Thoughts from My Head
What do Hannah Arendt's report of the Adolf Eichmann trial "Eichmann in Jerusalem" and Gitta Sereny's interviews with Franz Stangl, "Into That Darkness" tell us about how individuals are able to facilitate mass murder?
One big problem is the turnover of emotive content. By thinking in logarithms over space and time we can better picture the effects of our actions.
This post began as a stream of consciousness Twitter thread that I've retrofitted into a blog post. As is always the case, both the political left and right see truths about the markets. The left is correct that money and trade reduces interpersonal prosociality (increased in-group "lovin’"). The right is correct that money and trade … Continue reading Thinking About Kinship & Society
Locality. It constrains with ubiquity. But why are we unable to see it?
Existential “meaning” is partly the telling of a story featuring ourselves that is available and consistent with our higher-level representations of the world. It is not, generally, rational; it is more a narrative correlated with a feeling of “selfness” and “correctness”.
Toxic sentiment in society doesn’t arise from a vacuum. History shows that it tends to follow a perceived threat to a way of live, a reaction to change. You cannot remove the toxicity without addressing the underlying issues. But what are these?
One Saturday morning I came upon the website 80000 Hours. The idea of the site is to direct our activity to maximise impact. They have a list of world problems here. One of the most pressing is explained as the artificial intelligence "control problem" : how do we control forces that can out think us? This … Continue reading Artificial Morality (or How Do We Teach Robots to Love)
Robotic Ape 