These four categories of moral reactions to behavior are:

1) Disgust: A visceral, emotional reaction to a behavior (which appears connected to the moral realm) that’s perceived as gross or disgusting.

Examples:

• The disgust that most people would have at the idea of someone eating human flesh (even in a survival scenario where there is no other food available and a person has died of natural causes).

• The disgusted reaction that some (but not most) people have to the idea of gay sex. For instance, in one study I ran, about 40% of Americans said that imagining themselves having sex with someone of their own gender caused them “an emotion of disgust.”  

I think that people sometimes confuse the visceral emotion of disgust in response to a behavior with the behavior itself actually being immoral. Jonathan Haidt’s “moral dumbfounding” experiments support this point of view, where people insist a situation is immoral but can’t explain what is immoral about it (because the situations were carefully crafted not to violate moral principles and not to involve harm).

2) Character judgments: when a behavior is seen as indicative of an unethical character, even in cases where the behavior itself has no actual effects.

Examples:

• A person going to watch the daily operations of a slaughterhouse because they are intrigued by the idea of watching an animal die

• A person who enjoys daydreaming about stealing items from people they know, even though they have never stolen before

Cases like these provide evidence (some would argue, though it’s perhaps debatable) that a person has bad moral character, even if the behaviors themselves are not immoral. But people can jump to thinking an action is immoral because the sort of person that does it is more likely to be immoral, which I’d argue is, a mistake. While immoral actions are evidence of bad moral character, some actions that are evidence of bad moral character are not themselves immoral actions!

3) Heuristics: when a behavior is (collectively) judged as being “bad” because it often either causes harm, involves unethical behavior, or involves defecting on a social contract of some sort. These negative judgments can apply even if the behavior in question isn’t causing any harm in the specific situation where it’s being witnessed.

Examples:

• Driving fifty miles an hour over the speed limit is generally categorized as bad behavior, but if someone did it because they were driving a dying person to the hospital, we’d say that was actually okay.

• The head of an organization dating one of their employees is generally viewed as bad behavior because it often leads to harm, but there are instances where many people would say that in that particular case, it was ethically okay, such as cases where the employee insistently initiated the relationship leading to the pair ending up happily married

It’s easy to think of violations of heuristics like these as being bad, but really what’s going on is that we’re socially agreeing they are bad because it’s a good and helpful rule of thumb to treat them that way. But special circumstances can make them fine. Because of this, it’s not unreasonable to judge actions as probably bad when they fall in these categories (when we lack other information), but we should be sensitive to the specific details of the case since they are not necessarily bad.

4) Fundamentally unethical: a behavior that is, in and of itself, actually unethical according to at least some people’s deep ethical values. These actions don’t necessarily cause a feeling of disgust, and don’t merely appear bad because they are the sort of thing bad people do, and aren’t merely matching a heuristic about what’s bad – they are actually bad because of the precise action for some ethical values that people hold.

Examples:

• Poisoning your toddler because you don’t want a child

• Pretending you love someone when you don’t because you lack the courage to be honest

• Secretly spying on someone so you can see them naked

• Violating a promise you swore to uphold merely because you’re feeling lazy

When we treat an action as fundamentally unethical merely because it produces a feeling of disgust, or because it’s the sort of thing that provides evidence of bad character, or only because we have a societal heuristic against it because actions in that category tend to be harmful, I think we’re making a mistake. These categories are easy to conflate with an action being immoral, but they aren’t the same thing.

This piece was first written on November 16, 2024, and first appeared on my website on January 20, 2025.

At what step do you stop agreeing with this logical argument relating to animals? For each step, I’m also showing the percentage of disagreements on social media that involved this step (either direct disagreements with the step or disagreements with its premise). (There were a total of 63 such disagreements described across my posts on Facebook and X.)

Note: any time the argument mentions something being wrong or immoral, you can treat it either as referring to something being (a) objectively wrong (if you believe in objective moral truth) or (b) wrong according to your own personal moral values (if you don’t believe in objective moral truth).

Step 1: Mammals (like dogs, cats, and pigs) and birds (like parrots and chickens) are capable of suffering.

1.6% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 2: It’s wrong to cause suffering to dogs and cats if the reason you do it is just because it leads to you getting a small amount of pleasure relative to the suffering caused (e.g., if someone finds it fun to kick dogs and cats, it’s immoral for them to do so merely for pleasure).

11.1% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 3: It’s wrong to cause suffering to pigs and chickens if the reason you do it is just because it leads to you getting a small amount of pleasure relative to the suffering caused (e.g., if someone finds it fun to kick pigs and chickens, it’s immoral for them to do so merely for pleasure).

None of the disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 4: It’s wrong to cause suffering to pigs and chickens if the only reason you do it is a small amount of convenience relative to the suffering caused (e.g., if kicking a dog or pig in the face is more convenient because it causes it to go into its pen a little faster, it’s immoral to do so merely for this convenience).

6.3% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 5: It is wrong to cause suffering to pigs and chickens merely for pleasure and convenience, even if the mechanism by which you cause this suffering is by paying someone else who then creates the suffering (e.g., if you pay someone to kick an animal because you enjoy seeing an animal be kicked, or you pay someone to kick an animal because the animal is in your way, that is still immoral even though you didn’t cause the harm with your own body).

4.8% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 6: On large factory farms in the U.S., most of the pigs and chickens suffer a great deal and experience more pain than pleasure (i.e., net negative utility) throughout their lives (e.g., most egg-laying hens live in tiny cages where they can barely move most of their lives, and pigs are often kept in crowded barns with concrete floors and no ability to roam).

11.1% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 7: The vast majority of egg and (non-fish) meat products sold at stores in the U.S. come from large factory farms.

None of the disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 8: By purchasing egg and pork products from stores that use large factory farms as the suppliers for these products, throughout your whole life, you increase the number of chickens and pigs raised on factory farms (in an expected value sense – just as predicted by standard economic theory regarding what happens to production when demand increases).

1.6% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 9: The vast majority of people in the U.S. could switch to a diet that doesn’t involve eating factory-farmed pork and eggs without increasing the amount of money they spend on food (e.g., most could find an egg-free vegetarian diet that is as cheap or cheaper than their current diet, or a diet that otherwise avoids factory-farmed pork and eggs).

