Are you looking up?

Craig Green
Tue, 05 May 2026 04:58:04 GMT

This is my first post to Less Wrong. I'm not sure if the moderators will consider it appropriate or not. I share it here for feedback on my writing. Nothing in here is likely to be new to readers of this forum. It is hortative literature intended to stir you on to live a rational and ethical life. The material of the exhortation is atypical of what I have observed here, but I've only been a reader for a little while. I was reading through the Sequences when I wrote this, and feel indebted to the ideas expressed therein. Please ignore the Substack link, I'm not committed at all to writing their with consistency. It just felt a bit weird to not do a link post when this is in fact a mirror of something I wrote there. The conclusion in my judgment is a failure, but I was worried I'd never do this at all if I didn't publish it now.

When you are standing on the ground, you can’t really tell how much taller Willis Tower is than everything else in Chicago.

Walking down the street, craning your neck, gawking at the verticality of it all, you can’t make sense of the scale because it is so sheer.

But then you hop on the elevator, and suddenly you are staring down at the tops of sky scrapers, almost as far above them as you were below, wondering what mundane vegetables are growing in rooftop gardens kissing the clouds.

There’s a scene in Skyscraper Live where Mark Rober explains that the sensation of vertigo we get when we approach the edge of a tall building is due to what’s called visual-vestibular conflict. Basically, our vestibular system helps us maintain balance by relaying to our brain information about our head position, motion, and orientation. Visually, in normal environments, we experience this thing called motion parallax, where, when we move, the things closest to us travel faster and further across the field of vision than objects more distant. But when you approach the ledge of a very tall building, everything is so distant, that even though your head is making constant tiny micro-movements, nothing appears to really move, and so you get vertigo.

There’s a similarly enigmatic quality to our experience of large numbers. To reduce our cognitive load, when we read a very large number, such as 10,000,000,000,000, we do not really imagine the contents of such a quantity, but instead just substitute in a symbolic placeholder for the number.[1]

This is computationally efficient, but can lead us astray. Without some sort of visual aid or other concrete reference point to anchor to, we don’t really have an intuitive feel for the quantities in the following statements:

Elon Musk is worth more than 800 billion dollars.

US GDP as of Q4 2025 was 31.42 trillion dollars.

There are approximately 162 million employed persons working in the US as of March 2026.

They all just express numbers too large to be directly imagined. You might have a suspicion that the above indicates some severe disparity in wealth or compensation, but probably that arises more from the name Elon Musk than any intuitive grasp of the mathematical facts and their implications.

Internally, it is thought that we represent magnitudes on a non-linear mental number line, extending from the left brain hemisphere (smaller) to the right (larger), and evidencing itself in strange effects, such as the tendency to generate ‘random’ numbers that are smaller when turning our heads to the left, and larger when turning to the right.[2] This is not something common sense would have predicted.

We often think of mathematical activities as cerebral and idealized, in contrast with more ‘physical’ and ‘embodied’ things we could do, such as kicking around a soccer ball or running a marathon. But the truth is, we don’t think of it as cerebral enough. To calculate with precision is to wrestle with the human body’s mightiest organ.

Lately, one of Logan’s favorite genres of videos, which has grown to a sizable portion of my algorithmic allotment, are astronomical-magnitude comparison videos, such as the following:

In this genre, we are shown progressively larger astronomical objects. Each object flits off screen and the camera pans out to take in a new one. As we progress through the asteroids, moons, planets, and stars, to the black holes, galaxies, nebulae, and finally the event horizon, Logan exclaims, “Whoa, that’s a huge galaxy!” or whatever it is. Cynically, I find myself wondering how long the optical illusion can continue to charm him before his brain becomes inoculated to it.

