That might sound stupid. Obviously the physical appearance doesn’t affect the way the chemicals in the beverage interact with my taste buds. But consider: it’s well understood at this point that a lot of taste is actually smell. Your nose is more complex than your taste buds in terms of the number of different chemicals it can distinguish. Your mouth is designed to send air up into your nose as you eat so you get a good sniff with every bite. So your brain is already stitching together the inputs from two different sense organs to generate taste. Is it that surprising that your brain would incorporate data from your vision as well?

My guess is that your senses are not straightforwardly mapped to specific sense organs. The senses are all psychological phenomena, not physiological phenomena. Probably your sense qualia are the result of an essentially psychological process combining data from all different sources available, doing some sort of Bayesian heuristic, and making that processed data stream available to your consciousness.

Another thing like this is “loudness.” The fancy term to use here is to say that loudness is a psychoacoustic phenomenon. That means it’s not a fundamental quality of the sound waves, but rather something that exists inside the listener’s head. For instance, multiple highly varied voices will often sound “louder” than one voice generating the same sound pressure. But adding multiple similar voices together (for instance, a violin section) sometimes has the opposite effect, sounding more subdued than a soloist.

The psychology of music is actually crazy. Consider this: a speaker cone can only produce a one-dimensional signal. It can’t generate two different sounds, it can only overlay the sound waves and send it out as one signal. But your brain can receive that overlaid signal and decode drums, guitar, bass, and vocals as distinct voices.

There are many cultures that induce certain trance-like states on purpose. In these states, the person might be possessed by a spirit (or the holy spirit), losing control of their actions for a time. By all accounts, the experience is authentic. People genuinely lose control of themselves. Except not really. They still always properly act out the cultural scripts in play. But psychologically, this feels like losing control of yourself as a foreign entity takes over your body. In my view, what’s going on is that their consciousness is altered, but their brain is still firmly in control. Experience and reality unhook. Unless maybe they were never that hooked up at all in the first place.

An observation that urbanists like to make is that cities are often safer per capita than rural areas. But people still seem to intuitively feel like cities are more dangerous. In my view, that’s because we’re wired to care about absolute rates of violence and disorder, not per capita rates. But more broadly, I think safety is better understood as a psychological phenomenon. Safety is a feeling, not a physical reality. Or at least, if you model safety as a psychological phenomenon rather than a physical phenomenon, I think you will have a better understanding of what policies are likely to result in a contented and prosperous citizenry.

Healthcare is also more psychological than it seems. As far as I can tell, just about every human culture has some sort of healing tradition. We in the west try to back up our healing with science, but we’re the weird ones in that regard. A lot of a healer’s job is to take on the emotional burden of sickness. People feel better knowing a powerful person is on their side telling them what to do.

The broad generalization here is that people think they care about the material world, but they actually don’t, or not as much as they think. They care about the version of the world in their head, which arrives pre-processed through layers of inaccessible mental machinery. There’s a meme going around about people saying stuff like “I swear the sun was warmer and more yellow in the 90s.” For them, maybe it was.

The two pilots need to cooperate in order to fly the plane. This is usually pretty easy so long as the two pilots generally agree on how things ought to be done (this may or may not be true, I don’t know anything about flying a plane). But things get harder if the pilots don’t agree. For instance, if the pilots disagree on the proper cruising altitude, they might fight with each other, one pilot raising the altitude while the other tries to drop it.

So far this is simple. Cooperating is easy so long as you agree with each other. Let me introduce a new wrinkle though. Suppose the two pilots agree on the proper cruising altitude, but a prankster has rigged their instruments to show different altitudes. Even if the two pilots are fully agreed on the correct cruising altitude, they might still get into fights with each other and have a hard time cooperating.

Let’s extend the hypothetical to something more real. Suppose two more people. One of them was raised in a very religious household in a very religious part of the country. This person eventually came to resent religion and left the church, a move that got them a lot of blowback from their friends and family. The second person was raised in a secular household and has remained secular their whole life.

These two people are similar to each other in their (lack of) religious beliefs. But they are going to have different perspectives on the impact of religion in the world. The first person may see religion as a powerful oppressive force that overlays everything and must be opposed. The second person might instead see religion as a weird thing other people sometimes do but doesn’t really affect him much.

The ideal, if these two people meet, is probably for them to share their experiences with each other and come out of the meeting with a renewed appreciation for the diversity of human experience. But I think equally likely is that the two end up in an argument about religion.

To relate back to the airplane parable, the two more or less agree on what altitude the plane ought to be (pretty secular). But they disagree about the current altitude of the plane. The first person thinks the plane is flying close to the religious side of things and needs a significant correction. But the second person might think the plane is fine where it is and not see any need to keep pushing it around.

This example might still feel a little forced. But if you think about it for a minute, you can see that many fights in politics are really not about how things ought to be, but instead about what direction we ought to be pushing things.

Racism is another good example here. Everyone has generally agreed that racism is bad and we shouldn’t do it. The actual core dispute is about how racist our society currently is. One view is that society remains very racist and we ought to engage in various strong interventions to try and remedy the problem. The other view is that society is not very racist and there is therefore nothing to fix.

The failure mode here is that the two sides misunderstand their disagreement. Both sides assume that the other side sees the same thing they do and has an opposite reaction to it. But in fact, the two sides are seeing different things! What appears to be a fight about values is actually a fight about a potentially resolvable empirical question (though good luck resolving it once tribal epistemics kick in).

To help my analysis, I want to introduce a new concept: traditional censorship. The way traditional censorship works is that there is a narrow range of opinions it is acceptable to express. Any other opinions will get you laughed at, ostracized, exiled, or killed (as society escalates against someone who refuses to back down). This is the "state of nature" for speech. This sort of censorship is older than states or laws and relies on neither.

There are people born occasionally who question their culture, or enjoy thinking about topics outside their normal cultural comfort zone. In small-scale societies, these people basically go undercover, or just unlearn those tendencies. But as societies get more complex, sometimes these people can find each other and have conversations.

During the enlightenment in Europe, intellectuals started to get more organized. They built larger and larger communities organized around the open exchange of ideas. These communities were never a majority of people. Normal, everyday conversation still mostly followed the rules of traditional censorship. But in the right place, surrounded by the right people, you could speak freely. You could talk about SOME controversial topics freely, SOME of the time

Within these communities, a problem they started running into is that the state would start censoring them. This was an especially significant problem for books and pamphlets and such, because the government could pick these up and look at them and see what's in them. If the government didn't like what they saw, they could start arresting people. The solution to this was to say that the government isn't allowed to do that and has to let people say what they want.

But that's not the essence of free speech. it's just one small piece of a set of cultural practices and institutions designed to encourage open discussion of controversial topics.

Notably, free speech does not mean speech anarchy. Traditional censorship is where speech anarchy naturally ends up. Free speech has to be protected by politeness norms. Politeness norms create the context in which people can discuss difficult topics without being overwhelmed by emotions or other natural human reactions.

Free speech has never and will never apply to the majority of speech. Most conversations are casual conversations between friends and family. In these conversations, it's totally natural that saying the wrong thing will piss people off and cause problems in your life (though I think different communities can be better or worse about this on average).

What's important is not that every space must be maximally free. Instead, what's important is to make sure some spaces are preserved for the actual difficult type of free speech that requires a serious commitment to politeness and intellectual inquiry. This is an unnatural mode for humans, but extremely valuable, because it lets us step outside our own culture in a small way and evaluate it from the outside.

Summary: free speech isn't something you naturally have. Free speech is a delicate thing that requires a dedicated safe space to function. The essence of free speech is in everyone agreeing to be polite to each other. Speech anarchy tends to devolve into traditional censorship in which the mob enforces conformity through social consequences. State censorship is just the final step in an escalation ladder that doesn't usually need to go that far to get what it wants.

An interesting way to think about certain culture war topics is to think in terms of adaptation executors vs fitness maximizers.

A fitness maximizer has a sense of what it wants, comes up with a plan to get it, and then executes on the plan. An adaptation executor instead just has various adaptive behaviors that get executed when the situation naturally elicits them.

I think traditional childrearing practices are closer to the adaptation executor side side of things. You teach your kids a bunch of rules and habits and then send them off into the world. The expectation is that your kids will live a similar life to you, so if you teach them good adaptations, that's most of what they need. You yourself probably don't understand why these adaptations work, but that's fine, because they've been passed down for generations and the bad adaptations have been filtered out.

But modern liberal childrearing is doing something different. It's trying to mold children in such a way as to be much more direct fitness maximizers. This is itself a cultural adaptation to a rapidly changing world full of opportunities available to those who are able to see and seize upon them.

I think this leads to the conservative complaint that liberals don't practice what they preach. Liberals say it's fine to live however you want, but often end up in arrangements that seem pretty traditional. Meanwhile, poor kids take their advice to heart and do whatever they want, often getting themselves into all sorts of problems.

But the thing is, liberal kids are built different. From infancy they've been wrapped in a world where individual choices are taken seriously and autonomy is respected. They've been told, over and over, that they are responsible for their own happiness and that can mean whatever they want it to mean.

The liberal childrearing system, taken as a holistic practice, does actually create adults who are much closer to individual fitness maximizers than our ancestors were. When educated cosmopolitan liberals do things that seem trad, it's not because they had it beat into them. They just evaluated the options and made choices that suited their needs and desires.

The problem is that if you aren't brought up with the full liberal system, exposure to this mindset can cause problems. Tearing away a bunch of adaptations doesn't turn a person into a fitness maximizer. It just turns them into a shittier adaptation executor. Or worse, they misinterpret upper-class behaviors as adaptations they can execute themselves. This is a problem with social media - behaviors get ripped out of context and executed by people who are operating under very different constraints.

I also think liberals sometimes overestimate how much fitness maximization they actually do. Modern liberals do more fitness maximization than in the past, but I think they're still closer to adaptation executors than true fitness maximizers. It's just that one of the adaptations they've learned to execute is something like "occasionally sit down and think about your overall life plan and how you would like it to go, then come up with a list of things you can do to move it in that direction." And then they have a bunch of behaviors (you might call it "critical thinking") that help them work through more complex plans and make sure their actions are lined up with their goals.

I think this is all tied up with education polarization. Education level is a good proxy for "raised with a fitness maximizing liberal mindset." These people have the cognitive tools to navigate a complex and confusing world in which each person has to assemble their own bespoke set of adaptations in order to get by. But people raised outside of that bubble don't have the right cognitive adaptations for a true "do whatever you want so long as you're not hurting anyone" liberal world. They need more guidance and structure. Honestly, I think a lot of liberal kids also need more guidance and structure than they're getting, but those people often end up as the "black sheep" of their families and are written off as unsalvageable.

I think for me, there are basically two moral approaches that make sense re: Israel/Palestine.

First, as a baseline, it's important to me that Hamas is pursuing a war of annihilation. They want to destroy Israel entirely.

So there are two responses I intuitively think it's fair for Israel to pursue. One is essentially paternalistic. They are the grown-up liberal democracy operating from a position of strength, so they have a special duty to treat the Palestinians with kid gloves. They need to carefully separate combatants from noncombatants and take care to only target combatants, even though the other side does not make any such distinction and wants all of them dead.

The other is tit-for-tat. The other side wants to annihilate you, so you annihilate them back. This is honestly more respectful of Palestinian agency, but also much more destructive.

