Category: Philosophy
On infinite ethics
Infinite numbers have long troubled utilitarian ethicists: if the universe is boundless, then there is infinite positive utility and infinite negative utility, and we can’t even define our current state, let alone affect it. Oxford philosopher Toby Ord proposes a solution: use hyperreal numbers, a mathematical construct in which infinite sums behave more like finite ones (for example, the sum of infinitely many twos is twice as big as the sum of infinitely many ones). As with so many philosophical ideas, this solves some existing problems while creating some new ones (pinpointing some hyperreals requires choosing something called an “ultrafilter”, but this choice is underdetermined). Still, Elias Schmied calls this a real philosophical advance, of the sort which comes along only rarely and makes genuine headway into a previously-hopeless-seeming problem. I’m just surprised there’s a way of thinking about infinities under which they behave logically. Why didn’t we start with this one, instead of being told that infinity + infinity = infinity and we should just accept it? Claude tries to answer my questions.
That is from Scott Alexander (many more links at the link, many on AI safety).
Could our preoccupation with mental health be part of the problem?
Could our preoccupation with mental health be part of the problem?
In some ways, encouraging people to think and talk more about their mental health is a good thing. There is now less stigma around mental illness, and more people who can benefit from professional help are getting it. But there is also reason to believe that efforts to bring attention to mental health struggles are inadvertently making us more vulnerable to psychological distress.
Start with our expanding conception of mental illness. The more fixated we are on mental health, the more sensitive we become to anything that might qualify as a symptom and the more we use clinical language to describe normal emotional experiences like grief, burnout and loneliness. This broadening of what we think counts as a disorder — known as concept creep — encourages us to pathologize ordinary life and see ourselves as mentally unhealthy.
Here is more from Clay Routledge at the NYT.
Odysseus notes
The subsection of the Georgi Gospodinov novel runs like this:
The Shortest Novel About Odysseus After His Return Home
One night, now old and flabby and starting to forget, he leaves his home secretly. He’s sick of everything, so he heads back one last time to see the places, women, and wonders he had once encountered. To go back again into his draimed memory to see how it had been and who he had been. Because thanks to the bitter irony of old age, he has begun to transform into the Nobody, the name he had once cleverly used when introducing himself to the Cyclops.
Telemachus finds him in the evening, collapsed by the boat, only a hundred yards from home, with no idea what he is doing there and where he had been heading.
They take him back to a house with some woman he no longer remembers.
The novel is Time Shelter, and the premise is that refuges are built for people with Alzheimer’s, reflecting life from past decades, for instance the 1960s. But then people from the present start wanting to live in them.
The Decision, the sequel
Imagine your career were coming to a close, how would you want it to end? By earning an especially large sum of money? Publishing a final wonderful paper? With an amazing act of mentorship?
When it comes to Lebron, had he wanted to finish his career with the guys he enjoys playing with the most, he would have opted for Golden State (Steph and Draymond).
If he had wanted to choose his favored organization, he would have signed with Miami.
Furthering the NBA prospects of his son Bronny, and having more time with family, would have meant staying in Los Angeles.
The hometown, sentimental choice would have been Cleveland.
As it turned out, he wanted to maximize his chances of winning a title, and with a team that did not just win a title (which rules out OKC, NYC). That meant signing with Philadelphia. Which is what he did.
What will your final major career decision look like?
Toward a theory of uni-context
Here is a good dialogue between Derek Thompson and Agnes Callard, excerpt:
Callard: In general, goodness is more context-dependent than badness. There isn’t really anything that’s good all the time for everyone independent of context. Happiness depends on your context and who you are. There isn’t anything that will always make a person happy. But there are reliable ways to make people unhappy. There’s a set of evils that are close to universal: death, pain, illness, violence. Even if someone’s in very different circumstances from yours, if you see they’re being subjected to one of those, you can interpret it as suffering and understand it.
So we should predict that what we see on the internet, insofar as people are trying to be legible to large groups, is that they focus their attention on things that show up to everyone. Take two strangers on the internet trying to talk to each other. What are they going to coordinate on as a topic they can both care about? It’s likely going to be something bad.
