EA-relatable quotes

“We have biases because our brain-design dates back to the stone age. Our intuitive decision-making consists of shortcuts, heuristics, that led to successful gene-copying more often than not in our ancestral environment. If you had a true belief that differed from the cherished beliefs of your group, you were at risk of ostracism. Our belief-acquiring mechanisms were not selected for producing accurate beliefs, but for producing beliefs that paid rent in terms of reproductive success. Upon reflection, we would hopefully come up with different personal goals. This mismatch between the (metaphorical) goals of our genes and our personal (very real) goals is one reason for the existence of cognitive biases.”

— Lukas Gloor, Rationality: The science of winning, Part III (Raising for Effective Giving)
“[W]e have no reason to trust anyone’s intuitions about very large numbers, however excellent their philosophy. Even the best philosophers cannot get an intuitive grasp of, say, tens of billions of people. That is no criticism; these numbers are beyond intuition. But these philosophers ought not to think their intuition can tell them the truth about such large numbers of people.

For very large numbers, we have to rely on theory, not intuition. When people first built bridges, they managed without much theory. They could judge a log by eye, relying on their intuition. Their intuitions were reliable, being built on long experience with handling wood and stone. But when people started spinning broad rivers with steel and concrete, their intuition failed them, and they had to resort to engineering theory and careful calculations. The cables that support suspension bridges are unintuitively slender.

Our moral intuitions are formed and polished in our homely interactions with the few people we have to deal with in ordinary life. But nowadays the scale of our societies and the power of our technologies raise moral problems that involve huge numbers of people. [N]o doubt our homely intuitive morality gives us a starting point, but we have to project our morality beyond the homely to the vast new arenas. To do this properly, we have to engage all the care and accuracy we can, and develop a moral theory.

Indeed, we are more dependent on theory than engineers are, because moral conclusions cannot be tested in the way engineers’ conclusions are tested. If an engineer gets her calculations wrong, her mistake will be revealed when the bridge falls down. But a mistake in moral theory is never revealed like that. If we do something wrong, we do not later see the error made manifest; we can only know it is an error by means of theory too. Moreover, our mistakes can be far more damaging and kill far more people than the collapse of a bridge. Mistakes in allocating healthcare resources may do great harm to millions. So we have to be exceptionally careful in developing our moral theory.”

— John Broome, Weighing Lives (2004), pp. 56-57
“The human brain cannot release enough neurotransmitters to feel emotion a thousand times as strong as the grief of one funeral. A prospective risk going from 10,000,000 deaths to 100,000,000 deaths does not multiply by ten the strength of our determination to stop it. It adds one more zero on paper for our eyes to glaze over.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

— Richard Feynman, address “What is Science?” (The Physics Teacher, 1969)
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

— Richard Feynman, lecture “What is and What Should be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society” (Galileo Symposium, Italy, 1964)
“Science advances through tentative answer to a series of more and more subtle questions which reach deeper and deeper into the essence of natural phenomena.”

— Louis Pasteur
“Whereas many philosophers and theologians appear to possess an emotional attachment to their theories and ideas which requires them to believe them, most scientists tend to regard their ideas differently. They are interested in formulating many logically consistent possibilities, leaving any judgment regarding their truth to observation. Scientists feel no qualms about suggesting different but mutually exclusive explanations for the same phenomenon.”

— John Barrow, Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986), p. 15
“Science’s capacity, without equal, is to remove, as far as possible, our own urges to delude ourselves.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson
“What separates science from all other human activities [i]s its commitment to the tentative nature of all its conclusions.”

— Michael Shermer
“Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.”

— Thomas Huxley
“It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe.”

— Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (1986)
“The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.”

— Edward Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), p. 262
“I, for one, fear that if we don’t subject religion to such scrutiny now, and work out together whatever revisions and reforms are called for, we will pass on a legacy of ever more toxic forms of religion to our descendants.”

— Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Chapter “Toxic memes”
“Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.”