I'd interpret actual Israeli behavior as being mostly camp 1 but sometimes shading into 2.

My preference would be for them to stay firmly in 1. They should be the grown-ups and exercise restraint.

I think many protesters right now have a totally different view though, which is that Israel is fundamentally illegitimate. No action they take is justified because the state is built on a rotten foundation. Protesters aren't calling for sober restraint or careful respect for the laws of war. They're calling for immediate ceasefire, regardless of conditions. They're calling for a one-state solution that would effectively end Israel as it currently exists.

I think this is what people are talking about when they talk about Israel's "right to exist." What they mean is to assert that Israel is a legitimate state with legitimate interests that it is permitted to defend with force if necessary. They are rejecting that Israel is bound by special rules or constraints owing to the particularities of how it came to be. They are asserting that Israel rests on firm foundations, not rotten ones.

I think this is a pretty fair view. I don't think Israel is *less* legitimate than most other modern states. States are almost always the result of violent consolidation. To the extent that Israel is unusual, it's just that they did their violence a bit more recently than most other states and there are still people alive who contest that original consolidation. There are of course principled anarchists who think all states are illegitimate and ought to be destroyed. But it's tough IMO to make a principled argument that Israel is substantially less legitimate than other states.

At a certain level here though you're debating metaphysics, which tends not to be very fruitful. Is Israel *really* legitimate? Do they have a *right* to anything? These aren't answerable questions, at least not without some prior agreement on hotly contested philosophical questions.

My own preference here is to cut through with the pragmatic method. What do we want to see happen? What will be the most good for the most people? What options are actually plausible given the situation on the ground?

I think from this perspective, the view that shakes out is that Israel ought to pursue a limited war with careful targeting and ought to continue negotiating towards a ceasefire and release of hostages. They should diligently work towards ways to destroy Hamas without having to cause mass destruction (which may not be possible). The details here will necessarily be a bit hairy since both sides have domestic audiences they need to keep in mind. And war is intrinsically messy and violent.

I still think the most viable possible long-term solution *by far* is the two-state solution. I think anyone who is out there trying to poison the well on a two-state solution is very directly undermining the best chance we have of a lasting peace.

I also think it's clear that Netanyahu is not a good faith negotiator. He wants to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the West Bank and claim it for Israel. I don't think he cares about Gaza per se but he certainly doesn't want millions of Palestinians living there. His policy is to poison the well on a two-state solution by every means available and hope to create an opportunity for eventual Israeli annexation of the West Bank.

But Netanyahu is also the democratically elected leader of Israel. So we can either try to engage with him or just disengage until Israel elects someone we can do business with. My actual preference here would be to disengage, but I am sympathetic to those who think it will be better to stay engaged even though Netanyahu is a bad actor.

To the extent there's a policy I think the US ought to pursue, I think we should disengage from Israel until they elect someone who is prepared to actually take a two-state solution seriously. This policy may actually end up worse for Palestinians - a disengaged US could free up Israel to turn even harder right.

I think in practice the main effect of US involvement has been to freeze the conflict in a perpetually unresolved state. The Palestinians and their Arab allies lack the capability to take what they want from Israel, and Israel has held back out of deference to the international community (and domestic doves who want to see a peaceful resolution). I don't think this policy has been very good for anyone involved. It has destabilized the region for generations.

BUT all that said, the most probable alternative is a short and bloody ethnic cleansing campaign that resolves the issue more or less decisively. That's how these things usually play out when the US isn't around trying to get everyone to play nice with each other.

As a final note, I think the issue is treated with more importance than it deserves (including by me, bothering to write this long post about it). Ethnic conflicts come and go and we rarely feel the need to have an opinion on them. For example, the conflict in Ethiopia has resulted in an order of magnitude more civilian deaths than the current conflict in Gaza.

You can argue that we should care more about this conflict since we are more tied up in it due to our support of Israel. But in practice I expect our engagement has made the conflict less deadly over the years, not more (for reasons mentioned above). If you care about innocent civilians killed in wartime, I expect your best bet would be to try and get the US to care more about other international conflicts and intervene in various ways.

But I think what people often care about is feeling clean, not doing the most good. Because the US has involved itself in Israel/Palestine, every bad thing that happens there feels like a blemish on our collective moral record. But bad things that happen in countries we aren't involved in are just things that happen. The best way to feel clean is to just not get involved in conflicts that aren't our business.

And this isn't a terrible policy tbh. It maintains the moral high ground and lets us focus our attention on different sorts of issues.

But still, a lot of the thinking people show here feels confused to me. People have unrealistic expectations, emotionally charged views, or just fundamentally don't understand the situation in a meaningful way. It seems bad to me that so many people are so worked up about something that is intrinsically kind of murky and intractable.

I used to have a model in my head that was something like: more efficient agriculture → denser population → urbanization. I thought of cities as being the logical outcome of more efficient agricultural practice. But this clashes with history in weird ways. The ancient world seems to have been more urbanized than the medieval world, even though the medieval world was more sophisticated in agricultural technique.

What sort of density do you need to have a city? Let’s consider the geometry of it. Suppose a city of about 5,000 family units, which would be about 40,000 people (a big city in pre-modern terms). The rule of thumb is that a typical family unit needs about five acres of land to survive. So our city needs about 25,000 acres of land to support itself. Let’s further constrain ourselves and say we can only realistically cultivate about a third of the land, so we really need 75,000 acres. If we convert that to square miles, that comes out to about 117 sqmi. That’s equivalent to a circle with a radius of just a bit over six miles. That’s a distance you can walk in about two hours.

You only really need something like half your labor force to actually work in the fields. So a lot of people can spend all their time in the city. Another chunk of people can live in the city and walk out to the fields. Then others might sleep further out from the city to be closer to their fields, splitting their time in some way between the city and the hinterland.

I think this actually explains a lot about the ancient world that I used to find confusing. If your culture values living in a city, it’s not, strictly speaking, that hard to do it. It just means some people have to walk a bit further sometimes. Realistically, I think you still find lots of non-urban settlements in most societies, so it’s unusual for everyone to clump up in cities, but there’s still a lot of variation in how “clumpy” your population can be as it spreads across the cultivable countryside.

The above sort of “natural variation” doesn’t get you to ancient Rome of course, which is estimated to have had something like a million people at its peak. That sort of population concentration requires a robust seaborne logistics network that can funnel vast amounts of grain into a port. But it does explain how a place like Greece could be covered in little city-states. The Greeks valued living in cities, so they did it.

So why do people live in cities? Today, we often think in terms of amenities you get in a city. But my impression is that the very earliest cities were more about collective defense. You’re worried about being attacked, so you build some walls to protect everyone. It’s logical at that point to put your house inside the walls so you’re not worried about it. Lots of people end up living inside the walls, at which point you’ve invented the city. Once you have a city, you start to build other sorts of cultural institutions around the thing you’ve made, and eventually the walls are less important than all the cultural stuff (at least until someone attacks, and then the walls feel really important again).

The decline of urbanism in medieval Europe makes more sense to me when I think this way. It’s not that they forgot how to make cities work or something. They just didn’t value it the same way the ancient world did. And the security situation was different enough that the peasantry weren’t as desperate to get their house behind a city wall.

Let’s start by imagining a hypothetical pre-modern farmer. Let’s call him Jim. Suppose Jim is experienced, having been raised from childhood to be a farmer. Suppose also that Jim has all the different tools and such that are typical to his preferred style of farming.

(Note: the word “farmer” is sort of an anachronism here, since farming as an occupation only makes sense when everyone is assumed to have some specific occupation. In the pre-modern world, working the land would be kind of assumed unless you had some more specific vocation or profession going on. A better term would probably be something like “peasant” but I’m going with “farmer” because I feel like “peasant” brings a lot of weird baggage. “Farmer” brings baggage too of course, but it’s different baggage).

If we give Jim access to all the land he wants and tell him to grow as much food as possible, what happens? Well, he’ll pick the best chunk of land he can find and will cultivate it to the max. Importantly, he will grow much more food than he could possibly eat on his own.

I think this is really important to understanding agricultural economics - one person’s labor can grow way more food than that person needs. If you consider it from first principles, this basically has to be true. If it wasn’t true that one person could grow enough food to live on, then agriculture wouldn’t work at all. We’d all be stuck hunting and gathering. So an individual needs to be able to grow at least enough food for themselves, plus some number of non-working dependents (children at the very least cannot work for some number of years). In reality, it turns out there is enough cushion for many non-farming dependents, though the exact number will vary depending on land quality.

Jim can’t grow infinite food by himself, of course. If my understanding of this is right, then his bottleneck would likely be the harvest. Harvesting tends to happen all at once, and is very labor intensive, so as a solo farmer, Jim would be very busy during that time. If he was smart and optimizing things, he might try to spread out the time of the harvest, perhaps with different crops that become ready for harvest at different times, or maybe by harvesting some fields earlier than is ideal, just in order to get around the labor bottleneck.

In reality, labor is rarely the bottleneck for agricultural output. Households tend to grow to fit the size the land is able to support. That means that there are almost always significant labor surpluses in the countryside, especially outside of the harvest period.

If you’re like me, you might wonder why they do it this way. Doesn’t it make more sense to have only the minimum number of people working the land, and have them grow food for everyone else? Shouldn’t such a society be able to support a ton of people who are focused on producing other sorts of goods? It seems like everyone would benefit from some division of labor.

What prompted me to write this post was I realized: they did do this. Just not the way we do it in the industrialized era. It was actually really common for more than half the labor capacity of a society to be devoted to manufacturing household goods, preparing food, and other non-agricultural activities.

But these activities were not typically done by specialized firms outside the household. They were mostly done internally within each household. Specifically, by the women of the household.

In many societies, it was common for the bulk of agricultural labor to be done by men (though it is very common for women to be involved during the harvest). This means that these societies set aside something like half their available labor for non-agricultural activity.

Today, we tend to think of “women’s work” mainly in terms of cooking, cleaning, and raising kids. And these were definitely a big part of what women did. But women were also responsible for manufacturing all the clothing for their household. This did not just mean sewing cloth. It meant spinning raw fiber (from flax or wool or whatever else) into thread, then weaving that thread into cloth, and then finally assembling that cloth into clothing. Spinning, in particular, was extremely time-consuming, and many pre-modern women spent basically all their free time spinning thread just to try and stay on top of their household’s clothing needs.

We don’t usually think of it this way, but we could think of every pre-modern household as being a clothing factory with a farm attached. A huge amount of society’s labor capacity was devoted to the manufacture of clothing. It’s just that without industrial technology, clothing was so labor-intensive that the capacity allocated to it was fully saturated making what to us seems like a modest output.

Conceiving of things this way also allows us to re-imagine what was going on in the early industrial revolution. A lot of the earliest industrial machines were focused on ways to use external energy sources (like coal) to drastically accelerate the manufacture of textiles. The earliest factories made textiles, and were staffed mostly by women. This was a huge game-changer because clothing was the main sort of manufacturing practiced in the large majority of households.

What is morality exactly? At it’s core it’s about what is “right” and what is “wrong.” But those terms are themselves not well defined. And if you think about it, morality is a very expansive area of inquiry. Here are some questions that seem distinctly “moral” to me:

• What sorts of goals should I pursue in my life? What goals should society be organized around?

