“Parfit believes that there are true answers to moral questions, just as there are to mathematical ones. Humans can perceive these truths, through a combination of intuition and critical reasoning, but they remain true whether humans perceive them or not. He believes that there is nothing more urgent for him to do in his brief time on earth than discover what these truths are and persuade others of their reality. He believes that without moral truth the world would be a bleak place in which nothing mattered. This thought horrifies him.”

— Larissa MacFarquhar, How to be Good (The New Yorker, September 5, 2011)

“If there were no [irreducibly] normative truths, nothing would matter, and we would have no reasons to try to decide how to live. Such decisions would be arbitrary. We would not be the animals that can understand and respond to reasons. In a world without reasons, we would act only on our instincts and desires, living as other animals live. [S]ome things, I have claimed, matter, and there are better and worse ways to live.”

— Derek Parfit, On What Matters: Volume Two (2011)

“The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education. And this offers priorities for educational policy: to provide students with the cognitive tools that are most important for grasping the modern world and that are most unlike the cognitive tools they are born with. The perilous fallacies we have seen in this chapter, for example, would give high priority to economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and statistics in any high school or college curriculum. Unfortunately, most curricula have barely changed since medieval times, and are barely changeable, because no one wants to be the philistine who seems to be saying that it is unimportant to learn a foreign language, or English literature, or trigonometry, or the classics. But no matter how valuable a subject may be, there are only twenty-four hours in a day, and a decision to teach one subject is also a decision not to teach another one. The question is not whether trigonometry is important, but whether it is more important than statistics; not whether an educated person should know the classics, but whether it is more important for an educated person to know the classics than to know elementary economics. In a world whose complexities are constantly challenging our intuitions, these tradeoffs cannot responsibly be avoided.”

— Steven Pinker (2002)

“I am deeply moved if I see one man suffering and would risk my life for him. Then I talk impersonally about the possible pulverization of our big cities, with a hundred million dead. I am unable to multiply one man’s suffering by a hundred million.”

— Albert Szent-Györgyi

“Statistics are human beings with the tears dried off”

— Unknown

“As the philosopher John Stuart Mill recognised, originality, diversity, and experiments in living are necessary to discover what is the best life. The same applies to the well-being of others. Be willing to revise your goals in the light of new evidence and reflection.”

— Julian Savulescu, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Five ways to become a really effective altruist (The Conversation, Feb 8, 2016)

“Rationality is about optimal goal achievement. Whatever your goals are, you’re rational if you act so as to maximize their expected achievement, i.e. so as to maximize your life-game EV. [I argue] that if people were more rational – reasoned better about what their life goals actually are and how to optimally achieve them – they would likely donate much greater amounts to charity than they currently do.”

— Adriano Mannino, Saving lives through donation: A rational choice (2014)

“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.”

— Jonathan Haidt

“If you have strongly concluded X, you should be able to easily describe how the world would look very different if not-X, or else how did you conclude X in the first place?”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“[W]e don’t have full read-write access to our minds, but internalizing declarative knowledge can still cause some pretty big changes in our value systems.”

— Kaj Sotala, An attempt to dissolve subjective expectation and personal identity (LessWrong, February 22, 2013)

“It is a good idea, and often necessary, if you are saying you have got hold of the truth, to have an explanation of why a lot of other people disagree.”

— Ted Honderich, How Free Are You?: The Determinism Problem (1993), p. 105

“We force the way we view reality to depend upon the evidence of reality.”

— Lawrence Krauss

“[T]here is a branch of human knowledge known as symbolic logic, which can be used to prune away all sorts of clogging deadwood that clutters up human language.”

— Isaac Asimov

“Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being “pushed to an extreme;” not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case.”

— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Chapter Two: Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion

“We think of certain departures from the principles encapsulated in probability theory, logic, decision theory, and Bayesian confirmation theory as irrational. For example, it is irrational to be more confident of the truth of a conjunction than of one of its conjuncts, and this norm corresponds to the fact that a conjunction cannot be more probable than either of its conjuncts. Should we think of departures from consequentialism principles in the same way?”

— Frank Jackson, Departing from Consequentialism versus Departing from Decision Theory (1994)

“Truth – more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality – is the essential foundation of good outcomes.”

— Ray Dalio

“Kahneman’s evidence shows that we suck at remembering and predicting our own well-being. We as a culture still ignore this empirical evidence, recommending to live our lives so as to avoid deathbed regrets. Deathbed regrets are like Hollywood films: they stir passions for a couple hours, but are poorly connected to reality. They are not good criteria for a well-lived life.”

— Nick Winter, The Motivation Hacker (2013)

“[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together. The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that “right” and “wrong” are absolute; that everything that isn’t perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.”