— Napoleon Bonaparte (h/t Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon)
“I try not to think with my gut. If I’m serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it’s okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.”

— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1996), p. 170
“The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson
“So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You’d better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can’t rearrange the universe.”

— Isaac Asimov
“What people really believe doesn’t feel like a BELIEF, it feels like the way the world IS.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
We deceive ourselves, the better to deceive others.

— Robert Trivers
“At every single stage [of information processing] — from its biased arrival, to its biased encoding, to organizing it around false logic, to misremembering and then misrepresenting it to others — the mind continually acts to distort information flow in favor of the usual good goal of appearing better than one really is.”

— Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life
“One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance. You are normally oblivious of your own blind spot, and people are typically amazed to discover that we don’t see colors in our peripheral vision. It seems as if we do, but we don’t, as you can prove to yourself by wiggling colored cards at the edge of your vision – you’ll see motion just fine but not be able to identify the color of the moving thing.”

— Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
“But ignorance exists in the map, not in the territory. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. A phenomenon can seem mysterious to some particular person. There are no phenomena which are mysterious of themselves. To worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky
“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith, Stop the Madness (July 6)
“This world has never really been about truth or lies. In this world, there’s only one thing that’s worth knowing – hard facts. Despite this universal truth, people misguidedly choose to only accept the facts that appeal to their way of thinking. They’re so limited they can only accept the truths that are comfortable for them. So this is simply about wanting to hold on to your personal power. Realizing things may not have been as we’ve accepted them to be unsettles us. It’s overwhelming. Are you absolutely sure that you know the truth?”

— Sosuke Aizen, Bleach (anime)
“A story that supports the status quo is generally considered to be neutral and is not questioned in terms of its objectivity while one that challenges the status quo tends to be perceived as having a ‘point of view’ and therefore biased.”

— Sharon Beder, Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism (1996), p. 205
“Sometimes the consequences of holding a belief matter more than its truth.”

— Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment (2002), p. 97
“All religions are dangerous, because the epistemic attitude of faith compromises the link between our beliefs about reality and what reality is actually like.”

— Phil Torres
“There is an ethical component to reason as well, because one’s beliefs are intimately connected to one’s actions. Some of one’s beliefs are themselves normative – beliefs about what is good and right, about whose life is valuable and why and in what manner (see abortion and euthanasia debates). And factual beliefs are also important, since how we understand the world in which we are acting shapes our actions every bit as much as our values and ends.

If one gives up reason in the formation of some of one’s beliefs, one gives up the only access to truth we have. Humans don’t have any perceptual capacity to immediately discern truth, the way we immediately discern color and shape (if the lighting is good and our eyesight is in good order). The closest we can get is to justify our beliefs. Faith is not justification, it is the suspension of all standards for justification. Faith declares that some beliefs – these important ones right at the center of my world-view that shape how I see many other things – need not be justified at all.”

— George M. Felis, Faith is a Moral Failing (2006)
“Providing reasons can help, even when it doesn’t lead to agreement. It maps out the field of options. It helps us understand each other. We keep each other (and ourselves) honest. We learn more of what a claim really involves. Sometimes, it can convince. Inculcate a culture of valuing reasons. The more you are exposed to good reasoning, the more you’ll recognise it, and be able to produce great reasoning of your own. Be prepared to give your reasons, and be curious about the reasons of others. Don’t expect to come to agreement. But be prepared to find some common ground.”

— Greg Restall, Logic and Rationality: Disagreement and Evidence – Why Fact-Checking Units are a Good Thing, even if they don’t lead us to agreement
“Breaking the chains of ignorance will loosen the grip of gravity and then we can travel to the stars and beyond.”

— Steven Regulus
“Given that thought necessarily takes time and energy, the fact that you considered an option and then disregarded it is not a “wasted effort,” because there’s no other way to figure out the right answer than actually to do the calculation. Similarly, you’re not at fault for failing to know something or for temporarily holding a misconception; the process of acquiring correct (or at least “less wrong”) beliefs about the world requires substantive computation and physical interaction with other people. Changing your opinions when you discover you’re in error isn’t something to be embarrassed about – it’s an intrinsic step in the algorithm of acquiring better opinions itself.”

