William MacAskill: belief

Transcript context

…Now, I’m going to use the word hinge-y to describe the quality of living in a time that is highly influential, where that influence may very well persist for a long period of time. Do people in their own eras know when they are living in especially hinge-y eras? Or are they clueless? I think we know a lot more now than we did in the past. I think people in the past would’ve been pretty clueless. They didn’t have a good sense of how long . . . The fact that the universe is so truly enormous, so big, and yet uninhabited, is actually a very recent idea, like a little over 100 years that we’ve really appreciated that. So, people in previous times may have thought that they were living in extraordinarily hinge-y times. The early Christians — extraordinarily hinge-y time. Kingdom was going to come in one or two generations. [laughs] It was, I would say.…

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