• What rules should I follow in daily life? What actions are permitted? What actions are forbidden?

• What obligations do I have towards other people?

• Who should I praise? Who should I scorn?

• What sorts of actions ought to be punished?

• Who should I seek to emulate? Who should I mark as worthy of emulation by others?

• What habits ought I cultivate in myself? What habits ought I encourage others to cultivate within themselves?

• Who should I associate myself with? Who should I avoid?

The above is by no means exhaustive. But I think it gives a sense of the scope of questions that might be considered “moral” questions.

I think some moral debate stems from conflict over which of these questions should be prioritized. Someone who is naturally goal-oriented may find consequentialist moral systems more appealing. They’re inclined to pick a worthy set of goals and then think of ways to bring those things about. But someone who is naturally more process-oriented may find deontological systems more appealing. They want to make sure they pick the right set of rules and then follow those rules with care. Realistically though, you need both. You need goals to motivate any sort of action, and then you need policies to guide your actions in the pursuit of those goals. Omitting either side will leave you with a big hole in your ability to navigate moral questions.

I have my own bias here. I think goals are more important than process. But I nonetheless think rules are important. Even the most hardcore consequentialist needs to figure out policies to follow and heuristics to apply. It’s impractical to constantly re-assess moment by moment and always pursue the exact action that optimizes all your preferences. Equally important, rules are necessary for cooperation. Binding everyone to a shared set of rules makes everyone better off.

On the other side of things, following rules with no regard for outcomes results in absurdity. Consider the classic conundrum in Plato’s Euthyphro. Socrates asks: what does it mean to be pious? And Euthyphro responds that it is simply what is pleasing to the gods. But Socrates continues to press, asking if it is pious because it is pleasing to the gods, or if it is pleasing to the gods because it is pious? Could something clearly offensive to justice become pious simply because it pleases the gods?

Another way to think about it: if the rule could be anything, why should it be something just and reasonable? Why do we all accept a rule to avoid killing each other instead of engaging in indiscriminate murder? It seems fairly obvious to me that the sorts of rules we choose to follow are rules that lead to harmonious social relations and overall prosperity. We don’t randomly select rules, we select rules that lead to outcomes we find preferable.

So rules and outcomes are both important. But I’ll stand by my bias: I think outcomes are primary. If a rule leads to terrible outcomes, then the rule is foolish and ought to be abandoned. Rules are a vital tool in our toolkit. But rules only make sense given some broadly understood goals we’re hoping to achieve by following those rules.

There’s a more subtle point I want to get at though. Suppose someone comes up to me and describes a situation. “Alice approached Bob and asked him if he could keep a secret. Bob agreed. Alice then told Bob that she was planning on murdering their mutual friend Charlie. Bob, horrified, told Charlie about Alice’s plot, foiling her murderous plan. Did Bob do the right thing?”

What I want to point out is that “did Bob do the right thing?” could refer to any number of different moral questions, each of which might have different answers. Let’s disambiguate the question:

• Should Bob be punished for breaking a promise? If so, what punishment is appropriate? Alternatively, should Bob be rewarded for making the right choice in a difficult situation?

• Should we publicly praise Bob as worthy of emulation? Should we encourage children to be more like Bob? Or should we shame Bob and tell children to not be like him?

• How should an individual, possessing all the facts of the matter, privately feel about Bob’s choices?

• Did Bob’s actions result in better or worse consequences down the line? Given Bob’s knowledge of things, what outcomes were predictable?

• Was Bob mistaken to make the promise in the first place?

• Conditional on having made the promise, should Bob have kept the promise, or was he right to cut his losses and break his word? What rules ought to be applied in terms of when to make a promise and when to break a promise? Is there any set of reasonable rules under which both of Bob’s choices (making the promise, then breaking the promise) are justified?

• Should we publicize Bob’s decision to break a promise, or should we suppress this information as potentially dangerous?

What I want to emphasize is that all of the above are different questions. Answering certain questions one way does not immediately determine our answers to all the other questions. For instance, we might believe that the law ought to punish Bob because it is important to maintain certain standards. But privately we might feel Bob did the right thing, and commit to making the same decision if we find ourselves in a similar scenario. But we might still teach our kids to never break a promise no matter what, because they aren’t yet prepared to process a nuanced situation like this. And finally, we may notice that Charlie turned out to be a terrible person, and letting Alice murder him would have led to better consequences down the line. But we may excuse Bob for not foreseeing this, given that he had no way of knowing.

I don’t want to suggest that a proper disambiguation of moral questions would resolve all moral conflicts. I think different people may consider the facts fully and come to different conclusions. But I DO want to suggest that naive “utilitarianism” or “deontology” are incredibly crude instruments, essentially unfit for any sophisticated moral thinking. Trying to reason purely from consequences will miss enormously important questions around what incentives are being created and what rules we want to encourage. Reasoning entirely from pre-determined rules will fail to consider if the rules themselves are fit for purpose or in need of amendment.

In the next few sections, I’m going to lay out the building blocks that I think are necessary for working through moral questions.

II. Normative Statements

Let’s look at a statement like “you ought to do X” or “you should do Y.” I think we can get a lot of clarity on these sorts of statements by stepping outside of morality for a moment. For instance, I might express to a friend that I’m looking to buy a car, but it’s important to find a reasonable price. The friend might respond, “Oh, you should talk to Dave. He has a car he’s been trying to sell. He’ll give you a good deal.”

What does this statement mean? Well, the way I read it, it’s suggesting a course of action that will help you achieve your stated goal. It’s sort of got the structure of a conditional:

• If you want to get a good deal on a car, you should talk to Dave.

Another way to look at it is that it is an assertion about what course of action aligns with the stated goals at hand. Your current course of action is failing to achieve the outcome you want. This alternate course of action is better aligned with your objective, so you should consider pursuing it.

I think that porting this structural understanding back to morality is illuminating. When we say you ought to do something, we mean that the proposed action is well-aligned with whatever shared moral objectives are understood to be in play. When we say “you ought to be kind to strangers” we mean, “given my understanding of our shared moral objectives, being kind to strangers ought to help bring those objectives about.”

III. Preferences

Preferences are just things we want. Humans tend to overlap considerably in preferences, but the overlap is not total. Preferences may also come into direct conflict if multiple people want the same scarce thing.

In my moral framework, morality is ultimately about aligning our actions so as to bring about the outcomes we prefer. This involves both personal alignment as well as societal alignment. Societal alignment is necessarily a negotiation, a compromise between different individuals. Fortunately, humans overlap enough with each other that mutually beneficial cooperation is typically possible.

The approach to morality I’m going to lay out here does NOT offer any metaphysical backing to anyone’s preferences. There is therefore no ultimate metaphysical source of good and evil. But insofar as we have preferences, we can engage in moral reasoning to try and satisfy the preferences we find ourselves to have.

Is this position relativism? I’m not sure. I don’t have any tool for deciding what the “correct” preferences might be. But given you already have things you care about, I think your actions can be objectively better or worse aligned.

IV. Policy

A policy is a pattern or guideline for moral conduct. The function of a policy is to help align our actions with our preferences. It is not generally possible to directly predict the outcomes of any particular action. So in practice, we need to adopt policies that guide our actions.

For instance, I may choose to establish a policy of telling the truth. In general, I realize that I benefit when other people know they can take me at my word. I may also simply observe that things go better for me when I am honest. I could of course try and make a decision in each particular scenario about whether or not to be honest. But adopting a policy is simpler. It also makes my actions more predictable to others, particularly if I make a point of sticking to my policy even when it causes problems.

Policies are ultimately made to serve our chosen ends. It is a mistake to stick to a policy that is causing pointless pain. Policies can always be amended or complicated. Though as we will see in the next section, shared policies may require renegotiation.

V. Cooperation

What happens if we have conflicting preferences? For instance, I would like to be named god-emperor of earth. I imagine many others have similar preferences. But these preferences are in conflict - we can’t all be god-emperor. Moreover, many people who would enjoy being god-emperor would, as a second-best option, prefer there be no god-emperor at all, and instead prefer we use some other mechanism for determining who gets to be in charge of things (for instance, a democratic election).

In general, everyone is better off when we cooperate on shared preferences. But cooperation can be derailed by people who refuse to cooperate and instead chase their own preferences with no regard for others. Such people may free-ride off the work done by society without contributing anything back. The solution to this problem is that we, through various methods, negotiate shared policies that everyone is expected to follow. Shared policies are thus rules. People who violate the rules get punished. The point of punishment is to make sure that even a totally self-interested person finds it in their best interest to fall in line with the rules.

Cooperation, defection, punishment, and collective action are all immensely complex questions and I’m not going to dive into them too deeply here. But for our purposes, the important thing is that we’re trying to build a society where everyone is incentivized to do things that advance the broadly shared preferences of the community. This is, once again, downstream of consequences: we want certain things, so we organize society such that those things occur. This process often involves creating rules for conduct. It may also involve creating laws, special rules that are enforced with particular rigor (usually by a political authority itself bound to very particular rules of conduct).

There’s another bit of alchemy that happens when humans cooperate on mutual preferences. We often elevate shared preferences to the level of a moral value. A value is a special type of preference - it is a preference not just about oneself, but about the community as a whole. A value is often a preference about the type of community we want to live in. For instance, we may prefer to live in a community where the poor are taken care of. We may prefer to live in a community where the elderly are respected. We may prefer to live in a community where certain religious ideas are widely shared. These values can become powerful enough to transcend many ordinary selfish preferences.

Values are special because they elevate humans beyond self-interest. Values expand the circle of concern from oneself, to one’s family, then to the community or even beyond. As I see it, values are an emergent property of strong, high-functioning communities.

If I were to be pressed on finding a metaphysical source of good, it would be in these communal values where people subsume their personal interests to a communal interest. But for now, I prefer to keep the metaphysics out of it, and just say that values are a special type of preference.

IV. Character and Virtue

People frequently express a preference but then act in ways that are not aligned with that preference. For instance, we might say that we value honesty, but nonetheless make occasional dishonest statements. Sometimes that’s because it comes into conflict with a different preference we care about more. But often, we fail because we simply fail to live up to our own ideal, doing what is easy instead of what is right.

This is the key observation of virtue ethics. Operating somewhat orthogonal to other ethical systems, virtue ethicists point out that humans are essentially creatures of habit. If we are accustomed to a behavior, we will tend to engage in that behavior regardless of whether it is appropriate or not. So the key moral project is to cultivate the appropriate virtues within ourselves. If we are in the habit of doing the right thing, then we will naturally do what is right, even in difficult situations. We can refer to the set of moral habits a person cultivates as making up a person’s character.

I think that we ought to understand virtue ethics as an insight that can be “bolted on” to any ethical system we want. Whatever specific things we’re trying to do, whether we’re trying to stick to rules or pursue certain goals, cultivation of the right habits is going to be crucial for success.

And in practice, this is the real work of morality. We all tend to agree on things more than we disagree. Almost everyone agrees that honesty, integrity, courage, discipline, care, discretion, etc. are important to doing the right thing. If you actually cultivate these virtues, you will be succeeding under almost any imaginable ethical system.

V. Holistic morality

If we put these pieces together, I think we have a compelling understanding of morality. At the root of things are preferences and values. These are the things we care about. Preferences and values are filtered through character, rules, and policy. This produces an action.