— Brian Tomasik, Dissolving Confusions about Consciousness (Essays on Reducing Suffering, 2014)
“You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.”

— Elon Musk
“What is true is already so.

Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.

Not being open about it

doesn’t make it go away.

And because it’s true, it is what

is there to be interacted with.

Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived.

People can stand what is true,

for they are already enduring it.”

— Eugene Gendlin
“*After [more than three] years of studying philosophy at university, I finally heard a professor point out that there is a difference between asking “What do people call ‘knowledge’‘beauty’‘ethics’?” and answering questions like “How can I reliably attain the most accurate model of the world?”, “What does my cognitive machinery tag as “beautiful” (insert deictic pointer towards a family of emotional states), to what extent does this differ among cultures, and why is all of this the way it is?” and “What is my goal in life?” / “What principles would I choose behind the veil of ignorance?” / “What would I say if I were given the task to come up with a post hoc rationalization/’justification’ of my moral intuitions?”

Unfortunately, I couldn’t quite make sense of the [professor’s] explanation on why the first type of questions seem interesting to philosophers (as opposed to linguists or sociologists or evolutionary biologists). It seems to me that, for whatever reason, philosophers tend to spend the vast majority of their time focusing on the first type of questions, and I’m often genuinely unsure whether they even realize that there are other questions to ask. To me, going into pedantic details in regard to the first type of questions seems quite pointless. On the other hand, at least some of the questions in the second category seem like they deserve a ton of attention.”

— Lukas Gloor
“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

— Isaac Asimov
“The sword of science is double-edged. Its awesome power forces on all of us, including politicians, a new responsibility – more attention to the long-term consequences of technology, a global and transgenerational perspective, an incentive to avoid easy appeals to nationalism and chauvinism. Mistakes are becoming too expensive.”

— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995), p. 15
“We urgently need to find ways to push scientific and technological progress in directions that are likely to bring us good, and away from those directions that spell doom. This cannot be done if we stick to the erroneous view that all such progress is good for us. The first thing we need is to be able to distinguish those advances whose potential is most in the direction of prosperity and human flourishing from those whose potential is more in the direction of destruction and doom, and we need to find safe ways to handle those technologies that come with elements of both. Our ability to do so today is very limited, my ambition with this book is to draw attention to the problem, so that we can work together to improve, and avoid running blindfolded at full speed into a dangerous future.”

— Olle Häggström, Here Be Dragons: Science, Technology and the Future of Humanity, Preface
“No great ethical conundrum can be answered in a way that appeases all moral philosophers—or all people—easily. But by carefully thinking through the self-doubt, logic, and instinct bound up in morality, it’s certain that, at the very least, the decisions we reach won’t be shallow.”

— Olivia Goldhill, An Oxford philosopher’s moral crisis can help us learn to question our instincts (Quartz, October 15, 2017)
“[W]e don’t just need knowledge per se but specifically ethically reflective knowledge that can slowly, carefully, and circumspectly decide how to move ahead. [O]ur slogan shouldn’t be just “more intelligence” but instead something like “more wisdom.””

— Brian Tomasik, Charity Cost-Effectiveness in an Uncertain World (Foundational Research Institute)
“Ethics is thinking about what the perfect world looks like, and then trying to make ours look more like it.”

— Lukas Gloor
“Philosophy is still young, and the human capacity for reasoning is strong. In a scrutable world, truth may be within reach.”

— David Chalmers, Constructing the World (2012)
“I persist in thinking that the puzzle of ethics is starting to come together, and that few, if any, pieces are missing.”

— Peter Singer, A Companion to Ethics (1991), p. 545
“Non-religious Ethics is at a very early stage. We cannot yet predict whether, as in Mathematics, we will reach agreement. Since we cannot know how Ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes.”

— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984)
“[R]eason is more than a neutral problem-solving tool. It is more like an escalator: once we get on it, we are liable to be taken to places that we never expected to reach.”

— Peter Singer, Are humans getting better? (2012)
“Moral false-positives (failing to recognize an unethical behavior as unethical) are probably more costly than false-negatives (failing to recognize an ethical behavior as ethical). But moral false-negatives are costly, too.”

— Hugh Ristik, LessWrong (February 8, 2011)
“It is easy for us to criticize the prejudices of our grandfathers, from which our fathers freed themselves. It is more difficult to search for prejudices among the beliefs and values we hold.”

— Peter Singer, Practical Ethics: Third edition (2011)
“Rationality is costly, in that it prevents us from believing whatever we want to believe.”

— Michael Huemer, The Irrationality of Politics (TEDxMileHighSalon, 2012)
“Irrationalities give rise to vulnerabilities that can be exploited by others. Free market forces then drive corporations and popular culture to specifically try to create situations that will trigger irrational human behavior because it is extremely profitable.”

— Steve Omohundro, The Basic AI Drives
“People are embraced or condemned according to their beliefs, so one function of the mind may be to hold beliefs that bring the belief-holder the greatest number of allies, protectors, or disciples, rather than beliefs that are most likely to be true.”

— Steven Pinker, Language, Cognition, and Human Nature
“I have only met a couple of people in my life who really understand how to ‘think’; not fantasize or free-associate unconsciously, but volitionally initiate a process that solves a problem.”

— Sydney Pollack, Preface (Minghella on Minghella, 2005)
“The mind does not require filling like a bottle but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling.”

— Plutarch, Moralia: On Listening to Lectures (100 AD)
“This is what a philosopher’s supposed to do, follow the argument wherever it leads[.] You’re supposed to follow it even if it leads somewhere you don’t want to go.”

— Jeff McMahan interview quote An Oxford philosopher’s moral crisis can help us learn to question our instincts (Quartz, October 15, 2017)
“The mind has its illusions as the sense of sight; and in the same manner that the sense of feeling corrects the latter, reflection and calculation correct the former.”

— Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1952)
“The universe is what it is, not what I choose that it should be. If it is indifferent to human desires, as it seems to be; if human life is a passing episode, hardly noticeable in the vastness of cosmic processes; if there is no superhuman purpose, and no hope of ultimate salvation, it is better to know and acknowledge this truth than to endeavor, in futile self-assertion, to order the universe to be what we find comfortable.”

— Bertrand Russell, Understanding History (1943), Chapter II: The Value of Free Thought, p. 52
“We also know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling.”

— Henri Poincaré
“[B]etter the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy. And in the final tolling it often turns out that the facts are more comforting than the fantasy.”

— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, (1995), p. 191
“I believe that most of us have false beliefs about our own nature, and our identity over time, and that, when we see the truth, we ought to change some of our beliefs about what we have reason to do.”

— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984), p. ix
“Is the truth depressing? Some may find it so. But I find it liberating, and consoling.”

— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 281
“Philosophers should not only interpret our beliefs; when they are false, they should change them.”

— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984), p. x
What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.

— Eugene Gendlin
”The question of whether computers can think is just like the question of whether submarines can swim.”*

— Edsger Dijkstra
“If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.”

— Montesquieu
“Of course, it’s important to translate these feelings into action. Empathy purely by itself does not reduce suffering. But these warm, loving feelings can play an important role in our mental attitudes toward altruism work and represent a helpful supplement to the distress and anguish that we experience when thinking about terrible suffering. We can want to reduce extreme suffering both because it’s indescribably awful and because we deeply care about and feel part of those whom it afflicts.”

