Some remarkable things I suspect are true of nearly all adults: 

1) We each hold some beliefs that are almost totally non-responsive to evidence involving some combination of our identity (who we are), our group, the nature of reality (e.g., God), or the nature of what’s good.

Examples:

• Many have an unshakable belief that they are good even as they harm the world (or believe they’re insufficient even though they’re altruistic and productive)

• Most have an unshakable belief that their in-group is good and any group opposing their group is bad

2) We assume that other people’s internal experiences are more similar to our internal experiences than they really are. Consequently, we tend to predict they’ll behave more like us than they really will.

Example:

• You’re an anxious person who avoids situations you’re afraid of, so you predict other people will be more afraid of similar situations than they really will be and that they’ll be more avoidant than they really will be

3) Emotions alter our behaviors and thoughts (increasing the likelihood of some behaviors and thoughts, decreasing the likelihood of others) in emotion-dependent ways.

Examples: 

• Physical disgust increases the chance of backing away and reduces the chance of eating soon

• Feelings of depression increase the chance of thinking thoughts about situations being hopeless or actions being pointless

4) How good or bad we feel about something happening depends on the difference between our expectations about what will happen and the reality of what actually happened.

Examples: 

• If you think someone with a gun is about to shoot, but instead, they take your wallet and run, you might feel relief (whereas normally wallet theft would be highly distressing) 

• If you expect to make $300k on a deal, you might feel bad if you “only” get $200k

5) We have multiple “drives” encoded in our brains that want different things (e.g., they have different values or goals), and these often come into conflict. Our behavior is influenced by which drives are activated and how strongly each is activated.

Examples: 

• If we smell delicious popcorn right in front of us, most of us will eat it, whereas if it’s a few feet away and we can’t smell it, we’re less likely to 

• If we’re exhausted but also slightly hungry, we may delay making food until we are more hungry or less tired

6) We are influenced by the behavioral norms and patterns demonstrated by the people around us, especially when they are people who we identify as being part of our group or similar to us.

Example: 

• If it’s common to dress or talk a certain way in a place we move to, it will increase the chance we start to dress and talk similarly

This piece was first written on October 20, 2023, and first appeared on my website on February 7, 2024.

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

Pretty much all of us have multiple intrinsic values (things we value for their own sake, not merely as a means to an end). This means that sometimes our intrinsic values come into conflict. For example, you might value:

• Both achieving ambitious goals and experiencing pleasure 
• Both your family’s well-being and the well-being of all people on Earth
• Both honesty and kindness

In cases like these, it can be difficult to maximize both values because working on one takes away from the other. If you spend most of your free time pursuing fun hobbies that give you pleasure, it may be difficult to achieve your ambitious goals; if you spend all your money on nice things for your family, you won’t have anything left to give to strangers; if you seek to be honest in all your interactions, you will sometimes say things that are unkind.

In this post, I describe how I approach dilemmas like this (as seen through the lens of Valuism – my life philosophy).

Handling Conflicting Values

When you’re in a situation where your intrinsic values conflict with each other, I think it is most helpful to avoid rejecting any of the values involved – yet we often do exactly that. We may try to dismiss (or act as if we do not have) one or more of our intrinsic values, especially if our social group or the culture around us respects some of our values but not others. For instance, if you value both ambitious achievement and having a pleasurable life, but the culture around you denigrates pleasure, you may want to assign pleasure a weight of zero (i.e., you may act as if you do not value pleasure) any time that it comes into conflict with ambition.

Rather than rejecting any of your values, I think it’s usually more helpful to carefully consider how your values trade off against each other in a given scenario.

To illustrate this with another example, many people value the happiness of other people but also value speaking the truth. Sometimes these collide. If a friend of yours writes a play and asks you if you like it, but you think it is terrible, you might feel conflicted between telling the truth and saying what you think will make your friend feel happy. If you value both truth-telling and your friend’s happiness, then both are worth taking into account in the decision.

Many people who strongly value both truth and happiness would find it worthwhile (according to their values) to sacrifice a little truth to produce a lot of happiness. They might, for example, be willing to tell a white lie to protect a friend from strong negative feelings. But they may not think it worthwhile to sacrifice a lot of truth to produce just a little happiness, for instance, by making up an elaborate lie just to make a friend feel slightly happier.

Intrinsic values can be difficult to compare – they may at first seem simply incommensurable or uncompromising. But in practice, we do often have value clashes like this in life, and so, whether implicitly or explicitly, we are forced to make tradeoffs between our values. I take the view that you should recognize when these conflicts arise and reflect carefully on which intrinsic values you value more in the given circumstance.