12.7% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 10: The vast majority of people in the U.S. could switch to a diet that doesn’t involve eating factory-farmed pork and eggs without sacrificing their health (e.g., most could find an egg-free vegetarian diet that’s as healthy or healthier for them than their current diet, or a healthy diet that otherwise avoids factory-farmed pork and eggs).

19.0% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 11: Something having been done naturally by our ancient ancestors, or being a tradition, or being a result of evolution, does not make something morally okay (e.g., even if it was common for humanity’s ancient ancestors to commit rape, or if a group had a tradition of committing rape, or if human evolution favored those who raped, that would not make rape any less immoral).

3.2% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 12: For most Americans, the only sacrifices they’d be making to switch to a well-thought-through diet free of factory-farmed pork and eggs would be a reduction of some pleasure (if they enjoy factory-farmed pork and eggs) and a loss of some convenience (when alternative food is not as convenient to obtain).

22.2% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 13: In most cases (e.g., when there aren’t overriding health concerns, dietary restrictions, or a lack of availability of alternative foods), it is immoral for Americans to buy most pork and egg products from most stores in the U.S.

3.2% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 14: The majority of Americans are acting immorally in their current purchasing behaviors regarding pork and eggs, but most of them could switch their behavior without excessive difficulty so as to have more ethical food purchasing behaviors (e.g., by adopting an egg-free vegetarian diet, or by avoiding buying animal products that come from factory farms, etc.).

3.2% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

This piece was first written on November 9, 2024, and first appeared on my website on January 22, 2025.

If someone “wastes” $100, someone else now has $100 extra to spend. Even burning bills deflates the currency, making other bills more valuable.

But people’s time genuinely can be wasted. The tragedy of someone spending hundreds of millions of dollars building a yacht is not the dollars spent but the enormous quantity of people’s time and all of those resources that could have gone towards much more societally valuable pursuits.

If you don’t believe this, just consider what happens after the yacht has been built – those dollars spent are now in the hands of the shipbuilders, ship captain, crew, boat insurance provider, etc., who can spend it themselves. So the money is not lost – not even a single dollar of it disappears; it just goes to other people to use! But all of those people’s time and most of the materials used in building the yacht are lost forever.

What do I mean by “lost” here? Well, time and resources can be spent creating lots of what conscious beings intrinsically value (e.g., happiness, positive relationships, freedom, justice, etc.), or they can be spent producing little to no value. Time and resources are “lost” when they produce little to no value in the process of using them up.

Someone buying an expensive yacht gets some genuine value out of it: some pleasure for them and their friends, social status, etc. But that amount of value is really tiny compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars of labor and resources permanently used up in the process (that could have been used to produce far more value). That vast sum of labor and resources could have produced large amounts of value for many people, but instead produced a small amount of value for one person.

This line of thinking has a surprising consequence: frivolous spending on things that are expensive due to labor and resource usage is much worse societally than frivolous spending on things that are expensive only due to taste preferences. It is much worse for society if someone builds a yacht for hundreds of millions of dollars than if that person spends the same amount on a lost Leonardo da Vinci painting that someone recently found in their attic. The latter scenario mostly just involves money moving around (which causes no harm), whereas the former scenario not only moves money around but ALSO uses up a ton of labor and resources.

There is a libertarian counterargument that may seem to refute what I’m saying. It goes like this: if people enter into transactions willingly and with full knowledge of what they’re giving and getting, then they are better off because of those transactions, so all transactions are good, even ones involving buying frivolous yachts for hundreds of millions of dollars.

To take this to an extreme, let’s suppose a billionaire goes around paying people to undergo torture (let’s assume that, like most people, these people hate torture). The billionaire offers enough money that these people are willing to accept the offer even though it is absolutely awful for them. Now by standard libertarian logic, the world is still better off since the billionaire chose to pay them, and the participants being tortured were willing to do it.

On the other hand, compare how much worse off the world is in that case compared to if the billionaire instead paid people to make beautiful things, or to run non-profits that seek to make the world better, or used that money to fund new startups, or just gave the money directly to those same people instead of requiring that they be tortured for it. In fact, the world would be better off if the billionaire did “nothing” with the money – leaving it in the bank so others can borrow it rather than using it to pay for torture.

The issue is not that the world is strictly worse off if a billionaire pays people to undergo torture (you could imagine a world where both the billionaire and the torture sufferers are slightly better off post-transaction – this only requires that the torture sufferers accept the deal with complete knowledge of the consequences and that they really do value the payments enough to make the torture worthwhile according to their values).

The issue is that there is a tremendous loss of value if a billionaire pays people to undergo torture relative to what could have been if the billionaire used the money for almost anything else. Paying people to be tortured does not destroy money (the money merely exchanges hands), but it does unnecessarily destroy value (people’s time is spent being tortured, which is horribly dis-valuable, instead of doing things with that time that are valuable). In this hypothetical example, the billionaire’s huge sum of money could have been spent on numerous things that would have produced value, and yet, they found one of the very least valuable ways to spend via voluntary exchange (by purchasing people’s suffering).

Buying a yacht is far less extreme than paying people to be tortured, but the torture example helps illustrate the point: using money never destroys that money; money always just moves hands, and some uses of money produce a lot of value in the world, and some don’t (and some even destroy value). Another way to put it is: buying a multi-hundred-million-dollar yacht creates VERY little value relative to the resources and amount of labor it consumes. A ten-million-dollar yacht, as a point of comparison, might make the billionaire slightly less happy, but it would produce a lot more value per unit of labor used. And a one-million-dollar boat is even better still on this ratio.

Since people’s time and physical resources are finite, when they are used on one thing, they are necessarily not used on another. To take it to extremes in order to illustrate the point, a society that spends most of its resources and work hours on making luxury goods that produce just a modest benefit for only a small number of people (as with yachts) is far worse at supporting human values than one where labor, time, and resources produce widespread benefit, with a higher “unit of what humans value” produced per hour of labor. A society that spends its time and resources building public parks and quality roads is a better one for flourishing than one which focuses instead on building pyramids to bury kings (even if the laborers are paid the same amount in each case).

I’m not saying it’s unethical to spend money on things you enjoy (I don’t think it is unethical so long as you don’t harm others). But it’s interesting to consider that, for very large expenditures for enjoyment (like multi-hundred-million-dollar yacht purchases), the amount of labor and resources they consume relative to the value they create may be bad societally relative to other equally frivolous-seeming purchases.