— Brian Tomasik, Personal Thoughts on Romance, Chapter: Universal Love
“And when the time is to act, [w]e need to combine systematizing reasoning with compassion. We don’t need to make emotionally-charged calls to action sparked by individual incidents that affect a specially small number of sentient beings in particularly attention-grabbing ways. [O]nly by combining compassion, empathy and a strong systematizing style, can our minds grasp the enormity of the problem of suffering and why our local solutions are doomed to fail.”

— Andres Gomez Emilsson, In Praise of Systematizing Empathy (Qualia Computing, April 2016)
“Our ability to track the inner state of beings in our lifeworld (our inner experience, including our representations of others) is a marvelous evolutionary innovation. [B]ut as long as we don’t fix its profound biases, we cannot rely on it to make ethical choices. We can only use it to understand the reality of the suffering of others.”

— Andres Gomez Emilsson, In Praise of Systematizing Empathy (Qualia Computing, April 2016)
“I am a utilitarian; I believe in trying to take actions whose outcomes are as good as possible. When I examine the trolley problem – or any similar dilemma – my goal is to bring about an end result that leaves as many people alive and healthy as possible.”

— Aaron Gertler, Utilitarian Thought Experiments
“[D]onors should aim their giving at beneficiaries in developing countries rather than in the UK because the typical British citizen was 100 times richer than the poorest 600 million people in the world. “You can therefore do about 100 times much more to improve their lives as you can to improve our lives,” he said.”

— William MacAskill paraphrased and quoted
“Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains – cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasise into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modelling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modelling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.”

— Peter Watts
“Nagel once claimed that it is psychologically impossible to believe the Reductionist View. Buddha claimed that, though it is very hard, it is possible. I find Buddha’s claim to be true. After reviewing my arguments, I find that, at the reflective or intellectual level, though it is very hard to believe the Reductionist View, this is possible. My remaining doubts or fears seem to me irrational. Since I can believe this view, I assume that others can do so too. We can believe the truth about ourselves.”

— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 280
““Personal identity” does not actually correspond to anything fundamental in the world, which is why some of the results of the anthropic trilemma actually feel weird to us, but it does still exist as a cognitive abstraction which our brains need in order to operate, and we can’t actually not believe in some kind of personal identity – at least, not for long.”

— Kaj Sotala, An attempt to dissolve subjective expectation and personal identity (LessWrong, February 22, 2013)
“[M]any kinds of reinforcement learning agents would, if given the opportunity, use a “delusion box” which allowed them to modify the observations they got from the environment. This way, they would always receive the kinds of signals that gave them the maximum reward. You could say, in a sense, that those kinds of agents only care about their subjective expectation – as long as they experience what they want, they don’t care about the rest of the world. And it’s important for them that they are the ones who get those experiences, because their utility function only cares about their own reward. [I]nstead of just caring about our subjective experience, we use our subjective experiences to construct a model of the world. We don’t want to delude ourselves, because we also care about the world around us, and our world model tells us that deluding ourselves wouldn’t actually change the world.”

— Kaj Sotala, An attempt to dissolve subjective expectation and personal identity (LessWrong, February 22, 2013)
“We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.”

— Mother Theresaf
“[Perhaps m]y life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”

— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
“This human world in all it’s beauty and horrible mess is the starting point. Our wish to be better people defines a direction. Our sense of our own imperfection provides the force that pushes us forward. But if we would know where we were going, we would already be there.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, The Challenge of Friendly AI (Singularity Summit, 2007)
“We care about suffering and flourishing, but it’s a commitment to putting the beneficiaries first. We live in a better world because we [help others]. Evidence-wise, we make a commitment to changing our minds.”

— Sebastian Farquhar, The State of the EA Union (Effective Altruism Global 2015: Oxford University)
“Imagine what seven billion humans could accomplish if we all loved and respected each other.”

