This is the third of five posts in my sequence of essays about my life philosophy, Valuism – here are the first, second, fourth, and fifth parts (though the links won’t work until those other essays are released).

Sometimes, people take an important value – maybe their most important value – and decide to prioritize it above all other things. They neglect or ignore their other values in the process. In my experience, this often leaves people feeling unhappy. It also leads them to produce less total value (according to their own intrinsic values). I think people in the effective altruist community (i.e., EAs) are particularly prone to this mistake.

In the first post in this sequence, I introduce Valuism – my life philosophy – and offer some general arguments for its advantages. In this post, I talk about the interaction between Valuism and effective altruism. I argue that the way some EAs think about morality and value is (in my view) empirically false, potentially psychologically harmful, and (in some cases) incoherent. 

EAs want to improve others’ lives in the most effective way possible. Many EAs identify as hedonic utilitarians (even the ones who reject objective moral truth). They say that impartially maximizing utility among all conscious beings – by which they usually mean the sum of all happiness minus the sum of all suffering – is the only thing of value, or the only thing that they feel they should value. I think this is not ideal for a few reasons.

1. I think (in one sense) it’s empirically false

Consider a person who claims that “only utility is valuable.”

If we interpret this as an empirical claim about the person’s own values – i.e., that the sum of happiness minus suffering for all conscious beings is the only thing that their brain assigns value to – I think that it’s very likely empirically false. 

That is, I don’t think anyone only values (in the sense of what their brain assigns value to) maximizing utility, even if it’s a very important value of theirs. I can’t prove that literally nobody only values maximizing utility, but I argue that human brains aren’t built to only value one thing, nor would we expect evolution to converge on pure utilitarian psychology since evolution optimizes for survival (a purely utilitarian brain would get rapidly outcompeted by other brain types if they existed 50,000 years ago). 

I think that even the most hard-core hedonic utilitarians do psychologically value some non-altruistic things deep down – for example, their own pleasure (more than the pleasure of everyone else), their family and friends, and truth. However, in my opinion, they sometimes deny this to themselves or feel guilty about it. If you are convinced that your only intrinsic value is utility (in a hedonistic, non-negative-leaning utilitarian sense), you may find it instructive to take a look at these philosophical scenarios I assembled or check out the scenarios I give in this talk about values.

For instance, does your brain actually tell you it’s a good trade (in terms of your intrinsic values) to let a loved one of yours suffer terribly in order to create a mere 1% chance of preventing 101 strangers from the same suffering? Does your brain actually tell you that equality doesn’t matter one iota (i.e., it’s equally good for one person to have all the utility compared to spreading it more equally)? Does your brain actually value a world of microscopic, dumb orgasming micro-robots more than a world (of slightly less total happiness) where complex, intelligent, happy beings pursue their goals? Because taken at face value, hedonic utilitarianism doesn’t care about whether a person is your loved one or a stranger, doesn’t care about equality at all, and prefers microscopic orgasming robots to complex beings as long as the former are slightly happier. But, if you consider yourself a hedonic utilitarian, is that actually what your brain values?

2. It can be psychologically harmful

Additionally, I think the attitude that there is only one thing of value can lead to severe psychological burnout as people try to push away, minimize or deny their other intrinsic values and “selfish,” non-altruistic desires. I’ve seen this happen quite a few times. Here’s Tyler Alterman’s personal account of this if you’d like to see an example. And here’s a theory of how this burnout happens.

3. I think (in one sense) it’s incoherent

When coupled with a view that there is no objective moral truth, I think it is, in most cases, philosophically incoherent to claim that total hedonic utility is all that matters.

If you believe in objective moral truth, it may make sense to say, “I value many things, but I have a moral obligation to prioritize only some of them” (for example, you might be convinced by arguments that you are objectively morally obliged to promote utility impartially even though that’s not the only value you have).

However, many EAs, like me, don’t believe in objective moral truth. If you don’t think that things can be objectively right or wrong, it doesn’t make sense (I claim) to say that you “should” prioritize maximizing utility for all of humanity over other values – what does this “should” even mean? Well, there are some answers for what this “should” could mean that philosophers and lay people have proposed, but I find them pretty weak.

For a much more in-depth discussion of this point (including an analysis of different ways that EAs have responded to my critique of pairing utilitarianism with denial of objective moral truth), see this essay. It collects may different objections (from EAs and from some philosophers) and discusses them. So if you are interested in whether it is or isn’t coherent to only value utility when you deny objective moral truth, and moreover, whether EAs and philosophers have good arguments for doing so, please see that essay.

I find that while many (perhaps the majority of) EAs deny objective moral truth, many still talk and think as though there is objective moral truth.

I found it striking that, in my conversations with EAs about their moral beliefs, few had a clear explanation for how to combine a belief in utilitarianism with a lack of a belief in objective moral truth, and the approaches to that that they did put forward were usually quite different from each other (suggesting, at the very least, a lack of consensus in how to support such a perspective). Some philosophers I spoke to pointed to other ways one might defend such a position (mainly drawn from the philosophical literature), but I don’t recall ever seeing these approaches being used or referenced by non-philosopher EAs (so they don’t seem to be doing much work in the beliefs of EAs who hold this view). 

