Last December, I wrote a post about a concept I call “belated philanthropy”.
In summary: When someone solicits me on the street, asking for money, I don’t give it. Instead, I make a note of the incident in my mind. Later, I donate to a charity based on how many people have asked me for money since my last “belated” donation.
Here’s why:
Update: This post is out-of-date. YEA now has its own website, where updates will be posted on various things we do. The website is also out-of-date, but to a lesser extent.
I’m starting a club!
The name of the club is “Yale Effective Altruists”, or “YEA”. It exists for three big reasons:
Members of YEA will:
There will be one recommended meeting each week (30 minutes or less), plus a variety of projects to work on and talks to attend if you’d like to be more involved. We’ll also hang out together (for more, see “good parties” below).
If you’re already curious, you can sign up to learn more!
(I’ll also give you the link at the end of this post.)
In which I steal an idea from Venkatesh Rao and publish a series of thoughts that are too short, and perhaps not logical enough, to be full posts.
Based on a recent conversation with two real people (“R” and “J”).
R, science writer and non-poet, standing on balcony:
“What if I’d done spoken word poetry at Yale? How would I be different?”
AG, writer and non-poet, also on balcony:
“Well, you’d have done spoken word, for one. That’s different.”
J, scientist and non-poet, also on balcony:
“There would be more poetry in your life.”
AG:
“And in this other world, if you’d still made the choices that led you to this balcony, you’d be standing on this balcony and wondering what would have happened if you hadn’t done spoken word.
“And then I’d say: ‘Well, you wouldn’t have done spoken word, for one. That’s different.’
“And J would say: ‘There would be less poetry in your life’.
“I mean, in this alternate reality of yours, we’re still the same people we are in this reality, right? We’d still be giving the same unhelpful advice.”
Conclusion:
It’s good to know that some things in our quantum multiverse never change.
Other Conclusion:
There is a more frightening possibility: Had R done spoken word, she might have become the kind of person who wouldn’t even wonder about the path of her life without spoken word.
Then again, we lose something every time we make a big decision — not just the possibilities we are aware of, but the possibilities we will never be aware of if we follow another path.
Reading time: 8-10 minutes, plus one short song.
A collection of musings around the topics of art, yearning, and synthesizers.
Most people worry about the future. Some people worry about the past. I worry about alternate histories: things that never happened, but what if they had?
One of those what-ifs has been on my mind lately:
What if I’d been born early enough in history that I never got to hear electronic music?
* * * * *
I still remember the first time I knowingly heard a synthesizer. (Whatever electronic sound effects Britney Spears and Nelly were using had escaped my notice.)
I was 12, and riding in the car of my good friend Peter Andrews. His mother was driving, and we were listening to songs from the 1970s. Most of them were background noise, and held no interest for me.
Until…
I just started writing for Applied Sentience, a blog curated by the humanist chaplaincies of various American colleges. This post first appeared over there.
Whether or not you like me, the other folks at Applied Sentience write really great stuff about physics, ethics, religious policy, and many other notable topics. Check them out!
* * * * *
Humanist communities need more wonder.
This isn’t the fault of the humanist communities. Most religious communities also need more wonder. Most people need more wonder.
(The words “awe” and “transcendence” could stand in for “wonder” – I’m referring to that whole category of emotions.)
Whether it comes from the high note of a gospel hymn or the highest rocket in a fireworks display, wonder might just be the single best emotion. Mix wonder with affection, and you get love. Seek out wonder in your daily life, and you might avoid the hedonic treadmill that so often exhausts the pursuers of happiness. As far as I know, wonder never gets boring.
I don’t come by the feeling of wonder easily. And when I do, it’s hard to tell whether the things that give me that feeling will also work for other people.
(For example, most people don’t see dubstep as a quasi-religious experience.)
But last November, I stumbled onto something I think could become a wonder-inducing ritual for humanists around the world. The ritual is cheap, safe, beautiful, and equally accessible to one person or a gathering of thousands.
I could reveal it now, but this essay will make more sense if I tell you a story first.
At a recent symposium, social scientists gathered to create a list of “big questions” that might serve as a driving focus for academics in the years to come—inspired in part by David Hilbert’s (largely successful) use of this technique to guide mathematicians.
More on the symposium here. The final list of questions is highly informal, but gives us a good idea of what problems are on the minds of very smart people:
1. How can we induce people to look after their health?
2. How do societies create effective and resilient institutions, such as governments?
3. How can humanity increase its collective wisdom?
Something I’m glad I did: Sitting down with a large pad of paper, thinking about all the things that ought to exist, and writing them out as ideas for startups.
Time: 26 minutes for brainstorming (an hour is a long time) plus 90 minutes of research and blog-writing.
At the end of this, I had something like two dozen ideas, most of which were terrible. But a few were promising, and overall, it was a pretty good use of time. If there are things about the world you wish were different, you might enjoy doing the same.
The biggest takeaways from the experiment:
Something else that occurred to me:
Many problems in life can be solved if one tries enough new things. The greater challenge seems to be that many people don’t like trying new things. A great meta-invention would be an addictive app that rewards people for trying new things—but how would you convince people who don’t try new things to try it in the first place?
*****
Most of the ideas are listed below. Steal them if you want to.
“It’s The Breakfast Club meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
Sleepy town in semi-rural America. Small public high school, too small for any actual cliques to form. Some kids are more popular than others. Every one of them is an individual with goals, hobbies, and a detailed personal life, though they are not, on the whole, especially introspective or knowledge-seeking.
In addition, each member of the senior class spends much of their time fighting the forces of darkness.
And seventeen other stories, besides.
None of these characters has any inkling of the others’ struggles; teenagers are very good at hiding their secret lives from others. But one day, all the hidden stories intersect, and the senior class will have to band together if they want to save their town…
…and the world? No, probably not the world. The world is a big place, with millions of hidden stories. But one town is enough.
This might be a metaphor for the fact that everyone has a unique set of problems and we shouldn’t judge from outward appearances, but it’s mostly a way for me to deal with real high school social dynamics (few books do this well) and also write lots of supernatural fight scenes.