[T]he personal responsibility vortex... sucks good people in... [W]e should redirect any effort that we are tempted to spend on personal responsibili… - Bret Weinstein

Humans are exquisitely sensitive, for very good evolutionary reasons... to being excluded from a group. ...[T]hat's effectively fatal for a hunter-gatherer, so... we very naturally act in our own self-protection by doing whatever is necessary to rejoin. ...[Y]ou exist in a very large population. If you take up the habit—the rationality community... coined a term for this called steelmanning (the IDW has borrowed it)... [Y]ou do your best to present the argument, of those that disagree with you, so well that they recognize you as having done it right. ...If you do it out of habit, certain people will reject you. They're doing you a favor. They're telling you to seek higher quality people... [S]ome of the things that are hard in life will cost you friends, but the quality of your friend group will be upgraded by the process. It's very painful... but if you'll just trust that this process will result in people... that you want to find yourself around when things get really serious, then you'll be glad you've done it.

[C]aptive-rodent breeding protocols, designed to increase reproductive output, simultaneously exert strong selection against reproductive senescence and virtually eliminate selection that would otherwise favor tumor suppression. This appears to have greatly elongated the telomeres of laboratory mice. With their telomeric failsafe effectively disabled, these animals are unreliable models of normal senescence and tumor formation. Safety tests employing these animals likely overestimate cancer risks and underestimate tissue damage and consequent accelerated senescence.

We have to ask ourselves, what fraction of the economic activity that surrounds us is profitable only by virtue of the fact that those who make the money are externalizing the cost to somebody else. If we were to eliminate such behaviors, we would... reduce the amount of activity by a lot... but we would reduce it by exactly the fraction of activities that shouldn't have existed in the first place.