Thank you for the two links, and the detailed discussions! The stuff about Hardin's influence on Parfit is actually more complicated than I knew at the time. After I turned in the dissertation, I ended up getting access to part of "Parfit's archive" (meaning, a bag for life filled with a thousand loose sheets of typewritten drafts of Reasons and Persons - spent a full day on the floor of the Oxford public library sorting and scanning them!), and it turns out that Part One of Reasons and Persons has a much _stranger_ prehistory than I had assumed; there are some truly bizarre early drafts. I still believe Hardin's influence explains the features I highlight, but it's not as simple as "this was all formulated in response to Tragedy of the Commons but then Parfit took out the references", which is what I had originally hypothesised.
> Tyler Cowen is asked ‘Why don’t people have more sex?’, and gives the most Tyler response possible: “People want their sex to consist of peaks, rather than seeking to maximize lifetime utility. Tom Schelling once told me this is why he did not listen to Bach more.”
Wait, how much sex does Cowen think is utility-maximising? I can't tell from the post. If a married couple has sex, say, an average of twice a week, I would say it's very plausible that they begin to hit the point of severely diminishing marginal utility; does Cowen disagree with me on that, does he think you only hit that point at, idk, at least once a day? Maybe he's having much better sex than me.
> There is currently some attention being paid to prediction markets on papal elections, but note that betting on a papal election is one of the few sins for which you can be officially excommunicated.
Not since the overhaul of Canon Law in the early twentieth century! See the recent Odds Lots episode on papal prediction markets.
> I knew that Bertrand Russell’s grandfather was prime minister, but I didn’t realise quite how much the whiggishness of his family influenced Bertie. Lord John Russell worshiped Charles James Fox, and he easily could have repealed the Corn Laws if Robert Peel hadn’t gotten to it first.
Russell's direct descendants are still to this day players in the Lib Dems! His son Conrad Russell especially was, as well as being an incredibly highly-respected historian of the English Civil War, also one of the most important Lib Dem members of the House of Lords: when the Blairite reform of the House of Lords came along and most of the hereditary peers were removed, the Lib Dems were asked to draw up a list of which hereditaries they wanted to keep in the Lords, and Conrad Russell went straight to the top. Conrad's second son, John Russell, 7th Earl Russell, is now back in the Lords and sitting as a Lib Dem too.
> At some point, I need to listen to Wagner’s Ring Cycle live, but I’ve never seen it playing in any city I’ve been in (maybe I’m looking in the wrong places…).
You mean, the whole thing??? That takes well in excess of ten hours total playing time, nobody does that except mad people in Bayreuth. You might well find individual bits of the Ring playing here and there. Though I think in general Wagner is less popular nowadays.
>Bentham’s Bulldog has an… extremely weird mix of opinions.
Does he? I have read the post you linked, and his opinions are not a weird mix at all. They are _exactly_ what I would have expected given his reputation. The only opinion there that's somewhat surprising is deism, but - given his *obvious* debt to John A. Leslie-esque anthropics and Parfit's two essays on 'Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing' - I would definitely have put a much higher credence on the possibility, by several orders of magnitude compared to the base rates among relevant populations.
I think the opinions might _look_ like a weird mix if you're unfamiliar with the intellectual tradition he's working in; but if you're familiar with the most dogmatic of the utilitarians among late twentieth century and early twenty-first century philosophers, "dogmatic utilitarian with a side-gig in shitting on 'woke' / postmodernism / continental philosophy and a smattering of unsystematic but equally dogmatic takes on some specific areas of metaphysics" is actually a super predictable archetype.* If anything, what's astounding about this blogger is the degree to which he doesn't deviate from the archetype _at all_: most people in this tradition have a degree more individuality and have some weird deviations, but this guy really is a stereotype.
When he writes, then, that "I don’t think that there’s a single core feature that explains all that I believe", this seems _obviously_ mistaken to me, and to reflect an immense failure of self-knowledge. The issue is that the "single core feature" is not a single fundamental premise that this guy believes and has logically derived all his other opinions from. Rather, the "core feature" is the tradition he's working in. But this is _even more irrational_: the issue with deriving all your beliefs logically from a small set of first principles is that your credence on the first principles should be quite low; but when you derive all your beliefs from a tradition, your credence that the tradition got everything right should be at least as low, and (in this case) you don't even have the benefit of logical relationships between all the beliefs!
In general, I find that the people who make such a big deal about how others don't "follow the arguments" and how important it is to have your own individual opinions... almost never actually have their own very individual opinions. They're just self-important and lacking in self-knowledge, as indeed seems to be the case here. But it's often very difficult to tell from the outside what the influences on someone's thinking are, and so we can tend to overrate the individuality of people who don't fit into broad cultural stereotypes; there's definitely no cultural stereotype for "god told me to save the shrimp and fight the wokes". But in fact I find that the people who actually have opinions that are objectively the most uncorrelated from each other tend to be shoehorned quite easily into overly broad stereotypes like "pretentious literary nerd" or "kooky scientist", stereotypes that don't actually pay attention to the specific content of their beliefs.
