People are thinking about:
- Future potential people are as deserving of our moral concern as people who are alive today.
- A useful way to think about the purpose of weekly/daily/hourly news media is not that it keeps people informed. Instead, it provides common subject matter for people to discuss. Given this, it's not surprising that news is often coupled with sports and weather.
- Campaign funding should be public and distributed in a relatively democratic way such as with democracy vouchers.
- The public would be better served and more informed if news stories were selected based on the aggregate impact of all similar incidents, rather than by the novelty and drama of rare outlier events. For example, mass shootings will affect far fewer people than suicides by gun.
- One of the most moral things one can do is to sustainably grow the economy.
- It is a good goal for political power in a society to be, in the aggregate, evenly distributed across members of that society.
- An individual or organization that releases open source software has some obligation to serve its users.
- An individual or organization that releases open source software should make intentions around support and community-building clear, so potential users can set their expectations appropriately and decide if they want to be a part of it.
- For an individual or organization releasing open source software, just the act of releasing implies an obligation to support it.
- Creating and maintaining a community [around a piece of open source software] implies an obligation for creators/maintainers to support its users by responding to queries, adopting noncontroversial fixes – generally listening.
- To promote knowledge work productivity, it is better for an organization to try to avoid wasting time and effort than to encourage people to work longer hours.
- A tax regime that replaced capital gains taxes on domestic property and financial securities with a 1 or 2 percent wealth/property tax would be superior to both the current regime and a universal wealth tax. This would also apply to primary residences which are often capital gains exempt.
- For devices that use Alexa, OK Google, Siri, etc., with voice recognition and always-on microphones, the risk to privacy and the potential for abuse (intentional or not) outweighs the benefits.
- Customers should cancel their Prime accounts due to the way Amazon treats warehouse laborers, delivery contractors, etc.
- It's a net positive to have a tax deduction for charitable giving.
- Assuming that it’s possible to make a simulation as complex as our observable universe, it’s highly likely that we are living in such a simulation.
- Your internal narrative about who you are and how you came to be that way, up to and including your memories of the basic facts, can be very different from a more objective “outside” view.
- Most individual conservation acts, such as recycling or composting, don’t have a meaningful impact on climate change. Instead, they can give people the false sense that they are making a difference.
andrew replied:
The Tyler Cowen "stubborn attachments" view is on here :)