I want to avoid three categories of fake catastrophe here:

• Things that only fringe people believe are catastrophes, like vaccines being worse than COVID. You should be able to go to a party of educated adults and find at least a few people who believe them, and when they talk about them others just nod along without questioning them.

• Things you can only believe aren’t catastrophes if you have a very specific political or religious outlook. I want to avoid things like “It’s bad that people are less religious now” because that’s too dependent on the values of the person speaking.

• Things without a clear expert consensus. For example, while I enjoyed The Economists’ coverage of the “myth” of the decoupling of wages and productivity, this is actually pretty contentious, and there are a lot of good counter-arguments to how they present it.

I’ll end with some things that I expected to be fake, but when I looked into them turned out to be real

Fake catastrophes

“More people in the US are getting cancer”

The total rate of cancer in the US has increased since the year 2000, but this is just due to the population being older on average now. If you adjust for age, incidents rates of cancer fell by 5.7% between 2000 and 2021.

“Cell phones/5G/Wifi cause cancer”

This one feels like it’s at the edge of being fringe, but I’ve been to multiple parties where educated people bring it up as if it’s real, and others nod along. There are multiple ways to go about showing that it’s wrong:

• As mentioned above, the average US cancer rate has actually dropped once you adjust for age since 2000. In this time, everyone has completely surrounded themselves with cell phones and wifi. It would be weird if every last one of us had each adopted some new habit that carried a significantly increased risk of cancer, but the cancer rate had also significantly dropped.

• There are two ways radiation causes cancer. Neither makes cell phone radiation look like it can harm us:

  • Ionizing atoms in DNA molecules (knocking electrons out of their orbits). To knock electrons out of place, waves need to each carry a specific minimum amount of energy (I explain this a lot more in my physics YouTube series here) that radio waves fall way, way, way short of. If they don’t carry that minimum amount of energy, they don’t affect the electron’s positions at all. They can oscillate them, but they can’t break them free. Wifi, cell phones, and 5G are all completely, totally lacking in this mechanism.

  • Heating tissue enough to damage DNA. If you heat cells enough, you can denature proteins and damage DNA structures. This is why severe burns increase cancer risk, and is why we can get cancer from UV rays. But this requires significant heating. Cell phone radiation is so weak that the maximum heating it can cause is a fraction of a degree, less than the temperature increase from holding the phone against your face and absorbing the battery heat, going outside on a warm day, or having a mild fever. Your body’s normal temperature regulation handles fluctuations vastly larger than anything wifi or 5G can produce. The FCC’s safety limits for cell phones are set to ensure heating stays below 1°C even under worst-case conditions, and real-world exposure is typically far below those limits.

• The only established way radio waves interact with your body is by heating it slightly, the same principle that makes a microwave oven work. But your cell phone’s output is roughly 100,000 times weaker than your microwave, and it’s not concentrated on you. The actual temperature increase in your head from a phone call is a tiny fraction of a degree—less than the temperature fluctuation you get from drinking a cup of coffee or walking outside on a warm day. If heating were the concern, we’d be far more worried about hot showers. Your body has robust systems for handling small temperature variations; it does this all day every day. The heating hypothesis doesn’t get you to cancer either.

• There have been plenty of studies on cellphone users and brain cancer that have found no relationship.

Climate and energy

“We’re going to run out of fossil fuels”

Basically all forecasts now seem to imply that it’s way more likely that we’ll hit a peak in fossil fuel demand before we hit a peak in fossil fuel supply. This is good. The main bad thing about fossil fuels is that they cause climate change. The fact that they’re finite is a secondary bad, and burning all of them would be disastrous for the climate.

“Wind farms kill birds”

A reader convinced me this is actually more of a problem than I thought, see his comment here.

They do, but not very many relative to other things we do.

Two thirds of bird species in North American are at risk of extinction due to climate change. If you want to help birds, build more turbines.

“Planes are significantly worse for the climate than driving the same distance”

If you compare the emissions you cause by taking a plane ride (dividing the emissions of the plane by the passengers) it’s often comparable to driving solo for the same distance. The reason why plane rides add so much to our carbon emissions is that they cause us to travel way, way farther distances than we would have otherwise, not that they’re drastically worse per mile. In the past year I’ve taken a few plane tripes that were thousands of miles (I flew way more than normal). I would not have chosen to drive solo this far to get to the same place. If I had, my emissions would have been about the same.

I regularly travel between DC and Massachusetts for holidays. If I drive, my emissions are about 120 kg of CO21 (440,000 ChatGPT prompts!). If I fly, my emissions (diving the plane emissions by the number of passengers) are about 110 kg CO22. I usually opt for the train, since it emits way less, but I should definitely not choose to drive for the sake of the climate. That’s the worst option here!

Planes pollute at higher altitudes. The effects of CO2 emissions doesn’t seem to change much based on the altitude they happen at. Some argue that the main bad effects of flying is in their non-CO2 pollutants like nitrogen oxides (NOx), water vapor, contrails, and cirrus cloud formation, which can have a warming effect 2-4 times greater than CO2 emissions alone. But the warming effects of all these other emissions is extremely short-lived. CO2 remains in the air and warms the atmosphere for centuries to millennia, but the warming caused by NOx lasts at most a few months if we consider its ozone effects, water vapor’s warming effects last up to a few years, and effects of contrails last for about a day. These very short warming effects aren’t really what matter for climate change. All the worst effects of climate are in the medium to longterm as more and more CO2 builds up in the atmosphere.

If we break down the immediate warming effects caused by plane emissions on a given day:

• 57% is caused by contrails

• 34% is caused by CO2

• 17% is caused by NOx

Though we’re uncertain about the exact magnitudes. But it seems possible to eliminate contrail emissions from planes for very little money. If we do this, the immediate warming effects of flying will mostly come from CO2 again, and flying becomes pretty comparable to solo driving even if we’re just considering the short-term effects. Unlike driving, flying also doesn’t significantly contribute more to local air pollution that people actually breathe.

If we look at the carbon footprint per kilometer traveled for different vehicles, gas cars and planes don’t look too different from each other, especially not compared to many other options like electric cars and trains:

On this graph “Domestic flights” are considered very short (as you can tell, the graph was made in the UK, so their “domestic flights” are all extremely short), whereas short and long-haul flights are longer. The carbon intensity per mile actually drops off a lot for longer flights:

I tried looking at the trade-off you make in CO2 saved per increased risk of injury and death when you choose to drive over taking a domestic flight, but the absolute risk of injury and death were both still so absolutely low while driving that it didn’t come out to much. Even if you were completely cutting all your CO2 at this rate of risk it wouldn’t add up to too much additional injury risk or death per year. Basically, if flying is more comfortable to you than driving, and those are your only options, and you would definitely make the trip either way, then if it’s a longer or medium flight (over ~400 miles) you should definitely fly, and if it’s a shorter flight the slight increase in emissions might still be worth the trade-off. It’s not a serious disaster. Obviously, if you have the option to take the train, just do that! I’m lucky to live in the Acela corridor so this is an easy choice for me. If you’re driving with other people or in an electric car, driving will basically always be better than air travel.

“The US middle class is disappearing”

Yes, because they’re all getting too wealthy to qualify as middle class.

“Using AI makes people less intelligent (it creates a ‘cognitive debt’)”

If you use AI to cheat on an assignment, it is true that you will not learn that assignment well. Your brain will also show less activation while you do it. But some people are going farther to say that this failure to activate your brain somehow makes you less generally intelligent over time. There’s suddenly a lot of worry about “cognitive debt” after an MIT Media Lab study blew up all over the internet. I’m going to pass the mic to the BS Detector here for a full explanation:

The BS Detector

The Cognitive Debt of Digging Through Preprints

1. One Media Lab preprint is worth a thousand think-pieces…

Read more

10 months ago · 59 likes · 12 comments · Ben

“Testosterone levels are plummeting”

Testosterone levels seem to have fallen. This is an interesting problem, but many reports of how much they’ve fallen wildly exaggerate how much, mostly due to a confusing measurement error.

You may have seen a graph that looks like this on social media:

A fall of almost 30% since 2000! Seems alarming! If this were real I’d be concerned. But it’s not. This Substack post is a good rundown of how this is likely the result of a change in how we measure testosterone, not the actual amounts:

Seeds of Science

Maybe it's just YOUR testosterone that's low

Eryney Marrogi is a 2nd-year medical student at the University of Vermont, and is currently working on AI protein design for continuous monitoring devices at Caltech. Before medical school, he was in the startup world, working primarily on making new viral vectors for gene therapy as one of the earliest employees at Dyno Therapeutics. He came to Dyno fr…

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a year ago · 27 likes · Seeds of Science

See also this Twitter thread. Along the same lines, it seems like the idea of declining sperm counts is currently relying on data that’s too uncertain to draw many conclusions from.

“Landfills will become a major problem as they take up more and more space”

Landfills aren’t bad for the environment and we have unbelievable amounts of additional space for them relative to the garbage we produce. They’ll basically never be an issue for us.

Think of all the garbage you and everyone you know has thrown away. Even just your personal circle could probably make a moderate mountain of garbage if you combined all your lifetime trash. Now think about all the times you encounter a landfill in your day to day life, as you’re driving around. They seem incredibly rare. That’s a weird mismatch!

It turns out it’s just incredibly easy to dig gigantic, well-contained holes in the ground to throw away centuries’ worth of a city’s trash while going mostly unnoticed. I think humans sometimes underestimate just how small they are compared to the planet. Rob Wiblin has a really great rundown here going into details about just how small of a problem landfills are.

“Seed oils are bad”

I’m open to considering stuff like seed oils and won’t write off concern about them right away, but the evidence that they’re harmful does in fact seem shockingly bad. Here’s a long roundup of the evidence. Here’s a good (sometimes goofy) video summary of the state of the evidence.

