Some thinking on charity interventions vs. direct cash donation

I live every day knowing that I live such a comfortable life compared to most people alive now (and compared to almost everyone who lived in the past). It is extremely unfair.

Donating money to charity is truly one of the most meaningful things I do in my life. It’s a way for me to take advantage of the extremely lucky life I live and help other people. Every month I know that - even if other things aren’t going well - I made the world a little better that month by donating a little bit.

Since it’s so important to me, it’s a topic I think about a lot about. This post is about some thining I’ve been doing recently.

A note: You can help people in extreme poverty! If anyone reading is interested in talking more about topics like this please let me know.

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Sometimes when I talk to people about donations I hear an argument that charities are by nature paternalistic and that the best way to help others with your money is to give money directly to the poor.

There’s a lot to be said for this. I think direct cash transfers to the extreme poor (e.g., by GiveDirectly) are among the most effective charities out there, and I would love to see many many more people sending their charitable dollars directly to the extreme poor - or even directly to the poor in their own communities.

But I think it is a mistake to say that we should avoid other charitable interventions because they take agency away from the poor and that that they imply the poor don’t know what’s best for them. People don’t always do absolute the best thing for themself with the cash they are given. Sometimes it is better to give someone a $2 bednet than to give them $2 in cash.

I myself often benefit from such policy interventions. For example:

• In undergrad, a group came to campus to give people free flu shots. I think this was more impactful than giving all the students $20 and the option to buy a flu shot

• Similarly, during COVID the US government gave us free COVID vaccines rather than selling vaccines for $20 and giving everyone $20 cash and the option to buy the vaccine if they wanted

• My company gives me health insurance rather than extra pay - I am glad they give me the insurance

I don’t feel I am being condescended to as a result of these policies. Neither should we think we are condescending to poor people if we donate to charities that provide malaria medicine or incentivize childhood vaccines (1).

I would never want to argue against people giving cash directly to extremely poor people - I think that it is an extremely good and generous way to help people. But I don’t buy that donating to another (highly effective) charity instead is automatically insulting and paternalistic.

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1. There are systemic questions to wrestle with about why it is necessary for charities to provide these health services rather than governments, but in the near term if governments do not provide such effective services than it is good for charities to step in

Beauty in Physics and Paul Dirac

I like to listen to audiobook biographies of physicists. The frustrating thing is that I’m always confronted with how much physics I’ve forgotten since I studied it in undergrad.

Recently I listened to a biography of Paul Dirac. Before listening I definitely knew his name, but the only specific thing I could have connected him with was the Dirac Delta Function.

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One of the best memories I have from college was going with a couple of my friends to the office hours of our favorite physics professor and having him teach us about the Dirac Delta function. The Dirac Delta function is a very weird and beautiful function.

Imagine a spike on a graph that is infinitely tall and infinitely thin, but somehow has an area of 1.

Imagine being told that this function:

1. Contains deep insights about the universe

2. Is hated by pure mathematicians (1), but us physicists who want results know better

3. Will save you hours of work on your homework

4. Is not necessarily something that will be covered in lecture, but you guys can handle it

Imagine being told all this by a radiant and brilliant theoretical quantum physicist whose only goal is to get you excited about physics.

It’s just a little bit of an exaggeration to say that’s the day I decided to become a physics major.

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When Dirac did physics, he sometimes seemed more focused on the aesthetic beauty of his models than their truth. He said “it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment.”

I’ve usually been pretty skeptical of this argument. It’s seemed to me that because beauty is so subjective, it’s better for us to look for truth in science than for beauty.

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I learned in reading that Dirac also came up with the notion of a magnetic monopole (2). No magnetic monopoles have ever been verified. If they exist at all, some theories predict there may only be one in the entire universe.

In another class, our favorite professor explained to us that somewhere in a lab in California, was a sensor meant to detect magnetic monopoles. One day, shortly after being set up, the sensor registered a spike. Since then, it has never registered anything.

Most likely the machine malfunctioned that day. But just maybe that was the one day when the one magnetic monopole in the cosmos happened to wander through California.

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Part of the fun of studying physics is learning beautiful arcane notation.

In quantum mechanics the most fun bit of notation is bra-ket notation, which is things like this:

Learning bra-ket notation felt like gaining the ability to understand a foreign script that quantum wizards use to describe nature’s secrets.

I hadn’t known Dirac came up with bra-ket notation too (3).

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Dirac had faith that sometimes the beauty of an equation could tell us something that experiment could not.

