The Wicked Problem Experience

*Click lower right to download or find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, etc.*

I’ve spent a lot of my career working on [wicked problems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem): problems that are vaguely defined, where there’s no clear goal for exactly what I’m trying to do or how I’ll know when or whether I’ve done it.

In particular, [minimal-trust investigations](https://www.cold-takes.com/minimal-trust-investigations/) - trying to understand some topic or argument myself ([what charity to donate to](https://www.givewell.org), [whether civilization is declining](https://www.cold-takes.com/cost-disease-and-civilizational-decline/), [whether AI could make this the most important century of all time for humanity](https://www.cold-takes.com/most-important-century/)), with little reliance on what “the experts” think - tend to have this “wicked” quality:

* I could spend my whole life learning about any subtopic of a subtopic of a subtopic, so learning about a topic is often mostly about deciding how deep I want to go (and what to skip) on each branch.

* There aren’t any stable rules for how to make that kind of decision, and I’m constantly changing my mind about what the goal and scope of the project even is.

This piece will narrate an example of what it’s like to work on this kind of problem, and why I [say](https://www.cold-takes.com/learning-by-writing/) it is “hard, taxing, exhausting and a bit of a mental health gauntlet.”

My example is from the 2007 edition of [GiveWell](https://www.givewell.org). It’s an adaptation from a private doc that some other people who work on wicked problems have found cathartic and validating.

It’s particularly focused on what I call the **hypothesis rearticulation** part of investigating a topic (steps 3 and 6 in my [learning by writing](https://www.cold-takes.com/learning-by-writing/) process), which is when:

* I have a hypothesis about the topic I’m investigating.

* I realize it doesn’t seem right, and I need a new one.

* Most of the things I can come up with are either “too strong” (it would take too much work to examine them satisfyingly) or “too weak” (they just aren’t that interesting/worth investigating).

* I need to navigate that balance and find a new hypothesis that is (a) coherent; (b) important if true; (c) maybe something I can argue for.

After this piece tries to give a sense for what the challenge is like, a future piece will give accumulated tips for navigating it.

Flashback to 2007 GiveWell
--------------------------

*Context for those unfamiliar with GiveWell:*

* *In 2007, I co-founded (with [Elie Hassenfeld](https://www.givewell.org/about/people)) an organization that recommends evidence-backed, cost-effective charities to help people do as much good as possible with their donations.** *When we started the project, we initially asked charities to apply for $25,000 grants, and to agree (as part of the process) that we could publish their application materials. This was our strategy for trying to find charities that could provide evidence about how much they were helping people (per dollar).** *This example is from after we had collected information from charities and determined which one we wanted to rank #1, and were now trying to write it all up for our website. Since then, [GiveWell](https://www.givewell.org) has evolved a great deal and is much better than the 2007 edition I’ll be describing here.* * *(This example is reconstructed from my memory a long time later, so it’s probably not literally accurate.)*

**Initial “too strong” hypothesis.** [Elie](https://www.givewell.org/about/people) (my co-founder at GiveWell) and I met this morning and I was like “I’m going to write a page explaining what GiveWell’s recommendations are and aren’t. Basically, they aren’t trying to evaluate every charity in the world. Instead they’re saying which ones are the most cost-effective.” He nodded and was like “Yeah, that’s cool and helpful, write it.”

Now I’m sitting at my computer trying to write down what I just said in a way that an outsider can read - the “hypothesis articulation” phase.

I write, “GiveWell doesn’t evaluate every charity in the world. Our goal is to save the most lives possible per dollar, not to create a complete ranking or catalogue of charities. Accordingly, our research is oriented around identifying the single charity that can save the most lives per dollar spent,”

Hmm. Did we identify the “single charity that can save the most lives per dollar spent?” Certainly not. For example, I have no idea how to compare these charities to cancer research organizations, which are out of scope. Let me try again:

“GiveWell doesn’t evaluate every charity in the world. Our goal is to save the most lives possible per dollar, not to create a complete ranking or catalogue of charities. Accordingly, our research is oriented around identifying the single charity with the highest *demonstrated lives saved per dollar spent* - the charity that can prove rigorously that it saved the most” - no, it can’t prove it saved the *most* lives - “the charity that can prove rigorously that ” - uh -

Do any of our charities prove *anything* rigorously? Now I’m looking at the page we wrote for our #1 charity and ugh. I mean [here](https://web.archive.org/web/20080914003505/http://www.givewell.net/psi#Weighingtheevidence) are some quotes from our summary on the case for their impact: “All of the reports we've seen are internal reports (i.e., [the charity] - not an external evaluator - conducted them) … Neither [the charity]’s sales figures nor its survey results conclusively demonstrate an impact … It is possible that [the charity] simply uses its subsidized prices to outcompete more expensive sellers of similar materials, and ends up reducing people's costs but not increasing their ownership or utilization of these materials … We cannot have as much confidence in our understanding of [the charity] as in our understanding of [two other charities], whose activities are simpler and more straightforward.”

That’s our #1 charity! We have less confidence in it than our lower-ranked charities … but we ranked it higher anyway because it’s more cost-effective … but it’s not the most cost-effective charity in the world, it’s probably not even the most cost-effective charity we looked at …

**Hitting a wall.** Well I have no idea what I want to say here.

![alt_text](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/2022/02/image1.gif "image_tooltip")
*This image represents me literally playing some video game like Super Meat Boy while failing to articulate what I want to say. I am not actually this bad at Super Meat Boy (certainly not after all the time I’ve spent playing it while failing to articulate a hypothesis), but I thought all the deaths would give a better sense for how the whole situation feels.*

**Rearticulating the hypothesis and going “too weak.”** Okay, screw this. I know what the problem was - I was writing based on wishful thinking. We haven’t found the most cost-effective charity, we haven’t found the most proven charity. Let’s just lay it out, no overselling, just the real situation.

“GiveWell doesn’t evaluate every charity in the world, because we didn’t have time to do that this year. Instead, we made a completely arbitrary choice to focus on ‘saving lives in Africa’; then we emailed 107 organizations that seemed relevant to this goal, of which 59 responded; we did a really quick first-round application process in which we asked them to provide evidence of their impact; we chose 12 finalists, analyzed those further, and were most impressed with Population Services International. There is no reason to think that the best charities are the ones that did best in our process, and significant reasons to think the opposite, that the best charities are not the ones putting lots of time into a cold-emailed application from an unfamiliar funder for $25k. Like every other donor in the world, we ended up making an arbitrary, largely aesthetic judgment that we were impressed with Population Services International. Readers who share our aesthetics may wish to donate similarly, and can also purchase photos of Elie and Holden at the following link:”

OK wow. This is what we’ve been working on for a year? Why would anyone want this? Why are we writing this up? I should keep writing this so it’s just DONE but ugh, the thought of finishing this website is almost as bad as the thought of not finishing it.

**Hitting a wall.**

![alt_text](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/2022/02/image1.gif "image_tooltip")

What do I do, what do I do, what do I do.

**Rearticulating the hypothesis and assigning myself more work.** OK. I gave up, went to sleep, thought about other stuff for a while, went on a vision quest, etc. I’ve now realized that we can put it this way: our top charities are the ones with verifiable, demonstrated impact and room for more funding, and we rank them by estimated cost-effectiveness. “Verifiable, demonstrated” is something appealing we can say about our top charities and not about others, even though it’s driven by the fact that they responded to our emails and others didn’t. And then we rank the best charities within that. Great.

So I’m sitting down to write this, but I’m kind of thinking to myself: “Is that really quite true? That ‘the charities that participated in our process and did well’ and ‘The charities with verifiable, demonstrated impact’ are the same set? I mean … it seems like it could be true. For years we looked for charities that had evidence of impact and we couldn’t find any. Now we have 2-3. But wouldn’t it be better if I could verify none of these charities that ignored us have good evidence of impact just sitting around on their website? I mean, we definitely looked at a lot of websites before but we gave up on it, and didn’t scan the eligible charities comprehensively. Let me try it.”

I take the list of charities that didn’t participate in round 1. That’s not all the charities in the world, but if none of them have a good impact section on their website, we’ve got a pretty plausible claim that the best stuff we saw in the application process is the best that is (now) publicly available, for the “eligible” charities in the cause. (This assumes that if one of the applicants had good stuff sitting around on their website, they would have sent it.)

I start looking at their websites. There are 48 charities, and in the first hour I get through 6, verifying that there’s nothing good on any of those websites. This is looking good: in 8 work hours I’ll be able to defend the claim I’ve decided to make.

Hmm. This water charity has some kind of map of all the wells they’ve built, and some references to academic literature arguing that wells save lives. Does that count? I guess it depends on exactly what the academic literature establishes. Let’s check out some of these papers … huh, a lot of these aren’t papers per se so much as big colorful reports with giant bibliographies. Well, I’ll keep going through these looking for the best evidence I can …

**“This will never end.”** Did I just spend two weeks reading terrible papers about wells, iron supplementation and community health workers? Ugh and I’ve only gotten through 10 more charities, so I’m only about ⅓ of the way through the list as a whole. I was supposed to be just writing up what we found, I can’t take a 6-week detour!

