Astral Codex Ten

utilitarianism

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utilitarianism

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utilitarianism is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between April 17, 2023 and November 03, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Under utilitarianism, you’d probably still want some sort of oversight”; “Can you really get a profound understanding of utilitarianism in 15 minutes?”; “Utilitarianism doesn’t have a great theory of obligation”. It most often appears alongside Aristotle, FDA, Iliad.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: April 17, 2023
  • Last seen: November 03, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On IRBs
April 17, 2023 · Original source
Finally, most of the surveys in question are just a series of basic psychology scales or tasks both the worker and average SSC reader are very familiar with. I suspect many of them are administered by students as practice rather than 'serious' research. As the other poster said, rejected HITs are just any task the requestor declines for any reason. A worker's acceptance rate is extremely important - one of the few pieces of advice Amazon seems to give requestors is to filter for 98% or 99% acceptance rate. It's probably pretty reasonable for surveys - if you can't get 99 out of 100 of those filled out acceptably (assuming good faith by the requestors), maybe you should be filtered. It's also worth noting that Amazon makes communication difficult, and that rejected HITs can only be reversed for like a month - after that, they're permanently on your record. It's also probably worth restating: if a worker goes below the high 90s, they'll have access to fewer tasks, likely from less reputable requestors, and they'll need to do 100 of these to offset every rejection. And the worker is at much greater risk of being dug deeper into that hole by requestors rejecting their work in bad faith with no recourse - part of why surveys are popular is because the IRB can bludgeon requestors into accountability. Most of the surveys in question are also are the crumbs that filter through the grasping pedipalps of the hordes of workers (and their scripts). If people are seriously using MTurk to monetize their time, they're likely looking for 'batch HITs' - the sort of thing where there's hundreds or thousands of tasks that can be quickly repeated (moderating images, 3 cents for a sentiment analysis, a couple quarters to outline a car in an image, etc.) Of course, this mana from heaven rarely lasts long, and the worker always takes a risk - 'if I do 100 of these, and this is an unscrupulous requestor, well - I better have ten thousand accepted HITs under my belt.' That's why workers are so protective of their acceptance rate. Back to surveys - again as the other poster replied, most of what the average MTurk worker will see is probably a psychology study questionnaire with a series of whatever common scales, attention checks, and other tricks the worker has probably seen at least dozens if not hundreds of times by now. They often pay Amazon's princely sum of about 10 cents per (expected) minute - based on the minimum wage in whatever benighted 00s year Amazon Mechanical Turk launched. Anecdotally, it also seems like a lot of these are from students - probably just practice research by someone who likely has less experience with the platform than the worker themselves. The problem the requestor has - at least as of ~2018 - is that there is a lot of fraud with foreign workers getting access to MTurk accounts and submitting totally garbo data, often very quickly. Based purely on a 'time to complete' metric, this is hard to distinguish from a legit worker who has filled out hundreds of these and is looking to maximize how many pennies they get for their minutes. It also wasn't uncommon for workers to 'cook' such a survey - letting it sit at the end screen before submitting - just to avoid getting pinged for finishing it quickly. As for how this all ties back into Institutional Review Boards - well, yeah, griping to the IRB is often the MTurk worker's only recourse. Amazon just doesn't care, and as I recall a lot of requestors don't even know workers can contact them - and as mentioned there's a narrow time window to discuss rejected HITs before they become permanent. On the other hand, in a lot of cases this is basically a reddit mob complaining that a student doling out dimes screwed up their understanding of MTurk's arcane inner workings, and that's in the case that the workers aren't actually trying to defraud them for said dimes. 5. Comments About Regulation, Liability, and Vetocracy CatCube writes: I think the fundamental problem is that you cannot separate the ability to make a decision from the ability to make a *wrong* decision. However, our society--pushed by the regulator/lawyer/journalist/administrator axis you discuss--tries to use detailed written rules to prevent wrong decisions from being made. But, because of the decision/wrong decision inseparability thing, the consequences are that nobody has the ability to make a decision. This is ultimately a political question. It's not wrong, precisely, or right either. It's a question of value tradeoffs. Any constraint you put on a course of action is necessarily something that you value more than the action, but this isn't something people like to admit or hear voiced aloud. If you say, "We want to make sure that no infrastructure project will drive a species to extinction", then you are saying that's more important than building infrastructure. Which can be a defensible decision! But if you keep adding stuff--we need to make sure we're not burdening certain races, we need to make sure we're getting input from each neighborhood nearby, etc.