I suspect it would help many EAs if they took a more Valuist approach: rather than claiming to or aspiring to only value hedonic utility, they could accept that while they do intrinsically value this – very likely far more than the average person – they also have other intrinsic values, for example, truth (which I think is another very important psychological value for many EAs), their own happiness, and the happiness of their loved ones.

Valuism also avoids some of the most awkward bullets that EAs sometimes are tempted to bite. For instance, hedonic utilitarianism seems to imply that your own happiness and the happiness of your loved ones “shouldn’t” matter to you even a tiny bit more than the happiness of a stranger who is certain to be born 1,000,000 years from now. Valuism may explain why people who identify as hedonic utilitarians may feel a great deal of internal conflict about this – even if you value the happiness of all sentient beings a tremendous amount, you almost certainly have other intrinsic values too. That means that Valuism may help you avoid some of the awkward conundrums that arise from ethical monism (where you assume that there is only one thing of value).

Valuism and the EA Community

From a Valuist perspective, I see the EA community as a group of people who share a primary intrinsic value of hedonic utility (i.e., reducing suffering and increasing happiness impartially) with a secondary strong intrinsic value of truth-seeking. Oddly (from my point of view) EAs are very aware of their intrinsic value of impartial hedonic utility, but seem much less aware of their truth-seeking intrinsic value. On a number of occasions, I’ve seen mental gymnastics used to justify truth-seeking in terms of increasing hedonic utility when (I claim) a much more natural explanation is that truth-seeking is an intrinsic value (not just an instrumental value that leads to greater hedonic utility). This helps explain why many EAs are so averse to ever lying and so averse even to persuasive marketing.

Each individual EA has other intrinsic values beyond impartial utility and truth-seeking, but in my view, those two values help define EA and make it unique. This is also a big part of why this community resonates with me: those are my top two universal intrinsic values as well.

If more EAs adopted Valuism, I think that they would almost all continue to devote a large fraction of their time and energy toward improving the world effectively. Maximizing global hedonic utility (i.e., the sum of happiness minus suffering for conscious beings) is the strongest universal intrinsic value of most community members, so it would still play the largest role in determining their goals and actions, even after much reflection. 

However, they would also feel more comfortable investing in their own happiness and the happiness of their loved ones at the same time, which I predict would make them happier and reduce burnout. Additionally (I claim), they’d accept that, like many effective altruists, they also have a strong intrinsic value of truth. They’d strike a balance between their various intrinsic values, and not endorse annihilating all their intrinsic values except for one.

I published this piece on this site on March 10, 2023.

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You’ve just finished the second post in my sequence of essays on my life philosophy, Valuism – click here to go to the fourth post.

This is the first of five posts in my sequence of essays about my life philosophy, Valuism – here are the second, third, fourth, and fifth parts.

Many of us struggle at times to know what to do. We are surrounded by conflicting advice about how to live our lives – from our parents, peers, and communities, from ancient philosophers, and from modern gurus and intellectuals. Faced with these conflicting opinions and a limited amount of time until we die, what should we focus our lives on?

In this post, I offer one answer to this question: my life philosophy, which I call Valuism. Simply put, if you’re a Valuist, you first work to figure out what you intrinsically value¹, and then you try to use effective methods to create more of what you intrinsically value.

Note that the phrase “intrinsic value” refers here to something you value for its own sake rather than something you value merely as a means to other ends. In other words, intrinsic values are things you would value having there be more of even if nothing else occurs as a consequence. Some intrinsic values we are born with, and others we develop through our experiences.

Your own happiness is probably one of your intrinsic values; subsequently, if you’re a Valuist, one of your aims is to become happy using effective approaches (e.g., by building healthy relationships with good people whom you are compatible with). Similarly, if you value justice, you work to create justice via effective means. If your intrinsic values include the well-being of others – as almost everyone’s do – you aim to improve the well-being of those others using effective approaches.

Like most people, you likely have more than one intrinsic value.

If you’re a Valuist, you recognize that you have multiple intrinsic values and strive to find the right balance between them; you may invest more time in some intrinsic values because they are more important to you or easier to create, but you don’t treat any of them as being worthless.

(Note: If you happen to identify as a utilitarian and believe that you only have one intrinsic value – the happiness of all conscious beings considered equally – you may want to check your reactions on these thought experiments to put that theory to the test.)

Here are some intrinsic values examples (of common intrinsic values that westerners have):

Let’s explore why one might adopt a Valuist approach.

Why be a Valuist?  

There is no moral imperative to be a Valuist. But here’s a simple argument for Valuism that some people find compelling:

There are some things that you value. But for most of these things, you value them only because they get you other things that you care about; that is, most of our values are instrumental, not intrinsic. For example, you very likely value having cash, but you value it only because it enables you to get other things you want (food, shelter, peace of mind, travel, convenience, status, pleasure, etc.), so cash is not something you intrinsically value.

Intrinsic values are the things that you value for their own sake, upon reflection; you value them not as means to other ends. In other words, you would want to create more of them even if doing so caused no other good thing to occur. You wouldn’t value cash if you couldn’t use it for anything. On the other hand, you very likely value your happiness even if it causes no additional positive consequences: your happiness is almost certainly one of your intrinsic values. In a sense, intrinsic values are the only things that you fundamentally value.