Dirac came up with 3 of the most inspiring physics concepts I encountered during undergrad. Moments like learning about possible existence of magnetic monopoles are what made me want to keep studying physics.

I now think the search for beauty is intertwined with the search for truth. You need to have the beauty in order to keep you motivated to find the truth. And we’re lucky enough to live in a world that when you find one, the other is often not far.

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 Footnotes:

1. In fact, they like to say things like that it’s technically a “distribution”, not a “function”

2. We all know magnets always have a north end and a south end. But what if you had a magnetic particle that was all north and no south? That’s the basic idea of a magnetic monopole.

3. He also came up with the Dirac Equation. I never made it far enough in physics to learn it, but my physicist friend tells me that it is very beautiful – it compactly describes every electron in the universe

A little bit of chicken fried to share - EA Christians blog post

Last week an article I wrote on global poverty was published on the Effective Altruism and Christians blog. Check it out here.

Thanks to Vesa and JD at EACH for thinking of me, and to J and J for their comments on drafts.

I write on the Effective Altruism forum about the importance of representativeness for long-termism

Link here - probably only interesting for those who care about Effective Altruism

We don’t expect people to have good reasons for their beliefs; or, a Footnote that got Out of Hand

Originally, the text of this blog post was going to be a footnote for another blog post. This that’s just context so the title — which was unavoidable — makes sense.

One way people (including me!) often give reasonable-sounding-but-not-actually-that-convincing arguments for their views is by what I like to call Appeal Without Evidence to a Hard-to-verify Outcome” (AWEHO). An AWEHO is a red flag that someone might be simply giving a justification for a view they want to believe instead of engaging in a pure and honest intellectual search for the truth.

Here’s an example of an AWEHO in action: The other day my flatmate asked me if I thought hate speech should be illegal. As a good, red-blooded, American I immediately said that it should not (without even clarifying what he meant by “hate speech”!).

I could have given a principled reason for this response, such as “I think that freedom of speech is an unalienable right that governments should not take away.” That could just be a core value that I hold which might have led to an interesting metaphysical debate about whether certain aspects of individual freedom are ends in themselves, how my views as a Christian and his as a Bahai’i affect our views on rights of communities, whether objective morality exists, etc.

But I didn’t make that kind of argument, because I don’t think freedom of speech should be an unalienable right. What I said instead was that making hate speech illegal would drive hateful ideas underground where they would fester and spread amongst hateful people. And since they were not being combated in the open marketplace of ideas, these hateful ideas would take deeper root and give rise to violence and vitriol that could have been avoided if those ideas were allowed to be debated in the open (I wasn’t this poetic when I was answering hastily and rashly).

In doing this, I’ve made an AWEHO. I’ve tied my support for the legality of hate speech to an empirical prediction: Allowing hate speech will lead to less hate in the long run. 

But I don’t really know if this prediction is true! It could just as easily be the case that banning hate speech in some circumstances decreases hate in the long run. I haven’t done any research to back up my empirical prediction. I’m sure there are lots of smart people on the internet with evidence of bans on speech leading to better outcomes, and I didn’t even do a cursory Google. The theoretical mechanism I described is compelling, but many beautiful theories are false.

And my flatmate did not challenge me on this defense of the legality of hate speech. Using an AWEHO as a rhetorical move is commonly accepted among people, like myself, who like to think we have good reasons for believing the things we believe.

I think that when I make an AWEHO — when I make a prediction like “making hate speech legal will lead to less hate” — most people don’t really expect me to back that up. When someone retreats to an AWEHO, it’s often taken as a conversation-ender — the point at which people simply agree to disagree. I make my AWEHO (allowing hate speech leads to less hate in the long term), you make yours (allowing hate speech leads to more hate in the long term) and we move on with neither of us intending to follow up either via conversation or via Googling.

Ending the conversation at an AWEHO is fine if the debate isn’t really about discovering the truth — and most conversations aren’t. We talk about stuff like this to get to know each other, or because it’s fun, or to feel superior to other people.

But if we actually care about arriving at the truth it’s crazy to end an argument at an AWEHO! That’s where the argument should just be beginning! That’s where people really have an opportunity to teach each other! If the two of us have different empirical predictions, then probably one of us has some information that the other doesn’t have, and we can exchange that information and eventually arrive at something closer to agreement (in fact, maybe we should always arrive at agreement if we’re being really intellectually honest).

If we care about arriving at the truth, a reasonable area to “agree to disagree” would be if we have different values. And this often happens. In fact, part of the reason that abortion is taboo to discuss is because it’s obvious that different values drive different opinions, and discussion isn’t likely to change those values. If I had simply asserted that I held the value that the freedom to hate speech was important in itself, that could have been a point at which my flatmate might have more reasonably agreed to disagree with me.

