Analects

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Analects

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I describe five levels that help understand how good people do bad things—neural, cognitive, situational, social, and cultural. Inject some norms into the stack, and you can explain (and predict) moral behaviour.

Navigating Moral Terrain: the ETHIC Stack

audio

I wrote a series of papers on practical ethics. I didn’t really like those articles. But I was inspired to write a 45-page treatise on the behavioural science of ethical behaviour. There’s no way you’re going to want to read that, so I made this instead. An AI generated podcast, and a short little explainer. If you like how the water looks, I assure you, it’s plenty deep.
I describe five levels that help understand how good people do bad things—neural, cognitive, situational, social, and cultural. Inject some norms into the stack, and you can explain (and predict) moral behaviour.

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marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

Against McAskillian Longtermism:

Whatever is wrong with utilitarians who advocate the murder of a million for a 0.0001 percent reduction in the risk of human extinction, it isn’t a lack of computational power. Morality isn’t made by us—we can’t just decide on the moral truth—but it’s made for us: it rests on our common humanity

See also anti-consequentialism, and anti-utilitarian economics.


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marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

Ethical astrology:

Astrological forecasting tends to describe the future more thematically or archetypically than concretely, and the vast majority of astrological prediction today falls into this category … Horoscopes work this way

Astrological prediction, wielded gently and skillfully, can help to “spot the meaning and the movement [going forward] by looking to what is different,”

The downside to the immense meaning-making potential of astrology? It renders the practice vulnerable to misuse by uncareful types with dubious commitment to honorable behavior.

See also the placebo effect.


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marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

The continued failure of the economy of small pleasures.

extrinsic incentives such as money or grades to learn [make it] harder to learn new related information when that incentive is gone … the learning outcome may be poorer due to the absence of reward

Actually, speaks a bit to the value of violence (or, rather, the lack thereof).


filed under:

marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

The deterministic view of free will always seems to cause such furore, forgetting that whether free will exists or not, this world is so intractably complex that for almost all practical purposes, it doesn’t matter. See also the arguments againse free well. See also AI predicting your brain activity into the future..


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