Today, Ems Seem Unnatural
The main objections to “test tube babies” weren’t about the consequences for mothers or babies, they were about doing something “unnatural”: Given the number of babies that have now been conceived...
View ArticleSanctimonious Econ Critics
The New Yorker review of Elephant in the Brain raved about Cents and Sensibility, by Gary Morson and Morton Shapiro, a book said to confirm that “intellectual overextension is often found in...
View ArticleSpaceship Earth Explores Culture Space
Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man...
View ArticleAvoiding Blame By Preventing Life
If morality is basically a package of norms, and if norms are systems for making people behave, then each individual’s main moral priority becomes: to avoid blame. While the norm system may be designed...
View ArticleMoral Choices Reveal Preferences
Tyler Cowen has a new book, Stubborn Attachments. In my next post I’ll engage his book’s main claim. But in this post I’ll take issue with one point that is to him relatively minor, but is to me...
View ArticleOverconfidence From Moral Signaling
Tyler Cowen in Stubborn Attachments: The real issue is that we don’t know whether our actions today will in fact give rise to a better future, even when it appears that they will. If you ponder these...
View ArticleDo I Offend?
The last eight months have seen four episodes where many people on Twitter called me a bad offensive person, often via rude profanity, sometimes calling for me to be fired or arrested. These four...
View ArticleCheckmate On Blackmail
Often in chess, at least among novices, one player doesn’t know that they’ve been checkmated. When the other player declares “checkmate”, this first player is surprised; that claim contradicts their...
View ArticleDownfall
On Bryan Caplan’s recommendation, I just watched the movie Downfall. To me, it depicts an extremely repulsive and reprehensible group of people, certainly compared to any real people I’ve ever met. So...
View ArticleEnd War Or Mosquitoes?
Malaria may have killed half of all the people that ever lived. (more) Over one million people die from malaria each year, mostly children under five years of age, with 90% of malaria cases occurring...
View ArticleDefrock Deregulation Economists?
Recent economics Nobel prize winner Paul Romer is furious that economists have sometimes argued for deregulation; he wants them “defrocked”, & cast from the profession: New generation of...
View ArticlePlot Holes & Blame Holes
We love stories, and the stories we love the most tend to support our cherished norms and morals. But our most popular stories also tend to have many gaping plot holes. These are acts which characters...
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A Perfect Storm of Inflexibility
Most biological species specialize for particular ecological niches. But some species are generalists, “specializing” in doing acceptably well in a wider range of niches, and thus also in rapidly...
View ArticleALL Big Punishment Is “Cruel”
Cruel – willfully causing pain or suffering to others, or feeling no concern about it. Cruelty is pleasure in inflicting suffering or inaction towards another’s suffering when a clear remedy is readily...
View ArticleWhy We Fight Over Fiction
We tell stories with language, and so prefer to tell the kind of stories that ordinary language can describe well. Consider how language can describe a space of physical stuff and how to navigate...
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