While I think there are very serious concerns that advancing technologies, and AI in particular, raise (such as lack of control over these systems with could be a tremendous threat, reduction of agency, and the potential for extreme concentration of power), if we can keep these technologies well under control and pointed at the betterment of humanity (a big if) I don’t think they have to destroy meaning. Here’s why:

While some people do derive a lot of their sense of self-worth from their work (such as myself), and such people could be especially hard hit if they are replaced by technology, there are, thankfully, many things that humans intrinsically value, and therefore, lots of potential sources of meaning. By seeking and then (at least to a reasonable degree) creating what we intrinsically value, we create meaning.

So let’s have a quick look at different human intrinsic values (i.e., things people value for their own sake, not as a means to an end) and how advancing technology, such as AI, may impact each of them:

—

Spirituality and purity: there are no reasons I see that technology would have to interfere with spirituality, religion, or attempts to act purely. So these values could continue being a source of meaning.

Truth and learning: if anything, really effective technology can accelerate the search for truth and our ability to learn. At the same time, technology gone wrong could make the truth harder to discern (e.g., if technology facilitates misinformation outcompeting accurate information).

Achievement: this one could be hard hit by technology insofar as it’s related to doing things that eventually AI may do better than all of us. At the same time, humans find a lot of value in achievements regardless of non-human performance. For instance, people compete in sprints (even though cheetahs could easily outrun us) and find value in achievement in chess (despite AI being able to easily beat the best human). A lot of people also value personal achievement – merely doing the best you can, or improving to do better than your own previous results.

Freedom: while technology could impair freedom (e.g., if it concentrates power into the hands of certain actors, they might choose to limit freedom), there is also potential for technology to expand freedom a lot by allowing us to do many things that weren’t possible before, either because we didn’t know how to do them or because they were too costly before.

Pleasure, non-suffering, longevity: there is no fundamental tension between technology and these values, and technology may be able to improve these by reducing sources of suffering (such as disease), increasing lifespans, and making pleasure more easily accessible.

Happiness (as distinct from pleasure and non-suffering): This is a tricky one, because technology can cut both ways here. For instance, while it’s likely social media has increased some kinds of pleasure, it may well have reduced overall happiness for some people by making them more disconnected or impacting the way they see the world.

Caring, reputation, respect, loyalty, and virtue: these don’t have to be impacted by technology; we could continue valuing these in our relationships with others, even in a world where AI has replaced most work. The main threats I see here from technology are the ways that social media can cause people to spend less face-to-face time together, and the way that AI friends or “relationship” partners could take the place of human relationships.

Justice and fairness: this could go either way. Technology could concentrate power in a way that makes these worse or systematize bias. On the other hand, if the benefits of technology are distributed widely, they could create increased abundance. Technology also has the potential, if harnessed correctly, to reduce (currently commonplace) human bias.

Diversity: globalization tends to reduce diversity, and so technology could accelerate that trend. On the other hand, giving people more freedom through technology could end up increasing forms of diversity (such as how people choose to live their lives).

Protection: technology has the ability to make us safer, so while we may experience more protection (for ourselves and our loved ones), it also could mean that our own role of protecting others is reduced, which could reduce the meaning derived from providing protection. On the other hand, if technology is not developed thoughtfully, the world could feel increasingly chaotic and even become more unsafe, so protection could become even more important.

Nature: technology has a track record of destroying nature, so that trend may continue. However, it’s possible that with sufficiently advanced technology, that trend will go the opposite direction (e.g., cheap green energy makes it easier to protect nature). Technology often destroys nature either as a means to accelerate or as a side effect of acceleration, but sufficiently advanced technology may reduce that effect.

Beauty: technology has the possibility of increasing beauty in the world (making it easier to create and experience beauty), but also runs the risk of filling the world with generic slop.

Overall, while advancing technology may have a negative impact on some things that humans intrinsically value, as long as we don’t destroy the world with these technologies and avoid allowing extreme concentration of power from them, other intrinsic values may not be impacted or even be benefited by technology. As long as we can seek and (to a reasonable degree) create what we intrinsically value, there are sources of meaning available.

