Fifty-four ideas from a philosophical bear

1. Cringe: There is nothing in this world quite so cringe as making aesthetic, political and epistemic choices on the basis of whether or not they’re cringe, and yet this is what the concept of cringe leads us to do. The internet concept of cringe, and the libidinal self-policing it represents, is itself the most cringe thing of all.

2. Philosophy and wild research: Philosophy should aim at bigger ideas- the current fad of narrowing scopes won’t do. We have been led astray by applying regulatory concepts from other disciplines. In philosophy, there are two very good reasons to support wild and speculative research that do not apply, for example, in Chemistry: A) While the sciences are shaped by a large number of small contributions, in philosophy, for better or worse, the discipline is mostly shaped by a small number of large contributions that go on to have a long term influence. These works are rarely just ‘more of the same’ and often make big claims. B) In the sciences, bad work that can’t be checked without difficult replications of research can lead people astray. In philosophy, work can be checked and argued with and no exterior experimental results (at least from philosophy itself) are generally relied upon. Even work that is difficult to check because of its conceptual intricacy is relatively rare. Both these factors mean that wild research- research that would be irresponsibly fast and speculative in science- should be encouraged in philosophy.

3. White-collar, Blue collar dynamics in an age of AI: What none of us had anticipated about AI ten years ago is that it may take white-collar jobs before it takes blue-collar jobs. We need to remember though- in the long run, it will be able to do all our jobs. The danger is that blue-collar workers will be leveraged against white-collar workers: “They want us to feel sorry for them losing their jobs where all they do is send three emails a day? Fuck off.” Against this background, it is tragic that the left has been losing its connection with manual workers. For many blue-collar workers, an AI white-collar jobs apocalypse would be revenge for decades of pretensions to moral and political superiority. Capitalists, I think, will be more than happy to destroy white-collar work- with its middle-class pretensions; they’ve always wanted to feel like they’re the brains of the operation- and not just the owners of it. One can palpably feel how badly Elon Musk wants us to think he’s the sole engineer on all his projects- having to employ human engineers gets in the way of that. We need to run a clear line: AI, without government support for a fair transition, is a risk to all jobs. It could be your career tomorrow.

4. Yvne: Yvne is my neologism. Whereas envy is upset about the happiness of those who have than you, yvne (pronounced Yev-knee) is its converse- a sense of happiness at the misery of those who have less than you. Perhaps the most interesting feature of yvne is its silence, despite arguably being a stronger force in history than envy, and certainly more cruel and reprobate, it has been invisible- not condemned one-tenth as much as envy by the great world religions, so obscure as to not have a name in English. Yvne is the secret pleasure of the masters of the world.

5. The parable of the auto-prince: Many years ago there was a kingdom. In this kingdom, there was a well. A stranger in finery fell down the well and died, but the townsfolk who saw the fall did not know that he was dead. The well was crafted in an odd way, and anyone who shouted down the well heard hard-to-make-out sounds echoed back up. The townsfolk decided he was a prince, and shouted down to him to seek his orders, certain townsfolk thought they could interpret the voices that came back. Their society was transformed and the ‘prince’s’ best ‘servants’ came to rule it. I know it’s considered naff to explain your own parables, but let me say, for the sake of clarity this is not about religion, or at least not more so about religion than any other system of power. This is about the way followers self-organize self-perpetuating reward and punishment structures around the figures they support. You can be rewarded for serving powerful people, even if the powerful do very little if anything to reward you- other servants of the powerful will reward you in the expectation that they themselves will be rewarded in turn. This is one of the reasons the powerful are so tenacious, even with little movement of their own, they act as loci for self-organizing reward and punishment networks.

6. Granting authority to undermine power: Let’s say you’ve got a book that’s holy to you. Only, following what it says all the time is a bit tricky, especially as times have changed. How do you deal with that? The modern, liberal theology approach is to vaguely insist that it’s metaphorical, but this contrasts fascinatingly with a number of other more historical approaches which instead treat the book as wholly and literally true- and precisely because it is wholly and literally true, laden with so many layers of meaning that every bit of grammar, syntax, word choice etc. is critical. This creates a text that is so full of meaning that you can make it say anything you like. Hence the tyrannical power of the text is undermined not by diminishing its authority, but by increasing it. Texts as varied as the Pentateuch and the US Constitution have been simultaneously venerated and tamed in this way.

7. Mitigation, not free will: Free will is a widely debated, difficult-to-pin-down philosophical concept. Mitigation, in my sense, is the tendency to go easier on people who have done terrible things when those terrible things are a result of misfortunes that have happened to them. Most philosophers think free will explains mitigation- I want to reverse the order of explanation. We have a fundamental, probably innate, tendency to mitigate. We have other tendencies as well- perhaps related- for example, if someone’s act doesn’t really reflect who they are in any long-term way (e.g. because they were involuntarily drugged) we tend to forgive. From these basic outlooks, we develop elaborate and perhaps unnecessary notions of free will. I am not suggesting philosophy should do away with the concept of free will, just that it is worth focusing attention on concepts like mitigation and expressiveness of character because these are closer to the source of our ethical positions.