So when presented with such a scenario pitting the happiness of a friend against truth-telling, it can be useful to ask yourself: how much truth am I willing to give up for how much of a friend’s happiness? There is no logically correct answer to this question – finding the answer will involve paying close attention to your intuition (and, in particular, the part of your mind that assigns values to states of the world). Your intuition may be aided by thought experiments, such as:

• If I had to tell a much more severe lie, but doing so would give my friend only as much happiness as is involved in this situation, would it be worth it in that case?
• If my friend were to be made much happier than they are in this scenario, would it be a no-brainer that it is worth it to tell this small lie?

By pushing the boundaries of the scenario with thought experiments such as these, it can bring the relative strengths of your values to light.

The Subtlety of Values

The process of reflecting on the relative strength of your intrinsic values is subjective because you’re drawing on a subtle operation of your mind: the ability to assign value to different states of affairs. It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to work out precise “units of exchange” for your intrinsic values, such as: “I value one happy day for a family member the same as one happy year for a stranger.” That’s okay because you can almost always make decisions without needing such precision. Furthermore, these units are unlikely to be constant anyway. And in cases where both sides of the equation seem nearly equally balanced from a values perspective, that may merely indicate that it doesn’t matter which choice you choose (from the point of view of your intrinsic values).

Empirically, I’ve observed that people’s values often seem to obey a form of diminishing marginal returns: if they try to let one value dominate over the others, the pull of other values becomes stronger. For instance, imagine you intrinsically value working towards your long-term goals, but you also intrinsically value your own happiness. You push yourself really hard at work so as to achieve your goals, but this makes you unhappy. At this point, your intrinsic value of happiness may start to gain more strength when you reflect carefully on what you value. This quirky property of values is not necessarily how you’d design a value-seeking robot, but I think it’s how many of us humans seem to work. 

A Values-Informed Decision-Making Process

I’ve observed that some of the most difficult decisions to make are ones where multiple values we care a lot about are pitted against each other (whether we realize that’s what is happening or not). In my experience, though, we can often make really hard decisions easier if we look at them through a values lens.

Here’s a step-by-step procedure you may find useful for decisions involving conflicts in your intrinsic values.

Step 1: Identify which of your intrinsic values are at play in the decision. It may help to write down a list of these values of yours that are at play. It may help to have a look at the intrinsic values wheel.

Step 2: Reflect on the relative importance of those intrinsic values to you (e.g., by using thought experiments to tease out how they trade off against each other – e.g., “would this decision be easy if one of the values wasn’t at stake?” or “would this decision be easy if one of the values was being sacrificed a bit more?”).

Step 3: Brainstorm different actions that you could take in this scenario. During brainstorming, it’s usually best to withhold judgment – just get all the ideas out that you can. Some potentially useful brainstorming prompts to try are: “what is an action that would support just one of my values?” and “is there a win-win action that looks good from the point of view of all the values of mine that are at stake?” and “is there a compromise action I could take that is pretty good from the point of view of all my values even if it isn’t ideal from the point of view of any of them?”

Step 4: Evaluate how good each action looks from the perspective of each of your relevant intrinsic values.

Step 5: Select among the actions based on how well they achieve your intrinsic values overall, attempting to take into account all the relevant intrinsic values of yours and the relative importance of each of those values to you.

As an example, recently, a friend came to me when stuck deciding between two options related to one of their relationships. After talking it through carefully, we decided that what made it so hard was that:

• Option 1 looked good from the perspective of their intrinsic values of honesty and loyalty, while

• Option 2 was better for helping them achieve their own long-term goals.

Once we had figured that out together, my friend reported feeling more clarity about the situation. Now, at least, they had a clear idea about what the tradeoffs involved were.

Thankfully, with some brainstorming, we were able to craft a third option for what to do that was able to preserve a substantial amount of all of their intrinsic values that were at stake.

Common Pitfalls

Here are some values-related mistakes I think are common during decision-making that it may be useful to be on the lookout for:

• Not noticing which intrinsic values of yours are at stake in the situation. For example, it’s easy to anchor on trying to figure out which is the “right” or “good” choice rather than reflecting on what the tradeoffs between the choices are (according to your own values) or focusing on the values of those around you rather than your own values. For instance, you might choose to cover up for your friend who has done a bad thing because of a heuristic you have that it’s the “right” thing to do, even though covering up for your friend, in this case, involves betraying other important intrinsic values you have.
• Completely dismissing one or more intrinsic values of yours that are at stake rather than balancing them based on careful consideration of how important they each are to you. For instance, you might assign no weight to your intrinsic value of having a pleasurable life.
• Not generating enough options for what choice to pick and anchoring on just the most obvious options or the ones you came up with first. For instance, you might frame a decision as “quit your job” or “stay in your role” without considering possibilities like “renegotiate your role at your job” or “transfer internally at the same company.”
• Choosing based only on what is instrumentally valuable, even when misaligned with your intrinsic values. For instance, you might choose based on what gets you the most money rather than based on what produces the most of what you intrinsically value.

