Civilization is an inherited game shaped by those before you.

You start this game as a product of previous iterations: “Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly - in you.”

Going forward, you must choose among possible games to pass on to your future self and generations.

You could make nihilistic outcomes like this more likely: "In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history" — yet [...]

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Outline:

(02:40) Meet the Players: Value Diversity

(02:45) Striving for Coherence, Built to be Conflicted

(05:44) Epistemic Humility and Open Minds

(08:23) From Value Diversity to Value Drift

(10:48) How To Win The Game: Voluntary Cooperation

(15:14) Zooming in on Voluntarism

(16:46) Zooming in on Cooperation

(19:07) Zooming in on Intelligence

(22:24) Chapter Summary

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

The original text contained 12 images which were described by AI.

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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