This is the fifth and final part in my sequence of essays about my life philosophy, Valuism – here are the first, second, third, and fourth parts.

In previous posts, I’ve described Valuism – my life philosophy. I’ve also discussed how it could serve as a life philosophy for others. In this post, I discuss how a Valuist lens can help shed light on various fields and areas of inquiry.

Valuism and Effective Altruism

Effective Altruism is a community and social movement about “using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis.”

Effective Altruists often operate from a hedonic utilitarian framework (trying to increase happiness and reduce suffering for all conscious beings). But Effective Altruism can alternatively be approached from a Valuist framework.

You can think of Valuist Effective Altruism as addressing the question of how to effectively increase the production of one’s altruistic intrinsic values within the time, effort, and focus you give to those values (as opposed to your other intrinsic values). If you’re an Effective Altruist, chances are two of your strongest intrinsic values are related to reducing suffering (or increasing happiness) and seeking truth.

For people with certain intrinsic values, Effective Altruism is a natural consequence of Valuism. To see this, consider a Valuist whose two strongest values are the happiness (and/or lack of suffering) of conscious beings and truth-seeking. Such a Valuist would naturally want to increase global happiness (and/or reduce global suffering) in highly effective ways while seeing the world impartially (e.g., by using reason and evidence to guide their understanding). This is extremely aligned with (and similar to) the mission of Effective Altruism.

For more on the relationship between Effective Altruism and Valuism, see this post.

Valuism and existential risk

Potential existential risks (such as threats from nuclear war, bioterrorism, and advanced A.I.) are a major area of focus for many Effective Altruists. According to most people’s intrinsic values, existential risk is also incredibly bad. Existential risks threaten many of the things that humans value (happiness, pleasure, learning, achievement, freedom, longevity, legacy, virtue, and so on). So for most people’s intrinsic values, Valuism is compatible with caring about existential risk reduction (depending on one’s estimates of the relevant probabilities).

Valuism and utopias

Utopias are hard to construct. Sure, we pretty much all want a world without poverty and disease, but it’s hard to agree on the specific details beyond avoiding bad things. If we go all-in on one intrinsic value, we end up with a world that seems like a dystopia to many. For instance, a utopia, according to hedonic utilitarianism, might look like attaching each of our brains to a bliss-generating machine while we do nothing for the rest of our lives, or it might look like or filling the universe with tiny algorithms that experience maximal bliss per unit of energy. Of course, these are horrifying outcomes for many people.

If we maximize utopia according to one or a small set of intrinsic values, it will very likely seem like a dystopia according to someone with other intrinsic values. To construct a utopia that is not a dystopia to many, we should make sure that it includes high levels of a wide range of intrinsic values, keeping these in balance rather than going all-in on a small set of values.

Put another way, if we preserve a wide range of different intrinsic values in our construction of potential utopias, we protect ourselves against various failure modes. For instance:

• The intrinsic value of avoidance of suffering protects us from a world where there is a lot of pain and suffering.
• The intrinsic value of freedom helps protect us from a failure mode of a world of forced wireheading. 
• An intrinsic value of truth helps protect us from a failure mode where we’re all unknowingly in the matrix (e.g., being used for a purpose unknown to us) or living under an authoritarian world government that tries to keep the populace happy through delusion.

Valuism and worldviews

Worldviews usually come with a set of shared intrinsic values. These are the strong intrinsic values that most (though not all) people with that worldview have in common. Of course, in most cases, in addition to these shared intrinsic values, each individual will also have other intrinsic values that are not shared by most people with their worldview. You can learn more about the interface between worldviews and intrinsic values in our essay on worldviews here.

Valuism and mental health 

Mental health may have interesting connections to intrinsic values. For instance, here’s an oversimplified model of anxiety and depression that I find usefully predictive (I developed this in collaboration with my colleague Amanda Metskas):

Anxiety occurs when you think there is a chance that something you intrinsically value may be lost. Anxiety tends to be worse when you perceive the chance of this happening as higher, when you perceive the intrinsic values as more important, or when the potential loss is nearer in time.

Depression occurs when you’re convinced you can’t create sufficient intrinsic value in your future. This could be because you think the things you value most are lost forever, because you see yourself as useless at achieving what you value, or for other reasons.

Valuism and animals

What do animals care about? While some animals (e.g., some insects) may not be conscious (i.e., they may lack something that it’s like to be them), and therefore it may not matter what they care about, for conscious animals, it may be important to understand what they intrinsically value so we know how to treat them ethically.

An intrinsic value perspective on animal ethics is that we should not deprive animals of the things they intrinsically value (and we should help them get the things they intrinsically value, at least when they are easy to provide). So, for instance, we can ask how much a chicken that lives almost its whole life in a small cage (as many chickens raised for food in the U.S. do) is able to have its intrinsic values met. The answer is probably very little.

But what are the sorts of things that animals may intrinsically value? I suspect there are a wide variety of animal intrinsic values and that they depend on species, but here are a few that may be especially common in mammals:

• Pleasure
• Not suffering
• Not experiencing large amounts of fear, stress, and anxiety
• Surviving
• Agency (e.g., the ability to choose)
• Bonding with other animals
• Protection of their offspring

Valuism and economics

Economics often operates under the assumption that each person has a “utility function”: i.e., a function that maps states of the world into how good or bad the person thinks those states are and that describes the choices people make. According to this frame, if a person chooses A over B, that means that their utility function assigns a higher value to A than B. For example, if I buy a Mac rather than a PC, and they are the same price, this must mean that I predict the Mac gives me more utility (according to my utility function). 

Valuism, on the other hand, says that when A is more intrinsically valuable to us than B (and equivalent along other dimensions such as price), we often will choose A over B because A produces more of what we intrinsically value; however, sometimes we choose B over A instead because we confuse instrumental value with intrinsic value, or we have a habit of doing B, we feel social pressure to do B, etc.

In other words, choosing something is not the same as intrinsically valuing something, and ideally, we want to construct a society where people get more of what they intrinsically value, not merely giving people more of what they would choose. 

A classic example where intrinsic value and choice come apart is addictive products like cigarettes or video games with upsells: people sometimes choose to pay for them and use them way past the point of benefit, according to their own intrinsic values.

