With that in mind, here are seven thought experiments related to happiness and suffering that might make you see your intrinsic values a bit differently:

— we don’t necessarily know our values —

Unfortunately, our deepest values are not something we automatically know about ourselves. The conscious side of our mind doesn’t have direct access to the rest of our mind. And much of what we care about lies in the subconscious, meaning that our explicit beliefs about our values may not be comprehensive or even accurate. So this at least opens the possibility that we might subconsciously value increasing strangers’ well-being more than we realize.

— our values are affected by our beliefs —

Some of what we value hinges on our beliefs about what’s true. And so if some of our relevant beliefs are false, or we haven’t fully explored all the implications of those beliefs (e.g., two things we believe imply a third thing but we haven’t realized that), then what we think we value may be, in a certain sense, “wrong”. So this at least opens the possibility that we might hold beliefs that are false or that contradict each other, such that, once they are corrected or the contradictions are resolved, we may end up caring more about increasing the well-being of strangers than we think we do now.

— our understanding of our values evolves —

We figure out our own values over time as we carefully introspect, discuss our values with others, compare options, notice and resolve contradictions, refine our understanding of the truth, flesh out the implications of what we already think is true, and infer things about ourselves from our own reactions. Hence, it is not that strange to think that our understanding of our values may change as we engage in reflection.

— a growing ember of classical utilitarianism —

So we may not fully understand what we value.

And I am proposing that through thought experiments about values, if carefully considered and reflected upon, quite a lot of people may realize that they care more about working to increase happiness or reduce suffering than they had originally thought. That many people are *partly* classical utilitarians in their values, even if they haven’t realized it, and that thought experiments can expose this.

— the thought experiments —

Warning: references to intense suffering and very difficult tradeoffs

(1) Suffering is bad, and not just for me

Remember that time when you felt really intense physical suffering (e.g., maybe you had a really nasty stomach flu)? Don’t dwell on that time, because I don’t want you to suffer now, but remember it just for a moment. Remember how much that suffering sucked?

Now take a few seconds to imagine a stranger. Someone you’ve never met and never will meet, but perhaps you passed them on the street at some point in your life. Take a moment to picture their face.

Now, suppose that right now this stranger is suffering in that same exact way that you recalled yourself suffering a moment ago. Assume this person is not someone who has done something terrible to deserve that suffering.

How do you feel about a state of the world where this stranger is suffering? Contrast it to a state of the world where that person is happy. I bet you think the latter world is better than the former.

I ran a survey asking people about their intrinsic values, that is, those things they value that they would continue to value even if no other consequences occurred as a result of that thing. In it, 49% of people (from the general U.S. mechanical Turk population that seemed to understand the question) reported that “people I don’t know suffer less than they do normally” is an intrinsic value, and 50% reported that “people I don’t know feel happy” is an intrinsic value.

It’s tough to measure people’s intrinsic values, and this is not a population that is fully representative of the U.S. population, so the exact numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. But these results suggest to me that many people do care about the suffering of strangers.

But now, the next question is, what properties should your caring about strangers have?

—

(2) Your friends care about the suffering of their friends

You presumably want the world to contain more of what your friends value (and less of what they disvalue) insofar as these values don’t conflict with your own.

Well, there’s a very good chance that one of the things your friends value is that their friends don’t suffer. Another thing your friends probably value is that their own friends get the things they value too, which presumably includes not wanting the friends of their friends (who are the friends of your friends’ friends) to suffer.

In other words, just by caring about the values of your friends, you may also care about the suffering of a whole host of other strangers. Not necessarily all strangers, but a lot of people you will never meet.

—

(3) More suffering is worse (a.k.a. scope sensitivity)

Suppose that 1 innocent person experiences a painful electric shock for one hour. How bad do you feel that is? Now suppose that, instead of that, 100 innocent people each experience the same electric shock for one hour. How much worse does that seem to you? Take a moment to consider it.

Now 10,000 people. How bad is that? Now 1,000,000 people. How bad is that?

At first, you may feel on a raw gut level that the 1,000,000 suffering is not that much worse than 1 person suffering. But are you really taking into account how many people 1,000,000 is? That’s about the entire population of San Francisco.

Notice how, when you really think about it, and you really try to get the enormity of the large numbers, 1,000,000 innocent people each experiencing a painful electric shock for one hour is way, way, way worse than 1 person experiencing it. Not just, say, twice as bad. But MUCH worse.

That implies that, for instance, eradicating a common and horribly debilitating disease that ten million people would otherwise get is not just a little bit more valuable than helping, say, 1000 people live slightly easier lives. It’s way, way, way more valuable!

I’m not saying you necessarily value a reduction in 1 million units of suffering as being 1 million times more valuable than a reduction in one unit of suffering, just that you probably do think it’s MUCH more valuable.

—

(4) Selfishness does not dominate

What’s the thing you value most in the world? Your life, maybe? Or your happiness? Or maybe something involving another person? My guess is that no matter how much you value this, there is an amount of suffering you’d be willing to give this up to alleviate.

For instance, if you had to give up your life to prevent all future suffering on earth, I bet you would do it, as terrible and unfair a choice as it would be to make.

—

(5) We should help suffering strangers when it is easy (a version of the famous drowning child thought experiment that Peter Singer has popularized)

Suppose a stranger you’re walking behind suddenly teeters and then collapses in front of you. The person is now lying on the ground, clearly in tremendous pain. You are the only person nearby.

I think most of us feel that even though we didn’t cause this person to be ill, we still have a moral obligation to try to help them. That is, (a) not being the cause of suffering doesn’t make us totally off the hook with regard to trying to relieve that suffering.

Furthermore, suppose that it would be a small inconvenience for us to help this person (e.g., we might have to show up 15 minutes late to a fairly important work meeting). I think most of us would still help this person (and would feel that it is the right thing to do). If true, that suggests that (b), if the size of the potential reduction of suffering to another person is much greater than our own loss by our helping them, we probably should help.

Finally, suppose that instead of this being a stranger right in front of us, we imagine that this is a stranger who we happened to have accidentally just Skype called by accident (by entering our friend’s user ID incorrectly). Assuming we don’t believe the person on the other end is faking, shouldn’t we still try to figure out some way to help this person (assuming it is feasible), even though they are far away? Of course, if we have no way to help them, obviously, we have no obligation to help. But suppose we can think of an easy way to help, shouldn’t we do it? This suggests that (c) our obligation to help doesn’t depend on how far away someone is, only on our ability to help that person.

We must then remember, of course, that there are people we could help around the world at little inconvenience to ourselves.

Even if you agree with (a), (b), and (c), that doesn’t mean that you think you should devote all your time and money to helping people who are suffering. But if you do agree with those points, then I suspect your value system tells you that you should expend at least some of your resources helping reduce suffering in others, if you have the means to do so without too much sacrifice.

