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Just how many people are you, anyway?
There's a lot going on in your brain that you aren't aware of. Enough thinking to accomodate a second 'person'? Psychology experiments give us a good reason to think that there are multiple streams of...
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Do we give because we care for others or for our image?
Sorting in Experiments with Application to Social Preferences provides some insight into our giving motivations: “We conduct an experiment to demonstrate the importance of sorting in the context of...
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Chimpanzee game theory
Chimpanzees coordinate in a negotiation game. A crucially important aspect of human cooperation is the ability to negotiate to cooperative outcomes when interests over resources conflict. Although...
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Choosing the best status games for society
Fortuantely we now have more welfare enhancing status competitions than jousting. How much better might we do? Humans have a natural impulse to compete amongst themselves for the esteem of those around...
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Why do we want the illusion that others already trust us?
Katja Grace observes that in certain personal relationships it is not acceptable to actively seek out people’s reputations in order to decide whether to trust them or not. Why do good businesses...
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To truly know yourself, watch your actions not your feelings
Related to: Murder (Meteuphoric), Just how many people are you, anyway?, Do we give because we care for others or for our image? When I propose cynical explanations for human altruism towards anyone...
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Every little bit doesn’t count
Right after writing a post on cynical explanations of human behaviour I read Yvain over at Less Wrong: “Interesting new study out on moral behavior. The one sentence summary of the most interesting...
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We don’t actually care about Haitians
Related to: Don’t help refugees, you bastards A while back I wrote that to know what you as a whole mind really wants, you should look at what you do, not at what the little conscious voice in your...
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Faux altruism at its most hilarious
I found this flyer in a lecture theatre today: “Join in an amazing two week volunteer and adventure program in South America or the Fijian Islands this year. The first week will see you commuting via...
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Why does the most important problem go so ignored?
Michael Anissimov is understandably exasperated: “It’s sad how the people who invented the nuclear bomb and spent their careers dealing with the threat of it are now screaming about the risk of...
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Why existential risk is the most important thing part I
Anna Salamon, Research Fellow with the Singularity Institute, does a back-of-the-envelope calculation on how much impact a single person could have by contributing to a good Singularity (or reducing...
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Does virtual filth set an example or provide a substitute?
It is common to worry that depictions of bad things have a negative impact on human behaviour. Violent movies and video games are turning young children into killers! Smutty advertising is normalising...
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Is a world without nuclear weapons a safer world?
All the recent talk about nuclear disarmament reminded me of a paper by Tom Schelling. As described by Dan Cole: “In the Fall 2009 issue of Daedalus, Tom Schelling explains cogently why a world without...
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Near and far thinking diagram
One way of explaining inconsistencies in human belief and behaviour is to model us as having multiple minds which rarely interact directly. Each set of views and pattern of thinking are brought to the...
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Thresholds in signalling
Most traits we signal are continuous variables: attractiveness, diligence, intelligence, loyalty etc. However, often the signals onlookers receive about our traits are binary, as are the rewards: did...
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For the real reason, check for consistency
“After more than a quarter century of debate, Yale faculty members are now barred from sexual relationships with undergraduates—not just their own students, but any Yale undergrads. The new policy,...
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Are the most important things in life free?
If there’s one thing an economist loves to spot, it is a trade-off. A trade-off puts us on familiar terrain and let’s us feel (not for the first time) that undergraduate microeconomics can make order...
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Why stories celebrate conflict rather than compromise
I wrote this for the Alternative Law Journal some time ago: As I was watching the film Avatar and the cinemagoers around me were cheering on the Na’vi heroes in their fight against human invaders, I...
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Preventing open-ended tasks from consuming your life
I have spent almost all of my life in formal education. One of the most stressful things about high school and university, at least for a diligent (indeed perhaps, obsessive) student like me, is the...
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Building a community of ‘effective altruists’
One of the big challenges in life is finding friends and colleagues who support and bring out the best in you. This is especially the case when your goals are unusual and you are less likely to be...
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Why doesn’t everyone use matching donations?
For the last two years whenever I have felt charitable, rather than directly give away the money – to VillageReach incidentlaly – I have offered to match donations made by my Facebook friends 1:1....
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The principle of ‘altruistic arbitrage’
There is a principle in finance that obvious and guaranteed ways to make a lot of money, so called ‘arbitrages’, should not exist. It has a simple rationale. If market prices made it possible to trade...
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Beeminding your way to greatness
Ever had a long term goal you wanted to achieve, like publishing a paper, getting fit or maintaining a blog, that you always put off and never actually got done? You and me both! I’m not sure whether...
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What do smoking and cleaning have in common?
There are four possible effects a habit can have on someone’s preferences that I would like to distinguish. For convenience I have labelled them appreciation, satisfaction, dependency and addiction....
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Don’t waste time to save money
For many years during my undergraduate degree I was living on a scholarship alone and so learned to be a very frugal person. As computers and mobile phones got cheaper, I would always take advantage of...
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The lives you could have saved
Below is a scene from the movie Schindler’s List. It is one of the most haunting exchanges I have ever seen on the screen. We all find ourselves in the same circumstance as Schindler: confronting...
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La Rochefoucauld on human hypocrisy
Before we had evolutionary psychology, ‘homo hypocritus‘, the subconscious and the modular mind people were still keenly observing human behaviour. Some were extremely insightful in noting our foibles,...
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