I’d be interested to know: what is missing from my new list of causes of bad things and potential types of solutions? Thanks to those of you who commented on my prior version!

Causes of bad things in the world:

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1) EXTERNAL CAUSES

1i) Nature or evolution (e.g., malaria, cancer) -> Potential solutions: technological development, such as medical cures

1ii) Bad luck (e.g., landslides, earthquakes, droughts) -> charity, government programs providing social safety nets

1iii) Scarcity (e.g., insufficient food or water in an area) -> migration away from high scarcity areas, technological development to increase food production

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2) FAILINGS OF HUMAN NATURE

2i) Highly selfish actions by non-evil people (e.g., some of the crimes that are committed, some of the manipulation that occurs) -> cultural norms discouraging selfishness, cultural norms to punish those taking highly selfish actions

2ii) Harmful actions taken in highly emotional, confused, or desperate mental states (e.g., crimes of passion, harmful, desperate reactions out of fear, harm caused during extreme mental illness) -> widely available and effective mental health treatment, widespread education/training related to mental health and emotional regulation

2iii) Well-intentioned ideologues who are convinced that their simple but wrong model of the world is the absolute truth (e.g., some of the genocides and wars, many harmful yet well-intentioned policies) -> rationality education/training, a robust culture of respectful disagreement and debate

2iv) Cognitive biases leading to actions with severe negative consequences (e.g., greatly misjudging whether a project will bring enough benefit to be worth the cost, excessive fear towards or devaluing of ‘othered’ outsiders leading to mistreatment or harm to outsiders, lack of preparation for likely occurrences that are not salient) -> rationality education/training, careful design of systems to counteract biases, strong moral norms of respect towards all, moral circle expansion

2v) Retaliation or revenge (e.g., cycles of retribution) -> a culture of forgiveness, effective dispute resolution methods and institutions, reliable enforcement of laws

2vi) Evil people acting alone (e.g., serial murder, child abuse) -> effective police forces, high crime clearance rates, enforcement of laws, scientific investigation into the root causes of evil

2vii) Evil people who rally supporters (e.g., some genocides and wars, some extractive government policies) -> strong norms around truth telling and social punishment for lying, a robust culture of respectful disagreement and debate, a culture of empathy toward and acceptance of those who are different than you, a well-educated and informed citizenry, scientific investigation into the root causes of evil, a strong constitution, a strong independent judiciary, strong norms around maintaining freedom and independence of thought

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3) CHALLENGES OF COORDINATION AND INFORMATION

3i) Negative-sum competition (e.g., fighting over food when there isn’t enough to go around) -> technological innovation to increase abundance, thoroughly enforced laws forbidding negative-sum behaviors

3ii) Unintended side effects of actions that are not innately unethical (e.g., addiction caused by the invention of social media, new promising-seeming medical treatments that turn out to have horrendous side effects) -> a robust and low-transaction cost systems for those who were harmed to be compensated by those who caused the harm, hard to undermine enforced regulation requiring organizations to ameliorate harms once they have been identified

3iii) Collective action problems and negative externalities caused by individually reasonable behavior (e.g., pollution, climate change, overuse of resources) -> methods for assigning prices to negative externalities so that someone bears the cost, regulation to limit negative externalities

3iv) Prisoner’s dilemmas and difficulties of pre-commitment and coordination (e.g., arms races, such as with nuclear weapons) -> technology to facilitate coordination and simultaneous action, public projects by governments and private donors

What other broad causes of bad things or potential types of solutions am I missing?

This piece was first written on November 2, 2025, and first appeared on my website on November 17, 2025.

1) Learning to WRITE well is a primary way people learn to THINK well. There are other ways to learn to think well (e.g., a strong culture of oral debate and rigorous discussion), but that’s largely not how things are set up, so without writing, there’s a vacuum. Until schools change, students are sacrificing learning to think.

2) Normalizing cheating in one domain normalizes it in other domains too.

There are lots of ways to use AI to improve your thinking (e.g., ask an AI to critique a belief you hold or to help you explore points on all sides of a debated issue). But when a teacher says, “Write this without AI,” and you have an AI write the essay, it’s preventing you from engaging in significant thinking.

Thinking well involves a number of components, such as:

– gathering evidence
– considering arguments
– formulating a viewpoint
– honing your viewpoint
– presenting your viewpoint clearly

Replacing thinking with AI is not analogous to replacing doing multiplication with a calculator. That’s a memorized algorithm. Thinking well, on the other hand, is core to understanding the world, figuring out what goals to set, not being duped by others, and many other essential aspects of life.

This piece was first written on May 23, 2025, and first appeared on my website on June 5, 2025.

1. Child education: those who aim to teach children “critical thinking,” – which often (but not always) means teaching the basic thinking, logic, and analysis skills that the majority of adults eventually acquire one way or another. I believe this is a valuable service (much like teaching reading, which is a valuable service even though most people will learn to read). I also think it usually sets the bar pretty low for what good thinking is, but the best of this work sets the bar higher. This work can also serve as a feeder into categories 3 and 4 if it fosters an interest in thinking well.

2. Dunking, which comes in two flavors:
   • 2a. Stupidity Dunking: those who fight unusually bad ways of thinking (that <1% of the population believe) – e.g., they argue against the beliefs of Flat Earthers or people who think Bill Gates created the COVID pandemic. Quite a lot of this work comes across as making fun of people with dumb beliefs or gawking at stupidity (without encouraging self-reflection on one’s own beliefs), and so I think it isn’t that valuable and may well be harmful. I believe the best of this work uses these extreme examples as case studies to teach genuine critical thinking skills, which can be genuinely valuable.
   • 2b. Out-group Dunking: those that point out dumb thinking engaged in by the opposing political group (but don’t critique similarly egregious errors from their side or even defend bad thinking and lack of nuance from their side). Like dunking on Flat Earthers, I think this is usually not useful and perhaps actively harmful – it gives the impression that you (the viewer) are smart and the other side is dumb. To improve critical thinking, it’s essential to focus on your own thinking weaknesses, not just make it about other people.

