Hopefully Interesting

People often want to act in a moral way [Citation needed] .  People often also subscribe to ethical rules that in general help them to be more moral.  But that's not the only goal that ethics help people achieve.  One of the very first things I blogged about here was a variant of the trolley problem that seemed to show that avoiding blame seems to be just as much a part of how people approach ethical decisions as any abstract notion of the greater good. There's a tendency that people have, "affectionately" labeled the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics where if a person completely ignores a problem they usually won't receive any aprobrium at all but if they provide an inadequate amount of effort towards solving it they'll often get a ton of flack.  The person who doesn't get involved can just keep their head down and nobody will have any incentive to link them to the problem in the first place and if someone does that person is almost certainly equally

Inspired by a recent-ish episode of Rationally Speaking I figured I'd blog about an idea I've had noodling around for a bit.  Stated simply, trust experts much more on matters of "is" than on matters of "ought".  An expert will tend to know much more about their area than you do but the act of acquiring that expertise and the norms of their profession might cause them to have different priorities and values than you and be conscious of that fact. I think the first thing to consider is the focusing illusion  or the fact that, as Daniel Kahneman put it, nothing is as important as you think it is when you're thinking about it.  When you spend careful thought on some topic you will often find myriad ways in which it affects your life.  If you don't spend equal careful thought on other topics you don't see how those others also have myriad impacts.  And hence, you overestimate the relative importance of the first compared to all the others. Ask someo

There I was taking my morning walk listening to the newest episode of The Weeds  which talked about inflation.  It was a good episode talking about how it can be difficult to measure actual inflation and how it can be a difficult gauge for the Federal Reserve to use since it takes a while to collect information meaning that the picture of the world it provides is always out of date.  And distorted too since information from different sectors arrive at different times. And the calculations are hard too.  If Verizon goes and starts offering unlimited data plans does this mean that data is cheaper, for less inflation?  Or are limited and unlimited plans not actually comparable that way?  I wrote a little on this way back in 2012 but this stuff is hard. This was all a big problem for all of us back in 2008 when the Lehman Brothers was collapsing.  According to the Fed's most recent data high commodity prices were continuing to cause higher inflation than they desired over the last few