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 ...

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 b...

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 c...

Why do some people oppose Roe v. Wade? I tried to figure it out by reviewing the responses to a series of open-ended and multiple-choice questions answered by 49 people in the U.S. who say they're "very happy" that Roe v. Wade was overturned. Here is what they said. I posed the following open-ended questions: 1. "What are your views on abortion?" 2. "If you oppose abortion, why do...

Here is a common situation that you might have noticed: close friends (or romantic partners) suddenly have their relationship explode – both people feel like the other one hurt them and that they themselves did nothing wrong. These heart-breaking and all-too-common situations can arise from a pattern we call "Clashing Trauma." It has been estimated that over 70% of adults in the world&nb...

Usually, when X causes Y that means that X is correlated with Y. This may seem obvious simply because correlation is simply a measure of the extent to which Y goes up, on average, when X goes up. But, fascinatingly, there are some special cases where you can have causation WITHOUT correlation. Here are five ways causation without correlation can occur: 1. Averaging: increasing A sometimes c...

Note (December 16, 2022): This piece is cross-posted from the Clearer Thinking blog, where it appeared on March 2, 2021. Can a chosen definition be "wrong"? No. If you choose a definition, then you can define a sound or series of characters to mean whatever you want them to mean. For instance, if you wanted, you could declare that whenever you say "phloop," you mean one of those littl...

This is a cross-post from my post on the Clearer Thinking blog (from March 1, 2022). The post first appeared on this site on December 3, 2022. Epictetus, born ~50AD, was a disabled man born into slavery in Phrygia (present-day Turkey). Nothing that he wrote down survives; we know about him only through the words of other scholars. But he was so wise that his ideas reverberate through society t...

I used to not think much of courage as a virtue. After all, isn't it courageous to drive 50 mph over the speed limit despite being nervous about driving - or to rob a bank despite being next to a police station?Don't soldiers show courage fighting, even when fighting for the more evil side?It takes courage to become a boxer (because you're likely to have your face pummeled by a powerful person), ...

This essay is cross-posted from the Clearer Thinking blog. The question of how to achieve true happiness has been debated for thousands of years. In this article, we've summarized ten approaches to happiness, new and old, that are popular today.  How do you think about being truly happy? You might find that your personal views on this topic are captured by one of these ten popu...