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To hear Bankman-Fried tell it, the idea was to make billions through his crypto-trading firm, Alameda Research, and FTX, the exchange he created for it — funneling the proceeds into the humble cause of “bed nets and malaria,” thereby saving poor people’s lives.

ast summer Bankman-Fried was telling The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus something quite different. “He told me that he never had a bed-nets phase, and considered neartermist causes — global health and poverty — to be more emotionally driven,” Lewis-Kraus wrote in August. Effective altruists talk about both “neartermism” and “longtermism.

Bankman-Fried said he wanted his money to address longtermist threats like the dangers posed by artificial intelligence spiraling out of control. As he put it, funding for the eradication of tropical diseases should come from other people who actually cared about tropical diseases: “Like, not me or something.”

a Scottish moral philosopher.The philosopher, William MacAskill,

his latest book, “What We Owe the Future,” became a best seller after it was published in August.

His rising profile parallels the worldwide growth of the giving community he helped found, effective altruism. Once a niche pursuit for earnest vegans and volunteer kidney donors who lived frugally so that they would have more money to give away for cheap medical interventions in developing countries, it has emerged as a significant force in philanthropy, especially in millennial and Gen-Z giving.

What interests me is not the details of what happened, but that implicit in the lack of sympathetic hand-wringing over Mr. Mortenson’s exposure is a kind of righteous vindication.

we knew all along that nobody could be that good. How did we know? Because we’re not that good. Mr. Mortenson’s altruism is an indictment of our own sloth, and so some punishment — of him — might be in order.

that unspoken challenge innate in public acts of courage and altruism: “What are you doing?” Speaking for myself, the answer is usually a highly uncomfortable, “Nothing.”

In 1964, the British biologist William Hamilton

he argued, helping your relatives can spread your genes faster than having children of your own.

If we give enough help to relatives so they can survive and have children, then they can pass on more copies of our own genes. Dr. Hamilton called this new way of tallying reproductive success inclusive fitness.

The lesser-known, and often overlooked, effects of climate change include the risks and impacts to mental health—the focus of this article.

the risks and impacts of climate change on mental health are already rapidly accelerating, resulting in a number of direct, indirect, and overarching effects that disproportionally affect those who are most marginalized

The overarching threats of a changing climate, can also incite despair and hopelessness as actions to address the ‘wicked problem’ of climate change seem intangible or insignificant in comparison to the scale and magnitude of the threats [29].

Edwards thought young people would be worried about immediate threats, like AI-powered surveillance, misinformation or autonomous weapons that target and kill without human intervention — problems he calls “ultraserious.” But he soon discovered that some students were more focused on a purely hypothetical risk: That AI could become as smart as humans and destroy mankind.

In these scenarios, AI isn’t necessarily sentient. Instead, it becomes fixated on a goal — even a mundane one, like making paper clips — and triggers human extinction to optimize its task.

To prevent this theoretical but cataclysmic outcome, mission-driven labs like DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to build a good kind of AI programmed not to lie, deceive or kill us.

Harvard, where, at a wood-paneled dining hall last year, two juniors explained how to assess a fellow undergraduate’s earning potential. It’s easy, they said, as we ate mussels, beets and sautéed chard: You can tell by who’s getting a bulge bracket internship.

A bulge bracket bank, like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase or Citi. The biggest, most prestigious global investment banks

Not to be confused with M.B.B., which stands for three of the most prestigious management consulting firms: McKinsey, Bain and Boston Consulting Group.

what is wrong with a particular kind of increasingly common environmental regulation: one that is short on impact but big on virtue signaling.

Some American states have banned cafés and restaurants from offering their customers single-use plastic straws.Many jurisdictions around the world now require grocery stores to charge their customers for plastic bags.The EU has phased out incandescent light bulbs.The EU has also banned plastic bottles with removable caps, leading to the introduction of bottles that don’t always properly close once they have been opened.Though not yet implemented, some prominent organizations and activists have called for gas stoves to be banned.