The above process, applied iteratively, creates outcomes. Sometimes an individual action has profound consequences. But more often, outcomes are shaped continuously, in an ongoing way, as we repeatedly choose actions that are consistent with a particular policy that is well-aligned to a desired outcome.

A failure at any point in the chain can cause problems, and is fair game for moral criticism. But when everything is working, human behavior aligns so as to produce outcomes that are broadly beneficial.

Let’s revisit some of our moral questions from the beginning:

• What sorts of goals should I pursue in my life? What goals should society be organized around?

  • You should pursue your own preferences and values. Society ought to be organized around shared values.

• What rules should I follow in daily life? What actions are permitted? What actions are forbidden?

  • You should seek first and foremost to follow the law where applicable (with possible exceptions if you are explicitly seeking to amend the law). Then you should conform to the typical rules of conduct that are considered appropriate within your community. Other than that, you may do as you see fit in pursuit of your own preferences.

• What obligations do I have towards other people?

  • You are obligated to follow the rules and laws established within your society.

• Who should I praise? Who should I scorn?

  • You should praise people who further shared values you think are important. You should scorn people who fail to live up to shared values, or who otherwise break the rules.

• What sorts of actions ought to be punished?

  • Actions that violate societal rules, particularly formal laws, ought to be punished.

• Who should I seek to emulate? Who should I mark as worthy of emulation by others?

  • You should seek to emulate people who seem particularly virtuous. You should praise such people so as to encourage others to emulate them as well.

• What habits ought I cultivate in myself? What habits ought I encourage others to cultivate within themselves?

  • You should cultivate habits that naturally align with your values and preferences. You should encourage others to do the same.

• Who should I associate myself with? Who should I avoid?

  • You should associate with people who are well aligned with values you think are important. You should avoid people who are poorly aligned with your values, or who regularly violate social rules for selfish reasons.

Let’s start by laying out what I understand to be the basic theoretical model that sits behind IQ. The most important observation is that performance on cognitive tasks is correlated. So a person who is good at one cognitive task tends to be good at other cognitive tasks, even if the types of cognition involved seem fairly different.

This is… kind of intuitive? I think we all sort of know that some people are smart and other people are less smart. But it does cut against certain other bits of popular folklore. For instance, we often think of some people as being good with numbers and other people being good with words. This isn’t really supported by intelligence studies, as far as I can tell. There’s not a hard trade-off between language and math skills - people who are good at one are also good at the other.

This may seem unintuitive, so let’s dig into why people might feel differently. For any particular individual, they probably find certain tasks are easier than others. So imagine a gifted writer. They excel at many language tasks, but may comparatively feel like they struggle with math. Note, however, that this is an internal subjective feeling. It can be true even if, objectively, they are still better at math than most people. Subjectively, writing feels easy for them and math feels hard for them. But from the outside, we can look and say that they’re good at everything while being particularly skilled at writing.

Obviously there can also be exceptions. Some people really are just hopeless at certain things. Or sometimes people are incredible at one really specific thing. These people don’t ruin the basic model, which is just a statistical finding, not a hard law. Performance across tasks can be correlated without it having to be always 100% the same for every person on every task.

The standard explanation for why cognitive performance across tasks is correlated is that humans possess some measure of general intelligence, and some people are more intelligent than others. General intelligence is often referred to as g. You can think of it as a sort of baseline intelligence a person brings to anything they do. Note, however, that g is more of a model than a specific measurable sort of thing. It’s not like height where we can just use a tape measure and figure it out. It’s possible that one day we’ll have a more specific thing we can measure directly - something like neuronal count, or synapse complexity, or whatever else. As I understand it though, we don’t quite have anything like that right now.

We can also talk about specific intelligences we bring to different tasks. I’ve never seen anyone else put it like this, but to me it makes sense to talk about s as a specific intelligence for a given task. This captures the fact that people are often better at some things than others. So in this model, your performance at a task is determined by g + s, where g is your general intelligence across all tasks and s is your specific intelligence related to that one particular task. g is the same across all tasks, but s varies.

The idea of an IQ test is to try and measure g. But since there’s no direct way to measure g, we try to get at it indirectly. We try and find tasks that are as unspecific as possible so as to minimize the effect of s. We may also combine different types of tasks so that the differences in s cancel out. We can then postulate that the overall score on this test is a reasonable approximation of g.

There are a few things we can say about IQ. The most important is that it is absolutely a useful measurement. IQ is very predictive of all sorts of things we care about. So IQ tests, on a basic level, work as intended - they’re a useful way to approximate a person’s general intelligence.

However, I think people are sometimes a little too impressed by this. Let’s go back to our initial empirical observation: performance across cognitive tasks is correlated. Given that, almost any test will give you a lot of information about someone’s general intelligence.

In fact, we see this with SAT scores. SAT scores are also very predictive of all sorts of things. A lot of people have suggested this is because SAT is basically a proxy for IQ. But if you sit on that for a minute, you realize that’s sort of a dumb way to think about it. The SAT isn’t a proxy for IQ. IQ and SAT tests are both proxies for general intelligence. It would be weird if they weren’t strongly correlated with each other, because they’re basically trying to measure the same thing.

And this leads into a major critique I have of IQ fundamentalism. It’s a case of mistaking the map for the territory. The language of IQ makes it seem like an objective fact about someone, like their height. But it’s not. IQ tests are fundamentally designed to rank people, normalized around 100 as a median. IQ tests are regularly tweaked and changed and renormalized.

The point about IQ tests being regularly renormalized and changed is sometimes brought up to discredit IQ as a measure entirely. That goes too far though, and ends up saying something stupid. IQ clearly works as a measurement. IQ is a useful predictive instrument. And the fact it keeps getting tweaked over time makes it work better. If they didn’t keep updating and renormalizing it, IQ measurements would eventually become untethered from reality.

But I do think we should see clearly what’s happening. IQ is not a fundamental fact of the universe, but rather a fairly crude attempt to measure something useful. There is nothing it “means” to be 115 IQ other than, at whatever point in time you took the test, you sat at some particular point in the distribution. We know from repeated testing that you’ll probably stay around the same point in the distribution over time, and we know that if you take other tests you’d probably end up at more or less at the same spot. We also can make certain soft predictions about life outcomes based on that number. But we don’t actually understand the raw physics behind human intelligence, and therefore don’t really have a firm grasp of what precisely it is that we’re measuring. We just know that a bunch of things are correlated.

One other thing that I think is important to keep in mind is that an intelligence test could be very biased but still be a useful predictor. Remember: performance on cognitive tasks is correlated. So if I make a test that boys are naturally better at than girls, it would still predict all sorts of things pretty well. Higher scores on the test would correlate with better life outcomes for both boys and girls. Even comparing individuals, you could probably compare a boy and a girl and guess the higher-scoring one is smarter. You’d be wrong every once in a while, but that’s true anyway, since the test is imperfect no matter what you do. And if you stick to comparisons within each group, the predictions would be spot-on. And similarly, if the test disproportionately favors certain tasks over others, it could still be useful. The scores would be a bit skewed, but not so badly as to ruin the test entirely.

You actually have to work pretty hard to make a test so bad it doesn’t measure anything useful. You can look at people’s grades in middle school, a completely unstandardized process, and make decent guesses that the A students will do pretty well in life and the F students will struggle.

In the above cases, since we don’t have some underlying physical reality to fall back on, I might easily just say “boys are more intelligent than girls” or something like that. If I define intelligence to mean a score on some particular test, then I wouldn’t even be wrong. It would be true that boys score better on the test than girls. But it’s unclear what I can do with that information. The fact my test shows some statistical skew between groups tells me as much about my test as it tells me about the groups being measured. And because it’s not that hard to come up with a predictive intelligence test, we shouldn’t take evidence of predictive power to be evidence of some incredible achievement in test design. And we certainly shouldn’t assume that predictive power means there can’t be any bias to the test.

The biggest takeaway here is that I think everyone, especially people thinking about education topics, should repeat this as a mantra: “performance on cognitive tasks is correlated.” If you remember this basic fact, you will have a robust world model. A student who succeeds in one class will probably succeed in other classes. An employee who is good at one thing will probably be good at other things. Smart engineers are good writers. Good writers are usually skilled at logical thinking. These things aren’t universally true, but they’re true more often than not.

But secondarily, I think everyone should be more skeptical of anything that treats specific IQ scores as being extremely meaningful, especially when you’re trying to compare across different populations. This does not mean you should reject the idea of intelligence as a measurable thing at all. Rather, once you properly internalize how intelligence works, I think you should be somewhat less impressed by how predictive any particular test is. Even very bad tests can give us a rough cut of who is smart and who isn’t. But we lack a physical model for what intelligence even is, so there’s no way to verify that a test is “really” measuring intelligence. Intelligence is clearly real, or at least it’s a model that cuts closely enough to reality to be useful. But I think we ought to be cautious about assigning too deep meaning to specific test results.

In my experience, this is not really how apologies work, and these expectations are unrealistic.

Before circling back to apologies though, let's talk about communities. People live as part of various formal and informal communities. (I'm not just talking about "official" communities here; I think my thoughts apply equally to a friend group, an extended family, or whatever.) The thing about communities is they only work when everyone in the community is committed to getting along. A conflict between community members threatens the whole community. If two people can't be in the same room together, you don't have much choice other than to expel one or both of them from the group. However, a community in the habit of regularly expelling members will not last very long. Each expulsion also runs the risk of splitting the community in half along some fault line. If enough people side with the person being expelled, the community can just fracture.

Judicious expulsion of troublesome members is necessary to having a functional community. But you have to handle it carefully, and you can't treat it as the primary tool of community management.

With all the above in mind - the point of an apology, as I see it, is to restore normal relations within a community. An apology does typically involve an admission of guilt, as well as some form of compensation. But this is directed at a particular end - restoration of the relationship. It's not just something you do because you feel bad about it. And it doesn't have to be a total capitulation. Just as two countries can sign a treaty to end a war while still disagreeing substantially, two people can choose to reconcile while still holding various grudges and believing themselves to be in the right.

There is often pressure on both parties in a conflict to work it out. That's because everyone in the community benefits if the two parties are able to settle their differences and move on. The exact nature of the settlement is often less important than just getting things back to normal. This is also why there can be a lot of social pressure to accept an apology once it's offered, even one that doesn't feel 100% sincere, or doesn't fully compensate for whatever offense was made. Compensation is offered to prove seriousness and bring the aggrieved party to the table, not necessarily to set everything 100% right. Importantly, the audience for the apology is not just the aggrieved party but also the community as a whole. The idea is to be reasonable enough that, if the community has to pick one side to expel, they'll pick the other side. When an apology is offered to you, it's best to see it as a negotiating position rather than judging it against a platonic ideal.

I think it's harmful and destructive to insist on "perfect" apologies. People *almost always* believe that their behavior was justified, understandable, reasonable, etc. After all, if they didn't believe that, they wouldn't have done it. Truly sincere apologies will never be common, no matter what you do. If you make true, genuine sincerity your requirement to accept an apology, you are essentially placing the value of your shared community at zero, and are committing yourself to blowing up every community you're a part of. The nature of communal life is learning to let go of conflicts. Or at least, learning to let conflicts subside to the point you can be around each other and be civil.

