“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 [...]

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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 docs

The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

June 3rd, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yYX7Rk7mHWxgwc762/notes-on-dynamism-power-and-virtue

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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