8. A mathematical theory of mitigation: Suppose people who suffer a certain misfortune are thereby made twice as likely to commit some wrong. Their level of culpability should be set such that their lifetime expected blame for committing that wrong is equal to the lifetime expected blame of someone who hadn’t suffered that misfortune, so in this case, 1/2.

9. AGI: I don’t think there’s any clear sense in which language models aren’t AGI’s. They’re capable of reasoning about just about any topic. The only clear, quantitatively definable qualities they lack are 1. Multi-modality and 2. A writeable long-term memory. Re: Multi-modality- do you really think it makes a huge qualitative difference if we stick audio and image recognition on? Re: Long-term memory- that’s a biggie, but it will likely be solved relatively soon. The idea that there’s some definite thing we’re currently lacking- artificial general intelligence- and that at some relatively definite point, it will flip is absurd. I predict we will sleepwalk into superintelligence.

10. Against the phrase “merely verbal”: I hate the phrase “merely verbal”. Let’s say we’re doing the philosophy of some concept, and we get down to verbal questions about how the folk use some words. These are questions about very fundamental taxonomic choices ordinary people make in classifying things into categories like ‘persons’ and ‘knowledge’. They reflect values, cognitive strategies, history, culture, and the pragmatic needs of agents, where people diverge on these questions- these divergences potentially reflect differences in all these things. To dismiss studying these things as merely verbal seems so parochial!

11. The suffering economy and exploitation: John Roemer, in a take on Marx, conceptualizes the economy as a flow of labor between persons. Those who consume more labor than they contribute are net exploiters, those who produce more labor than they consume are net exploited. I think an equally interesting lens is to look at the flow of suffering. Some people in society don’t have to suffer to get their bread, others do. Exploitation (or suffering-exploitation) is a situation where some people are able to get their daily bread without suffering because others suffer on their behalf. Suffering egalitarianism is, roughly, the view that, at least pro-tanto, we should all sacrifice equally to make society run, or more accurately something like, we should all have the same ratio of (suffering engaged in to make the economy run/suffering embodied in commodities and services we consume). Although I don’t believe suffering egalitarianism, it and its twin concept of suffering-exploitation are an interesting lens through which to see the world- the economy conceived of as a flow of disutility and pain from some, for the benefit of others. I find this is an interesting, albeit somewhat tragic lens by which to see things.

12. The stipulative theory of intuitions: A lot of philosophers wonder why we should take intuitions- for example in the Gettier case- seriously. There are cases in which I have no satisfactory answer to this question but for many cases, the answer is as follows: intuitions are evidence because intuitions are truthmakers- they’re stipulative. The Gettier cases are evidence that knowledge isn’t justified true belief because our responses to the Gettier cases are a stipulation that- at least in that case of justified true belief, we refuse to extend the predicate “knowledge”. These linguistic choices help give knowledge the meaning it has. Now what if you say “Ahh, that’s the word knowledge, but what about knowledge itself”? A nonsense question- knowledge isn’t like water- there isn’t a privileged knowledge property [if there even is a privileged water property]. There are an infinity of knowledge-like properties, and our language usage picks which one we refer to. The same is true of properties like “freedom” and “personhood”. I think a lot of philosophers believe this, but I’ve never seen a philosopher spell it out quite like this, in terms of intuitions being truth makers rather than evidence in a more conventional sense.

13. Speculations on theology, time, and omnipotence: I’m an agnostic, but I’m flabbergasted by how little theists recognize the omnipotence of God and the theological possibilities it creates. Protestants often claim that we shouldn’t pray for the dead- because either they are in heaven, or they are not and never will be. Even if true, this misses the point that God can rewrite the past. Claims that this or that person must be in hell because they died an unbeliever or a sinner (e.g. suicides) ignores the capacity of God to reach out in an infinitesimally small slice of time before someone dies. Discussions over the problem of evil often ignore the possibility that we consented prior to birth for our own spiritual development. It seems to me that debates over a lot of topics- universalism, the problem of evil, etc. underestimate the concept of omnipotence and the sheer scope of possibilities it creates.

14. Counterfactual philosophical history and Personhood: [This probably won’t make sense unless you’ve read about the philosophy of personal identity]. Imagine two standard views in the philosophy of personal identity- 1. it depends on the continuation of your body as a physical object (bodily continuity view). 2. It depends on the continuity of your mental states- a continuity of both causation and similarity (the psychological continuity view). On the first view, you die if you are teletransported (destroyed and recreated), and if you swap brains with someone else - ‘you’ have a new brain- because you are your body. On the second view, you survive teletransportation, and in a brain swap ‘you’ go with your brain and get a new body. Now it seems to me that in the debate between these views, two orthogonal questions are being conflated, viz: 1. does my survival consist in the survival of my mind (so in a brain swap I switch bodies) or body (so in a brain swap I switch brains) and 2. Does my survival consist in the continuation of a pattern (so teletransportation counts) or does my survival consist in the ordinary persistence of a physical object (so teletransportation is death). Any combination of these views is possible. It’s possible to think, for example, that my survival consists of the survival of my mind as an ordinary physical object- so teletransportation kills me, but with a brain swap, I go with my brain. The two classical views are only two options in what is really a 2x2 matrix of views. I like to imagine how philosophy might have gone differently if these options were the starting set, and how they might have interacted with other ideas like animalism. I’m fascinated by this method in philosophy- imagining how logical terrains of options might have been conceived differently- a kind of counterfactual philosophical history.