--you can eventually end up overconstraining the problem, where there turns out to be no viable path forward for a project. This is often a consequence of the detailed rules to prevent wrong decisions. But because we can't admit that we're valuing things more than building stuff (or doing medical research, I guess?), we as a society just end up sitting and stewing about how we seemingly can't do anything anymore. We need to either: 1) admit we're fine with crumbling infrastructure, so long as we don't have any environmental, social, etc., impacts; or 2) decide which of those are less important and streamline the rules, admitting that sometimes the people who are thus able to make a decision are going to screw it up and do stuff we ultimately won't like. Darwin on why safetyism expanded just as the neoliberals were trying to decrease government regulation: Without the excuse of 'we were following all of the very strict and explicit regulations, so the bad thing that happened was a freak accident and not our fault' to rely on, companies had to take safety and caution and liability limitation and PR management into their own hands in a much more serious way. And without the confidence in very strict and explicit regulations to limit the bad things companies might do, and without democratically-elected regulators as a means to bring complaint and affect change, we became much more focused on seeking remedy for corporate malfeasance by suing companies into oblivion and destroying them in the court of public opinion. Basically, government actually *can* do useful things, as it turns out. One of the useful things it can do is be a third party to a dispute between two people or entities, such as 'corporations' and 'citizens', and use it's power to legibly and credibly ensure cooperation by explicitly specifying what will be considered defection and then punishing it harshly. This actually allows the two parties, which might otherwise be in conflict, to trust each other much more and cooperate much better, because their incentives have been shifted by a third party to make defection more costly. Without government playing that role, you can fall back into bad equilibrium of distrust and warring, which in this case might look like a wary populace ready to sue and decry at the slightest excuse, and paranoid corporations going overboard on caution and PR to shield from that. Meadow Freckle writes: Why can’t you sue an IRB for killing people for blocking research? You can clearly at least sometimes activist them into changing course. But their behavior seems sue-worthy in these examples, and completely irresponsible. We have negligence laws in other areas. Is there an airtight legal case that they’re beyond suing, or is it just that nobody’s tried? I don’t know, and this seems like an important question. And Donald writes: Why do we need special rules for medicine? The law has rules about what dangerous activities people are allowed to consent to, for example in the context of dangerous sports or dangerous jobs. Criminal and civil trials in this context seem to be a fairly functional system. If Doctors do bad things, they can stand in the accused box in court and get charged with assault or murder, with the same standards applied as are applied to everyone else. If there need to be exceptions, they should be exceptions of the form "doctors have special permission to do X". I do want to slightly defend something IRB-like here. When a doctor asks you to be part of a study, they’re implicitly promising that they did their homework, this is a valuable thing to study, and that there’s no obvious reason it should be extremely unsafe. As a patient (who may be uneducated) you have no way of knowing whether or not this promise is true. Every so often, someone does everything right, and something goes wrong anyway. A drug that everyone reasonably thought would be safe and effective turns out to have unpredictable side effects - this is part of why we have to do studies in the first place. If every time this happened, a doctor had to stand trial for assault/murder, nobody would ever study new drugs. Trials are a crapshoot, and juries tend to rule against doctors on the grounds that the disabled/dead patient is very sympathetic and everyone knows doctors/hospitals are rich and can give them infinite money as damages. There is no way for an average uneducated jury to distinguish between “doctor did their homework and got unlucky” and “doctor did an idiotic thing”. Either way, the prosecution can find “expert witnesses” to testify, for money, that you were an idiot and should have known the study would fail. In order to remove this risk, you need some standards for when a study is safe, so that if people sue you, you can say “I was following the standards and everyone else agreed with me that this was good” and then the lawsuit will fail. Right now those standards are “complied with an IRB”. This book is arguing that the IRB’s standards are too high, but we can’t cut the IRB out entirely without some kind of profound reform of the very concept of lawsuits, and I don’t know what that reform would look like. 6. Comments About The Act/Omission Distinction jumpingjacksplash writes: I think you've unintentionally elided two distinct points: first, that IRBs are wildly inefficient and often pointless within the prevailing legal-moral normative system (PLMNS); second, that IRBs are at odds with utilitarianism. Law in Anglo-Saxon