This doesn't mean you have to accept every apology. I definitely think there are offenses that should not be forgiven. But refusing to accept an apology ought to be understood as the opening of impeachment proceedings. You are implicitly telling the community they have to choose between you or the other party. If that's what you want, then go for it. But you ought to understand that's what you are doing. And you ought to be aware that others in the community are within their rights to decide the other party is more valuable to have around than you are, regardless of any particular offense.

(I'll pause here to note that certain types of offenses, such as sexual harassment, are deeply corrosive to community life, and ought not be tolerated. This is not because these offensives are ontologically unforgivable, but rather because systematically punishing and removing offenders will benefit the community as a whole. It is up to each community how exactly they want to draw these lines, but such lines ought to be drawn and made clear. In these cases, an apology is not usually relevant at all, and punishment or expulsion should simply be carried out as a matter of formal or informal policy.)

This perspective also offers some insight into the strange phenomenon of the online apology. The trope here is that some figure does something offensive, gets a lot of blowback, and then releases some sort of statement, video, or whatever that apologizes for their behavior.

My experience is that this tends to feel rather unsatisfying. A big part of that is that there's usually not any specific aggrieved party available to accept the apology. Internet outrage is fundamentally diffused and decentralized without obvious leadership. So random posters are free to simply demand that the offender "do better."

This doesn't make online apologies totally pointless. At their most effective, they reassure fans that it's okay for them to continue to associate with and follow an online figure. But if you are a fan reading an apology, you ought to keep in mind that each individual has to decide on their own if the apology is sufficient. There is no possible apology that will satisfy every single person, and there is no coordination mechanism in place to get everyone on the same page to agree to accept an apology. The opposite happens actually, because the incentives point everyone in the direction of performatively rejecting the apology.

I think that approaching apologies as a negotiated end to a conflict is much healthier than treating them like they're supposed to spring true and clear from a sincerely contrite mind. Conflict is normal, and we need tools to resolve conflict. Apology is an important tool in the toolbox. An apology doesn't need to be 100% sincere and doesn't need to perfectly compensate for every perceived harm. The truly important message of the apology is that the other person cares enough about their relationship with you and your shared community to make an effort at mending things.

On the whole, this makes sense. Our affiliations are for the most part voluntary. If someone sees their org do something bad or “problematic” and chooses to remain affiliated, it stands to reason that they support the bad thing. One assumes that if they disagreed with the thing, they would disaffiliate. Or perhaps they disagree with the bad thing but are willing to tolerate it in order to continue receiving the benefits of affiliation, selfishly putting their own interests above moral requirements.

I have a sense though that in the past, people tended to be more “loyal” in their affiliations. Loyalty, after all, was generally seen to be a virtue. You might have a problem with some of the beliefs and stances of your church, your political party, etc, but you'd stand by them because that's what you do.

This sense of loyalty has eroded significantly. It isn't perceived to be an honorable thing to stand by a bad person or organization out of a sense of duty. Instead, it's perceived as weak and cowardly to stand by while bad things happen.

I think this creates the conditions for a phenomenon I've started calling “moral drain.” Moral drain is a self-reinforcing cycle. It starts when an organization does something wrong. This will cause the most morally upright / morally sensitive people to disaffiliate, reducing the overall moral character of the org. This will lead to further bad things happening, causing more folks to disaffiliate. The logical outcome is the org ends up run entirely by the worst people possible.

Since most power in society is mediated by various organizations and institutions, this dynamic essentially guarantees that the worst people in the world monopolize access to power.

It seems to me like there are only two ways to prevent moral drain.

1. Make sure organizations always just do the right thing at all times so good people never feel like they have to distance themselves.

2. Encourage people of good character to stay in organizations even when they do bad things.

Of these options, 2 seems more realistic to me.

Does this mean we should never pressure people to leave evil organizations? I don't think so. But we should see this as a balancing concern. We should know that we need to tolerate a certain amount of bad behavior from an organization without condemning the good people who continue in their affiliation.

A lot also depends on the importance and power of the organization in question. The more power the organization wields, the more cautious we ought to be about simply ceding that power to evil folks.

We can also be strategic in how we think about these things. A coordinated effort to punish really terrible behavior with swift collapse might be quite effective. But it doesn't follow that an endless low-effort boycott will achieve similar effects. But we ought to actually think about what we're trying to achieve with the incentives we create rather than blindly applying the same approach in every situation.

The actual science here are recent studies that show the effects of parenting are relatively small compared to genetics and peer effects. In other words, two kids raised the exact same way can turn out very different.

There's also some studies that suggest school effects are smaller than you might think. Most people intuitively think of “bad schools” and “good schools,” but the evidence shows this is mostly about selection effects. Kids from well-off families do about as well when they go to a “bad school” as when they go to a “good school.”

When you synthesize this together, I think what you end up with is that many of the specific things middle-class families agonize over are not very important. The quality of the school your child attends isn't as important as you'd think, the specific parenting choices you make don't matter that much, and in general the best you can do is try to be supportive and let your kid find their own way.

There's a sense in which you can round this off to “parenting has no impact.” But the problem is that's not actually true. If you starve your child, throw them in a mud pit for six months, or beat them daily, I think the weight of evidence suggests that will have a large impact.

Additionally, though the evidence for any particular intervention is weak, it is incredibly obvious that growing up in a rich family makes a big difference to your life path. So something about parenting, or at least parentage, has to be doing a lot of work.

Okay, so why does any of this matter? Well, the problem is that, when you take something true and round it off to something true-ish but ultimately false, you risk what happened here. Someone saw the rounded-off claim, correctly assessed it to be false, and then dismissed the entire line of thought as incurably stupid.

I think folks do this all the time. They have some clever and nuanced idea in their head but they round it off to something similar but ultimately false. Then they go around saying this is a fact everyone needs to acknowledge. Some people will take them at their word and believe the thing, sometimes taking it way too literally. Other people will say “no that's stupid” and reject the whole thing. Neither of these are really desirable outcomes.

At the same time, you ought to be aware that when you read a claim that sounds obviously stupid, you probably ought to read between the lines. Most likely, there's an actual kernel of truth in there, but you aren't familiar enough with the perspective to understand what it is. It's not really your fault for not seeing it, but it can be useful to remember that most people aren't completely stupid.

The fair price for labor depends on skill. Unskilled labor isn't worth as much. Maybe it's only worth minimum wage, or maybe it's worth like $15 an hour. More skilled labor is worth more - $20, $50, $100 or more an hour.

The fair price for a product is the cost of the parts involved plus the cost of the labor, and then maybe a bit extra to cover overhead or something. So if a chair costs $500 in parts and $500 in labor, the fair price for that chair is somewhere around $1000, maybe a bit more.

I think the above sounds pretty reasonable to most people.

The problem is, it's nonsense.

There is no "fair" price. There's just the market price - the price people are willing to pay. If you try to sell below the market price, your inventory will be snapped up right away and you'll be forced to raise prices. If you try to sell above the market price, nobody will buy, regardless of how much effort and material you put into the thing. You'll have no choice but to lower your prices.

What is true is that in a liquid market with lots of competition, we expect the market price to converge with the "fair" price. If it's easy to make money on something, then more people will enter the market and bring the price down until it stops being worth it. If nobody is making any money, people will drop out of the market and the price will go up until things settle down.

But this only happens because people respond to price movements. It isn't automatic or instantaneous. So at any given moment, most prices will not match the "fair" price in one direction or the other.

This is particularly true if there is a shock to either demand or supply. If there's a new TikTok craze for scented candles, the demand may outstrip the supply. Either the price for candles will go up or there will be shortages. People who happen to have candles in their inventory will get a windfall from this. Manufacturers of scented candles will also enjoy windfall profits for a bit until production scales up to meet the new demand and stabilize prices.

The above is just how it works. If you freeze prices, the result won't be that everyone will be able to buy candles. There will just be mass candle shortages as the limited supply gobbled up. You can theoretically attempt to ration out the candles at a lower price, but this is complicated to administrate with unclear benefits.

I think a lot of people use a "fair price" model in their head when thinking about prices. The "fair price" model is therefore a folk theory of economics. Not scientific at all, but widespread and popular nonetheless. But if this is the main way you think about pricing, you will always be confused and upset about prices. Every movement in prices will seem like an attempt to rip you off rather than the inevitable result of market logic.

The other more subtle failure of "fair price" theory is that it inverts the creation of value. It pretends that the value of a thing is dependent on the effort and materials that go into the thing. But this is backwards - the value of a thing depends on how much other people want it. If you are able to make the same item with fewer hours of work and less expensive materials, that is a good thing.

People often think that because they put a lot of work into something, it must be valuable. But that isn't how things work. It's thinking backwards - what you ought to do is figure out what people need and find the easiest way to answer that need. Value is created by our desires and preferences, not by our labor.

The same can go for skills. People often complain that, because a job requires some special qualification, it ought to be paid more. But pay isn't determined by your "skill." Your pay is determined by how much actual useful stuff you do. It's true that qualifications in high-demand often command a premium. But it's not because those people worked really hard. It's because those skills are *genuinely useful* and *rare*. If there are more people who know how to do a thing than there is a need for the thing to be done, then the thing will never command a high salary regardless of how "difficult" or "skilled" it is.

I think a tremendous amount of angst comes from the disconnect between "fair price" theory and actual market prices. It feels unfair when a price shoots sky high because of a demand shock. It feels unfair when one person makes twice the money for the same amount of work. But the alternative always creates perverse incentives - encouraging people to pour effort into things nobody asked for or deploy scarce resources towards things nobody really wants.

Imagine two cities. The two cities have the same laws, but there are some cultural differences.

In the first city, children are taught that it's best to always speak your mind. Everyone's voice is welcomed, and as long as you remain civil you won't be heckled, shouted down, or ostracized. Everyone shares a general assumption that speech is unlikely to cause much harm. Folks in this city are taught that if someone says something that bothers you, you can disagree, but you are expected to remain calm and civil.

In this city, the norm extends even into controversial topics. The inhabitants of this city think that it's better to let folks say what they think and then you can hash out any disagreements. Punishing someone for being honest about their opinion is thought to be counterproductive - it doesn't squash the opinion, it just causes the people who hold it to stew and become resentful.

The people of the city don't carry this to the absolute extreme. For instance, randomly shouting slurs at people will get you kicked out of most places. And direct insults are thought to be crossing a line; attacking ideas is acceptable, but attacking individual people is widely understood to be uncivil and is met with condemnation. But as long as you keep away from personal insults, most people assume they can say what they want and other folks will take it in stride, even when there is serious disagreement.

In the second city, children are taught from a young age that they need to watch how they speak. Many things are considered offensive, and saying something offensive is considered a big deal. In this city, most people believe that speech can cause a lot of harm.

In this city it is considered acceptable, encouraged even, to shout down someone you don't like. Heckling and ostracism are important tools for shutting down harmful speech. In fact, if you hear someone say something and don't shout them down, everyone assumes you endorse what they have to say.

This city still has freedom of speech as a legal principle. They don't have secret police to throw you in jail for saying the wrong thing. But if you say the wrong thing you can definitely expect to be yelled at, cut off socially, or even lose your job.

II.

Which of these cities seems like a more pleasant place to you?

The advantage of the first city is you aren't constantly having to watch what you say. You just need to remember some basic rules - be civil, no insults, no heckling, etc. You can say what you're thinking, and if others disagree, they'll just explain the ways in which they disagree. They won't usually hold a grudge against you or yell at you. It's normal in this city for people with very different opinions to be friends.