But the fact that we accept AWEHOs in arguments means that we really don’t expect people to have good reasons for having the opinions they do. We’re happy to end an argument when they say something that sounds like it could be a good reason, even if they give no evidence to support it.

I think it’s important to be aware of these tendencies, both to give AWEHOs and to accept it when others give them, so that you don’t accidently think that they are actually grounds for reasonable disagreements between two people searching for the truth.

Using percentages in the face of uncertainty

In this post I talk about how historians could potentially improve their efforts to ensure their audience understands the level of uncertainty we have about historical events. I use examples from James C. Scott’s book Against the Grain, but these problems aren’t specific to him or this book.

There are many unknowns in history, from the exact dates and details of events to the major causes of historical trends. Filling in gaps in our understanding with educated guesswork is the job of a historian. But I think these theories would be even more useful if historians were very clear about the level of uncertainty in their theories, preferably by putting percentages on their estimates for how likely they think their theories are to be true.

For example, Scott offers several explanations for why there are so many abandoned settlements in Mesopotamia dating to ~2000-700 BCE: disease, environmental degradation, bad harvests leading to abandonment by the working class, war. All these answers are compelling, but he doesn’t offer any way to think about which is most important. Do we think disease explains 20% of the abandoned settlements? Or 80%? How much more important is abandonment by working class vs. war? The explanations are all plausible, but “plausibility” is not “100% correct,” and the problem is that I don’t know if in this case “plausible” means 90% or 10% likely to be correct.

Here’s another example: We aren’t certain why people started planting crops in the first place (around ~10,000 BCE). Scott considers two commonly-given explanations (people wanted to be able to store their food longer, and people wanted to be able to do work now and reap the benefits later) and says “neither … are remotely plausible” due to the large amount of work agriculture takes. But he argues people might have taken up agriculture because it was extremely easy in floodplains — this is the type of work that a hunter-gatherer “might take up.” 

Should we take this to mean that the floodplain explanation is 100% of the reason that people start agriculture? Probably not. But we aren’t sure if 1) other explanations aren’t given because Scott thinks that floodplain agriculture is ~90% likely to be the reason that people started agriculture and so the other options aren’t worth mentioning since they only make up 10%, or 2) floodplain agriculture is actually only 30% likely to explain the adoption of agriculture, but the others aren’t relevant to the discussion at this point in the book.

I’m fine with either explanation 1) or 2), but it’s not knowing which is the case that bothers me. And I don’t mean this as a critique of James C. Scott in particular — Against the Grain is a very good book. But I think historians (definitely popular historians) often do their audience a disservice by not providing a framework to understand how much confidence we should put in their theories.

This applies to things outside of history too (e.g., see the Good Judgement Project, and apparently the economist Larry Summers required that people give numbers to their uncertainty when in the White House), and you can catch me starting to put percentages on my uncertainties going forward.

Mencius on how morality isn’t just following rules

Morality tells us what things we should do, and what things that we should not do. Much of western philosophy is concerned with describing morality similarly to how we describe the natural world: using reason to determine the “rules” of morality that we should follow strictly. For example, utilitarianism says “always maximize utility”. Kantian deontology says “there are certain things you can never do”.

Mengzi, the Chinese Confucian sage (also known by the latinized name “Mencius”), approaches this effort of becoming more moral very differently. He’s not concerned with providing an overarching moral framework for his teachings, or in laying out hard-and-fast rules. He acknowledges the importance of the moral rules of ritual priority, implying that one should be willing to die for the sake of being treated with the proper respect (Mengzi, 3B1). But it is important to abandon what is ritually proper when the ritual would cause you to deviate from the Way: “It is the ritual that men and women should not touch… but if your sister-in-law is drowning, to pull her out with your hand is a matter of discretion” (4A17).

So according to Mengzi, becoming an honorable person means developing our faculties of discretion, which will help us to make decisions (and, importantly, to form our motivations) in accordance with the Way. Mengzi’s teachings in themselves don’t correspond with the Way, and neither does ritual propriety. Both are methods to help his students cultivate the discretion needed to see what’s truly right.

The takeaway from this for me is that you can have a coherent system of morality without requiring that every action you take be backed up by rational reasoning. If moral obligations exist outside the natural world, then perhaps they’re things that can’t be well-described through a system of rules the same way physical laws can. And maybe utilitarianism and deontology are mistaken in assuming there is a set of abstract rules that describe morality, and what each of us should truly aim for is becoming wise enough that we no longer need hard-and-fast rules to guide us.

