No. of Recommendations: 13
(From Andrew Tobias's daily letter)
Once, there were but a few hundred thousand humans on Earth.
The day I arrived: 2.5 billion.
Today: 8.3 billion.
All told, since the beginning, 120 billion of us, give or take.
AnyHumanEver (
anyhumanever.com: Any Human Ever: one life from over 100 billion) lets you pick one at random (and then another and another and another) to see when and where and how they lived.
It calls to mind John Rawls’ veil of ignorance, a hugely important concept (if you ask me), of which I had never heard until, 25 years ago, I asked Warren Buffett why he’s a Democrat.
That’s why, he explained. And it made perfect sense.
The veil of ignorance is a thought experiment that asks you to design the rules of society without knowing who you will be in it: rich or poor, talented or not, of any race, gender, or generation. Choose the rules from behind that veil, and you choose fairly. John Rawls built it in A Theory of Justice (1971, revised 1999) as the centerpiece of his account of justice. The device forces self-interest to produce impartial principles.philosophyprofessor.com - Veil of ignorance 