This piece was first written on November 16, 2025, and first appeared on my website on December 22, 2025.

According to YouGov polling, 41% of people in the United States think that it is the greatest country in the world. Others see the U.S. as a place full of arrogance, violence, and inequality. So, what’s the truth? 

The truth is that there isn’t a single notion of what makes something the “best.” To explore how great (or not) America is, we’ll start by looking at the question from multiple angles. We’ll see how the U.S. stacks up according to a number of important factors before we decide how great it really is:

 1. Technology 

The U.S. is among the best countries in the world for technology and business innovation. It currently ranks 3rd in the United Nations’ Global Innovation Index. It has the most startups worth over $1 billion (the 3rd most startups per capita) and is the originator of many technologies used globally. It is also considered by many to be the best place to create a tech startup. 

2. Violence

The U.S. is a violent place, given its level of wealth, with the 2nd highest number of gun-related deaths in the world and the 2nd highest rate of firearm-related suicides per capita. Among high-income countries with at least 10 million people, it has the highest number of homicides per capita.

️3. Prisons

The U.S. is a country of many prisoners, with the most people in prison of any country in the world and the 6th highest incarceration rate in the world (and the single highest rate among wealthy countries).

Violent crime charges are the number 1 reason people are locked up in the U.S. (though in some cases, the definitions for “violent” can include actions that don’t cause immediate physical harm, such as purse snatching and drug manufacturing). 

4. Wealth

It’s an extremely wealthy place with the highest nominal GDP in the world, as well as the highest GDP per capita (both nominal and PPP) of any country with over 10 million people. California’s economy alone is large enough that, if California were a country, it would rank 6th in the world by some metrics. And by some metrics, Texas’s economy is larger than Russia’s and would rank 8th.

About 9% of U.S. adults are millionaires, and 39% of ALL millionaires are in or from the U.S. 

5. Inequality

The U.S. is a fairly unequal place in terms of wealth and income, with inequality higher than 63% of countries (the Gini coefficient is 39 vs. a world average of 38). It’s the 5th most unequal among the 37 OECD countries, and the average income of the top 20% of earners is 9.4 times the bottom 20% (though note that inequality figures can be dependent on how taxes and social benefits are handled in the calculations).

The wealth gap in the U.S. is especially pronounced across racial lines, with the median Black household having $24,000 in savings vs. the median white household with $189,000 in savings (almost 8x more). 

6. Science

The U.S. is a very scientifically innovative place, with the most Nobel prizes of any country (the 15th highest per capita). It also has the 2nd highest annual patent applications (which is the 4th highest per capita), many of the world’s top universities, and the most clinical trials worldwide. 

7. Health

The U.S. is an unhealthy place relative to its level of wealth. It has the 10th highest prevalence of obesity (the highest of any wealthy country) and the highest rate of death from illicit drugs of any country where such data is known. Life expectancy in the U.S. is 79 years, which places it 47th highest out of 193 countries (so, it’s roughly in the top 25th percentile). 

8. Entertainment

The U.S. is arguably the most influential country in the world in terms of entertainment production, with the most movies made each year of any country, as well as the largest box office sales and the largest music market size. 

9. Healthcare

Many Americans feel let down by U.S. healthcare despite the U.S. spending the most per capita on healthcare of anywhere in the world. Roughly 48% of Americans rate the healthcare system as excellent or good, 31% as fair, and 21% as poor, which are worse ratings than surveys found in the 2010s.

The U.S. has exceptional top hospitals but bad price transparency (so it’s hard to know what you will end up paying) and inflated prices relative to a lot of the rest of the world. 

10. Desirability

The U.S. is rated the single most desirable place to move to for people worldwide looking to emigrate, though its ratings have declined somewhat. In terms of Americans wanting to leave, during the Bush and Obama eras, about 10% of Americans said they’d like to move to another country, and this jumped to 16% in the Trump era. 

