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.

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

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.

Many of us might be feeling bad about life at the moment. One approach that may improve your mood is shifting your psychological “baseline” of what you view as normal to reflect the reality you’re currently living in. This blog examines how to accept the state of things as they currently are instead of getting stuck wishing the world looked how you want it to be. This valuable technique, which we describe below, can be applied to many different kinds of setbacks and difficult situations you encounter.

Understanding your psychological baseline

How bad we feel depends on our psychological “baseline” for what we consider normal. For example, if you view the baseline for your finances as having $5000 in the bank, having $3000 is going to make you feel bad. But if you view your baseline as having $1000, then $3000 is going to make you feel good!

Accepting reality as it actually is (letting go of what we call “mental rebelling”) can reset your baseline, which can tremendously improve your outlook in some circumstances. If your baseline reflects the way the world actually is, rather than the way it recently was (before something was lost) or the way you want it to be, reality hurts less. Of course, we can (and should) strive to make reality better than it is. But you can still do this while accepting the facts about the current state of the world. Acceptance doesn’t stop you from taking valuable actions, but it does make it easier to deal with reality.

What does acceptance really mean?

Acceptance is a mental maneuver that is hard to define (we generally lack the vocabulary in English for these kind of mental actions), but it might involve steps like: 

• Noting the facts that actually constitute reality (not how you would like reality to be or what reality recently looked like). 
• Noting that you CAN handle the fact that the state of the world is what it is (unless you literally can’t, which is another matter, but that’s rarely true). 
• Noting that the state of the world does not mean that everything important is lost; there are likely to still be many things of value that exist. 
• Avoiding “mental rebelling.” Mental rebelling might involve thoughts like: “This can’t be happening,” “This is awful,” “I can’t take this,” “This sucks,” or “Why me?” When you notice this kind of thought, acknowledge it (“I just had the thought “this can’t be happening”), but don’t dwell on it. Let it drift out of your mind once you’ve acknowledged it. 
• Reflecting on the real state of the world and trying to feel an emotion of “acceptance” towards it. Feeling this emotion doesn’t mean you like the current state of the world, but it might help you accept the facts of reality instead of trying to resist them. You can accept a situation that you really dislike, and sometimes, it is essential to do so. And, of course, even after accepting it, you probably will want to work to make that situation better (acceptance doesn’t stop you from trying to improve things; it just makes reality easier to handle). 
• Paying the psychological cost of acknowledging that the reality you want doesn’t exist NOW (instead of putting off that cost). This means not trying to delay the sense of loss that you will feel; that would not be productive, since this loss has already occurred (the state of the world isn’t the way you want it to be, and it’s better to acknowledge that now rather than later). It is tempting to avoid acknowledging this because the loss will hurt, but you actually hurt yourself more by delaying the experience. 

An example of acceptance

To give another monetary example, suppose $100 accidentally fell out of your wallet while you were walking, and now it is gone. You’re beating yourself up for having lost it and are continuing to search the streets you walked down for the money even though it’s become abundantly clear you won’t find it, and you’re feeling really bad about it. 

Acceptance in this situation might look like: 

• Fully acknowledging that the $100 is gone 
• Noting any negative self-talk (“I’m such an idiot”) but letting those thoughts drift away without getting stuck in them 
• Experiencing the full psychological loss of the money right NOW (not trying to delay the feeling of loss or deny it) 
• Acknowledging that you can survive without the $100 
• Attempting to move your baseline (the state you were in when you had $100) to be one that doesn’t involve having that $100 (so that not having this money feels normal instead of bad). You want to get yourself to the mental state where suddenly stumbling on the $100 would feel like gaining $100, rather than it feeling like simply restoring you back to the prior baseline! 

 Using gratitude to shift your baseline

Shifting your psychological baseline can also be achieved with gratitude. By reminding yourself that not everyone has the good things you have, that you may never have had what you have now, or that you won’t have it forever, you can move your baseline below the way you currently perceive it. Then, what’s real starts to look like a gift rather than something merely neutral. Your food feels like more of a gift if you remember not everyone has enough food to eat. Your loved ones are more precious when you remember that not everyone is around people they love.

Faulty baselines can bias your decision-making.

Our psychological baselines also play an important role in decision-making (“Prospect Theory” is one example of this). If you just made a lot of money at a casino, your mental baseline may not yet have caught up to having that extra money. Hence, you view that money as above and beyond what’s normal, so you are more willing to gamble it than you would be if you came back to the casino tomorrow (after your baseline has adjusted). A way to reduce this bias is to adjust our baseline to match reality faster (though, in this case, it could have the negative side effect of making you not feel as excited about your winnings). 

There is a related bias that can occur in the opposite situation: if you’ve just lost a lot of money at a casino but not adjusted your baseline to incorporate this new state of affairs, you may take unusually risky gambles to try to win the money back (perhaps in the hopes of not having to incorporate this loss into your view of reality). This is obviously a bad idea in a gambling context, and you’d be better off adjusting your baseline to match reality instead. 

