This is a really good book about how to be skeptical and how to use your newfound powers.

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World". It's by two professors, Carl T. Bergstrom (Theoretical & Evolutionary Biologist) and Jevin D. West (Data Science). This isn't a book about bipolar but it's very much worth the read (and I highly recommend it ([the full course is on YouTube] (https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPnZfvKID1Sje5jWxt-4CSZD7bUI4gSPS)))

Towards the end, the authors try to instill a sense of responsibility in the reader of their new found powers by providing multiple warnings, which unfortunately could be read as a list of devastating personal attacks on my character provided by someone who has spent serious time with me (I was once told that having a conversation with me "felt like the verbal equivalent of getting mugged"...by a friend, who wasn't wrong).

• "Carelessly calling bullshit is a quick way to make enemies of strangers and strangers of friends." (pg. 266)

• "Scoring rhetorical points on tangential technicalities doesn't convince anyone, it just pisses people off." (pg. 280)

• "The less antagonistic your interaction is, the more likely someone will seriously consider your ideas." (pg. 280)

• "What's a well-actually guy? It’s the guy who interrupts a conversation to demonstrate his own cleverness by pointing out some irrelevant factoid that renders the speaker incorrect on a technicality." (pg. 284)

• "A well-actually guy doesn't care so much about where the argument is going as he does about demonstrating his own intellectual superiority." (pg. 285)

• "A well-actually guy doesn't care about protecting an audience, he is merely interested in demonstrating his own cleverness." (pg. 285)

• "His motivation is to put the speaker in her place while raising himself up." (pg. 285)

• "A caller of bullshit makes a careful decision about whether it is worthwhile to speak up, derail a conversation, risk a confrontation, or make someone feel defensive. A well-actually guy simply cannot help himself. He hears something he believes he can contradict and doesn't have the self-control to think first about whether it is helpful to do so." (pg. 285)

• "He doesn't care about advancing truth, or about the logical coherence of his objections. He is simply trying to impress or intimidate someone with his knowledge." (pg. 286)

Station Eleven was amazing. Hiro Murai (EP on Atlanta who directed 26 episodes) directed episodes 1 and 3 (you'll notice the overhead shots with skewed perspectives...he does that all the time and it always works). Highly recommend.

Hopping on the top comment to provide more context on "longtermism" and "effective altruism", which I think the author was criticizing (but I'm honestly not sure).

First things first: humanity (in our biological form) is not getting out of our Solar System.

So the whole "colonize the galaxy" plan with people being born on the way is not going to work. Those babies will not survive because every biological system depends on the constant force of Earth's gravity. Plus their parents are probably not going to fare much better, as their bones density degrades over time and that lost calcium develops into painful kidney stones.

Here's an article from the Economist's 1843 Magazine that covers Effective Altruism (which is getting a lot of attention right now thanks to Sam Bankman-Fried having bankrolled the movement).

My perspective is that there are a lot of people with good intentions, but the intellectual leaders of the movement are ethically-challenged, who are at the "getting high on their own farts" stage, and it's being seized on by some of the absolute worst people (Elon Musk & Peter Thiel) to justify their horrible actions, with dreams of populating the stars.

>The Oxford branch of effective altruism sits at the heart of an intricate, lavishly funded network of institutions that have attracted some of Silicon Valley’s richest individuals. The movement’s circle of sympathisers has included tech billionaires such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Dustin Moskovitz, one of the founders of Facebook, and public intellectuals like the psychologist Steven Pinker and Singer, one of the world’s most prominent moral philosophers. Billionaires like Moskovitz fund the academics and their institutes, and the academics advise governments, security agencies and blue-chip companies on how to be good. The 80,000 Hours recruitment site, which features jobs at Google, Microsoft, Britain’s Cabinet Office, the European Union and the United Nations, encourages effective altruists to seek influential roles near the seats of power.

#William MacAskill A 35 year-old Oxford Professor is the closest thing to a founder and has produced increasingly controversial positions.

>The commitment to do the most good can lead effective altruists to pursue goals that feel counterintuitive. In “Doing Good Better”, MacAskill laments his time working as a care assistant in a nursing home in his youth. He believes that someone else would have needed the money more and would have probably done a better job. When I asked about this over email, he wrote: “I certainly don’t regret working there; it was one of the more formative experiences of my life…My mind often returns there when I think about the suffering in the world.” But, according to the core values of effective altruism, improving your own moral sensibility can be a misallocation of resources, no matter how personally enriching this can be.