On Competition

Terminology alert: Competition = “A situation in which two or more people are working towards the same goal without necessarily cooperating”

People are motivated by competition. Like any other source of motivation (love, fear, pity, hunger, etc.), competition can push us towards being the best versions of ourselves, or push us towards destructive behavior. In this post I’ll explore the different mechanisms through which competition can motivate us to action, and then discuss how we can harness our competitive nature in a way that pushes us to do good. 

There are a few different ways that we might be motivated by the knowledge that somebody else is striving for the same goal that we are. Here are all the different manifestations of  competitive motivation I can think of:

1. If the goal is rival, so my success in achieving the goal depends on your failure to achieve the goal (e.g. in winning a sports competition, getting a contract, winning an election), then the desire to achieve this goal equates to a desire to be better than you.

2. Even if the goal is not rival, I can still be motivated by my own pride to be better than you just because I don’t like the idea of someone being better than me at something (e.g., playing the harmonica, expounding poetically about jazz music, baking cookies, the kinds of things we all are really prideful about).

3. Other people with the same goals as me can serve as a reflection of the type of person I want to be. It’s much easier to imagine myself writing a novel when I see my friend do it. And it’s much harder for me to make excuses for not working towards my goals when I see somebody else working hard.

So how can we harness these feelings of competitive pressure in order to be the best versions of ourselves possible? I propose a couple general guidelines:

Reframe your rival goals as non-rival goals: Competition for rival goals tends to be the type of competition that brings out the worst in us. Because basically, if the only way I can succeed is for you to fail, then I am incentivized to hurt you and disposed to rejoice at your misfortune — neither of which are healthy. But in many cases (not quite all, but maybe most cases), I can shift my goal away from succeeding in this zero-sum competition, and towards a more fundamental achievement of excellence. 

Some examples: 

• Instead of having my goal be to win a swimming race, my goal can be to swim the best race that I can possibly swim. 

• I can reframe a desire to get a job at someone else’s expense to be a desire for me to be extremely capable so that the employer has great options when deciding who to choose for the job. 

• Even when competing in an election, you could reframe your fundamental goal from being “I want to win this election” to being “I want to ensure that the people clearly understand what I would do if I win this election, so that they can make the best decision about who to vote for”.

Reframing goals in this way is not always easy and requires a degree of selflessness and ego-control. But the times I have been able to do it, I have a degree of peace and confidence that I don’t feel when my goal is to achieve at someone else’s expense.

Pride is a crutch for when your intrinsic motivation isn’t enough. Imagine that, much to the delight of the kids in my neighborhood, I put up crazy amounts of Christmas decorations every year (including lights that flash in sequence, actual reindeer, animatronic nutcrackers performing a synchronized dance to a Trans-Siberian Orchestra song, the whole deal). It would be great if I was motivated to do this out of a fundamental desire to bring joy to the kids in my neighborhood. But maybe if I’m honest with myself, the real reason I work so hard at putting up these decorations is because Brian across the street just got a giant inflatable Santa, and there’s no way in heck I’m going to let him out-do me this year. 

It’s still better to act based on this prideful motivation than to not act at all (as long as I don’t go so far as to sneak over at night and stab Santa in the kidneys with a carving knife). The kids are still getting the joy of my decorations, regardless of my motivations. So I can accept that in this case my intrinsic desire to delight the children of my neighborhood isn’t enough, and I can harness my prideful desire to be better than Brian to motivate me to do good. Maybe next year I’ll be a better person, but for now I’ve got to work with what I have.

From Gödel -> Faith

Gӧdel’s incompleteness theorem says any sufficiently complicated mathematical system is either incomplete or inconsistent. There’s a lot of complicated math here that I don’t totally understand, this basically means that in any logical system, there are logical statements that you can make that are true, that cannot be proven to be true from within the system.

“1 + 1 = 2” is a statement you can make using basic arithmetic. And it’s true according to the rules of basic arithmetic. Because we assume that it’s meaningful to talk about things like numbers, and addition, and equality when we are doing arithmetic. And we define 2 as being equal to 1 + 1. But you can never really prove that 2 = 1 + 1 using only arithmetic.

If we were arithmetical beings that could only communicate using mathematical statements, I could prove to you that 3 + 2 = 5 by saying:

“2 = 1 + 1

4 = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1

4 = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 2 + 1 + 1 = 2 + 2

4 = 2 + 2”

If you were suspicious of my claim that 2 + 2 = 4, but agreed with me that 2 = 1 + 1 and that 4 = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1, then you would be forced by my argument to accept that 4 does, in fact, = 2 + 2.

