Here are some snippets from a Lex Fridman interview with John Abramson, outspoken critic of Big Pharma. Lex: Are people corrupt? Are people malevolent? Are people ignorant that work at the low level and at the high level, at Pfizer for example? How is this possible? I believe that most people are good, and I actually believe if you join Big Pharma your life trajectory often involves dreaming, wanting, and enjoying helping people.

Turns out that money does buy happiness. You may have heard that people’s average happiness stops improving once you make more than $75,000/year? Researchers did a better survey with more data and found that that was not the case. The researchers cited 5 methodological improvements over the old research that suggested that it didn’t matter after $75,000: They measured people’s happiness in real time, instead of having people try to remember past happiness levels.

Here are some snippets from a Lex Fridman interview with Philip Goff, a panpsychist. The Enlightenment ideal is to follow the evidence and the arguments where they lead, but it’s very hard for human beings to do that. I think we get stuck in some conception of how we think science ought to look. People talk about religion as a crutch, but I think a certain kind of scientism, a certain conception of how science is supposed to be, gets into people’s identity and their sense of themselves and their security.

thinking for yourself I recognized myself a little in this book, not in the events, severity, or locations but in the path to being “educated” in the sense that Westover intends. I’ll try to convey what that sense is with some quotes from the book. The first moment is after she takes a class on American history at BYU. She returns home and gets her face dirty while working, and her brother calls her a N—r, a joke he had made many times before.

Here are some snippets from a Lex Fridman interview with Peter Wang, co-founder and CEO of Anaconda: For a lot of human history, there wasn’t so much a meaning crisis as just a food and not getting eaten by bears crisis. Once you get to a point where you can make food there was a not getting killed by other humans crisis. Sitting around wondering what it’s all about is a relatively recent luxury.