countries, and most people's opinions, draw a huge distinction between harming someone and not helping them. If I cut you with a knife causing a small amount of blood loss and maybe a small scar, that's a serious crime because I have an obligation not to harm you. If I see a car hurtling towards you that you've got time to escape from if you notice it, but don't shout to warn you (even if I do this because I don't like you), then that's completely fine because I have no obligation to help you. This is the answer you'd get from both Christianity and Liberalism (in the old-fashioned/European sense of the term, cf. American Right-Libertarianism). Notably, in most Anglo-Saxon legal systems, you can't consent to be caused physical injury. Under PLMNS, researchers should always ask people if they consent to using their personal data in studies which are purely comparing data and don't change how someone will be treated. For anything that affects what medical treatment someone will or won't receive, you'd at least have to give them a full account of how their treatment would be different and what the risks of that are. If there's a real risk of killing someone, or permanently disabling them, you probably shouldn't be allowed to do the study even if all the participants give their informed consent. This isn't quite Hans Jonas' position, but it cashes out pretty similarly. That isn't to say the current IRB system works fine for PLMNS purposes; obviously there's a focus on matters that are simply irrelevant to anything anyone could be rationally concerned with. But if, for example, they were putting people on a different ventilator setting than they otherwise would, and that risked killing the patient, then that probably shouldn't be allowed; the fact that it might lead to the future survival of other, unconnected people isn't a relevant consideration, and nor is "the same number of people end up on each ventilator setting, who cares which ones it is" because under PLMNS individuals aren't fungible. Under utilitarianism, you'd probably still want some sort of oversight to eliminate pointless yet harmful experiments or reduce unnecessary harm, but it's not clear why subjects' consent would ever be a relevant concern; you might not want to tell them about the worst risks of a study, as this would upset them. The threshold would be really low, because any advance in medical science could potentially last for centuries and save vastly more people than the study would ever involve. The problem is, as is always the case for utilitarianism, this binds you to some pretty nasty stuff; I can't work out whether the Tuskegee experiment's findings have saved any lives, but Mengele's research has definitely saved more people than he killed, and I'd be surprised if that didn't apply to Unit 731 as well. The utilitarian IRB would presumably sign off on those. More interestingly, it might have to object to a study where everyone gives informed consent but the risk of serious harm to subjects is pretty high, and insist that it be done on people whose quality of life will be less affected if it goes wrong (or whose lower expected utility in the longer term makes their deaths less bad) such as prisoners or the disabled. The starting point to any ideal system has to be setting out what it's trying to achieve. Granted, if you wanted reform in the utilitarian direction, you probably wouldn't advocate a fully utilitarian system due to the tendency of the general public to recoil in horror. I want to stress how far we are away from “do experiments without patient’s consent” here - a much more common problem is that patients really want to be in experiments, and the system won’t allow it. This is most classic in studies on cancer, where patients really want access to experimental drugs and IRBs are constantly coming up with reasons not to give it to them. Jonas argued that all cancer studies should be banned because it’s impossible to consent when you’re desperate to survive, which isn’t the direction I would have taken that particular example in. But there are other examples - during COVID, lots of effective altruists stepped up to be in human challenge trials that would have gotten the vaccines tested faster, but the government wouldn’t allow them to participate. I would honestly be happy with a system that counts the harm of denying a patient’s ability to consent to an experiment they really want to be in as a negative, forget about any lives saved. And JDK writes: I haven't finished reading by felt compelled to comment on this: "the stricter IRB system in place since the '90s probably only prevents a single-digit number of deaths per decade, but causes tens of thousands more by preventing lifesaving studies." No. It does NOT "cause" deaths. We can't go down this weird path of imprecision about what "causing" means. I've been examining Ivan Illich, "Medical Nemesis" recently. By claiming IRBs which stop research ostensibly CAUSE death strikes me as cultural iatrogenesis masquerading as a cure for clinical iatrogenesis. […] "Might have been saved if" is not the same as "death was caused by". This seems to me to be a weird and overly metaphysical nitpick. Suppose a surgeon is operating on someone. In the process, they must clamp a blood vessel - this is completely safe for one minute, but if they leave it clamped more than one minute, the patient dies. They clamp it as usual, but I rush into the operating room and forceably restrain the surgeon and all the staff. The surgeon is unable to remove the clamp and the patient dies. I (and probably the legal system) would like to be able to say I caused the