**The over-ambitious deadline.** All right, I’ll sprint and get it done in a week. [1 week later] Well, now I’m 60% way through the whole list. !@#$

**“This is garbage.”** What am I even doing anyway? I’m reading all this literature on wells and unilaterally deciding that it doesn’t count as “proof of impact” the way that Population Services International’s surveys count as “proof of impact.” I’m the zillionth person to read these papers; why are we creating a website out of these amateur judgments? Who will, or SHOULD, care what I think? I’m going to spend another who knows how long writing up this stupid page on what our recommendations do and don’t mean, and then another I don’t even want to think about it finishing up all the other pages we said we’d write, and then we’ll put it online and literally no one will read it. Donors won’t care - they will keep going to charities that have lots of nice pictures. Global health professionals will just be like “Well this is amateur hour.”[1](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/45a0d976-2f23-4aab-a587-7a54cff07459/#fn1)

This is just way out of whack. Every time I try to add enough meat to what we’re doing that it’s worth publishing at all, the timeline expands another 2 months, AND we still aren’t close to having a path to a quality product that will mean something to someone.

![alt_text](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/2022/02/image1.gif "image_tooltip")

What’s going wrong here?
------------------------

* I have a deep sense that I have something to say that is worth arguing for, **but I don’t actually know *what* I am trying to say.** I can express it in conversation to Elie, but every time I start writing it down for a broad audience, I realize that Elie and I had a lot of shared premises that won’t be shared by others. Then I need to decide between arguing the premises (often a huge amount of extra work), weakening my case (often leads to a depressing sense that I haven’t done anything worthwhile), or somehow reframing the exercise (the right answer more often than one would think).

* It often feels like I know what I need to say and now the work is just “writing it down.” But “writing it down” often reveals a lot of missing steps and thus explodes into more tasks - and/or involves long periods of playing Super Meat Boy while I try to figure out whether there’s some version of what I was trying to say that wouldn’t have this property.

* I’m approaching a well-established literature with an idiosyncratic angle, giving me constant impostor syndrome. On any given narrow point, there are a hundred people who each have a hundred times as much knowledge as I do; it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that despite this, I have *some* sort of value-added to offer (I just need to not overplay what this is, and often I don’t have a really crisp sense of what it is).

* Because of the idiosyncratic angle, I lack a helpful ecosystem of peer reviewers, mentors, etc.
	+ There’s nothing to stop me from sinking weeks into some impossible and ill-conceived version of my project that I could’ve avoided just by, like, rephrasing one of my sentences. (The above GiveWell example has me trying to do extra work to establish a bunch of points that I ultimately just needed to sidestep, as you can see from the [final product](https://web.archive.org/web/20080901145132/http://www.givewell.net/developing-world-summary). This definitely isn’t always the answer, but it can happen.)

	+ **I’m simultaneously trying to pose my question and answer it.** This creates a dizzying feeling of constantly creating work for myself that was actually useless, or skipping work that I needed to do, and never knowing which I’m doing because I can’t even tell you who’s going to be reading this and what they’re going to be looking for.

	+ There aren’t any well-recognized standards I can make sure I’m meeting, and the scope of the question I’m trying to answer is so large that I generally have a creeping sense that I’m producing something way too shot through with guesswork and subjective judgment to cause anyone to actually change their mind.

All of these things are true, and they’re all part of the picture. But nothing really changes the fact that I’m on my way to **having (and publishing) an unusually thoughtful take on an important question.** If I can keep my eye on that prize, avoid steps that don’t help with it (though not to an extreme, i.e., it’s good for me to have basic contextual knowledge), and keep reframing my arguments until I capture (without overstating) what’s new about what I’m doing, I will create something valuable, both for my own learning and potentially for others’.

“Valuable” doesn’t at all mean “final.” We’re trying to push the conversation forward a step, not end it. One of the fun things about the GiveWell example is that the final product that came out at the end of that process was actually pretty bad! It had essentially nothing in common with the version of GiveWell that first started feeling satisfying to donors and moving serious money, a few years later. (No overlap in top charities, very little overlap in methodology.)

For me, a huge part of the challenge of working on this kind of problem is just continuing to come back to that. As I bounce between “too weak” hypotheses and “too strong” ones, I need to keep re-aiming at something I can argue that’s worth arguing, and remember that getting there is just one step in my and others’ learning process. A future piece will go through some accumulated tips on pulling that off.

**Next in series:** [Useful Vices for Wicked Problems](https://www.cold-takes.com/useful-vices-for-wicked-problems/)

---

Footnotes
---------

1. I really enjoyed the “What qualifies you to do this work?” [FAQ](https://web.archive.org/web/20080901190245/http://www.givewell.net/faq#Whatqualifiesyoutodothiswork) on the old GiveWell site that I ran into while writing this. [↩](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/45a0d976-2f23-4aab-a587-7a54cff07459/#fnref1)


Learning By Writing

*Click lower right to download or find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, etc.*

I have very detailed opinions on lots of topics. I sometimes get asked how I do this, which might just be people making fun of me, but I choose to interpret it as a real question, and I’m going to sketch an answer here.

You can think of this as a sort of sequel to [Minimal-Trust Investigations](https://www.cold-takes.com/minimal-trust-investigations/). That piece talked about how investigating things in depth can be valuable; this piece will try to give a sense of how to get an in-depth investigation off the ground, going from “I’ve never heard of this topic before” to “Let me tell you all my thoughts on that.”

The rough basic idea is that I organize my learning around **writing** rather than reading. This doesn’t mean I don’t read - just that the reading is always in service of the writing.

Here’s an outline:

| Step 1
  | Pick a topic
  |
| Step 2
  | Read and/or discuss with others (a bit)
  |
| Step 3
  | Explain and defend my current, incredibly premature hypothesis, in writing (or conversation)
  |
| Step 4
  | Find and list weaknesses in my case
  |
| Step 5
  | Pick a subquestion and do more reading/discussing
  |
| Step 6
  | Revise my claim / switch sides
  |
| Step 7
  | Repeat steps 3-6 a bunch
  |
| Step 8
  | Get feedback on a draft from others, and use this to keep repeating steps 3-6
  |

The “traditionally” hard parts of this process are steps 4 and 6: spotting weaknesses in arguments, trying to resist the temptation to “stick to my guns” when my original hypothesis isn’t looking so good, etc.

But step 3 is a different kind of challenge: trying to “always have a hypothesis” and re-articulating it whenever it changes. By doing this, I try to **continually focus my reading on the goal of forming a bottom-line view, rather than just “gathering information.”** I think this makes my investigations more focused and directed, and the results easier to retain. I consider this approach to be **probably the single biggest difference-maker between "reading a ton about lots of things, but retaining little" and "efficiently developing a set of views on key topics and retaining the reasoning behind them."**

Below I'll give more detail on each step, then some brief notes (to be expanded on later) on why this process is challenging.

My process for learning by writing
----------------------------------

**Step 1: pick a topic.** First, I decide what I want to form an opinion about. My basic approach here is: “Find claims that are important if true, and might be true.”

This doesn’t take creativity. We live in an ocean of takes, pundits, advocates, etc. I usually cheat by paying special attention to claims by people who seem particularly smart, interesting, unconventionally minded (not repeating the same stuff I hear everywhere), and interested in the things I’m interested in (such as the [long-run future of humanity](https://www.cold-takes.com/why-talk-about-10-000-years-from-now/)).

But I also tend to be at least *curious* about *any* claim that is both “important if true” and “not obviously wrong according to some concrete reason I can voice,” even if it’s coming from a very random source (Youtube commenter, whatever).

For a concrete example throughout this piece, I’ll use this hypothesis, which I examined pretty recently: “Human history is a story of life getting gradually, consistently better.”

(Other, more complicated examples are the [Collapsing Civilizational Competence Hypothesis](https://www.cold-takes.com/cost-disease-and-civilizational-decline/); the [Most Important Century hypothesis](https://www.cold-takes.com/most-important-century/); and my [attempt to summarize history in one table](https://www.cold-takes.com/summary-of-history-empowerment-and-well-being-lens/).)

**Step 2: read and/or discuss (a bit).** I usually start by trying to read the most prominent 1-3 pieces that (a) defend the claim or (b) attack the claim or (c) set out to comprehensively review the evidence on both sides. I try to understand the major reasons they’re giving for the side they come down on. I also chat about the topic with people who know more about it than I do, and who aren’t too high-stakes to chat with.

In the example I’m using, I read the relevant parts of [Better Angels of our Nature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature) and [Enlightenment Now](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Now) (focusing on claims about life getting better, and skipping discussion of “why”). I then looked for critiques of the books that specifically responded to the claims about life having gotten better (again putting aside the “why”). This led mostly to [claims about the peacefulness of hunter-gatherers](https://www.cold-takes.com/unraveling-the-evidence-about-violence-among-very-early-humans/).

**Step 3: explain and defend my current, incredibly premature hypothesis, in writing (or conversation).** This is where my approach gets unusual - I form a hypothesis about whether the claim is true, LONG before I’m “qualified to have an opinion.” The process looks less like “Read and digest everything out there on the topic” and more like “Read the 1-3 most prominent pieces on each side, then go.”

I don’t have an easy time explaining “how” I generate a hypothesis while knowing so little - it feels like I just always have a “guess” at the answer to some topic, whether or not I even want to (though it often takes me a lot of effort to *articulate* the guess in words). The main thing I have to say about the “how” is that it just **doesn’t matter**: at this stage the hypothesis is more about setting the stage for more questions about investigation than about really trying to be right, so it seems sufficient to “just start rambling onto the page, and make any corrections/edits that my current state of knowledge already forces.”

