My Intellectual Autobiography

The follies of youth

I recently read Bryan Caplan’s intellectual autobiography in which he details the various major shifts in his thinking about the world between 1988 and 2003. It’s probably one of my favorite things that I read this year—it’s always interesting to see how one went from plucky undergraduate to formidable public intellectual. So I decided that, despite my intellectual biography being much shorter, it would be fun to write. Hopefully seeing how this deeply self-indulgent project culminates—how I got to the views I currently have—will be interesting to some people or to my future self, perhaps when I’m 60 and struggling to remember what I thought around 2018. Of course, seeing as I was not around in 1988 and only briefly made an appearance in the last month of 2003, my intellectual biography is not as detailed or interesting as Caplan’s.

I think that up to around 2015, nothing I thought was especially interesting, though there were a few things I thought about. I was an atheist for as long as I can remember—the idea of god always struck me as deeply silly. I even remember articulating some mediocre version of the problem of evil at one point when I was in first grade or so. I even had a reply to the skeptical theist argument that god has a mysterious plan—I noted (rightly, in my current view) that if you’re omnipotent, you don’t need to cause suffering in pursuit of some grand plan. A parent only needs to inflict pain on their child to vaccinate them because they’re not omnipotent, and can’t vaccinate them without causing any pain.

(A picture from my Bar-Mitzvah, which took place around that time).

Before that time, I still had a few ideas. I remember at my birthday party in 4th grade or so, we had a lengthy discussion about whether money should be replaced by just trading. I was firmly on the side of money. I also watched some atheist YouTube channels, and formed various naïve views—like that there was no evidence for god. All in all though, I think none of this was especially interesting.

In 2015, I was very interested in magic the gathering. After school, I would usually play magic the gathering online for a few hours, on a site that allows one to play with whatever MTG cards one wants to for free. But, having ADHD, I would usually multitask while doing this—listening to music, for instance. At some point, I concluded that because there was an election primary season going on, I had better know some things about politics. So I decided to watch the Republican debates. I still remember vividly—the first I really engaged with politics was listening to the fifth Republican debate—the one where all the candidates except Rand Paul described their desire to bomb ISIS, Iran, and every other nefarious-sounding Muslim group, while Rand Paul suggested that bombing the entire middle-east might not be a good idea.

I watched many more of the debates. This sent me spiraling down a rabbit hole—trying to figure out what was true. My dad was pretty libertarian and introduced me to lots of libertarian thinkers. I still remember quite fondly eating chicken and watching Milton Friedman’s program Free to Choose with my dad on Shabbat, though I would no longer indulge in the former activity.

I voraciously devoured books and videos about libertarianism—I’m pretty sure I watched every video of Milton Friedman or Thomas Sowell on YouTube. I took David Friedman’s book Hidden Order to summer camp, and loved it! I remember thinking that economic reasoning could be applied to food. The rule at camp was that when one took the last of some food, they had to refill it—an often unpleasant process. But, as I noted, this disincentivized taking the last of the thing of food, because the one who did it bore all of the cost. This was confirmed by the frequent presence of one last bread roll—no one wanted to finish it.

I proposed that one person should be in charge of all refilling, and it should alternate by meal. This would produce much more desirable incentives! Unfortunately, such ideas did not catch on, and the tragedy of the bread role continued.

At that time, many of my beliefs were the precursors for things I believe now. I argued for the position that some number of people losing one second of life is worse than one person dying and that it would be worth sacrificing the world to make one person infinitely well off. I also argued at length that one can put a price on a human life—and should! It’s amusing that these views later morphed into my defenses of the utility monsters and the utilitarian verdict about headaches vs. human lives.

I remember, also when I was away at camp, explaining to someone why I wasn’t convinced by the libertarian moral arguments. I thought free markets were efficient vehicles of human welfare, but inherently no more moral than communism. If communism brought about more welfare, I’d support that! My explanation of why the libertarian argument that taxation is theft wasn’t convincing was that even if it is theft in some technical sense, it doesn’t make people’s lives worse in the way that theft usually does, and thus doesn’t inherit theft’s troubling features. When I expressed this to a counselor, she said “that sounds like utilitarianism.” When she explained what utilitarianism meant, I thought it was clearly correct. I was sort of baffled by the presence of nonutilitarians.

Some of the things I thought at this time were clearly wrong in egregious ways. I had the very naïve view that as long as a person has a brain that functions decently, they could be convinced of libertarianism just by describing the arguments. I thought that there was no room for rational disagreement. I remember being baffled the first time I came across a poll of economists and found many of them disagreed with me. I didn’t realize that different people can have different intuitions about cases without either of them being clearly irrational.