A similar issue comes up when people slip into treating every dollar of GDP or each unit reduction of “deadweight loss” as though they are equally valuable. Imagine that an influencer gets all the hottest celebrities to start wearing the hair of a rare species of sloth and that buzz convinces millions of people that it’s really cool, so consumers spend billions of dollars buying these sloth hair pieces. Unfortunately, the sloth hair is really aesthetically ugly, uncomfortable, and expensive, and making clothes out of it requires torturing the sloths. This will probably increase GDP, yet (on net) intrinsic value will almost certainly have been destroyed. There is no good reason to care about GDP for its own sake, but intrinsic values are precisely the things we care about for their own sake. While increasing GDP may often be aligned with producing more of what people intrinsically value (both now and potentially in the future), in cases when GDP and the long-term production of intrinsic values are out of alignment, I would argue that GDP is no longer a good measure of societal benefit.

Going back to the sloth hair example, having a free market for this sloth hair would, according to simple economic theory, reduce “deadweight loss” (relative to having restrictions on their sale). And yet, the production of this sloth hair will likely be net destructive to what people intrinsically value. We can imagine a multi-faceted accounting of how society is doing that takes into account productivity and wealth but goes beyond it to consider the extent to which people are creating their intrinsic values; productivity and wealth would be viewed as being in the service of intrinsic value production.

As a complement to GDP, we can think about measuring how well the people of a society get the things that they intrinsic value. For instance, attempting to measure:

• How happy are they? 
• To what extent are they accomplishing their goals? 
• How free are they?
• How meaningful are their relationships? 
• How much are they suffering?

This is related to the Human Development Index, though that index includes items that are not intrinsic values, and it doesn’t cover all intrinsic values.

If we had such an accounting, different people would naturally rank societies differently (in terms of how good they are overall) because they value these intrinsic values to different extents.

As you can see in this post, a Valuist perspective may have something to say about many other topic areas, giving us a different way to look at topics like Effective Altruism, utopia, animal ethics, worldviews, mental health, and economics.

You’ve just finished the fifth and final part in my sequence of essays on my life philosophy, Valuism – here are the first, second, third, and fourth parts.

This is the third of five posts in my sequence of essays about my life philosophy, Valuism – here are the first, second, fourth, and fifth parts (though the links won’t work until those other essays are released).

Sometimes, people take an important value – maybe their most important value – and decide to prioritize it above all other things. They neglect or ignore their other values in the process. In my experience, this often leaves people feeling unhappy. It also leads them to produce less total value (according to their own intrinsic values). I think people in the effective altruist community (i.e., EAs) are particularly prone to this mistake.

In the first post in this sequence, I introduce Valuism – my life philosophy – and offer some general arguments for its advantages. In this post, I talk about the interaction between Valuism and effective altruism. I argue that the way some EAs think about morality and value is (in my view) empirically false, potentially psychologically harmful, and (in some cases) incoherent. 

EAs want to improve others’ lives in the most effective way possible. Many EAs identify as hedonic utilitarians (even the ones who reject objective moral truth). They say that impartially maximizing utility among all conscious beings – by which they usually mean the sum of all happiness minus the sum of all suffering – is the only thing of value, or the only thing that they feel they should value. I think this is not ideal for a few reasons.

1. I think (in one sense) it’s empirically false

Consider a person who claims that “only utility is valuable.”

If we interpret this as an empirical claim about the person’s own values – i.e., that the sum of happiness minus suffering for all conscious beings is the only thing that their brain assigns value to – I think that it’s very likely empirically false. 

That is, I don’t think anyone only values (in the sense of what their brain assigns value to) maximizing utility, even if it’s a very important value of theirs. I can’t prove that literally nobody only values maximizing utility, but I argue that human brains aren’t built to only value one thing, nor would we expect evolution to converge on pure utilitarian psychology since evolution optimizes for survival (a purely utilitarian brain would get rapidly outcompeted by other brain types if they existed 50,000 years ago). 

I think that even the most hard-core hedonic utilitarians do psychologically value some non-altruistic things deep down – for example, their own pleasure (more than the pleasure of everyone else), their family and friends, and truth. However, in my opinion, they sometimes deny this to themselves or feel guilty about it. If you are convinced that your only intrinsic value is utility (in a hedonistic, non-negative-leaning utilitarian sense), you may find it instructive to take a look at these philosophical scenarios I assembled or check out the scenarios I give in this talk about values.

For instance, does your brain actually tell you it’s a good trade (in terms of your intrinsic values) to let a loved one of yours suffer terribly in order to create a mere 1% chance of preventing 101 strangers from the same suffering? Does your brain actually tell you that equality doesn’t matter one iota (i.e., it’s equally good for one person to have all the utility compared to spreading it more equally)? Does your brain actually value a world of microscopic, dumb orgasming micro-robots more than a world (of slightly less total happiness) where complex, intelligent, happy beings pursue their goals? Because taken at face value, hedonic utilitarianism doesn’t care about whether a person is your loved one or a stranger, doesn’t care about equality at all, and prefers microscopic orgasming robots to complex beings as long as the former are slightly happier. But, if you consider yourself a hedonic utilitarian, is that actually what your brain values?

2. It can be psychologically harmful

Additionally, I think the attitude that there is only one thing of value can lead to severe psychological burnout as people try to push away, minimize or deny their other intrinsic values and “selfish,” non-altruistic desires. I’ve seen this happen quite a few times. Here’s Tyler Alterman’s personal account of this if you’d like to see an example. And here’s a theory of how this burnout happens.

3. I think (in one sense) it’s incoherent

When coupled with a view that there is no objective moral truth, I think it is, in most cases, philosophically incoherent to claim that total hedonic utility is all that matters.

If you believe in objective moral truth, it may make sense to say, “I value many things, but I have a moral obligation to prioritize only some of them” (for example, you might be convinced by arguments that you are objectively morally obliged to promote utility impartially even though that’s not the only value you have).

However, many EAs, like me, don’t believe in objective moral truth. If you don’t think that things can be objectively right or wrong, it doesn’t make sense (I claim) to say that you “should” prioritize maximizing utility for all of humanity over other values – what does this “should” even mean? Well, there are some answers for what this “should” could mean that philosophers and lay people have proposed, but I find them pretty weak.

