All of Kenny Easwaran's Comments + Replies

I don't think your argument against risk aversion fully addresses the issue. You give one argument for diversification that is based on diminishing marginal utilities, and then show that this plausibly doesn't apply in global charities. However, there's a separate argument for diversification that is actually about risk itself, and not diminishing marginal utility. You should look at Lara Buchak's book, "Risk and Rationality", which argues that there is a distinct form of rational risk-aversion (or risk-seeking-ness). On a risk neutral approach, each outco... (read more)

I haven't gone through this whole post, but I generally like what I have seen.

I do want to advertise a recent paper I published on infinite ethics, suggesting that there are useful aggregative rules that can't be represented by an overall numerical value, and yet take into account both the quantity of persons experiencing some good or bad and the probability of such outcomes: https://academic.oup.com/aristotelian/article-abstract/121/3/299/6367834

The resulting value scale is only a partial ordering, but I think it gets intuitive cases right, and is at leas... (read more)

A few comments:

Although doing something because it is the intuitive, traditional, habitual, or whatever way of doing things doesn't necessarily have a great record of getting good results, many philosophers (particularly those in the virtue ethics tradition, but also "virtue consequentialists" and the like)  argue that cultivating good intuitions, traditions, habits, and so on is probably more effective at actually having good consequences on the world rather than evaluating each act individually. This is partly probably due to quirks of human psychol... (read more)

The keywords in the academic discussion of this issue are the "Archimedean principle" (I forget if Archimedes was applying it to weight or distance or something else, but it's the general term for the assumption that for any two quantities you're interested in, a finite number of one is sufficient to exceed the other - there are also various non-Archimedean number systems, non-Archimedean measurement systems, and non-Archimedean value theories) and "lexicographic" preference (the idea is that when you are alphabetizing things like in a dictionary/lexicon, ... (read more)

I recently rewatched the movie Her (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/) which is one of the few examples of unironically utopian fiction I can find. The total extent of conflict and suffering in the movie is typical of a standard romantic comedy - the main character is going through a bad breakup with an ex, and dealing with a new relationship (which happens to be with an artificially intelligent phone operating system). It's got its own amounts of heartache and loss, but it's utopian in that all the bigger problems of the world seem to be gone. The mai... (read more)

I think that part of the issue is that people are sometimes mistaking a comparative claim for an absolute claim. Researchers claiming that hunter-gatherer societies had better gender relations than early agricultural ones aren't thereby claiming that hunter-gatherer societies are anywhere near equal - just less unequal than the agricultural societies that followed them.

Searching a bit (using "origin of patriarchy" as the search term) I found two relevant books that seem to be the sources of a lot of claims: The Creation of Patriarchy, by Gerda Lerner, from... (read more)