Why that candidate over 50 might be your best new hire - The Globe and Mail - "older entrepreneurs have a better track record at establishing successful businesses than younger ones. One common stereotype is that mature job seekers aren’t tech-savvy... “I think people who’ve been in the work world [longer] bring so much more to the table in terms of problem-solving skills. We’ve seen a lot of different things, like changes in technology,” she says. “We need to stop apologizing for being older.”... “The feedback we get from corporate partners is great maturity, great judgment … and loyalty.” Mr. Kearns says that mature employees tend to stay longer at their jobs and require less handholding... "there are certain advantages to having some more mature individuals infused into that environment because they bring in perspectives, thoughts, ideas and experience you just don’t get with the younger person”... Older hires can also bring more stable personal lives to the table, Mr. Kearns says. Many are past the stage of raising young kids... For older jobseekers, there are some pro-active strategies for getting past ageism in the hiring process. Dr. Dart suggests getting up to speed before the job search on digital skills with team collaboration tools such as Slack and understanding the importance of digital marketing such as the LinkedIn profile helps. Courses and programs can also help to build confidence. Mr. Kearns advocates addressing the stereotypes in interviews by talking about loyalty to an employer, getting up to speed quickly on past projects, fitting in with different ages of co-workers, adaptability and open-mindedness."
Iceland's 'Pompeii' emerging from the ash - ""Wake up, something terrible has happened on the island! There is an eruption!" Helga Jonsdottir's mother shouted as she shook her awake at 02:00 on 23 January 1973. She was 17, and lived on the Icelandic island of Heimaey. In the early hours of that morning a volcanic system that hadn't erupted for 5,000 years burst open without warning, ripping a 2km (1.2 mile) tear through the earth."
'No Shoot Zone' activist shot in East Baltimore on Wednesday - "Moorehead could be seen standing outside of his home in hospital scrubs, surrounded by police. He had ripped off at least one of his bandages, displaying a gunshot wound to his neck. Neighbors described Moorehead as antagonistic, sharing video footage of him brandishing an ax and sharpening it on the sidewalk. Over the years, Moorehead spread his message across the city by spray painting "No Shoot Zone" on abandoned buildings, sidewalks, and other objects. Some of his no-shoot messages are incredibly detailed. Others are generic. More than 200 of his anti-violent messages have been scrawled across Baltimore."
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Future of Work - "‘What about those who don't consider to be working strictly, what about students. What about being a retiree? Are they do they have a valueless, worthless life? Probably not. We don't want to say that. So I think emphasizing the dignity of work and the nobility of work can lead In quite a dark direction, if we start saying well, though, only those who do work have dignity and worth’"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Do we get the politicians we deserve? - "‘Did politicians of the past behave better do you think?’
‘No… So the first Prime Minister 300 years ago this year, Robert Walpole. So alike Boris Johnson in so many ways. But if we take money, they both love money, but Walpole knocked him into a cocked hat in terms of the amount of money that he was able to acquire. Not least in his luscious Halton Hall in Norfolk, his personal morals, basically living in Downing Street with women 25 years younger than them, who they then married, but Walpole had lots of mistresses. Moving on quickly from that, broken promises. Walpole was an absolute master at broken promises. That's why he won so many elections. And finally bribery. Walpole. I mean, they're both familiar with it, but to Walpole, he said, every man has a price. So we can go down through Melbourne and Palmerston and Lloyd George and others on the way to the 55th Prime Minister, but there is no decline. They are all mortal human beings.’"
EP14 The Game of War | Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum | Podcasts on Audible | Audible.com - "'So few people in war actually proportionately fire their weapon at the enemy... people actually had to deliver the ammo to the frontline troops... 15% of frontline, of troops made up the frontline'
'That's different, it's different in every army. 17 to 1 in the US during the Second World War'"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Animal Sentience - "'Certainly, you know, our laws that protect animals are an an evolution, you know, they're not, it's not a static point, or we can ever say, right, we finished now, and everything's perfect, because they're evolving in line with our increased understanding, our enlightened, you know, scientific understanding of animal sentience, of the welfare needs of animals. And so things that we used to do, you know, whaling, bear baiting, you know, a long time ago, which were considered totally acceptable are now considered abhorrent. And society's moral compass is, you know, pointing in a different direction'...
