“Notes on dynamism, power, & virtue” by Lizka
This is very rough — it's functionally a collection of links/notes/excerpts that feel related. I don’t think what I’m sharing is in a great format; if I had more mental energy, I would have chosen a more-linear structure to look at this tangle of ideas. But publishing in the current form[1] seemed better than not sharing at all.I sometimes feel like two fuzzy perspective-clusters[2] are pulling me in opposite directions: Cluster 1: “Getting stuff done, building capacity, being willing to make tradeoffs & high-stakes decisions, etc.” There are very real, urgent problems in the world. Some decision-makers are incredibly irresponsible — perhaps ~evil — and I wish other people had more influence. Pretending like we’re helpless (I do not think we are, at least in expectation), ignoring decisions/tradeoffs we are in fact making, or trying to abdicate the power we have — perhaps to keep our hands [...] ---Outline:(06:16) List (excerpts)(07:18) Dynamism, carving up the future, gardens(07:23) Dynamism vs stasis(10:00) Carving up the future(11:50) Gardening as an alternative to carving things up?(12:32) An approach that focuses on legitimacy, boundaries, liberalism...(18:46) Virtues & cooperation(18:49) Virtue as ~parenting yourself(20:32) Making oneself a beacon/fixed point (not enough to approach everything strategically when playing a part of a whole)(22:41) Paretotopia & cooperation(24:12) Appendix: lightly adapted from one of my messy internal docsThe original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: June 3rd, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yYX7Rk7mHWxgwc762/notes-on-dynamism-power-and-virtue --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.