My understanding is that there are four main reasons tariffs get put in place:

(1) Special interests that benefit from tariffs lobby for them at the expense of everyone else. This is obviously a bad reason to have tariffs.

(2) Sometimes countries have an interest in building out capabilities in very specific industries as part of a long-term wealth/self-preservation plan, which can be rational and wise when narrow and well thought out (e.g., “in 20 years, we want to have a globally competitive automotive industry” or “we want to have a strong local industry in steel in case of war”). This can be a good reason to have tariffs, but it also requires a carefully thought-out, specific, long-term plan that is well executed. And these kinds of plans often fail.

(3) It is a punishment tool to retaliate or threaten other countries (though they cause self-punishment at the same time, so it’s a very costly form of punishment).

(4) Irrationality from leaders about the purposes and real effects of tariffs. In such cases, the tariffs mainly cause harm to all involved parties.

There are also some other special cases where tariffs get used, such as when a country subsidizes an industry and exports to another country. Still, the latter country wants its own producers to be able to compete on an equal playing field, so it puts in place tariffs. Or when a country can’t raise taxes for some reason, it can try to use tariffs as a substitute. Tariffs can sometimes be used as an attempt to increase local jobs in times of high unemployment. But this is a rare situation.

Trade is usually good because if A and B trade freely, it’s because they both believe they are better off making the trade than not. Hence, gains from trade. Tariffs distort this process and make the involved parties worse off. So unless a tariff is well justified, it’s very likely making things worse. That’s why I think that tariffs should be viewed as a special measure: something that countries should avoid by default but use when they have special reasons to do so.

This piece was first written on April 7, 2025, and first appeared on my website on April 22, 2025.

But that’s also how so many others in the past made grave moral errors.

Right now, it seems important to make an assertion that is so obvious that one shouldn’t have to say it: Even in a war, all militaries/armed groups should be very careful to avoid unnecessarily killing ordinary people who are just going about their lives.

Of course, there’s no one value that’s infinitely valuable, so in wild situations, there can hypothetically be times when killing is justified. But the vast majority of the time, when groups have claimed that not being careful to avoid killing innocent civilians is justified, they were wrong.

Sadly, being very careful not to kill innocent civilians is not the same as killing zero civilians. The horrible reality is that war in areas with lots of civilians nearby will almost always lead to dead civilians even when a lot of care is taken not to kill them. But taking great care should lead to many fewer civilians dead than would have occurred otherwise.

When groups PURPOSELY kill innocent people to achieve their ends, I believe that more than 99.9% of the time they were morally in the wrong taking that action.  And if you find yourself advocating for PURPOSELY killing innocent people, it is a very strong red flag that you’re advocating that other people do something very immoral. There are incredibly strong moral priors that say you should take great precautions to avoid murdering innocent people.

In my view, one of the only potentially-valid justifications for killing innocent civilians is to save a much larger number of other innocent civilians. But, also, that calculus should be used with great care – I believe that most of the time, when it ends up getting used in real life, it is actually misused, and ends up (accidentally) becoming a justification for immoral behavior.

This piece was first written on October 17, 2023, and first appeared on this site on October 26, 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.

1: Start to think that one ideology you like – which contains genuine benefits, truths, and positive moral elements – might be the only valid perspective.

2: Surround yourself with believers until you’re convinced that your view is common and normal.

3: Ignore your own doubts so that you can fit in better. Join in on chastising (and eventually ostracizing) insiders who doubt too much. Punish slightly more harshly than you feel is fair in order to prove that you are one of the good guys.

4: Since challenging the ideology is punished, pretend to believe more than you really do – contributing to the sense that almost everyone else has no doubts – in a self-reinforcing cycle.

5: Assume that since your view is obviously correct, normal, and morally good, those who strongly oppose your view are bad people.

6: Since you are good and they are bad, conclude that you, as the good guys, should try to destroy them (figuratively, or in extreme cases, literally).

7: But how can you tell who is bad? Decide that a set of beliefs that sound similar to the bad people’s beliefs are off-limits. Anyone who believes them is probably bad. In those cases, humane treatment is no longer necessary.

8: Even just spending too much time with one of the bad people, or speaking well of them, is morally suspect. Why would you do that if you weren’t bad too?

9: Unfortunately, some true beliefs were accidentally put on the “bad” side of the good/bad dividing line. Now there are true things that you would become a bad person for believing.

10: Because of that, you and your group must avoid looking at reality too closely, lest you become bad too.

11: If you start to notice something true that you’re not allowed to believe, look away quickly or contort reality to make it seem different than it is.

12: Intensify your self-delusion and your punishment of non-believers so that you can make sure that still more people in your group will delude themselves out of fear.

13: Start teaching children (before they are old enough to think for themselves) that your belief system is the only correct one, perpetuating the system for future generations.

14: Congratulations! You’ve succeeded at being a good person who harms the world. Your mostly good ideology has eaten itself and has become more bad than good.

This has happened many times throughout history, and it will happen many more times. Watch out for this pattern so that you (and the people you love) don’t end up as “true believers” who do harm by accident.