‘Do you see logically that ending in, say, banning meat eating?’
‘No’...
‘This bill makes no distinction between pets and pests, would you be as concerned about the capacity of the rat, for example, to feel pain as that of a rabbit or a dog?’
‘I think it's important to take animals sentience, and their welfare needs into account an individual level. And so it's a bit fallacious to be trying to sort of rank animals or sort of try and make them compete against each other in some sort of, you know, sentience Olympics. It's really the job, you know, the committee to look at whether ministers have given sufficient thought to each animal’s individual lifetime experience and the ways that we're impacting on that both negatively and also potentially positively. And so for a rat, you know, suffering, for example, on a glue trap, which we hope, you know, the government will be banning, fairly shortly, you know, that suffering experience, it's going to be different to the way a dog might experience it, or, or certainly to a human, but it doesn't make it any less wrong. And you know, as moral agents, we have a duty where we can to act, you know, to prevent suffering... There would rightly be national uproar if a restaurant you know, boiled a pig alive to serve up for dinner. And yet we know that lobsters you know, have the same similar capacity for pain and suffering, and that happens to them all the time’...
‘Do you think we have a moral duty to eat meat?’
‘Absolutely. I think we need to think of the kinds of animals that we're dealing with. And when you're dealing with domesticated animals, it's different from the, from wild animals. So domesticated animals owe their lives to us. They're, they’re artifacts. We've made them, we're like gods to them, if you like. So they wouldn't exist if we didn't eat them. So if you really want to respect animals, if you think they have some kind of dignity, if you think their sentience matters, all these kinds of things, we should eat them because without us eating them, most of them wouldn't exist. Now this would only apply to animals that have relatively decent lives. And many, of course, ,don't but many of them do. For some sheep, for example, their life is a bit like a spa. So, I think that, so I think in most cases, we actually have a duty to eat them and not to eat them would be very wrong, because you're depriving them of life.’"
The "myth" of the slippery slope strikes again
If domesticated animals' lives are not worth living, one could make the case that we have a duty to kill some wild animals to put them out of their suffering
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Rules - Expectations and Apologies - "‘Is it defensible to elect somebody that you know, has all sorts of character flaws in the belief that they're actually going to deliver on the promises, which is what you want? And that's what people do. Is it defensible? It happens, it happens all the time. Would we rather have saints? Sure. Can the saints deliver? Every time we try one, we get into big, big trouble. You know why? Because the outside world there is not a saintly place. And the leaders of other countries, for example, in Russia and China are not saints, we need people who are extremely shrewd about the failings of human nature. And that may sometimes be because they share them... consistency is a quality you ask from butter. It's not a quality you expect from politicians, what you want from politicians is results’...
‘People tend to get much more upset about what philosophers call procedural justice rule breaking than they do about social justice. So you can bang on about inequality between rich and poor, but people will complain about the person down the road who's nicking 10 quid off the benefit system. And I think that's what this is about, is that we are obsessed with the procedural justice of, there are rules and those rules have been broken’"
3004 - “The greatest man who ever lived or will ever live”: The story of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor - The History Network - "John the Fearless was about to come to an arrangement to keep the English out of France with the Dauphin, the Mad King's son, when he was assassinated by a savage blow to the skull in 1419. When Francis I, a later French King, Charles the Fifth’s chief rival throughout his reign, was shown the skull of John the Fearless kept at the monastery of Blois, the monks pointed to the hole in the back of the skull and commented through this hole, the English entered France... There are other reasons Charles remains obscure today. In a sense, he was neither fish nor fowl, a king everywhere but nowhere, who initially did not speak well any of the languages of the kingdoms he ruled, speaking French instead, which was the language of his most hated rival."