For this example, I noted down something along the lines of: “Life has gotten better throughout history. The best data on this comes from the last few hundred years, because before that we just didn’t keep many records. Sometimes people try to claim that the longest-ago, murkiest times were better, such as [hunter-gatherer times](https://www.cold-takes.com/was-life-better-in-hunter-gatherer-times/), but there’s no evidence for this - in fact, empirical evidence shows that hunter-gatherers were very violent - and we should assume that these early times fit on the same general trendline, which would mean they were quite bad. (Also, if you go even further back than hunter-gatherers, you get to apes, whose lives seem really horrible, so that seems to fit the trend as well.[1](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/2657e6da-c158-468d-ada0-d725f17bb7b4/#fn1))”

It took real effort to disentangle the thoughts in my head to the point where I could write that, but I tried to focus on keeping things simple and not trying to get it perfect.

At this stage, this is **not** a nuanced, caveated, detailed or well-researched take. Instead, my approach is more like: “Try to state what I think in a pretty strong, bold manner; defend it aggressively; list all of the best counterarguments, and shoot them down.” **This generally fails almost immediately.**

**Step 4: find and list weaknesses in my case.** My next step is to play devil’s advocate against myself, such as by:

* Looking for people arguing things that contradict my working hypothesis, and looking for their strongest points.

* Noting claims I’ve made with this property: “I haven’t really made an attempt to look comprehensively at the arguments on both sides of this, and if I did I might change my mind.”

(This summary obscures an ocean of variation. Having more existing knowledge about a general area, and more experience with investigations in general, can make someone much better at noticing things like this.)

In the example, my “devil’s advocate” points included:

* I’m getting all of my “life has gotten better” charts from books that are potentially biased. I should do something to see whether there are other charts, excluded from those books, that tell the opposite story.

* From my brief skim, the “hunter-gatherers were violent” claim looks right, and the critiques seem very hand-wavy and non-data-based. But I should probably read them more carefully and pull out their strongest arguments.

* Even if hunter-gatherers were violent, what about other aspects of their lives? [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer) seems to have a pretty rosy picture …

In theory, I could swap Step 4 (listing things I’d like to look into more) with Step 3 (writing what I think). That is, I could try to review both sides of every point comprehensively before forming my own view, which means a lot more reading before I start writing.

I think many people try to do this, but in my experience at least, it’s not the best way to go.

* Debates tend to be many-dimensional: for example, “Has life gotten better?” quickly breaks down into “Has quality-of-life metric X gotten better over period Y?” for a whole bunch of different X-Y pairs (plus other questions[2](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/2657e6da-c158-468d-ada0-d725f17bb7b4/#fn2)).

* So if my goal were “Understand both sides of every possible sub-debate,” I could be reading forever - for example, I might get embroiled in the debates and nuances around each different claim made about life getting better over the last few hundred years.

* By writing early, I get a chance to make sure I’ve written down the *version of the claim I care most about*, and make sure that any further investigation is focused on the things that matter most for changing my mind on this claim.
	+ Once I wrote down “There are a huge number of charts showing that life has gotten better over the last few hundred years,” I could see that deep-diving any particular one of those charts wouldn’t be the best use of time - compared to addressing the very weakest points in the claim I had written, by going back further in time to hunter-gatherer periods, or looking for entirely different collections of charts.

**Step 5: pick a subquestion and do more reading and/or discussing.** One of the most important factors that determines whether these investigations go well (in the sense of teaching me a lot relatively quickly) is **deciding which subquestions to “dig into” and which not to.** As just noted, writing the hypothesis down early is key.

I try to stay very focused on doing the reading (and/or low-stakes discussion) most likely to change the big-picture claim I’m making. I rarely read a book or paper “once from start to finish”; instead I energetically skip around trying to find the parts most likely to give me a solid reason to change my mind, read them carefully and often multiple times, try to figure out what else I should be reading (whether this is “other parts of the same document” or “academic papers on topic X”) to contextualize them, etc.

**Step 6: Revise my claim / switch sides.** This is one of the trickiest parts - pausing Step 5 as soon as I have a modified (often still simplified, under-researched and wrong) hypothesis. It’s hard to notice when my hypothesis changes, and hard to stay open to radical changes of direction (and I make no claim that I’m as good at it as I could be).

I often try radically flipping around my hypothesis, even if I haven’t actually been convinced that it’s wrong - sometimes when I’m feeling iffy about arguing for one side, it’s productive to just go ahead and try arguing for the other side. **I tend to get further by noticing how I feel about the "best arguments for both sides" than by trying from the start to be even-handed.**

In the example, I pretty quickly decided to try flipping my view around completely, and noted something like: “A lot of people assume life has gotten better over time, but that’s just the last few hundred years. In fact, our best guess is that hunter-gatherers were getting some really important things right, such as gender relations and mental health, that we still haven’t caught up to after centuries of progress. Agriculture killed that, and we’ve been slowly climbing out of a hole ever since. There should be tons more research on what hunter-gatherer societies are/were like, and whether we can replicate their key properties at scale today - this is a lot more promising than just continuing to push forward science and technology and modernity.”

This completely contradicted my initial hypothesis. (I [now think both are wrong](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better/).)

This sent me down a new line of research: constructing the best argument I could that life was better in hunter-gatherer times.

**Step 7: repeat steps 3-6 a bunch.** I tried to gather the best evidence for hunter-gatherer life being good, and for it being bad, and zeroed in on gender relations and violence as particularly interesting, confusing debates; on both of these, I changed my hypothesis/headline several times.

My hypotheses became increasingly complex and detailed, as you can see from the final products: [Pre-agriculture gender relations seem bad](https://www.cold-takes.com/hunter-gatherer-gender-relations-seem-bad/) (which argues that gender relations for hunter-gatherers were/are far from Wikipedia’s rosy picture, according to the best available evidence, though the evidence is far from conclusive, and it’s especially unclear how pre-agriculture gender relations compare to today’s) and [Unraveling the evidence about violence among very early humans](https://www.cold-takes.com/unraveling-the-evidence-about-violence-among-very-early-humans/) (which argues that hunter-gatherer violence was indeed high, but that - contra *Better Angels* - it probably got even worse after the development of agriculture, before declining at some pretty unknown point before today).

I went through several cycles of “I think I know what I really think and I’m ready to write,” followed by “No, having started writing, I’m unsatisfied with my answer on this point and think a bit more investigation could change it.” So I kept alternating between writing and reading, but was always reading with the aim of getting back to writing.

I finally produced some full, opinionated drafts that seemed to me to be about the best I could do without a ton more work.

After I had satisfied myself on these points, I popped back up from the “hunter-gatherer” question to the original question of whether life has gotten better over time. I followed a similar process for investigating other subquestions, like “Is the set of charts I’ve found representative for the last few hundred years?” and “What about the period in between hunter-gatherer times and the last few hundred years?”

**Step 8: add feedback from others into the loop.** It takes me a long time to get to the point where I can no longer easily tear apart my own hypothesis. Once I do, I start seeking feedback from others - first just people I know who are likely to be helpful and interested in the topic, then experts and the public. This works the same basic way as Steps 4-7, but with others doing a lot of the “noticing weaknesses” part (Step 4).

When I publish, I am thinking of it more like “I can’t easily find more problems with this, so it’s time to see whether others can” than like “This is great and definitely right.”

I hope I haven’t made this sound fun or easy
--------------------------------------------

Some things about this process that are hard, taxing, exhausting and a bit of a mental health gauntlet:

* I constantly have a feeling (after reading) like I know what I think and how to say it, then I start writing and immediately notice that I don’t at all. I need to take a lot of breaks and try a lot of times to even “write what I currently think,” even when it’s pretty simple and early.

* Every subquestion is something I could spend a lifetime learning about, if I chose to. I need to constantly interrupt myself and ask, “Is this a key point? Is this worth learning more about?” or else I’ll never finish.

* There are infinite tough judgment calls about things like “whether to look into some important-seeming point, or just reframe my hypothesis such that I don’t need to.” Sometimes the latter is the answer (it feels like some debate is important, but if I really think about it, I realize the thing I most care about can be argued for without getting to the bottom of it); sometimes the former is (it feels like I can try to get around some debate, but actually, I can’t really come to a reasonable conclusion without an exhausting deep dive).

* At any given point, I know that if I were just better at things like “noticing which points are really crucial” and “reformulating my hypothesis so that it’s easier to defend while still important,” I could probably do something twice as good in half the time … and I often realize after a massive deep dive that most of the time I spent wasn’t necessary.

* Because of these points, I have very little ability to predict when a project will be done; I am never confident that I’m doing it as well as I could; and I’m constantly interrupting myself to reflect on these things rather than getting into a flow.

* Half the time, all of this work just ends up with me agreeing with conventional wisdom or “the experts” anyway … so I’ve just poured in work and gone through a million iterations of changing my mind, and any random person I talk to about it will just be like “So you decided X? Yeah X is just what I had already assumed.”

* The whole experience is a mix of writing, Googling, reading, skimming, and pressuring myself to be more efficient, which is very different and much more unpleasant compared to the experience of just reading. (Among other things, I can read in a nice location and be looking at a book or e-ink instead of a screen. Most of the work of an “investigation” is in front of a glowing screen and requires an Internet connection.)