Note: as some commenters pointed out, there is substantial value in buying a yacht in terms of redistribution of wealth – it’s usually better for the world that the wealth moves from the billionaire to the yacht crew, etc. That’s absolutely true, but it would also be true for most usages of the money spent by billionaires, and the points I’m getting at here (about usage of labor and resources) are separate and independent from redistribution effects.

This piece was first written on February 24, 2023, and first appeared on this site on April 30, 2023.

Ethical force 1: Emotion 

The vast majority of us experience empathy and compassion. We tend to feel happy when seeing others happy and feel bad when we see others suffering. These feelings guide our ethical behavior at an interpersonal level, causing prosocial behavior. For instance, people who behave kindly tend to have more compassion than average.

Ethical force 2: Mimicry 

Most of the time, most of us copy the behaviors of our social peers without even thinking. If everyone stands up, we’ll stand up. If everyone dangles a funny piece of fabric around their necks, we’ll do it too. Copying seems to be deeply rooted in us.

Social mimicry limits bad behaviors that aren’t the sort of thing that our peers do. For instance, in most subcultures in the US, punching someone when you feel angry is considered wildly inappropriate. So mimicry, in this case, can reduce violence.

Ethical force 3: Punishment 

Most of us have a strong desire to belong. We don’t want to be ostracized, which encourages avoiding unethical actions that our social group condemns. If we hurt someone, they may personally take revenge on us. And nobody wants to go to jail, which helps reduce the frequency of people committing crimes.

Some unethical behavior is avoided just to avoid punishment.

Ethical force 4: Belief 

Many people believe in specific ethical systems. Examples include Christians who adopt God’s commandments and the subset of Effective Altruists who adopt a flavor of utilitarianism. Belief can guide ethical behavior even in the absence of the other forces.

Individual Differences

People differ in how strongly they experience each of these four ethical forces. For instance, sociopaths (by definition) have a diminished capacity to experience #1 (especially empathy and compassion). From my observations, they also seem to be less influenced than usual by #2 (mimicry) and #3 (punishment). Hence, unless they have a strong #4 (belief system) or are especially fearful of punishment, they can be at a greatly elevated risk of unethical actions.

When someone engages in unethical behavior, we can return to this Four Forces framework to help make sense of their action. Most people would avoid that behavior due to some combination of the four forces described above. So, which of those forces were missing in this person’s case?

These Forces Can Also Promote Unethical Behavior

It’s also worth noting that each of these four forces can work in reverse. Whereas compassion discourages unethical behavior, emotions like anger can cause it. 

Whereas mimicry encourages good behavior in some ways, in an unjust society, it can encourage bad behavior (e.g., you may harm the outgroup because your ingroup normalizes it).

In a society with highly unjust laws, punishment can actually promote unethical behavior (e.g., requiring that you discriminate against a certain group).

And some belief systems lead to unethical behavior as well (e.g., if you join a cult whose leader teaches you that you must commit mass murder to become a martyr). 

Situational Factors

Some situations have little to no influence on one’s moral behavior, whereas other situations tend to create a strong pull toward or away from ethical behavior.

For example, there are some situations that would cause a substantial percentage of normal people to behave unethically. For instance:

• When there is a very strong social mimicry force in favor of unethical behavior (e.g., everyone you know thinks it’s good to hurt people from group X)

• When there is an extremely large personal gain to be made from behaving unethically, with no risk of punishment and with no identifiable victim (e.g., you have a chance to steal ten million dollars by taking pennies each from lots of people and it’s almost impossible for you to be caught)

• When there is an extremely large punishment for not behaving unethically (e.g., you’ll be tortured if you don’t commit a heinous act) 

So when we’re considering whether a person will behave unethically, we need to consider both personal factors (e.g., do they experience strong compassion for others) and situational factors (such as those described above).

This piece was first written on December 9, 2022, and first appeared on this site on January 7, 2023.

Thanks to William MacAskill’s excellent new book on the topic (What We Owe the Future), lots of people are talking about longtermism right now. For those not familiar with the concept, “longtermism” is the ethical view that “positively influencing the long-term future should be a key moral priority of our time.”

Below are some of my favorite arguments for longtermism, followed by some of my favorite against it. Note that I borrow from Will’s book heavily here in the section on arguments in favor of longtermism.

Five of my favorite arguments FOR longtermism:

1. We value future people. If someone creates a hidden nuke set to explode in 150 years, we can agree this is highly immoral, even if we’re sure none of the people harmed exist today. And we can agree it’s wrong to neglect the world so much that it’s a hell hole for our grandchildren.

2. There may be VAST numbers of future people. We can agree that harming more people is worse than harming fewer and that helping more people is better than helping fewer. So if our choices affect all future people, that puts a large moral weight on those actions.

3. We may live at a pivotal time to influence the future. Because of technologies that might cause existential catastrophes for humanity (e.g., nuclear bombs, human-engineered viruses, advanced A.I.), our choices today could have a massive impact on the future of our species.

4. It’s neglected – relatively little work goes into improving the far future. News cycles, political terms, profitability requirements, and many other factors push us towards thinking near-term. It seems likely that less than 1% of current resources go into trying to improve the long-term future.

5. Future people don’t have a say. When we take actions impacting the environment or our chance of extinction or technological development, we do so without input from the future people that may be affected. Historically, groups with no say are often ethically undervalued.

Six of my favorite arguments AGAINST prioritizing longtermism:

1. The future may not be big. Much of the pull of longtermism comes from assuming the future could have FAR more people than alive today. But if there’s a lower bound on the yearly probability of extinction that you can’t change, the expected length of the future may not be long.

2. Humans need tight feedback loops. My opinion is that without such feedback toward a clear objective, human behavior usually spirals off into something weird (e.g., impracticality or status signaling). It can be VERY hard to tell if we’re positively influencing the long-term.

3. There may be valid reasons to discount the future. Empirically, few people care about far future people nearly as much as those alive today (the further out, the less they care). If there’s no such thing as objective moral truth (a debatable question), they aren’t making a mistake.

4. Longtermism is less compelling than other arguments for similar goals. Most people really care about humanity not going extinct and want the world to be a good place for our grandchildren (even if they don’t now have grandchildren). Bringing in considerations of humans in 20000AD makes these important topics less convincing.