As mentioned, Valuism proposes that you carefully figure out what you intrinsically value and then aim to effectively produce those things. By “effectively,” I mean using strategies that really work well.

But why should you bother trying to produce more of what you intrinsically value? Well, simply because you fundamentally value those things. You are not necessarily “wrong,” “immoral,” or “irrational” if you don’t create more of what you intrinsically value – but you are, in that case, producing less of what you consider fundamentally valuable. Valuism is not telling you to give in to momentary urges – rather, it’s saying to use effective methods to produce what you value (upon careful reflection and introspection).

Why does Valuism have an emphasis on effective methods? Because if you value there being more of something, you implicitly prefer methods that produce more of that thing, rather than less. In other words, preferring effective methods for creating a value (over ineffective ones) is a logical consequence of having that value in the first place.

As we’ll discuss later in the essay, the Valuist approach to life ends up being quite different from how most people live. It also comes with a number of side benefits.

“The single most important moment of my life was when I sat and decided what I valued. I ended up writing what I value as soon as I wake up every morning. The year I started doing that was the happiest of my life. You might be onto something!” -John Salter

Advantages of Valuism  

I believe that Valuism offers many advantages compared to the way that many people live. For example, as a Valuist:

You’ll be less likely to confuse your instrumental and intrinsic values 

Valuists work to clearly distinguish their instrumental values from their intrinsic ones, which helps them avoid the “value traps” of mistakenly pursuing instrumental values. 

You’ll be more likely to strategically pursue what you fundamentally value

Therefore, you’ll probably create more of what you value. You might try to make your habits work in favor of your intrinsic values rather than against them: for example, if you value health, you might make a habit of walking part of the way to work. You’ll also aim to prevent urges, mimicry, trauma, or default paths from derailing your plans to produce what you value.

You’ll prioritize your values in a balanced way

You’ll take into account how much you care about each of them and how easy each is to create – rather than neglecting any of them or letting one take over your whole value system. Valuists carefully reflect on the tradeoffs between intrinsic values and pursue them in accordance with how much they are valued and how easy they are to create in a given scenario.

An additional advantage of Valuism over some other life philosophies (such as most flavors of utilitarianism) is that it doesn’t rely on you believing in objective moral truth. Back in my early 20s, I considered myself something like a classical utilitarian; at the time, I thought that the only thing that matters is maximizing utility for conscious beings across the universe. 

But on further reflection, I came to realize that I don’t believe in objective moral truth: I don’t think moral propositions such as “it’s right to maximize the flourishing of all conscious beings” can be true or false³.

This got me to wonder: what does it mean to say that I “should” maximize utility if there is no such thing as objective morality? I don’t think statements like “You should do X” are coherent unless they have an (explicit or implicit) objective, such as “You should do X if you want to achieve Y.”

(If you’d like to explore this tension between moral anti-realism and some flavors of effective altruism in more detail, see this essay I wrote about it). 

After many years of reflecting on this topic, I developed the idea of Valuism because I wanted to answer this question: “How do I decide what to do, given that I don’t think there is any objective moral truth?” If there’s not an objective answer to this question, at least there is an answer implied by what I fundamentally value. Valuism can be a source of meaning without requiring belief in objective moral truth – whether or not your values are “objectively valuable,” they are valuable to you! If you think “objective moral truth” is non-existent (or is an incoherent concept or human construction) then Valuism gives you a path towards meaning without requiring objectivity.

There’s no metaphysical obligation on you to be a Valuist, but if you are, it will likely cause you to produce more of what you actually value (i.e., precisely what fundamentally matters to you).

Can a Valuist also be an X?

Valuism is compatible with a wide variety of other philosophical beliefs. For instance, it’s compatible with a variety of meta-ethical views, including error theory, non-cognitivism, relativism, and subjectivism – see the diagram below – as well as intuitive and evolutionary-biology-based approaches to ethics. If you happen to be religious, it can also fit in with a religious worldview.

Even if you’re not sure whether or not there is such a thing as objective moral truth, Valuism could still be helpful for you. For example, if you think that there is a 20% probability of objective moral truth, then you may want to act in such a way as to combine what you think objective moral truth would dictate with what your values would dictate. Valuism may also give you a way to decide what to do in domains that are not governed by your morality. Even if you are really confident in the existence of objective moral truth, you could still incorporate Valuism into your worldview if you believe that objective moral truth is not maximally demanding and hence shouldn’t guide all your actions (i.e., Valuism can help you figure out what to do with regard to those other actions)².

Is Valuism selfish?

At first glance, this might seem like a selfish philosophy: does Valuism just mean looking after your own interests? No, not even close. Almost everyone (as we found in our research) has at least some intrinsic values that are not just about the self. In addition to values related to the self (e.g., “I value my own happiness”), people usually have values about their communities ( e.g., “I value that my friends and loved ones get the things that they want”) and “universal” intrinsic values that involve wanting good things for people beyond the people they personally know as well as abstract values that don’t pertain to people at all (e.g., “I value that people and animals all around the world don’t suffer” or “I value that all humans are treated fairly” or “I value fairness”).