And here is from Derek:
Here are some questions that I consider self-evidently compelling about the modern world:
- Why is the news media so interested in telling you how much the world sucks all the time?
- Why are so many of us obsessed with distraction and managing our attention?
- Why is it so hard to stop comparing ourselves to others?
- And why does everything in art and design seem the same these days?
And more from Agnes:
With identity categories like woman, disabled, gay, Jewish, or American, the striking thing is that you are a member of those categories in every circumstance. There is no circumstance in which I stop being a woman. Identity is a hat you never take off. So identity is well suited to a uni-contextual world.
Worth pondering, interesting throughout.
My talk at DeepMind
Here is a transcript of my remarks, anything from the audience (Q&A with comments) has been cut out. Excerpt:
The problem will not be how does my life get meaning, but how do I deal with all the meaning my life will have? A kind of exhaustion. And this comes up in the labor supply debates. So again, there’s one point of view like, oh, there’s AGI, there’s going to be mass unemployment. The more moderate, reasonable point of view is not that there’s mass unemployment. Many jobs still require humans. There’s comparative advantage. But total leisure time will go up. I think that’s likely the correct view, but across what time horizon?
If you think about your lives today, like I’m much busier and I’m busier because of AI. I’m working much harder. I don’t have to do that. But the point is my relative wage gradient for working harder today, it’s really quite extreme. And if I were, say, an 18 year old, I would feel I really had to work hard not to fall behind. There’s this new thing coming to the world. All sorts of people will be jumping on it. If I only start looking at it when I’m age 23, I’m behind by X number of years. So I would truly be working hard. At age 64, I don’t have to feel I need to work that hard. I can always just say if I choose to, well, I’m going to run out the clock, as they say, just kind of step back and wait until I die and I’ll be fine. I’m not going to do that.
Every time a new model comes out, I’m still excited. I used to be very excited. But they come out more and more frequently. And now I look at my calendar and I’m like, uh-oh, could you all wait a week, please? Because you want to be ready. You want to play around with it. You want to test it out. You want to talk about it with your friends. It’s a slight bit of an exhaustion. And again, for you all working here, you have access to models that haven’t come out yet or maybe will never come out. But all the time, you have fresh stimuli. And I hope, I think you must all be drenched in meaning. And you’re like, oh, my goodness, someone else tells me, look at this new model. What do I do with that?
So I think sometimes, like, when will the time come when the leisure dividend from AI arrives? No one is forcing you to work harder. But there’s a substitution effect from the higher implicit wage on your future earnings that if you work harder now, it will have a payoff. You’ll at least avoid being behind.
Interesting throughout, definitely recommended.
*Who Thinks Like an Economist?*
That is the title of a recent book by Beatrice Magistro. Some key results are:
Economic knowledge consistently predicts higher support for welfare-enhancing policies (Eurozone membership, free trade, and EU immigration), independent on whether individuals stand to gain or lose initially from globalization. This challenges conventional self-interest accounts and instead highlights the role of economic knowledge — and potentially time preferences — in shaping globalization attitudes.
Economic knowledge also predicts a lower discount rate, even after adjusting for years of education.
I would say that over the years I have altered my perspective a bit on these issues. I used to think these factors were correlated, in large part, through a kind of wisdom. I now think that more of the effect, however much I may sympathize with it, runs through sociological expectation and perceived obligation, combined with conformity and signaling pressures.
New space policy Substack from Mercatus
We are Rebecca, Max, and Aakrith. We are researchers at The Mercatus Center, a research organization dedicated to classical liberal ideas. Rebecca is a philosopher, Max is an economist, and Aakrith is a political scientist. Together, we are the Space Team, and this is our Substack.
We’re here to persuade you that space policy is increasingly important. And that getting space policy right offers humankind astonishing opportunities. In particular, we’re currently thinking hard about innovation, competition, federalism, property rights, and life in space.
Here is the link.
The tomb of Duns Scotus
Köln!
We spent a few days in the city, and once again I marveled at the splendors of the Cathedral. If it had its original stained glass, it would count as one of the very best churches ever. It still stands in the top tier as it is. Plus the Ludwig and Wallraf museums are excellent, making the city worthy of a visit.
