Omne ignotum pro magnifico

Book Review: Benjamin Todd and the 80,000 Hours team, "80,000 Hours: Find a Fulfilling Career That Does Good", Centre for Effective Altruism, 2016. As an appropriate follow-up to my book review of Will MacAskill's Doing Good Better ( link ), I have recently read 80,000 Hours's career guide in book form. Their career guide is available for free online (on their website 80000hours.org), but I thought the PDF edition would be nice. And as I'm soon finishing my Master's degree, it was personally relevant. For the unfamiliar, 80,000 Hours is a nonprofit organization that is part of the effective altruism movement, and focuses on giving advice on how to choose and plan a career that is both fulfilling and has a maximally-positive social impact. Their name comes from the fact that the average person does about eighty thousand hours of work in their career over a lifetime. This is relevant because it puts into perspective the importance of making the right care...

Eliezer Yudkowsky used to run a series of "Rationality Quotes" on OvercomingBias / LessWrong back in 2008-9. Here are some of my personal favorites. "In The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha expresses the idea which panicked Dostoyevski more than any other: Without God, 'everything is lawful'. But as Mohammed Atta can explain, the opposite is true. Without God, murder is forbidden by human law; it is only for those acting on behalf of God, that everything is permitted." -- Jonathan Wallace ( source ) "People can't predict how long they will be happy with recently acquired objects, how long their marriages will last, how their new jobs will turn out, yet it's subatomic particles that they cite as "limits of prediction." They're ignoring a mammoth standing in front of them in favor of matter even a microscope would not allow them to see." -- Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan "Faced with the choice of changing one's...

Book Review: William MacAskill, "Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference", 2016, Guardian Books & Faber. This is a book that introduces the core ideas behind the effective altruism movement. It is also, I think, a book that conveys the principles of good reasoning. Writing with clarity, Will MacAskill tells us how to select a charity to which to donate, how to pick a career or cause area to work in, and how to make the greatest difference as consumers. However, the principles underlying his advice -- the "five key questions of effective altruism" as MacAskill calls them -- could also be adapted to decision-making in general. Doing Good Better begins by discussing two different approaches to helping others: the first is exemplified by the PlayPump (a kind of water pump that doubles as a roundabout/playground for kids), which caught a lot of attention in the early 2000s and raised millions of dollars. People thought ...

Book Review: Dale Carnegie, "How to Win Friends and Influence People", Vermilion, 2006. Like many people, I tend to have a certain skepticism toward self-help books. These books typically repackage clichéd conventional wisdom, lack rigorous academic research, and have sensationalistic titles that over-promise on their content. However, Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People (henceforth abbreviated HtWF&IP) is not a merely average self-help book; it is arguably the most popular and influential self-help book of all time. Before reading it, I had heard it mentioned by so many people on so many occasions that I thought, "Okay, I have to see what this is about." The book was originally published in 1936 and revised in 1981, so it has been around for a while. While reading HtWF&IP you may, as I did, experience a sense of déjà vu regarding its advice: Smile? Use the other person's name in conversation? Let them do most of the tal...

Here are some of my favorite quotes from this list . Personally, I've been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I'm willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes. -- Patrick Nielsen Hayden "If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?" "Oh jeez. Probably." "What!? Why!?" "Because all my friends did. Think about it -- which scenario is more likely: every single person I know, many of them levelheaded and afraid of heights, abruptly went crazy at exactly the same time... ...or the bridge is on fire?" -- Randal Monroe ( XKCD ) You are not the king of your brain. You are the creepy guy standing next to the king going "a most judicious choice, sire". -- Steven Kaas ( Twitter ) A Bet is a Tax on Bullshit -- Alex Tabarrok ( Marginal Revolution ) It shouldn't be disrespectful to the compl...

I think I planned to start blogging over a year ago, but somehow never got around to it. Well, 2018 seems to be the year. I don't expect large numbers of people to follow this blog, but hopefully those who do will get something out of it, and I myself will benefit in the following ways: Putting the random ideas floating around in my head onto paper (or, in this case, silicon). By itself this can be stimulating and gratifying; plus writing an argument down forces one to think it through. Building a "time capsule" of writings to look back on, so that when I'm older I can cringe at all the ways that I've been dumb. Spending more time producing stuff instead of just consuming stuff in my spare time. To get a rough idea of the types of things I am likely to write about, check out the tabs above (on "Rationality", "Effective Altruism", and "AI Safety"). Happy New Year! ~Michael (P.S.: Perhaps I should have written that I do e...

This is part 6 of 6 in my series of summaries. See this post for an introduction.

This is part 5 of 6 in my series of summaries. See this post for an introduction.

This is part 4 of 6 in my series of summaries. See this post for an introduction.

This is part 3 of 6 in my series of summaries. See this post for an introduction.

This is part 2 of 6 in my series of summaries. See this post for an introduction.

This is part 1 of 6 in my series of summaries. See this post for an introduction.