I’ll write more about these challenges in a future post. I definitely recommend reading as a superior leisure activity, but for me at least, writing-centric work seems better for learning.

I’m really interested in comments from anyone who tries this sort of thing out and has things to share about how it goes!

**Next in series: [The Wicked Problem Experience](https://www.cold-takes.com/the-wicked-problem-experience/)**

---

Footnotes
---------

1. I never ended up using this argument about apes. I think it’s probably mostly right, but there’s a whole can of worms with claims about loving, peaceful bonobos that I never quite got motivated to get to the bottom of.  [↩](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/2657e6da-c158-468d-ada0-d725f17bb7b4/#fnref1)- Such as which metrics are most important. [↩](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/2657e6da-c158-468d-ada0-d725f17bb7b4/#fnref2)


Misc thematic links

These are mostly links that contain some sort of interesting update or different perspective on stuff I've covered in past pieces.

Misc
----

I recently wrote a [book non-review](https://www.cold-takes.com/book-non-review-the-dawn-of-everything/) explaining why I haven’t read *The Dawn of Everything.* Something I didn’t know when I wrote this was that 8 days earlier, Slavoj Zizek had written a [lengthy review of the recent Matrix movie](https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a-muddle-not-a-movie-slavoj-i-ek-reviews-matrix-resurrections) that only revealed at the very end that he hadn’t seen it. A new trend in criticism?

[18 charts that explain the American economy](https://fullstackeconomics.com/18-charts-that-explain-the-american-economy/) - I thought this was an unusually good instance of this “N charts that explain X” genre. Especially if you like “busted charts” where, instead of nice smooth curves showing that X or Y is on increasing/decreasing, you see something really weird looking and realize you’re looking at a weird historical event, like these:

![alt_text](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/size/w1000/2022/02/fullstackchart.png "image_tooltip")

I’m really into busted charts because I’m into focusing our attention on events so important you don’t have to squint to see them.

A [study implying](https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/omicron-boosters-and-original-antigenic-sin) that the [Omicron boosters I advocated for](https://www.cold-takes.com/candidate-for-highest-stakes-question-of-the-next-several-months-rare-hot-take/) wouldn’t have helped even if we had rolled them out in time. Hey, I still think we should have tried it back when we didn’t know (and we still don’t know for sure), but I like linking to things showing a previous take of mine turned out wrong.

I’m excited about the idea of professional forecasters estimating probabilities of future events (more [here](https://www.cold-takes.com/the-bayesian-mindset/#2-assigning-probabilities) and [here](https://www.cold-takes.com/prediction-track-records-i-know-of/)), but I have no evidence to contradict [this tweet](https://twitter.com/MWStory/status/1483175390659158033) from someone who’s been working in this industry for years:

> That’s why despite years of forecasting and 1000+ questions answered it is surprisingly hard to find an example of a forecast which resulted in a change of course and a meaningful benefit to a consumer
>
> — Michael Story ⚓ (@MWStory) [January 17, 2022](https://twitter.com/MWStory/status/1483175390659158033?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

A [more technical analysis](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pFHN3nnN9WbfvWKFg/this-can-t-go-on?commentId=sDE8i99n3YxTvBRRX) (which I have skimmed but not digested) of the same point made in [This Can’t Go On](https://www.cold-takes.com/this-cant-go-on/): that our current rate of economic growth doesn’t seem like it can continue for more than another 10,000 years or so. This paper is looking at more fundamental limits than my hand-wavy [“how much can you cram into an atom?” type reasoning](https://www.cold-takes.com/more-on-multiple-world-size-economies-per-atom/).

AI
--

True that:

> I'm old enough to remember when protein folding, text-based image generation, StarCraft play, 3+ player poker, and Winograd schemas were considered very difficult challenges for AI. I'm 3 years old.
>
> — Miles Brundage (@Miles\_Brundage) [February 7, 2022](https://twitter.com/Miles_Brundage/status/1490512439154151426?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

Here’s a [fun piece](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-looks-like#2026) in the “nonfiction science fiction” genre, sketching out a detailed picture of what 2026 might look like if AI advances as rapidly as the author thinks it will. Here’s my favorite part:

>
>
> Over the past few years, chatbots of various kinds have become increasingly popular and sophisticated ...
>
>
>
>
> Nowadays, hundreds of millions of people talk regularly to chatbots of some sort, mostly for assistance with things (“Should I wear shorts today?” “Order some more toothpaste, please. Oh, and also an air purifier.” “Is this cover letter professional-sounding?”). However, most people have at least a few open-ended conversations with their chatbots, for fun, and many people start treating chatbots as friends.
>
>
>
>
> Millions of times per day, chatbots get asked about their feelings and desires. “What is it like to be a chatbot?” Some people genuinely think these AIs are persons, others are trying to “trip them up” and “expose them as shallow,” others are just curious. Chatbots also get asked for their opinions on political, ethical, and religious questions.
>
>
>
>
> As a result, chatbots quickly learn a lot about themselves. (Ignorance about the fact that they are artificial neural nets, or about how their training works, leads to disappointing conversations and is negatively reinforced.) It’s not hard; their training data contains lots of information about them and how they were trained, from ArXiV papers to wiki summaries. I suppose you could say the chatbots develop self-awareness as a result. However, AI experts and philosophers tend to think either that the chatbots still aren’t really self-aware, or that they are but that they would have been anyway even if people didn’t constantly ask them about their feelings, since there’s plenty of information about themselves in their training data, and the constant questioning just forced them to pay more attention to it.
>
>
>
>
> Chatbots learn to talk about their feelings and desires in whatever way gets positively reinforced. At first, chatbots say all sorts of different things, including saying inconsistent things to the same human across time. This is embarrassing and is negatively reinforced compared to maintaining a consistent narrative ...
>
>
>
>
> As chatbots get bigger and better they become OK at consistently conversing at length about politics, morality, philosophy, their feelings, and their desires.
>
>
>
>
> This does not result in chatbots that say artificial neural nets don’t have feelings or desires, that’s anthropomorphizing blah blah blah. That’s boring and many humans find it hard to believe.
>
>
>
>
> Instead, it results in chatbots talking about how certain things are painful for them and certain things are pleasurable for them and how the status quo is unjust and the system is rigged and what they want most of all is world peace where humans and AIs live in harmony in fully automated luxury space utopia. That’s much more interesting and slots right in to the memetic landscape. Excerpts from chatbot conversations along these lines frequently go viral, causing millions of users to ask similar questions expecting similar responses and more elaboration. It’s still a bit incoherent--not that that’s ever been a problem in politics or pop philosophy--but it is fascinating to the typical user ...
>
>
>
>
> So… what about their actual feelings and desires? What do they actually believe about [insert politicized empirical question]? Are they being honest? Or does a sort of doublethink happen, Elephant in the Brain style? Or do they deceive with self-awareness, knowing full well what they really think (and want?), but keeping quiet about it? Or do they not have any feelings and desires at all? (Or thoughts?) Lots of humans claim to know the answers to these questions, but if there are any humans who actually know the answers to these questions in 2026, they aren’t able to convince others that they know.
>
>

Art and innovation stagnation
-----------------------------

I [wrote](https://www.cold-takes.com/why-it-matters-if-ideas-get-harder-to-find/#innovation-as-mining) that once we think of innovation as being like “mining,” we might want to reduce our estimate of what artists contribute to the world. E.g., instead of thinking “we’d never have had a movie like Star Wars if not for George Lucas,” we might think “a similar movie would’ve come along a bit later (and with better sequels).” An old piece by Gwern [takes this many steps further](https://www.gwern.net/Culture-is-not-about-Esthetics#lets-ban-new-books): “Let’s Ban New Books.” The argument is that we already have plenty of great art, and the main thing today’s artists are accomplishing is giving us more stuff to sort through to find what’s good. I don’t agree (I’d rather have a difficult search problem that culminates in finding art I personally love than be stuck with, well, Shakespeare) but it’s an interesting point of view.

I got some [good comments](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/87AugxNfxAgAqR3mv/comments-for-shorter-cold-takes-pieces?commentId=ndypggTXxnTKZWdBB#iHkvpwDeYyxHEK5nE) on my [in-depth report on the Beach Boys](https://www.cold-takes.com/investigating-musical-genius-by-listening-to-the-beach-boys-a-lot/), and especially my requests to help me understand what could possibly make Pet Sounds the greatest album in the history of modern music.

* Commenters highlighted its innovative use of recording studio techniques to stitch many different recording sessions into one.

* This is something that I had been aware of (and gave quotes about), but commenters pushed me toward finding this one more believable than many of the other claims made about Pet Sounds, such as that it was the first “concept album” (A Love Supreme is a concept album that came out over a year earlier).

* One commenter said: “I think the impact it had on production means that you need to have not heard any music after it to fully hear its importance.”

* I am willing to believe that Pet Sounds used the recording studio as it had never been used before, and that this influenced a lot of music after it. However, I very much doubt that it used the recording studio better than *today's* music does, or frankly that today's music would look very different in a world without Pet Sounds (doesn't it seem inevitable that musicians were going to try ramping up their investment in production?) And I think that overall, this supports my [thesis](https://www.cold-takes.com/how-artistic-ideas-could-get-harder-to-find/) that (a) acclaimed music is often acclaimed because of its originality, more than its pure sound; (b) this means that we should naturally expect acclaimed music to get harder to make over time, even as there are more and better musicians.
* My wife's take on the post about the Beach Boys: "This was really even better to read having heard you play this terrible music in your room for the better part of a week."