— Anthony Douglas Williams
“Billions of humans in this world. And so many lives burdened and stunted by poverty, illness, trauma, war. Billions. Imagine if you could hear the sound of it all at once. That furious ocean of suffering, which is invisible to me because I’m here. Because of how quiet this street is. Because this street has conspired to squelch the sound and magnitude of that ocean. But you see, it’s not the suffering that gets me. I can accept suffering. Somewhere, someone will always be suffering, and I know that. It’s just the injustice of it. It’s that the injustice is so big, so absolute, it’s almost suffocating. It’s so much that you can’t swallow right. All around the world, billions of lives – billions, never given any relief, never given a way out of that ocean. [W]hat would you do if you lived in such a world? [T]o me, EA promises: if you want to do good in the world, I will show you the thing that will do the most good. And when the stakes are so high, and when the question is so dire and important, how could you not take up that promise? [T]hat’s why I became an effective altruist. Perhaps you’ll become one too.”

— Haseeb Qureshi, Why I Became an Effective Altruist
“Billions of humans in this world. And so many lives burdened and stunted by poverty, illness, trauma, war. Billions. Imagine if you could hear the sound of it all at once. That furious ocean of suffering, which is invisible to me because I’m here. Because of how quiet this street is. Because this street has conspired to squelch the sound and magnitude of that ocean. But you see, it’s not the suffering that gets me. I can accept suffering. Somewhere, someone will always be suffering, and I know that. It’s just the injustice of it. It’s that the injustice is so big, so absolute, it’s almost suffocating. It’s so much that you can’t swallow right. All around the world, billions of lives – billions, never given any relief, never given a way out of that ocean. So why me? Why do I get to walk down this street in silence? Why am I the one with a laptop and a messenger bag?”

— Haseeb Qureshi, Why I Became an Effective Altruist
“If [the richest] 10% gave 10%, the first year would give enough to: eliminate extreme poverty and hunger, eradicate all neglected tropical diseases and many others besides, triple medical research, give everyone secondary education, permanently save every rainforest in the world, get us well on the way to fixing climate change, fund an unparalleled renaissance in the arts, and have enough leftover to launch several manned missions to Mars. That would be the first year. Goodness only knows what we’d do in year two. How can we make this happen? Luckily, there are some simple answers: give more, give more effectively, and encourage others to do the same.”

— Beth Barnes, Effective Altruism (TEDxExeter, 2015)
“Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, that this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, that understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone’s holy text.”

— David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
“I choose to die in a way that I know will be painful, but will save the lives of several other people. I am doing what, knowing the facts and thinking clearly, I most want to do, and what best fulfils my present desires. (In all my examples these two coincide.) I also know that I am doing what will be worse for me. If I did not sacrifice my life to save these other people, I would not be haunted by remorse. The rest of my life would be well worth living.”

— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1983), p. 131.
“Consider the fact that, in a few years, I shall be dead. This fact can seem depressing. But the reality is only this. After a certain time, none of the thoughts and experiences that occur will be directly causally related to this brain, or be connected in certain ways to these present experiences. That is all this fact involves. And, in that description, my death seems to disappear.”

— Derek Parfit, The Unimportance of Identity (1995)
“My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.”

— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 281
“I believe that to meet the challenges of our times, human beings will have to develop a greater sense of universal responsibility. Each of us must learn to work not just for one self, one’s own family or one’s nation, but for the benefit of all humankind. Universal responsibility is the key to human survival, it is the foundation for world peace.”

— The 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, Messages on The Global Community World Peace
“Through rationality we shall become awesome, and invent and test systematic methods for making people awesome, and plot to optimize everything in sight, and the more fun we have the more people will want to join us.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Epistle to the New York Less Wrongians
“The next stage in the development of a desirable form of sensitiveness is sympathy. There is a purely physical sympathy: a very young child will cry because a brother or sister is crying. This, I suppose, affords the basis for the further developments. The two enlargements that are needed are: first, to feel sympathy even when the sufferer is not an object of special affection; secondly, to feel it when the suffering is merely known to be occurring, not sensibly present. The second of these enlargements depends mainly upon intelligence. It may only go so far as sympathy with suffering which is portrayed vividly and touchingly, as in a good novel; it may, on the other hand, go so far as to enable a man to be moved emotionally by statistics. This capacity for abstract sympathy is as rare as it is important.”