On the other hand, you're much more likely to hear something you find offensive. It's also a lot easier for people with offensive views to find each other. And it's easier to spread those offensive views in public spaces. It's also common in the first city for people to hide behind civility to express various bigotries. And if you find someone's words upsetting or triggering, you won't find much support. Everyone else is going to roll their eyes and call you a snowflake if you complain.

The big advantage of the second city is that you're unlikely to hear really offensive views. And if you do hear something offensive, most folks will be on your side and support you if you go off yelling at the perpetrator or want to break off social ties over it.

The biggest disadvantage of the second city is that you're constantly having to monitor your speech to make sure you're not bothering anyone. You also don't know where people stand on things - people with odious views learn quickly to keep that to themselves. Many topics are never discussed in public, though conversations may still happen in small groups behind closed doors.

Another issue in the second city is that it's tricky to change the window of acceptable discourse. If everyone agrees an opinion is offensive, it's very difficult to even talk about that opinion at all. If public opinion is wrong on some controversial topic, it's really tough to fix it without getting a ton of blowback.

I'll be honest, to me the first city sounds nicer. I'd rather live in a place where everyone says what they think rather than holding it in. I'd rather hear the occasional hurtful or offensive thing than live in a place where I feel like I always have to watch my tongue.

I also recognize though that this may be a matter of personal preference. It may also be a matter of privilege. I'm relatively privileged in most of the ways that matter (though not all), so I feel like I have relatively little to lose. I have a lot of sympathy for the perspective of a person who thinks it is important that we actively shut down and discourage offensive, bigoted, or otherwise harmful speech.

III.

What I'm really trying to get at here is how "freedom of speech" is mostly about culture and norms. Laws matter, but only in fairly extreme situations. Most day-to-day discourse is determined much more by implicit social norms than legal rulings. Actual freedom of speech is not a rigid set of rules one either follows or fails to follow, but an emergent property of a cultural system.

It's also notable that a culture of free speech relies in practice on certain types of restrictions, either formal or informal, on speech activity. Free speech doesn't mean speech anarchy. For instance, heckling is a form of speech. But in order to cultivate a culture of free speech, it might be necessary to discourage heckling, insults and other "uncivil" behaviors.

A common line I see on social media is people saying that we have freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences. It's also often noted that heckling, ostracizing, criticizing, etc are all themselves speech acts, protected just as much as any other form of speech. It's therefore hypocritical to say you favor free speech but then turn around and yell at people who are exercising their perfectly legal rights.

But I think that this approach is overly legalistic and technical. On a high level, if you want a society where people feel free to express themselves on controversial topics, you actually do need freedom from consequences. It doesn't take secret police or official censorship to shut someone up - normal social consequences will do the job fine in many cases.

And often that's the point! A lot of folks today are invested in using ostracization, heckling, low-key harassment, etc to silence others from expressing views they think are harmful. This isn't inherently illegitimate - it fits within the current legal system just fine. And if the views in question are genuinely harmful to speak aloud, this sort of silencing may be a good thing in certain circumstances.

What I object to is the idea that this can all be done with no cost, or that it ought to be scaled to the max against every "problematic" view. There are real benefits to being able to just talk openly about things, and the more rigid your discourse rules become, the more of those benefits you lose.

IV.

There is one more consideration I haven't really touched on. Sometimes, shutting down one point of view is necessary to let marginalized points of view thrive. For instance, if you permit people to say things that make [marginalized group] uncomfortable, many members of that group will take that as a sign to stay quiet (or walk away entirely). If you create norms against whatever sorts of speech make [marginalized group] uncomfortable, you may be able to bring that group back into the conversation and increase the overall diversity of ideas within your discourse.

My experience is that this is often true, and is by far the strongest justification for adopting more restrictive speech norms.

Note, however, that the ultimate point is still to cultivate spaces where discourse can flourish. This still requires real trade-offs. You have to leave space for actual serious disagreement - after all, if everyone already knows what the right thing is, there's no point to having discourse at all other than just gassing each other up.

Also, once you open this up as an option, you create incentives for each group to make itself appear marginalized and emphasize their own fragility in the face of opposing viewpoints. This opens up an entire meta-discourse about which groups are marginalized and what specific views ought to be permissible vs out-of-bounds. The problems here are not unsolvable. But we ought to be aware of these types of problems and exercise some care to handle them well.

V.

My final attempt at synthesis here is to say that, instead of arguing about technical and legalistic "free speech" issues, we ought to take seriously the idea of cultivating spaces where healthy discourse can happen. This has very little to do with the First Amendment and everything to do with building a culture that genuinely values ideas and discussion as positive things to be cultivated.

"Civilized discourse" as an idea has become right-wing coded in some places, seen as having no purpose other than silencing the weak and empowering the strong. And admittedly, it can have this effect. People who benefit from the status quo and possess social and cultural capital can use civilized discourse norms to quietly silence their opposition while keeping their own privileges sacrosanct.

But the same can easily be said about more modern norms of speech. Long lists of phrases you aren't allowed to say, constantly changing terminology, and complex rules of proper conduct are just as easily co-opted by the privileged to their own benefit as the normal rules of "civilized discourse."

There is no simple solution. But if we want healthy discourse communities, I think the most important thing is for leaders and thinkers to actually see that as a thing worth striving for.

Fortunately, perfection here is not necessary - humanity is blessed by the simple fact that we crave to express ourselves and be known to others, even at great risk to ourselves. This is a valuable thing, and it's important that we not smash it out of fear of what some people might say.

Let's do a healthcare thought experiment.

Alice isn't feeling well, and goes to visit the doctor. She learns that she has an aggressive form of cancer. Over the course of the next year, she visits a number of different specialists, many of them operating at the top of their field. She undergoes a number of different treatments, including the most advanced, cutting-edge techniques. At the end of the year, she has a difficult conversation with her doctor. Her doctor tells her that they've tried everything they could, but none of it is working. Her cancer is just too aggressive. She is projected to die in six months. Alice goes home, tells her family, and asks them to help her make the next six months the best they can be. She passes away six months later surrounded by friends and family.

Bob's situation is very similar to Alice's. He receives the same diagnosis, visits the same specialists, and receives all the same treatments. The only difference is that, when he sits down with his doctor to have the difficult talk, the doctor tells him they have done all they can do - except for one thing. They believe that if Bob were to take an unobtanium pill, he would have a 50% chance of making a full recovery. However, unobtanium is incredibly rare and wildly expensive. The pill Bob needs would cost $50 million. There is no chance of getting insurance or anyone else to pay for it. If Bob wants the treatment, he will need to come up with the money out-of-pocket. Bob and his family set up a GoFundMe, they get themselves on every news show that will have them, and they call every politician they can find. They try as hard as they can to raise the $50 million. But they're only able to raise $5 million. Bob passes away after six months.

The question is: who was better off?

You can make a case that they were about the same. After all, they both received the same treatments and got the same result. Bob was unable to obtain the unobtanium pill, so the possibility of it ended up being irrelevant.

You could also make the case that Bob was better off. At least that he was given a chance. Perhaps if he had tried other things, worked harder, or been a little luckier, he would have been able to get the pill. The possibility of the pill gave him a hope that was never even presented to Alice.

But to me, the more intuitive case is that Alice was better off. She spent her last six months doing things she enjoyed with the people she loved. Bob spent his last six months in a hellish grind trying to raise an impossible sum of money.

I think Alice also got something subtle, but important - Alice got peace. Alice could plausibly tell herself that she had genuinely done everything she could. She had seen all the specialists and done all the treatments. She had, in some sense, done her part. Anything bad that happened to her after all that was definitively not her fault.

Bob's best chance at that sort of peace is to convince himself that the pill was never really an option. That amount of money was completely out of his reach, and he would be fully justified in simply dismissing the option as unrealistic. But I think a lot of people would have trouble convincing themselves of that. There are big forces working on us encouraging us to always push, to always fight, to never say never. So Bob is stuck - he goes to his grave believing if he had just done things differently, he'd have had a real shot at decades more of life.

II

I think about this thought experiment whenever I hear about some new drug or treatment hitting the market for some obscenely high price.

The reason for these incredibly high prices are patent protections, of course. Patents mean that companies have a legally protected monopoly on any new drug for twenty years (under current US law). While a drug is under patent, companies can charge whatever they want, and nobody can undercut them.

The argument for patent protection is pretty good. Patents are the main way we incentivize companies to come up with new drugs. Coming up with new drugs is both expensive and risky, so it makes sense for the rewards to be substantial. And over time, we generally expect that prices will be pushed down. New, even better drugs will come on the market to compete. And after the patent expires, generic manufacturers will be able to take things over and push the price down even more.

All of the above is rooted in the idea that new, better drugs coming on to the market is a positive good, even if the new drugs start off mostly unaffordable. After all, even if you can't afford a fancy new drug, you've still got all the old drugs available. And even if prices stay high forever, which happens to some drugs, it seems like nobody would be harmed by some fancy designer drug floating around out there. And in the normal case where prices do come down over time, it seems like everyone benefits.

The story of Alice and Bob, though, suggests a scenario in which the mere availability of a superior, costly treatment could cause genuine harm.

I'm honestly not sure how big a deal this is in practice. One case that comes up a lot is insulin. It is often noted that insulin prices have increased to pretty ludicrous levels, especially considering that insulin was relatively cheap not that long ago. Untangling the complexity of the insulin market is pretty difficult - but part of what's going on is that it IS possible to find cheap insulin (Walmart has a store brand that can be purchased for $25). But the cheap insulin is a lot worse than the expensive insulin. Back when the only insulin available was the cheap insulin, diabetics lived worse lives and died younger. Newer, more expensive insulin lets diabetics live better and longer than before. But it's a lot more expensive.

From what I can tell, actual medical improvement is only part of the story - there's a lot of other stuff going on in the insulin market, and a lot of it seems very shady. But even if we set the shady parts aside, I worry that the core of it sends us into Alice and Bob territory. In a world where the insulin available is cheap but only somewhat effective, diabetics get to live their lives mostly unburdened by the cost of their medication. They don't have to spend very much money, and they still get the peace of mind that comes from knowing they're doing everything right. If you drop a better, but wildly more expensive, insulin into the mix, diabetics suddenly have to become amateur economists, figuring out what they're willing to spend on quality-of-life improvements. There are real benefits here - people who can afford the more expensive insulin (or can convince insurance to cover it) will live longer, better lives. But it seems like there are costs too.

III

So probably the logical place to go from here is to talk about socialized medicine. I do think socialized medicine solves a lot of the problems I've mentioned above. I don't know if it solves everything - for instance, some entity at some point needs to make tough decisions about what it will pay for and what it won't. Being told that there's an experimental treatment you could try, but the government refuses to pay for it, isn't necessarily an improvement over being told you could get it if you manage to scrounge up enough money (though in practice well-run government institutions have a lot more market leverage than individual healthcare consumers, rendering a lot of these scenarios less likely).

Honestly though, other people have made lots of great cases for socialized medicine, and the topic has been debated to death. I don't really feel like I have a ton to add to the discussion. So I want to go in a slightly different direction: what other scenarios have Alice and Bob properties?

