On my reading of history people who want to bring us the best are usually the people we ought to be afraid of.

I became religious and at 14 went to a boarding school 500 miles from home to begin theological studies. By the time I started university, politics had replaced religion in the economy of my enthusiasms but I had no idea what to study. My boarding school emphasized languages which I was bad at, and deemphasized math and science which I was good at.

We need more science, but what we especially need is science fiction.

The bizarre thing about the anthropocene is that never has humanity been more powerful and never have individual humans felt so powerless. This is because so much that drives the circumstances of the anthropocene is the aggregation of apparently negligible acts, often amplified by technology, rather than decisive acts by autonomous decision-makers.

We can use economic instruments to help realize our goals but economics does not tell us what our goals should be.

Philosophers are often actively disinterested in what happens between the cup and the lips (after all, that's "non-ideal theory").

In the last few centuries we've managed to reduce how much we kill each other, we've learned some basic lessons about public health, and life is relatively good for more people than ever before.