In the conclusion to Moral Uncertainty, Krister Bykvist, Toby Ord, and William MacAskill write:

Every generation in the past has committed tremendous moral wrongs on the basis of false moral views. Moral atrocities such as slavery, the subjection of women, the persecution of non-heterosexuals, and the Holocaust were, of course, driven in part by the self-interest of those who were in power. But they were also enabled and strengthened by the common-sense moral views of society at the time about what groups were worthy of moral concern.

Given the importance of figuring out what morality requires of us, the amount of investment by society into this question is astonishingly small. The world currently has an annual purchasing-power-adjusted gross product of about $127 trillion. Of that amount, a vanishingly small fraction—probably less than 0.05%–goes to directly addressing the question: What ought we to do?

They continue:

Even just over the last few hundred years, Locke influenced the American Revolution and constitution, Mill influenced the [women’s] suffrage movement, Marx helped birth socialism and communism, and Singer helped spark the animal rights movement.

This is a tempting view, but I don’t think it captures the actual causes of moral progress. After all, there were many advocates for animal well being thousands of years ago, and yet factory farming has persisted until today. At the very least, it doesn’t seem that discovering the correct moral view is sufficient for achieving moral progress in actuality.

As quoted in the Angulimālīya Sūtra, the Buddha is recorded saying:

There are no beings who have not been one’s mother, who have not been one’s sister through generations of wandering in beginningless and endless saṃsāra. Even one who is a dog has been one’s father, for the world of living beings is like a dancer. Therefore, one’s own flesh and the flesh of another are a single flesh, so Buddhas do not eat meat.

A few hundred years later, in the 3rd century BCE, The Edict of Emperor Ashoka reads:

Here (in my domain) no living beings are to be slaughtered or offered in sacrifice. Nor should festivals be held, for Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, sees much to object to in such festivals

Of course, the slaughter of living beings and consumption of meat would continue for thousands of years. In fact, as I argued previously, the treatment of animals has likely declined since Ashoka’s time, and we now undertake factory farming of unprecedented scale and brutality.

I don’t believe that this is due to our “false moral views”. Unfortunately, we seem unlikely to give up factory farming until we develop cost-competitive lab grown meat, or flavor-competitive plant-based alternatives.

Similarly, the abolition of slavery was plausibly more economically than morally motivated. Per Wikipedia:

…the moral concerns of the abolitionists were not necessarily the dominant sentiments in the North. Many Northerners (including Lincoln) opposed slavery also because they feared that rich slave owners would buy up the best lands and block opportunity for free white farmers using family and hired labor. Free Soilers joined the Republican party in 1854, with their appeal to powerful demands in the North through a broader commitment to “free labor” principles. Fear of the “Slave Power” had a far greater appeal to Northern self-interest than did abolitionist arguments based on the plight of black slaves in the South.

Switching gears, here’s a much more explicit case of moral philosophy failing to enable social change. From Peter Singer:

Jeremy Bentham, before the 1832 Reform Act was passed in Britain, argued for extending the vote to all men. And he wrote to his colleagues that he would have included women in that statement, except that it would be ridiculed, and, therefore, he would lose the chance of getting universal male suffrage. So he was aware of exactly this kind of argument. Bentham also wrote several essays arguing against the criminalization of sodomy, but he never published them in his lifetime, for the same reason.

Here we have a case where a moral philosopher explicitly acknowledges that he has discovered a more progressive moral view, but declines to even publish it. So the fact that Bentham made progress in moral philosophy did not allow him to make any actual moral progress. The two are totally decoupled.

What about gay rights? In the Bykvist et al. narrative, some moral philosopher comes around, determines that homosexuality is okay, and everyone celebrates. But what we’ve seen in the last few decades was not a slow dwindling of homophobia, but a massive resurgence of previously vanquished attitudes. The moral arc has not been monotonic.

So what really did happen? Here’s one alternative narrative:

• Despite efforts by LGBT activist groups, “little change in the laws or mores of society was seen until the mid-1960s, the time the sexual revolution began.”

• The sexual revolution was itself spurred largely by oral contraceptives, invented in the 50s, and first approved in the US in 1960.

So rather than being driven by moral philosophy, what we have instead is a societal shift driven by a scientific advance, which subsequently allowed rapid liberalization.

Can we investigate the claim on a more macro scale? There are some charts from Our World in Data comparing human rights to GDP per capita:

You could argue that this is really just tracking some underlying variable like “industrialization” or “western culture”. But here are some more breakdowns by continent:

Admittedly, even assuming there is a causal relationship, I don’t know which way it goes! There are numerous papers demonstrating the link between democracy and economic growth, so there is at least some reason to believe that economic progress is not primary.

Overall, I would guess that “progress” occurs as a confluence of various domains. Perhaps without a social need, or without a moral demand, oral contraceptives would never have been invented in the first place. But I remain skeptical that investing directly in moral philosophy will accelerate humanity’s march out of moral atrocities.