To me at least, the core of what makes the Alice and Bob story interesting is that, in many life situations, it is important to us to feel like we did the right thing. For instance, suppose that I hire an inspector to look over my new house and they tell me everything's up-to-code. If my house burns down later due to a freak electrical issue, I will be upset about my house burning down, but I probably won't feel guilty over it. On the other hand, if everyone told me to hire an inspector, and I didn't, and then my house burned down, I would feel like I'd made a terrible mistake.

Let's make it worse. Imagine that there are a dozen different accrediting agencies for home inspectors, and they all hate each other and say the others are frauds. Some of them are quite affordable, while others are incredibly expensive. My official goal in hiring an inspector is to avoid having my house burn down. But actually, a big part of what I want is peace of mind. I want to feel like I did the right thing. And I want to know that, if something bad does happen, it wasn't my fault. But the situation I'm presented with now makes that impossible. Whoever I hire, I'll know there are some people out there who think I'm a huge idiot and deserve whatever I get for hiring the wrong type of inspector.

Maybe what I need to do is just buck up and take responsibility. I need to do my research, figure out which inspector is the best, and then hire them. With so much competition, it seems likely that the quality of inspection available to someone willing to do the work on this is really high. But truly, the probability of my house burning down is pretty low no matter what I do. And the probability of me being frustrated, anxious, and uncertain is rapidly approaching certainty.

To circle back around to medicine, what I think a lot of people want from the doctor is to feel like they're doing the right stuff. A doctor's job isn't just to offer medical expertise. Part of the point of a doctor is to take on the burden of medical decision-making. A patient's duties are straightforward - they need to show up at the right times and follow instructions. This might be difficult in some cases (for instance, if your doctor tells you to lose weight or quit smoking). But your responsibilities as a patient are clear. If a doctor offers a choice to a patient, it is the doctor's job to present only the best options and clearly explain all the relevant considerations.

I actually think a lot of decisions people make in life are driven by this sort of thinking. People from middle-class families go to college because that's what you do. Lots of folks are told that if they study hard, go to a good school, pick a good major and avoid trouble, then they've done their part. I think most people realize this doesn't specifically guarantee anything. After all, in our initial thought experiment, Alice did all the best treatments and none of them worked. But they feel that if they do all the right things, then they will have done what was expected, and come what may, dignity and honor will be retained.

I think older generations had more scripts like this, and larger sections of their life were controlled by those scripts. The obvious examples here are around marriage and kids, and are highly gendered. If a woman married a good man, kept a good house and raised happy kids, she was doing everything right. That didn't guarantee happiness - bad things happen all the time to good people. But the script lets her offload some of the responsibility. If she's following the script and things go wrong, she can hold her head high knowing she did the right thing.

IV

I want to make one more distinction here to try and emphasize what I'm talking about.

I think a lot of people are already aware of how the complexity of the modern world is overwhelming. Having to constantly sift through endless options is a lot of work. And though a lot of people are out there making guides, explainers, etc. to help parse the ocean of information available to us, I think there is still a lot of work to be done here.

But that isn't actually the problem I'm getting at. Or at least, it's only part of the problem I'm getting at. What I'm talking about is something more subtle, but perhaps also deeper. It's not just that the modern world makes us do more work sifting through options. It's that the modern world gives us fewer opportunities to offload moral responsibility. When we have fewer options available to us, it is easier to simply accept things for what they are. When there's no treatment for a condition, we can turn away from trying to solve the problem and focus on making peace with what must be. But as the space of viable options expands, it becomes harder and harder to accept that things simply are as they are, because we know for a fact there are many other ways things could have been.

I don't think this is entirely bad. For instance, I think it is bad that, for much of human history, it has been simply accepted that when duty calls, a man picks up his weapon and marches out to fight the enemy. Martial tradition is full of scripts that encourage soldiers to offload their moral responsibility for terrible acts of violence. Weakening the scripts that shield people from taking responsibility for violence seems important to me. I also think it is good for men and women both to think more seriously about what they want out of life. Abandoning easy scripts leaves people psychologically vulnerable, but also opens up possibilities that would be otherwise impossible.

But I do wonder if the classically millennial temperament - anxious, scared, confused, insecure, uncertain - is influenced by the additional burden of responsibility millennials have had to carry through their lives. I also wonder if some of the weirder, more intense online political communities are working as a release valve, letting people offload moral responsibility on to ideologies that supply straightforward answers to difficult questions. I think you can even see some of this emerge in influencer culture or "grindset" thinking, which encourage people to throw everything they have into the pursuit of incredibly specific lifestyle goals.

I don't know if any of what I've said is super original. What I'm saying sounds kind of similar to other ideas I've heard before, like ennui, anomie, nausea, and other french words. But to me, these french words imply a certain passivity, or giving up, in the face of the machinery of the modern world. And I don't think that's really what's happening. People aren't giving up - in many cases, they're kicking into overdrive and burning themselves out trying to do everything, or they're endlessly guilt-tripping themselves for every little decision they've ever made.

We could try and bring back all the old stuff that managed these burdens for us. But I think that would be, in some ways, a step back. Ultimately, I think the true way forward is probably learning to live with less certainty and more choice. We need to learn how to accept things as they are, even when the way things are is our fault. We need to get better at avoiding sunk-cost thinking so we don't make the perfect the enemy of the good. And we need to learn to articulate our values clearly so that, even when things go wrong, we can say with confidence that we did the best we could given what we had to work with.

The characteristics I would say make up a racialized worldview are:

• The population of the world is divided into some number of distinct natural groups. These may be called races, or they might be called peoples, ethnicities, nations, etc.

• Each group is understood to possess a characteristic mix of cultural and biological traits. Notably, there is little attempt to differentiate biological differences (skin color, hair, height) from cultural characteristics (clothing, marriage customs, cuisine). These will be assumed to come as a package deal.

• History is frequently conceived as being fundamentally about the developments of these groups and their interactions between each other. The past will often be seen as an arc leading up to the present arrangement. There is an emphasis on continuity, but mainly in a way that extends the roots of the current order into the deep past. Contingency within the current order is often downplayed. Events and political units from the past that can't be linked to current groups will be ignored or treated as afterthoughts.

This sort of "racialized worldview" is an extremely common thing among human societies. When reading ancient Greek or Roman writers, they frequently adopt this mode - they group people into convenient buckets and then characterize those buckets with a hodge-podge mix of biological and cultural characteristics. Nuance is erased in favor of simple, monolithic groupings. And I expect most modern readers will recognize this sort of mental model as common today. As one example, the Civilization series of games is just this style of thinking dialed up to absurd extremes.

Why is this model so common? Its main virtue, as I see it, is legibility. A racialized worldview is straightforward and easy to understand. It makes simple predictions that will often be accurate enough to get by. It is not mentally taxing. And I think on some level, it is satisfying. People like simple, essentializing categories. This is the same urge that draws folks towards Hogwarts houses, Myers-Briggs personality types, and astrological signs. There is a very human urge to reduce the vast scope of human diversity to a small number of easily understood, highly legible characteristics.

The actual fantasy racism part

Fantasy, and D&D in particular, have a lot of influences, but I'm going to focus on the Tolkien influence. Mostly that's because it's what I'm most familiar with. But also I think he is one of the most important influences on the specifics of how fantasy races are typically deployed in D&D (and other fantasy derivative works).

The way I understand Tolkien is that he was a fundamentally kind man, but like everyone, was stuck with the mental models his cultural world made available to him. And his model of the world was very, VERY racialized.

What Tolkien ended up creating in Middle-Earth is what might be described as a racialized utopia. The racialization is VERY present. But Tolkien presents a world where each race brings different strengths to the table, and by cooperating they can achieve more than could ever be achieved alone.

This is not really a modern "multicultural" view. Tolkien clearly sees each race as having its own distinct culture, lifestyle, and even geographic habitat. Cohabitation between races is unusual. He does prize personal relationships across racial boundaries, but these manifest in a distinct way - separate communities are always maintained, and occasional visitation never threatens to erode the distinctiveness of the individual communities.

I think this racialized utopia vision is appealing to a lot of people. The racialization renders it static and legible, which is appealing for the reasons I mentioned previously. The utopian aspects of it let you escape the realistic misery that usually accompanies racism and instead occupy a world where every stereotype is positive, benign, or humorous.

A more subtle level of appeal is that the existence of these racialized tropes provides grist for subversion. A lot of D&D players really enjoy intentionally playing fantasy races "against type." This feels subversive, but it only works because the stereotypes are so ingrained. Without stereotypes to play on, this sort of character loses a lot of its punch. A character who is played against type mainly serves to entrench the stereotype further - all the humor and fun revolve around the fact that everyone knows that's not how the race is “supposed” to be played.

I think that recent D&D rules changes around racial stat bonuses ought to be interpreted as supporting this style of play. The rules changes don't change any of the underlying stereotypes (nor could they if they wanted to), but they do lend mechanical support to players who enjoy playing against type.

The only way to actually be rid of race would be to do away with the races. But nobody would like that, because fantasy racism is fun, and D&D wouldn't be D&D without elves, dwarves, halflings, etc.

I don't think it is particularly sinister that people find joy in these simplified world models. The appeal is that they let you dabble in the playful parts of a racialized worldview without inflicting harm on actual people in the real world or perpetuating stereotypes about real-world racial groups.

Of course, problems arise because, inevitably, it becomes clear that certain fantasy races skirt too close to real-world marginalized groups. Suddenly, a goofy stereotype about a fantasy race stands out as an offensive caricature of a real-world group.

Realistically, the best defense against this is probably to redirect fantasy racism to stereotypes about groups that everyone can agree aren't particularly marginalized. This has been done pretty successfully with dwarves, who Tolkien imagined as semitic, but have now been thoroughly reinterpreted as vaguely Scottish or something. Since Scottish people are generally not marginalized in the modern day, this is mostly harmless (though perhaps die-hard Scottish nationalists would disagree).

What I think is probably not possible is to excise the racialization entirely. It's just too big a part of the game and the brand to be removed without fundamentally changing what D&D is about. Even if a new game were to come out, the urge to racialize is potent and it’s a powerful short-hand for worldbuilding. A game that tries to worldbuild without using some sort of racial shortcuts is going to be nearly incomprehensible to most players.

Unfortunately, their complaints are often incoherent, or never really gel into anything that makes sense. It's mostly just a vibe - they feel like they are being silenced in various ways and they don't like it. But they struggle to properly articulate what the precise problem is or how it might be solved. For instance, Elon Musk got tied into knots at one point trying to claim that twitter moderation should permit anything allowed under US law, a position that is absurd for many reasons.

In the US at least, the first amendment looms large - a lot of people basically equate the first amendment with free speech. I think this is a bad analysis. The first amendment only applies to the US government. The government is certainly an important actor in terms of free speech, but it is one of many. The government isn't magical - anything the government does can also be done by other organizations of sufficient power, reach, and resources.

So let's theorize out free speech and see what's actually going on here.

The pyramid of speech

I've come to think of speech as a pyramid, sort of along the lines of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The bottom of the pyramid is more fundamental, and without it free speech is impossible. The higher levels of the pyramid represent more advanced levels of speech.

The bottom of the pyramid represents raw physical constraints on speech. At the most basic, if your mouth is sewn shut and your fingers are broken, your ability to communicate is obviously severely compromised.