—

(6) Other values may seem to diminish when happiness is even slightly reduced as a consequence of them

Suppose that you happen to have found out that (through no action on your part) certain people have a false belief about a certain topic. Furthermore, you know they would believe you if you corrected this belief.

The problem is that these people would all be slightly less happy if they knew the truth about this thing, and in fact, nobody would benefit in any way from this truth being known.

Would you tell these people? Well, you may think truth is important (I do too), but you may feel that it substantially takes the wind out of the sails of truth if all people involved are less happy because of it, and nobody benefits. I think in this case, some people will say, “What is the point of the truth if everyone suffers slightly more because of it?” In other words, they might feel the value of truth is reduced to almost nothing.

This isn’t just about truth. For instance, you can do a version of this thought experiment about equality (what if, in a particular group of people, you could make the group more equal in some dimension, but every single member of the group would be slightly less happy as a result). Or you can do it for almost any other value.

My guess is that these other values seem quite a bit less valuable (and perhaps to some not even valuable at all) when everyone is slightly less happy as a consequence, highlighting the potential importance of happiness in your value system.

Note that you may not necessarily feel this property is symmetrical with other values. For instance, suppose that someone reduces suffering a significant amount, but in doing so causes the people involved in the situation to have slightly less accurate beliefs. You may not feel that the slight reduction in accurate beliefs makes the reduction in suffering itself any less valuable.

—

(7) We can at least agree on suffering

Some people like apples and others like oranges. Some want to spread atheism, and others want to spread theism. Some people think you should obey authorities, while others value freedom of thought. But one of the few dimensions we are just about all similar on is that we don’t want to suffer ourselves, and we don’t want the people we love to suffer.

Some people are perhaps exceptions (e.g., Christopher Hitchens claimed Mother Teresa believed suffering to be at least sometimes good, quoting her as saying “I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.”) I’m not sure what she meant by that or whether she would apply that to her own suffering or that of her loved ones, but it’s a possible exception.

That being said, though, disagreement on the badness of suffering seems really rare. Nearly everyone seems to find suffering bad, at least when it happens to themselves or their loved ones.

So if we all had to work as a species to reduce one thing, suffering seems like a pretty good contender. It’s hard to think of another thing we all dislike more.

— final thoughts —

Taken together, these thought experiments suggest (insofar as you buy into them) that you may believe:

(1) Suffering is bad when it happens to strangers

(2) You at least somewhat care about the suffering of many strangers by virtue of caring about the values of those people you care about

(3) More suffering of strangers is worse than less, and way, way more suffering is much worse still

(4) Your own self-interest is not more valuable than the potential for reducing all the suffering in the world

(5) We should put at least a little effort into reducing the suffering of strangers if it’s not too costly for us to do so, and we should not care whether those strangers are far away or near

(6) Most other values don’t seem as great if the result of producing them is to cause everyone involved to suffer slightly more, with no one benefiting, and these other values may even seem to lose their value in these cases

(7) We can all at least agree that suffering is bad and work together to reduce it

These points are not the same as classic utilitarianism, but they point in roughly the same direction as it does, I think. And anecdotally, some people seem to be quite impacted in their ethical views by thought experiments like these (though of course we can’t be sure it’s because they are revealing their deeper values as opposed to actually reshaping those values).

I don’t think that increasing the happiness of and/or reducing the suffering of conscious beings is the ONLY thing you care about. Nor do I think you SHOULD only care about those things.

But perhaps these thought experiments will make you realize that you care more about them than you thought you did, or that you’re more of a classic utilitarian than you realized.

This piece was first written on June 2, 2018, and first appeared on my website on December 2, 2025.

[Note: I’ve updated this post based on some feedback in the comments I received when I first wrote it.]

1. ADHD Focused Temperament

Since a core aspect of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) involves difficulty regulating focus, which may manifest as challenges in choosing what to focus on, and may involve hyper-focusing on a particular thing without feeling there’s a choice, an aspect of Focused Temperament would be finding it easy to focus on whatever you choose, and finding it easy to focus with whatever degree of intensity you choose. 

Since restlessness and fidgeting are other common symptoms of ADHD, Focused Temperament would involve finding it easy to still while doing nothing.

2. Schizophrenia Grounded Temperament

Since a core aspect of schizophrenia is seeing connections between things that aren’t really connected, an aspect of Grounded Temperament would be avoiding such false positives, but also failing to see hard-to-spot connections between things that really are connected. Since it’s common for schizophrenia to involve paranoia, Grounded Temperament would involve an absence of conspiratorial thinking and a tendency not to impute negative motives.

3. Imposter Syndrome Poster Syndrome

Since a core aspect of Imposter Syndrome is the belief that others see you as more capable than you really are, an aspect of Poster Syndrome would be a belief that others see you as less capable than you really are.

4. Autism Spectrum Social Savantism

Since a common aspect of being on the Autism Spectrum is having trouble spotting or interpreting subtle social cues, an aspect of Social Savantism would be an unusually strong ability to process and make accurate inferences from all subtle social information in interactions and to respond so as to produce the exact impression intended.

5. Borderline Personality Unreactive Personality

Since some of the major aspects of Borderline Personality are a high intensity and variability of emotion, an aspect of Unreactive Personality would be having dulled emotion with little fluctuation. Other aspects of Borderline Personality are a lack of sense of self/core identity, along with a strong attachment to others to root one’s identity to, so Unreactive Personality would involve a stable sense of self with unusually low attachment to others.

6. Sociopathy Selfless Personality

Since major aspects of sociopathy are a lack of (or greatly diminished capacity for) compassion and empathy, an aspect of Selfless Personality would involve extremely intense empathy and compassion, with these emotions driving an unusually large amount of the person’s actions.

And as a bonus, here’s one by John Nerst:

7. Nerd Wamb

Nerst describes a Wamb like this:

“Wamb is a vernacular label, not a scientific one, but it’s usually earned by a love for activities that are social and physical rather than intellectual — football, dancing, or socializing rather than learning, building things, or playing games. The leisure activities we associate with wambs — team sports, gossiping and partying — all depend on primal instincts like competition, alliance building, and mating, and tend not to involve intellectually complex exchange with others or the physical world.”

If you’d like to learn more about your own personality, you can take the ultimate personality test here, which gives MBTI-style, Big Five and Enneagram results all in one test.

Click here to answer one or two quick questions about your reaction to this post or to the One Helpful Idea newsletter.

This piece was first written on January 7, 2023, and first appeared on this site on January 28, 2023.

People that this essay is not about

Some Effective Altruists believe that objective moral truth exists (i.e., they are “moral realists”). They think that statements like “it’s wrong to hurt innocent people for no reason” are the sort of statements that can be true or false, much like the statement “there is a table in my room” can be true or false.

I disagree that there is such a thing as objective moral truth, but I at least understand what these folks are doing – they believe there is an objective answer to the question of “what is good?” and then they are trying to figure out that answer and live by it. 

