New York Times bestselling (4 times!) author and journalist AJ Jacobs experiments on himself to help us all learn.

In this Sentientist Conversation he talks with me about what he believes, what matters morally, and how his writing projects link to Sentientism‘s tenets of evidence, reason and universal compassion.

AJ: “I love the idea of Sentientism”

We discuss:
– Sentientist themes in AJ’s personal experimentation writing projects: Living biblically, connecting everyone, thanking everyone, never lying, learning everything!
– The “belonging, belief and behaviour” of religion – including secular Judaism and hanging out at the Scientology centre.
– Effective altruism and longtermism.
– Moral realism, relativism and why the Taliban’s ethics just aren’t good.
– Preferring shallow beliefs to deeply held beliefs.
– The ethics of human and non-human animal, robot and far future ethics.
– Expanding our moral circle through recognising our connectedness and/or through seeing climate change as a common enemy.
– Presenting positive opportunities to do good vs. using guilt.
– What a Sentientist utopia might look like and whether we should even specify one.
– Can Sentientism help address today’s dogmatic polarisation?

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