culture, Common Knowledge & AI
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In this episode, Steven Pinker unpacks how common knowledge shapes everything from why rational people can’t agree to disagree to why markets boom and bust. We explore the risks of falsifying expert claims, the power of social norms, and whether civilization is held together by truths—or by the fictions we all agree to share.
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Key Takeaways:
00:00 Intro
00:58 When common knowledge is wrong
02:37 The role of common knowledge in social
coordination
08:48 Free will and determinism
14:48 Judging a book by its cover
21:08 Government suppression and common knowledge
30:08 The agree to disagree theorem
34:54 Generosity and charity in human affairs
41:12 The role of common knowledge in religious
beliefs
48:31 LLMs and common knowledge
50:39 Outro
Additional resources:
📚 When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… by Steven Pinker: https://a.co/d/bKJzohi
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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating
Think like a physicist. Wonder like a human. Into the Impossible is where Cosmic Conversations happen — uniting Nobel Prize winners, iconoclasts, authors, and technologists to explore reality’s deepest questions. From AI to aliens, from biophysics to the brain, from the cosmos to the multiverse, Brian Keating, Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego covers it all.
If you’ve ever asked What’s out there? or What’s next?, this is where curiosity meets clarity.
Learn to think like this. 🎙 Full episodes, notes & more: briankeating.com/podcast
