Thinking Complete

The philosophy and psychology of death seem weirdly under-discussed - particularly by the wider silicon valley community, given how strongly anti-death many people in it are. This post is an attempt to think through some relevant considerations, primarily focused on my own intuitions and emotions. See also this old blog post - I mostly still agree with the points I made in it, but when thinking about it now I frame things pretty differently. Fearing death, loving life Let’s first distinguish two broad types of reasons for wanting to avoid death: fearing death, and loving life.* Perhaps these seem like two sides of the same coin - but, psychologically speaking, they feel very distinct to me. The former was particularly dominant when I was in primary school, when a part of me emerged that was very afraid of death (in a way that wasn’t closely linked to fear of missing out on any particular aspects of life). That part is still with me - but when it comes to the surface, its fear feels vi

This post is largely based on a lightning talk I gave at a Genesis event on metacognition, with some editing to clarify and expand on the arguments.  Reductionism is the strategy of breaking things down into smaller pieces, then trying to understand those smaller pieces and how they fit together into larger pieces. It’s been an excellent strategy for physics, for most of science, for most of human knowledge. But my claim is that, when the thing we're trying to understand is how to think, being overly reductionist has often led people astray, particularly in academic epistemology. I’ll give three examples of what goes wrong when you try to be reductionist about epistemology.  Firstly, we often think of knowledge in terms of sentences or propositions with definite truth-values - for example, “my car is parked on the street outside”. Philosophers have debated extensively what it means to know that such a claim is true; I think the best answer is the bayesian one, where we assign cred

This post discusses two books by Michael Strevens: The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science and Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy . I loved the former, which tries to answer the core question in philosophy of science: why does science work so well? It’s a masterful synthesis of previous ideas and important new arguments, and it’ll be my go-to recommendation from now on for people interested in the field. The latter was… slightly less persuasive. But let’s start with the good stuff. The Knowledge Machine begins with a review of two of the key figures in philosophy of science: Popper and Quine. Historically, philosophers of science focused on identifying a “scientific method”: a specific way of generating theories, designing experiments, and evaluating evidence which, when followed, led scientists to the truth. Popper’s influential account of the scientific method focused on scientists trying to refute their hypothese

I recently finished Shoshana Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism . It’s received glowing reviews, but left me disappointed. Zuboff spends much of the book outraged at the behaviour of big tech corporations, but often neglects to explain what’s actually bad about either the behaviour itself or the outcomes she warns it’ll lead to. The result is far more polemical than persuasive. I do believe that there are significant problems with the technology industry - but mostly different problems from the ones she focuses on. And she neglects to account for the benefits of technology, or explain how we should weigh them against the harms. Her argument proceeds in three stages, which I’ll address in turn: Companies like Google and Facebook have an “extraction imperative” to continually “expropriate” more personal data about their users. They use this for “the instrumentation and instrumentalisation of behaviour for the purposes of modification, prediction, monetisation, and control.”

I feel pretty confused about whether I, as an effective altruist, should be vegetarian/vegan (henceforth abbreviated veg*n). I don’t think I’ve seen anyone explicitly talk about the arguments which feel most compelling to me, so I thought I’d do that here, in a low-effort way. I think that factory farming is one of the worst ongoing moral atrocities. But most of the arguments I’ve heard for veg*nism, which I found compelling a few years ago, hinge on the effects that my personal consumption would have on decreasing factory farming (and sometimes on climate change). I now don’t find this line of thinking persuasive - my personal consumption decisions just have such a tiny effect compared to my career/donation decisions that it feels like I shouldn’t pay much attention to their direct consequences (beyond possibly donating to offset them). But there are three other arguments which seem more compelling. First is a deontological argument: if you think something is a moral atrocity, you sho

There are many explanations of the evolutionary value of sex in terms of gene exchange ( I particularly like this one ). But these don’t explain the evolutionary value of having sexes : of the differentiation between males and females. A species of hermaphrodites would get all the genetic benefits of sex, but without the massive cost of half its population being unable to bear offspring. On average, each individual could have twice as many offspring, unless other problems arose. And indeed, most plants are hermaphroditic - but only a few animals. So why aren’t most animals hermaphrodites? A quick search doesn’t turn up any widely accepted answer, so I’ve brainstormed a few possibilities. I may well be missing something obvious; if so, let me know. Specialisation of labour . If there’s a strong division of labour between males and females, then maybe it’s harder for hermaphrodites to gather enough resources to support offspring. But in many species the males contribute little in terms

I loved Joe Carlsmith’s blog post on "the innocent gene" . It’s a post about perspective shifts. One of them occurs when, as Dawkins suggested, we shift from thinking about organisms as agents, and start to think of them as vehicles for their “selfish” genes. From the selfish gene perspective, a lion is armour which the genes use to propagate themselves. In making this shift, we implicitly transfer agency from the lion to the genes: we conclude that the genes “want” the lion to hunt down antelope. That’s predictively useful, but Joe observes that in doing so we often implicitly assign moral agency to the genes - as if we should judge them for the outcomes they give rise to, like we judge humans. The word “selfish”, with its loaded connotations, is a good example of this moral transfer. So Joe offers a third perspective: that of the innocent gene. From this perspective, genes have the property of building up lions around them - but not because that’s something they “want”, jus