My values/worldview
From 10 000 meters
I just had a chat with my roommates that ended up with “let’s write down what our values are”. Here we go.
My axioms for moral concern
Plants execute automatic responses in reaction to certain stimuli. Most animals can feel pain and pleasure and respond based on the desire/aversion induced by these feelings. Human beings and some animals are capable of having preferences about their future existence; executing action patterns based on these preferences is what I think of as “agency”.1
The things I consider to carry moral value (in the good & bad sense) are:
I don’t care overly much about whether to focus on the mean agency/pleasure, the maximum, reducing the lows etc. What I do care about is the scope, and what beings are to be included in our concern: I want to include all humans, all animals, all future humans and all future animals.4 This requires a long-term perspective, making sure that our actions are sustainable long-term.5
Heuristics for effective action
There is a lot of bad shit going on in the world. To figure out what kind of bad shit to focus on, I use the effective altruism framework developed by GiveWell:
Focus on important things. Importance depends on the severity6 of the situation, multiplied by the number of beings affected.
Focus on things where you can actually make progress. Do you have particular skills or resources that can be leveraged to make an impact? Or a great plan no one has thought about yet?7
Focus on things that are neglected. If no one knows about a problem, you will have a bigger impact working on it, than you’d have if you work on something that our society is already set on fixing.
Mistakes to avoid
If you go with something unconventional, it’s easy to make mistakes by ignoring things that are already known to people. The best way to avoid this mistake is to listen to people and get feedback instead of taking unilateral action.
Another mistake involves thinking of complex systems in terms of entities. States don’t have plans or agendas, the actions of “the public” or USA is best understood in terms of public choice theory. All plans that assume coordinability8 of a population are doomed to fail.
There are no “evildoers” at the root of the world’s problems; global struggles are rooted in small biases spread throughout the population, bad incentives, the chaotic side-effects of complex systems, and poor systems design.
A similar assumption is that “grand plans” are a good idea. Reality is complex, and it’s close to impossible for a central authority to figure out a plan that works after being imposed top-down. The antidote here is to change things a bit at a time, while listening to people on the ground, letting their voices be heard.
We can’t use “golden hammers” to solve complex problems. Things that work well in one situation will fail in another situation. Things that fail in one situation might work in another. We need to be quick to change strategies, testing new ways of working until we find a way that.. works.
And finally, we need to be mindful of side effects. Whenever something changes, there’s a risk of unintended consequences that might be worse than the problem you tried to solve. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to change things, only that you change things that actually need changing, and that you do it in ways that reduces the potential harm.9
Communities
Because reality is hard to understand, and different people have different ideas, biases and perspectives, I find it important to surround myself with a diverse set of people. To promote intellectual diversity, I want a high ceiling for testing out new ideas.10
In order to evolve and learn from each other, I wish for group norms that value understanding rather than scoring points and trying to “win” debates.
In order to avoid acting out of emotional turmoil and trauma, I want people to have basic trauma awareness. It’s important to me that people take responsibility for their own emotional/psychological baggage. I don’t expect people to process everything solo, but if there isn’t clarity to what’s who’s, codependency ensues.
To further increase feelings of safety, I want my communities to have a level of emotional awareness, be able to negotiate boundaries and take care of each other on bad days.
Finally, I want to contribute to the communities I’m part of, and cultivate a sense of community feeling.
Personal struggles
I think I know better than others. In some cases, I’m pretty sure I do. In other cases, I’m way off. I find it very easy to find faults in others, and very hard to find mistakes and faulty perspectives of my own.
I tend to take up too much space in social interactions and hold other people’s beliefs to unfair standards of rigour. I’m working on finding myself a way around these patterns, in order to better be able to take in new perspectives and information.
I have heard from people that I sometimes react emotionally when certain topics come up, shutting myself out of conversations. Not optimal.
I don’t live up to the standards I wish for people in my communities. But I want to live up to them, and I’m working towards embodying them to a higher degree. I’ll get there in time.
Treatment of myself
I don’t believe in evil. I believe in skill and unskillfulness. I make mistakes all the time, and I’m often mistaken about the magnitude of my mistakes. Acting unskillfully leads to personal suffering. I want to improve my action patterns and perspectives, training myself to act more skillfully over time.
I’m a strong believer in intrinsic motivation, finding joy and play instead of forcing myself to do things. As such, I aim for self-compassion and self-love.
It’s important for me to have a purpose, and for that reason, I do my best to make the world a better place. For how I go about that, see the sections above.
All these more advanced stages still have elements of the prior ones. Humans have both pleasure/pain and instinctual reactions.
Exception: Giving some people agency might lead to catastrophic consequences or inhibit the agency of others.
Exception: BDSM, child enjoying sugary candies a bit too much, etc etc.
I care more about current than future beings. But I still think we should care about them.
Environmentalism etc springs from this.
Measured in negative impact on agency/suffering.
These plans are rare, check around to make sure you’re not delusional.
I don’t know if this is a word. Coordinability assumptions include things like “If only everyone understood that X, then they would do Y”. Or “If people just got together, then we can do Z”. Or “We have the resources to do X, we just need to coordinate everyone”.
Aint no “just” about it.
We can gene-modify Anopheles gambiae, the species of mosquito that is the main spreader of malaria, with a gene that:
causes the females to be born sterile.
is inherited by 100% of the mosquito’s offspring. (called a “gene drive”)
This would eradicate Anopheles gambiae, and as such save more than half a million lives per year. Last year 627 000~ people died from malaria, with about 80% of these being children under 5 years of age.
And this isn’t science fiction, we have eradicated lab populations of Anopheles gambiae with gene drive technology.
So, why don’t go ahead and kill these mosquitos?
The main argument is that we don’t know the potential side-effects. Personally, I’d go ahead and do it if I could, but then again I tend to be rash.
I make an exception for conspiracy theories and nazism here. Not tabooed as topics of discussion/analysis, but I prefer to not relate with people that push those beliefs. I think of nazism as a dangerous viral meme, and I find conspiracy theories annoying and/or dangerous. Part of me wants to be morally consistent and have the same “policy” regarding speciesism/short-termism, but that seems unfair given the state of the Overton window