Also: people who say they "just followed the arguments bro" tend to have a pretty poor grasp on what the arguments actually are or were. The claim that "The objections to utilitarianism are mostly not very complicated—they primarily involve pointing to scenarios where utilitarianism hold to judgments that are unintuitive" is just straightforwardly false, but I imagine that this guy's first year philosophy tutor gave up trying to explain Rawls' separateness of persons objections to him after he just kept dogmatically insisting that Rawls was an idiot rather than trying to get to grips on the problem. (Actually, I would bet money on something like that scenario having actually played out at some point.)
* And, importantly, I mean specifically that it was predictable which areas of metaphysics he would be interested in. It would have been super surprising to me if this guy turned out to have strong views on whether the Converse Barcan Formula is acceptable in general as a logical principle or 'only' as a metaphysical principle. It would have been super surprising to me if he were a mereological nihilist. It's not surprising at all that he's very interested in (and dogmatic about) anthropics and cosmological arguments.
Hi Peter. While your comment does have a fairly negative assessment of me, it has the advantage of being thoughtful! So kudos!
One brief comment: you repeatedly say I’m dogmatic about cosmological arguments, even attributing that to Parfait’s influence on me. I’m not at all dogmatic about cosmological arguments—as a matter of fact, I don’t quite know what to think about them. It is other arguments—eg fine tuning, the anthropic argument, psychophysical harmony—that really move me.
Regarding the claims that I draw my beliefs from some pre-existing tradition—can you give some examples of who else forms part of this tradition. It sounds like your real complaint is that I’m a dogmatist, but one can be dogmatic and original. To be clear, I did not mean to suggest that one who follows arguments will inevitably come to agree with my weird smattering of views, only that taking arguments more seriously will perhaps make them seem less random than they are. A deontologist friend (who is a philosopher at a reputable department) once commented, for instance, that he feels about both sia and utilitarianism that though there are powerful arguments in their favour he feels they deviate from common sense too substantially to be acceptable. In such cases, I think people are too willing to hold on to their original views.
Is anthropics really much more predictable for a utilitarian to care about than mereology? That claim struck me as rather odd. And what does dualism, another claim about which I have strong views, have to do with utilitarianism?
Regarding the core charge of dogmatism, I think this is partially a result of the way I write. I’m rarely more than 70% confident in a view—even utilitarianism. I tend to think writing is more enjoyable when people are more brazen in their claims and less prone to hedge. I also tend to write about things I have strong views about—I have never written about decision theory, for instance, as I have little idea what to think about it.
(Regarding the charge that I’m influenced by Leslie, my views are the opposite of his and I haven’t read him).
Lastly, regarding the jab about separateness of persons, unfortunately your story about this is fiction. I never spoke with a first year professor about the separateness of persons. And while I accept that lots of undergraduates are philosophically overconfident—and likely I am often among these people—I can only protest that on various objective marks—grades, published papers, etc—it seems I am not as woefully philosophically competent as you seem to suggest.
I'm glad you got good marks in university! Most of us managed to stop bragging about that very shortly after we left university, and also learned to stop bragging about how we're such wonderfully original thinkers and how amazing we are at following arguments to their logical conclusions when everyone else is just ignorant and bases everything they think on vibes; I'm sorry you never got past that.
Edit: I add (only because of the potential interest of others reading this; I have no desire to waste more of my time with someone so obviously fucking full of themselves) that it's possible to have deep debts to people you haven't read, if their indirect influence structures your thought. It is generally considered good practice to be aware of your intellectual debts, rather than assuming you have none and asserting that you deserve great kudos for your incredible originality. Again, I'm sorry that it seems you haven't quite made it this far.
Sorry to hear that! As I say, I did find your comment interesting, so I’m sorry that you seem not to be my biggest fan :).
I didn’t deny that you can be in someone intellectual debt you hadn’t read. I merely asked what tradition of utilitarians with strong views about anthropics I was part of. I don’t think most of my views are original, only that I didn’t get all of them from one or two people.
Also, fwiw I am still an undergrad and only made my comment because you were accusing me of philosophical incompetence. It’s not the sort of thing I spend any time discussing in typical situations.
> Gabriel Fauré, Requiem. In the great nationalities of classical music, I have not done much to explore the French. I am yet to have any choral music really hit me emotionally the way instrumental music can, so I’d appreciate recommendations on this front.