This usually ends up being some flavor of utilitarianism plus maybe some moral uncertainty giving some weight to other theories such as protecting rights. In the 2019 EA survey, 70% of EAs identified with utilitarianism (though this survey did not distinguish between those who do believe in objective moral truth and those who don’t believe in objective moral truth but have utilitarian ethics anyway). I think this group of EAs that believe in objective moral truth is mistaken but that they are being coherent. They are the first group listed in the poll I took below, and they are NOT the group I am focusing on in this post. 

The flaw I see:

The group I am focusing on is represented by the second bar in the poll above. Many (most?) Effective Altruists deny that there is objective moral truth or think that objective moral truth is unlikely. But then I still go on to hear quite a number of such EAs say things like:

• “We should maximize utility.”

• “The only thing I care about is increasing utility for conscious beings.”

• “The only thing that matters is the utility of conscious beings.”

• “The only value I endorse is maximizing utility.”

(Note that by “utility” here, they mean something like happiness minus suffering, not “utility” in the Economics sense of preference satisfaction [unless they are preference utilitarians] or the Von Neumann–Morgenstern theorem sense.)

I find these statements by Effective Altruists very strange. If I try to figure out what they are claiming, I see a few possible disambiguations:

Possibility 1 – Contradictory beliefs: they could believe that maximizing utility is objectively good even though they don’t believe in objective moral truth – which seems to me to be a blatant contradiction in their beliefs. Similarly, they could be claiming that while they have other intrinsic values, they think they SHOULD only value utility (and should value all units of utility equally). But then, what does the word “should” mean here? On what grounds “should” you if there is no objective moral truth?

Possibility 2 – Misperception of the self: they could be claiming that while there is no objective answer to what’s good, the only intrinsic value they have (i.e., the only thing they value as an end in and of itself, not as a means to an end, that matters to them even if it gets them nothing else) is the utility of conscious beings (and that all units of utility are equal). In other words, they are making an empirical claim about their mind (and what it assigns value to).

Here I think they are (in almost every case, and perhaps in every single case) empirically wrong about their own mind. This is just not how human minds work.

If we think of the neural network composing the human mind as having different operations it can do (e.g., prediction, imagination, etc.), one of those operations is assigning value to states of the world. When people do this and pay close attention, they will realize that they don’t value the utility of all conscious beings equally and that they value things other than utility. While I can’t prove there is literally no such person on earth that only has the intrinsic value of utility, even for the most utilitarian people I’ve ever met, when I question them, I discover they have values other than utility.

And it stands to reason that human minds (being created by evolution) are not the sort of things that are likely to only value the utility of all beings equally. For instance, just about everyone I’ve ever met would be willing to sacrifice at least 1.1 strangers to save one person they love (even if they think that person wouldn’t have a higher than average impact or a happier-than-average life). I certainly would, and I don’t feel bad about that!

One very strong intrinsic value I see in the effective altruism community is that of truth – many EAs think you should try never to lie and are suspicious even of marketing. They sometimes try to justify this on utilitarian grounds (indeed, it can often be beneficial from a utilitarian perspective, not to lie). But this sometimes seems like rationalization – a utilitarian agent would lie whenever it produces a higher expected value of utility (but potentially only if it was using naive Causal Decision Theory (CDT) – H/T to Linchuan Zang for pointing this out), whereas many EAs make a hard and fast rule against lying (saying you should try to NEVER lie). This is easily explained as EAs having an intrinsic value of truth that they don’t want to accept as an intrinsic value (and so try to explain in terms of the “socially acceptable” value of utility).

As a side note, I find it upsetting when EAs try to justify one of their (non-utility) intrinsic values in terms of global utility because they think they are only supposed to value utility. For instance, an EA once told me that the reason they have friends is that it helps them have a great impact on the world. I did not believe them (though I did not think they were intentionally lying). I interpreted their statement as a harmful form of self-delusion (trying to reframe their attempts to produce their intrinsic values so that they conform to what they feel their values are “supposed” to be).

Possibly 3 – Tyranny of the analytical mind: they could be saying that while they may have a bunch of intrinsic values, their analytical mind only “endorses” their utility value. But what does “endorse” mean here? Maybe they mean that, while they feel the pull of various intrinsic values, the logical part of their mind only feels the utility pull. But then why should their analytical mind have a veto over the other intrinsic values? Maybe they believe their other intrinsic values are “illogical,” whereas the utility value is logical. But on what grounds is that claim made? If they could prove logically that only utility mattered, wouldn’t we just be back to claim (1) that there is objective moral truth, and they don’t believe that? 

Intrinsic values are just not the sort of thing that can have logical proof, and if they are not that sort of thing, then why give preference to just that one part of your mind? I’m genuinely confused.

Possibility 4 – Maybe they mean something else that I just don’t see. What else could they mean? I’d love to know what you think (or if you’re one of these people)!

It’s certainly possible that there are very sensible interpretations for their claims that I’m just not seeing.

In conclusion, for Effective Altruists who think there is objective moral truth, I think they are wrong, but I understand what they are doing (this post is not about them). But for ones that don’t believe in objective moral truth (which I think is the majority?) I think they are making some kind of mistake when their sole focus is utility. Of course, I could be wrong.

My personal philosophy – which I call Valuism (and which I am working on an essay about), attempts to deal with this specific philosophical issue (in a limited context).

But in the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic! What do you think? If you are an EA who doesn’t believe in objective moral truth, but you’re convinced that only utility matters, what do YOU mean by that? And even if you don’t identify with that view, what do you think might be happening here that I might have missed or misunderstood?

Thanks for reading this and for any thoughts you are up for sharing with me!

Summarizing responses to this post

Edit (1 September 2022): after posting an earlier draft of this post on social media, there were hundreds of comments, some of which tried to explain why the commenter is utilitarian despite being an anti-realist, or presented alternative possibilities not delineated in the original post.

One thing that’s abundantly clear is that there is absolutely no consensus on how to handle the critique in the above post. There are a really wide variety of ways that people use to try to explain why they identify with utilitarianism despite not believing in objective moral truth.

Here are some of the most common types of responses given:

1. Responses related to Possibility  1 (i.e., addressing “contradictory beliefs“)

      1.1 Accepting contradiction: many people have contradictory beliefs (and contradictory beliefs may be no more common in moral anti-realist EAs than in other people), and some people are willing to lean into them. As one commenter put it: “many sets of intuitions are *wrong* if you take coherence as axiomatic.” Some people are just okay with self-contradiction.

      1.2 Beliefs that aren’t actually contradictory: my explanation of Possibility 1 might interpret  “we should maximize utility” differently than some people who say that phrase mean it. Here are potential some interpretations by which that statement might actually be consistent with anti-realist views:

           1.2.1 Personal preference: some people do not intend for statements like “we should maximize utility” to be representative of moral truth but instead mean it as an expression of a personal preference that they have for maximizing utility, or an expression of the fact that they will avoid feeling reflexively guilty if they aim to maximize utility, or a statement that they will have a positive emotional response if their focus on maximizing utility. However, these responses still seem to fall victim to another critique from the post, which is the arbitrariness of giving preference to certain feelings/preferences over other ones. 