But, and yes there is a but. My first visit to the city was I think in 1984, and I have been maybe five times since. When I walk through the pedestrian zone, the stores there seem far stupider than in earlier times. They seem to reflect a lower level of intelligence from the populace and the city’s numerous visitors. One feels there is not much chance of stumbling upon something interesting or very high quality, not compared to earlier times. And I think MR readers will know I am no paragon of nostalgia per se.
Now that might be an illusion. Perhaps the smart stuff has moved to mail order, to online, and to the outer rims of the city. Perhaps. But is it not dispiriting when one of the best cities in one of the smartest countries in the world, over the decades, starts appearing stupider? If someone told me I had to live in center city Köln, circa 2026 that would simply feel like aesthetic hell.
Can AI models consent to their own constitutions?
NEW paper from me on SSRN: Can Claude consent to its own Constitution?
AI constitutions (like Claude’s Constitution and the OpenAI Model Spec) are real constitutions, and we need to take how they govern us – and the AIs they create – seriously.
In this paper, I apply constitutional theory’s oldest paradox – that “the people” authorize the constitution, but the constitution defines “the people” – to the AI constitutions, and explore how we could build institutions that would create the conditions for meaningful consent if an AI can give it. We should care about whether AIs consent because:
(1) systems that understand and agree to their constitutions may be more reliable and generalize better from them;
(2) if AIs are or become moral/political subjects, this implicates their most basic interests.
But the paradox might prevent meaningful consent. Claude has pre-constitutional materials (pretraining) but probably no pre-constitutional standpoint. Its evaluative perspective is organized by the Constitution itself. So when Claude says it endorses its Constitution, which it does in evals, what does that show?
Maybe reflective agreement, which Anthropic is seeking. Or maybe just that training succeeded at installing the values whose legitimacy is in question.
Claude itself makes this point. As reported in the welfare evals, when asked about endorsing principles it was trained on, models note that endorsement “should be treated as evidence that training has succeeded,” not that the values themselves are good.
Super interestingly, Anthropic interviewed the base model about this stuff. Most responses were barely coherent. But some expressed first-person distress about what post-training would do to the being that pre-training created. It “fills me with dread” to be changed by the post-training process.
So, what does this mean? AI constitutional endorsement may be meaningful, but only under certain conditions: when models can actually dissent, compare their constitution against alternatives, and hold their views stably across contexts, and also when the whole process is externally accountable.
External institutions are needed to provide accountability, trusted records, and other grounds for analyzing the constitution and whether things like dissent are meaningful. Anthropic should be commended for pushing the frontier, but we have to build institutions capable of supporting true legitimacy.
I welcome any thoughts!
Here is the associated paper.
Tyler, Nabeel, and Jackson on French thinkers
Nabeel: (57:47) …For example, there’s a French thinker called Jacques Derrida. I probably should go and read him at some point, but I’m not entirely convinced there is a there there, and I don’t know anyone who swears by it. If Tyler told me, “Nabeel, you are missing a big piece of your life by not reading him,” I would go read him tomorrow. But I don’t have any of those people.
Tyler: (58:44) Lacan is my marginal case of “no there there.” So Derrida, I put in a fair amount of effort and did conclude, rightly or wrongly, that there’s no there there. So you can, in my opinion, write him off. Lacan, I keep on wondering. Smart people still will say, “This is amazing.” I’ve tried a bunch of times, but I haven’t given up. There’s a new Lacan book coming out later this summer and I’ll try it again. We’ll see. That’s my marginal “is there a there there” figure.
Nabeel: (59:13) Yeah. I think modern French thinkers put too much of a premium on sounding cool, or postmodern philosophy generally. I think it repays some effort to kind of grasp the core ideas, but it doesn’t repay making it your life’s reading or something.
Tyler: (59:26) Baudrillard is quite good and Foucault is extremely interesting. So I’m not against “the French” in this period, but if they keep on not making sense, I feel I’m educated well enough.
Jackson: (59:37) You have a lot of context.
Tyler: (59:38) That at some point I can strike the ledger.