For a much more in-depth discussion of this point (including an analysis of different ways that EAs have responded to my critique of pairing utilitarianism with denial of objective moral truth), see this essay. It collects may different objections (from EAs and from some philosophers) and discusses them. So if you are interested in whether it is or isn’t coherent to only value utility when you deny objective moral truth, and moreover, whether EAs and philosophers have good arguments for doing so, please see that essay.

I find that while many (perhaps the majority of) EAs deny objective moral truth, many still talk and think as though there is objective moral truth.

I found it striking that, in my conversations with EAs about their moral beliefs, few had a clear explanation for how to combine a belief in utilitarianism with a lack of a belief in objective moral truth, and the approaches to that that they did put forward were usually quite different from each other (suggesting, at the very least, a lack of consensus in how to support such a perspective). Some philosophers I spoke to pointed to other ways one might defend such a position (mainly drawn from the philosophical literature), but I don’t recall ever seeing these approaches being used or referenced by non-philosopher EAs (so they don’t seem to be doing much work in the beliefs of EAs who hold this view). 

I suspect it would help many EAs if they took a more Valuist approach: rather than claiming to or aspiring to only value hedonic utility, they could accept that while they do intrinsically value this – very likely far more than the average person – they also have other intrinsic values, for example, truth (which I think is another very important psychological value for many EAs), their own happiness, and the happiness of their loved ones.

Valuism also avoids some of the most awkward bullets that EAs sometimes are tempted to bite. For instance, hedonic utilitarianism seems to imply that your own happiness and the happiness of your loved ones “shouldn’t” matter to you even a tiny bit more than the happiness of a stranger who is certain to be born 1,000,000 years from now. Valuism may explain why people who identify as hedonic utilitarians may feel a great deal of internal conflict about this – even if you value the happiness of all sentient beings a tremendous amount, you almost certainly have other intrinsic values too. That means that Valuism may help you avoid some of the awkward conundrums that arise from ethical monism (where you assume that there is only one thing of value).

Valuism and the EA Community

From a Valuist perspective, I see the EA community as a group of people who share a primary intrinsic value of hedonic utility (i.e., reducing suffering and increasing happiness impartially) with a secondary strong intrinsic value of truth-seeking. Oddly (from my point of view) EAs are very aware of their intrinsic value of impartial hedonic utility, but seem much less aware of their truth-seeking intrinsic value. On a number of occasions, I’ve seen mental gymnastics used to justify truth-seeking in terms of increasing hedonic utility when (I claim) a much more natural explanation is that truth-seeking is an intrinsic value (not just an instrumental value that leads to greater hedonic utility). This helps explain why many EAs are so averse to ever lying and so averse even to persuasive marketing.

Each individual EA has other intrinsic values beyond impartial utility and truth-seeking, but in my view, those two values help define EA and make it unique. This is also a big part of why this community resonates with me: those are my top two universal intrinsic values as well.

If more EAs adopted Valuism, I think that they would almost all continue to devote a large fraction of their time and energy toward improving the world effectively. Maximizing global hedonic utility (i.e., the sum of happiness minus suffering for conscious beings) is the strongest universal intrinsic value of most community members, so it would still play the largest role in determining their goals and actions, even after much reflection. 

However, they would also feel more comfortable investing in their own happiness and the happiness of their loved ones at the same time, which I predict would make them happier and reduce burnout. Additionally (I claim), they’d accept that, like many effective altruists, they also have a strong intrinsic value of truth. They’d strike a balance between their various intrinsic values, and not endorse annihilating all their intrinsic values except for one.

I published this piece on this site on March 10, 2023.

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You’ve just finished the second post in my sequence of essays on my life philosophy, Valuism – click here to go to the fourth post.

This is the first of five posts in my sequence of essays about my life philosophy, Valuism – here are the second, third, fourth, and fifth parts.

Many of us struggle at times to know what to do. We are surrounded by conflicting advice about how to live our lives – from our parents, peers, and communities, from ancient philosophers, and from modern gurus and intellectuals. Faced with these conflicting opinions and a limited amount of time until we die, what should we focus our lives on?

In this post, I offer one answer to this question: my life philosophy, which I call Valuism. Simply put, if you’re a Valuist, you first work to figure out what you intrinsically value¹, and then you try to use effective methods to create more of what you intrinsically value.

Note that the phrase “intrinsic value” refers here to something you value for its own sake rather than something you value merely as a means to other ends. In other words, intrinsic values are things you would value having there be more of even if nothing else occurs as a consequence. Some intrinsic values we are born with, and others we develop through our experiences.

Your own happiness is probably one of your intrinsic values; subsequently, if you’re a Valuist, one of your aims is to become happy using effective approaches (e.g., by building healthy relationships with good people whom you are compatible with). Similarly, if you value justice, you work to create justice via effective means. If your intrinsic values include the well-being of others – as almost everyone’s do – you aim to improve the well-being of those others using effective approaches.

Like most people, you likely have more than one intrinsic value.

If you’re a Valuist, you recognize that you have multiple intrinsic values and strive to find the right balance between them; you may invest more time in some intrinsic values because they are more important to you or easier to create, but you don’t treat any of them as being worthless.

(Note: If you happen to identify as a utilitarian and believe that you only have one intrinsic value – the happiness of all conscious beings considered equally – you may want to check your reactions on these thought experiments to put that theory to the test.)

Here are some intrinsic values examples (of common intrinsic values that westerners have):

Let’s explore why one might adopt a Valuist approach.

Why be a Valuist?  

There is no moral imperative to be a Valuist. But here’s a simple argument for Valuism that some people find compelling:

There are some things that you value. But for most of these things, you value them only because they get you other things that you care about; that is, most of our values are instrumental, not intrinsic. For example, you very likely value having cash, but you value it only because it enables you to get other things you want (food, shelter, peace of mind, travel, convenience, status, pleasure, etc.), so cash is not something you intrinsically value.