           1.2.2 Metaethical constructivism: this is defined as “the view that insofar as there are normative truths, they are not fixed by normative facts that are independent of what rational agents would agree to under some specified conditions of choice” (source). Some say this is “best understood as a form of ‘expressivism’“. Constructivism seems compatible with both moral anti-realism and utilitarianism, but it’s unclear to me how many effective altruists would hold this view (I think very few). 

           1.2.3 Valuing a different kind of utility: some people may mean “we should maximize utility” in reference to a different kind of “utility” than the classic hedonistic utilitarian interpretation of the word. For example, “utility” is sometimes used to mean a “mathematical function serving as a representation of whatever one cares about.” By such an interpretati, if someone says they are trying to maximize utility they are presumably referring to maximizing their own utility function (rather than some objective one) – and so they are not the focus of this post.

2. Responses related to Possibility 2 (i.e., “misperception of the self“)

      2.1 Second-order desires: people might not be misperceiving themselves at all but might instead be talking about second-order desires or desires about desires. As one commenter put it: “It might be that, though someone empirically does NOT possess desires consistent with maximising the utility of conscious beings, they possess the desire to possess these desires. They want to be the sort of person who does have a genuine utilitarian psychology, even if they don’t possess one now. This may explain the motivation to act as a utilitarian (most of the time) [despite being a moral anti-realist].” Though in this case, it’s unclear why they would want to or think they should give those second-order desire preference over their first-order desires.

      2.2 Unshakable realist intuitions: people might be acting and/or feeling as if utilitarianism is true while also believing (upon reflection) that moral realism isn’t true. One person commented that “many of our intuition[s] are based on a realist world even when rationally we do not believe in one, so it is easy to accidentally make arguments that work only in a realist world, and then try to rationalize the argument afterwards to somehow work anyway.”

      2.3 Mislabeling one’s metaethics: instead of misperceiving what they value, some people might be mislabeling themselves as moral anti-realists even though they aren’t. In other words, some people who call themselves anti-realists might actually be moral realists without realizing it (e.g., because they haven’t reflected on it). One commenter thought that this would be a common phenomenon: “They are expressing a real, but subjective, truth ‘It is true to me that everyone should maximize utility’…I think that ‘deep down’ you will find that in fact most effective altruists and indeed most people are moral realists but under-theorized ones. Even the anti-realists tend to act as if they were moral realists.”

      2.4 Choosing one’s own values: some argue that you can choose your values for yourself (though it’s unclear by what process one would make such a choice, or whether such a choice really can be made – it may hinge on what is meant by “values”). As one of the commenters put it: “It seems like you are assuming in [Possibility 2] that there is an objective answer to what a mind values, e.g. based on how it behaves. For one thing, it’s not clear that that is right in general. But a particular alternative that interests me here: one could have a model where one can decide what to value, and to the extent that one’s behavior doesn’t match that, one’s behavior is in error.” In other words, according to this view, maybe an individual themselves is the only person who can define their intrinsic values, and there is no objectively correct opinion for them to hold about this. But then, by what criteria (or based on what values) is a person deciding on what their values should be?

3. Reasons why Possibility 3 (i.e., “tyranny of the analytical mind“) may not be a confused approach

      3.1 Identifying with the analytic part of the mind: some people feel that choosing to endorse a particular framework (and choosing to endorse some values over other ones) is part of who they are – part of (or even the most important part of) their self-concept. In other words, the reflective part of them making that choice feels to them like it is “who they are” more so than other parts of them that have other preferences. Here’s how one person explained it: “For my part, the part of my mind that examines my moral intuitions and decides whether I want to act on them feels about as ‘me’ as anything gets.” Another person thought that ​endorsing some values over others makes sense because many people think that their “best” self would live “in accordance with the judgments they make based on arguments and thought experiments.” Another proposed explanation for people being guided by the analytic mind is that being guided in this way might be a normal feature of human psychology (which at least one person saw as needing no further explanation). Yet another explanation put forward was that some people can have a completely arbitrary “personal taste” for giving their analytical mind a veto over other parts of their mind (and, according to this argument, those people don’t need a further justification beyond their arbitrary taste).

      3.2 Simplicity and coherence meta-values: having fewer intrinsic values or having fewer intrinsic values that one allows to dictate their behavior can (some argue) be justified by having an intrinsic value of coherence, simplicity, or consistency. As one commenter put it: “I genuinely think I just have utilitarian intrinsic values. [It seems] relevant here that I also value coherence (in a non-moral sense, probably as an epistemic virtue or something), so if I find myself thinking something that is incoherent with another value of mine, I can debate & discard the less important one.” 

Possibility 4: Moral uncertainty

      4.1 Meta-moral uncertainty – believing that realism might be true: people who don’t identify as moral realists might still feel there is some possibility that moral realism is correct and might act as if it was correct (at least to some degree – say, in proportion to how much weight they give this possibility compared to other action-guiding beliefs). As one commenter put it: “Why do I keep donating (and doing other EA things), albeit to a lesser extent [since switching from moral realism to moral anti-realism]? The main reason is (meta) moral uncertainty: I still feel that it is possible that moral realism is correct, and so I think it should have some say over my behavior.”

      4.2 Misinterpreting moral uncertainty as anti-realism: People who think that their own beliefs are not necessarily objectively true (due to moral uncertainty) might conclude that they must be moral anti-realists, but they might be mistaken in calling themselves that. As one commenter explained it: “believing in moral objectivity is different from believing we are actually able to parse the true moral weights in practice.”

Possibility 5: Precommitment and cooperation arguments

      5.1 Benefiting from pre-committing to impartiality: some argue that acting as if classical utilitarianism is true might be justified on grounds related to resolving collective action problems (without having to believe that moral realism is true). For instance, one commenter wrote: “Being impartial between oneself (and one’s friends / family) vs. random people isn’t something that any human naturally feels, but it’s a ‘cooperate’ move in a global coordination game. If we’d all be better off if we acted this way, then we want a situation where everyone makes a binding commitment to act impartially. It’s hard to do that, but we can approximate it through norms. So EAs might want to endorse this without feeling it.” Though presumably, if this was the justification for utilitarianism, they would then switch to a different moral theory if they thought it better solved collection action problems (e.g., if they came to believe virtue ethics better solved collective action problems).