— Isaac Asimov, The Relativity of Wrong (The Skeptical Inquirer, 1989)

“The best chance of enjoying enhanced cognitive skills is to fall in love with ideas, or intelligent conversation, or intelligent books, or some intellectual pursuit. If I do that, I create within my own mind a stimulating mental environment that accompanies me wherever I go. Then I am relatively free of needing good luck to enjoy a rich cognitive environment. I have constant and instant access to a portable gymnasium that exercises the mind. Books and ideas and analyzing things are easier to transport than a basketball court. No one can keep me from using mental arithmetic so habitually that my arithmetical skills survive.”

— James Flynn, What Is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect (2007), p. 87

“Probability is the guide of life, and of death, too.”

— Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (1993), p. 197

“What did [Peter Singer] do? Appeal to emotions? Exploit the “single victim effect” and reinforce people’s innumeracy? No. He appeals to reason first and foremost. Why? Because our emotions are deeply out of sync with the reality of non-human suffering. I mean, we all know the facts: We know how “bad” factory farms are and what slaughterhouses do to animals. But these facts don’t sufficiently affect us because we’re not seeing them with the right eyes. Philosophy, at its best, changes our eyes for the better.”

— Adriano Mannino

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”

— Isaac Asimov

“Lay off with the ‘You reason, so you don’t feel’ stuff, please. I feel, but I also think about what I feel. When people say we should only feel [I] am reminded of Göring, who said ‘I think with my blood.’ See where it led him.”

— Peter Singer, ‘Reflections’, in J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (1999), p. 89

“”[C]onfidence all the way up“, the skill of believing in your capabilities while not being overly sure of anything.”

— Nate Soares, Conclusion of the Replacing Guilt series (2016)

“These kinds of arguments show at the same time the limitations to the reach of the human intellect, in that we’re discovering how our little corner of our world may, indeed, just be a small, small, small, small corner of a vastly bigger world that we never imagined, and that we might never, even in principle, be able to reach out and look at the other parts. And at the same time these arguments also emphasize the astounding reach of the human intellect in that we can begin to formulate theories and hypotheses that extend way beyond the world around us that we’ve evolved to cope with – how many lions entered the cave, will it rain later this afternoon, what does that person think of me – these kind of very down to earth uses that our brain evolved, but it turns out that it can be used to grapple with these fundamental questions of existence and the nature of the world.”

— Nick Bostrom, What We Still Don’t Know: “Are We Real?” (Channel 4 series, 2004)

“There’s no particular reason why our human brain should have evolved just far enough to be able to simulate the deepest levels of reality. What is amazing is that we have been able to make so much sense as we have of the external world. I believe when the history of science is written, then what has been discovered about our universe in the last decade or two will be one of the most exciting chapters. But the key question, of course, is: “What we still don’t know?” And that is the challenge for the coming century.”

— Sir Martin Rees, What We Still Don’t Know: “Are We Real?” (Channel 4 series, 2004)

“[I] try not to think with my gut. If I’m serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it’s okay to reserve judgement until the evidence is in.”

— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995), p. 170

“We are not designed by natural selection to solve all the deep problems of the universe.”

— Colin McGinn

“People who are depressed at the thought that all our motives are selfish are [confused]. They have mixed up ultimate causation (why something evolved by natural selection) with proximate causation (how the entity works here and now). [A] good way to understand the logic of natural selection is to imagine that genes are agents with selfish motives. [T]he genes have metaphorical motives – making copies of themselves – and the organisms they design have real motives. But they are not the same motives. Sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is wire unselfish motives into a human brain – heartfelt, unstinting, deep-in-the-marrow unselfishness. The love of children (who carry one’s genes into posterity), a faithful spouse (whose genetic fate is identical to one’s own), and friends and allies (who trust you if you’re trustworthy) can be bottomless and unimpeachable as far as we humans are concerned (proximate level), even if it is metaphorically self-serving as far as the genes are concerned (ultimate level). Combine this with the common misconception that the genes are a kind of essence or core of the person, and you get a mongrel of Dawkins and Freud: the idea that the metaphorical motives of the genes are the deep, unconscious, ulterior motives of the person. That is an error.”

— Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), Chapter 11: The Fear of Nihilism, p. 192

“Let us suppose, unrealistically, that IQ tests really measure intellectual ability. Let us in fact assume, even more unrealistically, that they measure the intellectual abilities that are relevant to success in metaphysics. Why should we suppose that a species with a mean IQ of 100 – our own species – is able to solve the problems of metaphysics? Pretty clearly a species with a mean IQ of 60 wouldn’t be in a position to achieve this. Pretty clearly, a species with a mean IQ of 160 would be in a better position than we to achieve this. Why should we suppose that the “cut-off-point” is something like 90 or 95? Why shouldn’t it be 130 or 170 or 250? The conclusion of this meditation on mystery is that if metaphysics does indeed present us with mysteries that we are incapable of penetrating, this fact is not itself mysterious. It is just what we should expect, given that we are convinced that beings only slightly less intellectually capable than ourselves would certainly be incapable of penetrating these mysteries. If we cannot know why there is anything at all, or why there should be rational beings, or how thought and feeling are possible, or how our conviction that we have free will could possibly be true, why should that astonish us? What reason have we, what reason could we possibly have, for thinking that our intellectual abilities are equal to the task of answering these questions?”