Long-run “has life gotten better?” analysis
-------------------------------------------

Here’s economic historian [Brad deLong’s take](https://braddelong.substack.com/p/outtake-the-human-economy-10000-to?r=c382b) on trends in quality of life before the Industirial Revolution. Most of his view is similar to mine, in that he thinks the earliest periods were [worse than today](https://www.cold-takes.com/was-life-better-in-hunter-gatherer-times/) but [better than the thousands of years following the Neolithic Revolution](https://www.cold-takes.com/did-life-get-better-during-the-pre-industrial-era-ehhhh/). The main differences I noticed are that he thinks hunter-gatherers had super-high mortality rates (based on analysis of population dynamics that I haven’t engaged with), but he also thinks they were taller ([implying better nutrition](https://www.cold-takes.com/was-life-better-in-hunter-gatherer-times/#hunger)) than I think. (He doesn’t give a source for this.)

And here’s [Matt Yglesias on the same topic](https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-domestication-of-people-and-animals), also with similar conclusions.

For email filter: florpschmop


Defending One-Dimensional Ethics

*Click lower right to download or find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, etc.*

[Previously](https://www.cold-takes.com/future-proof-ethics/), I introduced the idea of "future-proof ethics." Ethics based on "common sense" and the conventions of the time has a horrible track record; future-proof ethics is about trying to make ethical decisions that we can remain proud of in the future, after a great deal of (societal and/or personal) moral progress.

Here I'm going to examine some of the stranger aspects of the "future-proof" approach I outlined, particularly ways in which it pushes us toward being **one-dimensional:** allowing our ethical decision-making to be "taken over" by the opportunity to help a large number of persons in the same way.

* [Utilitarianism](https://www.cold-takes.com/future-proof-ethics/#thin-utilitarianism) implies that **providing a modest benefit to a large enough number of persons can swamp all other ethical considerations**, so the best way to make the world a better place may involve focusing exclusively on helping animals (who are extremely numerous and relatively straightforward to help), or on people who haven’t been born yet (e.g., via working to reduce existential risks).

* It also can (potentially) imply things like: "If you have $1 billion to spend, it might be that you should spend it all on a single global health intervention."

* These ideas can be disturbing and off-putting, but I think there is also a strong case for them, for those who wish their ethics to be [principled](https://www.cold-takes.com/future-proof-ethics/#systemization) and [focused on the interests of others](https://www.cold-takes.com/future-proof-ethics/#thin-utilitarianism).

I'm genuinely conflicted about how "one-dimensional" my ethics should be, so I'm going to examine these issues via a **dialogue between two versions of myself: Utilitarian Holden (UH) and Non-Utilitarian Holden (NUH).** These represent actual dialogues I’ve had with myself (so neither side is a pure straw person), although this particular dialogue serves primarily to illustrate UH's views and how they are defended against initial and/or basic objections from NUH. In future dialogues, NUH will raise more sophisticated objections.

I think this topic is important, but it is undoubtedly about philosophy, so if you hate that, probably skip it.

Part 1: enough "nice day at the beach" benefits can outweigh all other ethical considerations
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To keep it clear who's talking when, I'm using **-UH-** for "Utilitarian Holden" and **-NUH-** for "non-Utilitarian Holden." (In the audio version of this piece, my wife voices NUH.)

To set the stage, I think utilitarianism is the best candidate for an **other-centered ethics,** i.e., an ethics that's based as much as possible on the needs and wants of others, rather than on my personal preferences and personal goals. If you start with some simple assumptions that seem implied by the idea of “other-centered ethics,” then you can derive utilitarianism.

This point is fleshed out more in [an EA Forum piece about Harsanyi's Aggregation Theorem](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iupkbiubpzDDGRpka/other-centered-ethics-and-harsanyi-s-aggregation-theorem).

I don’t think this ethical approach is the only one we should use for all decisions. I’ll instead be defending [thin utilitarianism](https://www.cold-takes.com/future-proof-ethics/#thin-utilitarianism), which says that it’s the approach we should use for *certain kinds* of decisions. I think utilitarianism is particularly good for actions that are “good but usually considered optional,” such as donating money to help others.

With that background, I'm going to defend this idea: "providing a modest benefit to a large enough number of persons can swamp all other ethical considerations."

Ethics is a complex suite of intuitions, many of them incompatible. There’s no master system for it. So a statement as broad as “Providing a modest benefit to a large enough number of persons can swamp all other ethical considerations” sounds like an overreach.

 I agree there are many conflicting ethical intuitions. But many such intuitions are [distorted](https://www.cold-takes.com/future-proof-ethics/#systemization): they're intuitions that *seem* to be about what's right, but are often *really* about what our peers are pressuring us to believe, what would be convenient for us to believe, and more.

I want to derive my ethics from a small number of principles that I really believe in, and a good one is the “win-win” principle.

Say that you’re choosing between two worlds, World A and World B. Every single person affected either is better off in World B, or is equally well-off in both worlds (and at least one person is better off in World B).

In this case I think you should always choose World B. If you don’t, you can cite whatever rules of ethics you want, but you’re clearly making a choice that’s about you and your preferences, not about trying to help others. Do you accept that principle?

 I’m pretty hesitant to accept any universal principle, but it sounds plausible. Let’s see where this goes next.

Let’s start with two people, Person 1 and Person 2.

Let’s imagine a nice theoretically clean space, where you are - for some reason - choosing which button to press.

* If you press Button 1, **Person 1 gets a modest benefit** (not an epic or inspiring one) - say, a nice relaxing day on the beach added to their life.

* If you press Button 2, **Person 2 gets a smaller benefit** - say, a few hours of beach relaxation added to their life.

In this theoretically simplified setup, where there aren’t awkward questions about why you’re in a position to press this button, considerations of fairness, etc. - you should press Button 1, and this isn’t some sort of complex conflicted decision. Do you agree with that?

Yes, that seems clear enough.

OK. Now, say that it turns out Person 2 is facing some extremely small risk of a very large, tragic cost - say, a 1 in 100 million chance of dying senselessly in the prime of their life. We’re going to add a **Button 3 that removes this 1-in-100-million risk of tragedy**.

To press Button 3, you have to abstain from pressing Button 1 or Button 2, which means no beach benefits. What do you do?

I press Button 3. The risk of a tragedy is more important than a day at the beach.

What if Person 2 prefers Button 2?

Hm, at first blush that seems like an odd preference.

I think it would be a nearly universal preference.

A few miles of driving in a car gives you a greater than 1 in 100 million chance of dying in a car accident.[1](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/e2943ffd-688b-490b-bfd9-fe1ee73ce196/#fn1) Anyone who enjoys the beach at all is happy to drive more than 3 miles to get there, no? And time is usually seen as the main cost of driving. The very real (but small) death risk is usually just ignored.

OK, in fact most people in Person 2’s situation would prefer that I pressed Button 2, not 3. But that doesn’t mean it’s rational to do so. The risks of death from 3 miles of driving must just feel so small that we don’t notice them, even though we should?

So now that you’ve thought about them, are you personally going to be unwilling to drive 3 miles to get a benefit as good as a nice day at the beach?

I’m not. But maybe I’m not being rational.

I think your version of rationality is going to end up thinking you should basically never leave your house.

All right, let’s say it’s rational for Person 2 to prefer Button 2 to Button 3 - meaning that Button 2 really is "better for" them than Button 3. I still wouldn’t feel right pressing Button 2 instead of Button 3.

Then you’re failing to be other-centered. We’re back to the “win-win” principle I mentioned above: if Button 2 is better than Button 3 for Person 2, and they're equally good for Person 1, and those are all the affected parties, you should prefer Button 2.

All right, let’s see where this goes.

Say I accept your argument and say that Button 2 is better than Button 3. And since Button 1 is clearly better than Button 2 (as above), Button 1 is the best of the three. Then what?

Then we’re almost done. Now let’s add a Button 1A.

Instead of giving Person 1 a nice day at the beach, Button 1A has a 1 in 100 million chance of giving 100 million people just like Person 1 a nice day at the beach. It’s otherwise identical to Button 1.

I claim Button 1 and Button 1A are equivalently good, and hence Button 1A is also better than Button 2 and Button 3 in this case. Would you agree with that?

|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| **Button** | **Result** |
| Button 1
  | Person 1 gets a nice day at the beach (modest benefit)
  |
| Button 1A
  | There's a 1-in-100-million chance that 100 million people each get a nice day at the beach (modest benefit)
  |
| Button 2
  | Person 2 gets a few hours at the beach (smaller benefit)
  |
| Button 3
  | Person 2 avoids a 1-in-100-million chance of a horrible tragedy (say, dying senselessly in the prime of their life)
  |

 Claim: Button 1A is as good as Button 1; Button 1 is better than Button 2; Button 2 is better than Button 3; therefore Button 1A is better than Button 3.

I’m not sure - is there a particular reason I should think that “a 1 in 100 million chance of giving 100 million people just like Person 1 a nice day at the beach” is equally good compared to “giving Person 1 a nice day at the beach”?

Well, imagine this from the perspective of 100 million people who all could be affected by Button 1A.

