Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
12 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“The internet also has disseminated all kinds of writing about abstract ideas that people didn’t know how many people would be interested in reading such things. So I think yeah, absolutely.”
02 / belief
“You know, I do too. But I think there is something about taste today that prefers a clearer, more limpid kind of prose.”
03 / belief
“If you’re writing, you are distilling vague thoughts into something more organized and purposeful, and I think there’s a lot of merit to allowing thoughts to just meander about in your head and make weird connections with each other before you push them onto the page.”
04 / evaluation
“No, because in order to make use of any kind of external memory function, be it library or a note-taking software or what have you, you have to know what you’re looking for.”
05 / prediction
“I would say that the predictions of the death of publishing and the death of reading have been going on for decades and they should ignore them.”
06 / evaluation
“. They can, in principle, avoid the traps that in fact are preventing effective altruists from being as effective as they should be because in practice, it’s very difficult to resist a short-term surer bet in terms of doing good.”
07 / evaluation
“Their information cannot be put back into the bottle. And we now know that Facebook — I’m just picking on Facebook because it’s the lowest-hanging fruit, but there’s many instances of this — we now know that Facebook’s mission to “connect everybody” — it sounded like it was going to produce a much more pluralistic, diverse world where people would have communication with people they couldn’t connect with physically because they lived in a different place.”
08 / prediction
“I think I had an experience that many people have had, which is they want to study philosophy because they think it’s going to be about the meaning of life, and they get into a philosophy class, and it turns out to resemble something more like algebra, and they’re discouraged and move onto some other discipline.”
09 / evaluation
“The idea is, if you try to do good, that’s what counts, and whether you are able to in fact do good is a result of luck of various kinds, like your own ability, the situation in the world that you find yourself in, all kinds of things like that. But more ancient notions of morality find this paradox less strange because they believe that you can hold someone to account for how wise they are and how able they are to judge their actions and successfully anticipate whether they will produce wrong or not.”
10 / evaluation
“” He advocated a kind of — it sounds odd because of the name — but a kind of peacetime peace corps because, he said, there’s no need to depend on moral luck, in effect — this is not his language — but we can engineer circumstances in which people are pushed to the same kind of self-sacrifice and heroism that they might be pushed to in war, but we can artificially engender it, and we can do it in a way that does not result in the horrible bloodshed and loss and waste of war, that results in something positive.”
11 / evaluation
“The idea here is that, if you grow up in a household where at least one of your parents is not functioning as a parent, either because they are mentally ill or they’re an alcoholic or an addict — for some reason they’re not functioning as a parent — obviously, in many cases, this just messes the child up.”
12 / recommendation
“I don’t think he thinks that empathy is useless, but I do agree with him that people could do a lot more good if they didn’t rely solely on impulse and emotional attachment to issues that may be there just because they’ve heard of them as opposed to trying to do research, trying to figure out how they really can do the most good with the resources they’re willing to give.”