15. The meta-argument for leftism- why and what? People interested in politics have a very strong tendency to be either leftwing or rightwing, but this might seem puzzling. Politics appears to consist in a series of independent questions- why assume one side is correct on all, or most, of them? Unless we have some story about why one side gets it right, wouldn’t that just be a staggering coincidence? As a leftist, I’m obligated to have an answer to this. Very roughly, I think we should believe the left is more likely to be right because there is good empirical evidence- e.g. from studies of Social Dominance Orientation to think that the left overall prefers the side of the weak whereas the right overall is on the side of the strong. For a variety of reasons (e.g., a sense of justice, utilitarian concerns over declining marginal utility in goods, status, and income), it is better to support the weak over the strong and the oppressed over the oppressor. All of this raises, to my mind, a fascinating question. Is there scope for a philosophy of partisan politics- for philosophical arguments about whether the left or right is correct? Political philosophy doesn’t normally work at this level, but maybe it should.

16. Non-tiling as a central problem of value theory: A central problem of ethics, to my mind, is to explain why it would be terrible if the universe were filled with people experiencing a simple, pleasant, reality over and over again. The hedonic theory of well-being, for example, at its face seems to imply this would be a good thing. The desire satisfaction theory of well-being also seems to imply this. Even unmodified Eudaimonic theories arguably lead to something a bit like this (e.g. endless copies of a small community living flourishing lives over and over again). Obviously, some kind of requirement for diversity is part of the solution but the exact form that should take is somewhat unclear. Part of the answer, I suspect, is that at bottom our concepts of the value of life- of welfare- are aesthetically laden.

17. The idea of an aesthetic task of philosophy: It is possible to give aesthetic meaning to a thing through the way we think about it. Aesthetic meanings aren’t just inherent to objects, or at least not always. Life itself is no exception. To my mind, this gives philosophy a special task- an aesthetic task, the task of weaving together a way of seeing life that enriches its aesthetic meanings- a task much analytic philosophy has neglected. Of course, it would be arrogant to imagine that only philosophy has something to contribute to this aesthetic task- but philosophy certainly has its portion here. Partly this task is dispatched in the narratives philosophy can tell about life and living. However, there’s also an element of conceptual engineering here- on the assumption that our concepts are somewhat vague- and the philosopher plays a role in refining them- Numerous concepts ranging from freedom, person, hope, and curiosity, come to the philosopher’s craft table. Part of that crafting should be aimed at supporting ethical behavior, but part of it should be dedicated to enriching the aesthetic dimensions of life. For those of us who believe that part of the value of humanity and life is inseparably woven with aesthetics, philosophy’s task becomes both more interesting as human powers of self-modification grow, and more time critical. There’s also tension here- but I think it’s a productive one- life is already beautiful, yet we are to add layers to that beauty.

18. Natural selection and thought: The field of memetics is based on the idea that the passing between individuals of ideas can be modeled using evolution. What if the evolution of ideas and thoughts within an individual can be understood as an evolutionary process? I first became interested in this when I noticed that the fears of individuals with OCD always matched what would be most destructive or upsetting to them. My theory was that thoughts randomly occur to individuals, and then those thoughts that monopolize attention are selected for and are more likely to keep reoccurring. Over time, through random variation, the thoughts become more fearful and attention monopolizing. As the individual develops methods to resist fearful thoughts, their fears continue evolving to subvert their defenses in a kind of arms race- a red queen effect. More generally, beyond anxiety, I think this kind of evolutionary model is extremely promising for explaining aspects of thought.

19. The split between two kinds of belief- in fact and norm: There are beliefs, in the sense of an internal model of the world that we sincerely assert with language, and there are beliefs in the sense of an internal model of the world we act upon. I don’t think these always overlap. This is why, for example, people will sincerely assert x, but be unwilling to bet on it- despite no general objection to betting. Now you can say that they don’t really believe x, but I’d prefer to say that two senses of belief just come apart. Further, I think these forms of coming apart can be healthy in cases of higher-order evidence- and should be promoted. Higher order evidence is the evidence of other people’s beliefs- if everyone else thinks X, and they have roughly the same information as you, that’s evidence for X. Suppose you’re seeing an oncologist- you probably hope that she contributes to her field by arguing for her idiosyncratic views on oncology- such debate is necessary to advance the field- but you probably also hope that she sticks to the orthodoxy when treating you. In general, as a rough and ready distinction, our verbal beliefs should focus only on how things seem to us directly in order to maximize debate and intellectual diversity, our action-guiding beliefs should include all information including the information given by what other people think. You should aim to get it right in your action-guiding beliefs, but the beliefs you argue for should reflect an attempt to make society get it right by increasing the range of ideas on the table and promoting exploration- focusing on your idiosyncratic perspective.

20. Functionalism and the status of LLMs: LLMs are trained on up to a trillion words of text- seeking to reproduce unimaginably high-level patterns in what they find. The models themselves work on billions and billions of interacting variables- more than complex enough to simulate mental processes. It’s very plausible that LLMs simulate the interacting beliefs, desires, and perceptions of a hypothetical author- this may be the most efficient way to generate text- maybe the only feasible way. If this is true, then it’s hard, on a functionalist view of mental states, to separate an LLM from a person, except by an (admittedly very important) matter of degree.

21. Consequentialism, ethical extremism and healthy self-destruction: Bernard Williams claims that consequentialism undermines the very value of human life it tries to uphold. The friend who calculates whether he should save his friend or a number of strangers has already undermined much that is valuable in life- intimacy & loyalty- if we all did this, we would destroy the very value we are trying to promote. I agree that consequentialism is self-destructive in this way, but I think that the paradoxical nature of human life is that moral self-destruction ends up being a form of self-affirmation. Having higher values that potentially call us to moral self-ruination enriches life in a strange and paradoxical way- and enriches our life world by placing it within a larger moral order. There is a tragic, life-affirming moral seriousness about consequentialism that many do not see.

22. The callousness of ethics: Ethics is, I think, doomed to tend to be callous in a particular way. There’s a screencap going around in which an author critiques ethicists for asking whether it’s right to steal bread to feed your family, but not whether it’s right to horde money while people are starving. This is true, but ethics has a peculiar weakness that inclines it toward this problem. You couldn’t really write a paper on “Is it wrong to kill innocents in cold blood for fun” for example, barring exceptional circumstances, because everyone agrees it’s wrong. there’s only so much philosophers can say about wrongs that are definitely wrong- even if they are very common- and this gives philosophy a certain appearance of ethical callousness in relation to common injustices. Indeed, trying to make an argument about them might make the situation worse. Of course, there are ways to mitigate the problem and raise the subjects (see Singer Famine, affluence, and morality for an example)- but it takes work, and so philosophy always has a sense of callousness about it in relation to these subjects. We should try to be as clear on these issues as possible, lest silence be taken for support.

23. A democratic program in experimental political philosophy: Experimental philosophy is a program of finding out ordinary people’s opinions on philosophical topics. Sometimes the intention is to gain insights into philosophical truths- especially those connected to defining concepts (the positive program) and sometimes it is done to deflate philosophical pretensions (the negative program). I believe that when it comes to philosophical questions that have political import- there’s a third program- a critical program exposing the limits of existing democracy by asking ordinary people about the philosophical presuppositions underpinning it. Governments, for example, use certain algorithms (e.g. unweighted cost-benefit analysis) to inform political choices- philosophers often analyze and critique these algorithms. I want to see a program of introducing ordinary people to these decision procedures, explaining them in detail, letting them debate and discuss among themselves and give a verdict- a democratic and experimental program in political philosophy. Of course, possible applications go far beyond decision procedures. Such an approach can expose the contradiction between the ideal and the reality of democratic representation and sharpen the demand for democracy.

24. AI art as the appropriation of the commons: A lot of artists and authors think that AI is theft of their copyright. Under existing laws, it’s very unclear that this is true. The problem is better analogized as a theft of the commons. The work of artists creates a commons of work, that artists learn and draw from in their own work, as they are training and throughout their lives. Experienced artists return the benefits they received from this commons during their apprenticeship. Art grows and continues to enrich society in many ways. Though we all win from this commons, artists are both the biggest winners from and the biggest contributors to, this commons. Essentially, AI art represents an appropriation of the artistic commons for training AI- use of it that doesn’t require artists and thus doesn’t return the value it has created but instead redirects it elsewhere. I don’t think the solution is to ban AI art, but to subsidize human art because it is important that humans continue to be involved in artistic projects. In general, we should view AI as the fruit of society as a whole, and its benefits as our common property for many reasons- but among the best is that we all helped make them by providing the training data. If we don’t insist on this, we will eventually end up in a world of capitalism that doesn’t need human labor - and I shudder to think about our fate in that world.

25. Religions start out leftwing: I have a theory I’m working on that religions start as progressive then tend to become reactionary over time. No idea if it’s true, just think it’s interesting.

26. Negative vs Positive rights as a bamboozle: A lot of people think that there’s a very important distinction between negative rights- things the state promises not to do to you- and positive rights- things the state promises to do for you. The right not to be imprisoned without a fair trial is a negative right, the right to food is a positive right. I reckon if there is a distinction at all, it’s far more unclear and murky than this. If you see property rights as they are- as a creature of the state- as a rule that violence will be used against you if you attempt certain things with certain objects in the world- then the government’s failure to recognize your right to food is not just a failure to provide you with food- it’s the affirmative choice the state has made to prevent you- through law and the violence that backs up its law- to stop you from accessing any food. Look at the prosecution of those who stole to feed themselves or their family. The right to food then is as much negative (don’t use violence to prevent me from accessing any available source of food- e.g. don’t act in a manner that will starve me) as it is positive (provide me with food). If the government wants to enforce property without also acting in such a manner as to literally force someone to starve, it needs to provide food. It’s as much a negative right as a positive one. Any suggestion that this is “rights inflation” should be rejected- not to be forced violently into starvation is a pretty core right!

27. Judgment as a spectacle: In “Society of the Spectacle” Guy Debord emphasizes the passivity of the spectacle. People are awed into watching rather than acting- by TV, by mass media generally, by celebrity culture, and so on: “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” Since Guy Debord’s time, the spectacle hasn’t gone away, but it has moved into a new phase, which we could well call the active spectacle, enabled by the internet and other communication devices. People are invited to join in the spectacle, to help determine its direction, to help create it. But the spectacle still isn’t the real world, and so just as the previous ‘passive’ spectacle provided an alternative to acting, the new ‘active’ spectacle still provides an alternative to acting meaningfully. Apart from simply generating more content to look at, the main kind of representation this “active spectacle” invites us to participate in is the activity of judgment. We rate things, people, events, and so on good and bad- especially bad. Thus screaming at people on the internet becomes a kind of spectacular facsimile of action. Labeling something or someone bad is an alternative to potentially effective collective action to abolish the conditions that made things this way. Addressing our condemnation to images, we are effectively reduced to sympathetic magic- trying to alter the world through representation.

28. Utilitarianism is a practical egalitarianism: Arguments between egalitarians & prioritarians on the one hand, and utilitarians on the other are pretty futile to my mind. Factoring in relative income effects, reasonable estimates of the diminishing marginal value of income, etc., a dollar given to someone with 30,000 dollars of income could easily be ten times more valuable than a dollar given to someone with an income of 100,000 dollars. Utilitarianism is, in practical terms, relative to the status quo, an extremely egalitarian philosophy. The more interesting question is how has utilitarianism become associated with inegalitarianism, and why have philosophers often accepted this at face value.

29. To be the best: A while ago, Scott Aaronson wrote an article about the tragic situation of the intellectual who is looking down the barrel of computers being better than her at all the things she prides herself on. I think one way to understand how the bulk of people feel on this is for most people this losing battle started in the Neolithic. In hunter-gatherer bands of 30 or so, connected to wider social worlds of a few hundred, everyone had a good chance of being the best at something- at least of people within a day’s walk- e.g. entertaining children, running, singing, memorizing lore, hunting or sex. Now most of us can’t even dream of being the best in our locality at something important, let alone in the known world. Intellectuals though occupy a strange position, many either harbor (mostly ridiculous) dreams of being among the best, or identify closely with those who do. The advance of computers threatens to take from us something most long ago gave up as a possibility. Before getting too excited about the idea that AI strips humans of their dignity through the abnegation of unique capacities, we should take a longer and more encompassing view of human dignity and the dignity of people who never even considered trying to be the best at something, but who still fully mattered.

30. The maintenance of unemployment and blame for unemployment: This is in no sense an original thought of mine, but I feel very passionately about it. The government manages the unemployment rate to make sure it doesn’t get too low. Governments then insult people for not having a job. Many people who benefit from this state of affairs condemn the unemployed for their plight. This is a sin on a scale almost unimaginable- to render someone without the means of a dignified life for your own convenience and then attack their dignity for it.

31. GovernmentWatch: Imagine if there was an NGO with no formal legal powers and a bit of money. Its sole purpose would be to convene a jury of perhaps 100 randomly selected citizens. This jury, changed every twelve months or so, would monitor government business, and pass motions indicating what it thought of government choices. Unlike opinion polling it would be deliberative- these citizens would be paid to monitor government choices 5 days a week and give their point of view. They would articulate a crystallized statement of informed public opinion reached through debate and dialogue, framing their views in their own words and able to request testimony from experts and affected people as necessary.

32. The problem of simulator evil: It has been often noted that if the simulation hypothesis is true, then we have a weird kind of quasi-theism. Our simulators are Gods in relation to us- at least in a superficial sense. If they are Gods, then we have a classic problem of evil- given their omnipotence, and the cruelty of the world- can there be any conclusion but that they are evil? I have a few theories on which the answer could be yes: for example, our simulators might be trying to recreate the dead or create a wide variety of people.

33. Hitler’s jig as a dividing line: Derek Parfit, upon learning that Hitler performed a little jig after conquering France (*actually this is a myth), remarked “At least something good came out of the German victory.” I think Parfit’s remark here divides the world in two- A) People who, whether they agree or not, hold no animus about the remark B) People who find Parfit’s remark infuriating, disgusting or worthy of mockery. Almost all the philosophers are in (A), but almost all politicians and public commentators are in (B). A’ers of the world, unite!

34. The writerly bias: Because we have encountered so many narratives, we tend to think events will unfold in a way that would make a good narrative. We come to think of ourselves as characters in a book. On a microscale, this likely contributes to a number of more specific biases. It helps feed an unjustified confidence that things will turn out well in the long run (the just world bias). It likely makes us much more afraid of violent crime from strangers than we should be. Perhaps the most striking example of this on a macroscale is science fiction and predictions about the future. Ways technology could turn out that are hard to write enjoyable stories about tend to be missing from our cultural imagination. For example, worlds in which everyone is superintelligent or superintelligent advice on any topic is readily available are very difficult to write about for humans, so are rarely portrayed- there are fictional worlds in which superintelligences exist, but they are rarely portrayed as available to the protagonists or consistently genuinely superintelligent. Worlds in which a working lie detector existed and was used very consistently lack narrative tension, so there also aren’t many books like this.

35. Radical Bayesian epistemology: On the subjectivist Bayesian view, initial prior probabilities are arbitrary and not subject to criticism if they aren’t contradictory. Only changes to beliefs are strongly bound by rationality. I think there’s an interesting way of interpreting this as a whole new approach to epistemology, neither coherentist or foundationalist. On this view, beliefs are never justified or unjustified- indeed talking about justified or unjustified beliefs is a category mistake. only updates to beliefs can be irrational. Apparent references to unjustified beliefs can be reinterpreted as follows. Suppose Juan thinks Jessica is a mathematician, but you think this belief is irrational, what you really mean is that it’s unlikely Juan started out with a high enough prior of Jessica being a mathematician for available evidence to have led him to update to that conclusion. Many forms of skepticism are also potentially resolved- my priors and subsequent evidence have kept me believing in an external world.

36. The historical inversion and return of politics: Politics is often seen as the way in which the few rule over the many- and I suppose it is- but this is ironic, given that politics is what made us egalitarian. We must renew the original meaning of politics and reverse the great inversion of the meaning of politics. Chimpanzees are mostly ruled over by very strong chimps. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors on the other hand were, for the most part, were egalitarian. The reason was that in a small group, you don’t want to be ruled over by some appointed petty tyrant, and if anyone tries than you can- using coalitional politics- organize a small group to bump him off. Our capacity for strategic social organization- politics- was the guarantor of our egalitarianism. Then at some point in history, the use of politics flipped, to create systems of authority so encompassing and sometimes uncompromising that our primate ancestors couldn’t imagine them. Then, yet again at a certain point, the meaning of politics started to shift once more- as mass democratic politics came into vogue. If we are to create a better world, we must restore politics to its original use- the apparatus that made us more egalitarian than the apes. The key may be transaction costs. At small scales, the transaction costs of democratic counterpower are affordable. As societies get bigger, the costs and conceptual technology needed to run democracy become larger. Democracy is costly, pre-modern democratic states A) had such limited franchises they were more like oligarchies B) were often city-states- (despite partial exceptions?). Even modern democracies are limited in their effectiveness, precisely because of the difficulties in coordinating action and keeping everyone informed, difficulties easily exploited by those who do not want action coordinated, or for that matter everyone informed. To restore politics to its original use, we need political, cultural economic, and technological overcoming of coordination problems. If this is to happen, we must regain faith in politics as a potential equaliser.

37. Philosophy as the loosening of concepts: Very often you’ll meet someone- maybe not even that conservative on a lot of issues- who will say “Look, trans women just aren’t women”- as if there’s a definition of the word “woman”- somewhere up in Plato’s heaven, as a baseline metaphysical fact. But this is just a specific example of a broader phenomenon- people act as if we have to conform to preexisting definitions, rather than choosing what our words mean- people act as if concepts are tight. One of the chief uses of philosophy is that through it we learn to loosen concepts- It is not in Plato’s heaven. If philosophy is good for critical thinking- in a way that goes beyond what you might learn in a critical thinking classroom- I suspect this is why. If I’m right about this, then that gives us all the more reason to double down on projects like conceptual engineering.

38. Zero-transaction cost utopia: I’m very interested in the idea of a zero-transaction cost utopia. Why don’t we, for example, renegotiate every collective decision from the ground up? Why do we rely on mediating institutions -like money and parliaments- which are ultimately just constituted by our actions, but come to take on a life of their own?- Because making every new choice from the ground up would take far too long. On the other hand, if we were all superintelligences, or represented by trusted superintelligent agents, we can imagine a society with few or no persisting institutions, just constant renegotiation as needed. A zero transaction cost utopia. I don’t know if such a thing is possible, but I think the idea is an interesting counterpart for what exists.

39. The paradox of reputation: The paradox of reputation is that almost everyone deserves a better reputation than the reputation they would have if their worst deeds were known. Why say people deserve a better reputation than their own deeds, if known, would grant? Most people have some skeletons in their closets. However, when something bad comes out about a person we, usually reasonably, assume that this is not all they’ve done. If we get angry at someone for yelling at a waiter, it’s not because we think that yelling at a waiter is the worst thing they’ve ever done- if that was literally only the worse thing they’d ever done they would likely be quite virtuous. it’s because we think it’s evidence that they’ve probably done many things worse than that- probably yelled at a lot of waiters among other things. Thus, for any given person, if the worst thing they’d ever done came out- without any context- we’d assume they’re horrible. I call this the paradox of reputation. Part of the reason the internet makes us so angry at people is that we haven’t factored in that bad deeds are more likely to come out now into our moral calculus of reputation. Partly what’s going on here is a base rates fallacy- people illicitly infer from “most yelling at waiters -and equivalently bad acts- is done by dickheads” to “most people who have at some point in their lives yelled at waiters -or an equivalently bad act- are dickheads.”