— Peter van Inwagen, Metaphysics (1993), p. 201

“[T]here can be no way of justifying the substantive assumption that all forms of altruism, solidarity and sacrifice really are ultra-subtle forms of self-interest, except by the trivializing gambit of arguing that people have concern for others because they want to avoid being distressed by their distress. And even this gambit [i]s open to the objection that rational distress-minimizers could often use more efficient means than helping others.”

— Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (1983), p. 10

“Persuasion isn’t always here’s the facts, you’re either an idiot or you’re not. It’s here are the facts and here is a sensitivity to your state of mind. And it’s the facts plus the sensitivity when convolved together creates impact.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson, discussion “Beyond Belief” (2006)

“Reporting a moral intuition is not the same as giving a reason.”

— Don Herzog, Without Foundations: Justification in Political Theory (1985)

“It is hard to see just what has gone wrong. But even if we cannot diagnose the flaw, it is more credible that the argument has a flaw we cannot diagnose than that its most extreme conclusion is true.”

— David Lewis, Illusory Innocence? (2000)

“It can’t possibly be a good idea to assess philosophical theories by the extent to which they preserve everyday intuitions. The trouble is that everyday intuitions are often nothing more than bad old theories in disguise. Any amount of nonsense was once part of common sense, and much nonsense no doubt still is. It was once absolutely obvious that the heavens revolve around the earth each day, that the heart is the seat of the soul, that without religion there can be no morality, that perception involves the reception of sensible forms, and so on. If philosophy had been forced to respect these everyday intuitions, we would still be in the intellectual dark ages.”

— David Papineau, The Tyranny of Common Sense ( The Philosophers’ Magazine, no. 34, April-June, 2006)

“Why bother with moral philosophy when common sense serves most of us perfectly well? The simple answer is that, as history shows, commonsensical beliefs are very often wrong. Slavery, marital rape, and bans on interracial marriage were all widely accepted in the relatively recent past. Much like fish who, as the proverb goes, are the last to discover water, humans are so immersed in immorality that we can be entirely unaware of it. Part of a moral philosopher’s work, then, is to question common sense and reveal our ethical blind spots.”

— Olivia Goldhill, An Oxford philosopher’s moral crisis can help us learn to question our instincts (Quartz, October 15, 2017)

“You study more and more of [human cognitive biases], and [they go] on apparently forever. They’re still [finding] more and more of them. The world is mad, it’s an experimentally demonstrated fact. The data admit to no other interpretation. The fact that humanity is spending billions of dollars annually on football while ignoring the existential risks that could completely extinguish it and when the successful navigation [of these risks] could determine its future, there’s no deeply clever explanation for that. We’re just crazy.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Cognitive biases and Giant Risks (Singularity Summit, 2009)

“[H]euristics provide explanations of actual behavior; they are not normative ideals. Their existence, however, poses normative questions.”

— Gerd Gigerenzer, Moral Intuition = Fast and Frugal Heuristics? (2008)

“Thanks to technology, what almost anybody can do has been multiplied a thousandfold, and our moral understanding about what we ought to do hasn’t kept pace.”

— Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

“Foot, Thomson, and Edmonds go wrong by treating our moral intuitions about exotic dilemmas not as questionable byproducts of a generally desirable moral rule, but as carrying independent authority and as worthy of independent respect. And on this view, the enterprise of doing philosophy by reference to such dilemmas is inadvertently replicating the early work of Kahneman and Tversky, by uncovering unfamiliar situations in which our intuitions, normally quite sensible, turn out to misfire. The irony is that where Kahneman and Tversky meant to devise problems that would demonstrate the misfiring, some philosophers have developed their cases with the conviction that the intuitions are entitled to a great deal of weight, and should inform our judgments about what morality requires. A legitimate question is whether an appreciation of the work of Kahneman, Tversky, and their successors might lead people to reconsider their intuitions, even in the moral domain.”

— Cass Sunstein, How Do We Know What’s Moral? (2014)

“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous.”

— Edward O. Wilson quoted in Harvard Magazine (2009)

“A more detailed understanding of the biases that afflict spontaneous epistemic judgments could assist philosophers wondering which epistemic intuitions to trust.”

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— Jennifer Nagel, Epistemic Intuitions (2007)

“Thought experiments are not supposed to be realistic. They are supposed to clarify our thinking about reality.”

— Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (1982), p. 4

“[P]hilosophers defending a given position against opponents have a powerful vested interest in persuading themselves that the intuitions that directly or indirectly favour it are stronger than they actually are. The stronger those intuitions, the more those who appeal to them gain, both psychologically and professionally. Given what is known of human psychology, it would be astonishing if such vested interests did not manifest themselves in at least some degree of wishful thinking, some tendency to overestimate the strength of intuitions that help one’s cause and underestimate the strength of those that hinder it.

