nibras

If you believe that the world is shaped by your and others’ actions, then the climate crisis or other global catastrophic risk don’t look quite so scary: they’re an opportunity to do something meaningful.

If you believe that the world’s problems are solved by people, then having children doesn’t seem like a waste of resources; it seems, in fact, like the most good you could do in the world.

My sense is that those with a strong sense of personal agency don’t always realize that not everyone shares this position.

A lot of people think that photography disconnects the viewer from the world, imagining for instance the person holding their phone at a concert, but I think often it’s the opposite. Practicing photography compels you to ponder what is meaningful and beautiful in your surroundings. Once you gain this aesthetic self-discovery, it stays with you for

" I want to highlight how the value of coding isn’t really about teaching programming skills. It’s about teaching agency."

If our social attitudes towards agency are as important as they seem, we should measure its prevalence in the general population, then find ways to track it over time. I grew up in the heady halcyon days of globalism, where celebrities sang “We Are the World” [ 3 ] and Whitney Houston proclaimed that  “I believe the children are our future.”