There is, after all, currently concentration camps in China, a famine in Yemen, and a genocide in Myanmar. The bottleneck does not seem to be our “false moral views”.

Finally, I’d like to posit that the perspective set forth by Bykvist et al. is all too compelling. Consider their statement again: “Every generation in the past has committed tremendous moral wrongs on the basis of false moral views.”

It’s a comfortable view, and one that allows us to put a kind of moral distance between ourselves and the horrors of the past. We get to say “yikes, that was bad, but luckily we’ve learned better now, and won’t repeat those mistakes”. This view allows us, in short, to tell ourselves that we are more civilized than our monstrous ancestors. That their mistakes do not reflect badly on ourselves.

As tempting as it is to wash away our past atrocities under the guise of ignorance, I’m worried humanity just regularly and knowingly does the wrong thing.

Social media is just the market’s answer to a generation that demands to perform. So the market said “Here: perform everything to each other all the time for no reason.”

It’s prison, it’s horrific… If you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.

– Bo Burnham, Make Happy

Alexey Guzey wants to persuade you to start a blog. He doesn’t care who you are or what your credentials. You, random internet stranger, should get out there and start sharing your thoughts.

What?

That’s sounds unjustifiably naive, but in his defense, there is a filter. Alexey’s advice is only transmitted to the kinds of people who read his blog, and thus demonstrate themselves to be the kinds of smart contrarians capable of generating insight. I guess that’s something, I’m just not sure it’s enough.

Let’s try this again. Should you start a blog? Here’s the statistical-quirk-insight-porn version: the blogs you read are, almost by definition, among the most popular. You are systematically exposed to success stories while the failures slither silently in the shadows. It’s all selection bias.

If you like writing and you want to write, do it privately. Share it with a few friends. If those friends insist on sending your writing to their friends, and if those friends-of-friends do the same, then maybe you have something good going on. Otherwise, you’d better keep your day job. Quitting isn’t going to turn you into a creative genius capable of churning out the daily intellectual labor that Substack demands.

Or as Byrne Hobart put it, “Writing: Good Career Move, Terrible Career”. [1]

Having said that, the problem is not even you’ll be unsuccessful and waste a bit of time. It’s that you’ll be moderately successful and waste a ton of time. The US median income is $36,000. That’s $28,000 after taxes, which isn’t a horrible opportunity cost… until you compound 10% annual returns less 2% inflation for 50 years, and realize you’re paying $1,300,000 for the privilege of pretending to be a writer.

But of course I don’t really believe any of that. Here I am writing. And honestly, I quite enjoy it!

With those qualifications out of the way, here is the much more optimistic angle: you probably have no idea before you start writing if it’s going to be any good. Other indicators of success are not good proxies, and it’s very hard to tell ahead of time how good you could be with a little bit of effort, practice and editing. [2]

This somewhat contradicts what I said earlier about top Substack authors attending very good schools and having very good jobs. But that’s just one data set. Here are some biographical notes of popular authors you might actually care about:

• Byrne Hobart had “astonishingly bad” grades in high school, attended Arizona State University (ranked #103 in the US). Then he dropped out to move to Brooklyn and live off rice and beans in a “former crack den”.

• Scott Alexander: Attended University College Cork School of Medicine in Ireland (ranked #151-200 globally for Medicine), was unable to get a residency. Once wrote that all math “slip[s] out of my mental grasp”. Spent 13+ years playing a nerdier and (more) made up version of Dungeons and Dragons, and clearly not in a casual way, but in a “we’ve only had one person totally lose touch with reality” kind of way.

• Alexey Guzey: failed high school entrance exams, was afraid of girls, was very depressed and addicted to video games, and didn’t have any friends.

These are three of my favorite writers. And with all due respect, they’re all massive losers. You could argue that Scott at least had a medical degree (even if it was from a 3rd-tier university). But I’m sorry, if your career plans include the phrase “going back to Japan and seeing if my old English teaching job is still available and whether I can just do that for the rest of my life”, something has gone wrong.

There are a few interpretations.

The first is something to do with growth mindset. Scott, Byrne and Alexey were losers, but then they became smart, capable and hardworking. If true, this implies that you can do great things with your life, no matter how it seems to be doing at the moment.

This sounds nice, but it strikes me as implausible. Sure, you can get better at math and learn new skills, but I don’t think you can just “growth mindset” your way from a community college dropout to world-class writer and financial analyst.

The alternative is much more disturbing, but it’s closer to what I actually believe. The world is filled with deep structural inefficiencies, and there is no guarantee that at this moment, some of our greatest geniuses are not rotting in gutters or trapped in poor institutions. In some ways these writers had difficult lives, but it could have been much worse. For every Wilbur Wright struck down by lawsuits, there may be a hundred Byrne Hobarts toiling away at ASU.

Finally, you might argue that only losers become bloggers, because everyone else is busy working actual jobs and making money. So Scott Alexander looks like a genius, but he’s really just the lord of the flies, or the one-eyed man leading the blind, or whatever your favorite ableist/speciest metaphor is for a winner who’s actually a loser.

