Sublime

Eventually he came to the view that we needed to give what we had to others until the cost to ourselves outweighed the benefits to them. We needed to stop thinking of charity as a thing that was nice to do but okay not to do, and begin to think of it as our duty.

Will this change behavior? Is what you’re working on really going to change anything? Don’t add something unless it has a real impact on how people use your product.

The missing Ripple reminded him of a favorite thought experiment. “You have a close friend, Bob,” he explained. “He’s great. You love him. Bob is at a house party where someone gets murdered. No one knows who the murderer is. There are twenty people there. None are criminals. But Bob is less likely in your mind than anyone else to have killed someo

The essence of Becker’s theory is that decisions about honesty, like most other decisions, are based on a cost-benefit analysis.

There are lots of good reasons why murder is usually a really bad thing: you cause distress to the friends and family of the murdered, you cause society to lose a potentially valuable member in which it has already invested a lot of food and education and resources, and you take away the life of a person who had already invested a lot into it. But

define a metric that you can use to gauge whether the product is successful or not

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