patient’s death in this scenario. But it sounds like JDK is saying I have to say the surgeon caused the patient's death and I was only tangentially involved. Here’s another example; suppose the US government bans all food production - farmers, hunters, fishermen, etc are forbidden from doing their jobs. After a few months, everyone starves to death. I might want to say something like “the US government’s ban on food production killed people”. But by JDK’s reasoning, this is wrong - the government merely prevented farmers and fishermen from saving people (by giving them food so they didn’t starve). I might want to say something like “Mao’s collective farming policy killed lots of people”. But since this is just a weaker version of hypothetical-Biden’s ban on food, by JDK’s reasoning I can’t do this. This seems contrary to common usage, common sense, and communicating information clearly. I have never heard any philosopher or dictionary suggest this, so what exactly is the argument? (JDK has a response here, but I didn’t find it especially enlightening) 7. Comments About The Applications For AI Metaphysiocrat writes: People have joked about applying NEPA review to AI capabilities research, but I wonder if some kind of IRB model might have legs (as part of a larger package of capabilities-slowing policy.) It’s embedded in research bureaucracies, we sort of know how to subject institutions to it, and so on. I can think of seven obvious reasons this wouldn’t work, but at this point I’m getting doomery enough that I feel like we may just have to throw every snowball we have at the train on the off chance one has stopping power. Zach Stein-Perlman writes: A colleague of mine is interested in 'IRBs for AI'-- he hasn't investigated it but has thought about IRB-y stuff in the context of takeaways for AI (https://wiki.aiimpacts.org/doku.php?id=responses_to_ai:technological_inevitability:incentivized_technologies_not_pursued:vaccine_challenge_trials). He's interested in people's takes on the topic. My take: my understanding is that the US can’t technically demand all doctors use IRBs. (Almost) al doctors use IRBs for a combination of a few reasons : The US government demands that everyone who receives federal funding use an IRB, and most doctors get some federal funding.
Inline links: writes, Darwin, writes, writes, writes, writes, has a response here, writes, writes, https://wiki.aiimpacts.org/doku.php?id=responses_to_ai:technological_inevitability:incentivized_technologies_not_pursued:vaccine_challenge_trials
Your Book Review: The Educated Mind
July 14, 2023 · Original source
Egan’s insight is that these obsessions give teenagers a sense of meaning, and that we can use them as tools to make middle schools that overflow with meaning. From meaningless to meaning-soaked Again, Egan sketches out a new kind of curriculum subject-by-subject. Before, his trick was to ask where the subject first evolved out of; now, it’s to ask who first discovered or created the specific content we’re teaching. “All knowledge”, he writes, “is human knowledge. Everything we know is knowable through the lives of its inventors, discoverers, or users, and we can have access to that knowledge through the hopes, fears, or intentions that drove them”. Middle school math Who first discovered the concepts students learn in math? The answer, of course, is a wide diversity of curious men and women living across the world over the last few thousand years. Egan says: bring those people into how we teach math. If we used gossip and heroes to help students find it meaningful, what kind of math would result? When we teach the Pythagorean theorem, we should give a sense of who Pythagoras was — a cult-founder who worshiped numbers to find God, whose followers (according to a piece of ancient gossip) murdered one of their members who discovered irrational numbers! Q: Well, sure, that works for Pythagoras, but he’s a known nut job; surely most math doesn’t come from such interesting roots? When we teach the Cartesian coordinate system, students should meet Rene Descartes, the Calvinist French polymath who saw the possibility that math could decipher the world, if only we could unite algebra and geometry… and invented the xy-plane to do exactly that. When we teach scientific notation, we should call our students’ attention to the importance of the number zero, and tell them the story of the Pope who tried to introduce Arabic numerals to Christian Europe and may have been assassinated because of it. When we teach algebra, we should ask students why “algebra” is Arabic for “the fixing of bones”, and tell the story of what Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi was up to. We could do this all day. Literally everything students learn in school was first invented or discovered by some interesting person who was struggling to accomplish something hard. To learn is to connect with those people, whether we know it or not. Egan says: help kids know it. Math has been dehumanized: re-humanize it. Q: So the math curriculum needs to become a history of math curriculum, and math teachers need to become history teachers? No, the content needn’t change. But with surprisingly little work, we can bring in the gossipy stories of heroes, and their obsessions can spread to students. Middle school science Who first discovered the things students learn about in science? If you’re thinking “scientists”, you’re only partially right. Most of the big-picture ideas that we now think of as “science” were discovered before the word “scientist” was invented, or the discipline was professionalized. Frequently, they were hatched by true