5. YOUR probability of creating far future positive change may be tiny. Longtermism says if YOU have a 1 in a million chance of non-negligible far future influence, that’s incredibly valuable. And more generally, it can be very hard to figure out what to do now that will positively influence the world (with any significant degree of confidence) hundreds or thousands of years from now. I think it may be wiser to focus on a higher probability of, for instance, preventing calamity in 30 years (rather than, say, focusing on preventing it from occurring in the far distant future).

6. It’s debatable whether it’s better for more people to exist. Philosophers don’t agree whether a world with vastly more people is better than one with fewer (see discussions of “population ethics”). I think that most lay people also prefer a world with billions of very happy people to one with quadrillions of very slightly happy people (even if the latter sums up to far more total happiness). While we are not necessarily forced to choose between these options (maybe we could have a world of a huge number of very happy people), it’s not obvious we should be aiming for a vast future rather than one with very high levels of good things (e.g., only tens of billions of people but where everyone has very high well-being, freedom, self-actualization, etc.).

This essay was first written on August 30, 2022, and first appeared on this site on September 1, 2022.

A libertarian, a socialist, an environmentalist, and a pro-development YIMBY watch an apartment complex being built. The libertarian is pleased – ‘the hand of the market at work!’ – whereas the socialist worries that the building is a harbinger of gentrification; the YIMBY sees progress, but the environmentalist is concerned about the building’s carbon footprint. They’re all seeing the same thing, but they understand it differently because they inhabit different worldviews.

We can think of worldviews as snow globes. We each occupy our own snow globe, and when we’re inside it, it can seem like the whole world. If it’s snowing in our snow globe, we think it’s snowing everywhere; if our snow globe is made of green glass, everything looks green to us. We might not even realize that there’s anything beyond our snow globe! But if we can step outside, we see that our view from inside was only part of a much larger picture. If you can step outside your snow globe – and visit other people’s – you’ll be able to see a more accurate representation of the world and communicate better with others. For every snow globe you master, you’ll gain a powerful new lens through which to see the world – and you’ll see that no single snow globe has all the answers.

What makes a worldview?

Worldviews are a type of story we learn about how the world works and about what things matter and why. In this post, we put forward a theory of worldviews that will help you understand how different worldviews work. We call this “Snow Globe Theory.” Every worldview includes many beliefs, but after reflecting on a wide variety of worldviews, we believe that almost every one has four central components. There are other common elements that some worldviews have but others don’t – for example, a strong culture, or a theory about trustworthy sources of knowledge – but this article will focus on these four central elements:

1. What is good?
2. Where do good and bad come from?
3. Who deserves the good?
4. How can you do good or be good?

You can understand a worldview quite well if you know what thoughtful people with that worldview would all answer in response to these four questions. While each individual member of a group will have somewhat different answers to the questions above, it is the portions of their answers that most members of that group share with each other that compose the group’s worldview. Let’s explore Snow Globe Theory and the four components it assigns to worldviews.

Component 1: What is good?

Different worldviews come with different primary intrinsic values. Intrinsic values (as opposed to “instrumental values”) are things that people care about as an end in and of themselves, not merely as a means to other ends. They are the traits and states of the world that people who share the worldview treasure and want to promote. People who hold the worldview don’t just think that these things are good – they care about them deeply and feel strongly motivated to pursue them. Examples:

• Some libertarian intrinsic values are freedom, personal choice, and individualism.
• Some intrinsic values of social justice advocates are justice, equity, and protecting the vulnerable and oppressed.

Here is our categorization of intrinsic values. You can find out your own with our Intrinsic Values Test.

Component 2: Where do good and bad come from?

Worldviews usually have a simple causal explanation for the origin of good and bad things. Examples:

• Christian conservatives think that God grants good things to people who obey him and follow his will. Bad things come from the Devil, from humans’ failure to trust God, or from humanity’s flawed and sinful nature.
• Effective altruists have intrinsic values of increasing happiness and reducing suffering. They think that people can make the world better by using reason and evidence to figure out which actions will create the most happiness and reduce the most suffering. Suffering comes from a combination of nature and human foibles and biases, which present obstacles to improving the world.

Component 3: Who deserves the good?

Worldviews tend to include beliefs about who deserves good things (or who most deserves them). Examples:

• Socialists think that most people deserve good things, but workers, in particular, deserve to reap the rewards of their labor; capitalists who exploit others are less deserving.
• Libertarians think that hard-working and ingenious people particularly deserve to be rewarded since they create value. If you create a successful business, then you deserve the wealth that comes from that business.

Component 4: How can you do good or be good?

Worldviews often include beliefs about what people should do to be good or to cause good things to happen. Examples:

• Conservatives think that to be good, we should fulfill our obligations to our family and community.
• Social justice advocates think that to be good, we should try to understand our privilege and implicit prejudices, and stop contributing to oppressive systems, such as white supremacy.

Other elements

There are other elements that worldviews commonly have, but that are not near-universal like the four components described above are.

Culture

Worldviews don’t exist in a vacuum. People who share a worldview cluster together, either because the worldview spreads within existing communities or because believers in the worldview seek each other out. This means that worldviews develop their own unique cultures. Some parts of a worldview’s culture are related to its intrinsic values and stories about where good and bad come from. For example, libertarians are more likely than socialists to work in finance, at least in part because they believe that the financial sector is a force for good. However, some aspects of these cultures are more arbitrary, and arise due to coincidences about where a worldview happened to take root. For example, Christian conservatives in the U.S. often live in the countryside and own guns. These aspects of Christian conservative culture aren’t directly related to the Christian conservative worldview – the Bible doesn’t forbid people from living in cities and, based on the pacifist content of the New Testament, you wouldn’t necessarily expect that Christians would own weapons. But for historical reasons, there is a demographic link between Christian conservatism in the U.S. and gun ownership.

Outgroups

Some worldviews also have an outgroup. This doesn’t just mean “everyone who doesn’t share the worldview” – rather, the outgroup is a specific group (or sometimes groups) of people who are seen as the particular enemies or adversaries of a worldview. For example, the outgroup for social justice advocates might be the alt-right.

