Arjun Panickssery

Con­sider work­ing more hours and tak­ing more stimulants

• Arjun PanicksseryOct 14, 2022, 4:45 AM

  3 points

  1 ∶ 2

  on: Against the nor­ma­tive re­al­ist’s wager

  Disclaimer: I didn’t read the whole post

  But taking just this wager:

  If moral realism is true, I’ll give you a hundred dollars. If it’s false, I’ll burn you, your family, and a hundred innocent children alive.

  You should accept this wager, since if moral realism is false then by definition it doesn’t matter whether anyone is tortured or not.

  I didn’t follow the meaningfulness to the argument of the natural/​non-natural distinction but from this quote it looks like your view doesn’t depend on it:

  tricky objection: namely, that this deal seems bad even if you have this pattern of credences – i.e., even if non-naturalist realism and nihilism are genuinely the only live options. That is, you may notice that you don’t want to be burned alive, even if nihilism is true, and it doesn’t matter that you’re being burned alive

  The perception you notice is just an intuition against moral non-realism. If moral realism isn’t true, it doesn’t matter what you want.

• Arjun PanicksseryOct 9, 2022, 7:15 PM

  6 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Why defen­sive writ­ing is bad for com­mu­nity epistemics

  And what you optimise for should depend on what you’re writing. Sometimes I primarily optimise for A) making readers have true beliefs about what I believe. Other times I primarily optimise for B) providing readers with tools that help them come to their own conclusions.

  When I’m doing B, it doesn’t matter what they believe I believe. If out of ten things I say, nine will be plain wrong, but one thing will be so right that it helps the reader do something amazing with their lives, I consider that a solid success.

  cf. https://​​slatestarcodex.com/​​2019/​​02/​​26/​​rule-genius-in-not-out/​​

The Biggest Prob­lem with Deon­tol­ogy: The Ag­gre­ga­tion Problem

• Arjun PanicksseryOct 7, 2022, 9:27 PM

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: peterhartree’s comment on: Our Bor­ing Ad­vice For Teens

  Was just about to post this

  I also like Scott Adams’s list of generic skills that “make you luckier” if you’re good at most of them:

  Public speaking
  Psychology
  Business Writing
  Accounting
  Design (the basics)
  Conversation
  Overcoming Shyness
  Second language
  Golf
  Proper grammar
  Persuasion
  Technology ( hobby level)
  Proper voice technique

  (though some—golf stands out—are kind of idiosyncratic)

• Arjun PanicksseryOct 7, 2022, 9:25 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: peterhartree’s comment on: Our Bor­ing Ad­vice For Teens

  Where

• Arjun PanicksserySep 12, 2022, 3:01 PM

  15 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: Con­tra Ap­piah Defend­ing Defend­ing “Cli­mate Villains”

  Disclaimer: I did not read this post

  But I think Michael Huemer’s 2014 paper “Devil’s Advocates: On the Ethics of Unjust Legal Advocacy” is relevant here: https://​​philpapers.org/​​archive/​​HUEDAO.pdf

  Most legal professionals would confidently reject my proposal in favor of some version of Devil’s Advocacy, the view that a lawyer should pursue his client’s interests without regard to justice. But the confidence with which lawyers advance this view is not matched by the arguments in its support. Some appeal to the impossibility of being absolutely certain of a client’s guilt, but this hardly seems to explain why pursuing an outcome that one believes to be in the client’s interest is more important than avoiding something that is almost certainly a serious injustice.

• Arjun PanicksserySep 5, 2022, 10:09 PM

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Selfish Rea­sons to Move to DC

  DC has the most equestrian statues of any city in the country, and once they erect another one it’ll tie Paris for the most of any city worldwide. Another plus.

• Arjun PanicksseryJul 16, 2022, 6:49 PM

  28 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Guy Raveh’s comment on: Pass­ing Up Pay

  Tax evasion is a crime. Tax avoidance—legally reducing your taxable income—is good and more people should learn about it. You shouldn’t unnecessarily “compensate the state” for things you don’t want it to do.

  there’s some amount—your donations—which is allocated according to your flavor of expected impact; and another one—taxes—that’s allocated by democratically chosen representatives in your country

  This is right, and you should just minimize the amount you allocate to the state, whose effectiveness is very low.

• Arjun PanicksseryJun 8, 2022, 6:06 PM

  11 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Jobs at EA-or­ga­ni­za­tions are over­paid, here is why

  However, this almost inevitably leads to all organizations in a sector competing on this metric leading them to pay far higher wages for each staff member than they would have had had they corporated and not paid above market rate.

  This reads like “It would be more efficient to have a cartel.”

  Also there is a messy distinction made between “impact” and “market” value with regard to competing for talent.

• Arjun PanicksseryJun 4, 2022, 12:38 PM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Zach Stein-Perlman’s comment on: Just Say No to Utili­tar­i­anism

  When your intuitions conflict you can think of your relative credence and then maximize the expected quality of your choice.