Have you tried Fauré's other choral works? Off the top of my head:
Thank you for the two links, and the detailed discussions! The stuff about Hardin's influence on Parfit is actually more complicated than I knew at the time. After I turned in the dissertation, I ended up getting access to part of "Parfit's archive" (meaning, a bag for life filled with a thousand loose sheets of typewritten drafts of Reasons and Persons - spent a full day on the floor of the Oxford public library sorting and scanning them!), and it turns out that Part One of Reasons and Persons has a much _stranger_ prehistory than I had assumed; there are some truly bizarre early drafts. I still believe Hardin's influence explains the features I highlight, but it's not as simple as "this was all formulated in response to Tragedy of the Commons but then Parfit took out the references", which is what I had originally hypothesised.
> Tyler Cowen is asked ‘Why don’t people have more sex?’, and gives the most Tyler response possible: “People want their sex to consist of peaks, rather than seeking to maximize lifetime utility. Tom Schelling once told me this is why he did not listen to Bach more.”
Wait, how much sex does Cowen think is utility-maximising? I can't tell from the post. If a married couple has sex, say, an average of twice a week, I would say it's very plausible that they begin to hit the point of severely diminishing marginal utility; does Cowen disagree with me on that, does he think you only hit that point at, idk, at least once a day? Maybe he's having much better sex than me.
> There is currently some attention being paid to prediction markets on papal elections, but note that betting on a papal election is one of the few sins for which you can be officially excommunicated.
Not since the overhaul of Canon Law in the early twentieth century! See the recent Odds Lots episode on papal prediction markets.
> I knew that Bertrand Russell’s grandfather was prime minister, but I didn’t realise quite how much the whiggishness of his family influenced Bertie. Lord John Russell worshiped Charles James Fox, and he easily could have repealed the Corn Laws if Robert Peel hadn’t gotten to it first.
Russell's direct descendants are still to this day players in the Lib Dems! His son Conrad Russell especially was, as well as being an incredibly highly-respected historian of the English Civil War, also one of the most important Lib Dem members of the House of Lords: when the Blairite reform of the House of Lords came along and most of the hereditary peers were removed, the Lib Dems were asked to draw up a list of which hereditaries they wanted to keep in the Lords, and Conrad Russell went straight to the top. Conrad's second son, John Russell, 7th Earl Russell, is now back in the Lords and sitting as a Lib Dem too.
> At some point, I need to listen to Wagner’s Ring Cycle live, but I’ve never seen it playing in any city I’ve been in (maybe I’m looking in the wrong places…).
You mean, the whole thing??? That takes well in excess of ten hours total playing time, nobody does that except mad people in Bayreuth. You might well find individual bits of the Ring playing here and there. Though I think in general Wagner is less popular nowadays.
Also:
>Bentham’s Bulldog has an… extremely weird mix of opinions.
Does he? I have read the post you linked, and his opinions are not a weird mix at all. They are _exactly_ what I would have expected given his reputation. The only opinion there that's somewhat surprising is deism, but - given his *obvious* debt to John A. Leslie-esque anthropics and Parfit's two essays on 'Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing' - I would definitely have put a much higher credence on the possibility, by several orders of magnitude compared to the base rates among relevant populations.
I think the opinions might _look_ like a weird mix if you're unfamiliar with the intellectual tradition he's working in; but if you're familiar with the most dogmatic of the utilitarians among late twentieth century and early twenty-first century philosophers, "dogmatic utilitarian with a side-gig in shitting on 'woke' / postmodernism / continental philosophy and a smattering of unsystematic but equally dogmatic takes on some specific areas of metaphysics" is actually a super predictable archetype.* If anything, what's astounding about this blogger is the degree to which he doesn't deviate from the archetype _at all_: most people in this tradition have a degree more individuality and have some weird deviations, but this guy really is a stereotype.
When he writes, then, that "I don’t think that there’s a single core feature that explains all that I believe", this seems _obviously_ mistaken to me, and to reflect an immense failure of self-knowledge. The issue is that the "single core feature" is not a single fundamental premise that this guy believes and has logically derived all his other opinions from. Rather, the "core feature" is the tradition he's working in. But this is _even more irrational_: the issue with deriving all your beliefs logically from a small set of first principles is that your credence on the first principles should be quite low; but when you derive all your beliefs from a tradition, your credence that the tradition got everything right should be at least as low, and (in this case) you don't even have the benefit of logical relationships between all the beliefs!
In general, I find that the people who make such a big deal about how others don't "follow the arguments" and how important it is to have your own individual opinions... almost never actually have their own very individual opinions. They're just self-important and lacking in self-knowledge, as indeed seems to be the case here. But it's often very difficult to tell from the outside what the influences on someone's thinking are, and so we can tend to overrate the individuality of people who don't fit into broad cultural stereotypes; there's definitely no cultural stereotype for "god told me to save the shrimp and fight the wokes". But in fact I find that the people who actually have opinions that are objectively the most uncorrelated from each other tend to be shoehorned quite easily into overly broad stereotypes like "pretentious literary nerd" or "kooky scientist", stereotypes that don't actually pay attention to the specific content of their beliefs.