      5.2 Benefiting from pre-committing to preference utilitarianism: some commenters pointed out that preference utilitarianism could also be justified on self-interested grounds (this post was not intended to be about other forms of utilitarianism such as preference utilitarianism, but it was edited to clarify that only after some people had started commenting). As one commenter put it: “If we’re viewing morality as playing a counterfactual game with others, we should take actions to benefit them in a way essentially identically to preference utilitarianism. That doesn’t require any objective morality, it only requires self-interest and buying into the idea that you should pre-commit to a theory of morality that, if many people embraced it, would increase your personal preferences.” Though in such cases (if they were actually optimizing for self-interest), it seems strange they would choose a moral theory where their interests count equally to people they will never encounter and never be in collective action problems with. (Some might argue that this would make more sense if the person endorsed a form of multiverse-wide cooperation via superrationality, though it’s unclear how this resolves more concrete/real-life collective action problems).

Possibility 6: Social forces – as Tyler Alterman put it (when I was discussing this post with him – he’s named here with permission): “[I felt] that [for some EAs] their actual beliefs were at odds with the cultural norms of other smart people (EAs) that they felt alignment with, so they stopped paying attention to their actual beliefs. I think this is what happened to me for a while. There was an element of wanting to fit in. But then there is an element of – there are so many smart people here [in EA]… EA is full of Oxford philosophers – they must have figured this out already; there must be some obvious answer for my confusion. So I just went along with the obligation and normative language and lifestyle it entailed.” Social forces can be powerful, and in some cases, an explanation for human behavior can be as simple as: the other people around me who I respect or want the approval of do this thing or seem convinced this thing is true, so I do this thing and am convinced it is true.

This essay was first written on August 14, 2022, first appeared on this site on August 19, 2022, and was edited (to incorporate a summary of people’s responses) on September 1, 2022, with help from Clare Harris.

1. The Wise Critic
Honesty + Courage = telling difficult truths that it’s important for others to hear.

Honesty without courage is still good and valuable, but you’re limited to telling easy truths.

2. The Protector
Compassion + Courage = protecting other people even when it is dangerous and difficult, such as when saving someone from a bully means risking being bullied yourself.

Compassion without courage is great, but it’s limited to certain kinds of help.

3. The True Friend
Loyalty + Courage = being on the side of your loved ones and those you are grateful to, even when it comes at significant personal risk.

Loyalty without courage is still really nice to have, but it limits the extent of that loyalty.

4. The World Changer
Justice + Courage = fighting against the status quo to make the world better and fairer.

Justice without courage is great at small scales, but courage is often needed to create widespread change.

5. The Investigator
Truth-seeking + Courage = uncovering what is true regardless of what you wish were true or what you get rewarded or punished for finding.

Truth-seeking without courage leads to truer beliefs, but only in domains where truth isn’t too inconvenient.

6. The Hero
Goodness + Courage = standing up against immoral behavior, even when that behavior is socially condoned or carried out by the powerful.

Goodness without courage is a wonderful quality, but it doesn’t effectively combat evil.

Courage can make good behavior better and bad behavior worse.
That’s why it’s not a virtue by itself. But a lack of courage limits one’s ability to do good. Don’t seek courage for its own sake. Cultivate it because it enhances your other virtues.

Many people do bad things not because they are bad people but because they lack the courage NOT to. Seek courage because it allows you to do the right thing in difficult situations.

Here is how others have put related ideas about courage:
“…courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions.”

-C.S. Lewis

“Courage is the most important of the virtues because, without it, no other virtue can be practiced consistently.”

-Maya Angelou

“Courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.”

-Samuel Johnson

“Who but a man of infinite courage could have dared to think those thoughts? That is the characteristic of great scientists; they have courage. They will go forward under incredible circumstances; they think and continue to think.”

-Richard Hamming

(Hat tip to @CallHimMoorlock and @alexisgallagher on Twitter for pointing me to some of these quotes.)

On a personal note, I’ve become more courageous over the years. I still have plenty of room for improvement, though, and it’s something I’d like to continue to work on.

If you read this line, please do us a favor and click here to answer one quick question.

This piece was first written on February 13, 2022, and first appeared on this site on February 3, 2023.

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 popular theories. We hope that understanding these different theories will help you to better refine your own views of happiness and understand the perspectives that other people take towards living a good life!

For each of these theories, there are lots of different variants with subtle differences – we’ve aimed to capture some central representative ideas that many variants have in common. 

We’ve also included some resources you can use to try and increase your happiness levels by applying these different methodologies!

Positive Psychology

A growing scientific field, positive psychology applies the tools of psychology to the question of what makes life most worth living.

“Gratitude is an antidote to negative emotions, a neutralizer of envy, hostility, worry, and irritation. It is savoring; it is not taking things for granted; it is present-oriented.”

-Sonja Lyubomirsky

How to achieve true happiness: Keep a gratitude list, cultivate positive relationships, find ways to use your strengths/virtues, do activities that get you into a flow state, savor pleasurable things in the moment, anticipate fun things in your future, reminisce about meaningful things in your past, buy more experiences and fewer things, avoid the hedonic treadmill.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools: 

• Building Happiness Habits
• Tactics for Happier Living
• Savor Your Life
• Become a Great Listener

Other resources:

• To be successful, should you focus on your strengths or your weaknesses? (Podcast episode)

Stoicism

Stoicism is an ancient school of philosophical thought from 3rd Century BC Greece and Rome, which is now experiencing a resurgence in popularity.

“Choose not to be harmed — and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed — and you haven’t been.” 

– Marcus Aurelius

How to achieve true happiness: Deeply appreciate what you have now since it all could be gone tomorrow, only try to control what you’re actually able to, remember you’re not entitled to anything, learn to love doing the right thing rather than the pleasant thing, seek value in all that happens. Through these practices, aim for equanimity in the face of any circumstance, no matter how bad.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• Reframing Negative Emotions
• Resolving Harmful Situations

Books:

• Meditations – Marcus Aurelius
• Stoicism and the Art of Happiness – Donald Robertson

Christianity

Based on biblical scripture and church traditions, many practitioners of Christianity view it as including rules and guidelines for living a good and happy life.

“The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water.”

– C.S. Lewis

How to achieve true happiness: Be humble, love God with all your heart, love your neighbor, accept Jesus Christ as your savior, worship God, pray, have faith, be thankful and take joy each day in all that God has given you, be a devoted wife/husband/father/mother/child, obey the Ten Commandments, don’t cast the first stone, avoid lust, greed, wrath, sloth, gluttony, envy, and pride, avoid hell at all costs, live for eternity in heaven with God.

Books:

• Winning the War in Your Mind: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life – Craig Groeschel

Insight Meditation

Vipassanā, or insight meditation, is a Buddhist practice popular before the 10th Century AD, which gained widespread popularity in the late 20th Century, including in the USA. This practice emphasizes mindfulness meditation as a path to gaining insights into the nature of reality.

“As the fletcher whittles and makes straight his arrows, so the master directs his straying thoughts.”

– Buddha

How to achieve true happiness: Follow the eightfold path, train your concentration through meditation until it is stable and precise (e.g., practice maintaining subtle focus on the breath), use your refined concentration to carefully observe the true nature of reality, mind, and self, realize the three marks of existence (impermanence, dissatisfaction, non-self), learn to stabilize your new experience of reality, become free from craving and aversion.

