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It is not given to us to know which acts or words will prove decisive. Every kindness you do may be the one that turns the tide. This is why there can be no small kindnesses.

— Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day (1967)
1w ago

It is not reason that gives us our moral principles, but habit and feeling. And yet the man who cannot give a reason for his virtue is in the gravest danger of losing it when circumstances change.

2w ago

We must not inquire too curiously into the uses of a discovery. All science has two aspects: the aspect of pure knowledge and the aspect of power; and though knowledge itself is beautiful, the aspect of power is sometimes horrible.

2w ago

It is not given to us to know which acts or words will prove significant in the long future, but every act upon a right principle, whether it produce fruit immediately or not, will prove a center of re-organization of the whole social fabric.

1mo ago
noahpinion.blog
The problem(s) with utilitarianism

For example, the fundamental question of AI risk — what chance of extinction we should accept in exchange for a shot at utopia — depends crucially on how much we value survival. Things get even more confusing when we weigh the utility of real people who are alive today against the utility of potential people who might be alive later on.

1mo ago

The penalty that good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by men worse than themselves.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
Albert Camus on the Source of Strength and How to Save Our Sanity in Trying Times

We know that we live in contradiction, but we also know that we must refuse this contradiction and do what is needed to reduce it. Our task as [humans] is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century.

1mo ago

It is not reason that gives us our moral principles; it is feeling. Reason is the slave of the passions, and ought only to be so.

1mo ago

We are always in search of the redeeming quality or deed that shall make us satisfied with our own evil and ours is a life that is not to be separated from the evil to which it gives birth.

2mo ago

The mass of every evil is swollen by the cowardice of those who could prevent it and do not.

3mo ago

The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.

4mo ago
noahpinion.blog
The way we treat pigs is a sin

Furthermore, vegetarianism, though morally laudable, has an obvious economic limitation — when one person refuses to eat meat, it lowers the price of meat for everyone else, which raises other people's meat consumption and partially offsets the vegetarian's action.

5mo ago
ai-supremacy.com
How to use Claude AI for Investing

2026 has been the year of Anthropic. They are the creator of the large language model Claude, which has taken the world by storm: The company was founded by a group of ex-OpenAI executives, who purportedly set out to create a more ethical generative AI tool.

5mo ago
noahpinion.blog
Do billionaires earn their money?

AOC seems to mean that in order for someone to get a billion dollars, they have to do something that society ought to forbid. In other words, billionaires can't get their wealth just by being lucky; they have to get it by being bad.

5mo ago
longreads.com
ISpyForGood

When I started paying my own rent and utilities, I frequently lied to the landlord and the gas company, saying the check was on its way when it wasn't. I didn't believe that scamming, or any illicit activity, even if done correctly, could ever be fruitful enough to get me or anyone else out of poverty—though it could easily attract the police or people of ill intent, who would make life worse.

5mo ago
noahpinion.blog
Why shoplifting is bad

Every time you shoplift, in other words, you're stealing from the people who work at grocery stores and drugstores and discount stores. You're stealing from the communities that those stores serve. You're contributing to food deserts. You're raising unemployment. You're making food less affordable for the most vulnerable.

6mo ago

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. The coordination of all knowledge and all effort toward the human purpose, the welfare of life, is the purpose of wisdom.

7mo ago

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.

7mo ago

To be entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise. The first principle for the relations between States should be loyalty to natural obligations of human beings, not to the state, whenever these conflict. A man who truly believes in an ordered society must believe in the equality of human rights.

7mo ago
platformer.news
Inside the backlash to the AI war machine

He felt the new contract wasn't true to the promise of tech: "This isn't what we came to the Valley to do. We came to build tech that makes people free!"

8mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

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