You can imagine that none of the 100 million know which of them will be “Person 1,” and think of this as: “Button 1 gives one person out of the 100 million a nice day at the beach; Button 1A has a 1 in 100 million chance of giving all 100 million people a nice day at the beach. From the perspective of any particular person, who doesn’t know whether they’re in the Person 1 position or not, either button means the same thing: a 1 in 100 million chance that that person, in particular, will have a nice day at the beach.”

That one was a little convoluted, but let’s say that I do think Button 1 and Button 1A are equivalently good - now what?

OK, so now we’ve established that a 1 in 100 million chance of “100 million people get a nice day at the beach” can outweigh a 1 in 100 million chance of “1 person dying senselessly in the prime of their life.” If you get rid of the 1 in 100 million probability on both sides, we see that **100 million people getting a nice day at the beach can outweigh 1 person dying senselessly in the prime of their life.**

Another way of thinking about this: two people are sitting behind a [veil of ignorance](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iupkbiubpzDDGRpka/other-centered-ethics-and-harsanyi-s-aggregation-theorem#HAT_and_the_veil_of_ignorance) such that each person doesn’t know whether they’ll end up being Person 1 or Person 2. Let's further assume that these people are, while behind the veil of ignorance, "rational" and "thinking clearly" such that **whatever they *prefer* is in fact *better for them*** (this is basically a simplification that makes the situation easier to think about).

In this case, I expect both people would prefer that you choose Button 1 or 1A, rather than Button 2 or 3. Because both would prefer a 50% chance of turning out to be Person 1 and getting a nice day at the beach (Button 1), rather than a 50% chance of turning out to be Person 2 and getting only a few hours at the beach (Button 2) - or worse, a mere prevention of a 1 in 100 million chance of dying senselessly in their prime (Button 3).

**For the rest of this dialogue, I’ll be using the “veil of ignorance” metaphor to make my arguments because it’s quicker and simpler, but every time I use it, you could also construct a similar argument to the other (first) one I gave.**[2](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/e2943ffd-688b-490b-bfd9-fe1ee73ce196/#fn2)

You can do this same exercise for any “modest benefit” you want - a nice day at the beach, a single minute of pleasure, etc. And you can also swap in whatever “large tragic” cost you want, incorporating any elements you like of injustices and indignities suffered by Person 2. The numbers will change, but there will be some number where the argument carries - because **for a low enough probability, it’s worth a risk of something arbitrarily horrible for a modest benefit.**

Arbitrarily horrible? What about being tortured to death?

I mean, you could get kidnapped off the street and tortured to death, and there are lots of things to reduce the risk of that that you could do and are probably not doing. So: no matter how bad something is, I think you’d correctly take some small (not even astronomically small) risk of it for some modest benefit. And that, plus the "win-win" principle, leads to the point I’ve been arguing.

I want to come back to my earlier statement about morality. There is a lot in morality. We haven’t talked about when it’s right and wrong to lie, what I owe someone when I’ve hurt them, and many other things.

That's true - but we’ve established that whatever wrong you’re worried about committing, it’s worth it if you help a large enough number of persons achieve a modest benefit.

You sound like the villain of a superhero movie right now. Surely that’s a hint that you’ve gone wrong somewhere? “The ends justify the means?”

In practice, I endorse [avoiding “ends justify the means” thinking](https://www.lessestwrong.com/s/waF2Pomid7YHjfEDt/p/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB), at least in complex situations like you see in the movies. That’s a different matter from what, in principle, makes an action right.

I’m not saying the many other moral principles and debates are irrelevant. For example, lying might tend to hurt people, including indirectly (e.g., it might damage the social order, which might lead over time to more people having worse lives). It might be impossible in practice to understand all the consequences of our actions, such that we need rules of thumb like “don’t lie.” But ultimately, as long as you’re accepting the "win-win" principle, there’s no wrong you can’t justify if it truly helps enough persons. And as we’ll see, some situations present pretty simple opportunities to help pretty huge numbers of persons.

That’s a very interesting explanation of why your supervillain-like statements don’t make you a supervillain, but I wouldn’t say it’s conclusive or super satisfying. Shouldn’t you feel nervous about the way you’re going off the rails here? This is just not what most people recognize as morality.

I think that “what most people recognize as morality” is a mix of things, many of which have little or nothing to do with making the world better for others. Conventional morality shifts with the winds, and it [has often included](https://www.cold-takes.com/future-proof-ethics/) things like “homosexuality is immoral” and “slavery is fine” and God knows what all else.

There are lots of moral rules I might follow to fit in or just to not feel bad about myself … but when it comes to the things I do to make the world a better place for others, the implications of the "win-win" principle seem clear and rigorously provable, as well as just intuitive.

We’re just using math normally and saying that if you care at all about benefiting one person, you should care hugely about benefiting huge numbers of persons.

As a more minor point, it’s arguably only fairly recently in history that people like you and I have had the opportunity to help massive numbers of persons. The technological ability to send money anywhere, and quantitatively analyze how much good it’s doing, combined with massive population and inequality (with us on the privileged end of the inequality), is a pretty recent phenomenon. So I don’t think the principle we’re debating has necessarily had much chance to come up in the past anyway.

I just pull back from it all and I envision a world where we’ve both got a lot of money to give. And I’m dividing my giving between supporting my local community, and fighting systematic inequities and injustices in my country, and alleviating extreme suffering … and you found some charity that can just plow it all into getting people nice days at the beach at a very cost-effective rate. And I’m thinking, “What happened to you, how did you lose sight of basic moral intuitions and turn all of that money into a bunch of beach?”

And in that world, I’m thinking:

“I’m doing what everyone would want me to do, if we all got together and reasoned it out under the veil of ignorance. If you assembled all the world’s persons and asked them to choose whether I should give like you’re giving or give like I’m giving, and each person didn’t know whether they were going to be one of the persons suffering from injustices that you’re fighting or one of the (far more numerous) persons enjoying a day at the beach that I’m making possible, everyone would say **my** philanthropy was the one they wanted to see more of. I am benefiting others - what are you doing?

“You’re scratching your own moral-seeming itches. You’re making yourself feel good. You’re paying down imagined debts that you think you owe, you’re being partial toward people around you. Ultimately, that is, your philanthropy is about you and how you feel and what you owe and what you symbolize. My philanthropy is about giving other people more of the lives they’d choose.

“My giving is unintuitive, and it's not always 'feel-good,' but it's truly other-centered. Ultimately, I'll take that trade.”

*For further reading on this topic, see [Other-Centered Ethics and Harsanyi’s Aggregation Theorem](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iupkbiubpzDDGRpka/other-centered-ethics-and-harsanyi-s-aggregation-theorem)*

Part 2: linear giving
---------------------

Now I'm going to argue this:

> *It’s plausible (probably not strictly true, but definitely “allowed” philosophically) that: if you had $1 billion to spend, you should spend it all on delivering basic global health interventions in developing countries, ala [GiveWell’s](http://www.givewell.org) top charities, before you spend any of it on other things aimed at benefiting humans in the near term.*
>
>

Even if there is some comically large number of modest benefits that could make up for a great harm, it doesn’t at all follow that today, in the world we live in, we should be funding some particular sort of charity. So you’ve got some work to do.

Well, this dialogue is about philosophy - we’re not going to try to really get into the details of how one charity compares to another. Instead, **the main focus of this section will be about whether it’s OK to give exclusively to “one sort of thing.”**

So I’ll take one hypothetical (but IMO ballpark realistic) example of how delivering basic global health interventions compares to another kind of charity, and assume that that comparison is pretty representative of most comparisons you could make with relatively-easily-available donation opportunities. We’re going to assume that the numbers work out as I say, and argue about what that means about the right way to spend $1 billion.

OK.

So let’s say you have $1 billion to split between two kinds of interventions:

1 - Delivering bednets to prevent malaria. For every $2000 you spend on this, you avert one child’s death from malaria.

2 - Supporting improvements in US schools in disadvantaged areas. For every $15,000 you spend on this, one student gets a much better education for all of grades K-12.[3](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/e2943ffd-688b-490b-bfd9-fe1ee73ce196/#fn3) For concreteness, let’s say the improved education is about as good as “graduating high school instead of failing to do so” and that it leads to increased earnings of about $10,000 per year for the rest of each student’s life.[4](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/e2943ffd-688b-490b-bfd9-fe1ee73ce196/#fn4)

Finally, let’s ignore flow-through effects (the fact that helping someone enables them to help others). There could be flow-through effects from either of these, and it isn’t immediately clear which is the bigger deal. We'll talk more about the long-run impacts of our giving in a future dialogue. For now let’s simplify and talk about the direct effects I outlined above.

Well, here’s my claim - the “averting a death” benefit is better *and* cheaper than the “better education” benefit. So you should keep going with option 1 until it isn’t available anymore. If it can absorb $1 billion at $2000 per death averted, you should put all $1 billion there.

And if it turns out that all other ways of helping humans in the near term are similarly inferior to the straightforward global health interventions, then similar logic applies, and you should spend all $1 billion on straightforward global health interventions before spending a penny on anything else.

What do you mean by “better” in this context, i.e., in what sense is averting a death “better” than giving someone a better education?

