Shyan's Share: How Speculative Worlds Can Help Us Demand A Better Future
- jeanne7629
- Dec 22, 2025
- 1 min read
From Shyan: This is a podcast interview with Ada Palmer, a Professor of History at the University of Chicago who studies "Intellectual History," the way ideas develop and spread. Ada has such a longterm view of humanity, that she is able to present concrete frameworks, grounded in history, that help with understanding current social issues and anxieties we normally think of as uniquely modern. There are a lot of fascinating concepts Ada brings up in this discussion, including useful tools for thinking about "hope" and "progress," that I have not seen explored much elsewhere. If you do not want to listen to the full hour of the podcast, I recommend at least checking out the portion from 22:58 to 36:12, where Ada makes a compelling argument for understanding much of modern political and technological discourse as the natural fallout of how 1900s science fiction posited a certain, particular vision of the future.
fascinating discussion, thanks!
Thanks so much for sharing this, Shyan! I’m really glad I listened. A few ideas from Ada really stayed with me:
1. Her point about children being masters at living in a world they don’t yet understand. They’re constantly gathering pieces without needing to know how they’ll fit together,and that mindset often carries into adulthood. Her link to sci-fi was fascinating too: if you grow up reading it, you develop that way of thinking early; if you come to it later, it’s much harder.
2. I appreciated her take on future technologies. Every innovation deserves caution, and there’s value in expressing worst-case scenarios so they can be examined and corrected. But when warnings get too far ahead of the science…