— Timothy Williamson, Philosophical ‘Intuitions’ and Scepticism about Judgement (2004)

“[M]orality is founded in a sense of the contingency of the world, and it is powered by the ability to envisage alternatives. Imagination is central to its operations. The morally complacent person is the person who cannot conceive how things could have been different; he or she fails to appreciate the role of luck -itself a concept that relies on imagining alternatives. There is no point in seeking change if this is the way things have to be. Morality is thus based on modality: that is, on a mastery of the concepts of necessity and possibility. To be able to think morally is to be able to think modally. Specifically, it depends upon seeing other possibilities–not taking the actual as the necessary.”

— Colin McGinn, Apes, Humans, Aliens, Vampires and Robots (The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity, 1993, p. 147)

“The purpose of philosophy is to find out by rigorous methods what the truth is. Often its results clash with the common sense view. In such cases it is reasonable to maintain that our relatively unexamined common sense views should be abandoned and give way to the conclusions of rigorous philosophical analysis.”

— George Schlesinger, Possible Worlds and the Mystery of Existence (1984)

“Most of us are (like it or not) at least somewhat partisan, and our convictions are in part motivated by extra-epistemic reasons: be it vested interests, maintaining certain relationships, group affiliations, etc. In pursuit of these ends we defend our beliefs against all considerations brought to bear against them. Few beliefs are indefatigable by the lights of any reasonable opinion, and few policy prescriptions are panaceas. Yet all of ours are.”

— Gregory Lewis, Beware surprising and suspicious convergence (Effective Altruism Forum, January 24, 2016)

“Remember that the goal is to improve reality. Never forget your purpose. Human brains are fickle things that easily forget what it is that they’re trying to do. Purpose is like water; very hard to hold on to over time. This is an important point that is hard to grasp until you notice how many of your seemingly altruistic acts are optimised for something other than actually helping others (e.g. they are optimised instead for impressing others, letting yourself feel like you’re a certain type of person, etc.). As C.J. Cherryh aptly said, “Your sword has no blade. It has only your intention. When that goes astray you have no weapon.””

— Timo Timo

“Often when reading philosophy one gets the feeling that the writer cares more deeply about his or her conclusion than about the argument, so that if the argument can be shown to fail, the philosopher whose argument it is will simply proceed to look for other arguments rather than take back his or her commitment to the conclusion.”

— David Enoch, An Outline of an Argument for Robust Metanormative Realism (2007)

“The point of all this discussion of rationality is to actually achieve truer beliefs and more effective actions. It’s not some arbitrary social fashion; there are actual criteria of success. It is for this reason that it is written that rationalists should win. If some particular ritual of cognition – even one that you have long cherished as “rational” – systematically gives poorer results relative to some alternative, it is not rational to cling to it. The rational algorithm is to do what works, to get the actual answer – in short, to win, whatever the method, whatever the means. If you can detect a systematic mistake in your thinking, then fix it; if you can see a better method, then adopt it.”

— LessWrong Wiki, Rationality is systematized winning

“[O]ur moral judgments are less reliable than many would hope, and this has specific implications for methodology in normative ethics. Three sources of evidence indicate that our intuitive ethical judgments are less reliable than we might have hoped: a historical record of accepting morally absurd social practices; a scientific record showing that our intuitive judgments are systematically governed by a host of heuristics, biases, and irrelevant factors; and a philosophical record showing deep, probably unresolvable, inconsistencies in common moral convictions. I argue that this has the following implications for moral theorizing: we should trust intuitions less; we should be especially suspicious of intuitive judgments [that] fit a bias pattern, even when we are intuitively confident that these judgments are not a simple product of the bias; we should be especially suspicious of intuitions that are part of inconsistent sets of deeply held convictions; and we should evaluate views holistically, thinking of entire classes of judgments that they get right or wrong in broad contexts, rather than dismissing positions on the basis of a small number of intuitive counterexamples.”

— Nick Beckstead, On the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future (2013), p. 19

“As motivated reasoning can distort evaluations and attitudes and also allow erroneous beliefs to persist, it is necessary to maintain a mindset intended to survey the landscape as accurately as possible instead of going after arguments supporting our views, not tying self-worth to our own opinions. [T]hus, if we want to reduce suffering and do our best to help animals, we need to constantly ask ourselves if we are favoring evidence that supports our own beliefs or if we are open to search and analyze data that suggests new ways to be as effective as we can.”