Theories of knowledge

Worldviews often privilege certain sources of information over others. It’s intuitive that people who hold a certain worldview seek out media produced by those who share that worldview – we’re familiar with the fact that liberals prefer liberal media while conservatives favor conservative media. Some worldviews also involve the belief that certain kinds of information or sources of knowledge have a stronger connection to the truth than others. For example:

• Adherents of religious worldviews often see holy texts as an important source of knowledge.
• Social justice advocates believe that it’s important to pay attention to people’s lived experiences, particularly if they belong to a marginalized group.

Worldviews within worldviews

Worldviews exist at many levels. Many worldviews contain smaller, more granular worldviews within them – for example, American Christian conservatives share a broad worldview, but you could also sketch the worldviews of individual denominations with Christianity. Similarly, there are broad overarching worldviews that unify some of the different worldviews we’ve listed below – for example, democratic socialists, communists, and social justice advocates all share a broad ‘progressive’ or ‘left-wing’ worldview. The broader you get, the less specific a worldview tends to be.

Why it’s important to understand worldviews

The truth lies outside any one worldview

Most of us are taught a worldview growing up, or we pick up one in college or from media that we consume. It can be tempting to stay in that snow globe forever. However, being stuck in just one worldview limits our ability to see the world as it truly is. Worldviews tend to be simplistic, which has some advantages – it’s easier to understand the world and relate to other people if you share simple stories about good and bad, right and wrong. But because worldviews are simple, and the world is complex, any one worldview necessarily misses a lot of nuance. Just about every worldview has some truths that it is good at seeing accurately, and some truths that it is systematically blind to. But you don’t have to be stuck in just one worldview. The more worldviews you understand, the more accurately you’ll see the world.

Occupying many snow globes lets you better understand the world and communicate more effectively

You might think, ‘Ok, but I know that my worldview is correct – otherwise, it wouldn’t be my worldview! Why should I waste my time understanding people whose beliefs are flawed or toxic?’ For instance, if you’re strongly committed to one of the progressive worldviews, you might not see the value in understanding the point of view of one of the conservative worldviews, and vice versa. However, it’s useful to know how other people think even if you believe that their worldview is deeply wrong. Governments, corporations, non-profits, religions, political parties, and other powerful groups are often guided by a particular worldview. If you don’t understand that worldview, then you’ll be unable to predict what these groups will do. You will also struggle to communicate with them in a way that they care about or persuade them to do things differently. When people engage with others who have a different worldview, they frequently make the mistake of relying too much on the stories and assumptions of their own worldview. But this is unlikely to work well, because the person they are talking to does not share these assumptions. To be really convincing to one another, you have to be able to see things from their perspective. To give a topical example: in abortion debates, pro-choice progressives often misunderstand the worldview of pro-life conservatives. We’re publishing this article only a few days after Roe v Wade was overturned; since then, abortion has been banned or restricted in several U.S. states.

We originally drafted this section before the overturning, and know that some of our readers will be feeling immense grief or distress at this ruling, and that abortion is an exceptionally fraught and emotionally-charged issue at the best of times. No matter how much you believe that the overturning of Roe v. Wade was harmful and wrong, and even if your only goal is to win a political victory, we believe it’s still going to be useful to understand what pro-lifers really think: that way, you’ll be better placed to predict what they’ll do, or persuade them of your own point of view.

When talking about abortion, progressives sometimes say things like this tweet by @leilacohan which has been retweeted more than one hundred thousand times:

“If it was about babies, we’d have excellent and free universal maternal care. You wouldn’t be charged a cent to give birth, no matter how complicated your delivery was. If it was about babies, we’d have months and months of parental leave, for everyone.

If it was about babies, we’d have free lactation consultants, free diapers, free formula. If it was about babies, we’d have free and excellent childcare from newborns on. If it was about babies, we’d have universal preschool and pre-k and guaranteed after school placements.”

From a progressive worldview, this tweet is powerful and persuasive; but it’s unlikely to be persuasive to U.S.-based Christian conservative pro-lifers – the group that it’s apparently discussing – because it misunderstands their worldview. The argument is that if conservatives cared about babies, they would support babies and children through funding and social programs. The subtext is that since conservatives don’t support those things, they are being dishonest about what they care about, and just pretending that they care about not letting fetuses die. But the idea that we should try to make good things happen through government intervention is itself a progressive belief. Conservatives tend to think that individual responsibility is more important, and to be skeptical that large government-run social programs produce good outcomes. While modern Christians have a variety of views on abortion (depending on factors such as their denomination), and the Bible doesn’t address the topic directly, within the first few hundred years of Christianity there were Christian scholars arguing that life begins at conception (rather than birth). In the U.S., many Christian conservatives who oppose abortion believe that fetuses should have the same rights as born babies: we polled 49 people in the U.S. who say that they’re “very happy” that Roe v Wade has been overturned. Of these, 90% said that they think abortion is wrong because it’s murder (i.e., similar to killing an adult human).

From within a U.S. Christian conservative worldview, there is no tension between (1) thinking that abortion is murder and (2) not supporting free diapers and childcare. If you momentarily step inside the snowglobe of this worldview, it becomes clear that you can oppose what you see as murder without believing that the government should fund large programs aimed at improving people’s quality of life. Another common misunderstanding (from the other side of the political spectrum) is that conservatives sometimes label anyone left-of-center as a “socialist”, and believe that liberals oppose capitalism (see the chart below which demonstrates the misunderstanding). But this is a misunderstanding of the average liberal’s worldview: in the U.S., most self-identified liberals (for example, Democrat voters) aren’t ‘socialists’ in the sense of ‘people who want to abolish capitalism and private ownership.’ Most support capitalism, but they differ from conservatives in that they support an expanded social safety net and favor moderate wealth redistribution through progressive tax policies.

Image Source

If a popular argument seems irrational or evil, see if you understand the worldview behind it

When you read an argument that you know is popular, but it seems clearly wrong to you, check with yourself: do you understand the worldview motivating it? Here are some questions you can ask to understand another person’s worldview:

• What are this person’s intrinsic values?
• What is their theory of what makes the world better?
• What is their theory of what makes the world worse?
• Can I understand why someone with their values would think this?
• Can I understand why someone with their theories of what makes the world better and worse would hold the position they do?

