Four thousand weeks is roughly the number of weeks you’ll have if you live to about 80. Although the book’s subtitle is “Time management for mortals”, it’s not really about time management (in the conventional sense). Rather, it’s about values and priorities and making the most of our limited time on this earth.
In this podcast summary, Will MacAskill talks about longtermism and his recent book, “What We Owe the Future”. The original podcast is 2 hours 54 minutes. The estimated reading time for this summary (excluding “My Thoughts”) is 42 minutes.
The Total View suggests that we should seek to maximise total wellbeing, including by creating new lives. There are problems with the Total View that have concerning implications in practice.
William MacAskill is one of the founders of the Effective Altruism (EA) movement. In Doing Good Better, he explains the reasoning behind a lot of EA ideas. The EA movement has changed a bit since 2015, when MacAskill wrote the book. But the core ideas in Doing Good Better are still very solid and worth understanding.
We can’t give a fuck about everything, so we have to choose our fucks carefully. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck suggests how we might make those choices.
The Courage to be Disliked features a series of conversations between a youth and a philosopher. The philosopher has three central claims, based on the philosophy of Austrian psychiatrist, Alfred Adler: the world is simple, people can change, and everyone can be happy.