SHAREphiliptrammell.com/blog/52  ·  11 Sep 2025  ·  #52

For better worse, I am now yet another person with a Substack. I might still post here, but on the whole, I think I’ll mainly post there from now on. My first post is on a new way to measure utility growth using nominal interest rates and the value of statistical life.

SHAREphiliptrammell.com/blog/51  ·  19 Apr 2024  ·  #51

I recently wrote a sort of sermon about a verse from the psalms. It's about as random and out of place for this blog as it sounds like it will be, but some people I shared it with seemed to like it, so here it is.

SHAREphiliptrammell.com/blog/50  ·  19 Nov 2022  ·  #50

When trying to do something like “maximize expected choiceworthiness” across moral theories, under moral uncertainty, or “maximize expected utility” across people, you face the problem of how to make intertheoretic comparisons of choiceworthiness or interpersonal comparisons of utility. The approach to doing this that seems to have gotten the most attention so far is variance normalization. See in particular Cotton-Barratt et al. (2020) and MacAskill et al. (2020, ch.4).

I don’t think it’s quite right. In fact I believe there are issues with prior-free “statistical normalization” in general, the class of approaches to making these comparisons to which variance normalization belongs. So I recent...

SHAREphiliptrammell.com/blog/49  ·  30 Jun 2022  ·  #49

I’ll start this post with the disclaimer that already goes on half my posts, and belongs on most of the rest: that I expect this idea has been had (and maybe rejected) before, since it’s on the obvious side, but I haven’t come across it. I guess I’m even worse at reading than writing.

Sacrifices seem counterproductive

As far as I’m aware, most societies in the world, for most of (at least agricultural) history, took a non-negligible share of their food to a priest each year. The priest then destroyed it. Sacrificing food was so widespread, and so seemingly counterproductive, that it presumably has some sort of cultural-evolutionary justification.

The only justification I’ve heard is that costly rituals serve as tribal bonding experiences in some way, and that better-bonded tribes outcompete their competitors. This strikes me as a bit of a stretch. Lots of modern “tribes” seem to have gotten quite ti...

SHAREphiliptrammell.com/blog/48  ·  10 Jul 2021  ·  #48

Consider a basic production function in which output is produced using capital and labor.

If the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor is bounded above 1, capital and labor are “gross substitutes”. In this case, any given level of output can be achieved with enough capital or enough labor; neither individual production factor is necessary. If we just have a high enough saving rate and pile up ever more capital—factories producing factories—output will rise indefinitely.

If the elasticity is bounded below 1, capital and labor are “gross complements”. In this case, both factors are necessary. If only one factor grows abundant, even infinitely abundant, output will be constrained by lack of the other. In particular, in this latter case, capital accumulation is not enough for sustained growth in output. As the number of factories rises without more people to work them, output rises only to a plateau. Long-run output g...

SHAREphiliptrammell.com/blog/47  ·  12 Apr 2020  ·  #47

People sometimes claim that speeding economic growth and development is the project on which classical utilitarians—for short, throughout this post, I’ll just say “utilitarians”—should focus their efforts. This post is a(nother) rough attempt to grapple with the plausibility of that claim, and ultimately, I think, a rough argument against the claim. The argument is on the abstract side, but hopefully the intuition is sensible and straightforward.

Hopefully it’s also clear enough that, though I’m restricting my attention to classical utilitarianism so as to avoid worrying about exactly which assumptions can be made where, the argument applies to many consequentialist value systems.

_____

The “global distribution of wealth”, without qualifiers, is the global distribution of wealth across individuals: how much wealth each person owns. Let us analogously define the “global distribution of wealth across...

SHAREphiliptrammell.com/blog/46  ·  29 Dec 2019  ·  #46

Some smart people, including some of my friends, believe that advanced AI poses a serious threat to human civilization in the near future, and that AI safety research is therefore one of the most valuable uses, if not the very most valuable use, of philanthropic talent and money. But most smart people, as far as I can judge their behavior—including some, like Mark Zuckerberg and Robin Hanson, who have expressed their thoughts on this explicitly—do not believe this. (I, for whatever it's worth, am agnostic.) In my experience, when someone points out the existence of smart skeptics like these, believers often respond: “Sure, those people dismiss AI risk. But have they engaged with the arguments?”

If the answer is no, it seems obvious that those who have engaged with the arguments have nothing to learn from these skeptics' judgment. If you aren't worried about rain because you saw a weather report that predicts sun, and I also saw that but also sa...

SHAREphiliptrammell.com/blog/43  ·  24 Aug 2019  ·  #43

Some groups spend a lot of energy fighting over what seem to outsiders like petty differences—even fighting “each other” more passionately than they fight people with whom they more substantively disagree. Freud called this the “narcissism of small differences”. His original illustration of the phenomenon was the intense conflict that sometimes arises between neighboring ethic groups, but he proposed it as a general rule of human psychology, produced by some sort of desire to individuate oneself from one’s crowd. Many psychologists since have tried to explore it more thoroughly.

As far as I can tell, it isn’t any sort of general rule. We often see it in religion (recall the joke about Baptists on a bridge), we often don’t (how much animosity is there between reform and reconstructionist Jews?). We often see it in politics (trans-inclusive feminists ...

SHAREphiliptrammell.com/blog/42  ·  14 Aug 2019  ·  #42

Pleasures and pains are not always as we think they are

I can't say I've spent twenty years on a mountain, but I have meditated enough at this point to realize that our experiences are not always as we think they are. It is common even for strong-seeming feelings to dissolve under scrutiny, leaving behind the impression that somehow they were never really there.

Take itchiness. When I think my arm is “feeling itchy”, and I close my eyes and concentrate on what exactly I feel, I find I feel my arm tingling; I feel a physical impulse “inside” the other arm, poised to reach over and scratch; I might even hear a faint voice inside my head whispering “ugh, this is so itchy!” or a faint image in my mind's eye of the second arm scratching the first. But that's it. Usually, once the feeling has been decomposed into these parts, no quale I would call “...

SHAREphiliptrammell.com/blog/41  ·  1 Aug 2019  ·  #41

If you hang around utilitarians for very long, you will learn the following jargon.