— Animal Ethics, Motivated Reasoning and Confirmation Bias

“Where almost everyone feels that a particular kind of conduct is wrong, that might seem solid evidence that such conduct really is wrong. But Mill is not denying that our moral feelings provide some prima facie support for our moral opinions. If we feel that torturing children or stealing bread from the starving are wrong actions, then they probably are wrong. However, it is worth remembering some of the other moral feelings that people have also had in the past. Thus at various times people have felt that it was right to burn heretics and witches, to practice slavery, to expose unwanted children, and to punish severely wives who were disobedient to their husbands. Reflection on such cases supports Mill’s contention that feeling is an unreliable guide to moral truth, and that it is dangerous to treat it as a final court of appeal. Following Bentham, Mill demands that our moral opinions should be answerable to some external standard – that is, that we should be able to articulate reasons for them that go beyond a statement of our gut feelings, attitudes or ‘intuitions’. The provision of reasons for moral beliefs makes moral debate possible, from which truth and enlightenment can emerge. By contrast, dogmatically insisting that one already knows all the moral answers via one’s feelings or intuitions forecloses the possibility of an escape from error should those feelings or intuitions be wrong. Mill’s position is therefore better described as one of moral caution than of moral skepticism. His aim is not to persuade us that moral knowledge is unattainable, but to warn us against supposing that it can be securely attained by a purely subjective process unassisted by reason.”

— Geoffrey Scarre, Mill’s On Liberty (2007), p. 99

“People have gut feelings that give them emphatic moral convictions, and they struggle to rationalize the convictions after the fact. These convictions may have little to do with moral judgments that one could justify to others in terms of their effects on happiness or suffering. They arise instead from the neurobiological and evolutionary design of the organs we call moral emotions.”

— Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), Chapter 15: The Sanctimonious Animal, p. 271

“If you postulate ‘intuitions’ as states which play a certain sort of role in a theory of beliefs about value, then the term ‘intuition’ is really just a place-holder for any state satisfying the demands of that theory.”

— Graham Oddie, Value, Reality, and Desire (2005), p. 41

“In ethics, as in mathematics, the appeal to intuition is an epistemology of desperation.”

— Philip Kitcher, Biology and Ethics (The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, Oxford, 2006, p. 176)

“The role that intuitions can play in moral philosophy is the role that we are content to let them play in other departments of thought (it is only in moral philosophy that they have risen so far above their epistemological station). In mathematics, the natural sciences, and other branches of philosophy, finding a conclusion intuitively repugnant does not close an argument; it is a reason to start looking for a good argument.”

— James Griffin, Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral Importance (1986), p. 2

“[W]e have no reason to trust anyone’s intuitions about very large numbers, however excellent their philosophy. Even the best philosophers cannot get an intuitive grasp of, say, tens of billions of people. That is no criticism; these numbers are beyond intuition. But these philosophers ought not to think their intuition can tell them the truth about such large numbers of people.

For very large numbers, we have to rely on theory, not intuition. When people first built bridges, they managed without much theory. They could judge a log by eye, relying on their intuition. Their intuitions were reliable, being built on long experience with handling wood and stone. But when people started spinning broad rivers with steel and concrete, their intuition failed them, and they had to resort to engineering theory and careful calculations. The cables that support suspension bridges are unintuitively slender.

Our moral intuitions are formed and polished in our homely interactions with the few people we have to deal with in ordinary life. But nowadays the scale of our societies and the power of our technologies raise moral problems that involve huge numbers of people. [N]o doubt our homely intuitive morality gives us a starting point, but we have to project our morality beyond the homely to the vast new arenas. To do this properly, we have to engage all the care and accuracy we can, and develop a moral theory.

Indeed, we are more dependent on theory than engineers are, because moral conclusions cannot be tested in the way engineers’ conclusions are tested. If an engineer gets her calculations wrong, her mistake will be revealed when the bridge falls down. But a mistake in moral theory is never revealed like that. If we do something wrong, we do not later see the error made manifest; we can only know it is an error by means of theory too. Moreover, our mistakes can be far more damaging and kill far more people than the collapse of a bridge. Mistakes in allocating healthcare resources may do great harm to millions. So we have to be exceptionally careful in developing our moral theory.”

— John Broome, Weighing Lives (2004), pp. 56-57

“[I]n addition to the mathematical illiteracy of at least some respondents, those of us who measure such things as the value of life and health have to face a misplaced sense of righteous indignation. Some studies have shown that about 25% of people in environmental value surveys refused to answer on the grounds that “the environment has an absolute right to be protected” regardless of cost. The net effect, of course, is that those very individuals who would probably bring up the average WTP for the environment are abstaining and making the valuation smaller than it otherwise would be.

But I wonder if this sense of indignation is really a facade. Those same individuals have a choice right now to forgo any luxury, no matter how minor, to give charitable donations on behalf of protecting the environment. Right now, they could quit their jobs and work full time as volunteers for Greenpeace. And yet they do not. Their behaviors often don’t coincide with their claim of incensed morality at the very idea of the question. Some are equally resistant to the idea of placing a monetary value on a human life, but, again, they don’t give up every luxury to donate to charities related to public health.”

