David > Recent Status Updates

Read Aristotle and you will discover what it means to be a wise and temperate Macedonian-Athenian aristocratic man. But one cannot resolve tribal disagreements by appeal to virtue: one tribe’s virtues are another’s vices.

Three major schools of thought in Western moral philosophy: Utilitarianism / Consequentialism (Bentham, Mill); Deontology (Kant); Virtue ethics (Aristotle). Aristotle uses manual-mode thinking to describe our emotional settings. Kant uses it to justify. Bentham and Mill use it to transcend.

Without a magic moment to believe in, pro-choicers simply have to draw the line somewhere, while acknowledging that the line is arbitrary. Pro-lifers, on the other hand, must ultimately insist that faith-based answers of their tribe should apply to all people.

When dealing with moral matters that truly have been settled, it makes sense to talk about rights: the risk of being incorrect is smaller than the risk of being insufficiently firm.

“Rights” are brilliant: a trump card that renders evidence irrelevant. Invoking rights allows us to rationalize our gut feelings without doing any work.

...to say that an action is right because it is consistent with the evolved function of morality, or wrong because it’s inconsistent with the same, is still fallacious. It simply doesn’t follow that something is good because it’s doing what it evolved to do.

Morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation.

Abraham is ordered by God to offer up his only son...we would, at the very least, call the police, and expect the Department of Children and Family Services to take Isaac away... we do not hear what Abraham hears, do not see what Abraham sees, true as those experiences may be. So the best we can do is act in accordance with those things that we all see, and that we all hear, be it common laws or basic reason. (Obama)

God is an all-encompassing force, outside of space and time, whose actions are not discrete events that may succeed or fail, but rather features of reality that we humans can comprehend only imperfectly with our finite minds. The fact that God could not approve of rape simply reflects the eternal and essential perfection of his will. (Not bad for an atheist, huh?)

Try translating “the gay lifestyle is an abomination against God” into secular terms. No wonder Santorum feels queasy.

Barack Obama: “Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values.. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons.. but I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all”

The Trolley Problem: a beautiful, fruit-fly-like model of all the things that had been puzzling me since my early teens. First, the Trolley Problem took the big, philosophical problem behind all of those high school debates and boiled it down to its essence: When, and why, do the rights of the individual take precedence over the greater good?

To attribute obesity to overeating is as meaningful as to account for alcoholism by ascribing it to over-drinking.

Joslin was the first of the many influential medical authorities who literally didn’t know what they were talking about when talking about sugar.

Homer Simpson seems to have forgotten where he put his reflective system. Homer once replied to a gun store clerk who informed him about a mandatory 5-day waiting period before buying a weapon – “5 days! But I’m mad now!”

How can two guys with such similar genes, raised by the same parents, in the same town, have such opposite feelings about baseball? What determines the adults we become? More fundamentally, what’s wrong with [my brother] Noah?

“…research has found that a meaningful percent of teenagers tell surveys they are more than seven feet tall, weigh more than 400 pounds, or have three children. One survey found that 99% of students who reported having an artificial limb to academic researchers were kidding."

Stated as fact: Our standard of living is not declining because of migrants but because of unregulated neoliberal capitalism, which has allowed corporations and the rich to avoid paying taxes or decent wages.

We cannot rely on a few well-intentioned individuals to rein in excessive police power. Countervailing institutional bases of power must be positioned to monitor the police actively and thoroughly.

In my rucksack are bleach and other cleaning products, that I bought at a petrol station on the long walk back from the forest. If you ever need to buy anything suspicious, it helps to buy some super-plus Tampax at the same time. Cashiers seem to get so flustered by them, they rarely pay attention to the rest of your purchases. They’ll want to get that box in a bag for you as fast as possible. Try it.

Aging is going to be remarkably easy to tackle – easier than cancer. I know how that sounds: it sounds crazy. But so did the idea of microorganisms...Just by washing up before surgery, we have profoundly improved the rates at which patients survive. Once we understood what the problem was, it was an easy problem to solve.

We also see that NMN is able to restore the fertility of old mice who have had all their eggs killed off by chemotherapy or who have gone through mouseopause.

Could we do this [add extra copies of NAD-producing enzyme] in humans? Theoretically, yes. We already have the technology to do it in my lab, using viruses to deliver the human equivalent of the PNC1 gene called NAMPT. But turning humans into transgenic organisms requires more paperwork, and considerably more knowledge about safety.

We are the guardians of the future of life now, as we shape the age of AI. …There is nothing inevitable about this future… [it is] easier to make a difference than I thought. Our future isn’t written in stone and just waiting to happen to us. It is ours to create. Let’s create an inspiring one, together.

...Yet [popular] futuristic visions are largely dystopian...We need more mindful optimists. ...Think about what future you want, rather than only about what future you fear.

[Maya] insisted that we give [the nonprofit organization] a positive name, as different as possible from “Doom and Gloom Institute” and “Let’s Worry about the Future Institute.” ... We converged on the “Future of Life Institute: FLI.”

Sure, we need to keep in mind these possibilities [intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe], but since there’s no generally-accepted evidence for any of them, we also need to take seriously the alternative – that we are alone.

Do you want a civilization striving towards a greater purpose that you sympathize with, or, are you OK with future lifeforms that appear content, even if you view their goals as pointlessly banal?

Horse 1 "I'm worried about technological unemployment"
H2: “Neigh! Neigh! Don’t be a Luddite. Our ancestors said the same thing when steam engines took our industry jobs.. we have more jobs than ever today, and they’re better, too! ...
H1: "But what if this internal combustion engine thing really takes off?”
H2: I’m sure there’ll be new jobs for horses that we haven’t yet imagined!

Our system was not designed for civility and cooperation; it was designed for compromise – a very different concept. Bipartisanship is highly overrated. ... When the lion lies down with the lamb, they are probably both up to no good.