Also: people who say they "just followed the arguments bro" tend to have a pretty poor grasp on what the arguments actually are or were. The claim that "The objections to utilitarianism are mostly not very complicated—they primarily involve pointing to scenarios where utilitarianism hold to judgments that are unintuitive" is just straightforwardly false, but I imagine that this guy's first year philosophy tutor gave up trying to explain Rawls' separateness of persons objections to him after he just kept dogmatically insisting that Rawls was an idiot rather than trying to get to grips on the problem. (Actually, I would bet money on something like that scenario having actually played out at some point.)
* And, importantly, I mean specifically that it was predictable which areas of metaphysics he would be interested in. It would have been super surprising to me if this guy turned out to have strong views on whether the Converse Barcan Formula is acceptable in general as a logical principle or 'only' as a metaphysical principle. It would have been super surprising to me if he were a mereological nihilist. It's not surprising at all that he's very interested in (and dogmatic about) anthropics and cosmological arguments.
Hi Peter. While your comment does have a fairly negative assessment of me, it has the advantage of being thoughtful! So kudos!
One brief comment: you repeatedly say I’m dogmatic about cosmological arguments, even attributing that to Parfait’s influence on me. I’m not at all dogmatic about cosmological arguments—as a matter of fact, I don’t quite know what to think about them. It is other arguments—eg fine tuning, the anthropic argument, psychophysical harmony—that really move me.
Regarding the claims that I draw my beliefs from some pre-existing tradition—can you give some examples of who else forms part of this tradition. It sounds like your real complaint is that I’m a dogmatist, but one can be dogmatic and original. To be clear, I did not mean to suggest that one who follows arguments will inevitably come to agree with my weird smattering of views, only that taking arguments more seriously will perhaps make them seem less random than they are. A deontologist friend (who is a philosopher at a reputable department) once commented, for instance, that he feels about both sia and utilitarianism that though there are powerful arguments in their favour he feels they deviate from common sense too substantially to be acceptable. In such cases, I think people are too willing to hold on to their original views.
Is anthropics really much more predictable for a utilitarian to care about than mereology? That claim struck me as rather odd. And what does dualism, another claim about which I have strong views, have to do with utilitarianism?
Regarding the core charge of dogmatism, I think this is partially a result of the way I write. I’m rarely more than 70% confident in a view—even utilitarianism. I tend to think writing is more enjoyable when people are more brazen in their claims and less prone to hedge. I also tend to write about things I have strong views about—I have never written about decision theory, for instance, as I have little idea what to think about it.
(Regarding the charge that I’m influenced by Leslie, my views are the opposite of his and I haven’t read him).
Lastly, regarding the jab about separateness of persons, unfortunately your story about this is fiction. I never spoke with a first year professor about the separateness of persons. And while I accept that lots of undergraduates are philosophically overconfident—and likely I am often among these people—I can only protest that on various objective marks—grades, published papers, etc—it seems I am not as woefully philosophically competent as you seem to suggest.
I'm glad you got good marks in university! Most of us managed to stop bragging about that very shortly after we left university, and also learned to stop bragging about how we're such wonderfully original thinkers and how amazing we are at following arguments to their logical conclusions when everyone else is just ignorant and bases everything they think on vibes; I'm sorry you never got past that.
Edit: I add (only because of the potential interest of others reading this; I have no desire to waste more of my time with someone so obviously fucking full of themselves) that it's possible to have deep debts to people you haven't read, if their indirect influence structures your thought. It is generally considered good practice to be aware of your intellectual debts, rather than assuming you have none and asserting that you deserve great kudos for your incredible originality. Again, I'm sorry that it seems you haven't quite made it this far.
Sorry to hear that! As I say, I did find your comment interesting, so I’m sorry that you seem not to be my biggest fan :).
I didn’t deny that you can be in someone intellectual debt you hadn’t read. I merely asked what tradition of utilitarians with strong views about anthropics I was part of. I don’t think most of my views are original, only that I didn’t get all of them from one or two people.
Also, fwiw I am still an undergrad and only made my comment because you were accusing me of philosophical incompetence. It’s not the sort of thing I spend any time discussing in typical situations.
Given your comment on French music, you may find this article interesting, if you have not already come across it: https://ulkaraghayeva.substack.com/p/on-french-music.
> Gabriel Fauré, Requiem. In the great nationalities of classical music, I have not done much to explore the French. I am yet to have any choral music really hit me emotionally the way instrumental music can, so I’d appreciate recommendations on this front.
Have you tried Fauré's other choral works? Off the top of my head:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVAY_AgHHp4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw8PurepHxk