Four forces that tend to promote or impede ethical behavior

December 9, 2022

In my view, there are "four forces" behind why humans avoid unethical behavior. I think understanding these forces can be useful when seeking to explain people's actions (especially when someone does something truly terrible). Ethical force 1: Emotion The vast majority of us experience empathy and compassion. We tend to feel happy when seeing others happy and feel bad when we see others suffering. These feelings guide our ethical behavior at an interpersonal level, causing proso...

Nine ways that text-generating AIs will probably change the world in the next ten years

December 3, 2022

Image generated by the A.I. DALL·E 2 using the prompt "A robot hand drawing itself by MC Escher"

Note (March 26, 2023): I first wrote this list on December 3, 2022. Since then, GPT-4 has come out, and several of the points in this list are closer to happening. For example, point #2 is partly true already, thanks to Bing Chat (which runs on GPT-4). Here are nine ways I think that AIs that generate text (like GPT-3) will have a >50% chance of changing the world for the better and worse in the next ten years: #1: The internet will get flooded with AI-written articles, and...

Eight methods to make conversations with acquaintances more interesting

December 3, 2022

If you're like me and really dislike small talk, you may find these ideas useful. (1) If you end up talking about their work, ask what they (i) most like about it and (ii) find most challenging about it. (2) If they end up asking about your work, try to explain what you do in a way you've never experimented with before. Example: if you're a programmer, maybe you'll say your job is to convert ambiguous human goals to instructions that are so precise a computer can follow them. ...

How can we look at the same dataset and come to wildly different conclusions?

November 30, 2022

Recently, a study came out where 73 research teams independently analyzed the same data, all trying to test the same hypothesis. Seventy-one of the teams came up with numerical results across a total of 1,253 models. Across these 1,253 different ways of looking at the data, about 58% showed no effect, 17% showed a positive effect, and 25% showed a negative effect. But that's not even the oddest part. The oddest part is that despite a heroic attempt to do so, the study authors failed to...

Life, death, and a squirrel

November 16, 2022

Cropped version of a photo by Rhododendrites ( Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Squirrel_in_CP_%2840494%29.jpg

One time when I was walking in Central Park, a branch fell from a really tall tree, perhaps a 50- to 60-foot drop. A squirrel was on that branch when it fell, and the branch hit the cement path with a loud thud. The squirrel lay there on its back, quivering. I knew it was totally screwed. Its back was probably broken, but it was clearly still alive. "Fuck," I thought to myself. "Look at how much it's suffering. Should I kill it to put it out of its misery?" I stood there pondering t...

Awkwardly Embracing Awkwardness

September 25, 2022

All else being equal, it's good to avoid creating awkwardness. But too much awkwardness-avoidance can be harmful. Lately, I've been trying to accept a bit more awkwardness (rather than reflexively avoiding it) in cases where I think doing so can produce value. Here are four areas where I'm leaning more into awkwardness: 1. When asked for feedback on a project (and I think it will fail), I'm usually tempted to focus on what I like about it. I've now become more likely ...

Arguments For and Against Longtermism

August 30, 2022

Thanks to William MacAskill's excellent new book on the topic (What We Owe the Future), lots of people are talking about longtermism right now. For those not familiar with the concept, "longtermism" is the ethical view that "positively influencing the long-term future should be a key moral priority of our time." Below are some of my favorite arguments for longtermism, followed by some of my favorite against it. Note that I borrow from Will's book heavily here in the section on arguments ...

Tensions between moral anti-realism and effective altruism

August 14, 2022

I believe I've identified a philosophical confusion associated with people who state that they are both moral anti-realists and Effective Altruists (EAs). I'd be really interested in getting your thoughts on it. Fortunately, I think this flaw can be improved upon (I'm working on an essay about how I think that can be done), but I'd like to be sure that the flaw is really there first (hence why I'm asking you for your feedback now)! People that this essay is not&...

On Emotionally Reactive Traits: a hidden cause of drama and ruined relationships

August 13, 2022

Have you ever known a well-intentioned, kind person who had a pattern of creating interpersonal drama? I've known quite a few people like this, and they've often baffled me. Why would good people engage in behavior that systematically destroys relationships? After spending a while thinking about my past experiences with such cases, I now have a name for a cluster of traits that I believe, in at least some of these cases, help explain what's going on. I call this cluster "Emoti...

Understand how other people think: a theory of worldviews

June 29, 2022

This piece was coauthored with Amber Dawn Ace. A libertarian, a socialist, an environmentalist, and a pro-development YIMBY watch an apartment complex being built. The libertarian is pleased - ‘the hand of the market at work!’ - whereas the socialist worries that the building is a harbinger of gentrification; the YIMBY sees progress, but the environmentalist is concerned about the building’s carbon footprint. They’re all seeing the same thing, but they understand it differently because they ...