But suppose you objected to my claim that 2 = 1 + 1. How could I answer you? I can’t, since I can only speak to you using arithmetic, and part of what it means to do arithmetic is to assume that 2 = 1 + 1. If we were non-arithmetical beings (imagine we were humans instead) I could try to convince you using words. I could say “Listen up punk, the fact that 2 = 1 + 1 is the foundation of arithmetic, so it’s something you just have to accept if you’re doing arithmetic.” But this is not an argument you can make to an arithmetical being, because words aren’t available to beings living in the arithmetical world. The fact that 2 = 1 + 1 forms the basis of the arithmetical world, and so cannot be proved from within it.

So it is with the world we live in. There are facts about the universe that are true, that cannot be rationally proven by beings like us that exist within that universe. Some of the biggest ones I can think of are:

• Morality exists; i.e., there are certain things that people should do, and certain things people should not do

• Cause and effect exist

• The people around me are conscious beings just like I am

• The natural world is governed by mathematical principles

You might disagree with these statements. And as much as I love to argue and debate about them, there is no way I can rationally prove to you that my views are the correct ones. Because the tools I’d need to prove them aren’t available to rational beings living in the natural world. I believe these facts form the basis of the world we live in, and cannot be proved.

So how can someone reasonably come to believe in facts that cannot be proven rationally? This is a really important question, because these “unprovable truths” form the basis of the world we live in. I would say you should believe what seems the most reasonable to you. For some people that will mean religious belief, for some it will mean a strict commitment to scientific inquiry, and for some it will mean skepticism. And even though some of these people are right and some of them are wrong, it’s not possible to make rational arguments proving that this is so.

And for some people maybe none of this matters. Maybe not all our beliefs don’t need to be rationally built up from reasonable assumptions about what the basic facts of the universe are. But that’s a topic for another time.

Two Ways of Looking at Moral Rules

Terminology alert: I will use “utilitarian” in this post to mean “someone who thinks that their moral duty is to maximize the happiness of sentient creatures”. My understanding is that there are many different versions of utilitarianism that prescribe moral duties that are different than this, but I think my definition is a decent baseline, and that anyways the points I make will apply to other versions of utilitarianism. 

Here are two ways of thinking about moral rules:

• Type I Rules: There are certain moral laws that govern what we ought and ought not to do. These can be rules like “don’t kill” and “recycle all your recyclables” and “strive for a society where people have freedom of speech”. If you believe these rules have value as Type I Rules, then it is because you believe there is some intrinsic moral value to about life, recycling, and freedom of speech, and you would follow these rules even if they lead to misery and ruin because they are the right things to do.

• Type II Rules: These are rules that are not morally binding in themselves, but are useful as means to help you achieve some moral objective. If you’re a utilitarian who thinks that it is your moral obligation is to maximize human happiness, then you might think that a rule like “don’t steal” is a good way to maximize human happiness. People aren’t happy when they’re stolen from, and theft breaks down trust in society. But it’s possible that stealing would be justified in certain circumstances, e.g. if you’re Jean Valjean and need some bread to feed your family. Type II rules are more like guidelines that point you towards the best moral action.

If you are a utilitarian, you don’t really believe in Type I Rules (except the foundational rule that you should maximize happiness), and all of the moral rules you follow on a day-to-day basis are Type II Rules. But even people who believe that their life is governed by Type I Rules (e.g. Christians, who believe in things like the Ten Commandments) still have Type II rules, because no moral code gives you rules that will help you make decisions in every situation you will encounter in your life.

I’ve found it useful to distinguish between the Type I and Type II rules that I follow in my life. Identifying as Type II rules that I previously thought were Type I has opened me up to new ways of thinking about the best way to accomplish the moral objectives I care about. That last sentence was incredibly general, so here are some specific examples.

Example 1 -- Recycling: I used to think it was my moral obligation to recycle. A sense of shame at throwing an empty bottle into a trash can had been drilled into my head as long as I can remember, mostly by my mom and articles in National Geographic Kids. It was black and white: It’s good for me to recycle, and bad for me not to recycle. But I’ve since realized it’s not inherently evil to throw away recyclable material, but it is better for the world if more things are recycled. So what really matters is the total amount of material recycled, and it’s better for me to spend 1 minute going through the trash at work and moving 5 bottles from the garbage to the recycling than for me to carry around an empty bottle for 2 hours because there are no recycling bins around.