“There’s a new loneliness epidemic”

Seems pretty uncertain. Americans are reporting spending more time alone, but not reporting being more lonely. See this piece for more.

If you break it down by gender and age, it seems like young men are significantly more lonely, but women over 35 are more lonely than men, and US young men are way more lonely than the OECD average, but so are women over 35:

So it seems like we have something like a continuing loneliness problem that mostly affects men between 15-34 and women between 35-54, not a sudden recent epidemic all concentrated in men.

“Kidnapping by strangers is common enough that parents should worry”

About 350 children are kidnapped by strangers annually in the US. Meanwhile, conservatively, about 75,000 children are kidnapped in the US by one of their parents and are seriously harmed as a result.

There are 73 million children in the US. In any given year, a kid’s odds of being kidnapped by a stranger are 0.0005%, one in 200,000. Obviously terrible, but way way less common than a lot of people seem to believe.

School-specific misconceptions

I was a teacher for 7 years and so got into the habit of debunking common myths about American education. The three central ones I would regularly talk about were:

• Schools are unsafe

• Schools are unfairly funded

• Teachers aren’t paid enough (my very very very very least popular take in education circles was that teachers receive adequate pay)

“Schools are dangerous now because of school shootings”

Back when I was a teacher, I was pretty regularly asked if I was concerned for my safety in schools. School shootings rose significantly from 2015 to 2022:

But looked at in the context of overall school violent deaths, things actually mostly hovered around the same number of deaths each year. This graph only goes up to 2015, but the worst year for school shootings on the upper graph wouldn’t be the worst year for total deaths on this graph, because students are also sometimes killed in other ways.

Schools in the 90’s used to be much more physically violent places, to the point that it was common in kids’ cartoons to jokingly show fight scenes like it was a normal part of life. They’ve become significantly less violent since then, and unfortunately outlier shootings are now balancing out the statistics to keep the overall number of people dying roughly the same.

But even in the peak year for school deaths (2006, with 63), my best guess is that adding up students and teachers, there were 55 million people learning and working in American schools. That means that your odds of being killed in a school in the single most dangerous year were one in a million. In comparison, your odds of being killed in general in America are about 1 in 15,000 each year (22,830 homicides in 2023, total population of 335,000,000). So American schools in the year the most killings happened in them are still about 66 times safer than everyday life outside of them.

“School funding is unfairly based on property taxes. Schools in wealthier areas get way more funding than poor schools because the tax base is richer. Shouldn’t we give the most money to the students who need the most support?”

This is a surprisingly common point in a lot of conversations about education in America, but is basically wrong. Schools are partially funded by local property taxes, but also receive state and federal funding. People in charge have also put together that poor students could also use additional support. As a result, via state and federal funding, spending on American schools is actually somewhat progressive, with school districts serving predominantly poor students receiving more funding in total than districts serving predominantly middle and upper income students.

If you break this down by sources of funding, it becomes clearer that the lack of local funding for poor schools is being made up for by increased state funding.

I suspect that many of the issues with American schools are actually downstream of bad teaching practices rather than insufficient funding. I’ve seen huge amounts of funding go to teaching practices that don’t replicably work. I’d very strongly recommend the podcast Sold a Story if you’d like an example of a catastrophic teaching practice that had huge amounts of funding behind it. Even very well-funded schools often have trouble forcing their teachers to teach phonics!

Real catastrophes

Things I expected to be fake but turned out to be real.

“You can harm your eyes with too much screen time”

It does seem like nearsightedness has grown over the years as more people use screens. This seems to result from the screens (and books, and other things we look at) being too close, rather than the light from them. I expected this effect to be smaller than it was.

I’ll circle back and add to this as more come to me.

• “I am not obligated to behave like an adult, but other people are.”

• “There are secret magical reasons why I am better than everyone else.”

• “I secretly enjoy having problems and want to push that on other people.”

• “I am a coward about my beliefs.”

This isn’t a list of all the ways we think badly, just the ways we think badly that aren’t receiving enough scorn. I’m lightly-to-moderately roasting each.

• Getting negatively polarized

• Being part of a preference cascade

• Not deferring to clear visible expert communities

• Implying that you could detect the deep significance of events, or that there was a way to detect that at all, without explaining the mechanism by which you did that, and implying that you’re just deeply in tune with the universe’s ultimate plan for things

• Implying that the whole world is designed to be a challenge to you specifically

• Speaking in slogans

Getting negatively polarized

It’s become too common to hear people talk with pride about how they got negatively polarized into believing something.

• “The left went crazy and drove me to the far right!”

• “I used to be a normal liberal but other liberals were so annoying that I’m a communist now!”

This is mental weakness.

It's embarrassing to let people negatively polarize you. You're an adult. Stop it. Negative polarization means your brain got hacked by individual annoying strangers. That’s ridiculous.

When I hear someone say "I once met a very annoying person who believed X and now I hate X as a result" my only thought is that the world has 8 billion individuals in it, each one an infinite story we can just barely begin to understand in our brief time here. This person I’m talking to has let that precious truth slip from their field of vision.

Getting negatively polarized is often a sign that the person enjoys having problems. They like the idea of having someone annoying who is causing them problems and turning them evil. It feels like they’re deriving some sublimated joy from the people who annoyed them. The annoying person has given them an exciting narrative where they get to enjoy being the victim. It should be low-status to enjoy having problems like this.

Being part of a preference cascade

A preference cascade is when people who hold an unpopular view realize they’re not the only ones who do, and feel more comfortable expressing their opinions publicly. A lot of people framed Trump’s victory as the cause of some preference cascades, where people got to announce that they had always been secretly more conservative than they let on. “The vibe has shifted” etc.

It should be low-status to pretend to believe things you don’t in the first place.

It’s good to change your mind when new facts arise or you learn more. It’s understandable that in extreme cases you might feel social pressure to not express what you actually believe about something. Outside of those cases, being a part of a preference cascade is somewhat embarrassing. It shows that you were just going along with what was understood as cool without sticking up for unpopular beliefs.

I’ve always been very pro very open immigration. This has recently become an unpopular opinion in America.

For a brief period from 2018-2021 it felt like the open immigration crew was ascendent. That was fun. It was easy to identify with the movement. Now when I mention I support much more open immigration, people who don’t know me well will sometimes react as if I haven’t “Read the room.” Open immigration isn’t a winning idea anymore. I ignore that and power through. I could be a coward and go along with the current vibe and basically lie about what I believe, or I could just say what I actually think. When the next preference cascade comes around on immigration, I won’t be a part of it.

Not deferring to clear visible expert communities

It is hard to describe how sad and skeevy it makes you look to be unwilling to defer to a clear expert consensus.

Life is hard. The adult world is hard. One thing that makes it hard is that there are a lot of ways you can feel low-status throughout the day. Deciding to hack your way out of that sense of low-status by pretending to be secretly smarter than all experts who have looked into a topic is a sad desperate lurch for attention and respect.

When I hear someone say “I’ve looked into the science and we’re not being told the full story about vaccines” I have the same internal reaction as if someone said “I’ve discovered fairies in my backyard. Now everyone needs to love and respect me.” It’s a very obviously weird assertion of your sense of self-importance via an insane reach. “Look! A clear way I could be important! I’ve discovered a Hidden Secret about the world! Everyone else is mindless and blind. Not like me. I’m special. Notice me.”

An expert is someone who is basically another version of you, except they’ve spent their whole life focused on understanding one specific topic. An expert consensus emerges when thousands of versions of you, who all have reasons to undermine and disagree with each other if they think the others are wrong, have arrived on a solid foundation which they assume they can’t fruitfully question. Unless you have an unbelievably solid reason to go against the consensus of a community of experts on a topic they deeply understand, going against them is basically pretending that if you had much more time (and thousands of clones of yourself) to look into a topic, you would somehow do a worse job of figuring out the truth. Seems fake.

A key part of being an adult is learning to give and receive complex forms of respect, care, and love, even when your life is hard. If someone makes these crazy lurches in a clear bid for status, what it tells me is that they don’t feel ready to be an adult.

Implying that you could detect the deep significance of events, or that there was a way to detect that at all, without explaining the mechanism by which you did that, and implying that you’re just deeply in tune with the universe’s ultimate plan for things

I have a memory of the months after 9/11. When people were talking about it, some would say “I remember years ago going up to the restaurant at the top of the towers, and just feeling at the time like something… something bad would happen… something was off.” Ridiculous.

Once you start to look for it, this happens all the time in otherwise smart circles. It’s just masked in fancier language. “Looking back, you could have drawn a straight line from the invasion of Iraq to the election of Donald Trump” Please explain how. What was the exact chain of causality you detected that was so obvious? How did you change or update your behavior or what you talked about in response? What was obvious that we should have picked up on? Most of the time what people mean by this is “I got bad vibes from something bad. Later… something else bad happened. I want to imply that I could detect the underlying bad vibes governing the world. They’re basically demons we should have been more careful to exorcise.”

There are times when I’ve pressed people on these statements and they’ve given great convincing answers to how and why they knew what they did and how they responded to that knowledge, but if you don’t have that ready to go, maybe don’t imply that you’re in tune with the secret forces governing the world if you can’t even name them.

Implying that the whole world is designed to be a challenge to you specifically

A common symptom of spending too much time online is starting to think that all the complex ways people live and act and think together actually mainly exist to be challenges to you specifically.

I sometimes meet people who will find out that I’m a capitalist or vegan or into effective altruism, and instead of talking with me directly about the idea, they’ll talk as if my entire involvement with the idea has been a complex plan to trick them.

