That seems plausible. There's also hedonic adaptation stuff. Things that seem gross to us might have been fine to people in earlier eras. Although Claude claims that having said all of this, people still often found their food to be gross.

I just made some dinner and was thinking about how salt and spices^[1] now are dirt cheap, but throughout history they were precious and expensive. I did some digging and apparently low and middle class people didn't even really have access to spices. It was more for the wealthy.

Salt was important mainly to preserve food. They didn't have fridges back then! So even poor people usually had some amount of salt to preserve small quantities of food, but they had to be smart about how they allocated it.

In researching this I came to realize that throughout history, food was usually pretty gross. Meats were partially spoiled, fats went rancid, grains were moldy. This would often cause digestive problems. Food poisoning was a part of life.

Could you imagine! That must have been terrible!

Meanwhile, today, not only is it cheap to access food that is safe to eat, it's cheap to use basically as much salt and spices as you want. Fry up some potatoes in vegetable oil with salt and spices. Throw together some beans and rice. Incorporate a cheap acid if you're feeling fancy -- maybe some malt vinegar with the potatoes or white vinegar with the beans and rice. It's delicious!

I suppose there are tons of examples of how good we have it today, and how bad people had it throughout history. I like thinking about this sort of thing though. I'm not sure why, exactly. I think I feel some sort of obligation. An obligation to view these sorts of things as they actually are rather than how they compare to the Jonses, and to appreciate when I truly do have it good.

1. ^{^}

   It feels weird to say the phrase "salt and spices". It feels like it's an error and that I meant to say "salt and pepper". Maybe there's a more elegant way of saying "salt and spices", but it of course isn't an error.

   It makes me think back to something I heard about "salt and pepper", maybe in the book How To Taste. We often think of them as going together and being on equal footing. They aren't on equal footing though, and they don't always have to go together. Salt is much more important. Most dishes need salt. Pepper is much more optional. Really, pepper is a spice, and the question is 1) if you want to add spice to your dish and 2) if so, what spice. You might not want to add spice, and if you do want to add spice, pepper might not be the spice you want to add. So maybe "salt and spices" should be a phrase that is used more often than "salt and pepper".

Would anyone be interested in having a conversation with me about morality? Either publicly^[1] or privately.

I have some thoughts about morality but I don't feel like they're too refined. I'm interested in being challenged and working through these thoughts with someone who's relatively knowledgeable. I could instead spend a bunch of time eg. digging through the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to refine my thoughts, but a) I'm not motivated enough to do that and b) I think it'd be easier and more fun to have a conversation with someone about it.

• To start, I think you need to be clear about what it is you're actually asking when you talk about morality. It's important to have clear and specific questions. It's important to avoid wrong questions. When we ask if something is moral, are we asking whether it is desirable? To you? To the average person? To the average educated person? To one's Coherent Extrapolated Volition (CEV)? To some sort of average CEV? Are we asking whether it is behavior that we want to punish in order to achieve desirable outcomes for a group? Reward?
• It seems to me that a lot of philosophizing about morality and moral frameworks is about fit. Like, we have intuitions about what is and isn't moral in different scenarios, and we try to come up with general rules and frameworks that do a good job of "fitting" these intuitions.
• A lot of times our intuitions end up being contradictory. When this happens, you could spend time examining it and arriving at some sort of new perspective that no longer has the contradiction. But maybe it's ok to have these contradictions. And/or maybe it's too much work to actually get rid of them all.
• I feel like there's something to be said for more "enlightened" feelings about morality. Like if you think that A is desirable but that preference is based on incorrect belief X, and if you believed ~X you'd instead prefer B, something seems "good" about moving from A to B.
• I'm having trouble putting my finger on what I mean by the above bullet point though. Ultimately I don't see a way to cross the is-ought gap. Maybe what I mean is that I personally prefer for my moral preferences to be based on things that are true, but I can't argue that I ought to have such a preference.
• As discussed in this dialogue, it seems to me that non-naive versions of moral philosophies end up being pretty similar to one another in practice. A naive deontologist might tell you not to lie to save a child from a murderer, but a non-naive deontologist would probably weigh the "don't lie" rule against other rules and come to the conclusion that you should lie to save the child. I think in practice, things usually add up to normality.
• I kinda feel like everything is consequentialism. Consider a virtue ethicist who says that what they ultimately care about is acting in a virtuous way. Well, isn't that a consequence? Aren't they saying that the consequence they care about is them/others acting virtuously, as opposed to eg. a utilitarian caring about consequences of involving utility?