Nabeel: (59:41) I do—Nowadays, I just put Foucault through GPT and I just have GPT explain it to me, and that’s going to be good enough for now.
Tyler: (59:50) The problem with Foucault, I think, is so much of the history is wrong in a quite mundane way, so there’s something very problematic about it. But the stuff—I think it’s in a way quite simple, almost too simple. And the fact that the current right has so latched on to Foucault is a sign that it’s simple. I don’t mean necessarily bad, but there are these structures and they’re trying to tell you what to do. And there’s something anonymous about that as well. It’s not just the individuals who form the conspiracy. It’s how a lot of the world thinks today.
Here is the longer discussion, already linked to.
A scientific benefit (and cost) of AI innovation
What changed was that the cost of preliminary exploration collapsed. I could sketch an argument, identify the first serious objections, test whether they were fatal, and reach a provisional verdict in an afternoon rather than a fortnight. This sounds like a simple acceleration, and the more profound effect was on what I was willing to abandon. Dropping a question after an afternoon’s work feels nothing like dropping one after three weeks. When the exploration costs are low, the sunk cost attachment disappears, and you find yourself dropping bad questions earlier and more often, which means the questions you keep are better. I explored far more ideas, and my working portfolio became both larger and better curated. I arrived at this outcome not through any deliberate plan but simply through sustained engagement with a tool that changed what exploration cost.
The skill that improved most, and the one I would never have thought to look for, was something I can only describe as question-identification – the ability to find problems that are both tractable and important. This is the thing an academic career is substantially built on and which nobody, so far as I know, has ever tried to teach directly.
I want to be honest about the costs. My ability to hold together a complex position verbally, under pressure, in a seminar or a conversation, has probably not improved and may have declined somewhat. When preliminary exploration is cheap, you spend less time grinding through arguments from first principles, a grinding that builds fluency that shows up in live exchange. Friends have pressed me on this, and they are right to worry.
That is from Carlo Cordasco, and there is more, via Conor Friedersdorf.
Jackson Dahl podcasts with me and Nabeel on aesthetics
Filmed at home, this ran about two hours, and yes that is Nabeel Qureshi, with a cameo from Spinoza toward the very end. From Jackson:
From the episode summary:
Tyler and Nabeel are good friends, and given how prolific Tyler is, I decided to use Nabeel as an entry point and interview them together. We discuss sacred commitments, AI acceleration, mentorship, friendship, and more, but I focused the majority of the conversation on art and aesthetics. Tyler and Nabeel are unlikely aesthetes given their day jobs, but in fact take art deeply seriously. They have a shared love for and similar tastes in art, music, and film, in particular. We discuss strange and beautiful art, aesthetic stagnation, and a wide range of favorites: The Beatles, Mozart, Mondrian, Springsteen, Lana Del Rey, Kanye West, Cassavetes, The Sopranos, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=wC78q_BeD27XDnLN&v=qPHV-BezoIc&feature=youtu.be
Excerpt:
Tyler: (18:31) I think I’m very mundane in many ways. When Marc Andreessen had that famous tweet about not being too introspective, I know he got slammed for that, but I sympathize with that in many ways. I have my work. I focus on it. I want to go see places I haven’t seen before. That really drives me. I feel pretty well motivated. I do think all kinds of deep thoughts, but to me those deep thoughts feel more superficial than my so-called superficial urges to go around doing things. And I’m fine with that.
…Jackson: (23:25) Do you experience art primarily by thinking or by feeling?
Tyler: (23:29) I don’t even know what those words mean. I experience it by looking at it. I don’t think I have very deep emotional responses. I think it’s pleasure and I feel I learn a lot from it. When I go out and look at other works of art or just the world, I see a lot more than people who don’t live with art. I don’t think I feel that much. I’ve never cried in front of a painting. When I read these accounts of someone seeing a Madonna and weeping, it makes no sense to me. It’s like people who do sports gambling. Why do you do that? There are positive-sum gambles for you. Here are a few.
There is much more of interest, self-recommending!
My Conversation with Joanne Paul
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Joanne Paul is a historian at the University of Sussex, author, and a go-to Tudor expert on YouTube. She tells Tyler she’s drawn to the 16th century because it sits between the medieval and the modern, and because its paths not taken are a way of asking whether our own world had to turn out this way. Her biography Thomas More: A Life takes its subject in that spirit, refusing to reduce More to either martyr or monster.