Books:

• The Art of Living: Vipassana Meditation as Taught by S. N. Goenka – William Hart
• Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book – Daniel M Ingram

Other resources:

• Waking Up (meditation app)

Traditional

This set of values may strike you as a familiar blueprint to a traditionally good life.

“The great Error of our Nature is, not to know where to stop, not to be satisfied with any reasonable Acquirement; not to compound with our Condition; but to lose all we have gained by an insatiable Pursuit after more.”

– Edmund Burke

How to achieve true happiness: Work hard, marry a good person, have multiple children, spend time with family, fit into your role, remember that many others have it worse than you, don’t complain, avoid vices (gambling, excessive drinking, drugs), don’t waste money, achieve stability in life.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• The Relationship Review
• Managing Arguments in Relationships

Common sense

A common-sense approach to happiness focuses on meeting all your needs and making sure you have stable sources of fulfillment. No surprises here!

“Philosophy is common sense with big words.”

– James Madison

How to achieve true happiness: Sleep enough, eat healthy food, exercise, spend your time with people you like, have a pet, seek work that’s enjoyable/challenging/meaningful, make sure your basic needs are met, try to make enough money to achieve financial security, save for retirement, marry someone you love who treats you well, have a fun hobby.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• 40 Winks: Better Sleep Made Easy
• Your Greatest Sources of Pleasure
• Career Fulfilment Diagnostic

Other resources:

• Choose a fulfilling life path using these five exercises from “Designing Your Life”

Introspection

Introspective theories say that the path to true happiness is through truly understanding yourself, healing your past trauma, and being authentic with others.

“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”

– C.G. Jung

How to achieve true happiness: Use psychedelics for self-exploration, listen to and get in touch with your body, engage in self-care and self-compassion, investigate and heal your trauma, find a daily practice that works for you (e.g., meditation/yoga/prayer), be vulnerable around the people that you trust, share your true feelings, explore and have compassion for the different “parts” of yourself that are afraid of and desire different things, investigate your “true self” and be true to it, learn to pay attention to your intuition, find a way to look at the world that resonates with you. 

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• Life-Changing Questions
• Your Primal World Beliefs
• Defining Emotions

Books:

• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma – Bessel van der Kolk
• Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself – Kristin Neff

Other resources:

• How many minds do you have? (Podcast episode)
• The 10 Most Important Components of Self-Compassion
• Could You Be in One of These 8 Psychological Traps?
• How to Communicate Better with the People in Your Life (podcast episode)
• Exploring your Shadow and Healing your Traumas (podcast episode)

Self-help books

Books advocating techniques for self-improvement have exploded in popularity since the mid 20th Century. Each takes a different angle on how to be happy – here, we have collected some common themes.

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

-Thomas Edison

How to achieve true happiness: Repeat affirmations that motivate you, form healthy daily habits, always work on becoming a better version of yourself, try new things, figure out what you really want and then plan to get it, prioritize, set ambitious goals, keep your home organized, think positive thoughts, believe you can do anything that you put your mind to, wake up early, make at least a little progress towards your goals each day, don’t let fear stop you, don’t give up, avoid negative people, surround yourself with people who inspire you and make you a better person.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• Daily Ritual: A Habit Creation System
• Design Your Own Self-Experiment
• Achieve Your Goals
• Get Going: Overcome Procrastination

Books:

• Atomic Habits – James Clear
• The Motivation Hacker – Nick Winter

Other resources:

• How to Achieve Self-Control Without Self-Control
• How to Hack Your Own Brain (podcast episode)
• The Secrets of Effective Learning (podcast episode)
• By the Book (podcast)

Hedonism

As an approach to life, hedonism is all about doing whatever you can to experience pleasure and avoid pain.

“Don’t worry. Be happy.”

– Bobby McFerrin

How to achieve true happiness: Remember that you get just one life, so you might as well enjoy it, live in the moment (don’t worry about the future), dance, party, seek out cool experiences, do exactly what you feel like, ignore societal pressure, have sex, eat tasty food, do fun drugs, spend money on fun things, don’t let others tell you what to do.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• 2 Minute Mood Boosters

Other resources:

• Atlas Obscura – Curious and Wondrous Destinations
• Happiness and Hedonic Adaptation (podcast episode)
• When is Suffering Good? (podcast episode)

Altruism

An altruistic approach to happiness is about devoting yourself to helping others and making the world a better place – the theory says you can gain fulfillment through knowing that other people are better off thanks to your efforts.

“The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.”

– Nelson Henderson

How to achieve true happiness: Give to charity, volunteer your time, choose a career that lets you help others, become a part of something meaningful (e.g., a cause or movement) that is much bigger than yourself, work hard to be kind, generous, and thoughtful, think hard about how you can do good, help strangers, build communities and projects to improve the world.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• Leaving Your Mark on the World
• Charity Effectiveness Test
• Change Behaviour for the Better
• What Causes Match Your Values?

Books:

• Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help – Larissa MacFarquhar
• Doing Good Better – William MacAskill

Other resources:

• Four ways to have a positive impact on the world right now

Which of these theories resonates most with you?

It might be challenging to decide whether and how to apply each of these different theories of happiness. An experimental approach could be useful – you could explore the resources we’ve linked above, try applying some of the techniques, and see which theories deliver on their promise of true happiness for you. 

We hope that exploring these theories has helped you conceptualize your own approach to happiness. Which theories of happiness have you lived by previously? How did you choose them, or did you pick them up unconsciously from your environment? How could you tweak these theories, combine them with other schools of thought, or replace parts that are unhelpful for you? What other theories of happiness do people live by?

A big thank you goes to Adam Binks for his help with this post!

Note: To help fund the free decision-making tools and programs that we provide, ClearerThinking.org is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program (an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com). If you buy a book using the links in this article, you’ll be supporting ClearerThinking.org in its mission to make free tools that help the world make better decisions.

The claim can be quite hard to argue against because it has a certain vagueness that makes it hard to pin down what (if anything non-trivial) is really being claimed. Regardless, here are eight arguments I put together against the idea that everything we do is “selfish” or just for our own pleasure:

1. There are many actions that we take automatically and thoughtlessly due to repetition – not because of wanting or pleasure. Consider habits like brushing our teeth or sticking our phone in (for example) our left pocket (as opposed to our right one) when we’re done using it . These sorts of behaviors can be so automatic that we forget immediately afterward whether or not we’ve done these things. The point is not that these habits aren’t useful, just that at some point, we come to do them automatically without even considering whether they benefit us or not (as you may dramatically learn as you drop your phone on the ground when wearing shorts without pockets, thoughtlessly executing the “phone in pocket” habit).