When we fall prey to the “Sunk Cost Fallacy,” we’re also failing to adjust our baselines to reality. This fallacy describes what happens when we continue with a project even when we know the future prospects of the project are bad; we don’t want to have “wasted” (or “sunk”) all the effort and resources we’ve put into it already. But if we accept reality and adjust our baseline to incorporate this loss (which has indeed already occurred), the temptation to engage in the sunk cost fallacy may be reduced (or disappear completely).

How can you use this information to become happier?

If you’re feeling bad about something, try shifting your baseline to reflect your reality by practicing the different forms of acceptance outlined above, and use gratitude to adjust your baseline BELOW reality (so that the state of the world looks better than you might have otherwise thought). 

Consider the state of your psychological baseline when making decisions that will affect your future. Does your baseline reflect the way that reality is in the current moment? Are there any recent changes you might have missed?

1. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
2. Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
3. Gates’ Law: Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.
4. Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
5. Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity (or, don’t invoke conspiracy when ignorance and incompetence will suffice, as conspiracy implies intelligence).
6. Acton’s Dictum: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
7. Amara’s Law: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
8. Benford’s Law: In a diverse collection of unrelated statistics, a given statistic has roughly a 30% chance of starting with the digit 1.
9. Betteridge’s Law: Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no’.
10. Brooks’ Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
11. Chesterton’s Fence: Reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.
12. Claasen’s Law: Usefulness = log(technology).
13. Clarke’s First Law: When a distinguished elderly scientist states that something is possible, they are almost certainly right, but when they state something is impossible, they are probably wrong.
14. Cromwell’s Rule: Nothing but logical impossibilities have a prior probability of 0 or 1.
15. Cunningham’s Law: The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.
16. Doctorow’s Law: When someone puts a lock on a thing you own, against your wishes, and doesn’t give you the key, they’re not doing it for your benefit.
17. Dunbar’s Number: Most people can’t maintain stable social relationships with more than 150 people.
18. Eroom’s Law: Drug discovery is becoming slower and more expensive over time, despite improvements in technology.
19. Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect: You’ll believe articles outside your area of expertise, even after acknowledging that neighboring articles in your area of expertise are completely wrong.
20. Gibson’s Law (or the Expert Witness Law): For each PhD (to use as an expert witness for one side) there’s an equal and opposite PhD.
21. Godwin’s Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
22. Morley-Souter’s Law (Rule 34): There is porn of it (no exceptions).
23. Greenspun’s Tenth Rule: Any sufficiently complicated C program contains an ad hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
24. Hebb’s Law: Neurons that fire together wire together.
25. Hubble’s Law: Galaxies recede from an observer at a rate proportional to their distance to that observer.
26. Hume’s Guillotine (Is-Ought Problem): Normative statements (about what’s moral/immoral/right/wrong) cannot be deduced exclusively from descriptive statements.
27. Humphrey’s Law: Conscious attention to a task normally performed automatically can impair its performance.
28. Kranzberg’s Law: Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.
29. Lamarck’s Principle (or “Use it or Lose it”): Use it or lose it (evolutionarily speaking, but also in the brain).
30. Lewis’s Law: The comments you’ll inevitably find on any article about feminism justify feminism.
31. Littlewood’s Law: Individuals can expect miracles to happen to them, at the rate of about one per month.
32. Maes–Garreau Law: Favorable predictions about future technology will fall at the latest possible date they can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the predictor.
33. Metcalfe’s Law: The value of a system grows as approximately the square of the number of users of the system.
34. Miller’s Law: To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of.
35. Moore’s Law: Computation per dollar grows exponentially (or: number of transistors per circuit doubles roughly every 24 months).
36. Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
37. Alder’s Law: What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating.
38. O’Sullivan’s Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.
39. Pareto’s Principle (80/20 Rule): For many phenomena 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes.
40. Peter’s Principle: In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
41. Poisson’s Law (or Law of Large Numbers): For independent random variables with a common distribution, the average tends to the mean as sample size increases.
42. Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy: In bureaucracy, those devoted to the bureaucracy get control, those devoted to what it’s supposed to achieve lose influence.
43. Putt’s Law: Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.
44. Rosenthal Effect (Pygmalion Effect): High expectations lead to an increase in performance, low expectations to a decrease in performance.
45. Schneier’s Law: Any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can’t think of how to break it.
46. Shermer’s Law: Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God.
47. Zipf’s Law: The frequency of use of the nth-most-frequently-used word in any natural language is approximately inversely proportional to n (few words are used often, most are used rarely).
48. Wirth’s Law: Software gets slower more quickly than hardware gets faster.
49. Sturgeon’s Law: Ninety percent of everything is crud.
50. Stigler’s Law: No discovery is named after its original discoverer, including this one.

This piece was first written on July 6, 2020, and first appeared on my website on May 30, 2026.