You can’t buy back time once you’ve spent it

February 24, 2023

There's a deep and surprising sense in which money can't be "wasted" from a bird's eye perspective - only resources and people's time can be wasted. If someone "wastes" $100, someone else now has $100 extra to spend. Even burning bills deflates the currency, making other bills more valuable. But people's time genuinely can be wasted. The tragedy of someone spending hundreds of millions of dollars building a yacht is not the dollars spent but the enormous quantity of people's time and all ...

Four forces that tend to promote or impede ethical behavior

December 9, 2022

In my view, there are "four forces" behind why humans avoid unethical behavior. I think understanding these forces can be useful when seeking to explain people's actions (especially when someone does something truly terrible). Ethical force 1: Emotion The vast majority of us experience empathy and compassion. We tend to feel happy when seeing others happy and feel bad when we see others suffering. These feelings guide our ethical behavior at an interpersonal level, causing proso...

Arguments For and Against Longtermism

August 30, 2022

Thanks to William MacAskill's excellent new book on the topic (What We Owe the Future), lots of people are talking about longtermism right now. For those not familiar with the concept, "longtermism" is the ethical view that "positively influencing the long-term future should be a key moral priority of our time." Below are some of my favorite arguments for longtermism, followed by some of my favorite against it. Note that I borrow from Will's book heavily here in the section on arguments ...

Understand how other people think: a theory of worldviews

June 29, 2022

This piece was coauthored with Amber Dawn Ace. 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 ...

Ten weird moral theories

March 19, 2021

1. Occamism: the simpler a moral theory is, the more likely it is to be true. Hence (a priori), the most probable two moral theories are that (a) everything is permissible or that (b) nothing is. 2. Majoritarianism: an action is morally right if and only if the majority of conscious beings capable of understanding that action and its consequences think it's right. 3. Restraintism: if you have the desire to do something, then you don't get moral credit for doing ...

A good manager CARES: the five aspects of being a good team manager

October 22, 2019

What makes for a good manager of a team? Below is a little framework I made to help answer this question, which I call: "a Good Manager C.A.R.E.S." Sometimes managers as a group get a bad reputation. Some people even wonder whether managers are needed at all since they don't seem to do any of the "real work." There are also plenty of bad managers who actually impede the people they manage. And there's the pretty common phenomenon of a company having too many managers, which leads to frus...

The Poison-Cactus-Vampire-Ward Problem

August 6, 2017

The Poison-Cactus-Vampire-Ward Problem, an ethics and "fairness" thought experiment I wrote for you in which your moral intuitions are represented as a number between 0 and 100: Suppose there are two villages, "Parvitas" and "Amplus," which are a 5-minute walk apart. Once per month, when the full moon is out, all men, women, children, and wizards of the two villages must meet to conduct the vampire ward ritual. The ritual requires all people from BOTH villages to be chanting at the same time...

What is the REAL effect of circumcising men?

January 27, 2014

Those who grow up in the U.S. are often surprised to find out that in many European countries almost no men are circumcised. In the U.S., where the majority of men have had the procedure performed on them, it is pretty common to hear people say that foreskin is unclean, ugly, or even unhealthy. On the other hand, Europeans tend to find the idea of circumcision bizarre. "Why would you cut off a healthy part of your body?", they wonder. And "How would you feel about a culture that cut off their ch...