amateurs, working in their free time, hungry to unlock the secrets of nature. We can use gossip and heroes to spread their obsessions to students just as we taught math, but Egan points out two twists. The first is that the content itself can take on heroic qualities: everything is impressive, when you look at it in a certain light. In an interview, Egan once said: “My book is an attempt to show that, indeed, everything in the world is wonderful, but that schools are designed almost to disguise this slightly shameful fact. We represent the world to children as mostly known and rather dull. The opposite is the case: we are surrounded by mystery, and what we know is fascinating”. What would even the most boring subjects look like, if we emphasized their heroic qualities? Well: What’s a tooth? Bone, wrapped in rock, surrounding tiny cells that your body feeds with blood. What’s a bar of chocolate? A crystal of jellyfish-shaped fat molecules stacked together; when you put it in your mouth you shake them apart into a writhing confusion. What’s the air around you? The bottom of a 10-mile-deep ocean; when you put your tongue over a soda straw and your Pepsi stops leaking out, it’s not because a “vacuum” is “sucking” it up, but because that ocean is squeezing it into your face. Again, we could do this all day! And in middle school science, we can. Everything in the world is wonderful; we can help students see this again and again. The second twist is that science is a subject rich in extremes. Here Egan introduces a concept that we’ll see crop up again: “15-minute segments”. To help us fit as much wonder as possible into a school day, he suggests we supplement the usual school subjects with a few quick lessons. To infuse science with extremes, he suggests we add on three: “human & natural records”, “extremes of animals & plants”, and “cosmology”. Middle school history Who first made the things students learn about in history? Why, the historical characters themselves! Since we’ve given kids a grounding in history in elementary school, now we can build on that, going through many of the same events as before, but in more depth, and more vividly. We’ll leverage the interest with other people’s inner lives to tell stories focusing on the perspectives of the people who made history — zooming in, when possible, on scandalous details. We’ll leverage the tool of idealism to choose historical characters who chafed against their surroundings, and understand what they were trying to accomplish. What was their vision of the world? What did they hope for, and what did they fear? Q: Isn’t the “great man” approach to history out of fashion? Egan’s approach doesn’t say that “great men” made history — it’s just leveraging gossip to help kids see history as something meaningful that can expand their own possibilities. “Early adolescence is commonly a time of intense and vivid emotional life, and also a time of deepest boredom and depression… [We] can give shape to the intermediate curriculum and offer the students a world that is rich, complex, varied, and as intense and vivid as their own emotional lives”. We also should add on another “15-minute segment” just to pump in as many biographies as possible, and from people who don’t always fit into the normal history curriculum. Call it “Brief Lives”, and throw in anyone who’s struggled to push some limit — Mary Wollstonecraft, Jesse Owen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the students’ great-aunts, whoever. As students get older, this can transition to “People and Their Ideas”. Here, we’d focus less on the details of the person’s life, and use it as a backdrop to showing how meaningful some of history’s most important ideas could be. Think Aristotle and syllogisms, Edward Said and orientalism, Confucius and propriety, Cornel West and race, Buddha on the four noble truths, Muhammad and the five pillars, Karl Marx and communism, Adam Smith and the invisible hand, Thomas Hobbes and the state of nature, John Locke and natural rights, Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism, Thomas Aquinas on the sacraments, Martin Luther on faith, Voltaire on the freedom of speech… you get the idea. Q: Can you really get a profound understanding of utilitarianism in 15 minutes? Yes! The point of this segment isn’t to develop a systematic understanding of any one idea, it’s to introduce students to the exciting possibilities of human thought. (As a bonus, this might make them less likely to fall for the first ideology that they encounter later in life.) Diversity is important for this — as it is with culture. Throughout this, we should also be trying to expose students to as much cultural diversity as possible, because in high school, we’ll be trying to make sense of our society, and it’s impossible to do that unless we have something to compare it against. Middle school literature & language You might think that this subject would be easy — that middle school literature is already filled with “strong and clear narratives”, that it deals with “transcendent human qualities such as courage, love, and persistence”, that it focuses on “extremes of human experience”, that it examines “something strange and exotic”. You’d be right! Egan’s pretty happy with a bog-standard middle school literature curriculum, done well. In this part of the book, his spends most of his limited space suggesting three rather odd activities which could also be useful — especially for increasing students’ awareness of language, so they can use it better. The first is etymology — not, however, memorizing lists of roots, but in being told the entertaining backstories