Deus Ex Machina podcast

I was obviously in an exuberant mood for this interview - it's one of my favorites! My interviewer is Bohan Lou, a Chinese-American Yale graduate: @loubohan

Some topics covered, with rough timestamps:

Growing up in Iowa. Athletics, Chinese culture. KMT and military family background.

12m Hearing about the Cultural Revolution from my dad - his family experienced it firsthand in Zhejiang. Meanwhile, US intellectuals and academics were entirely deluded about reality in PRC (same as today, but with different directionality).

20m “Experts” are often miscalibrated: example of US foreign policy and geostrategy. Huge difference in competence level between today and the height of the Cold War. “Word calculus” and the limitations of wordcels and intellectuals who lack technical expertise. “Policy Entrepreneurs” and other grifters.

35m Physicists and finance. Was Charlie Munger right to say it’s a waste of talent to channel top brains into finance? Are AI startups a better use of brainpower? Why I didn’t leave Physics for Wall St.

45m Hedgehogs, Foxes, and Eagles. Polymathy.

48m Development of modern China as the greatest story of the last 50 years. My first visit to China: the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone in 1992. US-China competition and the future of Asian Americans.

54m Genomic Prediction. Genomics of cognitive ability. Leftists holding back genetic science. PING = NIH-funded Pediatric Imagining, Neurocognition, and Genetics study. Stephen J. Gould was a fraud. Asian culture (pragmatic realism) and resistance to wokeness.

1h05 Physics and Free Will. Meat machines programmed by evolution to have an illusion of self?

1h10 Copenhagen Interpretation of QM, Is there true randomness in Physics? Many Worlds, Foundations of QM, and groupthink on modern physics.

1h15 Christianity, raised as a Methodist by my mother, whose family has been Christian since the 19th century. Religious Experience vs Physics viewpoint. Meat machines programmed by evolution to have mystical religious feelings?

1h18 Raising children, family, happiness, the meaning of life in view of my father’s life

1h23 The meaning of life, “All is Vanity” (Ecclesiastes), Religion