In other scenarios, our limitations are far less beneficent. In The Most Good You Can Do, Peter Singer writers:

Effective altruism does not require the kind of strong emotional empathy that people feel for identifiable individuals and can even lead to a conclusion opposed to that to which this form of emotional empathy would lead us. In one study, people were shown a photo of a child and told her name and age. They were then informed that to save her life, she needed a new, expensive drug that would cost about $300,000 to produce, and a fund was being established in an attempt to raise this sum. They were asked to donate to the fund. Another group was shown photos of eight children, given their names and ages, and told that the same sum, $300,000, was needed to produce a drug that would save all of their lives. They too were asked to donate. Those shown the single child gave more than those shown the eight children, presumably because they empathized with the individual child but were unable to empathize with the larger number of children. To effective altruists, this is an absurd outcome, and if emotional empathy is responsible for it, then so much the worse for that kind of empathy. Effective altruists are sensitive to numbers and to cost per life saved or year of suffering prevented. If they have $10,000 to donate, they would rather give it to a charity that can save a life for $2,000 than one that can save a life for $5,000 because they would rather save five lives than two.[3]

Wandering the first floor of the Art Institute, I found myself charmed by the familiar scenes depicted in Greek and Roman pottery and mosaic.

A wealthy Roman household adorned their dining room with plain mosaics of food stuffs, flanked by blonde-haired Spring, smiling, and a weary-looking brunette, Autumn. I could imagine the arrangement on the walls of an upper-crust southern home.

A drinking bowl, which would be filled with wine and served at parties, depicts lovers in an erotic embrace, revealed only when the last drought had been drunk.

A λουτροφόρον used to carry water for the ritual bath which virgins would undergo before marriage.[4] In this case, the young woman is depicted in a ναΐσκος, a little temple, indicating that she had died unwed.

A huge sarcophagus for Claudia, his most beloved wife, by Marcus Cerdo.[5]

I did not take photos, but a recurring scene recorded on precious ceramics and in marble reliefs was that of a dead loved one, holding hands with the living, being called upon by some lesser deity to depart to the next life. A father grasping the hand of his wife. Or his daughter. Or two parents saying farewell to their deceased son.

These scenes need no commentary. But I marveled at the artifacts. It is not typical in our culture to commission expensive works of art to record the most painful days of our lives. We are encouraged to move on. We are encouraged to productivity.

I think part of what makes them feel so human is not merely that they depict the common places of our lives, but that they keenly express our self-awareness. The self-confidence of Spring and the exasperation of Autumn reflect the cycle of our own moods and endeavors more than any truth about the seasons. The bowl of wine flirts with those who would imbibe. All the frustrated anticipation of everything lost forever is cruelly embedded in the form of a basin of water.

On the second floor of the museum, there is a painting of a striking scene. Four Native Americans are depicted. A young boy grasps at presumably his mother with a pleading look, who stares off into the distance. His father gazes intently upon her, clasping his hands together within his robe, whilst another, older man waits, looking out the corner of his eyes awkwardly, standing behind the father, as though he were trying to stay out of the family’s discussion. The men are clothed in white, traditional garb, whereas the woman wears a blouse.

The boy is going to pledge himself to an education in the kiva, a large, underground room which served as the center of Puebloan worship and political life. I understand the mother to be expressing reluctance, concerned perhaps about the value and relevance of such an education in the modern world.

Her hidden face invokes a feeling of tragedy in me. Not because there is some clear solution, but the painting hides her face almost in shame, the way we look away from some horrid revelation, like a doctor delivering a fatal diagnosis. How much more would we often prefer ignorance to a knowledge of the inevitable?

Nearby stands a painting of Peter and John in the empty tomb.

When I first saw it, I misunderstood it. In John’s Gospel, the ‘other disciple’ arrives first but waits to enter into the tomb, whereas Peter rushes forward. So I interpreted the painting to depict John standing behind Peter.

But actually, it is John standing at the front. According to commentators new and old, John was much younger than Peter, which aligns with the accepted dates of their deaths. In the gospel, Peter is described as gazing upon the folded linens and cloth which once covered Jesus’s body, but John alone is said to have believed. In the painting, we see Peter, fingers folded together, gazing down, trying to make sense of the evidence, while John lifts his head up to catch the light of revelation, illuminating his face with glory. His clear-eyed expression denotes the understanding of faith.