If your answers would be insulting to the person holding that worldview, you probably haven’t understood your interlocutor’s worldview deeply. For example, if you think ‘this person’s intrinsic value is to oppress people,’ it’s likely that you haven’t found what truly motivates them. All worldviews feel right from within their own snow globe. While some worldviews do lead people to do great harm, reality has few cartoon villains; worldviews make sense internally and are aimed at making things better, even if (from an outsider’s perspective) they can seem deeply misguided. If you want to understand how other people work, or even just persuade them more effectively, try leaving your snow globe and visiting theirs for a while.

Many worldviews at a glance

Every identity group label is somewhat ambiguous, and within each worldview there will be people with differing beliefs. But that being said, identity groups tend to have specific worldviews attached. As we’ve discussed, different worldviews have different causal theories of how good or bad things come about. Rarely are any of these causal theories totally correct or totally false. There are things to be learned from each worldview about why people behave the way they do, and how the world functions. We recommend trying to understand worldviews that are very different from your own – the more snow globes you master, the more clearly you’ll see the world, and the more you’ll understand others (even if you still think your snow globe is the best). Below we list what we think are the critical elements of various worldviews. If you notice any mistakes, please let us know so that we can correct them.

✟ American Christian Conservatives

✞ American Christian Leftists

☭ American Communists

+ Effective Altruists

‘Family Values’ American Conservatives

Libertarians

New Atheists

Silicon Valley Techno-Optimists

Social Justice Advocates

Trumpers (fervent Donald Trump supporters)

Further reading and listening

See this article and spreadsheet for the idea of “memetic tribes” – a slightly different framing that partially overlaps with ours.

Thanks

Thanks to Elizabeth Kim for helping Spencer develop the ‘snow globes’ metaphor for worldviews. You can listen to their conversation on this topic here.

Thanks to Lovkush Agarwal, Corinne Clinch Gray and Lisa Greer for helping us write our infoboxes on (respectively) New Atheists, American Christian Conservatives, and American Christian Leftists.

And thanks to Richard Ngo for suggesting that we add a “view of history” to our article for each worldview.

Thanks to Holly Muir and Adam Binks for helpful edits and comments.

This essay was first posted on the Clearer Thinking blog on June 29, 2022, and first appeared on this site on July 15, 2022.

1. Occamism: the simpler a moral theory is, the more likely it is to be true. Hence (a priori), the most probable two moral theories are that (a) everything is permissible or that (b) nothing is.

2. Majoritarianism: an action is morally right if and only if the majority of conscious beings capable of understanding that action and its consequences think it’s right.

3. Restraintism: if you have the desire to do something, then you don’t get moral credit for doing it (since the action is satisfying your OWN desire).

So, to maximize the good you do, become the sort of person that hates everyone and doesn’t want to help – then help a lot anyway!

4. Infinitarianism: god is infinite goodness. A finite number plus an infinite number is just the same infinite number again (left unchanged). All actions humans take can only create finite good. Hence, no human action can change the total goodness in the universe.

5. Virtue ethics prime: virtue ethicists are right – being good is only about having good character. But it turns out the only character strengths that count as morally good are cleanliness and moderation.

6. Purely positive utilitarianism: the only thing that matters morally is the sum total of happy mental states (suffering is irrelevant and doesn’t impact the calculation). Hence the attempts to airdrop MDMA into the forests.

7. Qualiaism: some actions are objectively morally right, and others are objectively wrong, but the criteria determining what is right is unique to each human and inaccessible to anyone who is not that person. Hence, each of us must discover our own unique, objectively-true morality.

8. Tegmark morality: for every mathematical structure, there exists some universe for which that structure is a complete description of what’s morally right. Hence, integer addition is a complete and correct moral theory (in some universe).

9. Similaritarianism: how kind you need to behave is determined by how similar someone is to you.

Hence you should be very nice to your parents, less so to strangers, and even less so to a rock. Since you are most similar to yourself, self-kindness is most important of all.

10. Unnatural law: we’re probably living in a simulation. Whoever the simulator(s) were, they were/are vastly more intelligent than us and hence far more likely to understand morality. We must study this creation of theirs (that we call reality) to figure out what’s good!

This piece was first written on March 19, 2021, and first appeared on this site on April 23, 2023.

• political wars that pull things back and forth instead of moving forward

• voter confusion

• voters prioritizing other topics

• collective action problems

• they’re blocked by the few who are made worse off by them

• they are bad ideas, I’m wrong about them, or people’s values around them differ too much

Regardless of the reason, here are some ideas for what I would consider “low-hanging fruit” policies that would make things better:

1. Require regular mail to have a clearly labeled unsubscribe phone number or URL on the outside of the envelope, much like how we already require email to have an unsubscribe link.

2. Prefill all of our tax forms, and then simply send them to us to edit/approve. For many people, the U.S. government already knows what they owe! It’s insanely wasteful that they have to go through the lengthy and tedious process of filing taxes in that case.

3. Release everyone in prison for charges related only to marijuana possession or sale, and stop arresting for it. It is legal or decriminalized for some uses almost everywhere (except 2 of 50 states?). Yet somehow people are still in prison. The public is now pro-legalization.

4. Add a gradually ramping up corporate tax for air pollution (or cap & trade system) and pay this money immediately back to all people (directly or as tax relief). Air pollution has multiple negative externalities not properly priced in by the market.

5. Over time, ramp up regulations to prohibit keeping animals in a hellish nightmare, which is currently the normal life for most farm animals. The food industry secretly implicates most Americans in moral atrocities that most would be sickened by if they witnessed them. Most people are actually against the conditions that some animals are routinely kept in when they understand what they actually are.

6. Gradually switch some income tax to instead be collected via other more efficient/less distorting forms of taxation, for instance, a combination of (i) “land value” tax, (ii) tax on social signaling items (like super expensive watches/jewelry/yachts), and (iii) consumption taxes. Most economists agree that there are better approaches to taxing than we use.

7. Gradually remove tax breaks that incentivize things we don’t actually want to incentivize (unfortunately, there are many). E.g., the mortgage tax deduction on interest and the tax deductions employers get for health insurance. Instead, this money could be distributed to everyone while simplifying the tax code.

8. The law gets longer and more complex each year, is impossible for anyone to understand, and is expensive to comply with. This could be improved by requiring law removal (of matching length) when adding new ones, or creating a body to find antiquated laws and bring them to Congress to vote on removing.