#Longtermism >One idea has taken particular hold among effective altruists: longtermism. In 2005 Nick Bostrom, a Swedish philosopher, took to the stage at a ted conference in a rumpled, loose-fitting beige suit. In a loud staccato voice he told his audience that death was an “economically enormously wasteful” phenomenon. According to four studies, including one of his own, there was a “substantial risk” that humankind wouldn’t survive the next century, he said. He claimed that reducing the probability of an existential risk occurring within a generation by even 1% would be equivalent to saving 60m lives.

>Disillusioned effective altruists are dismayed by the increasing predominance of “strong longtermism”. Strong longtermists argue that since the potential population of the future dwarfs that of the present, our moral obligations to the current generation are insignificant compared with all those yet to come. By this logic, the most important thing any of us can do is to stop world-shattering events from occurring.

#Going full Orwell

>In 2019 Bostrom once again took to the ted stage to explain “how civilisation could destroy itself” by creating unharnessed machine super-intelligence, uncontrolled nuclear weapons and genetically modified pathogens. To mitigate these risks and “stabilise the world”, “preventive policing” might be deployed to thwart malign individuals before they could act. “This would require ubiquitous surveillance. Everyone would be monitored all of the time,” Bostrom said. Chris Anderson, head of ted, cut in: “You know that mass surveillance is not a very popular term right now?” The crowd laughed, but Bostrom didn’t look like he was joking.

>Not everyone agrees. Emile Torres, an outspoken critic of effective altruism, regards longtermism as “one of the most dangerous secular ideologies in the world today”. Torres, who studies existential risk and uses the pronoun “they”, joined “the community” in around 2015. “I was very enamoured with effective altruism at first. Who doesn’t want to do the most good?” they told me.

>But Torres grew increasingly concerned by the narrow interpretation of longtermism, though they understood the appeal of its “sexiness”. In a recent article, Torres wrote that if longtermism “sounds appalling, it’s because it is appalling”. When they announced plans on Facebook to participate in a documentary on existential risk, the Centre for Effective Altruism immediately sent them a set of talking points.

>Chugg, for his part, also had his confidence in effective altruism fatally shaken in the aftermath of a working paper on strong longtermism, published by Hilary Greaves and MacAskill in 2019. In 2021 an updated version of the essay revised down their estimate of the future human population by several orders of magnitude. To Chugg, this underscored the fact that their estimates had always been arbitrary. “Just as the astrologer promises us that ‘struggle is in our future’ and can therefore never be refuted, so too can the longtermist simply claim that there are a staggering number of people in the future, thus rendering any counter argument mute,” he wrote in a post on the Effective Altruism forum. This matters, Chugg told me, because “You’re starting to pull numbers out of hats, and comparing them to saving living kids from malaria.”

>Effective altruists believe that they will save humanity. In a poem published on his personal website, Bostrom imagines himself and his colleagues as superheroes, preventing future disasters: “Daytime a tweedy don/ at dark a superhero/ flying off into the night/ cape a-fluttering/ to intercept villains and stop catastrophes."

I think this is ultimately driven by a whole group of people obsessed with "maximizing" instead of "optimizing". They want a number (to the decimal) about which option to choose and can't stand the thought of "good enough, but it could have been better". Essentially they're letting perfect be the enemy of the good and if we're not careful they're just going to slide into fascism with more math.

Oh for sure. But that doesn't mean he doesn't know how to tell the truth when his freedom depends on doing so. He's a grifter, not a true believer. And the defense can try to shred his credibility (not hard because it comes pre-shredded) but it helps to build the case and allows them to bring in evidence they might not otherwise be able to introduce.

Let's not forget fuckface Nigel Farage of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), whose push for Brexit gave the Tories the choice between doing what was in the country's best interest and doing what's in their short-term political interests...and the Tories always choose the second one.

Farage would leave politics to work as an anchor for the British Fox News. The UK would go on to execute Brexit, weakening the European Union (to Russia's benefit), reducing their own bargaining power, fucking up their trade infrastructure, weakening their currency, and exacerbating inflationary pressures.

Fuck Dyson. Not because of the product, but because James Dyson is a piece of shit:

>Sir James Dyson, the British billionaire inventor and outspoken Brexiter who called on the government to walk away from the EU without a deal, is moving the headquarters of his vacuum cleaner and hair dryer technology company to Singapore.

Motherfucker did all he could to get the UK to successfully shoot itself in the foot and then dipped out. Fuck that guy.