This happens most often with veganism. If I offhandedly mention I’m vegan, I’ll sometimes get someone who starts talking as if the whole reason I’m vegan is to trick them specifically into going vegan as well. My saying “I’m vegan” sounds identical to them as saying “I’ve been waiting my whole life to trick you specifically into being vegan.” They respond as if my tricks won’t work on them and go into long rants and counter-arguments before I’m able to make it clear that I’m not trying to have a debate. When this happens, it’s hard not to think that they’re just failing to model me and other vegans as full humans living our lives and responding to what we think are realities in the world, who happen to drastically disagree with them. It feels more like they see me as a 2D side character in their own story. It’s often clear when you meet someone who sees everyone who disagrees with them as basically NPCs in a world centered entirely around their own narrative of themselves, who they need to own and destroy rather than engage with as fellow adults with deep value disagreements. This is another way people fail to fully grow up. Understanding that you’re one of many fallible adults in the world and that everyone has a complex inner life takes time and work to fully internalize.

Speaking in slogans

Every ideology has slogans. People like saying them for the sense of belonging. If you’re having a serious conversation, you should clearly signal that you can step out of that mode and only use slogans if you think they’ll communicate a point especially effectively. Sometimes people don’t do this, and when I try to respond to the slogan, they’ll find a way to wrangle a completely unrelated slogan into the conversation. It’s like the conversation is a river they need to cross and each slogan is the next stone they need to jump to. Their actual job is to make sure I hear all the slogans. If I’m not convinced after I hear them all, I’m an enemy or just fundamentally asleep to the world. This makes me want to pause, wave my hand in a friendly welcoming way, and say “Step out of the game. Just be present with me. Let’s just talk. Be not afraid.”

• I have investigated and compared this contentious belief to others and tested it against the world, and after a lot of careful diligent thought I have decided it is so uniquely powerful as an explanatory tool that I have decided to structure my life around it.

I’ve realized now that a lot of the time, they (and I) are doing something more like this:

• I have muttered this basic idea to myself repeatedly for years to make myself feel important. I first found this idea because a person with a cool jacket said it. I wanted to be more like them.

This isn’t to say all deeply held beliefs are like this, but it happens more often than I thought when I was younger.

We have very strong incentives to construct narratives of ourselves that make us feel important, give us access to the people we perceive as cool and with it, and shield us from the indignities of everyday life. Often the beliefs we trick ourselves into thinking are deeply held are the beliefs we want to be most associated with, because we see them as useful keys to unlock the right social doors. This means that beliefs we perceive as “deeply held” probably don’t have a strong relationship to what’s actually influencing our decisions or how much we’ve interrogated them.

I’ve been in a lot of conversations with people who are seemingly structuring their whole lives around a belief, but when I poke them and ask them simple obvious questions they act like they’ve never thought about it before. This happened a lot in education and pedagogy, a field where notoriously few practices replicate, and a lot of fads take over. I would sometimes meet people who were spending years promoting a specific pedagogical idea as an important key to completely transforming American education. When I would ask simple but specific questions about how the idea compared to others, they would get hand-wavy quickly and not have clear answers. This doesn’t make sense if they decided the belief was important via a lot of exploration of different ideas and evidence, but it does if they want to be associated with something they sense is important and good and high status. I and my friends have had similar experiences talking to people about their deeply held beliefs about politics, religion, and their own careers and longterm life plans.

I’ve come around to thinking that if someone makes it clear that they’re expressing a deeply held belief, what’s often happening is they’re expressing something they want to be especially strongly associated with rather than something they’ve actually thought deeply about. If you think that someone’s deeply held belief is wrong or harming them, you should go ahead and find ways to gently poke at it. Because they want to be strongly associated with it, it’s helpful to give the belief a lot of status and not attack it directly. Instead, just ask boring follow-up questions about the specifics of what they think. It might be that they have actually put a lot of thought into it and can answer your questions, but if they haven’t this can open up an avenue to show them where they might be wrong. The best way to deflate a harmful belief is often to make it boring and clearly uninteresting when applied to the complexities of the world, rather than trying to make it low status directly. You might be surprised at how willing they are to change their minds when the context is shifted even a little.

A sad result of not noticing this until I was older was that there were probably a lot of minds I could have changed, and maybe saved from some bad beliefs, that I didn’t. I shouldn’t have been so deferential to others’ (or my own) narratives of how they came to believe what they do. This seems like one place where we’re especially opaque to ourselves. I wish I could tell my younger self to push people more on what they thought. Thinking this way makes a lot of otherwise difficult conversations much easier to manage, so I’d like to advertise it more as a simple but really useful intuition.

• The title is a nod to one of the funniest blog titles: Reality has a surprising amount of detail.

• Dan Williams writes about a lot of this stuff much better than I can, you should follow him if you haven’t.

Violence is a big deal. The evolutionary environment did not give us good intuitions for thinking about violence, so it's easy to think badly about it. Wrong instincts about violence can worsen your mental and physical life and encourage wrong or even fascistic political thinking about other people and society. I've come around to thinking that many people think badly about violence. I'm not sure how well I'm doing, but I feel pretty confident that each of these statements are true and healthy ways of relating to it, and I'll write more about each one:

• To be a good person, you need to take the problem of violence deathly seriously

• Violence does not transform you into a player in the game of history

• Justified violence does not come with plot armor

• Violent ideation is not a weapon you can use in battle on the astral plane

• The world involves grizzly trade-offs where horrific hellish violence is sometimes morally required because it is better than the alternative. Keeping our hands clean is impossible if we want to be truly ethical

I’ll add to this post over the next few months. I’m expecting it to end up being pretty long. Some additional points I’ll add to this in the future:

• Violence will spring up and can't be re-educated away

• Complex, impersonal systems are required to reduce violence

• Consequentialism or bust

• Direct interpersonal violence used to be the norm

• Violence and the state

A lot of this post will be obvious or repetitive, but I think a lot of correct thinking on violence is obvious and repetitive but still gets forgotten and neglected. This is my attempt to put a lot of obvious and repetitive but important ideas about violence in one place. I have trouble holding these in my head in extreme situations and it’s worth coming back to them and trying to write them out. I hope it’s worthwhile to read! My other posts so far have had very specific topics and focus. In this post I’m trying something new and throwing a bunch of different unrelated ideas that have been important to me at a big general problem and seeing what happens.

A note on the definition of violence I'm using: This post will only discuss violence in the context of direct, intentional actions with the primary goal of causing physical harm to someone else, either committed by individuals or states. I'll distinguish this from ideas like economic violence, where economic decisions harm people without the actors directly attempting to damage each other physically. Economic injustice is real, and violence is sometimes justified in response to it. However, if I don't distinguish between direct violence and economic injustice, the post will spiral into commentary on all forms of injustice, and it's already very long. One of the most common objections to writing about violence is that the author is "ignoring forms of violence which are less visible," which effectively demands to either account for literally all injustice in the world or stay completely silent on violence. You can talk about specific forms of violence without justifying other forms of evil. It’s true that things like private property, borders, and other aspects of the modern world involve implicit threats of violence, and so could be worthwhile topics for a post about violence. Still, any arrangement of society involves tacit agreements about when and how to use violence. I can't turn this post into a treaty on the exact correct distribution of all resources in addition to what I've already written.

Almost every section of this post will circle back to World War 2 and make the same points about it. I see World War 2 as the clearest example of justified mass violence, so it’s an especially useful reference point.

To be a good person, you need to take the problem of violence deathly seriously

Violence is real and a portal to hell. People can suffer from violence in ways many of us can barely understand, if at all. Brian Tomasik has a fantastic essay here on how easy it is to use narrative and mental tricks to avoid how horrific extreme suffering can be. Violence is not something we should play mental games with.

This applies to all forms of violence: interpersonal violence, violent crimes, unjust organized violence from the state, war, and atrocities. Violence from school bullies can leave the recipients shaken and changed for years. Being violently attacked or threatened by a stranger can permanently change your sense of self or relationship with where you live. Police violence against innocent people is at least as bad. Most of us can’t really imagine what war is like.

These facts all seem obvious, but many people lose sight of them. There's a romance to danger and an excitement about violence that many people haven't given up. It's easy to see violence as something bad that happens in a moment instead of as the beginning of a long process of pain and (if the victim is lucky) healing. It's easy to read about a murder and forget that every day for the next 60 years, there will be a person who is not there but would have otherwise been. It's easy to read about a violent assault and not hold in your head that for the victim, daily life will be different and much worse for a long time. War is especially easy to play mental games with compared to its actual brutality. It does not seem possible or worthwhile to react emotionally with the correct level of intensity to each instance of violence, but we should aim to respond with the correct ideas and ways of thinking about it.

Playing mental games with violence and behaving like it’s not a big deal is bad. It will cause you to be less careful about what policies and cultural practices work at protecting people from hell. A clear example of how bad a failure to think seriously about violence can get is pacifism during World War 2. If the US had not entered the war, as advised by pacifist groups at the time, fascism might be a permanent part of the international community. The world would include a lot more hell than it does. The reason we are not living in that hell is, in part, the simple reason that enough people in the US were thinking correctly about violence.

The rest of this post will be rules for thinking seriously about violence.

Violence does not transform you into a player in the game of history

There are specific strands of the left and right who discuss violence as if it gives you access to something more real than your day-to-day life. Everyday life is a veneer hiding the reality of violence, and by participating in violence, you break free and become an actor in the world rather than merely a spectator or pawn. The NPC meme is helpful in understanding people's fear of falling into inauthenticity. An NPC is an everyday person who is functionally unconscious and unaware of the real world. Some people tell a story where violence is your ticket out of life as an NPC, a way to become a player in the game of history rather than a pawn. In the story they tell, comfort and safety are lies or tricks. Violence is the truth.