3105 - War in the Philippines - The History Network - "With his American allies Aguinaldo laid siege to the Spanish forces holding out in Manila. The Spanish commander knew there was no hope of relief. At the same time, he refused to capitulate to what he perceived to be the Filipino rebels. The compromise was a mock battle that was agreed between the Spanish and the Americans to satisfy Spanish honour and allow them to surrender to the Americans. In doing so Philippine sovereignty passed to the Americans, which would be confirmed in the Treaty of Paris, signed in 1898. Aguinaldo and his revolutionaries felt betrayed by their American allies. As power passed to the Americans, random acts of violence against what some Filipinos saw as another occupying force, blossomed into a full scale resistance movement"
An opt-out organ donor system might actually lead to fewer transplants | New Scientist - "under both systems, families are still given the final say... People were more certain that their injured relative really wanted to donate their organs if they had signed up under the opt-in system, than if they had been presumed to consent under the opt-out system"
What’s So Bad About Nepotism? - Freakonomics - "DUBNER: If you want to look at family firms generally, and what happens once the next generation takes over, there are a few economists who have studied this. One is Antoinette Schoar. Another is Francisco Péréz-González. When they look at what happens when a firm goes from the parent to the offspring, Antoinette Schoar found that there were drops of between 10 and 20 percent of profitability... Péréz-González found that the underperformance of family C.E.O.s was basically explained by the group of family C.E.O.s that did not attend a good college."
How Simple Is Too Simple? - Freakonomics - "DUCKWORTH: They call him “the professor.” And he has this new book called Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop. But there was this one passage — it’s so related to this magic bullet psychology. I’m going to read you what he said about teaching a group of executives. He says, “I was teaching this group of executives online. I asked the class, ‘What caused the massive fraud at Theranos?’ Each executive was asked to enter their answer in the chat function. The time allowed was generous. Clearly, there were multiple causes of fraud at Theranos, but when I looked at the class’s answers, I found they tended to be simple and singular. 62 of the 70 responses offered a single cause. 56 of those 62 were a simple description of Elizabeth Holmes, such as her ego or lack of integrity.”... the psychology of these executives who thought of a cause, a reason — not multiple reasons. And here is his conclusion, “In other words, the vast majority of the sophisticated executives in my class who knew all aspects of the story blamed a single source.” And then, Max goes on to talk about the single-cause bias. We have a propensity to stop thinking after we see or understand one cause of an effect. When, if you just pause to think about it, really, almost everything... it’s hard to even think of a single phenomenon or human behavior that doesn’t have many causes.
DUBNER: It’s so interesting, because what’s pushing against his word of caution is a long history of embracing simplicity as a means to figure out a very complex world. Occam’s Razor is a famous example...
One factor that did cause a drop in crime was a big increase in imprisonment. In other words, if you put a lot of people in prison, which we did in the ’80s and then ’90s, that is definitely going to decrease the crime rate because — this is a basic tenet of criminology — it’s a relatively small group of people who do the majority of crimes. So, if you’re very, very tough on them, you convict them, and you put them in prison for quite some time, then crime will go down.
DUCKWORTH: And I think I found the other two.
DUBNER: One, I want to say, is more policing...
DUCKWORTH: The fourth one is the waning of the crack epidemic...
DUBNER: Even if someone reads Freakonomics, where we actually walk through this paper of Levitt’s and say, here is evidence that there were four pretty major contributors to the drop in crime and six contributors that you might think had contributed — those include: a stronger economy, innovative policing methods, changing demographics, gun-control laws, carrying of concealed weapons, the use of capital punishment. Those were some that Levitt empirically argued didn’t decrease crime for a variety of reasons. It is astonishing to me how even someone who’s read that fairly carefully seems to gravitate toward the magic bullet — or single-cause explanation — and say, “Oh, it was abortion.”"
