philosophy

The big three in economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes

This book was published in 2007, before the Great Recession. It definitely reads that way. Very capitalist, very Christian, very neo-liberal. I enjoyed learning more about Adam Smith. I feel like Skousen does a good job painting the importance of his ideas as an invention that drove the Industrial Revolution. According to Skousen, Marx is the devil incarnate, and his ideas are a dangerous disease infecting the minds of intellectuals and workers.
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thoughts on Effective Altruism

Thanks to the crash of FTX and Scott Aaronson’s subsequent post about SBF, I read a very interesting deep-dive into Effective Altruism by the New Yorker. I’m seeing a lot of important characters show up that I’ve seen before: Eliezer Yudkowsky, earn-to-donate, 80,000 hours, etc. It’s really fascinating to see this all coming together in one narrative so I can understand a little better the inspiration for these ideas and the way that the movement has interacted with the world up till now.
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ethics drift within bubbles

Here are some snippets from a Lex Fridman interview with John Abramson, outspoken critic of Big Pharma. Lex: Are people corrupt? Are people malevolent? Are people ignorant that work at the low level and at the high level, at Pfizer for example? How is this possible? I believe that most people are good, and I actually believe if you join Big Pharma your life trajectory often involves dreaming, wanting, and enjoying helping people.
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Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year

Turns out that money does buy happiness. You may have heard that people’s average happiness stops improving once you make more than $75,000/year? Researchers did a better survey with more data and found that that was not the case. The researchers cited 5 methodological improvements over the old research that suggested that it didn’t matter after $75,000: They measured people’s happiness in real time, instead of having people try to remember past happiness levels.
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quotes from a Lex Fridman interview with Philip Goff

Here are some snippets from a Lex Fridman interview with Philip Goff, a panpsychist. The Enlightenment ideal is to follow the evidence and the arguments where they lead, but it’s very hard for human beings to do that. I think we get stuck in some conception of how we think science ought to look. People talk about religion as a crutch, but I think a certain kind of scientism, a certain conception of how science is supposed to be, gets into people’s identity and their sense of themselves and their security.
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