This is dumb and wrong. Violence will not provide you with the sense of authenticity you're looking for, and it will rarely be the most effectual thing you can do to change history.

On the left, Marxism tells the story that underneath the superstructure of our daily lives and concerns is an economic base built on violence and oppression. What to do about this varies by how thoughtful the specific Marxist is. I don't want to misrepresent thoughtful academic Marxists on this. Instead, I'm trying to call out a pattern of thinking I see in Marxists who are less thoughtful about violence, which I'll call Marxism for Stupid People. Marxism for Stupid People says that because the reality of the world is violence, any violent act in the name of liberation is justified, is an authentic step toward liberation, and elevates the person who commits it to a player in the game of history rather than a mere observer. Most actual Marxist intellectuals have rejected this way of thinking; see, for example, Trotsky's condemnation of individualistic terror in favor of coordinated proletarian revolution. This passage from Days of Rage on the Weather Underground exemplifies Marxism for Stupid People: zero strategy, a desire not to be seen as a wimp, and a faith that you can move history forward by simply enacting violence.

By the first week of February 1970, all three Weatherman groups—San Francisco, the Midwest, and New York—were more or less in place. Everyone, at least in the leadership, understood what would come next: bombings. Perhaps surprisingly, there appears to have been no coordination among the three groups, no overarching plan of attack. Instead, the field marshals in each group—Howie Machtinger in San Francisco, Bill Ayers in the Midwest, and Terry Robbins in New York—mapped out their initial actions independently. Given Weatherman’s leadership culture, it is hardly surprising that a keen competition arose among the three men and their acolytes to see who could launch the first, and splashiest, attacks.

“The problem with Weather wasn’t that people disagreed with our ideology,” Machtinger says. “It was that they thought we were wimpy. The sense was, if we could do something dramatic, people would follow us. But we had to act fast. We had no idea what Terry and Billy were doing, they had no idea what we were doing, but everyone wanted to be first.” Adds Wilkerson, “That was the real problem: all these macho guys with their macho posturing, seeing who could be the big man.”

The extreme right's neuroses about violence are more obvious. Fascism's central premise is that good and virtuous people must use violence against diseased, weak, and evil people who have stolen the vigor of the population under the guise of procedure, abstraction, and neutrality. Violence against weak people is a cleansing and transformative act that strengthens a nation. The Anatomy of Fascism lists the fundamental patterns of fascist thought, all of which point to a simple worldview where violence and will ought to override reason and procedure:

• A sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;

• The primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;

• The belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;

• Dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;

• The need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;

• The need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s destiny;

• The superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason;

• The beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success;

• The right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.

For a fascist, to refrain from violence is not only to be tricked and subdued by your enemies. It also means that you have lost your authenticity and vigor. If this thinking pattern is relatable, you should step back and ask yourself whether you should continue to think that way.

My argument against both the far left and right's conception of violence is simple. The evolutionary environment trained us to think of violence as a way to make things happen. We kill our enemies and take their stuff, and things get better. The evolutionary environment also trained us to eat as much sugar as possible. We should be wary about our impulses here. They make sense in bands of 100 people, not in a world of 8 billion people. A good question to ask yourself if you think violence is a path to impact is whether you have processed how many people are alive today. Take some time to look over this webpage. Of all the ways you could spend your time to have the most impact on the most people, to be effectual in history, how likely is it that interpersonal violence is your ticket to that effect?

What affects society is incredibly complex economic and social processes and individual decisions that mostly have nothing to do with in-the-moment interpersonal violence. Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution had a much more significant effect on the lives of more people than most other humans or movements in the 20th century, mainly accomplished through boring scientific experiments.

Nazi Germany was the most systematically violent society of the 20th century, where very intense violence was built into every economic and political relationship. Individuals lurching toward whatever made them feel meaningfully violent in the moment could not have defeated Nazi Germany. In many cases, individual acts of terror could have made the state more popular. If you wanted to help end the systematic violence of Nazi Germany, you could not merely step into the realm of violence and escape the veneer of the everyday. This step does not exist. What was required to end Nazi Germany was a vast, coordinated war effort with millions of soldiers following carefully planned intricate orders, a massive amount of industrial capacity, and the willingness of specific actors to make gruesome trade-offs in decisions like firebombing cities or building the nuclear bomb to potentially use against Germany. Many instances of successful violence that made Germany less powerful likely felt meaningless to the participants. The mere fact that Nazi Germany was built on violence did not imply that all forms of violence committed by its enemies could harm it. Most could not, or could even help it.

Violence affects history, but this is mostly incredibly complex and coordinated violence, which feels meaningless to the individual participants. Imagine that two armies are fighting each other. One is full of soldiers who will override any intuitions they have if given orders from above. The other is full of soldiers not being commanded who will each individually act in whatever violent ways seem most meaningful. The coordinated army wins every time. There is no relationship between how personally meaningful violence feels and how much effect it has on history. Drone operators have a much more significant impact sitting thousands of miles away from battle than their targets have. The only way to be a player in history is to ignore most of your impulses toward what seems immediately meaningful and what will give you a ticket out of your emotional malaise and instead think and behave extremely strategically with lots of other people attempting to accomplish a similar goal regardless of how it makes you feel.

Justified violence does not come with plot armor

People have an innate feeling that there is some relationship between the rightness of a cause and the ease with which they can be violent for it. Consuming lots of media about superheroes and action heroes who effortlessly mow down their enemies might reinforce this impulse and cause people to imagine that actual violence is similar. Plot armor is the name for the tendency of characters to be invulnerable to death because they are necessary for the plot. Action heroes can kill hundreds or thousands of people, and throughout you know that they will be safe because they need to make it to the end of the movie. If you find yourself with an intuition that you or your side has plot armor because you're right and good, you should remember that this is false!

This long passage from For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War is an especially interesting description of the imagined adventure vs. the real meaningless brutality of actual violence. If you find yourself eager to engage in violence out of any sense that it would be adventurous and exciting rather than completely random, brutal, and meaningless, ask yourself how your experience would be different than the soldiers described:

To judge from their correspondence early in the war, most soldiers were “spoiling for a fight.” Rebel and Yankee alike, they clamored for a chance to “see the elephant”—a contemporary expression denoting any awesome but exciting experience. “Our boys are dieing for a fight,” wrote a recruit in the 8th Georgia. An officer in the 37th North Carolina told his wife that “our Men are allmost Crazy to Meet the Enemy,” while a lowly private in the 13th North Carolina wrote to his father that “the Company is all anxious to get in to a battle and they cannot go home with out a fite.”

…

The zeal of unbloodied troops for trial by combat was scarcely unique to the Civil War. Even in World War II, which Americans entered with less enthusiasm than most previous wars, soldiers seemed anxious for the fray. “The anticipation of . . . getting into a fight stimulates a powerful excitement, which the men habitually refer to as ‘eagerness,’ ” wrote two army psychiatrists during the war. “They become very restless for combat and impatient of delay. . . . The men seldom have any real, concrete notions of what combat is like. Their minds are full of romanticized, Hollywood versions of their future activity in combat, colored with vague ideas of being a hero. . . . They are not at all prepared for the nightmare experiences in store for them. . . . Combat is always a surprise and a shock, because there is no way of preparing for the emotional impact short of actual experience.”

Substitute Currier and Ives for Hollywood in this passage, and it would serve as an accurate description of Civil War soldiers. Many of them found their first experience of combat indeed a surprise and a shock. An Ohio soldier who had written home before his first battle that “Wee ar all big for a fight” told his wife afterwards: “Mary I went into the fight in good hart but I never want to get in another it was offal [awful] mary you cant form any idy how it was the bulets and cannon ball and shells flew thick as hail.” A private in the 6th North Carolina wrote his father after the first battle of Manassas: “Sutch a day the booming of the cannon the ratling of the muskets you have no idea how it was I have turned threw that old Book of yours and looked at the pictures and read a little about war but I did not no any thing what it was.” A Texan penciled breathless diary entries during and immediately after his first battle: “We are lying down in the dark, actually scared nearly to death. . . . We hear amid all the roar of the artillery zip-zip-zip bullets from the enemy. . . . Whoopee now comes the business. . . . Oh what is the matter—is this the end of the world?” A shell exploded nearby “killing one man and cutting off both legs of his brother. The one that had his legs shot off turned his body about half way to speak to his brother, not knowing that he was dead. As soon as he saw his brother was dead, he takes his pistol (a 6 Shooter) puts it to his head and killed himself.” Little wonder that a Virginia private could write, after similar experiences, that “I have seen enough of the glory of war. . . . I am sick of seeing dead men and men’s limbs torn from their bodies.”

Once they had seen the elephant, few Civil War soldiers were eager to see it again. Whether or not they had passed this test of “manhood” with “honor,” their curiosity about the nature of battle was fulfilled, their ardor for a brush with the enemy sated. Rebel and Yankee alike, a great many soldiers wrote home after their first battle in similar words: “I hope I will never be in another . . . no man can tell me any thing about war I have got a plenty.” “I am satisfied with fighting. I wish the War was “over.” “You can never realize the severity of battle and I hope it may never be my lot to go into another one.” A teenager who enlisted in the 9th Indiana Cavalry in 1864 with visions of glory in his head wrote after his first fight, against Nathan Bedford Forrest’s troopers, that he “got to see the Elephant at last and to tell you the honest truth I dont care about seeing him very often any more, for if there was eny fun in such work I couldent see it. . . . It is not the thing it is braged up to be.”