This piece was first written on August 7, 2020, and first appeared on this site on April 29, 2022.

To know what an expert of a particular type is truly expert at, we need to understand the system that creates that type of expert. What are these experts rewarded for doing or knowing? What actions make them more or less likely to succeed? If in a particular field a behavior X is strongly rewarded with prestige, promotions or wealth (or not doing X is strongly punished) then we would expect many experts in that field to do X. Those that do it naturally or adapt to the system and do it consciously will be more likely to succeed, while those failing to do it will tend to remain obscure or move into other fields. What determines an expert’s actual expertise is not just what her field is ostensibly about, but what knowledge and behaviors she is rewarded or punished for having.

Let’s take the field of pure mathematics as a case study. Experts in this field are created through the University system. Top expertise is determined primarily through the impact and quantity of publications. To produce many publications with high impact, you need traits like an expansive knowledge of theorems and methods, a strong ability to reason logically, the inclination to work for long periods on difficult problems, and sufficient creativity to generate novel ideas. These are the things we typically assume a mathematician has to be good at. But top mathematicians must have another extremely important skill as well: a knack for producing work that other mathematicians will consider important. It is largely other pure mathematicians who determine what gets published, which grants get issued, and what jobs get offered, so it is largely other pure mathematicians that ultimately determine who the top experts in their own field are.

To pure mathematicians the importance of a theorem is generally not determined by whether it has real world applications (in some circles, applications may even be considered a negative). It also is only partially captured by how hard the theorem was to produce. Importance depends on things like whether:

• other pure mathematicians find the theorem aesthetically pleasing (it should be simple yet non-trivial, powerful, and of an appealing form)
• it has implications for or connections to the work of many other pure mathematicians
• it provides new insights related to something that mathematicians care about that was previously not well understood
• other respected mathematicians have tried and failed to produce something similar
• it is part of a mathematical subfield that currently happens to be trendy

Mathematicians who have a non-standard aesthetic (i.e. their definition of what is beautiful or interesting in math differs a lot from what other pure mathematicians think) are at a big disadvantage, as are ones who work in areas that happen to be unsexy at the moment, and ones whose work doesn’t tie nicely into work that many other mathematicians care about. We should expect therefore that top pure mathematicians don’t just have expert mathematical knowledge, but also are expert at playing the pure mathematics game. That means being excellent at producing work that fits certain subjective criteria that are highly valued by many other pure mathematicians.

The pure mathematics game is not a bad game. It is very intellectually stimulating, and it sometimes yields results that end up being extremely useful in practical applications (especially in physics and engineering). But it certainly is not the only game that could be played in mathematics, and its rules are not optimized to make it as beneficial to society as it could be.

The rules of the game are self-perpetuating to a significant extent. Those who play by different rules are less likely to succeed in the field, and those who are good at playing the existing game are more likely to succeed. Those who advance are eventually in a position to decide who else gets to advance, and generally choose people with tastes similar to their own, so the game continues for another round. The details of the game drift over the decades as fashions come and go, and professor die. But certain aesthetic values and notions of what is important can get preserved over long periods.

A similar analysis can be done for nearly any field. What are top doctors expert at? Not just medical knowledge and procedures, but also at satisfying those who reward them. One group that rewards doctors (with their money) is patients. If a doctor is really good it is obviously true that a patient’s condition is more likely to improve, and therefore the patient is more likely to come back next time they have a problem. But it can be very hard to tell whether your improvement was due to your doctor’s skill, or whether you would have gotten better just as fast if you had gone to an average doctor, or even to no doctor at all. Many conditions get better regardless of what treatment is given (and some get worse even when treated properly), so it may be very difficult for patients to accurately assess the true skill of a doctor.

Doctors don’t get rewarded just for making you well fast. They also get rewarded for doing things with you that you believe a good doctor would do, since those behaviors make you view them as a good doctor (and so you’ll be more likely to go back in the future and tell your friends about them). These “good doctor” behaviors might include spending extra time with you, using obscure but impressive sounding medical language, speaking with authority even when they aren’t very sure of themselves, running lots of tests that aren’t really necessary, or using expensive and complex looking machines. There are plenty of ways a doctor could give you the impression of having done a great job that have little or nothing to do with getting you well faster or at low-cost. A doctor who gets you well fast but doesn’t SEEM like a good doctor could in some cases keep fewer patients than a doctor who seems to be better than he truly is. So we should expect to find that top doctors (of the type that rely on patients for almost all of their income) are not just medical experts, but are usually very good at meeting people’s expectations about how a good doctor should behave.

Some exercises for the reader:

• What are art critics truly expert at?
• What are lawyers truly expert at?
• What are contractors truly expert at?

When you consider what experts in a field are truly good at, don’t just ask “what is this field about?” but also, “what traits or behaviors get rewarded or punished in this field?” Behaviors that get rewarded or punished are not necessarily the ones we typically associate with the field, but considering them gives us information about how the experts truly behave.

Influences: Robin Hanson