Some of my own most important intrinsic values are:

• Universal
  • reducing suffering and increasing happiness for conscious beings
  • promoting truth and reducing falsehood
• Community
  • the happiness (and lack of suffering) of my loved ones
• Self
  • my own happiness (and lack of suffering)
  • not harming others with my behavior
  • believing true things and not false things
  • being honest
  • sticking to my commitments
  • being kind and having positive intent towards others

My aim in life is to increase these (and the other things that I intrinsically value).

Is Valuism just what most people already do?

Another common reaction to Valuism is: “Isn’t Valuism just telling you to do what you’re already doing? Aren’t most people already just figuring out what they value and then pursuing those values?” No! That’s not nearly as common as you might think.

The Valuist life philosophy differs from how most people live in many ways. In particular:

Most people haven’t spent much time thinking about what their intrinsic values are.

This means that they sometimes do things like accidentally pursue the intrinsic values of the people around them rather than their own intrinsic values. For instance, your parents might care a lot about you having a job that garners “respect,” whereas you may not value this at all – but you might end up becoming a doctor anyway, thanks to their influence.

People often don’t cleanly distinguish between intrinsic values and instrumental values. 

They often pursue instrumental values way past the point that makes sense for non-intrinsic values. For example, many people end up mindlessly trying to earn more money even when they can afford everything they possibly want, and more money wouldn’t help them achieve any more of their intrinsic values.

People often underinvest in plans around their intrinsic values. 

They usually don’t spend lots of time thinking about, making strategies around, and taking action in order to effectively create more of what they intrinsically value. For instance, people who strongly intrinsically value love may not be thoughtful enough about who they decide to become friends with – and end up surrounding themselves with people who aren’t very loving. And people who intrinsically value the happiness of people all around the world often donate to charities that are not very cost-effective. 

People often do not think carefully about the tradeoffs between their intrinsic values.

People may over-prioritize some values relative to how much they value them and how easy they are to create. Some are overly influenced by their family – think of people who go into a career they hate because their family expects it of them. Others over-prioritize values due to routine or a lack of reflection – think of people who always see the same friends because it’s who they’re used to making plans with, even though they haven’t meshed for years. 

And some people let a specific philosophical value take over their whole value system. This can arise when people bite a philosophical bullet. For example, when they’re in a debate with someone more well-versed in the philosophy literature, they may fail to come up with a reason to value anything other than the happiness of all conscious beings equally, so they conclude they must only care about other things (like justice, equality, or the satisfaction of their own preferences) as a means to this other end.

In fact, people are mostly guided by forces other than their intrinsic values. For instance, our behavior is heavily influenced by: 

• Habits – we do things because we’ve done them that way many times before, automatically and without thinking about it.
• Urges, appetites, and addictions – we have primal urges to do things, such as to eat ten cookies (long past the point where we are really enjoying the cookies anymore). We can get addicted to things that we don’t value.
• Pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain in the present – of course, most of us have our own present pleasure (and lack of pain) as intrinsic values, but it’s easy to pursue these past the point where we intrinsically value them (at the expense of our other intrinsic values). For example, we might spend excessive time playing video games or avoid going to the dentist.
• Mimicry – we have a drive to do what others are doing.
• Trauma triggers – we sometimes act out of distress because something has reminded us of past trauma, even when the present environment is completely safe. 
• Conventional paths and defaults – we often follow standard paths instead of thinking about what would create the most of what we intrinsically value.

The upshot here is that people very often make choices that are not aligned with their intrinsic values.

What does it mean to “value” something, and what are intrinsic values?

You might think, “Ok, I’m convinced that I should try to create more of what I intrinsically value – but what do I intrinsically value?” We actually developed a test that will help you work out your intrinsic values! 

An intrinsic value is something that you value in itself (i.e., for its own sake) and not merely because of its consequences. We can distinguish these from things we value instrumentally – that is, things we value only because they help us get (or create) more of other things.

Here is the values wheel that we created to illustrate the different categories of intrinsic values we found in our research:

Most people value money, but probably no one values money intrinsically; people only value money because they can use it to buy other things that they value. Imagine if money didn’t let you buy anything, didn’t give you any power, prestige, or positive feelings, and it couldn’t even be burned for warmth. Clearly, in that case, it would be worthless – so it lacks intrinsic value. The experience of happiness isn’t like this (for almost everyone). You value feeling happy even if nothing else comes about as a result of that happiness.

What does it mean to “value” something? I use the term “value” in a purely psychological, empirical sense. That is, I’m referring to facts about your brain. Your brain can perform various operations (such as making predictions about what’s about to happen, or imagining a hypothetical scenario, or evaluating how “true” something you just said feels to you). One such operation is considering a state of the world and judging how valuable it is (to you) – our brains seem to have a basic operation related to assigning value to states of the world.  Value comes in degrees and can be positive, neutral (i.e., zero value), or negative. These degrees of valuing can be very fine-grained. We can feel that one thing is just slightly better than another –  e.g., we might do a taste test and decide we get just slightly more pleasure from one flavor of ice cream than another. However, introspection can be challenging, and there can be significant uncertainty in our reflections on value.