Are you looking up? What distinguishes us from the other animals is not our ability to feel pain or affection or happiness, but our ability to see dimly the deeper truth of things. Socrates says in Cratylus:

This name, human[6], means, that the other creatures, what they see they do not linger on, neither reason about, nor closely examine,[7] but the human, when he perceives something, he looks carefully at it and considers this thing he has seen. From this alone are human beings rightly called ἄνθρωποι, considering what they have seen.[8]

This is a sort of folk etymology of the Greek word for humans, ἄνθρωπος, taking it to be related to the verb ἀναθρέω, “to look up at,” and in a derivative sense, “to look carefully at or examine,” which serves as the basis of Socrates’s etiology. It is, ironically, not the true one.

Gregory of Nyssa, a father of the church and staunch defender of Nicene orthodoxy, asserts that the image of God, in which man was made,[9] extends even to the bodily form of the human being, in that we stand upright and look upward, unlike the other creatures, which stoop in a bowed position towards the dust.[10] But this natural superiority he grounds in our rational nature, which Gregory says, is not so much a gift given from God as a part of God himself, which he enables us to participate in.[11]

What I like about this conception is that it captures well the tension inherent in our experience of rationality—it is in some sense an alien thing we are grasping onto, a truth that does not fit neatly into the frame of our limited, corporeal perspectives, yet somehow, by a miracle of synapses and electrical pulses, we take hold of reality and pull the truth into view.

In those moments of understanding, we are struck dumb. The conventional term is something like enlightenment, which well captures the way it feels, as though truth were finally pouring into us from the outside, spilling over the lips of chinked jars of clay, the human brain, man made out of dust. The experience of insight comes with a giddiness akin to the vertigo of standing on the ledge—and it’s only a matter of time before we step back.

I’m just making things up at this point, but maybe the narrative is helpful. We tend to run away from the truth. We barely can bring ourselves to focus upon it, even when it is of immense and unsurpassed relevance to our lives. The classical example must be the fear of death. We don’t like thinking about dying even though it is a certainty. But it is but one of many. We almost never think about the mass suffering of animals that we inflict for the purposes of feeding and clothing ourselves. The immense burden of preventable disease we could relieve with only a little exertion on our own part.

Our reflex is to quickly step away from the ethical cliff. We stare up at the tower of suffering in the world and the face of it is so sheer that we just stop counting. Who can tell which is worse from the ground floor? How can I even know what to focus on when my intuitions and heuristics are so poorly equipped for this task?

I remember being a middle schooler in my church youth group, and frequently speakers would talk to us about missionary work sharing the gospel in faraway countries. I would often feel a strong impulse to resolve myself to serve in some way, but as I would start to consider seriously what I would need to do to live a life that was truly selfless and perfectly optimized, I would become mentally nauseated at the endless stream of questions and answers and duties and concerns. The scale of need in the world is too great for us to bear by ourselves.

I wish I had some sort of answer to give, instead of just gesturing at the problems. I try not to look up at the big ones too often because I can only handle so much. And some things I already know. I’m not going to solve all the problems. But we have to keep on trying if we are going to be truly who we are, truly human beings, in all the dignity that our upright stature commands and commends. To be human is to wrestle with God, to struggle to take hold of the truth. It’s to be relentless in our interrogation of ourselves, to be quick to change our minds. Don’t forget who you are.

1. ^

Did you even count the zeros to figure out what number I wrote down, or did you just read on to the end of the sentence with the placeholder a big number in mind?

2. ^

“Head Turns Bias the Brain’s Internal Random Generator - ScienceDirect.” Accessed April 18, 2026. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982207022130.

3. ^

Singer, Peter. The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas about Living Ethically. The Castle Lectures in Ethics, Politics, and Economics. Yale university press, 2015. Pg. 78. Citing Kogut, Tehila, and Ilana Ritov. “The ‘Identified Victim’ Effect: An Identified Group, or Just a Single Individual?” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 18 (2005): 157–67.

4. ^

Some similar practice may be referenced in the letter to the Ephesians chapter 5, verse 26.

5. ^

Thanks to Tyson Watson for somehow translating the effaced script.

6. ^

Ἄνθρωπος that is.

7. ^

The verb is ἀναθρεῖ and it is used throughout in the following sentences.

8. ^

Plato. Cratylus. 399c.

9. ^

Genesis 1:26.

10. ^

Gregory of Nyssa. On the Making of Man. Chapter 8. Section 1.

11. ^

Ibid. Chapter 9. Section 1.

Discuss