Intrinsic values are the things that you value for their own sake, upon reflection; you value them not as means to other ends. In other words, you would want to create more of them even if doing so caused no other good thing to occur. You wouldn’t value cash if you couldn’t use it for anything. On the other hand, you very likely value your happiness even if it causes no additional positive consequences: your happiness is almost certainly one of your intrinsic values. In a sense, intrinsic values are the only things that you fundamentally value.

As mentioned, Valuism proposes that you carefully figure out what you intrinsically value and then aim to effectively produce those things. By “effectively,” I mean using strategies that really work well.

But why should you bother trying to produce more of what you intrinsically value? Well, simply because you fundamentally value those things. You are not necessarily “wrong,” “immoral,” or “irrational” if you don’t create more of what you intrinsically value – but you are, in that case, producing less of what you consider fundamentally valuable. Valuism is not telling you to give in to momentary urges – rather, it’s saying to use effective methods to produce what you value (upon careful reflection and introspection).

Why does Valuism have an emphasis on effective methods? Because if you value there being more of something, you implicitly prefer methods that produce more of that thing, rather than less. In other words, preferring effective methods for creating a value (over ineffective ones) is a logical consequence of having that value in the first place.

As we’ll discuss later in the essay, the Valuist approach to life ends up being quite different from how most people live. It also comes with a number of side benefits.

“The single most important moment of my life was when I sat and decided what I valued. I ended up writing what I value as soon as I wake up every morning. The year I started doing that was the happiest of my life. You might be onto something!” -John Salter

Advantages of Valuism  

I believe that Valuism offers many advantages compared to the way that many people live. For example, as a Valuist:

You’ll be less likely to confuse your instrumental and intrinsic values 

Valuists work to clearly distinguish their instrumental values from their intrinsic ones, which helps them avoid the “value traps” of mistakenly pursuing instrumental values. 

You’ll be more likely to strategically pursue what you fundamentally value

Therefore, you’ll probably create more of what you value. You might try to make your habits work in favor of your intrinsic values rather than against them: for example, if you value health, you might make a habit of walking part of the way to work. You’ll also aim to prevent urges, mimicry, trauma, or default paths from derailing your plans to produce what you value.

You’ll prioritize your values in a balanced way

You’ll take into account how much you care about each of them and how easy each is to create – rather than neglecting any of them or letting one take over your whole value system. Valuists carefully reflect on the tradeoffs between intrinsic values and pursue them in accordance with how much they are valued and how easy they are to create in a given scenario.

An additional advantage of Valuism over some other life philosophies (such as most flavors of utilitarianism) is that it doesn’t rely on you believing in objective moral truth. Back in my early 20s, I considered myself something like a classical utilitarian; at the time, I thought that the only thing that matters is maximizing utility for conscious beings across the universe. 

But on further reflection, I came to realize that I don’t believe in objective moral truth: I don’t think moral propositions such as “it’s right to maximize the flourishing of all conscious beings” can be true or false³.

This got me to wonder: what does it mean to say that I “should” maximize utility if there is no such thing as objective morality? I don’t think statements like “You should do X” are coherent unless they have an (explicit or implicit) objective, such as “You should do X if you want to achieve Y.”

(If you’d like to explore this tension between moral anti-realism and some flavors of effective altruism in more detail, see this essay I wrote about it). 

After many years of reflecting on this topic, I developed the idea of Valuism because I wanted to answer this question: “How do I decide what to do, given that I don’t think there is any objective moral truth?” If there’s not an objective answer to this question, at least there is an answer implied by what I fundamentally value. Valuism can be a source of meaning without requiring belief in objective moral truth – whether or not your values are “objectively valuable,” they are valuable to you! If you think “objective moral truth” is non-existent (or is an incoherent concept or human construction) then Valuism gives you a path towards meaning without requiring objectivity.

There’s no metaphysical obligation on you to be a Valuist, but if you are, it will likely cause you to produce more of what you actually value (i.e., precisely what fundamentally matters to you).

Can a Valuist also be an X?

Valuism is compatible with a wide variety of other philosophical beliefs. For instance, it’s compatible with a variety of meta-ethical views, including error theory, non-cognitivism, relativism, and subjectivism – see the diagram below – as well as intuitive and evolutionary-biology-based approaches to ethics. If you happen to be religious, it can also fit in with a religious worldview.

Even if you’re not sure whether or not there is such a thing as objective moral truth, Valuism could still be helpful for you. For example, if you think that there is a 20% probability of objective moral truth, then you may want to act in such a way as to combine what you think objective moral truth would dictate with what your values would dictate. Valuism may also give you a way to decide what to do in domains that are not governed by your morality. Even if you are really confident in the existence of objective moral truth, you could still incorporate Valuism into your worldview if you believe that objective moral truth is not maximally demanding and hence shouldn’t guide all your actions (i.e., Valuism can help you figure out what to do with regard to those other actions)².

Is Valuism selfish?

At first glance, this might seem like a selfish philosophy: does Valuism just mean looking after your own interests? No, not even close. Almost everyone (as we found in our research) has at least some intrinsic values that are not just about the self. In addition to values related to the self (e.g., “I value my own happiness”), people usually have values about their communities ( e.g., “I value that my friends and loved ones get the things that they want”) and “universal” intrinsic values that involve wanting good things for people beyond the people they personally know as well as abstract values that don’t pertain to people at all (e.g., “I value that people and animals all around the world don’t suffer” or “I value that all humans are treated fairly” or “I value fairness”).

Some of my own most important intrinsic values are:

• Universal
  • reducing suffering and increasing happiness for conscious beings
  • promoting truth and reducing falsehood
• Community
  • the happiness (and lack of suffering) of my loved ones
• Self
  • my own happiness (and lack of suffering)
  • not harming others with my behavior
  • believing true things and not false things
  • being honest
  • sticking to my commitments
  • being kind and having positive intent towards others

My aim in life is to increase these (and the other things that I intrinsically value).

Is Valuism just what most people already do?

Another common reaction to Valuism is: “Isn’t Valuism just telling you to do what you’re already doing? Aren’t most people already just figuring out what they value and then pursuing those values?” No! That’s not nearly as common as you might think.

The Valuist life philosophy differs from how most people live in many ways. In particular:

Most people haven’t spent much time thinking about what their intrinsic values are.