Is It Worth It for Charities to Harass Their Donors? - Freakonomics - "DUBNER: With Smile Train, if you signed up and gave them something, they would send you — do you want to know how many mailings a year you would get from Smile Train?... Eighteen mailings a year... And the reason they did this is because the economics of fundraising are such that the acquisition of a new donor — just like the acquisition of a new customer in business — is difficult and expensive. And almost every charity loses money in that phase. But a donor, once they’re hooked, will tend to give again and again, and that’s because they’re being harassed. So, Brian Mullaney thought, “Well, hang on a second. What if we try to change this dynamic? If people don’t like getting hassled, but they are giving, would it be worth thinking about offering a different solution? What if we offered donors a way that they would agree, if they gave money, that we’ll never be in touch with them again?” He called this a once-and-done letter... there were three options in this card that you’d get in the mail. Option one: “This will be my only gift. Please send me a tax receipt and do not ask for another donation again.”... Number two: “I would prefer to receive only two communications from the Smile Train each year. Please honor my wishes to limit the amount of mail sent to me.” And number three was: “Please keep me up to date on the progress the Smile Train is making on curing the world of clefts by sending me regular communications,” which means, I guess, 18 letters... households that got this once-and-done letter were twice as likely to become first-time donors as people who got a regular, standard solicitation letter. By fundraising standards, this was a massive gain. Twice as many people were giving for the first time. Also, they were giving a little bit more money. On average, it was about $56 instead of $50. So, Smile Train immediately raised millions of extra dollars, but then you have to ask yourself: Are they sacrificing long-term? Because now every new donor has the option to tell Smile Train to get lost. So, you might expect that all the new donors would check box number one — “This will be my only gift. Please send me a tax receipt, do not ask for another donation.” But only a third of them opted out of future mailings. Most donors were very happy to let Smile Train keep harassing them. And overall, this once-and-done operation, it raised donations by 46 percent. And because some people did opt out of future mailings, Smile Train actually raised more money by sending fewer letters because they’re saving so much on expenses as well...
Katie TSAI: Hi. My name’s Katie. I live in Philadelphia, and my favorite, most successful fundraising strategy was: When I was in high school, we sold pieces of duct tape. It was one piece of duct tape for a dollar, and each piece of duct tape went towards taping our principal to the wall of our school gym. And I think at the end of our fundraiser, we raised, like, $300. Our poor principal was plastered against the wall with all these pieces of duct tape. His feet weren’t even touching the ground — that’s how much tape was on our principal. And not only do we make a lot of money through our fundraiser, but we even got our principal safely off the wall...
DUCKWORTH: There was an article that came out a couple of years ago in Marketing. This article’s called, “Coins Are Cold and Cards Are Caring: The Effect of Pre-Giving Incentives on Charity Perceptions, Relationship Norms, and Donation Behavior.” It’s an article that kind summarizes the research that’s already been done to date. But they also compare this kind of return-address-label, gift-card, non-monetary, pre-gift incentive to, just, cash. And here’s what I learned. When you get those letters in the mail from a charity that has a little dollar in the window, or a quarter, et cetera, you are more likely to open it. I think very few of us can just throw that envelope in the trash. But, if you compare monetary incentives (like coins, dollars), non-monetary incentives (greeting cards, return labels), and then just, like, no incentives, which of these modalities is the best? It’s actually giving nothing. That said, you do get people to open more when there’s a coin in the window, et cetera. It’s just that the average donation isn’t necessarily more, and then you have to subtract the cost of the coin or the dollar. And then, I think one of the most important things that I got out of it is that, when you send somebody a dollar, or a quarter, or a nickel, asking them to, in turn, make a donation to this charity, however you frame it, you’ve actually changed that relationship. And now you’ve made this a transaction. You’re no longer in the kind of altruistic mindset. This is more now “tit-for-tat.” Like, “Well, they gave me a dollar, so I should probably give them fill-in-the-blank.” So, I appeal to charities, publicly, to stop sending us [BLEEP]. I don’t need any more address labels, and this research suggests that, in the long run, just for your own fundraising, you may not be doing yourself any good at all."