So remember: the next time you’re in a difficult decision-making scenario, you may find it useful to reflect on what intrinsic values of yours are at stake, and you may want to consider using a step-by-step process for incorporating your values into the decision, such as the one outlined above.

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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 third post.

1. Narratives Serve Power – powerful groups do tend to have a substantial influence on narratives, beliefs, and what’s “normal.” Something “obvious” or “objective” or “a fact” may just (invisibly) be a part of the narrative you’re immersed in and subtly be serving those in power.

2. Categories Bleed – just about any dichotomy or grouping will be leaky and imperfect (e.g., male/female, straight/gay). Some won’t fit any categorization, and there’s a subjective choice of where to draw boundaries. Yet we often treat categories as reality, forgetting their arbitrariness.

3. Intersectionality Can Matter – being perceived to be part of two categories can cause different treatment/perceptions than the sum of the effects of each category alone (i.e., there is non-linearity). A Chinese woman’s experience isn’t just Chinese experience + female experience.

4. Truth Is Elusive – many assumptions are baked into our interpretations. The truth is incredibly complex; epistemic modesty is warranted. Many have attempted to (or claimed to) use “science,” “objectivity,” or “rationality” yet have come to conclusions that were incorrect and harmful.

5. Values Differ – it’s very hard to argue in a principled way that one set of common intrinsic values is superior to another. For instance, if one culture values honesty and loyalty more than other values, and another values freedom and happiness instead, who’s to say one of those cultures is “right”?

6. Word Choice Can Have Consequences – for instance, suppose person P takes action X, and person Q dies. It matters if society calls that action “murder,” “manslaughter,” or “an accident.” Beyond legal questions, it matters socially (for the victim’s family and the perpetrator).

7. Universals are Rare – people claim to find universals (in economies, societies, individual psychology), yet almost none of them stand up to scrutiny as being actually universal. Truth turns out to be contextual with lots of variation. Even our theories of physics get supplanted.

8. Normal Is Not Better – what’s “normal” is often considered superior, and yet normal in one place and time may be weird in another. Much of human behavior is trying to fit in/be normal/be in fashion, which can help you to be liked, but normal is in flux and is not inherently better.

9. Art Is Arbitrary – stories tend to be linear and to follow the hero’s journey, architecture has a certain look based on location, and paintings in one era tend to be in a similar style to each other. But stories, art, etc., can still be compelling when fragmented, non-linear, convention-violating, or subversive. A much broader range of things can produce the effects of art than the limited array we usually see created.

10. Our Qualia are Unique – it is genuinely extremely hard to know what it’s like to be another person or to have had their experiences. We tend to overestimate our ability to relate. Those who have had an experience often do have unique information critical for understanding it.

11. The Oppressed Should Be Helped – some people continue to be oppressed, and those who are should obviously be helped. It’s important to remind ourselves of this oppression and try to stop it.

12. Context Often Matters – knowing who was saying something, what point in history they were saying it, who the audience was, the history of people saying similar things, and so on, can substantially change the meaning of what was said.

13. Some Things Are Said Without Being Said – meaning can be implied without saying something directly (e.g., through dog whistles, euphemisms, and by hinting at something). Even the omission of an idea that one would expect to have been said can imply a meaning.

The elements I listed above related to postmodernism are those that I find most helpful or useful. On the other hand, while I’m far from an expert on the topic, my perspective is that a number of aspects of postmodernist thought are quite unhelpful or mistaken.

Here is what I most dislike about the postmodern way of thinking (and related ways of thinking, like through the lens of critical theory):

1. It can ignore genuine progress made towards truth and a better society.

2. It can assume that word usage/language choices are more powerful than they are.

3. It can deny useful categories.

4. It can be self-undermining (if you apply its critiques to itself).

5. It’s not (I think) that effective at changing the problems it points out (since its proposed solutions to these problems seem, in my opinion, unlikely to achieve their own aims).

6. It can overemphasize the importance of certain problems over other equally or more important ones.

7. It uses obscure language/complex sentence structure that makes it confusing or even impenetrable.

8. It can be overly cynical about society and human nature.

9. It can seem to be in denial that many valuable things were discovered using reason, rational thinking, science, etc., and some of these have greatly improved people’s lives.

10. It can view society through too much of a zero-sum lens, not sufficiently acknowledging the importance of the many opportunities for positive-sum interactions.

11. It can overemphasize the value of information gained from the personal experience of individuals relative to aggregate information and scientific evidence.

