Astral Codex Ten

Constraint consequentialists believe that you should try to do good things that improve the world, unless those break hard-and-fast rules (“deontological bars”).

For example, you shouldn’t assassinate democratically-elected leaders, even very bad ones. Why not? Since bad leaders set bad policy, and bad policy can kill many thousands of people, wouldn’t it be for the gre...

As a blogger, I hear about lots of projects to “solve debate”, or “disagree better”, or “map arguments”. Often these are ACX grant applications. I always turn them down. They’re well-intentioned, sophisticated, and doomed.

I appreciate that Internet arguments usually don’t go well, that there are lots of ways to improve them, and that this is a worthy cause. But I’ve a...

This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and

[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]

1: It’s e...

This month, rationalist institution Lighthaven is running their second Inkhaven, a bootcamp for aspiring bloggers. Participants have to publish a post a day, or they get kicked out. You can read their p...