That might have been a fair argument before Substack, but these days top authors are so wealthy that it must be a competitive market. It’s possible the non-losers are still catching up and 5 years from now all the top Substack authors will be Harvard-educated ex-Googlers, but I doubt it.

I think it’s just that being successful in real life is genuinely not well correlated with being a successful blogger.

Scott Alexander (presumably) did poorly on his MCAT, but it turns out that had nothing to do with his potential as a writer. Byrne Hobart did poorly in high school, but only along the axis that matters to college admissions officers. Arguably, high school GPA proxies for intelligence, but also for not having anything more interesting going on in your life. Alexey Guzey was addicted to video games, but now he’s addicted to building scientific institutions. It seems to be working out okay.

I still don’t think you should start a blog, but you definitely shouldn’t not start a blog just because you expect it to go poorly.

Think hard, write words, get an audience, find out for yourself.

Footnotes
[1] Disclosure: Byrne Hobart is now a popular and prosperous full-time writer.

[2] More importantly: the upside is so massive that even a 7-figure opportunity cost is easily justified. It’s easy to make fun of hypothetical want-to-be writers for the same reason it’s easy to mock failed entrepreneurs and geniuses. “If I can’t have it, neither can you.” Get back in the fucking bucket. Get back in the fucking box. In the words of Kanye West:

If the slave gets too strong, then the other slaves will feel too proud. So what we’re gonna is take this slave and put him in front of the crowd. And we’re gonna whip his ass every motherfucking day! And tell him "What’s up now??

So when you see the media talk shit about me…

While critics were busy calling him lost and confused, Kanye was writing Ye, his 8th album in a row to debut at #1. While they raced to publish op-eds questioning his mental stability, Kanye was negotiating the deal that would make him a billionaire. While they called his politics internalized self-hatred, Kanye was funding James Turrell’s Roden Crater and donating to victims of police brutality.

The New York Times headline The Battle for Kanye West Is Happening in Real Time reveals more than it lets on. Kanye is not a man. Just a prize to be won. As described by journalist Jon Caramanica, Kanye is merely “a vessel, not an agent” and “all around him, what amounts to a collective global rescue effort for his mind and soul…is playing out in real time.”

This is more than just garden variety condescension. It is dehumanization, disguised as sympathy for the mentally ill. No different than the rhetoric of colonialist missionaries professing to “save the souls” of heretic savages.

From the outside, Kanye is a mystery no one can quite grasp. Is he leftist, as he was in 2005 when he called out “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” on national TV? Far right, as he was portrayed for supporting Trump in 2016? Is he the sinner who wrote “Fuck you and your Hampton house, I’ll fuck your Hampton spouse”, or the saint who hosts Sunday Service?

There are at least three answers.

The first, is that he sold out, or converted. That Kanye was once “woke”, but has since fallen.

Second, that he’s ascended. Like the lovecraftian Old Ones, Kanye exists on a higher plane, leaving us capable only of witnessing his low-level earthly projection, and unable to comprehend behavior impossible in both our physics and our ideology.

Third, the tension lies not in him, but in ourselves. Kanye’s image has been mashed up, remixed and distorted so many times that each side sees only what they want to. Compare, for example, the Atlantic’s headline “Lou Reed Compares ‘Yeezus’ to Farting” to Reed’s actual review: “the guy really, really, really is talented. He’s really trying to raise the bar. No one’s near doing what he’s doing, it’s not even on the same planet.”.

Or to take a more nuanced musical case:

• When Kanye performed New Slaves on SNL, it built in anger for 3 minutes, ending with “I’m 'bout to tear shit down, I’m ‘bout to air shit out, now what the fuck they gon’ say now?”
• As performed live in concert, it contains the same line, but then pours out into an outro “I won’t end this high, not this time again…” followed by this incredible melodic hum from Frank Ocean.
• On the album, there is yet a 3rd version, which follows Ocean’s chorus with a sample from the Hungarian band Omega. As described in that same Lou Reed review: he nails it beyond belief on ”New Slaves.” It’s mainly just voice and one or two synths, very sparse, and then it suddenly breaks out into this incredible melodic… God knows what. Frank Ocean sings this soaring part, then it segues into a moody sample of some Hungarian rock band from the ’70s. It literally gives me goosebumps… just overwhelmingly incredible.

The discord lies not in Kanye, but in our own refracted images of his work.

Our modern world is rife with contradictions, and if Kanye seems incomprehensible, it’s because he’s the only honest person living in it.

The rest of us are content to care for pet dogs, then go on to eat pork. To donate to charity while wearing clothes sewn by slaves. We make transpacific flights to attend climate conferences. Make vows to the sanctity of marriage then get divorced. We go out into society covered in the veil of civility as if we will not be naked, cold and alone each night before our final return to ashes.

Like all of us, he is stuck between animal and God. Both perfectly human and perfectly divine.

Kanye is merely the one who doesn’t turn away.