I wasn’t immune to the incentive gradient, either. After I was dismissed from the crypto hedge fund I’d planned to work for in February 2022, I kept my distance from EA for a few months, wary of what I perceived as wastefulness and superficiality in the slice of the community I had encountered. But by May, I needed a job, and it was not hard to see that the fastest path to prosperity in the Effective Altruism world included a pit stop in the Bahamas. So I bought a plane ticket to Nassau, and within two weeks of my trip I had a fantastic position at an exciting new nonprofit organization funded by the FTX Foundation. I don’t know how to feel now about that plane ticket. On the one hand, the job I ended up in was a perfect fit. I was eminently qualified, and both I and the organization were substantially better off as a result of me joining. It introduced me to a community of earnest, introspective, devoted people, banded together to try to change the world for good, a community that I feel extraordinarily lucky to now call home. On the other hand, I was a willing participant in a web of incentives that likely compromised my epistemics and ethics. Participating in it had such high expected value — first in dollar terms, when I planned to trade crypto, and then in impact-on-the-world terms, when I went in search of an altruistic job. It seemed absurd to keep my distance just because the “vibes felt off” in the world of FTX and EA (at that point, the two were interchangeable in my mind), with no concrete cause for concern or evidence of wrongdoing in my field of vision. But if the incentives hadn’t been so strong, would I have paid more attention to the suspicious feelings in my gut?I think sometimes about the versions of me out there who would have held back from buying that plane ticket. There are alternate-universe-Rickis who smelled something rotten in FTX land and decided to stay away from that rot despite the enormous incentives not to. Those Rickis don’t end up in the Effective Altruism world. I think we would have benefited from having more of them around.

Much of what they do can be done without eliciting the ire of nation-states. Bike shares, pedestrian zones, insulated buildings, renovated port facilities, congestion fees, car emission limits, furnace specifications, fuel upgrades (from oil to gas to alternative energy) and white paint roofs, for example, are only some of the innovations city officials can promote to effect significant reductions in emissions and pollutants.

here states have grown dysfunctional and sovereignty has become an obstacle to global democratic action—as when the United States (or China, France, or Canada) refuses to compromise its sovereignty by permitting the international monitoring of carbon emissions on its soil—cities have increasingly proven themselves capable of deliberative democratic action on behalf of sustainability, as they have actually done in intercity associations like the C-40 or ICLEI. If presidents and prime ministers cannot summon the will to work for a sustainable planet, mayors can. If citizens of the province and nation think ideologically and divisively, neighbors and citizens of the towns and cities think publicly and cooperatively.

he um belt has two sides to it which are not separable in german they're the merkveld and the virgvelt the merkwelt is the umvelt considered 00:19:24 from the aspects of semiotics or signs or meaningful stimuli things to differentiations one might draw distinctions one might draw that are available to one the virgvelt is the same thing 00:19:37 considered under a different aspect which is the space of possible effective actions to draw a distinction is now to move in knowledge of that distinction 00:19:49 this notion of the virgvelt will will appear later in ecological psychology with the notion of affordance and and again a concept that follows totally nails long before it appears in the literature 00:20:02 so when you hear umwelt try not to think entirely visually but to recognize that we we're dealing here with a concept which must be understood as a sort of a stereoscopic fusion 00:20:14 of the idea of meaningful appearance meaningful showing up and capacity for action because of the difficulties in disciplining this view of this emerging 00:20:28 view of the subject you won't find it easy to interpret vulnerability in terms of personal experience he vacillates here and our vocabulary is still not great here but the umvelt has 00:20:40 this important character of being neither a theory of perception or theory of action in keeping with all embodied theories later perception and action are absolutely indistinguishable but we can characterize them in this 00:20:53 with this dual aspect manner so when you encounter sketches like this he's full of bold imaginative sketches in his work