About a year ago, I published a list of research questions that could be valuable and important to gain clarity on. I still mostly endorse this list (though I wouldn’t write it just as is today).
Could you expand on “though I wouldn’t write it just as is today”?
Had less fake meat protein at meals and added more fresh fruit and veggies.
Was this the feedback from the survey? I (hazily) remember the meat substitutes running out faster than the fruit.
Tabarrok’s paper (see the 5th page of the PDF): https://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/PrivateProvision.pdf
I think that if exactly 10 people take the contract, then the ones who didn’t don’t benefit by giving me money and the ones who did don’t benefit from keeping their $20 since the post is more valuable than the $20 to them? Note that my game theory knowledge is unexceptional.
I’ve used this feature exactly once, to meet a group of friends who were all in DC last summer but spread out afterward. Swapcard also has a group chat feature, where we actually coordinated the timing. Scheduling the group meeting on Swapcard was just to book the time so that other attendees wouldn’t try to book meetings with us then.
They had this at EAGx Rotterdam and it was very nice. The area was marked off with a sign and you could walk around there joining conversations when you weren’t in a meeting.
Making it impossible to book 1:1s sounds annoying, but since a lot of people like to schedule a break from 1:1s for themselves and would enjoy hanging out with other people during that gap, a somewhat arbitrary “Schelling break time” could help them coordinate.
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.
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/
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)
Where
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.
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.
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.
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.
When your intuitions conflict you can think of your relative credence and then maximize the expected quality of your choice.
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.
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.”
What do you think is the source of ethical knowledge if not intuitions
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.
The relevant part of the Cowen talk: