Notes that made the cut, plus music I like

Periodically I like to share notes I wrote on Substack that seem like they might be worth sharing as a post. This will be less polished than usual (already a low bar!) because I’ve just cut and pasted notes I wrote which I liked, and because I have a cold.

Love in Heaven

Something glorious about a post-scarcity utopia or heaven or whatever good-end-of-history you want to imagine is that you could love particular individuals as much as you liked, wholly and fully, without the lingering guilt that someone was left out by your love. On earth, if I love someone, I am constantly aware that I might have to choose between them and others, and morality might require me to choose others, for their numbers, or because of some other reason. In a better world, I would never need to fear that. My particular ends would be fully compatible with the whole. All watched over by loving grace.

Theory of mind and teaching

I have a strong impression that one of the worst habits in teaching, in receiving job applications, in relationships, and probably in many other areas is this:

I’m going to ask a question. There’s a very specific answer I want. That answer isn’t clear from the question, rather, you have to put together a series of clues I have scattered, plus careful thinking about the sort of thing I want. This will allow me to discriminate between who’s really paying attention and who isn’t.

Often the expected answer will tick off many boxes, which the assessor has mentally prepared. The more boxes you can guess, the better.

This is bad for a couple of reasons. One is that, whatever else you’re testing for, you make the test about advanced theory of mind and theory of your mind in particular.

Okay, but sometimes do need to test for theory of mind, so maybe this is a feature not a bug. The second problem is that you, the assessor, are not as skilled at theory of mind as you think you are. Those hints you’ve laid down, that you think should be obvious to anyone paying attention? They’re likely not, you’re likely projecting your own psychology onto other people, vis a vis what should be obvious, and even masters at the theory of mind won’t necessarily get your ‘hints’. The end result is a scattershot, where you don’t test for domain knowledge or theory of your mind very well.

Intellect and age

People talk about the under 30 as if they were absurdly childish, ignorant and useless. People talk about the over 50 as if they're completely checked out. Maybe the problem you are having is not that only people in a very narrow age range possess a good intellect, but that most people are too dumb for your tastes, and you're attributing that to their age so as to avoid facing the dread truth- people generally can be pretty stupid.

Class and social experience

Here’s a factor that’s often missed in discussions of how our class affects our politics. Class affects us both through our own lives and perhaps even more importantly, through the aggregate effect of discussions with friends. Our friends who tend overwhelmingly to be from the same class as us.

Thus, even if class only affects individuals political views slightly through their own life experiences, the cumulative tendency of almost all their friends to share those experiences will push them and the friend group in a particular political direction. This is especially true considering evidence that groups that start with a certain slight but definite orientation tend to go further in that direction.

So far this is all quite trivial. To the extent I have anything to add it’s through the attached diagram which shows just how strong class social sortition is. The next thing I want to say though is a little less trivial: this phenomenon explains why class politics is dying.

It’s why the collapse of civil society and socializing has been an apparent disaster for class politics. Our friends become less of a factor in shaping our politics, and this makes us less likely to form a shared class orientation to politics with them.

I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say “organizing a house party or a social club is a revolutionary action” but I‘m getting there.

AI risk and politics

I remember when COVID was just becoming a thing there was a brief period where some people on the left took the position that it wasn’t a major issue and was just a stalking horse for sinophobia and restricting immigration, then the poles inverted.

I strongly suspect similar things are going to happen in relation to catastrophic AI risk.

Conservatism and the public

I think the fundamental mistake conservatives make is misunderstanding the nature of the public’s (limited) support for conservatism. People didn’t want Roe v Wade overturned, they wanted judges who made Grave Comments like “while obviously, RvW is settled law, it is tragic how many abortions there are today”. People don’t want welfare claimants left starving, they want a social worker to give welfare claimants a Stern Lecture About Self Reliance before extending their payments ‘reluctantly’. They want a system that makes conservative grumbles but doesn’t actually do the mean thing in the end.

Autism and Machivellianism

What neurotypicals ‘have’ on autistics, when it comes to social maneuvering, is often not so much the capacity to act in a Machiavellian way, but the capacity to do so without even realizing it.

Given our history, it should be unsurprising that many people cannot cope with industrial society, and our failure to help is justly held against us

We spent hundreds of thousands of years as a species as forager-hunters living in small bands. We then spent about 10,000 years living in farming communities. Now we have the teremity to regard it as a moral failing when a person can't cope with industrial mass society!

Some people are perpetually unable to cope, they need lifelong support but aren't disabled enough for disability pension (or are unjustly excluded from it). Rather than pitying them, we regard them as the undeserving poor and send them to prisons, onto the streets etc.

We setup a society where there are no places to hunt or gather, where the vast majority of the earth you cannot walk without legal permission, where you have to follow endless complex rules, governmental or corporate. We impose this all on them for our benefit, and then some people have the teremity to say that any support for these people is an imposition on the freedom of the taxpayer! As if the taxpayers wealth didn’t come from the same structures that make these people marginal, that fence them in with no way to cope.

