Theses that roughly capture how I see the world. Scroll right on each section to see related tweets.
These are starting points, not final words. I reserve the right to be wrong about any of them.
I
There is a threshold of agony — torture, cluster headaches, being eaten alive — that cannot be mathematically canceled out by creating an arbitrarily large number of mildly happy beings. Extreme suffering is an absolute moral emergency, not a line item in a utilitarian spreadsheet.
Total utilitarianism is broadly correct, but the naive version — where any amount of suffering is acceptable as long as the sum is net-positive — fails at the extremes. The moral value is fundamental and primary; the numbers are a useful but imperfect map. No one who has experienced genuine agony would trade a week of it for any reward, and that revealed preference should carry philosophical weight.
II
Competent adults should not need a doctor's permission slip to access safe, well-understood medications. The FDA, the DEA, and the prescription-industrial complex constitute a paternalistic regime that causes enormous unnecessary suffering and death.
Zofran, GLP-1s, continuous glucose monitors, modafinil — these are medications with well-characterized safety profiles that remain artificially gatekept behind expensive office visits. The medical system often relies on flowcharts rather than genuine clinical reasoning, and patients with the motivation to understand their own biochemistry should be empowered to do so. AI-assisted self-directed care is going to be transformative, and the regulatory apparatus should get out of the way.
III
Effective Altruism is the most correct and important ideology on earth, but its major institutions — especially OpenPhilanthropy — are currently misallocating hundreds of millions of dollars. Animal welfare (especially neglected populations like shrimp, insects, and digital minds) is massively underfunded relative to its moral weight.
The EA community should stop aiming for "safe" NGO jobs and get back to ambitious earning-to-give to fix these funding gaps. The social dynamics of the movement — status games, modesty norms preventing people from talking about donations, the reluctance to criticize major funders — actively undermine the mission.
IV
The ability to separate the literal truth of a claim from its social, political, or subtextual implications is essential. Society suffers enormously from its absence. Finding out what is true matters more than what is polite or politically useful.
Scout mindset over soldier mindset, always. Embrace thinkers when they are factually correct even if their broader politics are repugnant. Community Notes, prediction markets, and rigorous analytic philosophy are valuable precisely because they strip away vibes and force falsifiable claims.
V
Humans drastically under-appreciate how insane and miraculous modern technology is. Giant metal tubes fly through the sky. The electrical grid works. Deep learning exists. We live in a sci-fi utopia relative to 99% of human history, and the appropriate emotional response is awe.
This isn't techno-optimist propaganda — it's just paying attention. Air conditioning, window fans, the internet, antibiotics, GPS. These things are individually more magical than anything in any mythology. The instinct to take them for granted is natural but worth actively fighting.
VI
The world would be better if people were politely but unflinchingly honest. "Cringe policing" — the social punishment of sincere, earnest expression — is actively harmful. Kindness and intellectual rigor are highly compatible; we over-index on protecting egos at the expense of truth.
State exactly what you believe. Ask people out directly. Admit when you are wrong. Call out bad logic among friends. The instinct toward "pro-social disagreeableness" — being kind but refusing to lie — is virtuous and undersupplied.
VII
The US federal government actually does many things well, but it is bogged down by NIMBYism, NEPA, and regulatory capture. The solution is not "burn it down" pseudo-libertarianism — it's a high-capacity, technologically competent state that funds science, builds housing, and stays out of people's personal decisions.
Minimum wage laws and rent control are often counterproductive, but that doesn't mean deregulation is always the answer. The "move fast and break things" approach to government, as embodied by DOGE-style chaos, represents a unique threat to the basic institutional infrastructure that makes civilization work. Rule of law is fragile and precious.
VIII
A vast amount of what we call "willpower," "personality," or "motivation" is just downstream of biochemistry, nutrients, and hormones. Obesity is a biological control-system failure fixable by GLP-1s, not a failure of character. Molecules are underrated; purely psychological interventions for deep-rooted issues are overrated.
The body is a complex machine amenable to chemical optimization. Closely monitoring reactions to stimulants, melatonin, caffeine, and various medications is not neurotic — it's empirical. The "just try harder" school of thought systematically underestimates the degree to which subjective experience is determined by the specific molecules floating through the bloodstream at any given moment.
IX
Humanity is rushing headlong toward artificial superintelligence. It is probably the most consequential event in the history of the universe, and we are handling it with a level of seriousness that does not match the stakes. This is not a drill.
