Cloudy with a chance of Coronavirus
Hello everyone, I hope you are all doing well, both physically and psychologically. Please take all the common-sense steps you can to safeguard your own health and those around you. The first I had heard about the coronavirus was towards the end of January. I was attending a series of...
A Better World
Hello everyone, I hope you are all well. Increasing happiness and alleviating suffering is the goal, so if you are all well we are a little closer to it. Last weekend I attended the EAGxAustralia conference. A three-day conference where people interested in Effective Altruism gather to share knowledge on...
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“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” When we are born we are given a name. We walk through life with a strong attachment to it, as if something about those syllables revealed who we really are. We pick up many more names on the way. I...
Book Recommendation
The problems we face
Hello everyone, I hope you are all doing well. Here are some questions I would like you to reflect on. What are our biggest problems? Where should we direct our time and energy towards? We all want happiness and shirk from suffering. In fact, a problem is essentially a cause...
Effective Altruism and Social Engineering
Hello everyone, I hope you have been doing well. In this week's email, I want to take the time to tell you about Effective Altruism. What is it? The goal of Effective Altruism is summed up pretty well by the title of William Macaskill's book. "Doing Good Better"...
The Tragic and Utopian Visions of Human Nature
The Blank Slate is a book about the question of whether we are nature or nurture. Are we born like blank slates to be written on by our life experience or do we have an innate nature that remains consistent through our lives?...
Book Recommendation
How far we have come
There are two biases that seem to be affecting all of us for the worse, that I would like to bring to your attention. 1. The Availability Bias[1] We judge the likelihood of events and the state of affairs based on how easily we can recall the data. Think...