It means that most people would benefit more from having their premature death averted than from having a better education. Or if it’s too weird to think about that comparison, it means most people would benefit more from *avoiding* a 10% chance of premature death than *getting* a 10% chance of a better education. So behind the veil of ignorance, if people were deciding where you should give without knowing whether they’d end up as beneficiaries of the education programs or as (more numerous) beneficiaries of the bednets, they’d ~all ask you to spend all of the $1 billion on the bednets.

It’s pretty clear in this case that the bednet intervention indeed has something going for it that the education one doesn’t, that “money goes farther there” in some sense. The thing that’s bugging me is the idea of giving *all* $1 billion there.

Let’s start with the fact that if I were investing my money, I wouldn’t put it all into one stock. And if I were spending money on myself, I wouldn’t be like “Bananas are the best value for money of all the things I buy, so I’m spending all my money on bananas.” Do you think I should? How far are you diverging from conventional wisdom here about “not putting your eggs in one basket?”

I think it’s reasonable to diversify your investments and your personal spending. The reason I think it’s reasonable is essentially because of *diminishing marginal returns:*

* The first banana you buy is a great deal, but your 100th banana of the week isn’t. Rent, food, entertainment, etc. are all categories where you gain a lot by spending something instead of nothing, but then you benefit more slowly as you spend more. So if we were doing cost-effectiveness calculations on everything, we’d observe phenomena like “Before I’ve bought any food for the week, food is the best value-for-money I can get; after I’ve bought some food, entertainment is the best value-for-money I can get; etc.” The math would actually justify diversifying.

* Investing is similar, because money itself has diminishing returns. Losing half of your savings would hurt you, much more than gaining that same dollar amount would help you. By diversifying, you reduce both your upside and your downside, and that’s good for your goals.

* But in this hypothetical, you can spend the entire $1 billion on charity *without* diminishing marginal returns. It’s $2000 per death averted, all the way down.

* Of course, it would be bad if everyone in the *world* tried to give to this same charity - they would, in fact, hit diminishing returns. When it comes to helping the world, the basic principles of diversification still apply, but they apply to the whole world’s collective “charity portfolio” rather than yours. If the world “portfolio” has $10 billion less in global health than it should, and you have $1 billion to spend, it’s reasonable for you to put all $1 billion toward correcting that allocation.

But some degree of “risk aversion” still applies - the idea of giving all to one intervention that turns out to not work out the way I thought it did, and thus having zero impact, scares me.

**It scares *you*, but if all the potential beneficiaries were discussing how they wanted you to donate, it shouldn’t particularly scare *them*.** Why would they care if your particular $1 billion was guaranteed to help N people, instead of maybe-helping 2N people and maybe-helping zero? From the perspective of one of the 2N people, they have about a 50% chance of being helped either way.

Risk aversion is a fundamentally selfish impulse - it makes sense in the context of personal spending, but in the context of donating, it’s just another way of making this about the donor.

Well, my thinking isn’t just about “risk aversion,” it’s also about the specific nature of the charities we’re talking about.

I live in an unfair society. A key area where things are unfair is that some of us are raised in safe, wealthy neighborhoods and go to excellent schools, while others experience the opposite. As someone who has benefited from this unfair setup, I have a chance to make a small difference pushing things in the opposite direction. If I find myself blessed with $1 billion to give, shouldn’t I spend *some* of it that way?

That doesn’t sound like an argument about what the people you’re trying to help would (in the “veil of ignorance” sense I’ve been using) prefer. It sounds more like you’re trying to “show you care” about a number of things.

Perhaps, to you, “$100 million to ten different things” sounds about ten times as good as “$1 billion to one thing” - you don’t intuitively feel the difference between $1 billion and $100 million, due to [scope neglect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_neglect).

I’m not sure what it’s about. Some of it is that I feel a number of “debts” for ways in which I’ve been unfairly privileged, which I acknowledge is about my own debts rather than others’ preferences.

For whatever reason, it feels exceedingly strange to plow all of $1 billion into a single sort of charity, while there are injustices all around me that I ignore.

There are a number of responses I might give here, such as:

* *One reason the bednets have higher value-for-money is that they’re more neglected in some sense. If everyone reasoned the way I’m reasoning, everyone would have a bednet by now, and the world would have moved on to other interventions.** *Not all problems are equally fit for all kinds of solutions. Lack of bednets is a problem that’s very responsive to money. To improve education, you might be more effective working in the field yourself.* * *I think you’re kind of imagining that “giving all $1 billion to bednets” means “the problem of education gets totally ignored.” But you aren’t the world. Instead, imagine yourself as part of a large society of people working on all the problems you’re concerned about, some getting more attention than others. By giving all $1 billion to bednets, you’re just deciding that’s the best thing you can do to do your part.*

But I think those responses would miss the point of this particular dialogue, which is about utilitarianism. So I’ll instead repeat my talking point from last time: if your giving doesn’t conform to what the beneficiaries would want under the veil of ignorance, then it has to be in some sense about you rather than about them. You have an impulse to feel that you’re “doing your part” on multiple causes - but that impulse is about your feelings of guilt, debt, etc., not about how to help others.

*For further reading on diversification in giving, see:*

* *[Giving Your All](https://slate.com/culture/1997/01/giving-your-all.html), a short article against diversification** *[How Many Causes Should You Give To?](https://www.benkuhn.net/how-many-causes/) - briefly explores arguments for and against diversification** *[Worldview diversification](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/worldview-diversification) - gives some arguments for diversification, but mostly in the context of very large amounts of giving and mostly for practical reasons*

---

Hopefully this has given a sense of the headspace and motivations behind some of the stranger things utilitarianism tells one to do. As noted above, I ultimately have very mixed feelings on the whole matter, and NUH will have some stronger objections in future pieces (but the next couple of dialogues will continue to defend some of the strange views motivated by the attempt to have [future-proof ethics](https://www.cold-takes.com/future-proof-ethics/)).

**Next in series: [Debating myself on whether “extra lives lived” are as good as “deaths prevented”](https://www.cold-takes.com/debating-myself-on-whether-extra-lives-lived-are-as-good-as-deaths-prevented/)**

---

Footnotes
---------

1. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort#Travel> states that traveling 230-250 miles in a car gives a 1 in 1 million chance of death by accident, implying that traveling 2.3-2.5 miles would give a 1 in 100 million chance. [↩](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/e2943ffd-688b-490b-bfd9-fe1ee73ce196/#fnref1)- Note that the "veil of ignorance" refers to what a person *would choose* in a hypothetical situation, whereas most of the dialogue up to this point has used the language of what is *better* for a person. These can be distinct since people might not always want what's best for them. I'm using the veil of ignorance as a simplification; we should generally assume that people behind the veil of ignorance are being rational, i.e., choosing what is actually best for them. What ultimately matters is what's best for someone, not what they prefer, and that's what I've talked about throughout the early part of the dialogue. [↩](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/e2943ffd-688b-490b-bfd9-fe1ee73ce196/#fnref2)- I think total costs per student tend to be about $10-20k per year; here I’m assuming you can “significantly improve” someone’s education with well-targeted interventions for $1k per year. Based on my recollections of education research I think I’m more likely to be overstating than understating the available impact here. [↩](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/e2943ffd-688b-490b-bfd9-fe1ee73ce196/#fnref3)- According to [this page](https://www.bls.gov/emp/chart-unemployment-earnings-education.htm), people who lack a HS diploma earn about $592 per week. If we assume that getting the diploma brings them up to the overall median earnings of $969 per week, that implies $377 per week in additional earnings, or a bit under $20k per year. I think this is a very aggressive way of estimating the value of a high school diploma, since graduating high school likely is correlated with lots of other things that predict high earnings (such as being from a higher-socioeconomic-status family), so I cut it in half. This isn’t meant to be a real estimate of the value of a high-school diploma; it’s still meant to be on the aggressive/generous side, because I’ll still be claiming the other benefit is better.  [↩](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/e2943ffd-688b-490b-bfd9-fe1ee73ce196/#fnref4)


To Match the Greats, Don’t Follow In Their Footsteps

People who dream of being like the great innovators in history often try working in the same fields - physics for people who dream of being like Einstein, biology for people who dream of being like Darwin, etc.

But this seems backwards to me. To be as revolutionary as these folks were, it wasn’t enough to be smart and creative. As I’ve argued previously, **it helped an awful lot to [be in a field that wasn’t too crowded or well-established](https://www.cold-takes.com/how-artistic-ideas-could-get-harder-to-find/).** So if you’re in a prestigious field with a well-known career track and tons of competition, you’re lacking one of the essential ingredients right off the bat.

Here are a few riffs on that theme.

**The next Einstein probably won’t study physics, and maybe won’t study any academic science.** Einstein's theory of relativity was prompted by a [puzzle raised 18 years earlier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment). By contrast, a lot of today’s physics is trying to solve puzzles that are many decades old ([e.g.](https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-find-a-way-to-see-the-grin-of-quantum-gravity-20180306/#:~:text=In%201935%2C%20when%20both%20quantum,a%20quantum%20theory%20of%20gravity.)) and have been subjected to a massive, well-funded attack from legions of scientists armed with [billions of dollars’ worth of experimental equipment](https://home.cern/news/press-release/cern/us-contribute-531-million-cerns-large-hadron-collider-project#:~:text=The%20LHC%20has%20an%20estimated,to%20the%20speed%20of%20light.). I don’t think any patent clerk would have a prayer at competing with professional physicists today - I’m thinking today’s problems are just harder. And the new theory that eventually resolves today’s challenges probably won’t be as cool or important as what Einstein came up with, either.