Let’s unpack a bit more what it means to assign value to a state of the world. Imagine yourself or someone you love feeling happy and reflect on the value of that state. You’ll find that your brain assigns positive value to that state. Similarly, if you imagine you or someone you love being harmed and reflect on the value of that state, you’ll find that you assign it negative value. Still, other things, like the state of the world where a new stone is added to a pile of stones on a random mountain, are likely to be assigned no value by your brain – that is, you consider the world to have equal amounts of value whether that stone is in that pile or not. In other words, when you reflect on certain potential states of the world, you have the internal experience (qualia) that they are good, bad, or neutral.

But how can you tell the difference between what you intrinsically value and what you value merely instrumentally? Unfortunately, our brains don’t automatically separate the things we intrinsically value from the things we value instrumentally. At first blush, valued states of the world feel the same, whether we value them intrinsically or not. To tell the difference, we need to use thought experiments. 

One way to work out whether something is one of your intrinsic values is by asking yourself, “if this were created, but it didn’t bring any other positive consequences, would I still value it?” For example, you surely value having food. But if you had a pile of “food,” but it contained no nutritional value, you derived no pleasure from eating it, it didn’t have any pleasant aromas or aesthetic value, and nobody else wanted it, would you actually still value it? Probably not – hence food is not an intrinsic value, despite being something that we all value (instrumentally). 

We can distinguish “valuing” something from being persuaded (on a purely intellectual level) that something is good. You might be convinced by a logical argument that something is objectively “good” in an abstract rather than intuitive sense, but still not actually value it; similarly, you might value something even though you’re convinced by a logical argument that it’s not a good thing. For example, imagine that a friend is trying to convince you that it’s bad to destroy plants. They make a strong argument, and you fail to find any flaws in it, so you accept it. You now would agree that you believe the phrase “it’s bad to destroy plants.” But even so, when you consider a state of the world where plants are being destroyed, your brain may not assign a negative value to it. You may feel that that state is neutral, despite being intellectually convinced that the phrase “it’s bad to destroy plants” is a fact. 

If you reject objective moral truth, you may think that we can’t logically prove that things are “good” or “bad” in this way; but some people are convinced by these arguments. Being purely intellectually convinced that something is good is different from actually valuing it – when your brain does its “is that valuable?” operation. However, being intellectually convinced that something is good or bad can eventually turn into valuing or disvaluing that thing. Whereas initially, you may merely fail to refute an abstract argument and decide that intellectually you agree with it, at some point, the inbuilt valuing mechanism in your brain may start to assign value that aligns with that argument.

We can also distinguish valuing from wanting (or desiring). You can want something but not value it – for example, a devout virgin nun might feel strong sexual desire even if she doesn’t value sex (i.e., her brain assigns a negative value to the state of the world where she’s had sex). Wants can also fluctuate moment-to-moment: for example, you might see a cupcake and immediately desire to eat it, but after a moment’s reflection (during which you look at the calorie count), you realize you no longer want it. Valuing, on the other hand, tends to lead to more stable conclusions. Your values might change over time, but we don’t usually value something in the morning and disvalue it in the afternoon. 

You can also value something but not want it at a particular moment. For example, even if you really value your own pleasure, you probably don’t want to experience pleasure at all moments – such as at a friend’s funeral. 

It’s often pretty easy to pick out what we value; it can be more complicated to determine which of our values are intrinsic rather than instrumental. It’s easy to mistake instrumental values for intrinsic ones. We often think that we intrinsically value a thing, only to discover, on reflection, that we only instrumentally value it. Here are some hypothetical examples:

• Althea believed that she intrinsically valued freedom, but she realized after a while that she only valued freedom because she thinks that people are happier when they’re freer. If people with more freedom had no additional happiness, she wouldn’t actually value freedom. So the happiness of others is an intrinsic value for Althea, but freedom is only an instrumental value (because she only values it insofar as it produces happiness).
• Brian loves his wife and thinks that he intrinsically values being married. However, he later realizes that what he values about marriage is loving and being loved – and that marriage just serves as a sign and symbol of that love.
  

We need to reflect carefully to work out what we intrinsically value. Imagine a person who is pursuing a prestigious law career. They’re sure that they value career success – but do they value it intrinsically? Perhaps they just value it instrumentally as a way to get other things – for example, money, the approval of family or peers, or as a way to influence the world for the better. Or maybe they are just mimicking the decisions of their best friend who is pursuing a similar career.

Conclusion

Valuism is a philosophy I just recently gave a name to, and I think it’s likely that some of the details will be adjusted and improved as I (and hopefully others) continue to develop the idea. 

Is Valuism new, though? Not really – I think that lots of people are already implicitly Valuists (without necessarily realizing it). But I’ve never seen the philosophy given a name, nor have I seen an attempt to work out what precisely the philosophy is in detail. I hope that this essay serves as a first step in that direction.

If the ideas in this essay have resonated with you, I hope you’ll consider whether you, too, are a Valuist. Though it takes time and careful thought to work out what your intrinsic values are, I’ve found that once you do, this can be a very fruitful approach to life. When you know what your intrinsic values are, this helps you ensure that you are pursuing what you truly value. And by adopting the Valuist idea of not merely pursuing your intrinsic values but pursuing them effectively, it orients you toward how to create a lot of what you value. 