12. It can treat large groups as monoliths, as though there really is an “X” perspective (for some large group, X).

13. It sometimes uses non-standard definitions for common words in a way that leads people to draw confused conclusions (assuming the conclusion applies to the common-sense meaning when it only applies to the non-standard one).

14. It can sometimes come across as idealizing those who are oppressed, creating weird incentives for some people to emphasize (or, in extreme cases, exaggerate) the oppression they experience in order to gain social points, or it can even create competition over who is more oppressed.

15. It can act as though feelings are facts, and that person A being upset by person B’s actions or words implies that A was wronged by B.

16. It doesn’t do a good job of summarizing itself, meaning that it can take a large time investment to begin to have a sense of what it even is.

17. It can fall into moral relativism and so runs the risk of being too reluctant to condemn harmful cultural practices of some societies (e.g., a practice of sometimes killing people for having premarital sex).

Overall, while I think that postmodern thinking contains some important ideas, I also believe that reliance on it tends to make things more confused rather than less and that many of its proposed methods and solutions don’t stand up well to scrutiny.

This piece was first written on March 29, 2021, and first appeared on this site on July 2, 2023.

For instance, I think some people believe that large, positive change usually comes about due to one or more of the following:

(1) Progress – technological and scientific advancement causing a rising tide that lifts most boats (e.g., futurists). Change is caused by our discoveries and creations.

(2) Capitalism – large numbers of individuals in pursuit of selfish desires create numerous mutually beneficial exchanges (e.g., objectivists). Change is caused by each of us looking out for ourselves.

(3) Culture – individuals choosing to be more selfless, pro-social, helpful, or loving through large-scale societal or cultural change (e.g., hippies). Change is caused by each of us changing.

(4) Heroes – the indomitable will of rare, heroic individuals who work tirelessly to cause a specific change (e.g., entrepreneurs). Change is caused by a single person.

(5) Education – thorough and proper education instilling appropriate skills, discipline, and values in the young. Change is caused by looking after the next generation.

(6) Communities – local groups discussing the problems in their communities and working as collectives to solve them (e.g., community leaders). Change is caused by groups acting locally.

(7) Government – democratically elected governments looking out for the interests of the people, thoughtfully enacting laws, and allocating tax dollars to solve social problems (e.g., liberals). Change is caused by the government acting intelligently for the good of society.

(8) Philanthropy – wealthy, altruistic donors and investors taking bold actions that are unencumbered by bureaucracy and politics in order to create and fund effective solutions that no one else will (e.g., philanthropists). Change is caused by innovative top-down strategizing and intelligent allocation of resources.

Of course, these ideas are not mutually exclusive and often work synergistically. Education can change culture, capitalism can lead to progress, and philanthropists can fund heroes. But who is ultimately more right about how the world usually gets substantially better? I think there is substantial truth in all of these ideas.

(1) Sometimes, technological and scientific progress really does make the world substantially better, for instance, through the discovery of antibiotics and the creation of technologies to produce and distribute them in large quantities.

(2) Sometimes, capitalism does stimulate rapid increases in wealth that help both the wealthy and the poor, for instance, arising in the wake of a poorly centrally planned economy that has recently become more open.

(3) Sometimes, culture does shift in a positive direction, such as when society becomes less tolerant of prejudice.

(4) Sometimes, individual heroic people do fight tirelessly for years and end up causing an important change much earlier than it would have otherwise occurred, such as when activists fight for human rights or entrepreneurs accelerate the creation of a new life-saving medical technology.

(5) Sometimes, better education can make a tremendous difference, for instance, when literacy rates start low and can be greatly improved, or when children do not have good role models at home but can find them at well-run schools.

(6) Sometimes, community members do collaborate effectively to solve their own problems, and if enough communities do the same, it can amount to widespread change.

(7) Sometimes, governments do solve major problems, such as when they ban dangerous but commonly-used substances or when they efficiently reallocate some money from those who have way more than they need to those who don’t have nearly enough.

(8) Sometimes, philanthropists do create ambitious plans for changing the world that actually work, for instance, strategies for eradicating a disease in a specific area.

While each of these approaches does contain some truth, that doesn’t mean that each approach is equally likely to be the cause of any particular potential improvement. I’d expect that the opposite is more likely: for any particular societal improvement, one or two of these approaches is much more likely to be the cause of it than the others. But I suspect that the most effective approach will vary substantially depending on the type of improvement.

So if you’re wedded to the idea that one of these is THE ANSWER to how the world will improve broadly, I think you’re going to be wrong a lot about what turns out to end up helping.

This essay was first written on February 24, 2018, and first appeared on this site on June 17, 2022.