This means that they sometimes do things like accidentally pursue the intrinsic values of the people around them rather than their own intrinsic values. For instance, your parents might care a lot about you having a job that garners “respect,” whereas you may not value this at all – but you might end up becoming a doctor anyway, thanks to their influence.

People often don’t cleanly distinguish between intrinsic values and instrumental values. 

They often pursue instrumental values way past the point that makes sense for non-intrinsic values. For example, many people end up mindlessly trying to earn more money even when they can afford everything they possibly want, and more money wouldn’t help them achieve any more of their intrinsic values.

People often underinvest in plans around their intrinsic values. 

They usually don’t spend lots of time thinking about, making strategies around, and taking action in order to effectively create more of what they intrinsically value. For instance, people who strongly intrinsically value love may not be thoughtful enough about who they decide to become friends with – and end up surrounding themselves with people who aren’t very loving. And people who intrinsically value the happiness of people all around the world often donate to charities that are not very cost-effective. 

People often do not think carefully about the tradeoffs between their intrinsic values.

People may over-prioritize some values relative to how much they value them and how easy they are to create. Some are overly influenced by their family – think of people who go into a career they hate because their family expects it of them. Others over-prioritize values due to routine or a lack of reflection – think of people who always see the same friends because it’s who they’re used to making plans with, even though they haven’t meshed for years. 

And some people let a specific philosophical value take over their whole value system. This can arise when people bite a philosophical bullet. For example, when they’re in a debate with someone more well-versed in the philosophy literature, they may fail to come up with a reason to value anything other than the happiness of all conscious beings equally, so they conclude they must only care about other things (like justice, equality, or the satisfaction of their own preferences) as a means to this other end.

In fact, people are mostly guided by forces other than their intrinsic values. For instance, our behavior is heavily influenced by: 

• Habits – we do things because we’ve done them that way many times before, automatically and without thinking about it.
• Urges, appetites, and addictions – we have primal urges to do things, such as to eat ten cookies (long past the point where we are really enjoying the cookies anymore). We can get addicted to things that we don’t value.
• Pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain in the present – of course, most of us have our own present pleasure (and lack of pain) as intrinsic values, but it’s easy to pursue these past the point where we intrinsically value them (at the expense of our other intrinsic values). For example, we might spend excessive time playing video games or avoid going to the dentist.
• Mimicry – we have a drive to do what others are doing.
• Trauma triggers – we sometimes act out of distress because something has reminded us of past trauma, even when the present environment is completely safe. 
• Conventional paths and defaults – we often follow standard paths instead of thinking about what would create the most of what we intrinsically value.

The upshot here is that people very often make choices that are not aligned with their intrinsic values.

What does it mean to “value” something, and what are intrinsic values?

You might think, “Ok, I’m convinced that I should try to create more of what I intrinsically value – but what do I intrinsically value?” We actually developed a test that will help you work out your intrinsic values! 

An intrinsic value is something that you value in itself (i.e., for its own sake) and not merely because of its consequences. We can distinguish these from things we value instrumentally – that is, things we value only because they help us get (or create) more of other things.

Here is the values wheel that we created to illustrate the different categories of intrinsic values we found in our research:

Most people value money, but probably no one values money intrinsically; people only value money because they can use it to buy other things that they value. Imagine if money didn’t let you buy anything, didn’t give you any power, prestige, or positive feelings, and it couldn’t even be burned for warmth. Clearly, in that case, it would be worthless – so it lacks intrinsic value. The experience of happiness isn’t like this (for almost everyone). You value feeling happy even if nothing else comes about as a result of that happiness.

What does it mean to “value” something? I use the term “value” in a purely psychological, empirical sense. That is, I’m referring to facts about your brain. Your brain can perform various operations (such as making predictions about what’s about to happen, or imagining a hypothetical scenario, or evaluating how “true” something you just said feels to you). One such operation is considering a state of the world and judging how valuable it is (to you) – our brains seem to have a basic operation related to assigning value to states of the world.  Value comes in degrees and can be positive, neutral (i.e., zero value), or negative. These degrees of valuing can be very fine-grained. We can feel that one thing is just slightly better than another –  e.g., we might do a taste test and decide we get just slightly more pleasure from one flavor of ice cream than another. However, introspection can be challenging, and there can be significant uncertainty in our reflections on value.

Let’s unpack a bit more what it means to assign value to a state of the world. Imagine yourself or someone you love feeling happy and reflect on the value of that state. You’ll find that your brain assigns positive value to that state. Similarly, if you imagine you or someone you love being harmed and reflect on the value of that state, you’ll find that you assign it negative value. Still, other things, like the state of the world where a new stone is added to a pile of stones on a random mountain, are likely to be assigned no value by your brain – that is, you consider the world to have equal amounts of value whether that stone is in that pile or not. In other words, when you reflect on certain potential states of the world, you have the internal experience (qualia) that they are good, bad, or neutral.

But how can you tell the difference between what you intrinsically value and what you value merely instrumentally? Unfortunately, our brains don’t automatically separate the things we intrinsically value from the things we value instrumentally. At first blush, valued states of the world feel the same, whether we value them intrinsically or not. To tell the difference, we need to use thought experiments. 

One way to work out whether something is one of your intrinsic values is by asking yourself, “if this were created, but it didn’t bring any other positive consequences, would I still value it?” For example, you surely value having food. But if you had a pile of “food,” but it contained no nutritional value, you derived no pleasure from eating it, it didn’t have any pleasant aromas or aesthetic value, and nobody else wanted it, would you actually still value it? Probably not – hence food is not an intrinsic value, despite being something that we all value (instrumentally). 

We can distinguish “valuing” something from being persuaded (on a purely intellectual level) that something is good. You might be convinced by a logical argument that something is objectively “good” in an abstract rather than intuitive sense, but still not actually value it; similarly, you might value something even though you’re convinced by a logical argument that it’s not a good thing. For example, imagine that a friend is trying to convince you that it’s bad to destroy plants. They make a strong argument, and you fail to find any flaws in it, so you accept it. You now would agree that you believe the phrase “it’s bad to destroy plants.” But even so, when you consider a state of the world where plants are being destroyed, your brain may not assign a negative value to it. You may feel that that state is neutral, despite being intellectually convinced that the phrase “it’s bad to destroy plants” is a fact. 