of specific words. Take the word “berserk”, for example — we now use it to mean something relatively mild (“if my mom catches me coming home late, she’ll go berserk”), but it comes from an old Norse word meaning “a raging warrior of superhuman strength”. And that’s because ber meant “bear” and serk meant “shirt”: soldiers of the bear cult would don the skin of a bear to, in their minds, transform into one — howling, foaming at the mouth, and gnawing the rims of their shields. (Most adults walk through life with little understanding that the words falling out of their mouths are entities, with their own back-stories. Communication is, at the very least, more interesting when we become aware of this.) The second is to add on another language to learn — not, this time, to become fluent in it, but just to become aware of how very different human languages can be. (For native English speakers, Sanskrit might work well, or Cantonese, or perhaps even ancient Egyptian. Again, the point isn’t for this language to be useful — it’s to explore diversity.) The final one is to study humor — not just jokes anymore, but comedy at its finest. Egan cites (at length!) Monty Python as a group of people who were particularly brilliant in their use of the English language. Examining their skits can lead us into not just an appreciation of semantics (the study of how meaning is made from smaller pieces, like etymology) but also pragmatics (the study of how meaning is made in social situations). Pretty heady stuff, for a conversation about a dead parrot. Part 4: A new kind of high school I’ll confess — I loved parts of high school… and among nerdy folks, I suspect I’m not alone. For some of us, this was a golden time. Even at my local public high school, I had access to academically thrilling classes — especially, in my last two years, advanced literature and history. I felt like I was finally understanding the ideas that mattered. In any case, Egan is quick to acknowledge that, at this level, the sort of education he advocates really is being practiced in some places. What he can add is an understanding of what makes it wonderful, how to make it even more wonderful, and how to make it wonderful for many, many more people. What’s the matter with high school? Far too often, even when high school classes are intellectual, they’re dry. For the majority of students, all this academic stuff is experienced as utterly lifeless, a mass of dead information to be squeezed inside one’s head for a test and then left to evaporate. Egan mocks the curriculum wars that seem to be a permanent feature of the teaching life; quoting the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, he says “while the academic left and right bicker over whether the curriculum is too traditional or too radical, they fail to recognize that most students absorb so little of academic culture that the bickering is largely irrelevant”. Why so dry? Egan suggests three reasons to explain this. First, because high school academic classes are too often masses of small details with no sign of the big picture. Second, because they’re typically slavishly disciplinary, and aren’t able to address the questions that span the disciplines. Third, because they’re often designed to bring students through what everyone is sure of, and hide away any controversies. In all of these, Egan suggests that what’s called “academics” in high school is too often a dim imitation of what real academics are actually practicing. There’s a fourth reason, though, and it’s probably the biggest of all — by the time they get to high school, most students haven’t actually learned that much! An academic approach is designed to connect small details into the big picture; for people who arrive in high school (and college) classes without having already collected much in their heads, academics are going to taste dry. (An implication of this for anyone trying to improve schools is that we might not want to start with high schools. If your goal is to create a new kind of academic learning, first start at elementary school — or barring that, middle school.) What motivates mad scientists? When we wanted to re-conceive the elementary and middle school curriculums, we looked at what students were already good at — kids’ cognitive strengths and adolescents’ obsessions. For this level it might be easier to look — for reasons that will become clear when we finally unveil Egan’s crazy-sounding definition of education — at the sorts of things that bring intellectuals joy. Q: Which intellectuals? Take your pick. Galileo, Einstein, Smith, Marx, Goodall, Chomsky, Curie… all the people who took to the life of the mind like fish to water. But that’s a lot to hold in my mind at once, so I’m just going to think about Doc Brown from Back to the Future: He was high on intellectualism I’ve never been there, but the brochure looks nice Let’s call these people “mad scientists”. And let’s pretend we once again took up our job of being primatologists, and snooped on these folks “in the wild” (“in the lab”? this is beginning to get recursive…)… what would we find motivating them? Asking simple questions, for one. (What is space? What is society? What is a human? What is language?) Building general schemes (big theories) that hold lots of evidence together. Finding their place in the cosmos. And (perhaps above all) seeking certainty. Once again, Egan suggests we use these as tools to remake the curriculum. From dry to daring What could a high school curriculum look like, if it were rebuilt on these tools? Once again, Egan has a trick. This time, it’s to ask what fights have driven the development