Some other examples of automatic behaviors that we usually do without having any apparent desire/wanting/pleasure/pain involved: breathing, continuing to walk (once we’ve begun to walk), balancing, swallowing (once food is chewed), looking towards a sound (when there is an unusual but non-threatening noise), and social mirroring of body language.

2. Evolution didn’t select for humans based on how much they did what they “wanted” or based on who maximized their own pleasure. Rather, it selected for those whose genes spread most. Selfishness and pleasure are important tools that evolution used, but not the ONLY motivator. For instance, genuine altruism and a sense of obligation towards kin and allies can provide substantial evolutionary advantages!

3. Which pleasure are we talking about? For instance, we clearly sometimes forgo more pleasure now in exchange for extra pleasure later (e.g., by getting work done early) and other times sacrifice long-term pleasure for the short term (e.g., playing video games instead of studying when you have a big test tomorrow). So if people are just maximizing for their own pleasure, which pleasure are they maximizing for?

You might be tempted to reply, “that’s because we’re just adding up the pleasure across time to decide what to do.” But it seems clear that some people aren’t doing this (e.g., drug addicts who know their life is being ruined but sacrifice everything for the next fix). Many experiments in behavioral science and behavioral economics also contradict the idea that people are merely happiness maximizers. It’s too simple to say we “just do what gives us pleasure.”

4. “Wanting” shouldn’t be conflated with something bringing pleasure or reducing pain. They are quite correlated (since we tend to want pleasurable things), but pleasure and wanting are distinct. There are things we can really want (e.g., to “one day understand a mysterious scientific principle,” or “to keep promises” or to have certain things happen after we die) which are not about our pleasure.

Some neuroscience papers claim that “wanting” and “liking” can even be separately stimulated in rat brains. Whether scientists know how to do this or not, it seems we sometimes want things because they bring pleasure, but other times we just WANT them, so wanting and pleasure are not identical.

5. If the claim is weakened to say that we humans always do things that we have SOME sort of motivation to do, then (interpreting “motivation” broadly) the claim is trivially true. But it also doesn’t say anything – it’s right just by definition. Motivation is not identical to pleasure or wanting. So defining “wanting” to do something as having ANY motivation to do a thing doesn’t work because it renders the argument trivial. Similarly, if “self-interest” or “wanting” is just defined to be any pattern of brain activity that causes us to act, or any form of motivation at all regardless of what sort it is, then it is true (by definition) but also adds no information. What’s the point of even making the claim if it’s true by definition? In those such cases the claim can be actively misleading because “self-interest” has connotations to most people (even if you try to define those connotations away).

6. People sometimes do things that they know will bring them more pain than pleasure. For instance, a protestor who uses gasoline to set himself on fire might feel a spark of pleasure just before he lights the match, but he knows he will tremendously suffer until death. Or consider someone who takes an action for a social cause even though they know it will likely lead to spending the rest of their life in prison. Clearly, the person is sacrificing more happiness than they are gaining by such an action, yet some people do act in this way.

7. If we imagine a person who is extremely altruistic because they love making others happy, and we claim they’re “selfish” because they are doing it just to feel good, this is a very non-standard way to use the word “selfish.” It insinuates their behavior is somehow less good and is misleading in conversation. Of course, we can define words however we want, but if we define them in a way that is different than how others use a word, it makes discussion difficult and confusing.

What work does the word “selfish” do to explain things here? It’s clearer to just say (in this case) “the person is motivated by their love of helping others” and leave it at that. Most people would call that “altruism” (not “selfishness”) upon knowing all the details.

8. When we try to make the claim precise, it’s hard to do so (and, unfortunately, few I’ve encountered making the claim bother to try). We’re clearly not always maximizing long-term pleasure, but nor are we always maximizing immediate pleasure. Claiming we “always do what we want” is not the same as claiming “we always do what is pleasurable.” So maybe we just try the former claim?

If we try to restrict the claim to not be about pleasure or pain and just say, “we do what we want,” then how do we explain our numerous subconscious behaviors? And how do we define “want”? People often say they didn’t do what they “wanted,” so we can’t use colloquial definitions.

If “want” is broadened too much, then we’re back to just claiming that we do what we’re motivated to do; that is, we’re making a trivial definitional claim. So what is really being claimed by “we only ever do what we want”?
I think either nothing interesting or something false.

Now, all of this being said, clearly, people often DO act based on however they “want” to act (by a reasonable definition of “want”). And very often, people do act in such a way as to seek pleasure and avoid pain. It’s just that not all human actions fit that description, which is what the “everything is selfish” crowd claims.

To finish up, I’ll attempt to take the other side/steel-man the claim that “everything we do is something we want.” I think there is a psychological state of “desire for things to be a certain way” that drives many (though not all) of our actions. This desire for things to be a certain way is not the same as pleasure (though is often related to it) and the way we want the world to be is not always the way we think will make us happiest (though it often is). So, although I think that the generalization made by psychological egoism is false, I do think it’s approximately true, in a certain sense, a decent amount of the time.

This essay was first written on November 9, 2021, and first appeared on this site on November 12, 2021.

Here are a number of reasons why altruism is often rational:

I. People can value altruism for its own sake:

1. Intrinsic values: as a psychological fact, most humans intrinsically value at least some things as ends (not merely as means to other ends) that are not about their own gain. For instance: people may value the reduction of suffering around the world or the flourishing of the people in their country. 

2. Warm glow: most humans find that it gives them happiness to do altruistic acts. I call this “the Lucky Fact” about human nature. It’s both important and very lucky (i.e., it didn’t necessarily have to be this way if our evolution had taken a different path). We feel good to see positive feelings in the people we like, and we feel good about ourselves when we cause good feelings.

II. Genuine altruism is also instrumentally useful:

3. Evolution: there are multiple reasons evolution programmed most of us with genuine altruism, even though it optimizes for gene spread.

Altruism is rewarded in settings of:

i) raising children

ii) iterated games

iii) tribal loyalty, with punishment of defectors

iv) deception detection

4. Relationships: altruistic people tend to have stronger, happier, more goal-aligned, and mutually beneficial relationships. Although, in theory, a purely selfish person can have highly beneficial relationships, it is much harder to make these expedient tit-for-tat relationships work.

5. Pre-commitment: suppose that there was a world of highly rational, purely selfish beings. If they were able, they might pre-commit (jointly, as a group) to become partially altruistic as a way to help solve difficult collective action problems. By uniting goals, they mutually gain.

This piece was first written on December 27, 2020, and was first released on this site on February 25, 2022.

(a) a set of rules (explicit or implicit) that are made up by humans,

(b) a scoring system (explicit or implicit) for determining how players are doing or for deciding who wins,

(c) participants who are trying to increase their “score,” and

(d) a game context (outside of which the game rules stop applying).