— Douglas Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of “Intangibles” in Business (2012) p. 210

“We have biases because our brain-design dates back to the stone age. Our intuitive decision-making consists of shortcuts, heuristics, that led to successful gene-copying more often than not in our ancestral environment. If you had a true belief that differed from the cherished beliefs of your group, you were at risk of ostracism. Our belief-acquiring mechanisms were not selected for producing accurate beliefs, but for producing beliefs that paid rent in terms of reproductive success. Upon reflection, we would hopefully come up with different personal goals. This mismatch between the (metaphorical) goals of our genes and our personal (very real) goals is one reason for the existence of cognitive biases.”

— Lukas Gloor, Rationality: The science of winning, Part III (Raising for Effective Giving)

“We also have different modes of altruistic concern. One is a quick emotional response – recoiling in disgust, crying with sadness, or yelling with anger when we see someone harmed. Usually it has decent precision, though sometimes it can misfire: e.g., when we see an already-dead animal being cut open, or when someone stabs a life-like doll. It also doesn’t fire enough in many cases, such as when the organisms being injured are out of sight, when the harm is reported in numerical form (“The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.”), when the person suffering is unattractive or evil-looking, or when the animal that’s in pain is gross or scary (spiders, snakes, leeches).

We try to go beyond our visceral responses to suffering by thinking more deeply about what’s going on. Even though it looks disgusting to cut open a human body, if that body is dead, then there’s no one actually feeling the incision. Even though cockroaches look disgusting, we have to remember that they have some of the most sophisticated brains in the insect subphylum. A recording of a baby’s cry sounds awful, but it doesn’t actually represent anyone in the immediate vicinity who needs help. These kinds of realizations constitute a reflective mode of concern, and most of us agree that these opinions should trump our immediate reactions. Over time, neural rewiring may indeed make these reflective sentiments become our more immediate responses.”

— Brian Tomasik, Which Computations Do I Care About?: Types of caring (Essays on Reducing Suffering)

“[M]aximization of DNA survival is not a recipe for happiness. So long as DNA is passed on, it does not matter who or what gets hurt in the process. Genes don’t care about suffering, because they don’t care about anything.”

— Richard Dawkins, God’s Utility Function (Scientific American, November, 1995, p. 85)

“Human beings are not perfect, but at least for now it is only human beings who think this. It is we who have this conception that we are flawed. You will not find that judgement written upon the stars or mountains, they are not minds, they cannot think. It is we who have a sense of a direction that we are going in, and giving up, shrugging will not push us forward in that direction.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, The Challenge of Friendly AI (Singularity Summit, 2007)

“[L]ong-term happiness, however appealing they may find it, is not really what [humans] are designed to maximize.”

— Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (1994), p. 191

““Nature is a hanging judge,” goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily improbable arrangements of matter, with many ways for things to go wrong and only a few ways for things to go right. We are certain to die, and smart enough to know it. Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education, and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can entertain.”

— Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), Chapter 14: The Many Roots of Our Suffering, pp. 241-242

“The other reason is that our environment has changed drastically, so that once goal-tracking shortcuts are now misleading. Our ancestors only ever lived in small groups, not in a globalized world where they could positively or negatively affect the lives of future generations or people living on other continents. Our intuitions fail to adequately keep track of large numbers, because brain size is limited and emotions cannot scale indefinitely; besides, up until very recently, we were never playing for stakes this high. Similarly, exponential processes or low-probability high impact scenarios are intuitively neglected as well, because the corresponding scenarios did not come up often enough in our evolutionary past.”

— Lukas Gloor, Rationality: The science of winning, Part III (Raising for Effective Giving)

“You should work to reduce your biases, but to say you have none is a sign that you have many.”

— Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – But Some Don’t (2012), p. 451

“Saving a person’s life feels great, and it would probably feel just about as good to save one life as it would feel to save the world. It surely wouldn’t be many billion times more of a high to save the world, because your hardware can’t express a feeling a billion times bigger than the feeling of saving a person’s life. But even though the altruistic high from saving someone’s life would be shockingly similar to the altruistic high from saving the world, always remember that behind those similar feelings there is a whole world of difference.”

— Nate Soares, On caring

“You don’t get to feel the appropriate amount of “care”, in your body. Sorry – the world’s problems are just too large, and your body is not built to respond appropriately to problems of this magnitude. But if you choose to do so, you can still act like the world’s problems are as big as they are. You can stop trusting the internal feelings to guide your actions and switch over to manual control.”

— Nate Soares, On caring

“You can’t actually feel the weight of the world. The human mind is not capable of that feat. But sometimes, you can catch a glimpse.”