Can Britain Get Its “Great” Back? (Ep. 393) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "SULLIVAN: There’s a kind of “media panic,” we call it in sociology, about the way in which our life is constantly speeding up and we never have enough time to do the things we want to do. And we always have too much to do. And one of the surprising things that we found is that in fact when you look at the actual evidence of how many activities people are doing, and how much they’re multitasking — because multitasking is also something that appears in the literature as being a major contributor to having too much to do — we don’t really find any change in that over time. And we also don’t find that people’s perceptions of feeling always rushed have changed over time. If anything, there’s been a general decrease in people’s reports of feeling always rushed for time.
DUBNER: That is so interesting because what your data say seem to be the opposite of what the media say and what most people feel, yes?...
SCHREIBER: According to the Vatican, you can reduce the time you spend in purgatory by following the pope on Twitter."
Why Are There So Many Bad Bosses? - Freakonomics - "TADELIS: We have data that allows us to measure the impact of a particular manager skill that we’re calling people-management skills as opposed to just, “do managers matter?”... In these high-tech, knowledge-based companies, retention is a very, very important focus because getting these high-skilled workers is not easy. And there’s a lot of competition...
So Tadelis and Hoffman set about to sort through all this data to look for any causal relationships between the rating of a given manager and the various outcomes of the employees working under them. What’d they find? For the most part, it was a big bag of nothing.
TADELIS: We didn’t find that the ratings of the managers seem to impact the subjective performance of their employees, their income, their promotions, or patent applications in a meaningful way.
That’s right. On all those employee outcomes — performance, earnings, patents — it just didn’t seem to matter whether the manager was highly rated or poorly rated. But: there was one other outcome to look at: employee retention...
Tadelis and Hoffman looked at employees at this one firm who moved from a manager with a poor rating to one with a high rating.
TADELIS: That’s associated with an attrition drop of about 60 percent... managers help retain better employees more than worse employees, which shows that the impact of being a better manager is strongest where it matters the most...
Employee retention was the only outcome where it seemed to matter whether a boss was good or bad...
TADELIS: I’m sure you know that economists are very wary about using surveys, and economists believe in what we call a revealed-preference approach... There is a lot of discussion about privacy and privacy regulation these days. And you hear a lot of people saying how their privacy is important to them. And then you turn to them and say, “Here’s a Snickers bar. Could I have your mother’s maiden name?” And they say yes...
Does being a good salesperson make you a good manager of other salespeople? Here’s what she found:
SHUE: A manager with double the pre-promotion sales as another manager leads to about a 6 percent decline in subordinate sales.
DUBNER: Oh my goodness.
SHUE: Yes. What we find is that among promoted managers, those with low sales prior to their promotion, they are actually better at managing their subordinates.
Let me say that again: “Oh my goodness.” When these firms select people to be managers based on their current job performance, they are actively making themselves worse off. In other words: the Peter Principle is as real as Laurence Peter said it was... Most firms are aware of the Peter Principle problem, and it’s a problem that they purposely choose to live with. Some evidence we have indicating that: in situations when the firm is trying to select a new manager who is going to be in charge of a very large team — so that’s a situation in which manager quality matters a lot — in those situations, firms put less weight on a worker’s sales numbers, probably because they know you’re going to end up with a bad manager...
What we believe is happening is the firm is doing its best to motivate workers. And they face a trade-off... Promoting based upon past performance is very motivating to workers. So it’s a very strong incentive system. We can also work out that it’s in some ways cheaper than offering really strong pay for performance. So there are two ways to motivate people: we can pay them a whole lot more, or we can give them an opportunity for promotion, which they might value a whole lot because that’s something that they can put on their resume, and it increases their status in society. You don’t want to brag about your pay on your resume... I’ve heard of many technology-focused firms, especially those in Silicon Valley — they face this problem that they have a pool of very talented and skilled engineers, and those engineers may not be the best managers of engineers. Many of those firms offer something called a dual-career track, where someone can rise in the ranks of being an engineer — basically having a higher and higher title. So you can start as engineer, then distinguished engineer, then lifetime-distinguished engineer. And that’s a way for the firm to recognize someone’s contributions in a public way without moving them over to management...