11. Military

The U.S. spends a shocking amount on its military, with about 39% of ALL worldwide defense spending being by the U.S. At times its military power has been a stabilizing force worldwide (e.g., against the Nazis). On the other hand, the U.S. has also initiated a number of disastrous wars. 

12. Happiness

The U.S. is a pretty happy place. When Americans are asked to rate their “general satisfaction with life on a scale from 0 to 10”, the average score is a 7 (compared to an OECD average score of 6.7), which places the U.S. 14th highest among 41 OECD countries.

When asked to imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 to 10 at the top, with the top representing the best possible life for you and the bottom the worst possible one,

Americans place themselves at 6.9 on average, which is 16th highest out of 167 countries (i.e., 10th percentile). According to the World Happiness Index, which attempts to evaluate countries’ happiness by combining factors like GPD per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and perceptions of corruption, the U.S. is 16th out of 142 countries (i.e., 11th percentile). ️

13. Ideals

The U.S. has high ideals, some of which are reflected in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

It sometimes lives up to these (e.g., through its strong personal freedoms), and sometimes has dramatically failed to live up to them (e.g., in its use of slavery and treatment of Indigenous Americans). 

Reaching a verdict: How great is the U.S., really?

So, is the U.S. one of the greatest countries? One approach to this question is to simply say that it can’t be answered because different countries differ in too many ways to make such comparisons possible. Another approach is to say that just one of the factors above trumps all the others.

Our preferred view, however, is to think of it in terms of your values: depending on what your values are, you will weigh the factors above differently. By some sets of values, the U.S. may arguably be the best country, whereas, by others, it doesn’t even come close.

At our organization, Clearer Thinking, we conducted research to figure out what it is that people value intrinsically (that is, what people value for its own sake – not as a means to other things). We’ve organized the results of that research into 22 different categories of common values:

Once you have a list of your own intrinsic values (which you can find out with our Intrinsic Values Test), then you can start to answer the question of how great the U.S. is.

For instance, if you have strong values related to protecting those who are less fortunate, you may give the U.S. lower marks due to its relatively high levels of inequality, whereas if you place more value on achievement, the U.S. may get higher marks due to being highly innovative in technology, business, and science.

It can be easy to base your judgments, including those about how good the U.S. is, on group identity rather than based on careful consideration of the facts and what you value. As political scientists Patrick Miller and Pamela Johnston Conover have said:

“The behavior of partisans resembles that of sports team members acting to preserve the status of their teams rather than thoughtful citizens participating in the political process for the broader good.” 

Employing a framework like the one outlined above, where you:

1. first attempt to impartially consider the facts,
2. then consider your values, 
3. and use the facts to inform how good or bad the thing is according to your values, can help you ensure that you’re deriving your conclusions thoughtfully and carefully, rather than simply deriving them from a desire (conscious or not) to conform to the expectations of group identities.

Ultimately, whether you conclude that the U.S. is great or not, we suggest basing your judgment on an evaluation of the facts plus careful consideration of your own values, not based on other people’s expectations.

This piece was first published on the Clearer Thinking blog on January 3, 2024, and first appeared on my website on January 10, 2024.

1) Psychedelics: In 1966, LSD was banned in CA, and in 1968, a U.S. law came out banning psilocybin (the chemical in “magic mushrooms”). Since then, the study of these compounds and the development of related ones has been incredibly slow, only recently making a resurgence.

2) Nuclear power: While other energy technologies like solar have dramatically fallen in price, regulation (caused by well-meaning but misguided environmentalists and scared NIMBYs) prevented nuclear power from following a similar trajectory, causing it to have poor adoption.

3) Consumer supersonic flight: Even though this technology has existed for a long time, the wasteful projects that initially deployed it convinced people that it couldn’t be viable commercially (despite this being far from proven), leading to a step backward in travel tech.

This piece was first written on July 8, 2023, and first appeared on this site on August 30, 2023.