So, by this definition, games include chess, poker, football, and tennis, but also things like:

• money games (e.g., competing with friends and acquaintances to have a more expensive-looking car/watch/suit)

• altruism games (e.g., billionaires outbidding each other in charity auctions)

• coolness games (e.g., choosing clothing to demonstrate that your taste is trend-setting rather than trend-following)

• intelligence games (e.g., Oscar Wilde verbally jousting with his friends)

• sexual games (e.g., a man trying to seduce a woman while maintaining plausible deniability and her playing hard to get despite her intense attraction to him)

• strength games (e.g., boys wrestling after school)

• legal games (e.g., lawyers using every tool they know to beat each other in a case)

• academic games (e.g., young academics trying to outcompete each other in terms of who can get the most papers published in the top 10 journals)

• knowledge games (e.g., two people debating a factual topic in front of others at a party, each trying to show that the other person is wrong)

• political games (e.g., trying to form a strong coalition and to make the opposing coalition look corrupt or incompetent)

• career games (e.g., optimizing your behavior for getting promoted, rather than, say, for accomplishing the purpose of your work role)

Our brains have a tendency to temporarily treat games as reality (a suspension of disbelief).

This is not a bad thing – it’s part of what makes games fun and motivating, and it gets us to try hard at them. Those that can’t or won’t do this suspension of disbelief tend to be bad at games. There’s little joy or motivation in games if we’re just thinking, “I’m moving this wooden peg, so this number goes up.” We must (at least temporarily) believe that the number MATTERS.

Games can be fun, rewarding, and motivating. For some people, game playing is one of life’s great joys. And games make learning more fun (in fact, games are fundamental to how we humans learn). Children invent and play many kinds of games that help them figure out adult behaviors. And gamification can make difficult activities feel easier (e.g., you can turn a difficult task into a game to make it more pleasant).

But, on the flip side, games also can become a big problem when we forget for too long that we’re playing a game. Or if we permanently swap them for reality. Or if we come to think that winning the game is what fundamentally matters.

Consider the way that game playing distorts different activities:

• Science gets really screwed up when it is treated as a game where we compete to publish, rather than being treated as a way to figure out the truth about reality. This is part of why science has so many false positives.

• Altruism gets really screwed up when it is treated like a game to prove you’re a good person rather than as a way to help others. This is part of why so much altruism is not effective at improving the world.

• Governments get really screwed up when politics becomes a game (where most of what matters is beating the other side) rather than treating politics as a way to get helpful policies implemented.

• Medical schools get really screwed up if they become a game of who can memorize the most and function the best without sleep, rather than being a means to train effective doctors.

• The startup world gets really screwed up when it becomes a game of who can raise the most capital or do the coolest sounding thing, rather than having a focus on making products that solve actual problems.

• News gets really screwed up when it becomes a game about who can get the most clicks rather than as a means to spread true information.

• Law gets really screwed up when it becomes a game about what companies and people can technically get away with, rather than as a means of enforcing agreements and protecting people.

Games can be small or large, great or terrible. The key thing is to not get stuck inside a game without realizing it. Sadly, many people spend their whole life stuck in a game, confusing it for something more.

Sometimes we have no choice but to play a game that we don’t value. But recognizing games for what they are can help us leave them when they are poorly aligned with what we actually care about.

It’s great to play games sometimes and to suspend your disbelief to make them more fun and motivating. But don’t forget for too long that you are suspending it.

Games are not reality, though they might have real-world consequences. The in-game scoring system (whatever it is) does not reflect what you truly, intrinsically value. The rules of the game are made up by humans and are not the fundamental constraints on what behaviors you can and can’t take (though there might be consequences for breaking the game rules).

Play games cognizantly.

This essay was first written on November 23, 2020, and first appeared on this site on June 23, 2022.

Altruism, at a large scale, often hinges on a chain of assumptions/requirements, such as:

A & B & C & D & E

One broken link in the chain means it looks like you’re doing good but you’re not really doing it.

For example, to help the world by delivering medicine, the chain might look like this:

The medicine reliably cures the disease

& the side effects are not worse than being ill

& many people are ill with the disease in that area

& you can deliver the medication to them cheaply

& they take the medicine

& they don’t already have access to an effective medication

A deep causal understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve, and a frequent refocusing on the value you’re trying to produce (not getting lost in intermediate goals), is really important when it comes to actually producing a broad positive impact.

This piece was first written on September 11, 2020, and first appeared on my website on June 24, 2026.

Can you justifiably believe that you may be able to really change the world?

There’s a certain seeming absurdity in believing you can change the world. And by “change the world,” I don’t mean playing a small (though still meaningful) cumulative role in bringing about change as part of a group of many thousands of people, each contributing incrementally. I mean, causing a large and important positive change to occur (and not merely by dumb luck) that would not have occurred (or that would have occurred much more slowly) had you not put in the effort.

The irony is that just believing you can change the world makes you, I think, significantly more likely to actually succeed at it, for at least four reasons:

(1) If you believe you can do it, you’re probably much more likely to TRY AT ALL compared to if you don’t, since the idea doesn’t seem automatically stupid or doomed to fail.

(2) When trying to create change, you’re likely to encounter numerous problems and obstacles, and if you really believing you can make change, you may be less likely to give up when these problems occur (e.g., if your first, second, and third attempts at a solution don’t work). Creating significant change probably requires smashing your way through, or skillfully dodging, EVERY ONE of these obstacles. In that vein, it’s amazing to see how often successful startups had times when they looked like they were going to fail, and if the founders had given up, they probably would have.

(3) When you really believe you can do something, others are more likely to believe it too, meaning it becomes easier to persuade others to help you or join you in your mission.

(4) If you really believe you can make change, you may feel more of a moral obligation to actually try really hard to do so. For instance, if you think you can actually ease the suffering of a million people with effort, isn’t it very important that you try hard to do so? On the other hand, if it were something you’re not capable of (or you convinced yourself of that anyway), then you wouldn’t be (or feel) obligated to solve the problem.

BOOTSTRAPPING BELIEFS

Hence, believing you can change the world is what I’ll call a “bootstrapping belief” (in the sense that it is a self-starting process). Your belief in it causes that very same belief to become truer. Another example of a bootstrapping belief might be a belief that the placebo effect has a strong effect on you. The more you believe it, the more effective the placebo effect may actually be, just by virtue of you having that belief

Yet, even with its bootstrapping nature, there is still a certain absurdity in believing you can change the world.

If you believe all that, and you’re truly willing and able to put in the effort, then maybe (with some luck) you really can.

If you don’t already believe “I may be able to really change the world,” maybe you can find yourself able to rationally endorse “I may be able to really change the world” with these extra conditions added. And if you already believe you can change the world, maybe adding these conditions to your belief will make it substantially more likely to be true.

Of course, being able to “change the world” is not binary. The amount of impact you can have is a continuous variable from “not at all” to “massive,” and the probability that you can change the world (in any particular way) is a continuous variable between 0 and 1. What I’m suggesting is that, compared to the statement “I can change the world,” the statement “I can change the world [given certain conditions]” should have a higher probability of being true.