40. Theft: John owes me a coat, he refuses to give it to me. As a result, I am freezing, and in great pain. I then take a coat from one of John’s friends, Sue. Sue is not freezing- I have done less damage to Sue than John has done to me. John punishes me for stealing Sue’s coat. This seems to me to be wrong. In fact, it seems like a general principle that if 1. (A) harms (B) greatly- through action or inaction and 2. (B) harms (C) more slightly in order to try and recover from the harm (A) did to them, then 3. (A) does not have the standing to punish (B). Likewise, if the state is culpable for involuntary poverty, the state doesn’t have the right to punish theft born of poverty, which the thief could find no way to escape. The theft is the result of a greater wrong by the state than the theft itself. The government can’t claim moral standing. We cannot punish others for wrongs we have forced them to commit if those wrongs are lesser than our wrongs in forcing them to commit their wrong. Barring unusual circumstances, the only exceptions are where the theft is violent, or against people who are even poorer. If you grant the state has an absolute responsibility to give people an opportunity to escape poverty, I see no plausible way out of this conclusion. The right answer is not to legalize theft, but for the government, as a matter of emergency, to meet its obligations.

41. Antipoenaism: Because I like to make up words, let’s call generalized opposition to punishment antipoenaism, from “poena” which is Latin for “punishment” and “anti” which is Latin for “anti”. Could antipoenaism ever be viable? Is antipoenaism the sort of idea that depends for its interest on whether it is, or ever will be, viable? No. Antipoenaism is pretty obviously not viable with the world the way it is—some people need incentives not to do bad things. However, it could be viable in a future where we have the technological capacity to restrain the violent without removing their liberty (see Iain Banks’ concept of the slap drone) or to cure the violent of their violent tendencies. But I think antipoenaism is an idea that holds power even in a world where it is not feasible and should hold that power to shock and shame us all. Jesus’ provocation, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”, holds our imaginations even now. We need a compass that points us towards utopia, even if we can’t make it there, and even if it can’t be real—you won’t see the world as it is without crazy dreams of what it could be.

42. Metaethics molds morality: I’m fascinated by the ways metaethical views mold normative ethics- both action and theory. Suppose you’re a metaethical realist- you think there’s a collection of ethical truths ‘out there’- separate from your opinions and desires- that you have access to, but that other people also can access. Each person can be wrong or right about ethical truth. This gives you another reason to respect and endorse democracy which an ethical anti-realist such as myself doesn’t have- many minds are more likely to get it right than one. Or consider my situation when a recently submitted an article on punishment to a philosophy journal. It was rejected because the editors wanted a more conclusive discussion- yet my ethical realism in part makes it impossible for me to provide such- I have a bunch of ethical intuitions in relation to hypothetical cases, and in my view, if you don’t share them, there’s only so much more I can say. The practical implications for how we should act are perhaps especially fascinating to me- anti-realists still have some reasons to seek ethical advice, for example, but arguably, in at least some circumstances, the realist will have a stronger reason to seek advice than the anti-realist. In general, the anti-realist can be more confident, although the details are complex in ways I can’t get into here.

43. Retributive punishment: Some philosophers think it’s important to punish the wicked just for the sake of punishing the wicked- not to protect anyone or prevent any future crimes. I argue this can only be justified if you’re absolutely certain they’re guilty- and in this world we never are. My case for this is a thought experiment. Imagine you’re given a chance to punish 10000 people. Punishing them will serve no purpose except punishment for their terrible crimes. No one- among the punished or otherwise- will be deterred or prevented from committing any more crimes as a result of your punishment. You’re fully committed to doing it, and then someone runs in and tells you that one, and only one, of 10000 is innocent- but you can’t determine which. Are you willing to punish 1 innocent person to punish 9999 guilty ones just for the sake of punishing them? Not for any positive goal? If not, why would you be willing to punish a single person with a 1/10000 chance of being innocent just for the sake of punishing them?

44. Conservatism, self-replication, and altruism. I cannot prove this, but I strongly suspect conservatives view having children as a way to cheat death, much more so than liberals do. They want to mold their children into copies of what they see as exemplary in themself, in order to "continue their line". Certainly, every lunatic I have encountered online who talks unironically of “propagating their lineage” or some such is rightwing, and there’s a surprisingly large number of them. In this theory, for the rightwing, the idea of their children being fully separate persons to themselves, free and autonomous to choose from an unlimited number of lives, is anathema, because it prevents the transmission of self in a way that avoids death. From a selfish perspective, the conservative wants to erase other modes of life so they can better mold their family. Thus the voice of selfishness says “do it”. However, there is no counter-voice to hold them back with guilt, because they perceive themselves as acting out of altruistic motives- protecting their family. Both the angel and the devil on the shoulder have been coopted, and so there is nothing to restrain them. “In order to protect my extended self-interest- family, I must eliminate. In order to follow the altruistic path I must protect my family and thus eliminate”.

45. Culture wars: To speak in (amateur) psychodynamic terms for a moment. Historically speaking the left has a kind of libidinal energy whereas the right has portrayed itself as the superego. No one likes the superego, but hey, if you’ve got the whip you’ve got the whip. Now the left is being portrayed as the superego, but it doesn’t have any of the material power that the right held when it was in that position. Moralism without power, what’s there to like? At least rebellion without power held a certain charm that could be parlayed into power. Moreover, whenever we react angrily to things, the right is (at least partly) winning. They’re setting the agenda. We’re implicitly confirming their worldview- a world full of depraved people who choose, purely out of a sense of wicked discretion, to do the wrong thing.

