Thinking Complete

This is a post about three intuitions for how to think about the effective altruism community. Part 1: responsibility The first intuition is that, in a global sense, there are no “adults in the room”. Before covid I harboured a hope that, despite the incessant political squabbling we see worldwide, in the face of a major crisis with global implications, there were serious people who would come out of the woodwork to ensure that it went well. There weren’t. And that’s not just a national phenomenon, that’s a global phenomenon. Even countries like New Zealand, which handled covid incredibly well, weren’t taking  responsibility  in the global way I’m thinking about - they looked after their own citizens, but didn’t try to speed up vaccine distribution overall (e.g. by allowing human challenge trials), or fix everyone else’s misunderstandings. Others developed the same “no adults in the room” intuition by observing failures on different issues. For some,  AI risk ; for others, climate chan

New York’s nightclubs are the particle accelerators of sociology: reliably creating the precise conditions under which exotic extremes of status-seeking behaviour can be observed. Ashley Mears documents it all in her excellent book Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit. A model turned sociology professor, while researching the book she spent hundreds of nights in New York’s most exclusive nightclubs, as well as similar parties across the world. The book abounds with fascinating details; in this post I summarise it and highlight a few aspects which I found most interesting. Here’s the core dynamic. There are some activities which are often fun: dancing, drinking, socialising. But they become much more fun when they’re associated with feelings of high status. So wealthy men want to use their money to buy the feeling of having high-status fun, by doing those activities while associated with (and ideally while popular amongst) other high-status people, parti