9. Currently, sex workers are much more likely to be punished than those who seek their services, despite sex workers having a high chance of being impoverished/in a dangerous situation/exploited. All the major alternatives may be an improvement to the current system: decriminalizing, making legal and regulating, or flipping who is prosecuted.

10. Prevent gerrymandering. It’s a horrendous abuse of the political system, and both major political parties do it. It’s appalling that this still happens regularly. It’s not an easy problem, but mathematicians can design a set of requirements in setting voter district lines that make it much harder to manipulate election results. Or, a simpler solution comes from Nicholas Gruen: districting can be done by a randomly selected group of citizens instead of being determined by politicians.

11. For those terminally ill with a short, excruciatingly painful future, provide a way for those who want it to get assistance with painless suicide if they choose (after passing a psychological and medical evaluation). We subject people who are already doomed to die in pain to live for months or years in torturous circumstances, rather than dying in peace.

12. Right now, we have solitary confinement prisons, where people can end up being alone for years, amounting to torture that would drive most crazy. It should be totally banned or severely limited in duration (e.g., no more than 2 days per month).

This piece was first written on August 23, 2020 and first appeared on my website on June 17, 2026.

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.

Sometimes managers as a group get a bad reputation. Some people even wonder whether managers are needed at all since they don’t seem to do any of the “real work.” There are also plenty of bad managers who actually impede the people they manage. And there’s the pretty common phenomenon of a company having too many managers, which leads to frustration and inefficiency.

But good managers do a number of very important things, even though it isn’t always obvious what all of these things are. I think that even pretty well-established managers sometimes wonder what it would look like to do their jobs better (I know that I do).

To help you remember what it means for someone to be a good manager, just think to yourself that “a good manager C.A.R.E.S.” In short, a good manager cares about their team working effectively together as an interdependent unit (Cohesion), cares about achieving the mission of the overall organization (Aim), cares about the rules and regulations their team needs to follow (Requirements), cares about the individual efficacy of their team members (Effectiveness), and cares about the happiness of the people they manage (Satisfaction).

Below is the full framework.

(1) Cohesion – help the team to work constructively together as a cohesive unit so that all the important tasks get done.

More specifically, this may require a manager to do things such as:

• Source Staff – make sure the team has enough staff members and make sure that everyone is in an appropriate role in order to accomplish the team’s goals

• Source Skills – make sure the members of the team have the various skills needed to accomplish the team’s mission, or else call in external help from those with the requisite skills

• Enhance Efficiency – find ways to accelerate the productivity of the team as a whole

• Clarify Responsibilities – make sure team members take full responsibility for, and are clear on, their respective responsibilities that affect the team’s success, and avoid having multiple people believing they are in charge of the same thing

• Prevent Oversights – make sure that someone has taken responsibility for each important part of the work that the team needs to do so that nothing slips through the cracks

• Clarify Norms – encourage and clarify the setting of both work and communication norms to set expectations about behaviors (e.g., “What time are people expected to go home by?” or “Is it acceptable to call work colleagues on Sunday for work-related non-emergencies?”)

• Ensure Communication – ensure good communication so that those who have valuable information share it with those who can benefit from it and so that when someone needs information that someone else on the team may have, they can get it

• Avoid Duplication – prevent duplication of work, and make people aware of related work done within the team and elsewhere in the organization, so that team members know what others are doing and what has been done before that may be relevant to them

• Resolve Disagreements – identify problems between team members, and help them figure out a solution (e.g., interpersonal conflict or disagreements about what to do)

• Focus Team – make sure the team is on the same page about the team’s near-term goals so that the output of different team members is aimed in the same direction

• Set Processes – put in place team and individual processes that encourage productivity, good communication, and high-quality output

• Fill Holes – if important work suddenly can’t get done by your team (e.g., because someone got sick, or because of an emergency, or because someone quit, or because of a miscommunication, etc.), jump in and do the necessary work yourself, or find someone who can immediately step in

• Improve Processes – figure out how the existing work processes could be improved or made more efficient

• Promote Safety – help ensure that team members feel the psychological safety to be vulnerable and honest in front of each other, to put forth ideas that might turn out to be bad ideas, to ask questions that might come across as naive, to admit mistakes, etc.

• Set Deadlines – create non-arbitrary deadlines and timelines that help keep the whole team focused on efficiently achieving milestones together

(2) Aim – ensure that the team’s output moves the organization as a whole towards the organization’s overarching goals.

• Maintain Vision – make sure the team is producing work that targets the vision of the overall organization, and remind the team of the vision periodically when the team’s output drifts off course

• Set Goals – work with the team to set team level goals and milestones

• Make Plans – work with the team to form plans for how to efficiently achieve the team’s long-term goals

• Prioritize – help team members prioritize so that they are doing what is most useful for ultimately achieving the organization’s objectives

• Provide R.O.I. (return on investment) – make sure the team is producing a high “expected value” when it comes to the return on investment the team provides for the whole organization

• Promote Collaboration – make sure that the team cooperates with other teams in order to help other teams at the organization achieve their goals

• Decide – thoughtfully make critical decisions on behalf of the team about how a project should proceed, or help guide the team towards making their own well-informed decision (e.g., about which technology is best to use for a project)

(3) Requirements – make sure that the team doesn’t violate important legal, ethical, project and resource constraints.

• Follow Laws – make sure team members don’t break any laws

• Follow Rules – make sure team members don’t violate any important company policies

• Ensure Ethics – make sure team members don’t behave unethically

• Ensure Safety – make sure that work is carried out in a safe manner

• Handle Violations – intervene immediately if laws are broken, rules are broken, or unethical behavior occurs

• Get Resources – make sure that the team has the resources they need to succeed, for instance, by communicating with higher up management on behalf of the team

• Limit Resources – make sure the team doesn’t use more than its allotted resources (e.g., money or company equipment)

• Maintain Brand – Make sure the team doesn’t take actions that reflect badly on the company or organization’s image or brand; leave a positive impression on customers, journalists, and the public

• Avoid Toes – make sure the team doesn’t undermine or create conflict with other teams at the organization

• Fix Rules – if company-wide rules, organizational structure, or processes are preventing the team from working effectively, try to get that structure modified or the rules changed

(4) Effectiveness – help each individual team member be effective at carrying out their own independent work.