When the romance and glory of war dissolved in the soldier’s first battle, a veteran’s solemnity replaced the recruit’s eagerness. No outfit had been “more anxious . . . to get into a battle” than the 4th Alabama, wrote a captain in that regiment, but 190 casualties at First Manassas “has produced a visible change in the regiment. You hear much less hilarity and joyous songs. My own company has lost some of its best men.” After the 26th Virginia’s baptism of blood at Seven Pines, a lieutenant told his mother that “ ‘the boys’ are not the same romping fellows they were at Glo[ucester] Pt. but a seriousness seems to have come over them all. They say they all wanted ‘to get into a fight,’ but they have had enough of it, until necessity compels them again to it.” A veteran captain in the 1st Maryland (Confederate) noted in 1863, a few months before he was killed at Gettysburg, that new recruits to the regiment “think it would be a disgrace never to have been in an engagement. I can appreciate their feeling and could once have expressed myself the same desire but now all such romance has vanished from my mind.”

A way to think about what large-scale violence is actually like is to imagine yourself, your friends, and your enemies all sitting in a large field, all far away from each other. You cannot move or leave. Bullets are shot into the field from completely randomized machines at random times, between long stretches of nothing. Sometimes, the bullets hit your enemies, and they die, and maybe you feel good about that. Sometimes, they hit your friends, and your friends are really dead. Just as dead as if they were killed in everyday life in a car crash or died from cancer. You will never see them again. Sometimes, the bullets don't kill but cause incredible tortuous pain that your friends have to endure. This process lasts for months. You do not get a break. You are not able to think about much else. Eventually, one side loses enough people to surrender or lose everyone. Everyone else goes home and rebuilds. You're wrong if you believe that actual combat is less random than this. You’re wrong if you think that one side's righteousness makes them less vulnerable to the randomness of violence.

If you introspect and find any intuition that you carry that says that you could be, in any way, protected from the worst outcomes of violence by the virtue of your cause, you should try hard to change your intuitions.

Genuinely virtuous and just causes need to win. If they don't, the world can become hell. World War 2 had to happen. 20th-century fascism needed to be defeated, or the world would have been hell. Good causes need intense strategic thinking, sacrifice, economic and political power, and lots of believers. If you want your side to win, you must work intensely hard on those instead of allowing yourself to be lulled into the fantasy world of easy plot armor violence.

Violent ideation is not a weapon you can use in battle on the astral plane

This is self-evident, yet I find that more and more people need to hear it. Contemporary life can be scary and give you a bad feeling of being out of control. A soothing but wrong and deeply unhealthy way to try to feel control is to imagine that the main task of politics is identifying the bad guys in the world and then spending a lot of time fantasizing about harming them. Many self-identified radicals will not take many radical actions, but will sometimes drop their fantasies of violence and revenge in everyday conversations to show that they’re serious. It often comes across as if they genuinely believe that violent ideation is, in some meaningful way, making the world better, or at least making themselves more effectual, as if they're fighting a spiritual battle on the astral plane against their enemies. Not reacting to it is a good way to deflate someone’s astral plane violent ideation. They are looking for shock value, not serious intellectual conversation or response. Denying them your shock is similar to denying a narcissist attention. It deflates them and makes them focus on other things. If they stop seeing their violent ideation as an avenue to do psychic damage to others and to shock the people around them, they might stop and do something useful.

Peppering your beliefs with violent ideation is a way to make them seem more legitimate, as if you're capable of entertaining violence in a way your enemies are not. This is always an illusion of control and effectualness. The most successfully violent people I know (mostly in the military and Department of Defense) experience no violent ideation at all.

There’s an especially ugly tendency for astral plane warriors to grab onto any news about violence that the average person finds unpalatable and then associate it with their beliefs to give them an edge in conversations. There are times when extreme forms of violence are justified, but eagerness to talk about how big gruesome instances of violence are good and noble almost always comes off as a desperate attempt to coast on the status of the perpetrators as tough and authentic actors in history, so that people think of you in the same way. This is always visibly desperate, and you can tell that the person saying it must really want to be a part of something big and important and latch their everyday concerns to it. It’s a form of worshipping human sacrifice as a prayer to the universe to transform you into an effectual person.

The world involves grizzly trade-offs where horrific hellish violence is sometimes morally required because it is better than the alternative. Keeping our hands clean is impossible if we want to be truly ethical

World War 2 is filled with examples of violence and horror on levels we can barely understand. Many of them also had to happen. Pacifism in World War 2 would have meant a permanent place in the global order for fascism. War is a grizzly horrific trade-off. Around 55 million people died during World War 2, many because America specifically decided to join the war. If America had not joined the war, many more people would have died, but the specific people who died would have been different. America entering the war was thus a decision to cause millions of deaths that would otherwise not have happened to prevent a much greater number of deaths and fascism from taking over Europe. To pretend that we do not have to make gruesome trade-offs like this is effectively to decide that it is better that more people experience hell than that we involve ourselves in morally ugly decisions. The depths of suffering are so deep that we need to make trade-offs to reduce them as much as possible if we want to be good people.

There is a way of talking about questions of violence, as if every side involved is evil for even considering the problem, and the solution is to merely reduce our influence over the world and shift the responsibility for violence to other people. This is very bad. It punishes people who take the issue of violence seriously for the sake of pretending that we can escape intense ethical trade-offs. There are probably times when we can escape trade-offs and avoid violence altogether, but there are also times when pretending we can avoid trade-offs is throwing away our responsibility to prevent hell for other people.

Distinguishing between necessary and unnecessary violence is hard. Part of the reason it’s hard is because of our illusions about violence’s relationship to what’s important. Feeling like we’re committing necessary violence is intoxicating, it gives us a sense of importance as actors in history. Part of the reason making gruesome trade-offs is so distrusted is that it is perceived as pretending to have some great and noble reason for violence when none actually exists, one of the most natural ways people are evil. This distrust is justified, but it doesn’t justify total pacificism. There are too many examples in history of good people needing to get their hands dirty to prevent horrific evil.

George Orwell’s description in Homage to Catalonia of a surprisingly effective nonviolent tactic used against fascists in the Spanish Civil War. This is a clear example where the necessity for violence against very specific fascist troops was in fact an illusion and by soberly examining options, a nonviolent solution was strategically better:

They say it takes a thousand bullets to kill a man, and at this rate it would be twenty years before I killed my first Fascist. At Monte Oscuro the lines were closer and one fired oftener, but I am reasonably certain that I never hit anyone. As a matter of fact, on this front and at this period of the war the real weapon was not the rifle but the megaphone. Being unable to kill your enemy you shouted at him instead. This method of warfare is so extraordinary that it needs explaining.

Wherever the lines were within hailing distance of one another there was always a good deal of shouting from trench to trench. From ourselves: 'Fascistas --maricones!' From the Fascists: ''Viva Espana! Viva Franco!'--or, when they knew that there were English opposite them: 'Go home, you English! We don't want foreigners here!' On the Government side, in the party militias, the shouting of propaganda to undermine the enemy morale had been developed into a regular technique. In every suitable position men, usually machine-gunners, were told off for shouting-duty and provided with megaphones. Generally they shouted a set- piece, full of revolutionary sentiments which explained to the Fascist soldiers that they were merely the hirelings of international capitalism, that they were fighting against their own class, etc., etc., and urged them to come over to our side. This was repeated over and over by relays of men; sometimes it continued almost the whole night. There is very little doubt that it had its effect; everyone agreed that the trickle of Fascist deserters was partly caused by it. If one comes to think of it, when some poor devil of a sentry “very likely a Socialist or Anarchist trade union member who has been conscripted against his will--is freezing at his post, the slogan 'Don't fight against your own class!' ringing again and again through the darkness is bound to make an impression on him. It might make just the difference between deserting and not deserting. Of course such a proceeding does not fit in with the English conception of war. I admit I was amazed and scandalized when I first saw it done. The idea of trying to convert your enemy instead of shooting him! I now think that from any point of view it was a legitimate manoeuvre. In ordinary trench warfare, when there is no artillery, it is extremely difficult to inflict casualties on the enemy without receiving an equal number yourself. If you can immobilize a certain number of men by making them desert, so much the better; deserters are actually more useful to you than corpses, because they can give information. But at the beginning it dismayed all of us; it made us fed that the Spaniards were not taking this war of theirs sufficiently seriously. The man who did the shouting at the P.S.U.C. post down on our right was an artist at the job. Sometimes, instead of shouting revolutionary slogans he simply told the Fascists how much better we were fed than they were. His account of the Government rations was apt to be a little imaginative.' Buttered toast!'--you could hear his voice echoing across the lonely valley--'We're just sitting down to buttered toast over here! Lovely slices of buttered toast!' I do not doubt that, like the rest of us, he had not seen butter for weeks or months past, but in the icy night the news of buttered toast probably set many a Fascist mouth watering. It even made mine water, though I knew he was lying.

I have to admit that I have ugly impulses toward violence against fascists. I can feel myself looking for reasons why it might be preferable to kill them. This is a very bad aspect of my personality, partly because it makes me less effectual at actually reducing the threat of fascism. The only way to correctly decide what violence is justified when is completely divorcing the question from any lingering violent ideation, carefully following the other rules in this post, and soberly weighing the consequences of acting and not acting. Orwell was correct both to identify uses for nonviolence in the Spanish Civil War, but also to later correctly identify pacifism in World War 2 as functionally equivalent to fascism due to the brute reality on the ground:

Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.

I’d like people to know where I’m coming from, so in this post, I’ll list beliefs in philosophy that influence basically everything else that I think about the world.

I wrote this by going through the Phil Papers survey and picking out questions I thought were especially important to my general worldview, modifying some of them a bit, adding a few, and then sorting them by how important they are to everything else I believe. There was a lot I have strong opinions about (I’d choose one box in Newcomb’s Problem) but that I wouldn’t describe as especially important. Others apply to specific situations and political questions (race is definitely a social construct, I’m much less sure about gender, I’m very pro-choice on abortion, etc.) which are extremely important and that I don’t expect to change but that I wouldn’t describe as having a really broad application to literally everything else in the way that something like physicalism does. There’s a small cluster of questions from the survey that I consider especially fundamental to my worldview and which shape everything else I believe, each of which I feel especially confident about. There’s a second section of beliefs I feel less sure about but which still guide a lot of my thinking. There’s a third section of beliefs I have no clue about, but seem really important.