— Nate Soares, On caring

“Many of us go through life understanding that we should care about people suffering far away from us, but failing to. I think that this attitude is tied, at least in part, to the fact that most of us implicitly trust our internal care-o-meters. The “care feeling” isn’t usually strong enough to compel us to frantically save everyone dying. So while we acknowledge that it would be virtuous to do more for the world, we think that we can’t, because we weren’t gifted with that virtuous extra-caring that prominent altruists must have. But this is an error – prominent altruists aren’t the people who have a larger care-o-meter, they’re the people who have learned not to trust their care-o-meters. Our care-o-meters are broken. They don’t work on large numbers. Nobody has one capable of faithfully representing the scope of the world’s problems. But the fact that you can’t feel the caring doesn’t mean that you can’t do the caring.”

— Nate Soares, On caring

“Science’s capacity, without equal, is to remove, as far as possible, our own urges to delude ourselves.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

“[A]ddressing the major problems of our time isn’t about feeling a strong compulsion to do so. It’s about doing it anyway, even when internal compulsion utterly fails to capture the scope of the problems we face. [N]obody gets to comprehend the scope of these problems. The closest we can get is doing the multiplication: finding something we care about, putting a number on it, and multiplying. And then trusting the numbers more than we trust our feelings. Because our feelings lie to us. [T]here is not enough money, time, or effort in the world to do what we need to do. There is only you, and me, and everyone else who is trying anyway. You can’t actually feel the weight of the world. The human mind is not capable of that feat. But sometimes, you can catch a glimpse.”
— Nate Soares, On caring

“Whereas many philosophers and theologians appear to possess an emotional attachment to their theories and ideas which requires them to believe them, most scientists tend to regard their ideas differently. They are interested in formulating many logically consistent possibilities, leaving any judgment regarding their truth to observation. Scientists feel no qualms about suggesting different but mutually exclusive explanations for the same phenomenon.”

— John Barrow, Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986), p. 15

“There is no guarantee that our minds will intuitively understand phenomena at scales of time and space that are very different from our own experience — hundreds of millions of years, billions of light years, Ângströms. [O]ur best science tells us that laws of reality work very differently from those at the scales we are used to thinking so disciplines like quantum mechanics, evolutionary biology, cosmology and even neuroscience are deeply baffling.”

— Steven Pinker

“Science advances through tentative answer to a series of more and more subtle questions which reach deeper and deeper into the essence of natural phenomena.”

— Louis Pasteur

“*We know about things from a tenth of a millimeter to a few kilometers, from a fraction of a second to a lifetime, and so on. So when we are dealing with matters of quantum physics, particles of the size of 10^{-13} cm or in cosmology where we are talking about 10 billion light years or more, it is very reasonable that our intuition is not adequate to the task.”

— Carl Sagan

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

— Richard Feynman, lecture “What is and What Should be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society” (Galileo Symposium, Italy, 1964)

*“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”

— Albert Allen Bartlett

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

— Richard Feynman, address “What is Science?” (The Physics Teacher, 1969)

“What we can imagine as plausible is a narrow band in the middle of a much broader spectrum of what is actually possible. [O]ur eyes are built to cope with a narrow band of electromagnetic frequencies. [W]e can’t see the rays outside the narrow light band, but we can do calculations about them, and we can build instruments to detect them. In the same way, we know that the scales of size and time extend in both directions far outside the realm of what we can visualize. Our minds can’t cope with the large distances that astronomy deals in or with the small distances that atomic physics deals in, but we can represent those distances in mathematical symbols. Our minds can’t imagine a time span as short as a picosecond, but we can do calculations about picoseconds, and we can build computers that can complete calculations within picoseconds. Our minds can’t imagine a timespan as long as a million years, let alone the thousands of millions of years that geologists routinely compute. Just as our eyes can see only that narrow band of electromagnetic frequencies that natural selection equipped our ancestors to see, so our brains are built to cope with narrow bands of sizes and times. Presumably there was no need for our ancestors to cope with sizes and times outside the narrow range of everyday practicality, so our brains never evolved the capacity to imagine them. It is probably significant that our own body size of a few feet is roughly in the middle of the range of sizes we can imagine. And our own lifetime of a few decades is roughly in the middle of the range of times we can imagine.”

— Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“The human brain cannot release enough neurotransmitters to feel emotion a thousand times as strong as the grief of one funeral. A prospective risk going from 10,000,000 deaths to 100,000,000 deaths does not multiply by ten the strength of our determination to stop it. It adds one more zero on paper for our eyes to glaze over.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“I was raised Catholic. On my eighth birthday, having received my first communion about a year prior, I casually asked my priest how to reaffirm my faith and do something for the Lord. The memory is fuzzy, but I think I donated a chunk of allowance money and made a public confession at the following mass.

A bunch of the grownups made a big deal out of it, as grownups are like to do. ‘Faith of a child’, and all that. This confused me, especially when I realized that what I had done was rare. I wasn’t trying to get pats on the head, I was appealing to the Lord of the Heavens and the Earth. Were we all on the same page, here? This was the creator. He was infinitely virtuous, and he had told us what to do.

