• Interesting way to quantify whether something is useful for you: Put it in terms of utility. i.e. Reading this book = +100 utility but takes up time =-25 utility, helping someone +50 utility for them but takes up 2 min of my time -5 utility for me.
  
• Your personal morals may come in to play and can change how you weigh certain excuses (scenarios that don’t fit the general population. e.g. someone’s mom has cancer and wants you to be at the funeral =-5000 utility for you (time,feeling depressed afterwards) but for them, +1000 utility because you’re a close friend. Society would say that going to the funeral would be the right thing to do despite the amount of negative utility it provides you. So do you be selfless or selfish?
  
• When a rule maker decides to make exceptions to a rule, they then need to ensure that they don’t need to make such exception for future rules. e.g. Saying “If you allow me to do x this time, I’ll never do x again and if I do you can put heavy consequences”

Slippery Slopes can be avoided by using a schelling fence, a rule or line that says that something can’t be crossed no matter what. E.g. Holocaust denial in Europe is banned. Going to bed at 12:00 and not 12:05 so that you don’t say 5 more minutes every time.

• When you’re being meta contrarian, be careful to analyze your views.
  
• Hipster: people who deviate from normal on purpose. Not because it actually makes sense.
  
• If you’re being contrarian, don’t do it for signalling. Think about what you say and whether you genuinely believe it.
  

• Media can highlight stories of a group which can unconsciously bias your view of that entire group. e.g. Cardiologists are all rapists/engage in sexual harassment. If you compared the number of men who sexually harass women in tech vs cardiology vs all other fields, you may find that in every field, there’s around the same number of men who sexually harass women. So its not the group’s characteristics, but it can easily be shown that way to convince you that it is.
  
• If you generalize a group after seeing a couple of examples of something, you’re making a conclusion with sample size of 100, out of the millions of people in that group. You’re overfitting.

• A lot of times, many views are valid when looked at it from their lens.
  
• The thing you can do is be more open of their views, try to understand it given their experiences
  
• Interesting thought: Imagine we lived in a world where we could experience a short movie that portrayed that person’s life (required perspective)…

• It’s better to be silent on some things then to talk about them at all. e.g. Writing about medical confidentiality on the New York Times (infinite loop here)

An argument that also proves fake conclusions. e.g. You can’t be an atheist, because it’s impossible to disprove the existence of God”, you can answer “That argument proves too much. If we accept it, we must also accept that you can’t disbelieve in Bigfoot, since it’s impossible to disprove his existence as well.”-