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This week's helpful idea:


Some possible theories for why the world is worse than it seems we should have been able to make it by now:

1. irrationality

2. selfishness

3. coordination difficulty (collective action/principal-agent problems)

4. we’re mostly social signaling

5. tribalism

6. bad governance systems

7. evil people 



This week's question for you is based on the idea above:

Why is the world worse than it seems we should have been able to make it by now? I’m interested to hear which of the explanations above you think best apply, or if there are other explanations not on this list.

You can read other people's answers or join the ongoing discussion about this question on Twitter or Facebook


Here is the newest Clearer Thinking podcast episode for you:

Dealing with our "groupstruckness" and "boundedness" (with Katja Grace)


Here's an essay that I recently put up on my website that you may find valuable: 

Could You Be in One of These 8 Psychological Traps? 

Lastly, you may have noticed that we've started releasing transcripts for our podcast episodes! Before we did this, we tested out four A.I.-based text-to-speech services and compared them on accuracy and price. For those interested, here is our write-up of our findings: 

Podcast transcription services comparison



Until next week!

Spencer Greenberg


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