Example 2 – Free Speech: As a proud American, I used to think that the idea that society should have freedom of the press and free speech was a Type I rule, and that free speech was valuable in its own right. It’s nice that having free speech and freedom of the press contribute to the open flow of ideas in society, and that citizens are happier when they have these freedoms, and these freedoms allow for mechanisms (like the press) that hold powerful organizations (like the government) in check. But these benefits of free speech weren’t the fundamental reasons I thought free speech was valuable. I thought the ability for citizens to speak their mind was valuable, even if that didn’t make the citizens any happier and didn’t contribute to the flourishing of society. But now I believe that free speech is a means to an end, and is only valuable insofar as it contributes to the flourishing of society and the happiness of citizens.

Note that I think that a prescription of free speech is so conducive to human flourishing, that for all practical purposes I think of it like a Type I rule. I think every society should have free speech (with similar exceptions as are made in the US, e.g. shouting “fire” in a crowded theater). So while there aren’t any fundamental moral laws that require freedom of speech, it should still be sought in every society. What is fundamentally a Type II rule is elevated to a pseudo-Type I rule by its near-universal applicability.

Another reason to act as though your Type II Rules are Type I Rules is to send a stronger signal about the morality of certain actions. I fully admit that this is why I started being vegetarian. Two years ago I became very concerned about the treatment of animals on factory farms, as well as the effects of animal agriculture on climate change, so I adopted a practice of “not contributing to meat production”. What this meant to me was that I would not buy meat, but if there was leftover meat from a meal (which there was every day at my fraternity), I would eat it, with the idea that on the margin this wasn’t contributing to meat production.

But I send a much stronger signal about how I feel about the ethics of eating factory farmed animals if I say “I’m vegetarian” than I do if I say “I don’t buy meat but will eat it if it’s leftover”. So even though I don’t believe there’s anything inherently wrong with eating meat, I believe that being vegetarian is one of the best ways I can help reduce the suffering of animals and carbon emissions. The important thing isn’t that I don’t consume meat myself – it’s important that the total amount of meat being consumed decreases. But the best way to do that is to not consume meat myself (for full transparency: I don’t treat my vegetarianism as entirely a Type I Rule – I still occasionally eat meat if it’s leftover from an event and was going to be thrown out anyways. But this happens infrequently enough that I am still comfortable calling myself vegetarian).

So here are the takeaways: Find out whether the moral rules you follow get their value from the underlying importance of the rules themselves, or if they get their value from the predicted outcomes of following the rules. If they get their value from the predicted outcome, then it’s possible that you should still follow those rules in all circumstances. But understanding why you think it’s important to do or not do a certain action will help you to be more certain of and more committed to your actions.

Venmo: The Scourge of Reciprocity

The existence of apps like Venmo make it very easy to pay your friends when they buy you something small. This means the likelihood of me and a friend reciprocally buying things for each other is much lower. If I buy you a coffee, you can just Venmo me the exact amount the coffee cost instead of just buying me coffee the next time. If we split a Lyft when going somewhere, you can pay me for half of it — to the penny —  instead of just letting me cover it, and then you paying for the Uber on the way back.

The kind of reciprocal spending that Venmo has made less commonplace is usually done in a pretty approximate way. We wouldn't worry that each of us was spending the exact same amount on the other. I just do you a favor when I get you coffee, you do me a favor when you call the Lyft, and things generally even out in the end. (Note that you can have a lesser version of this reciprocity with Venmo if you just pay each other approximately what things cost — e.g. you paid for my $2.99 dinner, and instead of calculating tax and tip I just send you $4. But if you are a to-the-penny Venmoer, you don’t even have this).

I think the decrease in this kind of reciprocity is not necessarily a good thing. There’s a nice feeling I get when I do you a favor, and know that we have a relationship in which I can expect you to do me a favor in the future, without us needing to tally up exactly who owes each other up. But because Venmo makes money transfers so easy that it feels a little like you’re showing off your deep pockets if you tell people they don’t need to Venmo you for something.

