Newsletter
Practical Ethics and other things
July 4, 2025
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
I forgot to schedule last week’s newsletter, but the article has been up since Friday. Apologies. I won’t send it now, I’ll just stack the two this week.
It’s not a terrible thing, because I hate sending these three or more part articles. With this week’s newsletter, you’ll get all of my moral terrain thinking-articles together.
Main idea: To avoid rationalising poor ethical intuitions, we can use three tools to develop our ethical muscles. Sensitising ourselves to the small number of basic ethical motivations and the the mechanisms which allow us ignore them, before asking what a good person would do. It gets us most of the way there.
Main idea: Most people think better ethical decision-making is just a matter of stopping to think before acting. But many moral judgements are intuitive, and then we rationalise them to ourselves. We have to train both intuition and reasoning, not rely on one to correct the other.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is the idea that:
People base their perceptions of performance, in part, on their preconceived notions about their skills. Because these notions often do not correlate with objective performance, they can lead people to make judgments about their performance that have little to do with actual accomplishment.
It has had trouble surviving the replication crisis. This is basically because of noise. People who are bad at things will score badly, and so will people who have bad luck. People who are good at things will score well, and so will people with good luck. If they rate their ability to perform, unlucky people will over-estimate and lucky people will under-estimate.
Most damningly, if you do random-number simulations, you will get a similar pattern.
Except this isn’t actually damning, it’s just confusing. If you sort high and low scorers, lucky and unlucky scorers, and random data into a line from high-to-low, you will get a line from high-to-low. It would be weird if you didn’t.
It would also be really if people who were bad at things didn’t over-estimate their performance. Probably, it’s that experts are just more ‘lucky’—they make fewer errors, and poor performers are less ‘lucky’—they make more errors.
Anyway, people are fighting. but what’s interesting to me is that it seems to imply, it may not so much be ignorance that makes us overconfident as the contextual noise. An error in conclusion I’ve made myself
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I think a lot of people intuitively like the kind of “calculus of pain and pleasure” that utilitarianism offers. But it often falls short of answering important ethical questions. That’s why there’s heaps of approaches. And as Roberts suggests, it leads to some pretty strange ways of thinking (to me). For example, I point out elsewhere:
There this way of thinking that says, if we just increase overall economic wealth, everyone will be better off (think economists like Tyler Cowan, or lots of the EA folks). You know, bring the average up, and that’ll bring everyone up, sort of thing. These are also often the people who often think things like affirmative action and DEI policies are obstacles to this kind of economic growth
[but] there seems something quite odd about preferring future, hypothetical people over the suffering of real, current people
And also the measures we use are troubling, as that marginalia points out.
Anyway. Here is a detailed, multi-part critique of utilitarianism. See also my own practical ethics, which isn’t quite there yet, but is getting there.
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The Risks and Social Costs of High Culture:
High culture now functions like a counterculture, entailing a conscious act of dissent from the mainstream … it carries more social risk than reward. Preferring things that are old, distant, and difficult to those that are immediate and ubiquitous means alienating oneself from one’s community, in some cases from one’s own family. It is at best an inexplicable quirk, at worst a form of antisocial arrogance.
I’m… actually not sure how this is distinguishable from elitism, except the social distance is framed as a bad thing rather than the point of being elitist?
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On the possibilities for secure digital personhood. I am fairly obsessed with this, but my only project on it isn’t very user-friendly. Nor is this. But if you’re obsessed with digital personhood, you might like it too.
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Are intelligentsia less happy? An argument for why intelligent people are less happy—because intelligence does not measure how good you are at solving the poorly defined problems of life.
People love ‘g’—the general mental ability Spearman was measuring. It predicts all sorts of things. But it’s not really clear what it is. Maybe processing speed?. This guy thinks we could extend that to speed at ‘well-defined problems’:
Spearman … did not, as he claimed, observe a “continued tendency to success throughout all variations of both form and subject-matter,” nor has anybody else. It merely looks as if we’ve varied all the forms and the subject-matters because we have the wrong theory about what makes them different … I think a good name for problems like these is well-defined … problems
But perhaps not to ‘poorly defined problems’ like raising a family well.
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God without god. Hard to explain in a marginalia. But there is this ‘hard’ problem of consciousness (not conscious access). Why do we have experiences? The pain of being slapped, the beauty of a natural vista, the feeling of hunger. None of these things seem necessary to produce behaviour. You could imagine a robot that responds to slaps without experiencing them. So we often try to explain consciousness in a material world that seems to not need it (though see the paragraph in my linked article about non-materialism).
An entirely different way to explain experiences is to say that, rather than consciousness coming from the material world, maybe the material world comes from the experientail world. Start with experiences and explain the physical, rather than starting with the physical and explaining the experiential. Since it’s literally anyone’s guess where consciousness comes from, it’s perfectly valid to consider.
If I’ve kept you so far, this is fun because she is building on the classical idealist view that, on this view, god must exist. The classic view is that, if the physical world is made of experiences, then something has to be experiencing it for it to exist when we stop—when we close our eyes, or fall asleep.
Yetter-Chappell says:
There must be something outside of us that can sustain objects when we are not perceiving them, and account for the regularity of our perceptions. But this needn’t be a god in any recognizable sense. It need not be omnibenevolent, omnipotent, or omniscient. There is no reason it must contain desires, intentions, or beliefs, or even be an agent. What’s crucial for ensuring the persistence and stability of the cake closed in my fridge is simply that there be a unified experience that encompasses all aspects of it.
In this case, it might be some kind of “tapestry” woven of innumerable experiential threads. My experiences mingled with yours and the other experiencing creatures in the world all maintain it. Fun
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The Personal and Private Nature of Smartphones:
because smartphones are considerably more personal and private than PCs, using them activates intimate self-knowledge and increases private self-focus, shifting attention toward individuating personal preferences, feelings, and inner states
This is precisely the kind of thing I’m talking about what I complain that the idea that social media is bad is too simplistic. The effects of social media are extremely unclear, because we’re responding to an environment that’s unclear (see also this). Social media might be problematic, but probably the effects have much deeper roots than simply that.
See also amusing ourselves to death, on the medium and the message.
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Love is about betterment. Love, in the ancient Greek world, is not about sacrifice but eudaemonia:
Diotima shows Socrates that love is a kind of joint ascension towards something greater. Love leads us towards good and beautiful things, the highest of which is knowledge. Loving then, according to Diotima, is helping each other to become better people
Probably, not enough is written about friendship. But love is about friendship first. See also romantic friendship.
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Romantic Friendships and Their Unique Dynamics:
there is nothing essential or inevitable about the ways we conceive of romantic relationships
Romantic friendships take some of the elements of a traditional romantic relationship – the desire for intimacy, the commitment to build one’s life around another person, and even sex – without having to take all of them at once
Probably, not enough is written about friendship. But love is about friendship first. See also Socrates (Plato) on friendship.
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I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,