When it comes to your altruistic intrinsic values, Valuism naturally suggests that you aim to do more good rather than less good as best you can (within the scope of the time and effort that you decide to put into your altruistic values following a careful balancing of your values), which you might consider a form of effective altruism (EA), narrowed to the scope of your altruistic intrinsic values. If your altruistic intrinsic values are strong, and you aim to use reason and evidence to try to effectively create a large amount of them in the world, then you may be a Valuist EA.

I find it satisfying that Valuism gives me a frame for my life: to create that which I intrinsically value. Perhaps it can provide a frame for your life as well.

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A big thanks goes to:

• Kat Woods for giving me the idea to call this philosophy “Valuism”
• Amber Dawn Ace for co-authoring this piece – Amber is not a Valuist, but she was indispensable in helping me organize and explain my ideas
• The many folks who provided valuable edits on this piece (and the accompanying other parts to this series), including Travis Manuel, Adam Binks, Amanda Metskas, Clare Harris, David Hartsough, and Kat Woods.

I’ll end with a poem that Kat Woods created from words that Tyler Alterman wrote, which to me reflects some key elements of Valuism:

You’ve just finished the first post in my sequence of essays on my life philosophy, Valuism – click here to go to the second post.

Please note that Valuism is a work in progress. I may update this (and the other accompanying) essays as my views continue to become clearer or more accurate.

Footnotes

1. Note that there are different uses of the phrase “intrinsic value.” What I mean by “intrinsic value” is what some others have called “final value,” or “non-derivative value,” or “terminal value”. I do not mean simply “value that supervenes on intrinsic properties.”

2. I’ve heard it argued that “if there is no objective moral truth, then there is nothing that you should do, so even if you assign a small probability to objective moral truth (even if it’s an incredibly small probability!), you should act as though it’s true.” A flaw in this line of thinking is that even if there is nothing that you objectively should do, there are still things that you value, and so by only focusing on an objective moral truth that you think is unlikely to exist, things that are valuable to you are sacrificed in the process. So, for instance, you may miss out on creating a lot of happiness for yourself or other things that you intrinsically value (hence there is a real cost).

3. Another philosophical viewpoint is that moral claims are the sort of thing that can be true or false, and they just all are false. Either way, objective morality is rejected, leaving a philosophical gap regarding what to do in one’s life. The philosophical viewpoint I’m aware of that is most similar to Valuism is Individual Subjectivism, which is a form of Normative Subjectivism/Ethical Subjectivism. However, it is not the same as Valuism for a variety of reasons, as GPT-4/ChatGPT explains here.

1. Autonomy

Pro: you’re the boss and decide what to do.

Con: you HAVE to always decide what to do. There will be a huge array of options at any given moment, and you’ll never know for sure which to work on. You can seek advice, but ultimately YOU are the one who must decide.

2. Lifestyle

Pro: since you’re the boss, you’ll have flexibility in your hours.

Cons: you’ll inevitably be working a lot of hours. It takes a lot of work to succeed as an entrepreneur. Since there is never an end to how much work can be done, you may have trouble “turning off” at the end of the day or on the weekend.

3. Resilience

Pro: it’s an incredible way to train resilience, persistence, and problem-solving skills.

Con: the world will punch you in the face between 5 and 100 times, and if you ever give up, you lose. This is stressful, and most humans would give up after 5 or 10 face punches.

4. Expected Value

Pro: if you’re well suited to it and work on a good idea, the expected (mean) value in terms of potential impact and monetary reward can be REALLY high. Some companies have truly altered the course of history. And obviously, many of the wealthiest people are entrepreneurs.

Con: the probability of failure is high, and luck is a significant factor. And unless you have substantial savings, you’ll likely be living frugally at first.

5. Learning

Pro: you will learn a tremendous amount. Even if the startup doesn’t work out, this valuable experience will apply to MANY other things. I don’t know of another way to learn so many things so quickly. One of the most important categories of things you’ll learn is “how to get difficult shit done in the real world while charting a path yourself for how to make it happen.”

Con: you will inevitably make many mistakes (ouch), and you have to face up to them (double ouch) in order to learn fast enough. It forces you to acknowledge and improve (or develop workarounds for) your weaknesses. It’s also important to note that if you are really not suited for entrepreneurship, or you just get unlucky right away, you might not learn that much. The great learning from entrepreneurship certainly doesn’t require success, but if you fail too immediately or don’t get anywhere close to success, it will be much less of a learning experience.

6. Meaning

Pro: you can choose to work on an idea that is DEEPLY meaningful to you. Most jobs don’t provide this level of meaning.

Con: if you fail, you will have invested a lot of time in (and then failed at) something deeply meaningful to you.

7. Respect

Pro: many people have a lot of respect for entrepreneurs, and it’s considered cool in plenty of circles.

Con: this respect increasingly kicks in as success increases, and before that, some people won’t even respect it as a career choice. If you fail, that will still garner respect from some people, but most people probably won’t give you much respect for having tried and failed.

8. Relationships

Pro: you will likely meet lots of interesting people and build meaningful relationships with your team members.

Cons: you may have to deal with difficult personalities or navigate complex human dynamics when it comes to employees, investors, customers, and/or co-founders.

9. Responsibility

Pro: it teaches you a deep form of responsibility, which strengthens your character.

