About
The human being is a marvelous creature. We’ve managed to get to the moon, we’ve produced quite a bit of useful knowledge about the way things work, and are probably the only species which cares about the state of our pale blue dot. Still, the human being is a lot less perfect than many people think, not just in deviating from various moral ideals, but in thinking clearly about the world. For one thing, our higher-level desires and values often don’t match up with the things which best propagated our genes. We’ve evolved to get status, get food, and get laid, not to make sure we don’t wipe out humanity, or end unwanted suffering the world over. So you get things like people being horrified about a few people dying, but apathetic about all humans dying.
Ideally, that’s where this blog chips in. There’s a lot of really rational, persuasive arguments for working on some of these big projects, like existential risk reduction, that can be found in places like the websites in the links sidebar. I mention those arguments a little, but I leave that mostly to those places. I’m a rationalist myself, and I write any large attempts at rational arguments on places like LessWrong. Like any human being though, I also get emotional about things I think really matter, and my emotional arguments go here. Perhaps you’ll find these writings helpfully motivating, in counteracting whatever crazy thing it is that inclines us to see these things as unimportant and boring.
Because, y’know, saving all 6,500,000,000 billion people on earth and ensuring every previous human sacrifice wasn’t for naught, that’s kind of important. And I’ll be incredibly surprised if I can find something more exciting to do with my life than help with that effort.