These seemingly disparate examples share an important commonality: They are a form of policy intervention that achieves small improvements for the environment at the cost of a salient deterioration in quality of life or a large loss of political goodwill. For that reason, each of these interventions is likely to backfire.

There’s no topic that Trump can’t bring back around to himself, no cause as compelling as his own. And while I and many others have examined his outsize egomania before, its migration into his administration can’t be noted too often or overstated.

It’s everything. It drives policy. It warps diplomacy. And it badly hobbles his leadership, because you can’t inspire others if nearly all of your energy goes so transparently and unabashedly into inflating yourself. At the least you have to do a pantomime of altruism and self-effacement. Trump seldom even tries.

The larger one is that when you’re selling a revolution and convincing yourself of it, you’re obliged to scale your actions to your exaggerations. They must be as sweeping as the supposed circumstances — it’s central to the delusion, integral to the illusion. Hence the wall. Hence the immigration ban. Hence all the executive orders signed and still to come.

President Obama's much debated "pivot to Asia" can often seem like an abstract diplomatic desire.

Yesterday two transport planes and a group of marines were sent to Tacloban.

The aircraft carrier George Washington and cruisers Antietam and Cowpens, the destroyers Mustin and Lassen, and the supply ship Charles Drew are also heading to the area.

“We are both ruder and more civil than in times gone by,” said Pier M. Forni, a professor of Italian literature at Johns Hopkins University and also co-founder of the university’s Civility Initiative. Professor Forni gives the example of the pregnant woman. “Fewer people may give up their seat on the bus for her, which shows a decline in civility,” he said. “But when she steps into the workplace, the number of people who take her seriously is much higher than in my father’s time. “We are more accepting of people who look different and the disabled, and we have a higher ecological awareness,” Professor Forni said. But he also acknowledged that what we classically think of as courtesy is on the decline. This ranges from a certain deference to authority and age to graciously allowing someone to merge into your lane of traffic.

to dismiss signs of courtesy as mere symbols and to argue that what matters is not the outward trappings misses the point

when a mother corrects her son for chewing with his mouth open, and tells him people don’t like looking at half-chewed food, “she has given him a rule of table manners, but also a fundamental notion of all ethical principles — actions have consequences for others. Good manners are the training wheels of altruism.

In a book to be published in April, “The Origins of Political Order,” Francis Fukuyama of Stanford University presents a sweeping new overview of human social structures throughout history, taking over from where Dr. Wilson’s ambitious synthesis left off.

he explicitly assumes that human social nature is universal and is built around certain evolved behaviors like favoring relatives, reciprocal altruism, creating and following rules, and a propensity for warfare.

Because of this shared human nature, with its biological foundation, “human politics is subject to certain recurring patterns of behavior across time and across cultures,” he writes. It is these worldwide patterns he seeks to describe in an analysis that stretches from prehistoric times to the French Revolution.

Wilson told me the new proposed evolutionary model pulls the field “out of the fever swamp of kin selection,” and he confidently predicted a coming paradigm shift that would promote genetic research to identify the “trigger” genes that have enabled a tiny number of cases, such as the ant family, to achieve complex forms of cooperation.

In the book, he proposes a theory to answer what he calls “the great unsolved problem of biology,” namely how roughly two dozen known examples in the history of life—humans, wasps, termites, platypodid ambrosia beetles, bathyergid mole rats, gall-making aphids, one type of snapping shrimp, and others—made the breakthrough to life in highly social, complex societies. Eusocial species, Wilson noted, are by far “the most successful species in the history of life.”

Summarizing parts of it for me, Wilson was particularly unsparing of organized religion, likening the Book of Revelation, for example, to the ranting of “a paranoid schizophrenic who was allowed to write down everything that came to him.” Toward philosophy, he was only slightly kinder. Generation after generation of students have suffered trying to “puzzle out” what great thinkers like Socrates, Plato, and Descartes had to say on the great questions of man’s nature, Wilson said, but this was of little use, because philosophy has been based on “failed models of the brain.”

