Inbox: - 2022-04 talk at Effective Altruism Netherlands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbeIFHMFRGM - Book reviews ## 2020-06 thoughts Bregman is a very good communicator. "Survival of the friendliest"!  He comes across as reasonable, epistemically virtuous, yet refreshingly radical. I think this guy is going somewhere. Should I go help him? Could be a way to end up helping a future US President?! ## Highlights ### Helen Lewis: Intelligence Squared Bregman has long been interested in overton window shifting. Political right has been better as pragmatic compromise forming alliances. Left tends to be worse at compromise, the narccisims of small differences. Tory party has been incredibly ideologically flexible. Party of 2020 incredibly different from party of 2010. ### Human Kind interviews #### Spectator Book Club: Human Kind Bregman one way to summarise message of the book: Most ppl are pretty good but power corrupts. Shamelessness is a route to power. History written by the victors. Cynical theory of human nature is in the interests of those in power, it justifies their power. "Self-fulfilling prophecy" is maybe the key claim. #### Wright show Bregman writes for The Correspondant. Slogan: unbreaking thé news. Entirely reader funded. Founder Rob Weinberg idea: Objectivity is bulkshit, just be explicitly subjective, say where you're coming from. Objectivity often just defending the status quo, choosing the side of those in power. Ev psych suggests that cooperativeness is selected for. Bregman's label: survival of the friendliest. Exact mechanism unknown, probably multiple. Groups may have killed the biggest assholes. Nice guys have more friends, maybe more attractive to women. Etc. Returns to the trusting generous overture. Most ppl find violence difficult. Many soldiers, especially those drafted with little training, never fire their guns. If they do manage to kill someone they often come back with PTSD. Bregman: 1st edition of the book The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins included a line that said something like: let us teach our children altruism and generosity because they are born selfish. He remove this from subsequent editions acknowledging that the theory did not imply this. Argument for UBI (freedom dividend): reflects the fact that most of our wealth is due to us being beneficiaries of a vast inheritance. Apparently Andrew Yang said that watching Bregman's TED talk got him interested in UBI. ### Ezra Klein show Rutger Bregman says he considered calling his new book "Rousseau was right".  Question: would you rather be born as a random human in the last 10K years (when civilisation really kicked off) or in the 100K years before that (as a savage)? Bremen answers that even though right now is probably the best time to be born, the answer to this question is obviously "the 100K years before" because the first ~9900 years of civilisation were kind of a disaster. "Thin veneer" theory is in interests of ruling classes. If we cannot trust each other then we need to preserve the status quo, we need a ruling class to preserve order. If we can, then we can reconfigure things. This book is revolutionary, a dangerous idea. History is the most subversive of all disciplines because it shows you that things can be different.