TADELIS: In companies like eBay, Google, Amazon, Facebook there’s the term of I.C. or independent contributor, and you will have people who are at the level of V.P. not managing a single person because they are just gods in their realm of engineering, or coding, or architecture, and so on. By distinguishing between I.C.s and the so-called management talent, the firm is saying, “Look, we are going to promote people in ways that reward them for what they’re great at. You’re not a great manager — you’re not going to get incentivized by becoming a manager.”
DUBNER: Has that model trickled out at all of that high-tech realm?
TADELIS: One area where I have seen it is in consulting companies, where you have this kind of deep technical talent — think of Ph.Ds., etc. — that will remain and be very heavily rewarded for the work they do, and they will not manage people."
Your doppelganger is out there and you probably share DNA with them - "Mr Charlie Chasen and Mr Michael Malone met in Atlanta in 1997, when Mr Malone served as a guest singer in Mr Chasen's band. They quickly became friends, but they did not notice what other people around them did: The two men could pass for twins. Mr Malone and Mr Chasen are doppelgangers. They look strikingly similar, but they are not related. Their immediate ancestors are not even from the same parts of the world... The two friends, along with hundreds of other unrelated look-alikes, participated in a photography project by Mr François Brunelle, a Canadian artist. The picture series, "I'm not a look-alike!," was inspired by Mr Brunelle's discovery of his own look-alike, English actor Rowan Atkinson... Dr Esteller found that while the doppelangers' genomes were similar, their epigenomes and microbiomes were different. "Genetics put them together, and epigenetics and microbiome pulls them apart," he said. This discrepancy tells us that the pairs' similar appearances have more to do with their DNA than with the environments they grew up in. That surprised Dr Esteller, who had expected to see a bigger environmental influence."
King Charles III will have to set aside his old self to wear the apolitical crown | The Star - "Nobody actually knows what the Queen thought about anything, except on the extremely rare occasions when she deftly and not so subtly made her government of the day aware: deep opposition to apartheid in South Africa and an aversion to Zimbabwe’s strong-arm president Robert Mugabe. Stripped him of his honorary knighthood in 2008, did Elizabeth, as a “mark of revulsion” at his human rights abuses and “abject disgust” for democracy over which Mugabe presided, as the British Foreign Office put it. The public, particularly Charles’ younger subjects, may yearn for a more progressive and activist King, to boost his relevance, but that’s just not on. Although Charles might still find a means to harmonize kinghood and personal principles whilst cleaving to constitutional law. That would take Machiavellian cunning."
Britain's King Charles inherits untold riches and passes off his own empire - ""He's willing to take money from anybody, really, without questioning whether it's the wise thing to do," said Norman Baker, a former government minister and author of the book " … And What Do You Do? What the Royal Family Don't Want You to Know". Baker described Charles as the most progressive, caring member of the royal family. But he said he had also filed a police complaint accusing him of improperly selling honorary titles. "That's no way to behave for a royal," he said, referring to an ongoing scandal over whether Charles had granted knighthood and citizenship to a Saudi business owner in exchange for donations to one of Charles' charitable ventures."
