Juan Orbea

You might agree that future people matter in the abstract. But it’s this point — that our actions today could meaningfully impact their lives — that might compel you to believe that positively influencing the long-term future should be a key moral priority of a time. This is the idea encapsulated by longtermism.

I sometimes like to call it “layered thinking”. There’s the rational layer, there’s the tacit layer, and there might be other layers. And they’re all important. And we can’t just make a decision based on any one layer, frankly, and certainly the top layer.

And so, the Enlightenment undertook a major strategic retreat. If the only way to stop people from killing one another about the right way to open an egg involved a world where nobody thought about it too much, then the intellectual cost of ceasing such thought seemed a small price to pay. The question of human nature was abandoned because it is... See more

Overall, it is worth remembering that throughout history it has been ideas that have driven great global change as much as material forces, individuals, or happenstance.

The same can be said of markets. Understanding how big a market really is can be difficult. But the act of attempted futurism can have a clarifying effect on your perspective.

Did you know the frequency of the words you use are determined by an underlying mathematical pattern?What’s stranger is that same mathematical pattern seems to determine the sizes of cities within a country, income distributions of people within an economy, income distribution among companies, how much traffic goes to different websites on the... See more

The spherical shape of triso fuel is designed so it contains the uranium in an impenetrable ceramic fuel element. I t can be stored long term right on site, taking up minimal space and it yields 5x the output of traditional fuel. 

A Thought Experiment