• Grow Skills – help team members figure out how to improve their skills

• Identify Weaknesses – make team members aware of their weaknesses in a way that doesn’t demotivate or offend them, and help them develop an effective strategy for improving

• Problem Solve – help team members problem solve any challenges that come up in their work and help them get unstuck if they aren’t sure what to do, can’t seem to get through a challenging problem, or can’t seem to make forward progress

• Track Performance – keep track of how each team member is performing, and if any team member is not performing sufficiently well, work with them to increase their performance; only fire them as a last resort

• Incentivize – incentivize good work, and disincentivize bad work

• Avoid Blocking – don’t slow down or delay the work of team members without good reason, and don’t keep team members waiting a long time for your feedback or help

• Give Feedback – give feedback on work, both as a way to help make that specific work output and as a way to help the team member improve similar work in the future

• Evaluate Quality – examine the work output of individual team members to evaluate what sort of work they are good at now (that they can do with little or no supervision), what requires supervision, what should be handed off to someone else who has stronger relevant skills, and what new work this person should be given

• Enhance Productivity – figuring out ways to help make team members more productive, whether through changes in the environment, the processes used, the equipment available, the team or communication structures, etc.

• Navigate Bureaucracy – help team members navigate the organization’s systems and bureaucracy to make sure they get the resources and information they need to do their job well

• Shield Team – protect the team from distractions and from low-value or unreasonable demands coming from above

• Encourage Risks – help team members feel comfortable in taking smart (i.e., high expected value and limited in magnitude) risks

• Establish Goals – make sure that each team member has relevant goals for their work that are specific, challenging, and attainable, and that these individual goals are moving the team as a whole towards its overarching goals

(5) Satisfaction – help ensure that the team members are happy and that they don’t want to quit.

• Motivate – help the team members stay excited about the work or feel meaning in it, remind them of the bigger picture of why their work matters (to others or to themselves), taking into account their individual motivations (e.g., learning, financial security, solving challenging problems, helping other team members succeed, improving the lives of customers, self-expression, etc.)

• Praise – Make sure to let team members know when they do a good job (e.g., giving at least 90% positive feedback and less than 10% critical feedback, since negative feedback tends to have a substantially stronger impact)

• Give Wins – Give the team regular wins, and the sense of completing goals, rather than a never-ending feeling of trudging forward

• Reduce Stress – Make sure that stress or anxiety caused by the work is not more than team members can handle

• Resolve Conflicts – Make sure to resolve conflict with and between team members as quickly as possible

• Build Trust – Help create trust with your team members (e.g., they should know that they can confide in you and that you are looking out for their interests)

• Communicate Care – make it clear to team members that part of your job is to make sure they are happy at work and that they should come to you if they are not

• Identify Burnout – identify when employees are struggling, and when it happens, show empathy, give support, and help them get back to a point where they aren’t burned out

• Improve Self – get robust (preferably anonymized) critical feedback about how you could be a better manager (e.g., by having both your team members and your boss fill out an anonymous survey with suggestions for how you can improve)

• Dissect Problems – when problems are occurring with a team member, make sure to get to a root understanding of what is actually happening so that you can develop an effective plan for resolving it (rather than developing inadequate solutions based just on what appears to be happening at a superficial level)

• Staying Professional – keep one’s own (and other people’s) appearance and actions professional, and avoid behaviors that might offend or upset others

• Contain Emotions – do not let one’s own negative emotions bleed into interactions with team members, for instance, by having one’s own anxiety stress out other team members or having one’s own irritability or bad day create a bad day for others

• Get Help – make sure that if you yourself are struggling to do your job well as a manager, or if you are burning out, you get the needed resources, rest, or help

• Get Buy-in – make sure the team is on board with the team’s overall goals and plan

• Identify Unhappiness – identify who is unhappy or thinking of quitting, and work to find ways to make them happier

• Develop – help team members grow into new roles and responsibilities, and give them opportunities and resources to improve their skills

• Avoid Micromanaging – help make sure that team members get their ideal level of autonomy, striking a balance between giving too little and too much guidance

• Give Credit – when a person or team does a great job, make sure they get credit and recognition for that

• Shield – shield team members from blame when they don’t deserve it or when it isn’t helpful for them to be blamed

• Communicate Upward – make sure higher-ups understand how the team’s work fits into helping the organization achieve its goals so that the value of the team is understood throughout the organization

• Set Norms – set positive norms for how team members treat each other (e.g., people being kind, respectful, helping each other, etc.)

• Communicate Impact – make sure the team is aware of the positive impact that their work has had on customers, other teams, and the organization as a whole

A SAILING METAPHOR

Here’s a sailing metaphor that I think helps make this C.A.R.E.S. categorization more intuitive.

Think of an organization as a squadron of sailboats. They are aiming to get to a particular place together, with each boat carrying a different essential cargo. The manager is the captain of one of these sailboats, and the manager’s team is the crew of that boat.

With this sailing metaphor in mind, here are the categories again, briefly:

Cohesion: this means making sure that the crew works together to raise the sails when the sails are needed. When rowing must be done, it means making sure the crew’s oar strokes are synchronized so that the boat goes as fast as possible. And it means making sure that every oar available in the boat is being rowed by someone.

Aim: this means the captain is making sure the boat is going in the same direction as all the other boats in the squadron. That way, the squadron as a whole can achieve its overall goal of getting to where it is going. This involves the captain communicating with their own crew, as well as with the captains of the other boats.

Requirements: this might mean, for example, making sure that the boat doesn’t go too close to protected coral reefs and making sure the boat doesn’t have more oars on it than it needs (that could be useful to use in other boats). It also might mean making sure that nobody smokes on the boat (which could be a safety hazard due to potential fire).

Effectiveness: this would mean making sure each individual team member is good at handling their particular duties on the boat, for instance, knowing how to tie strong knots and using proper form when rowing. And it means making sure that if an oar breaks, the team member it belonged to gets a new oar right away.

Satisfaction: this might involve reminding the team of the importance of the squadron’s overall mission and of their own boat’s critical role in that mission. And it means making sure that the crew is happy and that nobody wants to abandon ship.

Putting this all together: if the crew is working together cohesively, the boat is aimed in the right direction, the crew members don’t violate any important requirements, each crew member is doing their own job effectively, and everyone is satisfied enough to see the journey through, then the boat should succeed in doing its part to help the entire squadron get to where it’s going.

This essay was first written on October 22, 2019, and first appeared on this site on April 15, 2022.