If you reject objective moral truth, you may think that we can’t logically prove that things are “good” or “bad” in this way; but some people are convinced by these arguments. Being purely intellectually convinced that something is good is different from actually valuing it – when your brain does its “is that valuable?” operation. However, being intellectually convinced that something is good or bad can eventually turn into valuing or disvaluing that thing. Whereas initially, you may merely fail to refute an abstract argument and decide that intellectually you agree with it, at some point, the inbuilt valuing mechanism in your brain may start to assign value that aligns with that argument.

We can also distinguish valuing from wanting (or desiring). You can want something but not value it – for example, a devout virgin nun might feel strong sexual desire even if she doesn’t value sex (i.e., her brain assigns a negative value to the state of the world where she’s had sex). Wants can also fluctuate moment-to-moment: for example, you might see a cupcake and immediately desire to eat it, but after a moment’s reflection (during which you look at the calorie count), you realize you no longer want it. Valuing, on the other hand, tends to lead to more stable conclusions. Your values might change over time, but we don’t usually value something in the morning and disvalue it in the afternoon. 

You can also value something but not want it at a particular moment. For example, even if you really value your own pleasure, you probably don’t want to experience pleasure at all moments – such as at a friend’s funeral. 

It’s often pretty easy to pick out what we value; it can be more complicated to determine which of our values are intrinsic rather than instrumental. It’s easy to mistake instrumental values for intrinsic ones. We often think that we intrinsically value a thing, only to discover, on reflection, that we only instrumentally value it. Here are some hypothetical examples:

• Althea believed that she intrinsically valued freedom, but she realized after a while that she only valued freedom because she thinks that people are happier when they’re freer. If people with more freedom had no additional happiness, she wouldn’t actually value freedom. So the happiness of others is an intrinsic value for Althea, but freedom is only an instrumental value (because she only values it insofar as it produces happiness).
• Brian loves his wife and thinks that he intrinsically values being married. However, he later realizes that what he values about marriage is loving and being loved – and that marriage just serves as a sign and symbol of that love.
  

We need to reflect carefully to work out what we intrinsically value. Imagine a person who is pursuing a prestigious law career. They’re sure that they value career success – but do they value it intrinsically? Perhaps they just value it instrumentally as a way to get other things – for example, money, the approval of family or peers, or as a way to influence the world for the better. Or maybe they are just mimicking the decisions of their best friend who is pursuing a similar career.

Conclusion

Valuism is a philosophy I just recently gave a name to, and I think it’s likely that some of the details will be adjusted and improved as I (and hopefully others) continue to develop the idea. 

Is Valuism new, though? Not really – I think that lots of people are already implicitly Valuists (without necessarily realizing it). But I’ve never seen the philosophy given a name, nor have I seen an attempt to work out what precisely the philosophy is in detail. I hope that this essay serves as a first step in that direction.

If the ideas in this essay have resonated with you, I hope you’ll consider whether you, too, are a Valuist. Though it takes time and careful thought to work out what your intrinsic values are, I’ve found that once you do, this can be a very fruitful approach to life. When you know what your intrinsic values are, this helps you ensure that you are pursuing what you truly value. And by adopting the Valuist idea of not merely pursuing your intrinsic values but pursuing them effectively, it orients you toward how to create a lot of what you value. 

When it comes to your altruistic intrinsic values, Valuism naturally suggests that you aim to do more good rather than less good as best you can (within the scope of the time and effort that you decide to put into your altruistic values following a careful balancing of your values), which you might consider a form of effective altruism (EA), narrowed to the scope of your altruistic intrinsic values. If your altruistic intrinsic values are strong, and you aim to use reason and evidence to try to effectively create a large amount of them in the world, then you may be a Valuist EA.

I find it satisfying that Valuism gives me a frame for my life: to create that which I intrinsically value. Perhaps it can provide a frame for your life as well.

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

A big thanks goes to:

• Kat Woods for giving me the idea to call this philosophy “Valuism”
• Amber Dawn Ace for co-authoring this piece – Amber is not a Valuist, but she was indispensable in helping me organize and explain my ideas
• The many folks who provided valuable edits on this piece (and the accompanying other parts to this series), including Travis Manuel, Adam Binks, Amanda Metskas, Clare Harris, David Hartsough, and Kat Woods.

I’ll end with a poem that Kat Woods created from words that Tyler Alterman wrote, which to me reflects some key elements of Valuism:

You’ve just finished the first post in my sequence of essays on my life philosophy, Valuism – click here to go to the second post.

Please note that Valuism is a work in progress. I may update this (and the other accompanying) essays as my views continue to become clearer or more accurate.

Footnotes

1. Note that there are different uses of the phrase “intrinsic value.” What I mean by “intrinsic value” is what some others have called “final value,” or “non-derivative value,” or “terminal value”. I do not mean simply “value that supervenes on intrinsic properties.”

2. I’ve heard it argued that “if there is no objective moral truth, then there is nothing that you should do, so even if you assign a small probability to objective moral truth (even if it’s an incredibly small probability!), you should act as though it’s true.” A flaw in this line of thinking is that even if there is nothing that you objectively should do, there are still things that you value, and so by only focusing on an objective moral truth that you think is unlikely to exist, things that are valuable to you are sacrificed in the process. So, for instance, you may miss out on creating a lot of happiness for yourself or other things that you intrinsically value (hence there is a real cost).

3. Another philosophical viewpoint is that moral claims are the sort of thing that can be true or false, and they just all are false. Either way, objective morality is rejected, leaving a philosophical gap regarding what to do in one’s life. The philosophical viewpoint I’m aware of that is most similar to Valuism is Individual Subjectivism, which is a form of Normative Subjectivism/Ethical Subjectivism. However, it is not the same as Valuism for a variety of reasons, as GPT-4/ChatGPT explains here.

Lately, I’ve been trying to accept a bit more awkwardness (rather than reflexively avoiding it) in cases where I think doing so can produce value.

Here are four areas where I’m leaning more into awkwardness:

1. When asked for feedback on a project (and I think it will fail), I’m usually tempted to focus on what I like about it. 