So we have here a situation where Venmo makes something more convenient, but the fact that this thing was inconvenient before actually brought people together in a certain way. This is a general pattern that you can see in other places areas affected by technological advancement:

• Instead of needing to visit your friends when they are sick to make sure they’re alive, you can just call them. And if they’re locked up at home, there’s no need to bring them groceries or hot soup, because they could just use DoorDash

• It’s so convenient to navigate on Google Maps that there’s no need to ask people on the street for directions

• Facebook alerts you to people’s birthdays automatically, which means that if someone wishes you happy birthday, you can’t be certain that they remembered it themselves, which might make it a little less meaningful

• Because so many facts are so easily Googled, there can be a sense of purposelessness around having an idle debate about something random (“is the climate in France colder or warmer than in the US?”) because if you really wanted to know the answer, you could just Google it

• The existence of sturdy, waterproof rain boots means that there are far fewer men spreading their jackets across the mud so that ladies can walk without dirtying the bottoms of their dresses (okay, maybe there are other reasons contributing to the decline of this habit)

Basically, many advancements make it easier for us to be independent. On balance I think this is a positive thing. But there is great spiritual and emotional value in having to rely on other people for things — in being interdependent. So maybe it’s worth looking out for situations where you can do small favors or ask for small favors from people, even when it’s relatively easy to avoid the need for favors. It’s nice to help and it’s also nice to be helped.

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Thanks to Connor for suggesting this topic! And sorry I don’t have many insights beyond what we talked about

Visions of Human Potential; or, One Factor in Why People Disagree

When you disagree with someone, it can be very insightful to find out what is the root cause of your disagreement. Is it that you have fundamentally different values? Fundamentally different ideas about how the world works? Different beliefs about the facts of a situation are? In this post I’d like to explore two different fundamental worldviews that affect how people think about morality and politics.

Here are two ways you can think about the potential of humanity:

• Constrained vision: People are inherently subject to certain limitations, particularly selfishness and egocentricity

• Unconstrained vision: Selfishness and egocentricity can be transcended, and are not inherent characteristics of humans

There is clearly a spectrum here — few people have either a totally constrained vision or a totally unconstrained vision of humanity. But I think this framework is very useful for understanding a lot of moral and political disagreements between people. Your vision about humanity’s potential drives a lot of your assumptions about how people interact and how they ought to interact.

Here is an assortment of examples of how I see this framework being applied to different groups of people:

• Someone who thinks that strong social systems are needed in order to make people behave well is more likely to be using the constrained vision (e.g., Hobbes).  Because people are inherently very egoistic, we need laws and social norms to keep us from acting solely out of self-interest

• Someone who thinks that people would live in harmony if only we could get rid of the social institutions that warp our incentives, like capitalism, are using an unconstrained vision (e.g., Rousseau). Egoism isn’t inescapable, but a society that encourages selfishness causes people to become much more self-centered

• If you are using a constrained vision, you might be more likely to advocate for incremental changes to existing economic and political systems. Since people are inherently greedy and shortsighted, a perfect system will never be possible, so we might as well improve the one we have

• If you have an unconstrained vision, you might be more in favor of completely overhauling the current western capitalistic system. A different way of structuring society has the possibility to be much much better than the one we have now and to free us of the greed and selfishness that are imposed on us by capitalism

• Christians tend to have an unconstrained vision, which fits well with teachings about hope, and the power of grace to help us overcome our weaknesses. Because of original sin, people behave selfishly, but it is possible to overcome this egoism through the grace of God

• Broadly speaking, those with an unconstrained vision are more idealistic about what humanity can achieve, while those with a constrained vision are more cynical

What I like most about the constrained/unconstrained distinction is that it describes a fundamental difference in worldview that can help illustrate why people have disagreements about moral matters. I might think that everyone should stop eating meat because of the harmful effects that raising animals has on the climate. And you might think that Americans as a whole will never stop eating meat because it tastes so good, so there isn’t really a point to being vegetarian because the overall meat-production system will not change.

In this instance, it’s helpful to know that I have an unconstrained vision of people’s capacity to overcome selfishness, and you have a constrained view, because that informs our opinions on whether people ought/ought not be vegetarian. These visions are fundamental assumption about humanity that affect how we view the world. They don’t completely determine our views, but they do explain at least part of them. And greater understanding of the people you disagree with is always to be cherished.

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My ideas about are paraphrased from ideas described in the book A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell. 

@Maggie, sorry I didn’t write about coronavirus, but here’s an article about it that’s better than anything I would have written.

Some Thoughts on Journalism

There are lots of problems in the world that a person can devote time to getting informed on, or solving. Because we all have different personalities, skill sets, and positions in life, we will each be interested in and suited to solving different kinds of problems. I might be a schoolteacher who can work to improve the experience of my students, and you might be a climate scientist who works to predict the effects of our efforts to slow greenhouse gas emissions. The types of issues I need to be informed about might be things like racial achievement gaps, economic disparities between the different neighborhoods in my town, and the effects of stress on learning outcomes. These are very different from the issues that you should be aware of, like the limitations of the Paris climate accords, the importance of the oil trade, and the difficulty of accounting for Scope 3 emissions. 

