Kyle Roth

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. Skousen takes a strange interest in painting Marx and Keynes as deranged, sexual deviants, etc. (“The Truth about Keynes’ Homosexuality” is a section in this book.)

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. Here are my notes and critiques of the ethical ideas presented in the article.

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. And then we look at the outcomes that you’re describing and that’s why the narrative takes hold that Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla is malevolent. The sense is that these companies are evil. So if the different parts are people that are good and they want to do good, how are we getting these outcomes?

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. They measured on a continuous scale instead of discrete. (The survey had a slider between “very bad” and “very good”, instead of discrete options to choose from.) They measured on “dozens of separate occasions per person” using an app, instead of just a single questionnaire. They used a comparable scale for experienced well-being (people’s evaluations of their lives) and evaluative well-being (how people feel during the day-to-day moments of their lives). They included a large number of high-earning participants and measured higher incomes in more granular increments. The data were collected from 33,391 employed adults (ages 18-65) in the United States. There were a total of 1,725,994 reports collected, so that’s ~52 reports per person.

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.