IMO, you can read out of this a very nice personal philosophy — one where you try to live a productive life, contributing ideas & labor as you can, & giving to others who are trying to do the same but whose circumstances make an additional dollar more useful to them than to you.
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It's hard to pin it down exactly, but... Attachments is really not about limiting your sense of obligation to others, but to widening the scope of that obligation (to, for example, people living many hundreds of years from now) & serving that obligation through high productivity.
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It’s difficult to appreciate the value of human lives which won’t be lived for many hundreds of years. Likewise, the value of lives already lived — lived without the gifts of growth even many of the poor among us can access: clean running water, heating/lighting, refrigerationpic.twitter.com/xTADR882d9
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Mason 🏃♂️ ✂️ Retweeted David Deutsch
Yes... this is a repeating theme for me, strangely converging across a few recent rabbit holes. What makes the world richer? Why does wealth compound? Ideas, which can be forgotten but not consumed away. When you get a good one, you usually get to keep it!https://twitter.com/DavidDeutschOxf/status/1052678945248878598 …
Mason 🏃♂️ ✂️ added,
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IMO, the moral isn't to grind yourself down either for the poorest (a potential failure mode for EAs) or for all civilization (a potential failure mode for the reader, perhaps). Maybe it's "find the awe in a *grand human tradition* & try to find your place in furthering it."
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Mason 🏃♂️ ✂️ Retweeted Mason 🏃♂️ ✂️
You could do worse than to spend your entire life in pursuit of good ideas to serve, either by promoting/spreading them OR by extending/revising them OR by executing on them. There are many paths to the thinker priesthood, and it needs youhttps://twitter.com/webdevMason/status/1047498394447429633 …
Mason 🏃♂️ ✂️ added,
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Getting *really* tangential now, the book + this interview with
@tylercowen &@robertwiblin convinced me today to make a real go at quitting alcohol. (Today, coincidentally, marks 6 weeks without nicotine!)https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tyler-cowen-stubborn-attachments/ …9 replies 1 retweet 59 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @webdevMason @tylercowen
I expect society would be better off without alcohol, but that 80% of people who drink benefit from it overall. The harm concentrated in the 20% who use the most, and most irresponsibly. Complicated!
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Replying to @robertwiblin @tylercowen
Don't necessarily disagree, but curious how you concluded the split is ~80/20?
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Replying to @webdevMason @tylercowen
Looking at distribution of consumption. 50% of Americans don't drink 40% drink little to quite a bit. Top 10% drinks a lot. Top few percent it gets pretty crazy.
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Replying to @webdevMason @tylercowen
The source of that data has major flaws but it's broadly right - we know it's very widely dispersed and the top are drinking SO much.
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In what ways is it flawed?
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