Ord, Toby

The Great Problems. Kevin M. Esvelt; Rosalind Picard; Neil Buddy Shah; Amy Smith; Anne White; Kai Steinmetz; David Keith; Toby Ord; Megan Palmer. MIT. canvas.mit.edu . 2021.

Introduction: Triumphs and Tragedies

Great Problem: Mental Health

• Finland is the happiest country in the world, and the Finns aren’t happy about it.
• Burden of Depressive Disorders by Country, Sex, Age and Year
• Development, Freedom, and Rising Happines: A Global Perspective (1981 - 2007)
• How to Be Happy
• A Nihilist’s Guide to Meaning
• How Bad Are Things?

Technological Trajectories

Signs of a Scout

These Don’t Make You a Scout

Feeling objective. The more objective you feel, the more you trust your own intuitions and opinions as accurate representations of reality, and the less inclined you are to question them.

Being smart and knowledgeable. It’s not a case of “if people were smarter and well-informed, they’d realize their errors”. For example, found that polarization (on political fronts) on anthropogenic climate change increases as scientific intelligence increases. found similar patterns: political & religious polarization on stem cell research, the Big Bang, human evolution; political polarization on climate change; little evidence of political or religious polarization on nanotechnology and genetically modified foods.