Con: you are ultimately, at the end of the day, responsible for everything. You’re the captain, the last line of defense, and the goalie. When someone else at your company screws up, and it ends up having a bad effect on the business, as unfair as it may seem, it’s actually your fault. You hired them, or didn’t put safety measures in place, or didn’t spot the problem early enough, or didn’t give them the training they needed, etc. The captain is responsible for the fate of the ship and every crew member on it.

10. Adaptability

Pro: it hones your creativity and adaptability, can really build self-confidence, and can help you develop a sense of how much you’re capable of (probably more than you think!) as you figure out solutions for complex challenges, develop new ideas, and map out how to make them a reality. It pushes your boundaries in new ways and makes you grow.

Con: it can stretch your creativity and adaptability to the limit. Plans, essential as they are to make, rarely survive their collision with reality. It sometimes pushes your boundaries more than you would like and can place you into situations that you find terrifying (e.g., a high-stakes negotiation to save your company when it is on the brink of failure, or a major technical failure that leaves hundreds of customers furious at you, etc.).

So, why NOT be an entrepreneur? Because it’s a high-risk, chaotic, stressful, responsibility-filled, boundary-pushing, challenging life. And it’s hard work. Not everyone is suited to this path, and it’s irresponsible to pretend that everyone is.

BUT, if you’re well suited for it, it can be one of the most deeply meaningful, high-value, high-impact lives to lead. You’ll meet lots of people, build resilience and adaptability, push your skills to new heights, and learn a STAGGERING amount. For some people, it is absolutely their best life path.

If you think that entrepreneurship may be the right path for you, and you haven’t yet picked what idea to work on, you may be interested in learning more about our work at Spark Wave. We’re a startup studio (venture builder), and we recruit people who are interested in becoming CEOs for our mission-driven software products (no technical background or prior startup experience is required). We aim to reduce some of the worst negatives of entrepreneurship while building products that we believe could add a lot of value to the world. Our goal is to help make a better world through software and entrepreneurship. You can learn more and get in touch with us at: https://www.sparkwave.tech

This piece was first written on September 3, 2020, and first appeared on this site on July 29, 2022.

With that definition in mind, there are many reasons a work team may have low productivity. To make a team more productive, I suggest first trying to pinpoint the predominant causes of inefficiency, since different failure points typically have different solutions. The key is to identify and then focus on just the 1-3 of these causes that seem to be the biggest recurring blockers of team productivity.

Once these biggest blockers are identified, an analysis needs to be made of why they are occurring (e.g., using a method like the “5 whys”, where you try to uncover the root cause of the issue). Then, strategies need to be developed to try to resolve the blockers, and one or two strategies that have sufficient team buy-in need to be selected for implementation. Finally, re-evaluation needs to occur to make sure the problems are actually improved by those strategies.

Below is a list of these potential failure points or blockers.

There are four main facets of team productivity (Planning, Effectiveness, Resources, and Communication), which break down further into specific reasons for low productivity. You can use this list by considering each potential reason and scoring the degree to which you think it’s a problematic factor on your team (or having all team members anonymously score each potential reason for how big a problem it is, and then aggregating the responses to find the few most important seeming issues).

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Reasons For Low Team Productivity:

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(A) Planning

(1) Wrong Goal – the work is focused on achieving a goal that is not actually particularly valuable.

      e.g., the team is building a new feature that customers don’t want

(2) Poor prioritization – rather than focusing on the very most important things, the team focuses on things of secondary importance.

      e.g., the team lead keeps pushing team members to make tiny improvements to existing features, even though there are really major features where implementation hasn’t even begun.

(3) Slow Path – the planned route for achieving the team’s goal is not as efficient as other routes to achieving the same goal.

      e.g., the team could use a well-tested plugin to help them solve their problem, but the team lead insists they build their own alternative to this plugin.

(4) Incompletion – there is no pressure to finish projects, or team members work on far too many projects at once, so work doesn’t get completed, or takes much longer than it should.

      e.g., when a crisis comes up, the projects already in progress are abandoned, and rarely are they picked up again.

(5) Feature Creep – the project takes a really long time to be released because its scope or feature set keeps unnecessarily increasing, repeatedly delaying the launch.

      e.g., the client keeps making more and more requests about what to include in the next version.

(6) Missing Buy-in – team members don’t actually care about achieving the team’s goals (i.e., they don’t view the goal as valuable, and don’t feel like a genuine team, such that they care about the team’s success).

      e.g., Bill doesn’t think the product they are building is worthwhile, Sally doesn’t feel invested in the success of her team members or the team overall.

(7) Incentive Misalignment – some team members have incentives that cut against the project going well, or are focused on optimizing for personal goals at the expense of project goals.

      e.g., team members know that if they succeed at the goal, then someone else will take all the credit, and if they fail at it, there will be no negative consequences, and Bob actually wants the project to fail because then he’ll get to move on to a different project he likes more.

(8) Missing Skills – certain skills are needed to accomplish the goals, but no one on the team has these skills, and there are no external consultants that can be called on.

      e.g., no one on the team has a good eye for design, so the interface you’re building has the right features but looks bad.