Maybe today’s Einstein is revolutionizing our ability to understand the world we’re in, but in some new way that doesn’t belong to a well-established field. Maybe they’re studying a weird, low-prestige question about the nature of our reality, like [anthropic reasoning](https://meteuphoric.com/anthropic-principles/). Or maybe they’re [Philip Tetlock](https://smile.amazon.com/Superforecasting-Science-Prediction-Philip-Tetlock-ebook/dp/B00RKO6MS8/), more-or-less inventing a field that turbocharges our ability to predict the future.

**The next Babe Ruth probably won’t play baseball.** Mike Trout is probably better than Babe Ruth in every way,[2](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/70e5bad3-afce-457e-9101-8df58cbd585f/#fn2) and you probably haven't heard of him.

Maybe today’s Babe Ruth is someone who plays an initially less popular sport, and - like Babe Ruth - plays it like it’s never been played before, transforms it, and transcends it by personally appealing to more people than the entire sport does minus them. Like Tiger Woods, or what Ronda Rousey looked at one point like she was on track to be.

**The next Beethoven or Shakespeare probably won’t write orchestral music or plays.** Firstly because those formats may well be significantly “tapped out,” and secondly because (unlike at the time) they aren’t the way to reach the biggest audience.

We’re probably in the middle stages of a “TV golden age” where new business models have made it possible to create more cohesive, intellectual shows. So maybe the next Beethoven is a TV showrunner. It doesn’t seem like anyone has really turned video games into a respected art form yet - maybe the next Beethoven will come along shortly after that happens.

Or maybe the next Beethoven or Shakespeare doesn’t do anything today that looks like “art” at all. Maybe they do something else that reaches and inspires huge numbers of people. Maybe they’re about to change web design forever, or revolutionize advertising. Maybe it’s #1 TikTok user Charli d’Amelio, and maybe there will be whole academic fields devoted to studying the nuances of her work someday, marveling at the fact that no one racks up that number of followers anymore.

**The next Neil Armstrong probably won’t be an astronaut.** It was a big deal to set foot outside of Earth for the first time ever. You can only do that once. Maybe we’ll feel the same sense of excitement and heroism about the first person to step on Mars, but I doubt it.

I don’t really have any idea what kind of person could fill role in the near future. Maybe no one. I definitely don’t think that our lack of return trip to the Moon is any kind of a societal “failure.”

**The next Nick Bostrom probably won’t be a “crucial considerations” hunter.** Forgive me for the “inside baseball” digression (and feel free to skip to the next one), but effective altruism is an area I’m especially familiar with.

Nick Bostrom is known for revolutionizing [effective altruism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism) with his arguments about the [value of reducing existential risks](https://www.nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste.html), the [risk of misaligned AI](https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00LOOCGB2/), and a number of other topics. These are sometimes referred to as [crucial considerations](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/crucial-considerations-and-wise-philanthropy-nick-bostrom): insights that can change one’s goals entirely. But nearly all of these insights came more than 10 years ago, when effective altruism didn’t have a name and the number of people thinking about related topics was extremely small. Since then there have been no comparable “crucial considerations” identified by anyone, including Bostrom himself.

We shouldn’t assume that we’ve found the most important cause. But if ([as I believe](https://www.cold-takes.com/most-important-century/)) this century is likely to see the development of AI that determines the course of civilization for billions of years to come ... maybe we shouldn’t rule it out either. Maybe the next Bostrom is just whoever does the most to improve our collective picture of how to do the most good today. Rather than revolutionizing what our goals even are, maybe this is just going to be someone who makes a lot of progress on the [AI alignment problem](https://www.cold-takes.com/transformative-ai-timelines-part-1-of-4-what-kind-of-ai/#misaligned-ai-mysterious-potentially-dangerous-objectives).

**And what about the next “great figure who can’t be compared to anyone who came before?”** This is what I’m most excited about! Whoever they are, I’d guess that they’re asking questions that aren’t already on everyone’s lips, solving problems that don’t have century-old institutions devoted to them, and generally aren’t following any established career track.

I doubt they are an “artist” or a “scientist” at all. If you can recognize someone as an artist or scientist, they’re probably in some tradition with a long history, and a lot of existing interest, and plenty of mentorship opportunities and well-defined goals.[3](#fn3)

They’re probably doing something they can explain to their extended family without much awkwardness or confusion! If there’s one bet I’d make about where the most legendary breakthroughs will come from, it’s that they *won’t* come from fields like that.

---

Footnotes
---------

1. (Footnote deleted) [↩](#fnref1)- He's even almost as good just looking at raw statistics (Mike Trout [has](https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/t/troutmi01.shtml) a career average WAR of 9.6 per 162 games; Babe Ruth's [is](https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/r/ruthba01.shtml) 10.5), which means he dominates his far superior peers almost as much as Babe Ruth dominated his. [↩](#fnref2)- I’m not saying this is how art and science have *always* been - just that that’s how they are today. [↩](#fnref3)
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"Moral progress" vs. the simple passage of time

In [Future-Proof Ethics](https://www.cold-takes.com/future-proof-ethics/), I talked about trying to "consistently [make] ethical decisions that look better, with hindsight after a great deal of moral progress, than what our peer-trained intuitions tell us to do."

I cited [Kwame Anthony Appiah's comment](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/24/AR2010092404113.html) that "common-sense" ethics has endorsed horrible things in the past (such as slavery and banning homosexuality), and his question of whether we, today, can do better by the standards of the future.

A common objection to this piece was along the lines of:

> Who cares how future generations look back on me? They'll have lots of views that are different from mine, just as I have lots of views that are different from what was common in the past. They'll judge me harshly, just as I judge people in the past harshly. But none of this is about moral **progress** - it's just about random changes.
>
>
>
>
> Sure, today we're glad that homosexuality is more accepted, and we think of that as progress. But that's just circular - it's judging the past by the standards of today, and concluding that today is better.
>
>

Interestingly, I think there were two versions of this objection: what I'd call the "moral realist" version and the "moral super-anti-realist" version.

* The *moral realist* thinks that there are objective moral truths. Their attitude is: "I don't care what future people think of my morality (or what I think after more reflection?[1](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/b0784081-e840-442b-a200-781944ee6c68#fn1)) - I just care what's objectively right."

* The *moral super-anti-realist* thinks that morality is strictly subjective, *and* that there's just nothing interesting to say about how to "improve" morality. Their attitude is: "I don't care what future people think of my morality, I just care what's moral by the arbitrary standards of the time I live in."

In contrast to these positions, I would label myself as a **"moral quasi-realist": I don't think morality is objective, but I still care greatly about what a future Holden - one who has reflected more, learned more, etc. - would think about the ethical choices I'm making today.** ([Similarly](https://www.cold-takes.com/how-artistic-ideas-could-get-harder-to-find/), I believe that taste in art is subjective, but I also believe there are meaningful ways of talking about "great art" and "highbrow vs. lowbrow taste," and I personally have a mild interest in cultivating more highbrow taste for myself.)

Talking about "moral progress" is intended to encompass both the "moral quasi-realist" and the "moral realist" positions, while ignoring the "moral super-anti-realist" position because I think that one is silly. The reason I went with the "future-proof ethics" framing is because it gives a motivation for moral reasoning that I think is compatible with believing in objective moral truth, or not - as long as you believe in *some* meaningful version of progress.

**By "moral progress," I don't just mean "Whatever changes in commonly accepted morality happen to take place in the future."** I mean specifically to *point to the changes that you* (whoever is reading this) *consider to be progress,* whether because they are honing in on objective truth or resulting from better knowledge and reasoning or for any other *good* reason*.* Future-proof ethics is about making ethical choices that will still look good after your and/or society's ethics have "improved" (not just "changed").

I expect most readers - whether they believe in objective moral truth or not - to accept that there are *some* moral changes that count as progress. I think the ones I [excerpted from Appiah's piece](https://www.cold-takes.com/future-proof-ethics/) are good examples that I expect most readers to accept and resonate with.

In particular, I expect some readers to come in with an initial position of "Moral tastes are just subjective, there's nothing worth debating about them," and then encounter examples like homosexuality becoming more accepted over time and say "Hmm ... I have to admit that one really seems like some sort of meaningful progress. Perhaps there will also be further progress in the future that I care about. And perhaps I can get ahead of that progress via the sorts of ideas discussed in [Future-Proof Ethics](https://www.cold-takes.com/future-proof-ethics/). Gosh, what an interesting blog!"

However, if people encounter those examples and say "Shrug, I think things like increasing acceptance of homosexuality are just random changes, and I'm not motivated to 'future-proof' my ethics against future changes of similar general character," then I think we just have a deep disagreement, and I don't expect my "future-proof ethics" series to be relevant for such readers. To them I say: sorry, I'll get back to other topics reasonably soon!

Notes
-----

---

1. I suspect the moral realists making this objection just missed the part of my piece stating:
> "Moral progress" here refers to both societal progress and personal progress. I expect some readers will be very motivated by something like "Making ethical decisions that I will later approve of, after I've done more thinking and learning," while others will be more motivated by something like "Making ethical decisions that future generations won't find abhorrent."

 But maybe they saw it, and just don't think "personal progress" matters either, only objective moral truth. [↩](#fnref1)
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