Really fundamental beliefs

Big foundational beliefs that affect everything else I think about the world and which I don’t expect to change.

• Physicalism: The only things that have any effect on the physical world are other things described by or used by the laws of physics. A good introductory article on physicalism here.

• Moral desert does not exist: It is not possible to deserve things in a moral sense based on your actions. Moral desert is a useful societal fiction, but we should remember that it is fundamentally only a fiction and avoid punishing people beyond what would provide solace for victims, rehabilitation and deterrence for the offenders themselves, and safety for society. It is not possible to deserve to suffer, and in an ideal world, everyone would receive the most good we can get them.

• Personal identity reductionism: The self does not exist over and above the series of mental experiences and patterns that constitute a person’s mind. This has some wild implications, including that if I were painlessly killed in my sleep and replaced with an exact clone of me with all my same memories and thought patterns, nothing meaningful about the world would change. Emotionally I can’t fully buy this and still find that I intuitively believe very strongly in a Cartesian Self, but Part 3 of Reasons and Persons is extremely convincing on this and it’s hard to go back to intellectually believing in a Cartesian self after reading it.

• Mental functionalism: “Functionalism in the philosophy of mind is the doctrine that what makes something a mental state of a particular type does not depend on its internal constitution, but rather on the way it functions, or the role it plays, in the system of which it is a part.” - The SEP. If you are a physicalist, it seems hard not to also be a mental functionalist, for reasons I can go into in a separate post. Among other things, this implies that consciousness and mental activity can be instantiated in any system that is capable of performing the same functions as biological brains, regardless of what material that system is made of.

• Political egalitarianism: The ideal society would treat everyone as political and moral equals. There have been many attempts at political egalitarianism which have drastically failed and made the world much less equal (communism, among others), so egalitarianism should be paired with skepticism about specific systems.

Beliefs I’m pretty sure about

But there’s a non-negligible chance I’ll change them.

• Some very vague that often converges on total consequentialism: Total consequentialism explained here. All else being equal, more good things are good, and the total amount of good things is what matters. Among other things, this means that (all else being equal) creating an additional happy life is extremely morally positive rather than neutral, and the future matters.

• Hedonic and preference utilitarianism are both incorrect: I think Parfit’s objections to both in Appendix I of Reasons and Persons are pretty devastating. A simple 1-axis scale of well-being to suffering with corresponding moral relevance is a bad way to think about what’s valuable in life, and preference utilitarianism implies that if you design a conscious agent with specific silly preferences (say, the agent’s single inner preference is to be in Idaho) then fulfilling that preference is comparably ethically valuable to fulfilling other strong preferences like not being in extreme pain, provided that the agent values it enough.

• Value pluralism: While some ways of living are meaningfully worse than others, there are many ways to access the good life.

• Free will compatibilism: We do not have ultimate freedom, but everything we consider “us” has causal effect on the world, so we can be said to have some form of freedom. This means that while moral desert is not possible, we are not helpless observers watching our lives unfold.

• Atheism: God probably does not exist.

• Liberalism: The state should, within reason, avoid commitments to specific visions of the good life. The role of the state is to mediate difference between people’s values and reduce the potential for violence that comes with that difference.

• Capitalism: The market seems to be the most effective way for people with drastically different values and interests to coordinate complex action and build spontaneous order together. I’m a pretty normal US liberal on this. Free markets plus a very strong redistributive welfare state is the best form of government currently available to us and will lead to the most people being authentically free and prosperous. The market is often used to undermine pre-existing class and status hierarchies. I see it as at least temporarily compatible with egalitarianism.

• Animals have morally relevant experiences: This seems extremely likely based on our evolutionary history, physicalism, and functionalism. It has intensely radical implications for how different the world ought to be, both for farmed and wild animals.

• Scientific structural realism: The purpose of science is and should be to attempt to model the way the world actually is rather than coming up with useful pragmatic games that yield correct predictions without actually correctly modeling the world.

• The B-Theory of Time: Article here. The present is a subjective illusion, and the past, present, and future are equally real. This seems to be required for relativity to work, and I doubt that relativity will be disproved.

• Philosophical zombies are not metaphysically possible: Thought experiment explained here. Physicalism plus functionalism mean that whatever is happening in our minds is ultimately physical.

• Semantic externalism: The meaning of a sentence is determined by facts outside of the speaker’s mind and intentions. The Twin Earth Thought Experiment is one of the most convincing in philosophy to me.

• Entering the experience machine would be a bad decision: Thought experiment explained here. What makes life valuable to the person living it is not only the quality of the series of experiences the person has.

Surprisingly challenging/have no idea

This is stuff I think about a lot but have basically no idea about.

• Moral realism vs. anti-realism: Are there moral facts in the world beyond our minds available to discover, or is morality a useful social game we play with each other? This seems like a straightforward question but actually cuts at some foundational questions about the philosophy of language, the meaning of facts and existence, and other things that I do not feel equipped to answer and have never gotten a satisfying account of after a decade of reading about it.

• Mathematical realism vs. anti-realism: Similar to moral realism vs. anti-realism, I have no idea how to explain mathematical entities. Math does not seem either invented or discovered, but there does not seem to be a third possible answer.

• Correspondence vs. epistemic theories of truth: Again, this comes up against the limits of what I know about language and ontology, and I feel kind of useless, but it seems important!

• Objective vs. subjective aesthetic value: This would probably hinge in some way on whether I think moral statements are statements of fact.

• Qualia: Given physicalism, I should not believe in qualia. And yet, I just can’t shake not only an intense sense that they exist but also an intense worry that defining them away would miss something fundamentally valuable and important about the world. This is one of the biggest holes in my worldview.

Contents

• Background

• Does increasing the mass of a car make it more likely for pedestrians to be killed? No! Increasing front end height does though.

  • Incorrect reasons you may think the mass of the car matters

    • More massive cars are more difficult to slow down before hitting the pedestrian (shown by F = ma), so they will hit with higher speeds.

    • More massive cars are more difficult for the pedestrian’s body to stop (shown by F = ma) so the collisions will be worse.

    • F = ma, so the more massive an object is, the more force it creates.

    • p = mv. More massive cars supply more momentum to the pedestrian when they hit them, and because change in momentum equals force x time, they apply a larger force.

• What to actually worry about in a collision

  • Surface area!

  • An intuition for why surface area matters and mass does not.

  • When you’re hit by a car, you want your legs to take all the force, NOT your head or chest

  • Things that indirectly mess you up in a collision

  • Technically, the thing that directly messes you up in a collision is actually pressure

  • Why does mass matter so much when two cars hit each other, and not when a car hits a pedestrian?

    • Stopping distance does matter in a car-on-car collision, so F = ma does apply here

Background

I’m writing this in response to this thread. I don’t want people to think that EVs being more massive means they’re more dangerous for pedestrians, in part because I’m pro EV and want them to replace ICE cars, but also because I’d like people to understand everyday physics and what F = ma and p = mv actually mean. I studied physics in undergrad and taught high school physics for 7 years, and have a semi-popular physics YouTube channel here. If you have suggestions for this post please let me know at AndyMasley@gmail.com.

Does increasing the mass of a car make it more likely for pedestrians to be killed? No! Increasing front end height does though.

The only reason larger cars are more dangerous for pedestrians is their higher front ends, NOT the physical mass of the cars themselves. Even sedans are incredibly massive compared to people, and the difference in mass between a sedan and an electric hummer (a hummer’s about 2.8x as massive) is not enough to change the pedestrian’s experience on its own. More massive cars ARE much more dangerous for drivers inside smaller cars in car-on-car collisions, and if all cars had equal mass the roads would be much safer for drivers, but that’s a separate question from whether more massive cars are more dangerous for pedestrians. I explain the car-on-car collision situation at the bottom of the doc.

A funny intuition to prove this right away is to imagine that instead of the car moving toward you, you are moving toward the car and colliding with it. These situations are equivalent in classical mechanics. Let’s say that you run at a sedan at 10 mph and hit it, and then you run at an electric hummer (3x as massive) at 10 mph and hit it. The main reason you would be more hurt by the hummer is its larger front end area, not the fact that there’s so much more mass waiting for you. In both situations you probably would not meaningfully move the car at all with your force. They’re just two massive objects you can run into.

Incorrect reasons you may think the mass of the car matters

More massive cars are more difficult to slow down before hitting the pedestrian (shown by F = ma), so they will hit with higher speeds.

• Why this is false: F = ma tells us that the larger the mass of a car, the more force is required to accelerate (in common language, decelerate) it by the same amount. However, this does NOT mean that it is more difficult for a DRIVER to slow down a car, because brake systems in larger cars account for the car’s larger mass and are designed to supply more force than brakes in smaller cars. Brakes are built to have the same effect on a car’s speed regardless of the car’s size so that drivers don’t have to supply 3x the force with their foot for cars that are 3x as large to have the same effect. Larger cars are not more difficult for drivers to slow down. This removes one candidate for the mass of the car mattering: speed of impact. Larger cars will hit pedestrians at the same speed as smaller cars will, because the driver’s reaction time and ability to affect the slowing will be the same in both.

More massive cars are more difficult for the pedestrian’s body to stop (shown by F = ma) so the collisions will be worse.