1. ^{^}

   The feature's been de-emphasized but you can initiate a dialog from another user's profile page.

I learned about S-curves recently. It was in the context of bike networks. As you add bike infrastructure, at first it doesn't lead to much adoption because the infrastructure isn't good enough to get people to actually use it. Then you pass some threshold and you get lots of adoption. Finally, you hit a saturation point where improvements don't move the needle much because things are already good.

I think this is a really cool concept. I wish I knew about it when I wrote Beware unfinished bridges.

I feel like there are a lot of situations where people try to make progress on the "introduction phase" of the S-curve without having a plan for actually reaching the growth phase. It happens with bike infrastructure. If a startup founder working on a new social network did this, it'd likely be fatal. I'm struggling to come up with good examples of this though.

Also, I wonder if there is a name for this failure mode where you work on the introduction phase without having a plan for actually reaching the growth phase. Seems worth naming.

Haha, yup. I have a Shoulder Justis now that frequently reminds me of this to disambiguate words like "this" and "that", which I'm grateful for.

Yeah, that seems plausible. I have no issues with that sort of a recommendation. I think cover-to-cover recommendations also happen not infrequently though.

I don't think social obligations play much if any role in my pet peeve here. If someone recommends a book to me without considering the large investment of time I'd have to make to read it, but doesn't apply any social pressure, I'd still find that to be frustrating.

I guess it's kinda like if someone recommends a certain sandwich without factoring in the cost. Maybe the sandwich is really good, but if it's $1,000, it isn't worth it. And if it's moderately good but costs $25, it also isn't worth it. More generally, whether something is worthwhile depends on both the costs and the benefits, and I think that in making recommendations one should consider them both.

My claim isn't that they capture all the content or that they are a perfect replacement. My (implied) claim is that they are a good 80-20 option.

A pet peeve of mine is when people recommend books (or media, or other things) without considering how large of an investment they are to read. Books usually take 10 hours or so to read. If you're going to go slow and really dig into it, it's probably more like 20+ hours. To make the claim "I think you should read this book", the expected benefit should outweigh the relatively large investment of time.

Actually, no, the bar is higher than that. There are middle-ground options other than reading the book. You can find a summary, a review, listen to an interview with the author about the book, or find blog posts on the same topic. So to recommend reading the book in full, doing so has to be better than one of those middle-ground options, or worthwhile after having completed one of the middle-ground options.

To be charitable, maybe people frequently aren't being literal when they recommend books. Maybe they're not actually saying "I think it would be worth your time to read this book in full, and that you should prioritize doing so some time in the next few months". Maybe they are just saying they though the book was solid.

Now, every program believes they give students a chance to practice because they have them work with real clients, during what is even called "practicums". But seeing clients does not count as practice, at least not according to the huge body of research in the area of skill development.

According to the science, seeing clients would be categorized, not as practice, but as "performance". In order for something to be considered practice, it needs to be focused on one skill at a time. And when you're actually seeing a client, you're having to use a dozen or more skills at once, in real time, without a chance to slow down and focus on one skill long enough to improve upon it.

The research on expertise is clear: performance, where you're doing the whole thing at once, does not lead to improvement in one's abilities. That's why therapists, on average, don't improve in their outcomes with more years of experience.

The truth is, having the chance to see more clients (gain clinical experience) does not make us better therapists. What does? Something called deliberate practice.

-- Dr. Tori Olds, Picking a Graduate Program | How to Become a Therapist - Part 4 of 6