Quantity over quality, at least at first.

Tools I’ve made

• Bet Maker

• Scoring calibration

And I often heard people as saying “trust your snap gut”, and I was like “my snap gut judgment is that that is insane.” But at least in one case, and likely others, they meant “trust your reflective gut”, the gut that’s had time to sit with everything and digest it (the metaphor pays dividends).

Figuring out without communicating who the media person is is a really interesting exercise. You repeat until you as a group are better calibrated than you were before, and then test that calibration in step 2, so you can notice how your views on how your preferences relate to the group’s change and whether you’re right about that.

The second time I ever gave a class like this, I co-taught it with the spectacular Gavin Leech, and here’s what we did

Core idea: You don't need to ask permission to just try things, and there's a lot out there that no one has tried, or no one has tried well.

Having now observed and taught a handful of classes on “agency”, whatever that means, I found it helpful to collect my thoughts on it and teaching it (and resources I found helpful).

Recipe for the peanut noodles I make

I want working effectively on the most important and pressing problems of the world to be easy. It's often not. It often causes people, stress, and anguish and guilt, fears of a breakdown, uncertainty about how to allocate resources, sometimes guilt at the money that they can spend on grants, or the difficulty of the decisions placed in their hands. I'm personally mostly having a great time, but the stakes are real, and I knew going in that there was a risk to my mental health.

I think that - taking a hit, or a hit in expectation, to your happiness or mental health - is a sacrifice.

Others can speak to the journey that took them from counting their every purchase in bed nets to endorsing throwing every ounce of their energy and resources and advocacy to saving the world from existential risks. My journey is not quite so vast and speaks less to the goodness of my heart, I was never living in my van or in pestilential apartments, but endorsing spending money is a real matter with real stakes to me and not one that comes out of not having feelings.

Here are my feelings:

I love Fermi problems and Fermithons as an activity, but when I go looking for problems, they’re surprisingly hard to find and scattered around.

Here are the resources I’ve collected over time.

A Worked Example, adapted from a recent conversation where someone was stressed not to have an opinion, and the process I ad hoc came up with, that I liked enough to want to write down here, subject to edits as I hone this.

Is it good or bad if Elon Musk buys twitter?

I have some mix of aversion/panic/anxiety/allergy upon encountering totalizing worldviews, ones that want to give me a totally different ontology of the world, especially ones that tell me I'm wrong about what I think and feel.

Some possibilities for what to do in those circumstances:

1. Really immerse myself in something for a day or week or month, read a book, talk to a million people, don't worry about how it maps onto any other ontology, just live and breathe it until you get it and then emerge on the other side and decide what to do

2. Play with it, grab what you want (anything from a tweet to many books), keep in touch with all the other things you think, switch back and forth between lenses, add it to the hammers you have when you encounter a nail

3. Dig into it, ask what the world would look like if it were true, excavate for predictions and object level claims, check with the world or with 20 people to see if it says something true, change your worldview incrementally

Bright lights are good. Here’s how I did it in the UK.

What keeps us morally and epistemically honest? Feedback loops suck as it is, it’s ok that we’re trying to field-build and skill-build and try things that don’t give obvious successes right away, but then what keeps us from being a very earnest group of people who get nothing done? Or get a lot done that doesn’t matter through frenetic effort and wasted motion?

And even worse, what keeps us from sucking up tons of talent and interest because we’re where the interesting ideas and the money are and everything comes through us and then we don’t save the world and also the people who could have don’t either because we made all our mistakes correlate?

I went into this week thinking that I’d finally get to the logarithmic utility question but instead we talked about how much money really rich people have. One student said they’d heard that if we took all the billionaires’ money, we could end poverty.

In perhaps my favorite moment of the whole club, I was like, ok, let’s look it up.

When we fall prey to confirmation bias, scope insensitivity, the desire to round off the complicated edges to be more persuasive, retreating to the “luxury of being overwhelmed”, there are real things at stake: people, beings, conscious experiences, visions of the future and paths forward that will be better or worse based on whether our goals are achieved. Reality does not grade on a curve.

I made that sound dark and hard! And I mean, look, eyes on the prize here, but let’s get concrete.