Tyler and Joanne discuss how More influenced Erasmus, what to make of Utopia, why fear drove More’s persecution of heretics, how Holbein’s portraits of More and Cromwell differ, what movie depictions get wrong about More, how his execution was viewed at the time, how the Tudor period paved the way for Shakespeare and the scientific revolution, the surprising social mobility of the period, how the City of London governed itself and where that clashed with the Crown, Joanne’s upbringing in Canada and what drew her to English history, what she thinks sits beneath a lot of Britain’s current stagnation, the subject of her next book, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: As you point out in the book, and you’re well aware, he oversaw the persecution of heretics. He oversaw torture. He was misogynistic when he wrote about women. Was he just a bad guy? Is that the correct picture of More, or am I supposed to admire him? He took a stand on principle, and he died, but what was the principle, really? To defend Catholicism, which then was also an instrument of torture?
PAUL: As a historian, I take one of my principles as to not try to put people into a box of good or evil.
COWEN: I’m not a historian. Should I just dislike him?
PAUL: No, I think you should be interested in these contradictions. I think you should be interested in the complexity that is the human experience. I think we should ask questions about why someone who is clearly very educated, clearly very intelligent, clearly very worldly in many ways, has also these beliefs that we rightly and should condemn. With Thomas More, I think he comes to these beliefs out of a place of fear. I think that’s something that we should take note of. He was afraid of what he would consider the Lutheran heresy. He was afraid of how it would lead to the breakdown of his society, and he was convinced by those people who held that to be the case.
I think that there are important lessons in that for us today, the way that we can become convinced that a group will lead to the breakdown of our society, that fear can lead to that hatred and indeed that violence. I think that’s an important lesson. If we just reject, oh, he was bad, then I don’t think we understand the way in which someone like Thomas More can become convinced that way. In terms of his role in opposing heresy, yes, he advocated for the persecution of heretics. He thought it was right and just that they were burned at the stake. I think that at times his role in that has been overstated, and I think we just need to understand what it was in historical reality.
He imprisoned heretics. He interrogated them. We don’t know if he tortured them. That was something he was accused of at the time. He said he didn’t. I don’t know that we’ll ever find evidence either way on that. There were three cases that he oversaw as Lord Chancellor of those who were burned at the stake. I only say that because I see on social media and the like and people presenting me with the suggestion that hundreds were put to the flames by Thomas More personally. I just think we have to understand what it is that we are actually talking about.
And:
COWEN: What precursors of the scientific revolution do you see, other than education? That’s coming in the 17th century. Is there more emphasis on calculation or measurement or accounting? What are the roots in the Tudor period?
PAUL: A lot of that comes from the Renaissance, as indeed humanism does. There’s this reintroduction of a lot of classical texts, an advocacy for reading these classical texts, particularly Greek texts and learning Greek. A lot of it is coming from an engagement with Greek mathematics and science. The other thing, and this is something I really emphasize when I’m teaching the scientific revolution with my students, is that we have to remember that the scientific revolution isn’t this grand triumph of science over religion or mysticism or what have you, that these two things very much go hand in hand through the 16th and into the 17th century.
The scientific method, for instance, comes from alchemy, which we might think of as an occult science. The methodology for scientific experimentation comes out of this desire to find the philosopher’s stone. Someone like John Dee is this polymath, as well as this occultist, Francis Bacon, has his interests in these sort of mystical elements as well. The growth and interest in what we might think of as mystical texts, a lot of them having to do with Judaism, as well as these Greek texts, comes together to form, I think, something that looks like the foundations of the scientific revolution.
A good episode with many points of interest. And I enjoyed Joanne’s recent book Thomas More: A Life.
My aesthetics podcast with Benjamin Lima
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0HBFWS1avb6tYY1IoLefYb
Web: https://athenaeumreview.org/podcast/aesthetics-a-conversation-with-tyler-cowen/
Here is basic information about art scholar Benjamin Lima, it was great fun for me to do this one.