of each of these fields forward — and how we can help students enter them. First, a mini-segment! Intellectuals invented the academic disciplines to better pursue the life of the mind, but the disciplines can get in the way. Some of the most important intellectual discoveries that could help students are too big to fit into any of the disciplines. We need a place to introduce them plainly. Egan proposes another mini-segment — again, just 15 minutes a day, a few times a week — called “Metaknowledge”. Q: Isn’t that already in the International Baccalaureate program? Yes, he acknowledges that he’s borrowing from that! This segment would introduce ideas that would enrich student thinking across the disciplines: game theory, cognitive biases, systems thinking, Bayesian reasoning, epistemology, ethics, logic, cultural evolution, and so on. High school literature How can we help students enter the big fights of literature? Intellectuals of a literary bent — professors, critics, poets, novelists — delight in arguing over literature like rabbis arguing over the Talmud. Take, just for one example, the debates over Shakespeare’s character of Ophelia. Does she love Hamlet, or is she a victim of his emotional abuse? Is she truly insane, or is she acting? Is she passive, or is she pulling the strings? Oceans of ink have been spilled arguing over questions like these; our students can, perhaps, spill a few ounces more. The usefulness of arguing literature, for Egan, isn’t that it’s oh-so important for educated adults to know a lot about Ophelia. (This, again, was where the academicists went wrong — in thinking that being educated was about getting the best knowledge in your head.) Rather, arguing over literature is a training arena for the all-important intellectual move of this kind of understanding: building general schemes out of evidence, and struggling with anomalies. One person, for example, might hold that Ophelia is insane, and cite all sorts of obvious evidence — her father just was murdered by her lover, she rants nonsense while (bizarrely) handing out flowers to friends… But then he’s challenged when he reads a scholar pointing out that, to people in Elizabethan England, types of flowers have symbolic meanings. How does he deal with that? He could ignore it, claiming it an over-reading of Shakespeare. (Sometimes a flower is just a flower!) Or he could address it, complicating his own scheme. This intellectual work is best done with other people, who are incentivized to challenge your understanding of something, and go back and forth, building competing models and calling attention to anomalies. This process — the “dialectic” — pops up again and again in the academic disciplines. It’s the center of how understanding works, at this stage. And the nice thing about practicing it on literature is that, more so than in history or science, the evidence is shared knowledge — it’s right in front of everyone, written out. But there are other ways literature class can be helpful to the general life of the mind. Egan also suggests that we’ll want to specially include literature that helps students understand complex ideas. Camus, Orwell, Borges, Calvino might be particularly helpful here… and I imagine that genres like science fiction and magical realism might be particularly useful, too. (Note, though, that once again none of this requires a radical remaking of the curriculum, or of the canon of texts that we traditionally assign to high schoolers.) Q: Oh yes, the canon — what does Egan have to say about the canon wars? When he wrote Educated Mind in the nineties, the long-brewing canon war was approaching its inevitable apocalyptic climax. On one side of this Plain of Megiddo were the pro-canon traditionalists, arguing that we should keep assigning the texts that had been argued over for centuries. Facing them were the anti-canon reformers, arguing the standard texts over-represented the perspective of dead white men. Onto the middle of the plain rides Egan on a white horse, who bellows above the din: “I’VE GOT A BUSLOAD OF HIGH SCHOOLERS WHO WANTS TO JOIN IN, EVERYONE OKAY WITH THAT?” To do so, he says, we need to give students the arguments from both sides. So, for example, bell hooks, Edward Said, and China Achebe should be on the syllabus, as should Allan Bloom, Mortimer Adler, and Diane Ravitch. And of course they should actually read the texts cherished by both sides, too, so they can argue better. High school history How could entering the big fights help us reinvent high school history? First, we might look for dueling histories. It’s time for students to get into historiography and understand that history isn’t just what happened, it’s something we make. We might help kids read chapters from Howard Zinn’s socialist history of America alongside the corresponding chapters from Paul Johnson’s conservative history of America. How could big questions help? We want to help students see how various people have disagreed over some of the big questions of what human history is, at its most basic. We can have them compare Steven Pinker’s theory of civilization’s progress (Better Angels of our Nature) with Yuvah Noah Harari’s theory of civilization’s woes (Sapiens). We could have them compare so-and-so’s account of human history as an ever-expanding unlatching of energy sources with Robert Wright’s account of human history as unlatching more and more positive-sum games (Nonzero). What role could the lure of certainty play? To help them grow their skills at finding anomalies, we might help them work through pseudo-histories and conspiracy theories. Q: Conspiracy theories! Oh, come