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Philip Trammell

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Philip Trammell RSS Some informal thoughts about economics, philosophy, effective altruism, and other stuff I know less about than I think I do Sacrifices as Slack SHARE · 30 JUN 2022 · #49 I’ll start this post with the disclaimer that already goes on half my posts, and belongs on most of the rest: that I expect this idea has been had (and maybe rejected) before, since it’s on the obvious side, but I haven’t come across it. I guess I’m even worse at reading than writing. Sacrifices seem counterproductive As far as I’m aware, most societies in the world, for most of (at least agricultural) history, took a non-negligible share of their food to a priest each year. The priest then destroyed it. Sacrificing food was so widespread, and so seemingly counterproductive, that it presumably has some sort of cultural-evolutionary justification. The only justification I’ve heard is that costly rituals serve as tribal bonding experiences in some way, and that better-bonded tribes outcomp

Philip Trammell blog 49 Philip Trammell ABOUT ME I am an economist at Stanford University's Digital Economy Lab , working with Erik Brynjolfsson and Chad Jones on questions related to economic growth and AI. I have also done work on decision theory and the game theory of public good provision. My doctorate is from Oxford, and as an undergraduate I studied economics and mathematics at Brown. (I recently started a second job as head of economics at Epoch AI , but-embarrassingly enough-went on leave just after I started to deal with a chronic headache issue which only seems to have worsened latel

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