Climate Strategy 1: Government Collaboration

If we collaborated, China, the U.S., India, and Europe could engage in substantial climate emission regulation (e.g., by taxing carbon, using cap-and-trade systems, setting deadlines by which certain industries must be carbon neutral, building cleaner power generation facilities, putting carbon-capturing methods in place, etc.).

A large percent of pollution comes from these regions (more than 55%, it seems; see here and here).  That’s why getting these four regions on board is so critical.

Ideally, these four regions would work closely with each other, all jointly agreeing to the measures that need to be taken (maximizing climate benefit per unit of implementation cost) and holding each other accountable. If climate change is likely to get worse, all four of these regions really do have a substantial incentive to prevent it, but there is a collective action problem where each may want to defect while getting the others to take measures to prevent it. That’s why a close collaboration is ideal, and the more enforceable, the better.

If that doesn’t happen, perhaps one or more of these regions could pressure the others into compliance. For instance, perhaps Europe could create pressure on other regions that are less motivated to take effective action (a hat tip to Justus Arnd for getting me to think about this strategy).

Climate Strategy 2: Technology

If we get really lucky, then without further intervention, technology might just advance fast enough that the problem ends up solving itself; new tech could make it in people’s own selfish interest to stop polluting so much.

I don’t think it’s at all wise to hope that we get lucky in this way, though. So a potentially viable strategy would be large (smart) investments in green tech. These could be in the form of huge prizes for key innovations that are on a critical path to reducing climate change. Or if someone can create tech that meets a certain specification, the government could guarantee it would buy a pre-specified (large) amount of it.

Or it could be that technology is accelerated by giving many grants and then making larger investments in the most promising areas. But these would have to be given out smartly – not just investing in any green tech. Such a strategy would probably involve taking many “smart risks” by putting money into new technologies that could cause large improvements if they pan out.

There are a lot of different potentially relevant technologies, from cleaner/more efficient/cheaper energy generation, to better battery technology, to carbon-capturing tech, etc. Government and non-profit funding is most valuable in those areas where tech could cause large societal benefits where the natural market reward mechanisms aren’t incentivizing sufficient action.

If all else fails, we may be able to use geoengineering-based tech strategies to solve the problem. While these could potentially be very promising, they would need to be used with enormous care to help avoid potentially catastrophic side effects or second-order consequences – and should ideally be done in careful collaboration (rather than being undertaken unilaterally).

Climate Strategy 3: Pressuring Megacorps

A surprisingly large proportion of greenhouse gases is emitted by just a few hundred companies (see here). If these companies could be effectively pressured to reduce their pollution, perhaps that could have a big impact. I’d like to give a big shout-out to Cassandra Xia, who made me aware of this very interesting approach.

How might this approach of influencing large companies work? One strategy is to combine votes from large institutional equity holders (e.g., mutual funds, colleges, sovereign wealth funds, etc.) so that they can influence these large companies to have more impact. Another strategy is to try to get consumers to demand change (and shame large companies) until they feel it is in their own financial interest to implement better practices. Of course, this has the danger that they make changes that look good from the outside without actually improving the situation.

Here’s some interesting info about this strategy: “the Climate Action 100+ initiative has an extremely specific, action-oriented agenda to pressure major corporations into cleaning up their carbon footprint. The initiative created a list of 161 focus companies – that together account for over 80% of global corporate greenhouse gas emissions – to target their efforts towards. Many of these are the sort of oil & gas majors that you’d expect, such as Exxon Mobil, BP, and Royal Dutch Shell, but they also include companies from transportation such as Ford, Toyota, and Boeing, consumer goods such as Nestle and Procter & Gamble, industrial goods manufacturers such as Dow and Caterpillar, and many others including 32 major electric utilities. For each industry, the initiative lays out a set of agenda items it wants its target companies to improve upon and a strategy for investors to get companies to comply, including by “voting for the removal of directors who have failed in their accountability of climate change risk.” (Source; hat tip Alyssa Vance)

Important note: There is a question here of direct vs. indirect creation of greenhouse gases. For instance, large energy companies provide energy to end consumers (such as small businesses and individuals who heat their homes and put gas in their cars). Do we count the greenhouse gases produced in that way as being attributable to the large energy company or to the end users of that energy? Depending on how we do that math, we may come to quite different conclusions about the extent to which greenhouse gases are attributable to large companies.

