TechTakes

I really enjoyed reading this piece, thanks for sharing.

Your writing is so stylish and punchy that I found myself frequently highlighting or annotating sections, sentences or phrases (I try to annotate as I read when I find something that grabs me, as part of an ongoing quest to read more thoughtfully). I'm working on improving my own writing, so it's always a useful exercise whenever I find writing that I enjoy so much that it helps me to understand my own taste in writing. I like your rhythm, in particular.

You caused me to think a lot about my own experience at one of the fancy UK universities (one that has a particularly strong Effective Altruist crowd). My time there radicalised me in the same way that your time at Google affected you. It's quite striking to me that although growing up in poverty looks very different in the UK compared to in Brazil, there are aspects that are remarkably constant. For instance, how naïve young people are told that they are special in order to make us ignorant of (and complicit in) our own mistreatment and the oppression of those ostensibly beneath us.