(9) Reactivity – the team is constantly reacting to crises or imminent deadlines, which means there isn’t time to focus on achieving the long-term goals.

      e.g., every month or two, there is a major system failure, followed by weeks of scrambling simply to get things back to normal.

(10) Groupthink – team members do not feel comfortable sharing their unique ideas, or challenging the team lead, or getting their ideas heard above the most vocal person, or contradicting the group consensus, so the best ideas don’t filter to the top.

      e.g., the first proposed solution to a problem was accepted because no one wanted to challenge the person who proposed it, and since no one spoke up, everyone assumed the other group members must be in consensus.

(11) Guessing – the team doesn’t have enough data or information to solve the problems they are working on, but rather than gathering this data or information, they guess at solutions that aren’t very likely to work.

      e.g., the team has the goal of reducing customer churn, but they haven’t conducted customer interviews or carefully analyzed the churn data, so they are merely guessing at why churn is occurring and developing inadequate solutions based on those guesses.

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(B) Effectiveness

(12) Insufficient Time – people not working enough hours.

      e.g., a culture of showing up at 10 am and leaving at 4 pm.

(13) Waste – spending time engaged in unnecessary processes or pointless meetings.

      e.g., a culture of constant meetings where you have little time to get your actual work done, or a requirement to tediously document all your work.

(14) Distraction – people may not be able to get “in the zone” on their work because of frequent distractions, or an environment where it is hard to focus.

      e.g., a noisy office environment where colleagues continuously interrupt you to ask you questions.

(15) Burnout – people may feel stressed, depressed, disinterested, bored, or exhausted, and find it is psychologically difficult to get their work done.

      e.g., a culture where bosses regularly yell at, blame, and fire employees for things that are not their fault.

(16) Bad Foundations – the work may be building on other work that was not well made, slowing down additional progress.

      e.g., programmers inherit a massive, buggy, and poorly written spaghetti codebase (i.e., high levels of technical debt).

(17) Disempowerment – team members are not allowed to do certain things (or make certain decisions) that would move the project forward, or they are required to follow a bureaucratic or standardized process that is not an efficient or effective process.

      e.g., a user experience researcher is not allowed to pay customers for doing interviews, but customers won’t do the interviews for free.

(18) Intrinsic Difficulty – the work may genuinely be intrinsically difficult, with progress speed inherently limited.

      e.g., work involving proving new theorems that others have failed to prove.

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(C) Resources

(19) Slow Platforms – the systems or platforms on which the work is performed make progress more difficult, slower, or more complex than it needs to be.

      e.g., teams are forced to work on Windows 98 and experience regular computer crashes, or teams are forced to work using old and out-of-date software.

(20) Lacking Tools – the team members don’t have the best tools to do their work.

      e.g., a construction team is forced to use a saw that is inappropriate for the job because they don’t have access to the right kind of saw.

(21) No Training – there is a lot of relevant information about how to do the job well that team members are not told, and have to laboriously figure out on their own, or struggle to get by without.

      e.g., programmers are expected to figure out how the undocumented API works on their own via trial and error.

(22) Insufficient Assistance – when team members are stuck, they have no one knowledgeable they can go to (or that they feel comfortable going to) for help.

      e.g., a machine learning researcher can’t get her neural network model training properly and has no one she can ask for advice.

(23) Insufficient Skill – team members are not sufficiently skilled at the tasks they are trying to do.

      e.g., the team members responsible for writing documentation are not skilled at clear communication.

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(D) Communication

(24) Blocking – team members are waiting on each other to do things before they can get their own work done.

      e.g., Sam needs approval from Sally to move forward, but Sally requires approval from Samantha in order to give Sam permission.

(25) Conflict – team members dislike each other, don’t trust each other, or have clashing personalities.

      e.g., Bill refuses to work with Sam, Jill thinks that Jenny is trying to undermine her, Tim and Tammy get into heated arguments.

(26) Discordant Goals – different team members are working towards different long-term goals, because they are not on the same page about what the purpose, mission, or primary goal of the team is.

      e.g., the product manager is trying to add features, whereas the engineering team is trying to do a feature freeze so they can focus on stability and efficiency.

(27) Ambiguity – the goals are not clear enough, leading to confusion, false starts, and stops, or circling around problems without directly solving them.

      e.g., there is agreement that the user interface needs to be “easier to use,” but little clarity on what that means.

(28) Duplication – team members end up repeating work that has already been done (or that is in the process of being done) by others, either because they don’t know that other work exists or because they don’t trust the quality of it.

      e.g., the new lead engineer doesn’t trust the code developed by the prior lead engineer and so decides to rewrite it from scratch.

(29) Unassigned work – it is not clear who is supposed to tackle certain work (e.g., it is not in any particular person’s job description or current assignments), so some important work just doesn’t get done by anybody.

      e.g., nobody has been assigned the responsibility of bug testing, so bug testing simply doesn’t get done, and therefore, the product is highly buggy.

(30) Siloed Information – team members need information from each other to do their work well, but this information is not transmitted reliably.

      e.g., the team member doing customer interviews isn’t reliably communicating what they learn to the team member planning UX changes.

A big shoutout goes to Eddie Liu, who helped develop this framework.

This piece was first written on July 3, 2019, and first appeared on my website on January 22, 2026.