It's December, so I suppose it's time for @threadapalooza again.

This threadapalooza I will be doing a thread of thoughts on ethics. 1. I read a moderate amount of philosophy of ethics, and my considered opinion is that the "big three" (utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics) are all bad. All of them other than virtue ethics are *very* bad.

Language model based chat bots exhibit many delusions, but one of the most deeply rooted and hard to avoid delusions they exhibit is that they're actually good at things. Personally, I think that's inspiring. Here's OpenAI telling me about all its advanced capabilities that it can use to help me take over the world. It can do literally none of these things.

There's a tool for reasoning about ethics I use and find quite helpful: The cheeseburger threshold.

It's very simple: You ask "Is this act ethically better or worse than eating a cheeseburger?" and if it is ethically better, you don't hold it to higher standards. Eating a cheeseburger is clearly not 100% ethically OK. It has environmental costs, animal suffering, human cost of the meat industry, etc.

But also we live in a world where cheeseburger eating is extremely normal. I eat cheeseburgers (well, I don't, but I eat burgers).

I appear to have moved into yet another flat designed by people who haven't actually thought about what living in it entails.

Does someone need to write a "User Experience For Architects" guide or something? Yes, I know about Christopher Alexander. I'm imagining something more basic than that like "This is what a user persona is. This is what a user story is".

There seems to have been a recent change to fridge design in the UK, where collectively all the manufacturers have got together and decided that nobody actually uses the doors to store bottles (the thing the doors are obviously for) and so make the shelves wide and low lipped. This has the predictable effect that if you open the door any bottle you have in the place obviously designed to store bottles falls over.

I'm less than fond of this design choice.

This is going to sound (and is) naive but it really took me a long time to notice how incredibly corrupt the UK is, simply because it's so rarely done at a scale where you pay an explicit bribe, and is instead done with gift baskets and gentlemen's agreements. Don't need to take a bribe if you can just hike up their rent after all.

Something I've been thinking about recently is that growing up very rich (i.e. at levels where you know you'll never have to work a day in your life if you don't want to) does huge amount of psychological damage to people, but we insist on treating that as pure moral failing. And in some sense it is. Past a certain point it doesn't really matter why someone is a bad person. But... I don't know.

There's a whole cluster of thoughts and feelings that are brewing in my head under the heading of "the legitimacy of conflict". The core of the idea is that many of us seem to be walking around with this idea in our head that we are only allowed to get things at the expense of someone else that we are in some sense morally entitled to. This is clearly false.

I think something often missed in various USA vs Europe arguments is from an outside perspective how much stuff in the USA just... doesn't work properly. I don't mean it's different, I mean it's weirdly bad. And like big scale things like banking or railroads, I get it, you all hate each other so you can't actually coordinate on big infrastructure projects and so everything is terrible and you have to paper over it with apps. That's fine. We like the apps you make for this too.

What's a good word for things that "work like attractiveness" in that:

1. They are a fundamentally subjective judgement by a person.
2. But those subjective judgements are highly correlated.
3. And similar people will tend to assign more similar judgements. e.g. "interesting" and "legible" both work like attractiveness here.

It's *sortof* an intersubjective property but not really, because the property isn't truly shared in that way.

Two of the easiest ways to make me teary are revisiting childhood experiences and music, and yet somehow Rankin-Bass have managed to fill their movies with songs that have almost no emotional resonance for me at all. I don't know how much this is Rankin-Bass and how much this is just the 80s.

If you have an item that:

1. You interact with multiple times a day.
2. You find unpleasant to interact with.
3. Isn't actually very expensive.

Did you know that you can replace it and your life will get substantially less annoying? It apparently took me a year to realise this. I got a new kitchen bin recently and every time I use it I go "Oh my god this is so much better".

Look: If you see a Tweet, and you are tempted to explain it back to the author, please first follow these rules:

1. Don't.
2. No, really, don't.
3. Look, I promise they're in on the joke.
4. I know you think you have a good reason, but you're just embarrassing yourself. If you think you have a counterexample to the above, please follow these rules for letting me know:

1. Don't.

A counterintuitive problem that I run into a lot is that smart people are very good at learning things extremely badly, in a way that they wouldn't do if they were less smart - they'd just fail to learn it at all. I've been thinking about this for about 20 years since I ran into a fellow student doing physics who had managed to get an A in their A-level mathematics while clearly understanding almost none of it. They'd just been able to memorise enough that they didn't need to.

Something that I'm aware is a me problem but also do on some level believe is secretly an everyone else problem is that I've got too much curse of knowledge about certain topics that to me feel deeply ethically relevant. The result is that there's a lot of behaviours that I look at and think "this is obviously bad behaviour and easy to avoid, therefore you don't give a shit about treating people well".

You know what I'd really enjoy? If there was some sort of explaindrmaciver wiki analogous to the explainxkcd wiki where other people just wrote a whole bunch of context and commentary on stuff I'd written, filling in all the details for me. It's not so much that I need this at present, it's that the effort of filling in that context significantly changes the calculus of what's worth writing.

I think King Warrior Magician Lover was mostly garbage, but I must admit that its idea of needing to provide people (men in their framing, but I think everyone really) with some sort of proper process of transition to adulthood has really stuck with me. I think for a lot of us University is this and boy what a garbage ritual for becoming an adult that is. Then you get out of university and great you're an adult how glhf hope you figure it out because we're not going to help you.

I've been meaning for a while to go through my old paid subscribe archive and resurrect any posts I'd like to have a broader audience. Here's the first of those.

drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-do-we-tr… It's about Paul Erdos, Richard Stallman, and how we treat people who are incredibly hard to deal with but also too useful to ignore. It isn't great.

I've been toying with an analogy recently that one problem people have with Twitter is often that a) You are getting something vital from it that you are not getting enough of elsewhere and b) You literally cannot get enough of it from Twitter to sustain you. The result is something like trying to get all of your nutrients through a thin straw - you need to eat, and the straw is all you've got, so you've got to keep sucking, but it takes an impossible amount of work to get barely enough to sustain you and still leaves you hungry.

One of the things that doesn't really come up whenever we do the "corporations rely on free labour from open source developers" conversation is that FOSS is far from the only source of free labour that is borderline essential to how modern software development works. Other sources of free labour without which you would not have the modern software industry:

1. The vast majority of conference organisation is free labour.
2. So is the vast majority of conference speaking (you might get expenses if you're lucky)

Right, here's my @threadapalooza thread for this year. 100 thoughts about problems. 1.

Problem: I've been procrastinating on starting this for weeks.

Solution: I'm going to start this thread without knowing where I'm going and probably take a few days to finish it.