EA-relatable quotes

“Statistics are human beings with the tears dried off”

— Unknown

“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

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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

“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

“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)

“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)

“[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

“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

“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

“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)

“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)

“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

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

— Colin McGinn

“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)

“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)

“”[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)

“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

“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

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

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

“[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)

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

— Ray Dalio

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

— Lawrence Krauss

“[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)

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

— Jonathan Haidt

“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)

“[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

“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

“[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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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)

“[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)

“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)

“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)

“[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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

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

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

“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

“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)

“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

“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

“[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

“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)

“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)

“[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)

“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

“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)

“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

“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)

““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

“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)

“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)

“[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

“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

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

— Albert Allen Bartlett

“*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

“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

“[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

“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

“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

“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

“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 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

“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)

“[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

“[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)