In King Charles, Canada can expect a very different monarch - The Globe and Mail - "While the Queen was well-known for her devotion to duty and for rarely causing controversy, Charles has never been shy about expressing strong opinions on a range of topics or held back from meddling in government policy... Robert Lacey, a royal historian, said the King likely understands from his mother that as monarch he’ll have to be more measured in expressing his opinions. “He’s studied the system and I would argue the expressions of opinion that we’ve seen him make over the years, and even interventions, reflect his own view of the fact that a prince, even, and heir to the throne, has more constitutional freedom than the monarch does,” Mr. Lacey said. “And I think the corollary of that is that as monarch he will respect that limitation.” Like the Queen, the King will also hold weekly meetings with the British Prime Minister, which Mr. Lacey said will likely give the monarch the opportunity he needs to make his views known... The public became enthralled with Diana, then a shy 19-year-old former nursery-school teacher who was 13 years younger than Charles. She quickly overshadowed the awkward and aloof Prince, who reportedly had to be pushed into marriage by his father. According to royal biographer Sally Bedell Smith, Philip wrote his son a letter spelling out that he should either propose or release Diana... From the start, the marriage was on shaky ground. Charles reportedly cried on his wedding night, while Diana battled bulimia and loneliness. As her popularity grew, Charles’s awkwardness became accentuated and he struggled under her increasing shadow. He also sought solace with Camilla Parker Bowles, and their relationship ultimately led to a bitter breakup with Diana in 1992. They formally divorced in 1996 and, a year later, Diana died in a car crash in Paris. Hearing of her death, Charles reportedly said: “‘They’re all going to blame me.”... Over the years, polls have shown a preference for William to succeed the Queen. But public attitudes toward the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall softened in recent years, and both were in much higher regard, particularly after the Duke and Duchess of Sussex withdrew from royal duties and moved to the United States... Mr. Lacey said that one of the consequences of Charles becoming King could be a weakening of the monarchy across the Commonwealth. Many countries have held on to the British monarch as head of state because of the Queen’s enduring popularity, he argued. But with her gone and Charles less popular, some governments may feel it’s time to become republics."
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Meaning - "‘The term utility makes me think of utilitarianism as a philosophy. And we know when it comes to happiness, in Western culture, you know, since really the advent of utilitarianism as a philosophy, it's become largely defined as kind of maximizing positive emotion, and minimizing negative emotion. And oftentimes, you know, Aristotle gets translated as, as you know, asserting that the ultimate goal of life is happiness, but actually Eudaimonia is much better translated as as human flourishing, which is more closely in that aligned to kind of leading a meaningful life than to this pursuit of happiness. And, you know, for Aristotle, you know, leading a meaningful life or a flourishing life was about being involved in your community, about leaving a life of virtue and activating kind of the potentials within you. And I think that that's something that, you know, a materialist, a deist, you know, wherever you are on that kind of spectrum, can pursue and find meaning in pursuing’...
‘I do think it's important to remember that if there's a meaning of life, cosmic significance or purpose for the human race, then this could be a good or a bad thing, people tend to assume it would be good, or that we might have been put here to build a utopia, we might have been put here to suffer, for example. There's no meaning of life, on the other hand, if nihilism is true, as I think that it is, then this cannot be a good or a bad thing. No significance can't be a good or a bad significance. Just as no smell can't be a good or a bad smell. And it seems to me that it's confusion on this point, thinking that nihilism will be a bad thing which has led to this project of trying to build meaning, meaning in life rather than meaning of life. A confusion, which it seems mainly comes from the German philosopher Nietzsche in the 19th century...
A lot of people saw the popular TV show Breaking Bad where a high school chemistry teacher pursues a life of crime. Okay, well, according to that criteria that makes his life more meaningful, suddenly, it becomes a better story that we want to watch. And that's more meaningful, that's not something we want’"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, How do we make a longer life a moral one? - "I'm all for living to a ripe old age, but not necessarily seeking longevity, longevity for its own sake. People in folklore who seek the fountain of youth are usually destroyed by the quest physically or morally. Why? Because the quest is ultimately selfish and impossible."
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Cleaning the Internet - "‘It has been, I think, shown, I think beyond doubt that the kind of media coverage of Israeli activity, military activity in Gaza leads directly to physical and verbal onslaughts on Jewish people in Britain, should that reporting be banned? In your view?’...
'I don't think there's wrong when we try to make the internet safer. I think, however, this legislation is trying to make the internet nicer. And that's a very different thing'"
Since we must ban Joe Rogan from Spotify since he "kills people"...