Another huge error I made involved confusion about economics. While I think I was mostly on the right track, there were some dumb mistakes I made. For instance, I concluded that the minimum wage wouldn’t raise anyone’s wages—if the person was worth more, they’d just be paid more by free market pressures. I neglected the way that a minimum wage would raise the wages of some people, as can be shown easily on a supply and demand graph. As such, I thought that those who supported the minimum wage were making basic errors rather than having different empirical judgments. In case you’re curious for a glimpse into my thought process at the time, I had a few essays that I wrote—ugh, reading my old writing makes me want to gouge out my eyes.

At this point my two great loves were economics and magic the gathering. Those two subjects occupied about 90% of my mental energy. I frequently listened to, for instance, John Stossel’s show, and was distraught when it went off YouTube. I even convinced a few people to vote for Gary Johnson in 2016.

By the time middle school ended, I was a pretty hardcore libertarian. I briefly flirted with anarcho-capitalism after reading The Machinery of Freedom, but ended up oscillating between minarchy, according to which the government should just provide for roads, police, and military, and a slightly more expansive view, according to which government should also provide modest welfare (perhaps a negative income tax).

As I started high school I became more conservative. I was never quite a conservative—I was most accurately described as a libertarian with some conservative views—but I became more conservative. I listened to Ben Shapiro quite a lot, finding him often wrong but quite sharp. I also became convinced of the pro-life view.

Being in a blue state defending the pro-life view is not fun. It also ended up leaving me more confident in the view, because people’s responses were mindbogglingly terrible—they claimed, for instance, that those lacking uteruses can’t have an opinion about abortion. I have a particularly vivid memory of being in ninth grade and arguing with 9 or so people simultaneously—none of whom were seemingly capable of adducing a single argument!

In ninth grade, I got somewhat involved with debate. This involvement ended up lasting throughout high school. It’s a bit hard to figure out how much of my political shift was caused by debate and how much of it was caused by other things—e.g. watching a lot of the David Pakman show—but by the end of tenth grade, I had moved on to be a relatively free-market liberal. This is roughly the view I currently have, though I’ve probably gotten less confident in my political views since then.

Tenth grade was probably the beginning of my thinking about things in a sophisticated way. I discovered effective altruism through Brian Tomasik’s blog, concluded it was super important, and became vegan. I also came across slatestarcodex, and began to read it regularly.

In tenth grade, though, the most significant change came when I met Ethan.

Ethan is the smartest person I ever met, by a sizeable margin. He’s a few years ahead of me and seemingly never struggles with schoolwork. I once made the mistake of taking a class that he claimed was super easy, and it was one of the hardest classes I took in college. I remember hearing him once joke that in college, lots of people claim classes are hard, but he’s still waiting to find one that is remotely challenging. In one class we both took, I’d study for about a week, while he’d never pay attention in class and only review the study guide the day before the exams—and then he’d always ace the exams, usually doing considerably better than me.

In one of my first interactions with Ethan, we argued about moral realism. I’d been a moral realist for as long as I could remember. In fact, from the very first time I heard about the dispute, moral realism had struck me as obviously true, so much so that if atheism implied moral anti-realism, I thought that was pretty much a knock-down objection to it. But when I argued about it with Ethan, I got completely wrecked. Ethan has this almost supernatural ability to win arguments; he is by far the most impressive debater I’ve ever met. I don’t know if I’ve ever won an argument with him.

After a few more arguments, I decided that I needed to do some reading about moral realism. I took the very responsible strategy of “read books that say I’m right so I can better defend my position.” I remember reading on reddit somewhere that Derek Parfit was a very convincing defender of moral realism, so I decided to pick up On What Matters.

I really loved OWM. Parfit was so breathtakingly clear and completely convincing. Reading Parfit got me hooked on philosophy—I read The Point of View of the Universe and Reasons and Persons and a wide array of philosophy papers. In tenth grade, I think I had some very confused views, which I grew out of. For instance, as of September 21, 2020, in my chat with David Friedman, I seemed to think utilitarianism was right but that moral intuitions weren’t reliable. However, I didn’t realize that if moral intuitions weren’t reliable, then I could rely on my utilitarian intuitions either!

What was really going on was that I found utilitarianism intuitive, but thought that others didn’t find it intuitive. So as a result, throughout much of 11th grade, I made elaborate arguments for why only utilitarian intuitions count—see this paper for a more cogent summary of the basic ideas that I affirmed. I now think that I was just obviously engaged in motivated reasoning throughout much of this period—coming up with a confused moral methodology to justify my first-order normative conclusions. As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to conclude that wholesale skepticism about moral intuitions is untenable, though there are some that we shouldn’t trust much.

I think many of my views throughout 11th grade were largely caused by motivated reasoning. I would start with a conclusion that I found plausible and then find evidence to support it, rather than the other way around. I would brazenly claim that the empirical literature says X, often when I had only briefly found a few studies about something. I was, in a very direct sense, the man of one study.

