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Third essay in a four-part series on expected utility maximization (EUM).

This is the second essay in a four-part series on expected utility maximization (EUM).

This is the first essay in a four part series on expected utility maximization (EUM).

Examination of various arguments that we should assign significant probability to living in a computer simulation.

Infinities puncture the dream of a simple, bullet-biting utilitarianism.

This essay lays out what I see as the strongest objection to normative realism: namely, that it leaves us without the right type of epistemic access to the normative facts it posits.

Second in a two-part series on whether morality falls out of instrumental rationality, if you do the game theory right.

First in a two-part series about whether morality falls out instrumental rationality, if you do the game-theory right.

Essay on whether a certain sort of prior helps resolve tough questions in anthropics.

Essay examining a certain sort of fundamental prior, called the “Universal Distribution.”

This is the first essay in a four-part series explaining why I think one prominent approach to anthropic reasoning (the “Self-Indication Assumption” or “SIA”) is better than another (the “Self-Sampling Assumption” or “SSA”).

This essay is the second in a four-part series, explaining why I think that one prominent approach to anthropic reasoning (the “Self-Indication Assumption” or “SIA”) is better than another (the “Self-Sampling Assumption” or “SSA”).

This essay is the third in a four-part series, explaining why I think that one prominent approach to anthropic reasoning (the “Self-Indication Assumption” or “SIA”) is better than another (the “Self-Sampling Assumption” or “SSA”).

Final essay in a four-part series, explaining why I think that one prominent approach to anthropic reasoning (the “Self-Indication Assumption” or “SIA”) is better than another (the “Self-Sampling Assumption” or “SSA”).

I think that you can “control” events you have no causal interaction with, including events in the past, and that this is a wild and disorienting fact, with uncertain but possibly significant implications.

What is altruism towards a paperclipper?

Contra some meta-ethical views, you can’t forever aim to approximate the self you would become in idealized conditions.

Is everything holy?

Richard Dawkins imagines genes as selfish agents.

Much of normative ethics centers on which considerations matter, and why.

An intuition pump for a certain kind of “holy sh**” reaction to existential risk, and to the possible size and quality of the future at stake.

Making happy people is good.

We wouldn’t expect prudence to be “not demanding.”

Reflections on the sense in which subjectivism about meta-ethics deprives morality of authority.

Two different ways of thinking about the epistemic position of future people: better informed about questions we ask using today’s concepts, vs. incomprehensible.

If God were playing a concert, would you take some hit to your overall pleasure in order to go?

If you kill something, look it in the eyes as you do.

Lots of ethical life, especially in a big world, rests on the ability to treat things you can’t see as real.

How can “non-attachment” be compatible with care?

There are oceans we have barely dipped a toe into.

Shouldn’t deontological distinctions between types of harm reflect something that matters *to* the potential victims of that harm?

We don’t need non-natural normative facts to tell us what to do.

On a thought experiment I find useful in thinking about what to do.

Can what you should do hold no appeal whatsoever?

Reimagining Peter Singer’s drowning child from the perspective of care rather than guilt.

You can’t keep any of it.

Trying to see through the eyes of people who think consciousness is an illusion.

Against hitching together your desire to accomplish things and your desire to do good.

On living in a glass tunnel, and on open air.

If we’re confused about consciousness, what else are we confused about?

In my last post, I wrote about an ethos expressed in A Wizard of Earthsea — an ethos that I find deeply resonant, but that I also think worth some scrutiny.

Recently I read Ursula K.

I started reading The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman’s account of the beginning of World War I.

Report for Open Philanthropy on the computational power sufficient to match the human brain’s task-performance.