• Why this is false: Pedestrians have basically no effect on a car’s speed, even for sedans at low speeds. If a sedan moving at 10 mph hits a stationary pedestrian, it will be slowed down to 9.5 mph and then keep going (shown in the table below). An electric hummer in comparison would slow from 10 mph to 9.8 mph. Not much of a difference! See the bullet point on p = mv below for how much difference in force the two collisions provide.

F = ma, so the more massive an object is, the more force it creates.

• Why this is false: This is a misinterpretation of F = ma. F = ma describes how much force is required to accelerate a specific mass by a specific amount. It says nothing about how much force a mass “creates” or applies on another object. There IS a relationship between the mass of an object and the force it can supply in collisions, but this is much more complex and based on conservation of momentum and the relationship between change in momentum, time, and force. The relationship between a car’s momentum, mass, and force is explored in the next bullet point. If it were the case that F = ma solely determines how much force an object “creates” when it impacts another object, then an extremely large object moving toward you at 1 mile per hour (let’s imagine a mobile Mount Everest) would immediately kill you when it made physical contact with you instead of just gently pushing you forward.

p = mv. More massive cars supply more momentum to the pedestrian when they hit them, and because change in momentum equals force x time, they apply a larger force.

• Why this is false: We can model a collision with a car and person as an inelastic collision (where two objects collide and stick together and move as one mass). Because of the conservation of momentum, the total momentum of the two objects before the collision equals the total momentum of the two objects moving together after the collision: m_car*v_car + m_person*v_person = (m_car + m_person)v_{after-collision}. The momentum supplied to the person by the car will equal the person’s mass times their final velocity (since their initial momentum is 0). I can make a table of the change in momentum and force on a person at different collision speeds for a midsize car and an electric hummer. A midsize car has a mass of about 1500 kg. An electric hummer has a mass of about 4100 kg. The average American has a mass of 86 kg. We can calculate the force on the person assuming a time of collision of 0.2 seconds and using the equation Δp = Ft, or F = Δp/t, where Δp is change in momentum. 

As you can see, the momentum and force supplied to the person in collisions with each car is basically the same, even though one car is 3x as massive as the other. If we were to increase the mass to infinity, the change in momentum of the person would approach an asymptote at the person’s mass times the car’s original speed, and no higher. Here’s a graph of the impulse supplied to a stationary 80 kg person in an inelastic collision at 10 m/s with an object at different masses:

Small cars like sedans have a mass of 1500 kg, which you can see is already very close to the asymptote of the graph. As you increase the mass beyond that, the impulse only slightly increases as it approaches the asymptote. This graph shows a reason why our intuitions fail us: in dealing with everyday objects (below 500 kg) the mass of the object matters a LOT in collisions. Getting hit with a bowling ball is very different than getting hit with a baseball. Our problem is we carry this forward and assume the almost vertical line on the graph increases forever, when in fact for very large objects it levels off and all collisions with an object above a certain mass are equally bad.

To intuit why this is the case, imagine seeing the Empire State Building moving toward you at 10 m/s. It hits you and begins to push you forward at 1 m/s along with it. Now imagine Mount Everest moving toward you at 10 m/s. It hits you and begins pushing you forward at 1 m/s. Do you think you would notice any difference between these two collisions in the force they supply on you? Probably not, even though Everest is MUCH more massive. Looking up at the graph, you can imagine that line staying flat as it approaches 800 Ns and the mass goes to infinity. The Empire State Building and Everest both lie far to the right on that flat line, and would each deliver about the same impulse (and therefore force) as the hummer and sedan. Cars (even sedans) are already so massive compared to humans that their difference in mass does not create much difference in the force they supply when they hit humans.

What to actually worry about in a collision

Surface Area!

Ultimately, the thing that puts pedestrians in danger is the size of the front of the car, because this determines whether their chest and/or head will be hit and receive force. This means that if we were to attach a vertical block of metal to the front of a sedan, it would become basically as dangerous for pedestrians as an EV hummer that’s 3x as massive. 

What this implies is that bigger cars are in fact much more dangerous for pedestrians, but it’s entirely because of their volume (or more specifically the height of their front ends) rather than their mass.

An intuition for why surface area matters and mass does not

Which of these would you rather be hit by, assuming they move at the same speed? 

Would your answer change if we stretched the limo to be even longer until it were 20,000 lbs, almost 5x the weight of the SUV? If not, this is a clue that what matters is the front end and not the mass of the vehicle.

When you’re hit by a car, you want your legs to take all the force, NOT your head or chest

Seems obvious. I’d much rather have a car hit my legs than my head at the same speed. With higher tops, cars impact your chest/head/other important body areas. That’s why larger cars kill more pedestrians.

Things that indirectly mess you up in a collision

• Being pushed back onto the ground and hitting your head/other body parts on the ground.

• Being pushed under the car and run over.

• Not being pushed to the side of the car

The odds of these happening go way up when the front of the car is higher. With a low sedan, it’s more likely that you’ll fall onto the top of the car instead.

Technically, the thing that directly messes you up in a collision is actually pressure

This section is kind of a deviation from the main point but I want to clarify how the amount of force specifically affects the body

Pressure is equal to the force supplied on an area divided by the area itself. P = F/A. Each part of your body has a certain amount of pressure it can withstand before it breaks. The amount of time the pressure is applied for does not matter. If it’s above what that part of your body can handle, that part of your body will break/puncture. For example, it takes 100 lbs per square inch of pressure to puncture human skin, but you can puncture skin with much less than 100 lbs of force if you use a needle, because the needle has an extremely small surface area. Because P = F/A, making the A (area) extremely small makes the pressure extremely large, even if the force is a normal size. If you spread force applied over the length of a bone, the bone may not break, but if you concentrate the force on a very small surface area of the bone, the bone is more likely to break. This is not determined by how much time the force is applied for.

What determines whether a collision kills you is whether it supplies enough pressure on vital parts of your body, like your skull + brain or ribcage + heart.

A “collision” with a bullet is extremely bad, because even though a bullet has much less momentum (33.2 Ns, assuming a 0.04 kg bullet moving at 2700 mph) than a sedan moving at 1 mph (660 Ns), the force in the collision with the bullet is concentrated in an extremely small surface area (the tip), so it creates an extremely high pressure and will puncture your skin and break bones or destroy vital organs.

Differences in pressure don’t actually matter too much with large cars, because the force will always be equally spread out over the parts of your body that the car hits. What matters is not putting any significant force on the parts of your body that you depend on to survive (head + chest).

Why does mass matter so much when two cars hit each other, and not when a car hits a pedestrian?

Imagine that you’re hit with a grain of sand moving at 10 miles per hour, and then by 10 grains of sand clumped together all moving at 10 miles per hour. The clump is 10 times as massive as the grain, but neither will affect you much.

Now imagine that someone with half your weight runs at you at 10 miles per hour and hits you. Then, someone with twice your weight runs at you at 10 miles per hour and hits you. There would be a big difference between these two experiences!

Now imagine that the Empire State Building and Mount Everest can both slide across the ground. They are both moving at 10 miles per hour. When either one hits you, you’ll feel an immediate large force push you forward until you’re moving with them at 10 miles per hour like a fly stuck to a windshield, and their speed would not be meaningfully affected at all. Everest is MUCH more massive than the Empire State Building, but that difference in mass wouldn’t affect your experience.

What I’m trying to show with these examples is that when objects are much smaller or much larger than you, large differences in their mass don’t matter when you collide with them. However, when objects are around your size, differences in their mass make a big difference in how you experience collisions with them. Cars are the same. A pedestrian being hit by a car will not notice much difference if the car has a mass of 1000 kg or 4,000 kg. However if you’re in a 2000 kg vehicle, getting hit by a 1000 kg vehicle will be extremely different than getting hit by a 4000 kg vehicle. The reason why this works can be shown with math and the conservation of momentum.

Stopping distance does matter in a car-on-car collision, so F = ma does apply here

When two cars collide (let’s say here in a head-on collision), they apply the same force on each other (by Newton’s Third Law) and both begin to crumple as they slow the other. If one car requires a lot more force to stop, it will move forward much more before being stopped than the other car, damaging the other car. F = ma says that the more mass an object has, the more force is required to accelerate it by the same amount. Much more massive cars receive the same force as smaller cars in a collision, but their motion is affected much less by it, so they experience less change in momentum in the same time and therefore the driver of the larger car experiences much less of a force.

This is different than a car-pedestrian collision because a pedestrian has no hope of stopping the car with their body. The car is going to move right through them and carry them along with it.

This post was inspired by similar posts by Tyler Cowen and Fergus McCullough. My argument is that while most drinkers are unlikely to be harmed by alcohol, alcohol is drastically harming so many people that we should denormalize alcohol and avoid funding the alcohol industry, and the best way to do that is to stop drinking.

This post is not meant to be an objective cost-benefit analysis of alcohol. I may be missing hard-to-measure benefits of alcohol for individuals and societies. My goal here is to highlight specific blindspots a lot of people have to the negative impacts of alcohol, which personally convinced me to stop drinking, but I do not want to imply that this is a fully objective analysis. It seems very hard to create a true cost-benefit analysis, so we each have to make decisions about alcohol given limited information.

I’ve never had problems with alcohol. It’s been a fun part of my life and my friends’ lives. I never expected to stop drinking or to write this post. Before I read more about it, I thought of alcohol like junk food: something fun that does not harm most people, but that a few people are moderately harmed by. I thought of alcoholism, like overeating junk food, as a problem of personal responsibility: it’s the addict’s job (along with their friends, family, and doctors) to fix it, rather than the job of everyday consumers. Now I think of alcohol more like tobacco: many people use it without harming themselves, but so many people are being drastically harmed by it (especially and disproportionately the most vulnerable people in society) that everyone has a responsibility to denormalize it.

