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Book Review: The Precipice
- keenmaster 7y agoI enjoyed this review and its discussion of existential risks facing humanity. I’ve always found the statement “a single death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic” to be absurd. It is often misused in a somewhat prescriptive manner, as if we should resign to our immutably corrupt psychology and care more about the death of a single person with an identifiable story rather than the unrelatable “cacophony” of thousands or millions of people. It is closely related to our obsession with stories, and again, our prescriptive admonition to make a story out of everything. The problem is that stories lead you away from first principle thinking and towards thinking by analogy with binary, unnuanced logic. It is time for first principles thinking to spread through the general public. In some ways, The Enlightenment never reached the public. The more exclusive first principles thinking is, the more power and wealth goes to the privileged few who exercise it in relatively high proportions. Ironically, they can use their elite status to manipulate their findings, knowing that they’ll be trusted anyway. This doesn’t have to be intentional. Renowned epidemiologists shut down an early whistle blower on the potential magnitude of Coronavirus back in January, in the name of “reason,” when they were in fact just paternalistically posturing. The “hyperventilating, panicking” whistleblower was right. They wouldn’t have been dismissed if journalists and the public provided a platform for experts on both sides of an issue, and had the analytical, evidence-based mindset to assess the merits of their arguments. Side note: Can you change the title to “Book Review: “The Precipice” in Existential Risks” or something a bit more descriptive? I think that would give this excellent write-up more exposure.