📚 node [[expanding the circle]]
⥅ node [[the-expanding-circle]] pulled by user

The Expanding Circle

I've been meaning to take notes on [[the expanding circle]] but I haven't found the time to do it. I didn't take notes here as I was reading it as I did much of the reading at night, in my [[e reader]].

I'll now try to write my impressions here in free form as I can and as I reference it through the [[agora]].

This is a hugely influential book for me but, wait for this, I only finished it on [[2021-12-21]] (I sometimes take unreasonably long to finishing things; it is one of my noticeable traits. In this case I left it at essentially 90% of the way through for no good reason but inefficiencies when scheduling it for reading.)

But because this book describes a proposition that I already believed, it felt valuable to me already. I considered it core to my thinking even if I hadn't finished it yet. It is a good [[distillation]] of the ideas of [[effective altruism]], or the ideas that led to the movement and represent, IMHO, its reasonable core.

  • The central tenet of the book is that over the course of human history, people have expanded the circle of beings whose interests they are willing to value similarly to their own. Originally that circle would have been self, family and tribe, but over time it grew to encompass all other humans.[

I wonder if this relates to [[dunbar's number]]

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