Tuna and Moskovitz were in their mid-20s in 2010 when they became the youngest couple ever to sign on to the Giving Pledge, the campaign started by Bill Gates and Warren E. Buffett to encourage the world’s billionaires to commit to giving away most of their wealth.

They had little experience with philanthropy, but they believed that the bulk of the money Moskovitz had made — estimated to be $8.1 billion by Forbes — should be returned to society in their lifetimes.

they have narrowed their interests to four major “buckets”: U.S. policy, global catastrophic risks, international aid and science. They plan to announce their first major gifts in early 2015 and eventually hope to scale up to give away hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Nordic nations have produced what is, by any metric, an impressive output of successful entrepreneurs, international businesses, and brands. Sweden has Ikea, H&M, Spotify, and Volvo, to name a few. From Denmark have come Lego, Carlsberg, and one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, Novo Nordisk. A Swede and a Dane co-founded the video calling service Skype. The core programming code of Linux—the leading operating system running on the world’s servers and supercomputers—was developed by a Finn. The Finnish company Nokia was the world’s largest mobile phone maker for more than a decade. And newer players like Finland’s Supercell and Rovio, creators of the ubiquitous video games Clash of Clans and Angry Birds, or Sweden’s Mojang, the publisher of the equally popular video game Minecraft, are changing the face of online gaming.

Nordic countries are well-ranked when it comes to helping facilitate starting a business. At the most basic level, what the Nordic approach does is reduce the risk of starting a company, since basic services such as education and health care are covered for regardless of the fledgling company’s fate. In addition, companies themselves are freed from the burdens of having to offer such services for their employees at the scale American companies do. And if the entrepreneur succeeds, they are rewarded by tax rates on capital gains that are lower than the rate on wages.

as capitalist economies the Nordic countries have proven that capitalism works better when it’s accompanied by smart, universal social policies that are in everyone’s self-interest.

The historian Robert Hannigan notes that the common portrayal of Wilson as one driven by “disinterested altruism” and “an unwavering commitment to principle . . . should never have gained the kind of authority it has, above all because its origins lay precisely in how the president advertised himself.” We agre

Wilson’s reputation as a peacemaker is undeserved. Rather than being suddenly thrust into war, the president took the nation into war, step-by-step. 

● Soon after the war began, the Wilson administration unofficially aligned the U.S. with the Allied Powers, providing Great Britain and France with arms, ammunition, food, manufactured goods, and large loans.

it will require much more than Republican congressional defeats in 2018 to halt Trumpocracy. Indeed, such defeats may well perversely strengthen President Trump. Congressional defeats will weaken alternative power centers within the Republican Party. If they lose the House or the Senate or many governorships—or some combination of those defeats—then Republicans may feel all the more compelled to defend their president. The party faithful may interpret any internal criticism of Trump as a treasonable surrender to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.

The more isolated Trump becomes within the American political system as a whole, the more he will dominate whatever remains of the conservative portion of that system. He will devour his party from within.

If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.

In 2014, I followed him from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked as a cognitive neuroscientist, to Hungary, where he was studying the biological underpinnings of racial prejudice. He wanted to pinpoint the causes of bias against Roma people and create programs that would help eradicate it.

He talked openly about “bottling up” the altruism and good will he found among the peace activists he worked with and giving it like medicine to recalcitrant extremists everywhere. He was actively looking for ways to do that, he said, and he was prepared for the challenges, and snickers, he would face.

Emile died this fall, at the age of 47, from an aggressive form of brain cancer. He left behind a wife, two young children and a body of work as expansive and hopeful as it is unfinished. The loss of such a beautiful mind to a disease of the brain feels especially awful — especially now. But Emile was well acquainted with awfulness, and even in death, he did not grant it much currency.