People are good-ish

This is an indisputable fact about the world that for some reason people keep demoting to an overly-optimistic belief. People are generally pretty decent most of the time, if they're not backed into a corner.

Humans have well-known biases, blind spots, and mental traps, but everything about the world today would not even be fathomable, let alone able to be accomplished, if even 5% more of human activity was malicious. In fact I'm starting a running list of all the things I can think of that would utterly fall apart if just a fraction of people were a fraction more fundamentally malicious or misanthropic.

This is going to be an evergreen note from the get-go for two reasons:

1. It is well-supported by evidence from the real world
2. It is fundamental to most of the ways in which my ideology—and therefore my ideas—differ from others

Backlinks

• an ethic of curiosity
• Capitalism needs mechanisms for humility in valuations