You are not likely to be harmed by alcohol. The average drinker probably suffers few if any negative effects. My argument is about how our collective decision to drink affects other people. This post is not about what will happen to you if you continue to drink. It’s about what will happen to vulnerable people if you and I and others continue to drink.

I’m only arguing here for personal behavior change, or raising alcohol taxes. I’m not arguing for government bans on alcohol.

Alcohol is a much bigger problem than you may think

The global disease burden is the most comprehensive single measurement of the total death and disability caused by disease. In 2021, COVID-19 was the single leading cause of disease burden worldwide, accounting for 7.4% of total DALYs globally. In comparison, every year alcohol is responsible for 5.1% of the global disease burden.

Between 100,000 and 140,000 Americans die each year due to alcohol, which is 2–3 times as many people as are killed by guns in America each year. Drunk driving causes 290,000 injuries per year in the U.S. and costs society $132 billion per year, or $400 per year per person in the country.

Alcohol probably makes people more violent. 30–40% of men who commit intimate partner violence were drinking at the time. 37% of sexual assaults, 27% of aggravated assaults, and 25% of simple assaults occur when the perpetrator is drinking. Half the people in American prisons had alcohol in their system when they committed the crime they were convicted for.

From Alice Evans:

Indian men’s alcohol consumption is the single strongest predictor of spousal violence. Regardless of wealth, education, employment or location, an Indian woman is much much more likely to be assaulted if her husband drinks. Indigenous Mexicans who drink every day are 13 times more likely beat their wives.

There may be more complex reasons why alcohol is correlated with violence, and it may be that reducing alcohol consumption wouldn’t have much impact on violent crime. However, if limiting alcohol consumption could lower these statistics by even a few percentage points, tens of thousands of Americans would be spared from horrific violence each year. There are some natural experiments on the effects of mass reductions in alcohol consumption. South Africa imposed a sudden and unexpected ban on alcohol in 2020 and injury-induced death fell by 14% and violent crime dropped sharply. This 2018 article on alcohol taxes summarizes the research on alcohol and crime:

Mark Kleiman, a drug and criminal justice policy expert at New York University’s Marron Institute, argues that the research on the alcohol tax is very clear.

“The single most effective thing you can to reduce crime right away is to raise the price of alcohol,” he told me. “If you talk either about crime policy or drug policy, that’s got to be the number 1 recommendation — just because it’s so easy. It doesn’t cost you anything. You don’t have to kick in anybody’s door. You just have to change a number in the tax code and crime goes down.”

Outside of the huge economic costs imposed by death, worse health, and violence related to alcohol, hangovers alone lead to $220 billion in lost productivity each year in the U.S., or $650 for every person in the country per year. Adding this number to the costs of drunk driving alone means that alcohol externalities are costing society over $1000 per year per person. Each person you know is effectively paying $1000 per year for alcohol to be a normal part of our culture, over and above the actual cost of drinks.

Alcoholism is really really really bad. It often (though not always) makes life hell for the people experiencing it and the people who depend on and care about them. Heavy drinkers who are not alcoholics still face shortened lives, serious harm to cognitive ability, and worse physical and mental health. While most drinkers do not become alcoholics, more do than you may expect. 1 in 8 drinkers are heavy drinkers, and 1 in 10 of those heavy drinkers become alcoholics. So at a minimum 1 in 80 people who drink will become an alcoholic. According to the DSM-5’s criteria, 1 in 10 drinkers have either moderate or severe alcohol use disorders.

Why you should stop drinking even if alcohol will not harm you personally

Because alcohol is killing the same number of people as COVID each year, I think we should treat it as a similar emergency. A difference is that many (though not all) deaths due to alcohol were caused by someone who chose to begin drinking, while each COVID victim did not choose to get COVID. I think that there is a moral difference between the two, but not so much that we should “live and let live” and accept the number of alcohol deaths. In this section, I’ll give some arguments for why we have an ethical obligation to denormalize alcohol rather than taking a live and let live attitude to other people drinking.

Most of the time, people behave in patterns they learned from the culture around them. Almost all of my behavior and what I consider normal was learned and copied from the example people around me set. It is very hard to step back from your social context and modify your behavior. In some sense, each individual drinker is choosing to drink, but in another sense, they are each doing what we all do most of the time: following the example of the culture around them. There have been some studies on how much of an effect the general social environment of drinking has on people, and it seems to be quite a lot. This study suggests that the social example of other people accounts for a sizable amount of each drinker’s alcohol consumption:

How malleable is alcohol consumption? Specifically, how much is alcohol consumption driven by the current environment versus individual characteristics? To answer this question, we analyze changes in alcohol purchases when consumers move from one state to another in the United States. We find that if a household moves to a state with a higher (lower) average alcohol purchases than the origin state, the household is likely to increase (decrease) its alcohol purchases right after the move. The current environment explains about two-thirds of the differences in alcohol purchases. The adjustment takes place both on the extensive and intensive margins.

We can compare the normalization of alcohol to the normalization of other behaviors. During the pandemic, part of the reason I was wearing a mask and socially distancing was to set an example for other people. If I lived in an area where no one was wearing a mask or distancing, it would have felt more difficult to choose to wear a mask and distance. Even though each person was individually choosing to mask and distance, our collective choices had a strong effect. We understood that we had a responsibility to normalize a specific behavior to keep everyone safe, even though each person was ultimately responsible for their own actions. I argue that we have the same responsibility with alcohol.

We can think of ideas and behaviors as spreadable in the same way diseases are spreadable. Before vaccines, we understood that we each had a responsibility to be extremely careful about not spreading COVID, to the point of going months without meeting people indoors. The idea that “it is normal and good to consume alcohol” is harming more people each year than COVID did, and it takes much less of a sacrifice to avoid spreading the idea than it takes to avoid spreading COVID.

I don’t think it is much worse to be murdered than it is to die of a harmful highly addictive personal habit. You are a victim of outside forces in both cases. The fact that alcoholics are mainly harming themselves rather than being harmed by other people bears little moral weight for me. In both cases, they deserve a culture that protects them. Denormalizing drinking is one way we can protect them.

1 person dies from alcohol each year for every 1900 people who drink. This means that throughout a lifetime of drinking (let’s say from 20 to 70) 1 person dies from alcohol for every 38 people who regularly drink. We can think of the 38 people as each casting a vote to normalize alcohol and fund the alcohol industry. Because it takes so few votes for an additional person to die, I do not want to be part of that 38.

60% of alcohol is sold to the top 10% of drinkers, who drink an average of 74 drinks per week. This number is misleading and skewed by the top 1% of drinkers, who drink much more than the top 10%, but the fact remains that the majority of drinks are sold to the tiny minority who consume them the most. When you step into a liquor store, the majority of the alcohol you see will likely be sold to people whose health it’s significantly harming, some of whom are addicted to it. When you pay for alcohol, you’re paying a business that is being significantly funded by addicts of the substance it’s selling. You’re helping it stay in business and grow.

I have a special responsibility as someone who is not genetically predisposed to alcoholism to avoid normalizing behaviors that would ruin the lives of people who are not as lucky, in the same way, that we have a responsibility to donate resources to people who were not given as many opportunities as we were.

In elite culture (which in many ways I consider myself a member of) there are sometimes disturbing status rituals where you engage in more dangerous behavior to demonstrate that you’re strong and rich and able to bounce back. There’s pressure to do more intense drugs and to drink more heavily. It’s hard not to see this as a way of filtering out people perceived as unfit or weak. While most people I know do not participate in this, I have been in social spaces where these rituals happen. They’re a form of social Darwinism and I don’t want anything to do with them. Concern about alcoholism is sometimes seen as an implicit weakness. I have a strong distaste for anything that resembles social Darwinism, which is part of the reason why I think we should consider people vulnerable to alcoholism more when we’re making personal consumption choices.

Alcohol is so normalized that most people have no reaction to negative statistics about it. It’s culturally understood that alcohol causes problems, so it’s easier to ignore how harmful it is. If alcohol were anything else and had the same negative consequences, it would be clear that we should not participate in it. If Minecraft were killing 140,000 Americans every year, and if 40% of intimate partner violence occurred after the perpetrator was playing Minecraft, I would not buy or play it. Like alcohol, Minecraft is very fun, but it would not be worth it for me even if I knew it would never personally harm me, because it was having so many negative effects on other people. I would not want to financially support it or normalize playing it.

I can’t think of another activity that’s both as dangerous as alcohol and as normalized. Smoking is more dangerous but much more frowned upon. Driving is more normalized but less dangerous.

Because so many people are being harmed by alcohol, even very small changes in drinking habits can lead to lots of lives being saved. This 2015 study suggests that an alcohol tax that raises the price of alcohol by 10% would save between 2000–6000 American lives per year. If a six-pack of Bud Light costing $0.50 more would save the same number of Americans every year as the number who died on 9/11, it seems clear that individuals setting an example for their peers can also have an outsized influence on the number of people harmed.

It will always be unclear how much effect the example we set can have, but I think it’s higher than we assume. We are highly influenced by the lifestyles of the people we’re closest with. If the 5 closest people in your life were heavy drinkers, you would probably have a very different relationship with alcohol than if your 5 closest people did not drink. Change in behavior of one person in a social group can have unexpected effects, especially if that person is well-respected and clear about why they decided to not drink.

Conclusion

In the past, I’ve been greatly benefited by alcohol. Being drunk sometimes left me so happy that I lingered in a more positive emotional state for weeks after. I take the social benefits of alcohol seriously, but I don’t think they’re worth the cost of so many vulnerable people being harmed and killed, and life without alcohol is just as exciting and fun for me. I understand that for many people giving it up would be more of a sacrifice, but it seems clear that the sacrifice is worth it to protect the people alcohol would otherwise kill and harm.