— Bertrand Russell, Education and the Good Life, Chapter: The Aims of Education (1926)
“The mark of a civilized human is the ability to look at a column of numbers, and weep.”

— attributed to Bertrand Russell
“The mathematical challenge of finding the greatest good can expand the heart. Empathy opens the mind to suffering, and math keeps it open.”

— Derek Thompson, The Greatest Good (The Atlantic, June 15, 2015)
“[Henry] Spira has a knack for putting things plainly. When I asked him why he has spent more than half a century working for the causes I have mentioned, he said simply that he is on the side of the weak, not the powerful; of the oppressed, not the oppressor; of the ridden, not the rider. And he talks of the vast quantity of pain and suffering that exists in our universe, and of his desire to do something to reduce it. That, I think, is what the left is all about. There are many ways of being on the left, and Spira’s is only one of them, but what motivates him is essential to any genuine left. If we shrug our shoulders at the avoidable suffering of the weak and the poor, of those who are getting exploited and ripped off, or who simply do not have enough to sustain life at a decent level, we are not of the left. If we say that that is just the way the world is, and always will be, and there is nothing we can do about it, we are not part of the left. The left wants to do something about this situation.”

— Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left (1999), pp. 8-9
“The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”

— Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: First Contact (1996)
“When you are inspired… dormant forces, faculties, and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.”

— Patanjali
“Commencement speakers are always telling young people to follow their passions. Be true to yourself. This is a vision of life that begins with self and ends with self. But people on the road to inner light do not find their vocations by asking, what do I want from life? They ask, what is life asking of me? How can I match my intrinsic talent with one of the world’s deep needs?”

— David Brooks, The Moral Bucket List
“Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.”

— Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
“Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.”

— Andrew Boyd
“[I]f you want [i]ntrinsic drive, drop the illusion. Refuse to tolerify. Face the facts that you feared you would not be able to handle. You are likely correct that they will be hard to bear, and you are likely correct that attempting to bear them will change you. But that change doesn’t need to break you. It can also make you stronger, and fuel your resolve. So see the dark world. See everything intolerable. Let the urge to tolerify it build, but don’t relent. Just live there in the intolerable world, refusing to tolerate it. See whether you feel that growing, burning desire to make the world be different. Let parts of yourself harden. Let your resolve grow. It is here, in the face of the intolerable, that you will be able to tap into intrinsic motivation.”

— Nate Soares, See the dark world (2015)
“Get rid of this foolish protection of greed and selfishness. Don’t fear but instead face the problems awaiting you. Maybe you’ll be ruined by it; maybe you’ll suffer agony. But once you have overcome your agony, and can endure, then you will arise stronger out of it. Then, you’ll have the power to change the world we live in.”

— Tachibani Kyouko, Golden Boy
“Many have stood their ground and faced the darkness when it comes for them. Fewer come for the darkness and force it to face them.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
“[T]apping into internal drive often requires tapping into a deep desire to make the world be different, in a world that’s very large and very hurting and very hard to change. When trying to do this, it can be easy to get overwhelmed by the odds stacked against you – regardless of their scale.”

— Nate Soares, Being unable to despair (2015)
“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say “Look at that, you son of a bitch.””

— Edgar Mitchell (1930-2016, Apollo 14 astronaut)
“[D]rop your obligations. Don’t try to help the world because you “should.” Don’t force yourself because you ought to. Just do what you want to do. And then, once you are freed of your obligations, if you ever realize that serving only yourself has a hollowness to it; or if you ever realize that part of what you care about is your fellow people; or if you ever learn to see the darkness in this world and discover that you really need the world to be different than it is; if you ever find something on this pale blue dot worth fighting for, worth defending, worth carrying with us to the stars: then know that there are those of us who fight, and that we’d be honored to have you at our side.”

— Nate Soares, Altruistic motivations (2015)