And yet, everyone was content to recite hymns once a week and donate for the reconstruction of the church. What about the rest of the world, the sick, the dying? Where were the proselytizers, the missionary opportunities? Why was everyone just sitting around?

On that day, I became acquainted with civilizational inadequacy. I realized you could hand a room full of people the literal word of God, and they’d still struggle to pay attention for an hour every weekend.”

— Nate Soares, On Saving the World

“*After [more than three] years of studying philosophy at university, I finally heard a professor point out that there is a difference between asking “What do people call ‘knowledge’‘beauty’‘ethics’?” and answering questions like “How can I reliably attain the most accurate model of the world?”, “What does my cognitive machinery tag as “beautiful” (insert deictic pointer towards a family of emotional states), to what extent does this differ among cultures, and why is all of this the way it is?” and “What is my goal in life?” / “What principles would I choose behind the veil of ignorance?” / “What would I say if I were given the task to come up with a post hoc rationalization/’justification’ of my moral intuitions?”

Unfortunately, I couldn’t quite make sense of the [professor’s] explanation on why the first type of questions seem interesting to philosophers (as opposed to linguists or sociologists or evolutionary biologists). It seems to me that, for whatever reason, philosophers tend to spend the vast majority of their time focusing on the first type of questions, and I’m often genuinely unsure whether they even realize that there are other questions to ask. To me, going into pedantic details in regard to the first type of questions seems quite pointless. On the other hand, at least some of the questions in the second category seem like they deserve a ton of attention.”

— Lukas Gloor

“What people really believe doesn’t feel like a BELIEF, it feels like the way the world IS.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“What is true is already so.

Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.

Not being open about it

doesn’t make it go away.

And because it’s true, it is what

is there to be interacted with.

Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived.

People can stand what is true,

for they are already enduring it.”

— Eugene Gendlin

“So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You’d better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can’t rearrange the universe.”

— Isaac Asimov

“You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.”

— Elon Musk

“The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

“Given that thought necessarily takes time and energy, the fact that you considered an option and then disregarded it is not a “wasted effort,” because there’s no other way to figure out the right answer than actually to do the calculation. Similarly, you’re not at fault for failing to know something or for temporarily holding a misconception; the process of acquiring correct (or at least “less wrong”) beliefs about the world requires substantive computation and physical interaction with other people. Changing your opinions when you discover you’re in error isn’t something to be embarrassed about – it’s an intrinsic step in the algorithm of acquiring better opinions itself.”

— Brian Tomasik, Dissolving Confusions about Consciousness (Essays on Reducing Suffering, 2014)

“I try not to think with my gut. If I’m serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it’s okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.”

— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1996), p. 170

“Breaking the chains of ignorance will loosen the grip of gravity and then we can travel to the stars and beyond.”

— Steven Regulus

“Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.”

— Napoleon Bonaparte (h/t Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon)

“Providing reasons can help, even when it doesn’t lead to agreement. It maps out the field of options. It helps us understand each other. We keep each other (and ourselves) honest. We learn more of what a claim really involves. Sometimes, it can convince. Inculcate a culture of valuing reasons. The more you are exposed to good reasoning, the more you’ll recognise it, and be able to produce great reasoning of your own. Be prepared to give your reasons, and be curious about the reasons of others. Don’t expect to come to agreement. But be prepared to find some common ground.”

— Greg Restall, Logic and Rationality: Disagreement and Evidence – Why Fact-Checking Units are a Good Thing, even if they don’t lead us to agreement

“I, for one, fear that if we don’t subject religion to such scrutiny now, and work out together whatever revisions and reforms are called for, we will pass on a legacy of ever more toxic forms of religion to our descendants.”

— Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Chapter “Toxic memes”

“There is an ethical component to reason as well, because one’s beliefs are intimately connected to one’s actions. Some of one’s beliefs are themselves normative – beliefs about what is good and right, about whose life is valuable and why and in what manner (see abortion and euthanasia debates). And factual beliefs are also important, since how we understand the world in which we are acting shapes our actions every bit as much as our values and ends.

If one gives up reason in the formation of some of one’s beliefs, one gives up the only access to truth we have. Humans don’t have any perceptual capacity to immediately discern truth, the way we immediately discern color and shape (if the lighting is good and our eyesight is in good order). The closest we can get is to justify our beliefs. Faith is not justification, it is the suspension of all standards for justification. Faith declares that some beliefs – these important ones right at the center of my world-view that shape how I see many other things – need not be justified at all.”

— George M. Felis, Faith is a Moral Failing (2006)

“The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.”

— Edward Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), p. 262

“All religions are dangerous, because the epistemic attitude of faith compromises the link between our beliefs about reality and what reality is actually like.”

— Phil Torres

“It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe.”

— Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (1986)

“Sometimes the consequences of holding a belief matter more than its truth.”

— Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment (2002), p. 97