I’ve now become more likely to explain what challenges I expect it to face (while suggesting routes to improvement).

I think that, usually, more value is produced by trying to help them succeed at their goals than by trying to help them feel good about their current plans. Ideally, though, this feedback is given in a way that is encouraging and not demoralizing.

2. When someone annoys or frustrates me (e.g., makes a request in a manner that bothers me), the easy thing is to ignore it. 

I’ve become more likely to gently tell the person that it bothered me and explain why – while trying to avoid making them feel attacked.

This gives others the opportunity to learn and improve, and also, I think, tends to strengthen your best relationships (by making them more open and honest, and by preventing you from feeling worse about your friends due to behaviors they were doing that they didn’t even realize were bothering you)

3. When I think someone is making a false claim, it reduces tension by just letting it go. 

Instead of letting it go, I’ve become more likely to tell them that I don’t agree with their point and explain why.

This gives us the best chance of arriving at more accurate beliefs together.

4. When there is something that I value, but it requires making a somewhat awkward request, the path of least resistance is to give up on it. 

I’ve become more likely to make the request while doing what I can to make it very easy and non-awkward for the other person to decline.

Often we can set up a situation so as to at least minimize the awkwardness for the other person (e.g., by giving them a simple way out of the request and making it clear you won’t be offended if they decline). By not making such requests at all, we end up missing out on opportunities that others would, in fact, be happy to provide for us.

I’m certainly not perfect at this. I still avoid awkwardness at times when more value is produced by pushing through it. But I’m getting better.

While awkwardness is certainly not a good thing, if you are too motivated to avoid it, then – much like with other forms of anxiety – you and others may miss out on a lot of value.

Of course, some people need the opposite advice – they put others into awkward situations too often or lack awareness of the awkwardness they create. And I think you should try to reduce awkwardness whenever there is not a good reason for it.

But if you (like me) tend to avoid awkwardness, it may be better to strategically lean into awkwardness in cases where more value is lost by avoiding it.

This piece was first written on September 25, 2022, and first appeared on this site on September 30, 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. The Wise Critic
Honesty + Courage = telling difficult truths that it’s important for others to hear.

Honesty without courage is still good and valuable, but you’re limited to telling easy truths.

2. The Protector
Compassion + Courage = protecting other people even when it is dangerous and difficult, such as when saving someone from a bully means risking being bullied yourself.

Compassion without courage is great, but it’s limited to certain kinds of help.

3. The True Friend
Loyalty + Courage = being on the side of your loved ones and those you are grateful to, even when it comes at significant personal risk.

Loyalty without courage is still really nice to have, but it limits the extent of that loyalty.

4. The World Changer
Justice + Courage = fighting against the status quo to make the world better and fairer.

Justice without courage is great at small scales, but courage is often needed to create widespread change.

5. The Investigator
Truth-seeking + Courage = uncovering what is true regardless of what you wish were true or what you get rewarded or punished for finding.

Truth-seeking without courage leads to truer beliefs, but only in domains where truth isn’t too inconvenient.

6. The Hero
Goodness + Courage = standing up against immoral behavior, even when that behavior is socially condoned or carried out by the powerful.

Goodness without courage is a wonderful quality, but it doesn’t effectively combat evil.

Courage can make good behavior better and bad behavior worse.
That’s why it’s not a virtue by itself. But a lack of courage limits one’s ability to do good. Don’t seek courage for its own sake. Cultivate it because it enhances your other virtues.

Many people do bad things not because they are bad people but because they lack the courage NOT to. Seek courage because it allows you to do the right thing in difficult situations.

Here is how others have put related ideas about courage:
“…courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions.”

-C.S. Lewis

“Courage is the most important of the virtues because, without it, no other virtue can be practiced consistently.”

-Maya Angelou

“Courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.”

-Samuel Johnson

“Who but a man of infinite courage could have dared to think those thoughts? That is the characteristic of great scientists; they have courage. They will go forward under incredible circumstances; they think and continue to think.”

-Richard Hamming

(Hat tip to @CallHimMoorlock and @alexisgallagher on Twitter for pointing me to some of these quotes.)

On a personal note, I’ve become more courageous over the years. I still have plenty of room for improvement, though, and it’s something I’d like to continue to work on.

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

This piece was first written on February 13, 2022, and first appeared on this site on February 3, 2023.

1. Mimicry: when our in-group promotes falsity that we copy

2. Incentives: when we predict that knowing the truth would feel bad or harm our objectives

3. Complexity: when the truth is hard to figure out

Examples:

1. Mimicry

• Some are Christians because all their friends and family are, too; some are atheists for the same reason.

• Some think that it makes sense to circumcise baby boys because the people they know think it’s healthy and normal; others think it’s bizarre because the people they know think foreskin is healthy and normal.

• Some believe it would harm Black Americans to defund police because their friends say so; others think it would help Black Americans because their friends say it.

2. Incentives

• If you make more money believing X, it’s going to be harder to stop believing it.

• If the idea of permanent death is terrifying to you, it’s going to be harder to stop believing in reincarnation.

• If it would make you feel really bad to find out you were wrong about something you posted online, your immediate reaction may be to deny being wrong (to others and to yourself) to shield yourself from the negative feelings.

Note that mimicry and incentives can blend together. Sometimes we mimic to fit in or to avoid being socially punished. But mimicry is even more basic than that: we seem to have a natural, in-built strong tendency to copy others. If all the people around us believe something, we usually will come to believe it too, without even questioning whether it might be false or even being aware that we copied the belief from others. 

If we see others all behave in a certain way, we’ll probably behave that way, too, unless we have strong reasons not to. This appears to be an evolutionary survival mechanism – it’s risky to (for example) eat plants that are different than the ones your tribe eats (they might be poisonous) or to avoid the behaviors everyone else does (those behaviors might be key to survival in some hidden way). In the wilderness, you can’t figure out how to survive from first principles (chances are you’ll die way too fast for that) – you need to mimic what has worked for centuries (some of which will be key to survival, some of which will be pointless, but evolutionary pressures will have weeded out most of the really harmful stuff and hung on to the most useful stuff).

3. Complexity

• It’s really not obvious how to prevent future risks from advanced artificial intelligence (though it often seems obvious to folks who’ve spent almost no time thinking about it).

