Sublime

“The Evolution of Altruistic Behavior.”

Caroline sensed, rightly, that her departure alerted Jane Street to an alarming new threat. Jane Street and the other high-frequency trading firms had been fishing for traders in the same ponds as Will MacAskill and the other Oxford philosophers fished for effective altruists. People able to calculate the expected value of complicated financial gam

Since MacAskill had first sold Sam, back in the fall of 2012, on the idea of earning to give, the EA movement had obviously changed. It had become a lot less interested in saving the lives of existing human beings than future ones. In early 2020, movement cofounder Toby Ord had published a book, The Precipice, which laid out where his thinking (and

In our view, the key to understanding how societies evolve is to understand factors that determine the costs and rewards of employing violence. Every human society, from the hunting band to the empire, has been informed by the interactions of megapolitical factors that set the prevailing version of the “laws of nature.”

Ultimately, he says, neuroscience will—and should—dictate human values.

What is striking about these documents is their practical sense and the awareness they exude of the limits of foresight about large human affairs.

Aquinas

most plausible or defensible—