On not getting a job as an option
This was originally a comment to VipulNaik's recent indagations about the academic lifestyle versus the job lifestyle. Instead of calling it lifestyle he called them career options, but I'm taking a different emphasis here on purpose. Due to information hazards risks, I recommend that Effective Altruists who are still wavering back and forth do not read this. Spoiler EA alert. I'd just like to provide a cultural difference information that I have consistently noted between Americans and Brazilians which seems relevant here. To have a job and work in the US is taken as a *de facto* biological need. It is as abnormal for an American, in my experience, to consider not working, as it is to consider not breathing, or not eating. It just doesn't cross people's minds. If anyone has insight above and beyond "Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism" let me know about it, I've been waiting for the "why?" for years. So yeah, let me remind people that you can spend years and years not working. that not getting a job isn't going to kill you or make you less healthy, that ultravagabonding is possible and feasible and many do it for over six months a year, that I have a friend who lives as the boyfriend of his sponsor's wife in a triad and somehow never worked a day in his life (the husband of the triad pays it all, both men are straight). That I've hosted an Argentinian who left graduate economics for two years to randomly travel the world, ended up in Rome and passed by here in his way back, through couchsurfing. That Puneet Sahani has been well over two years travelling the world with no money and an Indian passport now. I've also hosted a lovely estonian gentleman who works on computers 4 months a year in London to earn pounds, and spends eight months a year getting to know countries while learning their culture etc... Brazil was his third country. Oh, and never forget the Uruguay couple I just met at a dance festival who have been travelling as hippies aro
Copied from the Heterodox Effective Altruism facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1449282541750667/):
Giego Caleiro I've read the comments and now speak as me, not as Admin:
It sems to me that the Zurich people were right to exclude Roland from their events. Let me lay out the reasons I have, based on extremely partial information:
1) IF Roland brings back topics that are not EA, such as 9/11 and Thai prostitutes, it is his burden to both be clear and to justify why those topics deserve to be there.
2) The politeness of EAs is in great part the reason that some SJWs managed to infiltrate it. Having regulations and rules that determine who can... (read 509 more words →)