46. Compensatory concealment: Compensatory concealment means that most apparently good changes are better than they appear, and most apparently bad changes are worse than they appear. It is best introduced through an example. The death rate on Autovania’s roads is Y. Let’s suppose that, tomorrow, every Autovanian miraculously becomes a better driver. For a little while, the death rate would fall to some level X. Then, slowly, the death rate would rise again to some level X’, lower than the original Y, but still higher than X. Why is this? A couple of reasons. Most directly, with drivers being more skilled, people would relax a bit on the roads. Over the years, the auto industry standards might be relaxed, or at least the rate at which their severity increased might be reduced. Traffic engineers would concentrate more on speed and less on safety. So we have a visible good change- a decrease in road accidents, and we have an invisible good change, a reduction in effort and stress devoted to avoiding crashes. The existence of the invisible good change means that there isn’t a full “flow-through” of the positive effect into the primary variable of concern (crashes). Whether we wish there was more flow through or not is a judgment we must all make ourselves, but a reduction in stress and effort needed to stop crashes is undeniably a good thing in itself. But this turns out to be a highly general phenomenon, true much more often than not. When something happens to alter a variable we care about Q, Q often (usually?) does not gain the full benefit or detriment. This is because other compensatory mechanisms designed to prop up Q if it’s good or keep Q down if it’s bad, might be removed or reduced in scope, as those who judge their cost effectiveness no longer think that they’re worth it. Big changes are almost always better and/or worse than they appear because we can relax the costly mechanisms we were using to achieve or prevent desired outcomes before they came along. Another example- suppose the reduction in environmental lead triggered a reduction in crime- part of the benefit is seen in reduced crime rates, but another, invisible aspect of the benefit is the reduction in the amount we have to pay to prevent crime- if we kept those costs constant, the effects of lead reduction on crime would be even more dramatic. In general, this should make as more sanguine about the potence of public policy effects.

47. You shouldn’t be too worried about confirmation bias: People are too often focused on getting it right. This is not the correct goal. When it comes to important questions, the correct goal is helping society get it right- infinitely more valuable a goal than getting it individually correct. arguing for unusual opinions is useful for this goal in order to increase epistemic diversity- even if you’re likely wrong- just don’t be a dick about it. A little bit of confirmation bias helps with this. Don’t worry about confirmation bias so much in your own life, worry more about finding interesting, under-argued positions and putting them forward. Doesn’t matter all that much if you’re wrong- social epistemology is a cooperative game- we’re all on spaceship earth together.

48. The altruism penalty: Under capitalism, you often pay a premium in reduced wages if you want to do especially socially useful work- see corporate law relative to other types of law, working for an NGO versus working for the private sector, etc. With a few exceptions, we systematically pay people who want badly to help others less. This has terrible flow-on effects when you consider that money sets social power and status, and hence the altruistic has less heft in setting the direction of society than they otherwise might- relative to those in lucrative but less pro-social positions.

49. Change and events: I sometimes feel like nothing can change anymore precisely because things keep happening. There’s a sense that things are happening always, all the time, but nothing is changing. So much has happened and nothing has changed that it now feels like time is suspended. It sometimes feels like even if there was, say, a revolution we’d wake up tomorrow and somehow things would still be the same. Events mean nothing except a succession of news slots without organized groups of people moving through them.

50. Utopia: There’s a lot of talk of utopias and dystopias, but it’s amazing to me how few people have posed themselves the question “If I were omnipotent, what kind of world would I create”? It’s the ultimate values clarifier- try it today!

51. Total forgiveness: Suppose you accept- as the evidence suggests- that almost anyone would do really awful things to you if you and they were put in the wrong circumstances. Only moral luck separates almost everyone from wrongfully harming you- in that sense, they might as well have done so already. You are then faced with a fundamental moral question. Are you, despite that, on the side of each person, and of people in general? Will you forgive humanity? Once you’ve made that choice, it will be easier to love and forgive others day to day. If you can’t make that choice, you will hate yourself, or deny your own nature as a human.

52. Lie detecting: 1. A working and cheap lie detector would transform society- from business to law to politics, to public discussion, enormously 2. Working lie detectors in the nearish future, given progress on AI-assisted mind reading, can’t be ruled out- progress is being made in reconstructing thoughts from brain scans. 3. We have spent almost zero time thinking about how a working lie detector might change things- partly because they don’t make for great science fiction, partly because people foolishly already think they exist. If lie detectors are possible, we’re sleepwalking into a social transformation.

53. The tragic quality of wonder in a competitive information economy: Have you ever encountered a claim on the internet so wondrous and fantastic that you’ve found yourself thinking “This can’t be true, else I would have already heard of it?”. Once I saw a falsified photo of a 20 ft high mushroom. I immediately knew it was fake, not because I’d researched the biggest fungi in the world, but because if anything that cool existed, someone would have already told me. That quality- a threshold on how interesting things can be before they’re almost certainly false- is the tragic quality of wonder in a competitive information economy.

54. Perspectival fever: I think we’re caught between a hunger to see ourselves through other’s eyes, and a hunger not to, and this is one of the great push-pulls of life.