Juan Orbea

The problem isn’t encouraging young people to aim high or dream big. It’s pretending that each of us is a blank canvas. I can dream all I want of becoming the next Michael Jordan, but my five-foot-seven frame and general lack of coordination say otherwise. Better advice came from the Greeks almost 2,500 years ago: “To know thyself is the beginning... See more

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.

The lessons to take from Buffet’s career, letters, etc. is not what criteria do I use to analyze stuff to buy, rather, where to get the capital to buy that stuff with. Don’t blow yourself up.

This is a significant innovation that reduces the amount of radioactive waste produced while generating nuclear energy more efficiently, making transport use and long-term storage simple and preventing security risks associated with moving the waste and fission products from fuel forms into storage containers as in the past.

Where does the college rank in US News & World Report college prestige list that dates back to 1981Are the classes amazing?Is there a sports team I’m keen to play on?Is there a particular professor I want to work with or a particular major I want to pursue? Only 27% of college grads end up with a job closely related to their major.

So, specifically, I imagine that what happened in 2008 crisis is that, consciously or unconsciously, a decision was made to prevent or inhibit the negative consequences of the financial and to a lesser, but very important extent, economic layers by actually spending resources at the sociopolitical and cultural layers.

We also cover some of Chris’ personal passions over the years, including his attempts to reduce what he calls ‘research debt’ by starting a new academic journal called Distill, focused just on explaining existing results unusually clearly.