Throughout 11th grade, I think I got more reasonable. I became a bit less politically dogmatic—more willing to challenge the Democratic party line, though I remained—and remain—liberal. I came to conclude that intuitions are what provide justification in epistemology, and stopped trying to exclude all and only non-utilitarian intuitions. Instead, I concluded that there are many good reasons to think utilitarianism is the most intuitive moral theory when one reflects. Reading Michael Huemer and thinking more about moral realism convinced me of ethical intuitionism.

Towards the end of 11th grade or the beginning of twelfth, I found Richard Chappell’s blog. I caught the tail end of philosophyetc—right before it became Good Thoughts. Richard’s blog made a major impact on the way I thought about things. I stumbled across his blog because it was recommended by Robin Hanson—and after reading a few articles, I almost forgot all about it. But a few months later I came back to it and got hooked. Richard is one of my favorite living philosophers and has hugely shaped my thinking.

I think in twelfth grade, I started to have more reasonable views. In 11th grade many of my views make my current self cringe—not so for my twelfth-grade self. I started this blog midway through twelfth grade, and so you can find what I used to believe through my old articles. I was much more polemical in my writing at the time—I think I’ve mellowed out quite a bit, though I’m still sometimes too polemical. There were some core intellectual mistakes I made.

One big one was that I overcorrected against my earlier self’s anti-intuitionism. I was too skeptical of anything that sounded like anti-intuitionism and, as a consequence, didn’t pay enough notice to arguments from many utilitarians, including Richard and Peter Singer, for why our relatively shallow, emotion-filled case judgments aren’t especially reliable.

In twelfth grade, I started thinking seriously about the hard problem of consciousness. It took me a while to get why it was such a problem. There was a while when I toyed with dualism, but leaned heavily towards physicalism. I came across the writings of Eliezer Yudkowsky and concluded that he was right about physicalism.

Over time, though, my confidence in physicalism slipped a bit. Thinking about Mary’s room and the possibility of disembodied minds undercut my confidence in physicalism quite a bit. For a while, I hovered around, pretty uncertain about physicalism.

Then I made a friend. His name is Chris, and he and I remain extremely close (see here for his only blog post, though he’ll have another one out soonish defending a really mindboggling idea about moral methodology). Chris leans towards epiphenomenalism. When I chatted with him about consciousness, he discussed finding the zombie and explanatory gap arguments convincing. When I repeated Eliezer’s worries about the zombie argument, he explained to me the error Eliezer made. Once my confusion had been cleared up, after a lengthy round of thinking, I became a dualist and have remained one to this day.

At this time, I was much more passionate about philosophy of religion. I watched lots of debates about philosophy of religion, and read about it frequently.

It was also at this time that I started thinking about foreign policy. My friend Ethan had become a big fan of Noam Chomsky around this time. Hearing Chomsky’s arguments convinced me, very gradually, that the U.S. has a deeply horrifying foreign policy. It took maybe a year for me to be convinced, but eventually I was.

For a brief time in 12th grade, I was convinced of moral naturalism. But over time, I came to conclude that moral naturalism couldn’t account for robust normativity—and struggled with other cases. Ultimately, I concluded that naturalism made normativity no more robust than anti-realism.

After 12th grade, I started my first year of college. There weren’t any seismic changes. I had a lot of new ideas in 12th grade, but abandoned few old ideas. I became more left-wing on foreign policy, and thought hard about lopsided lives. Most of the clever philosophical arguments that I’ve thought of were thought of in my first year of college.

I’ve now just started my second year of college. So far in the two or so weeks of college, I’ve:

• Finally realized how 2-D semantics works and the problems it poses for moral naturalism.

• Thought of a new argument for sadistic pleasure being a welfare good.

• Thought of three new arguments against objective list theory.

• Realized the importance of thinking seriously at the margins.

That’s exactly 2 ideas of this caliber per week. Hopefully, this frenetic pace continues, and I had 100 new significant ideas by the end of the year. Though that’s a bit doubtful—I’m not usually this creative.

I’m trying to go into academia. That requires publishing philosophy. I recently completed a paper on desert (the idea is described here) and I’m now writing a paper on a paradox on moderate deontology. Hopefully I can publish something one of these days . . .

I sometimes think about just how close things were to going wrong. If I hadn’t decided on a whim to watch the Republican debates, I probably would be intellectually years behind where I am now. I met Ethan by chance, and yet he really kickstarted my philosophical journey. If I hadn’t clicked the link to Richard’s blog on a whim, I would probably be much worse at philosophy than I am now. I often think about the following lines from the song Happy Accidents:

And another time and place
Where I never even had the chance to see your face

Ever think what if we never met?
You love me, but you don't know it yet
Everything is just an accident
A happy accident

This song could very easily be about my love for philosophy. There are nearby possible worlds where I’m doing economics and lack the concept of a nearby possible world entirely.