• How best to prevent economic crashes is a fundamentally complicated question.

• Nobody actually seems to know how to cure cancers in general.

A weird thing about these three causes for believing falsehoods is that we are usually not aware of their effects.

1. We don’t usually realize it when we believe something just because we copied our social group.

2. We don’t usually realize when we believe something just because it would hurt us not to believe it.

3. We don’t usually realize when our analysis of a complex issue is oversimplified and misses important considerations.

Believing in falsehoods feels just like believing the truth – until the moment we genuinely face up to the possibility of being wrong.

So how do we be right more often?

1. To combat mimicry: we can keep our identities smaller (or have more of them), be more willing to be viewed as having “weird” beliefs, join social groups that value diversity of thought, learn to do less social mimicry (e.g., having greater skepticism towards in-group consensus). We can recognize that every in-group will get some things wrong (including ours) and that it’s worth investigating where ours is wrong. In summary, we can combat mimicry with social resilience and skepticism.

2. To combat harmful incentives: we can recognize that, while there can be short-term pain from accepting the truth, being truth-seeking is usually a better long-term strategy (especially because you can’t just suddenly decide to be truth-seeking when it’s convenient – it’s best to have a habit of being truth-seeking all the time). We can consider thought experiments like: “If X were true, would I rather believe it or be wrong about it?”. We can also leave “lines of retreat” so that we can decide what we’d do and how we’d move forward if we turn out to be wrong on something important. In summary, we can combat bad incentives with a Scout Mindset and a focus on seeking the truth.

3. To tackle complexity: we can use probabilistic thinking, consider multiple hypotheses, and consider the evidence for and against each one. We can train ourselves in evidence and argument evaluation, practice steel-manning arguments, talk to smart and knowledgeable people with different views and fight back against overconfidence (e.g., through calibration practice). We can also do large amounts of research when it’s important to be right. In summary, we can combat complexity with good epistemic hygiene, honed thinking skills, and self-skepticism.

This piece was first written on June 3, 2021, and first appeared on this site on November 11, 2022.

Increasingly, people in the U.S. are concluding that society is really F’d up. But the reasons are subtle, hidden, and complex, so each group picks their favorite simple enemy to blame. Problems go unfixed.

Points in favor of the claim that people are increasingly coming to this realization:

1. This helps explain Trump’s election in 2016. Many rural Republicans and disaffected independents believed society was going down the tubes. They didn’t think that electing the same people (who would use the same old solutions) would fix it.

2. COVID-19 exposed malfunctions of various authorities (the FDA, Surgeon General, CDC, etc.) that are pretty hard to ignore. Liberals blame Trump for these failures, which may be fair, but another possibility is that these American institutions have been rotting for a lot longer. I don’t know enough to say with confidence.

3. Costs for health care, education, housing, infrastructure projects, and energy ($ per kWh) have (as far as I can tell?) been rising for a long time, with debates raging over the (surely complex) causes. People feel the sting of these rising costs. Meanwhile, many argue that wages have stagnated (which has been vigorously debated). What’s more, inequality seems to have risen, though this, too, is debated.

4. An appalling number of people in the U.S. end up in jails and prisons. Shockingly, we have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. This is obvious to the communities that are most impacted. Though still awful, the numbers have fortunately been improving somewhat in recent years [H/T Alyssa Vance].

5. Student debt growth is out of control, and it’s hard for most students to ignore this.

6. People don’t have adequate savings, the saving rate seems to be relatively low, and a disturbing number say they don’t have enough cash to deal with emergencies. “About four out of 10 Americans said they had enough in savings to cover a surprise $500 expense. Another 21 percent said they would rely on a credit card, while 20 percent said they’d cut back on other expenses. Another 11 percent said they’d turn to family or friends for the money” (source). That being said, the wording of the survey that generated those results was rather confusing, so the results should be interpreted with caution. Note that “a 2016 study [found] that 76% of households had $400 in liquid assets, after…monthly expenses” (source).

7. There is a huge racial wealth gap (even more so than an income gap, I believe), contributing significantly to poorer quality of life for Black Americans.

8. Eric Weinstein’s “the Portal” podcast, which seeks to give explanations about what the hell has gone wrong in America, rose extremely rapidly to popularity. Its theories are quite interesting, in my opinion. It is nuanced (and hard to summarize), but it blames a significant portion of the problem on broken institutions that were predicated on rapid economic/productivity growth that we didn’t end up having, the collective behaviors of the Baby Boomer generation, misleading justifications given to us about immigration, a broken scientific establishment, and a propped up system of harmful deceptions.

So what’s really to blame for the U.S.’s problems?

Trump blames immigration, China, and the left.

The left blames Trump, Wall Street, the right, and (sometimes) capitalism/wealthy people/big tech.

Yang points to automation and globalization.

The BLM movement points to racism and police violence.

The right blames the left, declining moral values, and political correctness.

Libertarians (and the right, too) blame regulation and bloated government.

What seems to me to be the case: many of the explanations by different groups have some truth in them. But they are each only pointing at a part of a much greater problem without really getting to the core of it.

I think that many of the biggest issues in society are simply not being addressed, and their root causes go largely undiscussed. We are spoon-fed simple, misleading explanations for very complex things.

To solve complex problems, we have to know what’s true. To know what’s true, we need to resist political bias, wishful thinking, scapegoating, and overly simplistic (yet appealing) explanations.

To fix society, we must unearth the (hard to spot) root causes and cooperate in order to implement reasonable solutions.

What’s at stake here is way bigger than left, right, democrat, republican, or libertarian. What’s at stake here is the flourishing or decay of our society.

Is society actually getting worse, though? I think the perception is that it is. Is it actually worse than 50 years ago? I really doubt that. Is it worse than 15 years ago? It’s hard to say, and depends on what you care about, but it seems to be worse on at least some metrics, like: the cost of healthcare, the cost of education, student debt, inequality, political polarization, and so on. It’s also improved on some metrics, like GDP per capita. Any way you slice it, society has serious problems. Whether they’ve been getting worse on net is harder to say.

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

This piece was first written on September 1, 2020, and first appeared on this site on March 19, 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.