• Arjun PanicksseryJun 3, 2022, 6:06 PM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Zach Stein-Perlman’s comment on: Just Say No to Utili­tar­i­anism

  intuitions shouldn’t be seen as data that give us direct access to moral truth,

  I think that our initial moral intuitions about particular situations are—along with immediate occurrences like “Courage is better than cowardice”—the lowest-level moral information, and these intuitions provide reasons for believing that the moral facts are the way they appear.

  I’ll read the Singer paper.

• Arjun PanicksseryJun 3, 2022, 5:56 PM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: technicalities’s comment on: Just Say No to Utili­tar­i­anism

  Your chosen method—refuting a rule with a counterexample—throws out all moral rules, since every moral theory has counterexamples.

  I’m not sure what exactly you mean by a moral rule, e.g. “Courage is better than cowardice, all else equal” doesn’t have any counterexamples. But for certain definitions of moral rule you should reject all moral rules as incorrect.

  You’re free to deny one of the assumptions, but there ends the conversation.

  Looking at the post, I’ll deny “My choices shouldn’t be focused on … how to pay down imagined debts I have to particular people, to society.” You have real debts to particular people. I don’t see how this makes ethics inappropriately “about my own self-actualization or self-image.”

• Arjun PanicksseryJun 3, 2022, 5:54 PM

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Zach Stein-Perlman’s comment on: Just Say No to Utili­tar­i­anism

  What do you think is the source of ethical knowledge if not intuitions

Just Say No to Utili­tar­i­anism

• Arjun PanicksseryMay 28, 2022, 7:39 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: timunderwood’s comment on: Fic­tion Writ­ing Re­treat: Ink in the Abbey

  I agree with you that the prose is passable, readable and fairly solid

  I didn’t say the prose was “fairly solid.” I would have to go back (and maybe it improves after the first several chapters) but I remember it being bad.

• Arjun PanicksseryMay 27, 2022, 3:54 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: There are no peo­ple to be effec­tively al­tru­is­tic for on a dead planet: EA fund­ing of pro­jects with­out con­duct­ing En­vi­ron­men­tal Im­pact Assess­ments (EIAs), Health and Safety Assess­ments (HSAs) and Life Cy­cle Assess­ments (LCAs) = catastrophe

  I have been told that there are a lot of Effective Altruists who would accept some degree of environmental harm, at least if the payoff in terms of human lives saved was great enough. (And I’ve also seen this tendency in some of the members of the EA courses I have been attending.)

  Yes.

  This attitude is rooted in a mindset, however, that is the cause of many of our problems in the first place: the idea that we humans are somehow separate from nature, and can do with it what we will. Many of us, even if we do not consciously espouse a religion, are still conditioned by monotheistic ideas of humans as the pinnacle of Creation, set above it and in dominion over it.

  Depending on what you mean by this, yes. There is no intrinsically “pure” quality about things that aren’t man-made. It is up to us to subdue the earth (and outer space) for the benefit of ourselves and our descendants.

  There is no ultimately no distinction between us and nature (https://​​theconversation.com/​​humanity-and-nature-are-not-separate-we-must-see-them-as-one-to-fix-the-climate-crisis-122110).

  What do you mean by this? Your linked post lists a bunch of views like Zen Buddhism and European paganism.

• Arjun PanicksseryMay 25, 2022, 10:48 AM

  13 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: timunderwood’s comment on: Fic­tion Writ­ing Re­treat: Ink in the Abbey

  It is a common misconception that because a piece of fiction was bad for the particular individual writing, or is low status, or is missing some desired marker of ‘goodness’, that it therefore is not ‘good’.

  I should clarify that my potshot was mocking the prose. There are other ways that HPMOR was good (or so I suspect—I only got through the first 5 or 10 chapters). I also failed to get through the first chapter of Atlas Shrugged even though I would probably find its aesthetic more agreeable than most people and even though it was much more influential than HPMOR.

  EDIT: Actually, I think my comment had more value than just a potshot. I know a bunch of wannabe writers, my past self included, who were overly concerned with prose quality.

• Arjun PanicksseryMay 25, 2022, 2:35 AM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Fic­tion Writ­ing Re­treat: Ink in the Abbey

  This is huge.

  Fiction like Atlas Shrugged and Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Jungle have been massively influential.

  A surprising number of people have told me they got into the EA/​LessWrong sphere through HPMOR, which at least tells us that the writing doesn’t even have to be good to make a difference.

• Arjun PanicksseryMay 20, 2022, 1:14 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: tae 🔸’s comment on: Guided by the Beauty of One’s Philoso­phies: Why Aes­thet­ics Matter

  My comment referred to “America,” not liberal university students at top schools. I was making an explicit contrast to “online progressives.”