Sublime

The EAs didn’t need his empathy; the EAs thought that even they shouldn’t care about their feelings. In their single-minded quest to maximize the utility of their lives, they were seeking to minimize the effect of their feelings. “The way they put it to me is that their emotions are getting in the way of their ability to reduce their decisions to j

He replied, “They’ll never know the difference.”

Nietzsche wrote (before he went mad). If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.

Levitt was telling us that a combination of curiosity, creativity, and data could dramatically improve our understanding of the world. There were stories hidden in data that were ready to be told and this has been proven right over and over again.

Is public display of superstimuli a negative externality, even to the people who say no?

David Barlow. He was (and still is) one of the premiere anxiety researchers on the planet.

But a human brain is a flawed lens that can understand its own flaws—its systematic errors, its biases—and apply second-order corrections to them.