A little higher up the pyramid would be the physical tools of speech. These depend on your culture and available technologies. But if writing is important, then access to pen and paper matters. Access to a printing press matters. An internet connection matters. Notably, the tools of speech usually cost money (sometimes a lot of money). So essentially every society gates speech behind financial resources, at least to some degree.

The final physical level of speech represents physical access to an audience. If you are allowed to say what you want but are physically prevented from standing in the town square, your ability to speak doesn't mean very much. If you are writing things but aren't able to get those in front of anyone, then your speech doesn't matter.

The middle levels of the pyramid represent freedom from reprisal. The threat of reprisal doesn't directly stop you from speaking, but it can powerfully disincentivize speech, creating a chilling effect.

The most basic level here is freedom from violent reprisal. Obviously, if someone has a gun to your head telling you what to do, most of your freedoms are in practice being severely curtailed, including freedom of speech. If the government publicly executes critics, then physical ability to speak doesn't matter very much.

The next level up is economic reprisal. If speaking on a topic will cost you your livelihood, then your practical freedom of speech is rather limited.

The most abstract level within the reprisal tier is social reprisal - loss of respect and status. If you feel that speaking your mind on a topic will cost you the respect and admiration of your peers, then your freedom is at least somewhat curtailed.

(A common phrase you'll see is "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences." I think this is just flat wrong. To a very large degree, freedom of speech really IS freedom from consequences. This is obvious when those consequences are things like death or jail time. My view is that other sorts of consequences also chill speech, though to somewhat lesser degrees.)

The highest level of the pyramid has to do with cultural receptiveness to new ideas. If society holds to religious beliefs that forbid hearing out conflicting opinions, then your speech is falling on deaf ears. Or if people are simply incurious and uninterested in new ideas, then your speech is effectively meaningless. This level is the most abstract and also the least important. It matters, but only when the lower levels are covered.

Does anyone have freedom of speech?

My pyramid model doesn't really establish a clear binary of has/doesn't have free speech. Instead, it establishes something like a rubric by which freedom of speech might be graded. I don't think it would be desirable to live in a place maximally devoted to freedom of speech - such a society would place strange and unfair burdens on people to make sure everyone had a chance to be heard to the fullest.

In practice, freedom of speech has always been and will continue to be heavily gated behind financial and social resources. Someone who is well-financed and well-connected is heard much more clearly than someone who is poor and unimportant. I don't think there is any good way around this, though policies might be taken up to try and flatten this out.

Why do we care?

So why do we care about free speech? My take here is that free speech is, in a practical sense, useful. Societies with freer speech will generate more robust dialogue and debate on important issues and will be more likely to do the right thing. They will also be much faster to embrace new ideas.

I do not think we need to optimize solely for free speech. Free speech is useful to a point, but other things matter as well. Abolishing money would make speech more fair, but would generate many other negative effects.

I think that in this light, the anti-woke complaint can be stated more plainly - there is a feeling that certain vital topics of discussion are being intentionally locked out of public discourse through the mobilization of both public and private resources. Is this true? I think it is. Does it matter? I think it obviously does. And stated this way, I think many on the side of censorship would have to agree that this is their objective. The whole point is to mobilize social and economic pressure to penalize certain types of speech that they believe are harmful.

The crucial question, then, is whether this is worth it. I've conceded that I am not a free speech maximalist - it is one of many things I value in society, but certainly not the only thing, or even the most important thing. If censorious behavior furthers other important values, a case might be made that it is worth making that tradeoff.

This piece is not meant to litigate that tradeoff. Instead, I wish only to make the case that there is in fact a tradeoff being made, and that the thing being traded away can reasonably be referred to as free speech.

Suppose that tomorrow, God came to you and told you that you are the only real person in the world. Everyone else is actually a soulless automaton, programmed to behave a certain way.

Is this believable? I think it's a horrifying thought. But I'm not sure how I would go about trying to demonstrate that it can't be true.

One thing I'm confident in is that *I* am conscious. I know beyond any possible doubt that I exist as a conscious being with internal experiences and such. So maybe I can start with that. I might point out to God that other people seem to report internal experiences similar to my own. God can answer that this response is simply programmed in, a mapping of inputs to outputs.

I can go a step further though. It's not just that other people report having experiences like my own. If I model them as having consciousness, this is pretty effective at predicting all sorts of behaviors. That feels like a point in favor of other people being conscious.

God might point out that this is just a version of teleological reasoning - making predictions about a system by thinking of it as being aimed at some core purpose. This sort of thinking can be applied to any optimizing system. For instance, I can make decent predictions about how an app on my phone might behave by pretending it is an agent with certain goals. That doesn't mean the app is actually a conscious agent - it just means my mental machinery for theory of mind can be applied to various other domains with reasonable levels of success.

I think my strongest argument would be: I know I have internal experiences, and other people seem to be like me in very many ways. It would be strange if I were to diverge so sharply from other humans on this one trait while matching them so closely across many other traits. God, being God, could simply assert that I am special (perhaps made special for some deific purpose). But beyond some contrivance, I think it is reasonable for me to continue believing other humans are more or less like me.

II

The reason I am interested in this question is curiosity around AI. Specifically, it seems really important that we figure out how to determine whether or not an AI is conscious. An unconscious AI is merely an object, having no more moral significance than a rock. But a conscious AI would be, in some sense, a person.

Is this right? It feels intuitive to me, but even as I write it out, I find myself second-guessing. Humans are connected to each other through bonds of family, friendship, and community. Can moral obligation extend outside this network? Maybe morality ought to be understood as a strictly human phenomenon.

But this feels wrong. For instance, it seems to me that exterminating an intelligent alien species would be an abominable act.

There's another assumption above that I haven't interrogated yet. I called the hypothetical aliens "intelligent." But earlier, I stated it differently - I spoke of *consciousness* as being the determining factor for morality, not intelligence. On reflection, it's pretty clear to me that my intuition is to equivocate between these two things, treating them as essentially the same.

Is that right? Probably not. For instance, I don't think smarter people are of greater moral worth than other people.

When I dive deeply on this, what I find in myself is a sort of anthropic morality - a tendency to assign moral worth based on similarity to humans. I think this drives my intuition that exterminating an intelligent alien species would be wrong - I'm imagining them as being sci-fi aliens, essentially humans with funny prosthetics. I'm imagining being able to speak with them, share culture with them, and possibly even live side-by-side with them.

Is this what actual aliens are likely to be like? It's hard to say, since we haven't encountered any alien life, let alone alien intelligences. But it's entirely plausible that an alien, even an intelligent alien, might be so different that I would have a difficult time recognizing them as a moral entity. What if the alien has no language, no ability to communicate, nor any desire to do so? What if the alien has no culture in the sense that I can parse or understand? What if the alien is so unlike earth life that it is difficult for me to tell it is even alive?

As an abstract matter, I feel like I nonetheless ought to extend moral worth to an alien who is alive and conscious. But would I honor it in a real-world situation, with real costs on the line? I'm not sure. I'm not a vegan - my diet involves killing animals. This doesn't bother me very much day-to-day. Perhaps it should, but in practice, it doesn't.

III

Seeing clearly now my own tendency to assign moral worth based on anthropic similarity, I find myself wondering - is my affinity for consciousness just more of the same? Is it just a fancier, more defensible version of my intuitive anthropocentrism? Have I just picked one human trait and decided to assign to it my entire moral load?

I think that's exactly what I've done. But I don't really feel bad about it. I am a human, after all, and any moral sentiment I carry will have to reflect that. I am able to imagine moral views based on different principles - for instance, a sort of ecological/Gaia morality that assigns innate moral worth to natural ecosystems. But I don't feel especially drawn to these views.

At this point, I feel like I've dug as far as I can, and I've hit bedrock. I'm willing to bite the bullet and take the moral worth of consciousness as axiomatic.

But from here, I run into a new problem - how do I know arbitrary things are *not* conscious? This is another assumption I hid away earlier - that random rocks are not conscious beings. How do I know that?

I'd probably start by flipping my arguments I made against God at the beginning. A rock has none of the behaviors I associate internally with consciousness, and therefore it would be strange for it to share that trait with me while diverging so sharply in other ways. If I try and model a rock as a conscious entity, my predictions will be flawed.

Is the prediction part true? Aristotle had a teleological view of the world - he believed earth had a purpose which it sought to fulfill. He explained gravity in an agentic way, with earth seeking the middle of things and air seeking the sky. Modern physics isn't usually understood this way, but am I certain it couldn't be? Newton's laws could probably be conceptualized this way. I don't know enough about relativity or quantum physics to say much about them.

It seems to me there's a kind of isometry at work here - any natural process can probably be understood as an agent trying to accomplish various goals. Whether or not such a model makes decent predictions may not tell me much about the underlying truth of the matter.

As I move back in the direction of contemplating AI, I run into something weirder. I generally act on the assumption that normal CPUs aren't innately conscious when they're turned on and running. I assume that any consciousness they achieve would be the result of higher-level software structures (that have not yet been achieved).

Can I support this view? Modern computers have memory, they perform computation, and they even respond to stimulus. Am I *certain* that a boring old computer isn't conscious? How would I even begin to demonstrate that a CPU is not a conscious being?

IV

Ultimately, I think I'm left with nothing but my guts-level anthropocentrism. If a plain computer is conscious, it is a consciousness very different from my own. I just can't bring myself to see a computer that blindly executes code and has no ability to grow, change, or learn as conscious in any way I actually care about. Or, rather, I can imagine it as a pure hypothetical, but I can't really hold on to it. It's too alien for me to see as my own.

This brings me face-to-face with a brute fact I am unlikely to overcome: I am going to assign moral worth to any non-human entity based almost entirely on its similarity to traits I find familiar and significant in myself. As a corollary, to whatever extent I widen my circle of concern to encompass non-human entities, it will be by convincing myself of my similarity with them.

This is, in some ways, an unsettling conclusion, but perhaps inevitable. On what else could I base my morality? As I said before, I am human myself, and morality is a human concept. How else was this ever going to work?

But it leads me to admit defeat on what I initially posed as an incredibly important question. I have no way of directly accessing the internal experience of anyone or anything besides myself. I have no way of indirectly assessing consciousness other than comparing the ways in which a person or thing behaves in ways similar to my own expression of consciousness. And therefore, I have no objective way to determine if an AI ought to be afforded moral worth.

I think the time is rapidly coming that AI is able to emulate humanity enough that we start to socially bond with it. And my guess is we will eventually turn a corner where it is more painful to deny the AI as a conscious, moral being than it is to continue treating it like an object. This will have relatively little to do with the AI's actual internal structure and much more to do with how capable it is at emulating and manipulating human social behavior.

It feels like there ought to be a more "rational," facts-based way of assessing something so important. But if there is, I have no idea what it would be. And I don't know what to do with that information.

I'm not sure who's going to read this. Maybe nobody. That's fine tbh - I'm mostly writing here for my own benefit.

What am I writing about? Well, whatever I want. I guess the main topics will be stuff like history, philosophy, politics, maybe a bit of tech here and there. But mainly it'll just be stuff that's on my mind lately.

To the extent this newsletter is for anyone though, it's going to be for people who vibe with how I think about stuff. There's some stuff I can plausibly say I'm an expert in (my actual job), but this has nothing to do with that. This is just a place to toss some ideas out and see how they fit.

Thanks for reading!