Some people can’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps, some people can’t even pull themselves up if they’re given ‘a fair chance’, but if there is a God, on judgment day he will not be impressed as we make our excuses for leaving these people in the dirt. We are supposed to protect each other, and this bizarre and confusing society is definitely something many need protection from.

Punishers and punishing

People desperately crave an enemy who is so deeply wicked that the harshest methods are called for, and they can support unlimited violence against this enemy and be called moral for it. See people fantasizing about their family being kidnapped so they can 'flip out'. See people who pop up in the comments section of terrible criminals fantasizing about what they'd do to them. People want their darkest feelings to be sanctified through approval. People dream of a figure who does terrible things for good causes. This is because they tire of morality and wish to shake it off in an orgiastic unleashing, but are too scared to do so unless they can hold onto a thread of public approval. This is why people love the death penalty. It's pathetic- the craving for a socially sanctioned reprive from moral constraints. The noble soul always punishes with a sad, reluctant spirit, not a hungry spirit.

Criticism of effective altruism

Re: Criticisms of effective altruism in print. Most are bad because the authors want to criticise a sociological phenomenon gathered around an idea, an idea’s fan club, but get trapped criticizing the idea instead.

Suicide Attempt Survival and Politics

In the Slate Star Codex user survey, among men, having attempted suicide, failing, and being glad you failed is associated with being more leftwing by about a third of a standard deviation. In practice that means being only half as likely to belong to a rightwing ideology, like conservatism, the alt-right, or neoreaction.

There is no such association among those who attempted suicide and wished they’d succeeded. These people were approximately like the sample as a whole- if anything, perhaps a smidgen to the right of it.

If all genders are included, the effect remains the same. I initially only included men because the dataset is mostly male and male and female suicidal behavior are known to be statistically profoundly different.

The result is significant, but the sample is very small, if anyone has a larger, more population-representative, sample that would allow me to look at this question I’d like to see it.

The four best arguments against utilitarianism, to my mind, are:

1. That traditional welfare concepts used in utilitarianism are inadequate because, for example, they imply a universe tiled with people blissed out on morphine would be good, wireheading, etc. My solution: Adopt a eudaimonic concept.

2. The diversity problem- utilitarianism implies that a universe full of copies of a person having identical experiences could be very good- it couldn’t, no matter how rich or complex those experiences. My solution: Add a diversity constraint of some kind.

3. The non-replaceability of persons, as discussed here. My solution: I think this might be avoided by a sufficiently rich eudaimonic conception of welfare which values, for its own sake, no involuntary termination, and values, for its own sake, specific entrenched relationships between living persons.

4. The following objection, a la Bernard Williams- utilitarianism undercuts the very value it aims to sustain by ignoring the projects and commitments that define our existence. My solution: No fully worked out response, but I think part of the solution is that paradoxically there is something life-affirming about being undercut in this way. Being caught between morality and our personal commitments is part of what defines our existence and is paradoxically enriching.

One interesting thing about these objections is that for the most part, they do not undermine Government House Utilitarianism. Goodin has made this point- most of these objections have very little bearing on policy questions, making utilitarianism still suitable as a guide to policy, at least until we have the capacity to tile the universe with things. In practice, all forms of well-being are highly correlated, wireheading doesn’t work etc. Thus even basic utilitarianism is good in practice, if not theory. A sophisticated utilitarianism is probably my theoretical position.

Also, this kind of utilitarianism is going to be extremely egalitarian relative to the status quo, so traditional debates between utilitarianism and more egalitarian philosophies are, in practice, somewhat coinfected.

We can also build an additional degree of egalitarianism into the concept of welfare in order to cover Omelas edge cases. Consider Omelas, but the cursed child only makes the town, which is already very happy, ten percent happier. Plausiably the cursed child tradeoff is bad for them because it’s pro tanto bad for the moral aspects of welfare to depend on a cursed child. This would still permit cases where the cursed child is necessary to stop many many people having horrible lives, which seems right, if regrettable.

Music I like

I’ve divided the music into two sections- non-Sufjan Stevens and Sufjan Stevens. I hope this isn’t too self-indulgent, but since I recently talked about how music is an opportunity to share ourselves, and since I’m always looking for ways to reject coolness and be cringe, I thought it would be nice.

Non-Sufjan

Wings for Marie Pt 2 by Tool

Down in the river to pray by Alison Krauss

Foggy Dew by Sinead O’Connor

Fast Car by Tracy Chapman

Bones by the Editors

Seo Linn - Óró Sé do Bheatha Bhaile

Who by Fire Leonard Cohen

Winter by Tori Amos

Dull Flame of Desire by Bjork with Antony Hegarty

Defying Gravity

Scarborough Fair by Simon & Garfunkel

Weather with you by Crowded House

Holy Grail by Hunters & Collectors

The Fox, by Nikki and the Dove

Montaigne, Fantastic Wreck

What the water gave me by Florence and the Machine

Born to Die by Lana Del Rey

Haunt me too

Pure Morning

Closing time by Semisonic

Rootless Tree by Damien Rice

Memories and dust by Josh Pyke

Forever Young by Youth Group

King of Wishful Thinking by Go West

Sufjan