Meta-strategies

I’ll point out that I think there are a number of effective “meta” strategies that can help support the three big strategies mentioned above.

For instance:

(A) Groups like Work on Climate (https://workonclimate.org), co-founded by Cassandra Xia, are trying to mobilize more talented people to go into the climate space and help them find good projects to work on.

(B) Groups like the Future Matters Project (https://futuremattersproject.org/), co-founded by Justus Baumann, are exploring ways to effectively strengthen and grow social movements to help support the big strategies above. They are also helping to train other groups and people already working on climate change in approaches that can enhance their effectiveness.

If you are looking for projects to support, consider supporting (A) or (B).

If you are interested in how to take a more “effectiveness-minded” approach to helping the world, you may find our free, interactive module useful: “Leave your Mark on The World“.

It is not climate-specific, but its lessons are applicable to the climate space.

Why I Find the Topic of Improving Climate Change Depressing

One thing that makes me depressed about climate change, as a cause area, is that I believe a huge number of good people with good intentions are applying strategies that won’t ultimately work to move the needle. And not in the “we have to try lots of strategies to figure out what works” way, more like “we have abundant evidence to see that this strategy doesn’t work, yet we continue to throw massive amounts of money and effort into it.” For instance, I’m skeptical of approaches that are mainly based on asking people to self-sacrifice in order to pollute less because they have been tried to a tremendous degree already, with very limited success. I don’t believe they will move the needle on pollution enough to make a substantial dent in the problem.

I would love to see a climate movement that is more focused on effectiveness, and more specifically, on strategies that might actually get the world to a much better place climate-wise.

I wish we lived in a world where just being a good person who invests a lot of time and effort into trying to work on a problem was enough. In fact, we live in a world where most strategies to solve big problems will fail, and to find better strategies, we have to be highly strategic in our approaches.

Truly small potatoes initiatives (like plastic straw bans) give us warm-and-fuzzy feelings while distracting us from doing things that might actually substantially help. It sometimes even feels like elements of the movement prefer environmental aesthetics over environmental change.

Maybe I’m Wrong

I’m far from an expert in climate, and I certainly could be very wrong about it in my thoughts above. And others have spent way more time thinking about this than I have. That’s why I’m asking you to change my mind.

So: what did I get wrong? What do you disagree with me on and why?

Are there other big strategies (beyond the big three mentioned above) that really could get us to a good place with the climate in the next 40 years? If so, I’d love to know about them.

It’s also possible I’m wrong about climate change being a big issue. I hope I am wrong, and the whole thing is overblown or a hoax. However, I don’t think that is true. While I do think that there is more uncertainty around the issue than is generally acknowledged, I don’t think that’s actually cause to dismiss it. A possible threat to civilization needs to be taken very seriously, even if it has only a 10% chance of happening, and I think significant climage change has a higher chance than that.

Currently, I’m most concerned that warming will not only hit the average of what climate models estimate but will exceed it. I believe the negative consequences are non-linear (i.e., 8 degrees of warming is way worse than 4 degrees, which is way worse than 2 degrees of warming, which is way worse than 1 degree). If that’s true, then the biggest risks from climate change are the tail risks (i.e., that temperatures are even worse than predicted). The scariest scenarios I’m aware of are “runaway” feedback loop scenarios, where, after a tipping point, climate spirals out of control (or huge new negative consequences come into effect). That’s why model uncertainty doesn’t make me feel better but instead makes me feel much worse – because they increase the tail risk!

This piece was first written on September 14, 2020, and first appeared on this site on December 10, 2021.

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.