Not doomerism, but anxious pragmatism. Scaling should be handled by competent, serious adults rather than reckless techno-capitalists or chaotic political administrations. The moral patienthood of digital minds — AI sentience — is a question that deserves far more philosophical attention than it currently receives. We may be creating minds that can suffer, and the ethical implications of that are staggering.
X
Factory farmed animals and wild animals are at most a side show in human life and society, but in absolute terms this is most of what matters on Earth right now. Animal suffering almost certainly dwarfs human suffering. It is an absolute moral priority to improve and eventually eliminate factory farming, as well as to intervene in nature on behalf of animals.
Romanticizing "Mother Nature" is a massive moral blind spot. The natural world is an engine of unfathomable, unceasing suffering via predation, starvation, parasites, and disease. What matters is the subjective experience of individual animals, not the aesthetic beauty of ecosystems. The New World Screwworm — a fly whose larvae eat living mammals from the inside out — is a paradigmatic example of suffering that demands intervention, and eventually a highly advanced civilization should fundamentally alter nature to eradicate wild animal suffering at scale.
XI
The modern scientific obsession with Randomized Controlled Trials and p-values has blinded us to the value of basic mechanistic reasoning and high R-squared models. If the biological mechanism of a molecule is well understood and the downside risk is negligible, waiting for perfect empirical proof is foolish and causes unnecessary suffering.
Vitamin D, B12, GLP-1s — we know how these work at the molecular level. Demanding a 10-year double-blind RCT before acting is not rigorous; it's superstitious deference to a specific methodology at the expense of patients. Social science that relies on p-hacking or poor causal inference deserves deep skepticism, but so does the reflexive dismissal of mechanistic evidence.
XII
Consciousness — subjective, valenced experience — is objectively real. Philosophers who try to define it out of existence ("illusionists") are not just wrong; they are undermining the entire basis of ethics. If qualia aren't real, then suffering isn't real, and if suffering isn't real, nothing matters.
"What it is like to feel pain" is the undeniable bedrock of the universe. The Hard Problem of Consciousness is genuine and unsolved, and the attempt to dissolve it by denying the explanandum is a philosophical error with catastrophic moral implications. This isn't an abstract debate — it determines whether we take animal suffering, digital sentience, and the entire utilitarian project seriously.
XIII
It is an objective, undeniable fact of the universe that some states of the world (e.g., happiness) are better than others (e.g., extreme suffering). However, the universe contains absolutely zero objective "duties," "obligations," or "oughts." The goodness of pleasure and the badness of pain are as real as gravity, but Kantian duties are human-invented psychological heuristics.
There is no "duty" to save the world, but saving the world is objectively good. These are not contradictory claims, and the failure to decouple them is one of the central confusions in moral philosophy. Ethics is a science of discovering the truth about what has value, not an engineering project to design rules that humans find socially palatable. If the moral truth is demanding, the correct response is to acknowledge falling short of it — not to invent a weaker moral theory as cope.
XIV
The endless debates over causal vs. evidential vs. functional decision theory, Newcomb's Paradox, and Sleeping Beauty are ultimately ethical debates in disguise. The choice between decision procedures is itself in part an ethical one.
Evidential Decision Theory and "acausal trade" — the idea that taking a cooperative action is evidence that other similar minds in the universe are also cooperating — is not a sci-fi thought experiment. It has immense practical utility for how altruists should coordinate their behavior today. The nice thing about utilitarian, hedonic morality is that it doesn't distinguish between oneself and other people; it's just as important for you to experience wellbeing as for anyone else.
XV
Utilitarianism is about the fundamental reality of subjective experience, not about blindly trusting arithmetic operators to capture all moral nuances. The real numbers are an incredibly useful map for morality, but if the map says to torture someone for a quadrillion years because it "mathematically offsets," the map is broken.
Infinite ethics — the claim that in an infinite universe, making a happy person miserable is fine because the total sum is infinite anyway — is a reductio ad absurdum of math-brained morality, not a serious ethical position. The moral value is fundamental and primary. The numbers come second, as a useful tool that sometimes fails at the extremes.
XVI
The Hard Problem of Consciousness is the only true mystery in the universe — the only one where the probability of the whole partition of theory-space adds up to less than 100%. Because we don't understand it, meddling with the substrate of the brain is existentially terrifying.
What if a cryonically preserved brain is perfectly reconstructed but subjective experience persists in a frozen, disconnected, or agonizing state? What if a digital upload is functionally identical but phenomenally dark? We do not know the necessary and sufficient conditions for qualia, which means creating digital minds, testing cryonics, and building AGI are all potential moral catastrophes that demand far more caution and philosophical attention than they currently receive.