now, you’re playing with fire. Well, the world is on fire. Our students will spend the rest of their lives encountering terrible-but-beguiling arguments about how the world works; if we don’t prepare them for those, what have we been doing? So we should introduce arguments that the Moon landing was a hoax, that the Illuminati founded America, that aliens built the pyramids, and so on. At no point can we demean students for falling for any of these theories — the job of a teacher at this stage, Egan writes, is to support students in their reasoning even when their beliefs are offensive and stupid, gradually offering anomalies. There’s no way out of bad theories except through them. By the time students graduate, we want them to have wrestled with terrible ideas and — for a while — lost. They need to experience what it’s like to change their minds about something they felt strongly about. They need to viscerally realize, in Feynman’s famous phrase, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” High school natural science How could entering the big fights reinvent high school science? At present, so much of the high school science curriculum — especially “honors” classes — is oriented toward helping amass details. (The same is true of 100-level university classes, which famously “survey” the field to prepare for more advanced studies. I always thought this was stupid — of the huge lecture hall of students in my Geology 100 class, how many went on to take even a second course?) The meaty debates that propel science forward are held back. Egan complains: “The more general and speculative theories in any discipline are treated like an unconventional and disreputable relation who, even though the children find her exciting and entertaining, must be kept hidden from view, her very existence denied as long as possible”. This is a stupid approach — students with an adventurous bent are convinced that science isn’t for them. Egan proposes, simply, that we flip this, and organize high school science classes around the big debates. We shouldn’t be ashamed at how, well, adolescent this might look: “the dramatic, speculative, and contentious theories will be up-front in the early years of the [high school] curriculum”. What might those be? Egan doesn’t give a list, but we can spitball some: instead of explaining what “matter” is from the top down, a physics class could problematize “matter” by following the debates over the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and by becoming familiarized with the various interpretations of quantum mechanics
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WPeH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F62ea55f8-0458-484f-be45-7a011d050756_1600x625.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FPXt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb017fc37-3151-4556-87f1-31a097cf7594_1600x574.png
Links For December 2024
December 17, 2024 · Original source
This maybe isn’t entirely their fault? Utilitarianism doesn’t have a great theory of obligation, and it’s genuinely hard to assert “remember that your donation could save a life” without at least slightly implying “you are a moral monster for not donating more”. I would argue that effective altruists didn’t invent the fact that donations could save lives, it’s not our fault, and we’re at least working on the philosophical project of finding a balance between the Scylla of putting our fingers in our ears and denying that charity is possible, and the Charybdis of having everyone be infinitely condemned for not giving more to it. Relevant posts I’ve written are Nobody Is Perfect, Everything Is Commensurable and Axiology, Morality, Law.
Inline links: Nobody Is Perfect, Everything Is Commensurable, Axiology, Morality, Law
I also got in a series of Twitter discussions here where I claimed that probably all charity is supererogatory. Some of the discussions were a little successful in arguing me down from this, and I’m currently not sure whether it’s all supererogatory or whether it’s obligatory up to some small amount (possibly the amount that everyone would agree to in an ideal Platonic contract, or whatever the prevailing moral norm - eg 1% or 10% - but the fact that we can’t actually agree on this makes me suspicious that there’s not really a prevailing moral norm and pushes me more towards supererogatory).
Inline links: a series of Twitter discussions here, ideal Platonic contract, 1%, 10%
Writing For The AIs
November 03, 2025 · Original source
One might thread this needle by imagining an AI which has a little substructure, enough to say “poll people on things”, but leaves important questions up to an “electorate” of all humans, living and dead. For example, it might have an ethos resembling utilitarianism, with a free parameter around how thoroughly to accept or reject the repugnant conclusion. Maybe it would hold an election. But are there really enough of these that the best way to cast a vote is a whole writing career, rather than a short list of moral opinions?
Inline links: repugnant conclusion
Maybe even a good liberal ought to have opinions on the superstructure? If everyone in 3000 AD wants to abolish love, should I claim a ballot and vote no? Would it require a failure in the substructure to even get to this point, like a form of utilitarianism that privileges wireheading over complex flourishing? How far do I want my dead hand reaching into my descendants daily lives? If they try to write bad poetry, can I make them stop? Even if they have IQ one million, and an IQ one billion superintelligence cannot find any objective basis for my tastes?