It might be great if everyone be informed about all the problems of the world, because oftentimes our actions have effects on problems that we aren’t as directly engaged in solving. For example, we vote for politicians who have plans to solve all sorts of problems, and being fully informed about all the problems that the government is trying to address would help each voter to pick the politician that would address them.

But of course, we can’t be informed about everything. So the next best thing is to be informed about the issues that are most relevant to each of us. I’ll focus on being informed about school-related issues, and you’ll focus on being informed about climate-related issues.

If you accept this premise, then the ideal journalistic system (Terminology alert! “Journalistic system” is a phrase which here means “anywhere people hear about the issues, like newspapers, Youtube, blogs, TV”. Maybe “the media” would be a better phrase, but that sounds off to me in this context) would deliver the relevant news to the right people, in the right proportions. If I’m a schoolteacher, I should probably be much more worried about barriers to educational achievement than about corruption in the Kingdom of Saudia Arabia. 

So to an extent, a beneficent journalist shouldn’t want their story to be widely read and distributed if it will distract from the problems that are more important to reader. But this is not how journalism works — journalists and publications are incentivized to have each of their stories be as big as possible. So this is a flaw in the media system we have: Journalists want each of their stories to be big, not for their stories to be big in proportion to the importance of the problem they address. There’s an incentive for them to have everyone read their story on health effects of vaping or of Ghosn’s escape from Japan.

I don’t have any particular solution to this problem, other than to realize that it’s easy to think the issues that receive the most airtime, whether among friends or on the front page of the New York Times, may be taking your attention away from other issues that you are more able to address. That doesn’t mean that the high-airtime issues aren’t issues — we each just need to prioritize.

St. Paul was Just Some Guy so He's Not Always Right

In this post, I’d like to argue that it’s not very meaningful to say that the Bible is “the word of God,” and that Christians should stop treating the books of the Bible as having fundamentally higher status than other writings. 

Within Christianity, the Bible is seen as being a consistent source of truth that should guide what we believe and how we behave. Biblical verses are often used as justification for certain beliefs or moral proscriptions, and within Christian circles it’s seen as far more robust to back up your argument with a quote from St. Paul than with a quote from C.S. Lewis.

Now maybe St. Paul does know more about morality, and is more in touch with what God wants than C.S. Lewis. But the comparison isn’t often even made in discussions about God’s teaching, because what St. Paul wrote is in the Bible. And the Bible is assumed to have authority of its own.

My basic problem with treating the Bible as something “special” in terms of how much weight we give to what is written in it goes as follows:

1. Stuff written by human beings have the chance to be wrong, or not relevant to my life

2. The different books of the Bible were written by human beings

3. Therefore, the books of the Bible have a chance to be wrong, or not relevant to my life

I want to be very clear that I think people ought to trust the Bible less, not trust God less. If God absolutely said something, then we should absolutely listen. But the main problem with how the Bible is often used, is that it’s not acknowledged that it was written by people. And people are often wrong.

You can make arguments that God used people when writing the Bible, that the Biblical authors were divinely inspired and that everything they wrote is in some sense true, if not literally true. But those lines of thinking don’t hold water. Even if you grant that God did divinely inspire some authors to write things that are incontrovertibly true (a dubious claim in my view), how do we have all the divinely inspired writings, and only the divinely inspired writings, collected in the Bible?

The disparate writings that are included in modern versions of the Bible were writings that the early Christians thought were important. I don’t know of any good argument to show that these writings have been marked with special approval by God (if you have such an argument, please let me know). Tradition is what gives them their power, and that’s okay! Even without placing the Bible on an epistemological pedestal, the writings collected in the Bible are still valuable  as sources of wisdom, historical facts, and instructive stories. But there are other sources of wisdom, historical facts, and instructive stories, and the assumption should not be that if you learn two things, one from the Bible and one from somewhere else, then the Bible is correct.

Christianity does not need the Bible to be the inarguable source of truth in order to make sense as a faith. And requiring the Bible to be something it is not leads to closed-mindedness. If you believe that the writings in the Bible are incontrovertibly true, relevant to your life, and self-consistent, then you are locked into reading the Bible a certain way, and into learning about the world a certain way. 

Having an a priori belief that an anthology of what we think people wrote 1800-3000 years ago contain indisputable truth does not put you in a good starting place towards learning about the biggest mysteries of life. If you want to learn more about God — or even if you don’t — approach the world with an open mind. He can speak to you from anywhere. Seek the truth and you will find it.