3. Mass market: Those who combat common types of bad thinking – e.g., that because a particular two-year stretch was unusually cold, that means humans are not causing climate change, or that food not being “natural” means it’s very likely harmful to your health. This work often focuses on public education (often for an audience that has only a limited interest in learning to think well). It often teaches just the most basic concepts/building blocks related to logic, statistics, rhetorical fallacies, and cognitive biases – since these are concepts that many people aren’t that familiar with. I think this work is often quite valuable and hopefully helps serve as a feeder into the next category.

4. Advanced: Those who want to help people who already care about thinking well further improve their thinking – e.g., by discussing the strength of evidence on complex topics or the pros and cons of different policies in a nuanced way. This audience already knows many or most of the most basic concepts for thinking but could benefit from learning to apply these concepts more frequently and fluidly, as well as from learning more advanced concepts that build on the basic ones. This is the category I aim to be in with a lot of my writing. As you get more and more advanced, the market for this gets smaller and smaller, so usually, I try to position what I write in a way that it’s still accessible for the least advanced among the “advanced” audience while still hoping to say things that will interest the more advanced among this group. As such, I try to avoid jargon and avoid assuming knowledge of ideas beyond the very basics of good thinking. To contrast this with another approach, I see LessWrong as being more focused on appealing to the tip of the advanced group, which narrows the audience but can be very informative for that readership.

Other than the “dunking” category (which often has questionable value), I think all of these categories of education play an important role in the critical thinking ecosystem.

This piece was first written on January 24, 2025, and first appeared on my website on March 25, 2025.

Note (March 26, 2023): I first wrote this list on December 3, 2022. Since then, GPT-4 has come out, and several of the points in this list are closer to happening. For example, point #2 is partly true already, thanks to Bing Chat (which runs on GPT-4).

Here are nine ways I think that AIs that generate text (like GPT-3) will have a >50% chance of changing the world for the better and worse in the next ten years:

#1: The internet will get flooded with AI-written articles, and you often won’t know if you’re reading something written by a human.

#2: Search engines will generate answers to your questions on the fly (from scratch) instead of just showing a list of websites to you and instead of using pre-extracted answers. Google will have to adapt, or it may finally lose its dominance.

#3: Cheating on school essays will become rampant, as AIs will be able to get students good grades in many classes (at negligible cost), and it will be very hard to detect such cheating since each essay will be unique.

#4: You will be able to train an AI on samples of your own writing, give it a new essay title and a bulleted list of points you want to make in the essay, and it will write a pretty high-quality essay covering all the points you listed, in a style that matches your own writing.

#5: Spam messages (and text-based phishing attacks) will become unique. Rather than sending the same message to each person, spam will be unique for each recipient. And it may even have its style adapted to what is known about each recipient (e.g., demographics).

#6: Propaganda on social media will start to become automated. Rather than bad actors having hundreds of people on their payroll to promote a viewpoint, they’ll replace them with larger swarms of human-seeming bots that each act uniquely.

#7: AIs will be fine-tuned on our own personal email corpus, and then (much of the time) you’ll be able to start with an automatically generated first draft of email replies rather than having to write emails from scratch or receiving mere sentence-level suggestions.

#8: The text of ads will get automatically edited/rewritten by AI to be fine-tuned to different audiences to help maximize clicks.

#9: AIs will start being used in education as digital private tutors to explain concepts to students, re-explain things and simplify explanations when a student is confused, point out mistakes made by students, etc.

We’re entering a wild time when it comes to AI. Its effects on our lives will be felt more and more, to say the least.

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

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.

• Making Observations
• Formulating Theories
• Making Predictions
• Testing Predictions
• Developing Happiness

Making Observations could include exercises where students make and record observations about the physical world, biological world, social world, political world, cultural world, etc. The tools students would learn about and employ could include stop watches and rocks to study how gravity works, telescopes to study the stars, microscopes to analyze blood, newspapers to study the government, and televisions to examine culture. Students would learn to operate these tools, pay attention, record, summarize, categorize, explain and simplify.

In Formulating Theories, students could learn about equations, probability, data, evidence, induction and deduction. They could study how various physical, psychological, economic, literary, musical and artistic theories arose. And they could be asked to develop their own theories about art, literature, culture, physical phenomena, psychological facts, and so on.

The subject Making Predictions would involve the study of many of the powerful theories from physics, economics, chemistry, and psychology, and students would learn to use each of these theories to make predictions about what one should expect to see.

In the study of Testing Predictions, students could learn about the scientific method, falsification, statistics, markets, computer prediction algorithms, the prediction algorithms of the brain, and randomized controlled trials. They could also learn how to do thorough research in order to be able confirm or disconfirm their future predictions based on knowledge gathered by others.

For Cultivating Happiness, there would be an emphasis on art appreciation, literature appreciation, food criticism, movie criticism, creative writing, art creation, meditation, exercise, health, positive psychology, cognitive therapy, etc. all directed towards learning how to increase pleasure, enjoyment and fulfillment as well as reduce misery. This could also involve a study of what makes humans happy and what makes them unhappy, which could lead to discussions of governmental systems, psychology, sociology, ethics, history, etc.

New ways of carving up knowledge can give us new ways of thinking about education.