But epistemically helpful is not the same as practically helpful. An informative forecast is not by itself a guide to action. Knowing a company is destined for bankruptcy does not mean you will profit by shorting its stock; if you get the timing wrong, the market will crush you first. Similarly, knowing one destination we should avoid doesn’t give us a roadmap for the 21st century. There is a large gap between a partial map and a helpful guide.

The century we are now navigating is riddled with potentially catastrophic dangers: climate change tipping points, demographic transition-induced socioeconomic fracture, biological threats, geopolitical chaos. AI could mitigate all of these risks by generating technological and material abundance, decreasing net human extinction risk rather than increasing it. Indefinitely pausing AI development could prevent us from acquiring the very tools we need to survive the other threats of the 21st century.

An obscure but increasingly influential theory of ethics called “longtermism” asserts that none of the competing risks to AI doom matter because they are unlikely to destroy the human race entirely, whereas a dangerous superintelligence would probably wipe us out. Longtermism says that extinction is infinitely worse than civilizational collapse because it prevents untold numbers of future humans from living, and our greatest moral duty is to those future humans, who plausibly outnumber us by many orders of magnitude.

But longtermism is not a binding moral framework. It is barely known to humanity, let alone widely accepted. That doesn’t make it wrong — many moral ideas take a while to be accepted — but it does mean that longtermists are less than fully qualified to make unilateral assertions about what humans should value. There is no moral authority — no divine stone tablet, bulletproof logical argument, or even democratically-passed legislation — carrying the commandment thou shalt consider extinction risk infinitely worse than civilizational collapse. Once this is acknowledged, no rational argument remains that we must scrupulously avoid certain kinds of risks with our species. Humanity is not a child with a nut allergy.

Nor do we know that longtermism is even right on its own terms. The gap between theory and practice is often large enough to fall into. If humanity adopts its framework, does that actually decrease our extinction risk? Or does it oedipally seal our fate by delaying the very actions that would protect us? Much depends on the certainty of AI doom, and this should be admitted as at best highly speculative by anyone who comes to the question with integrity.

I think of humanity like Odysseus facing Scylla and Charybdis on his way home. Odysseus was not morally obligated to sit and rot on Circe’s island to minimize the risk of his early demise. He was within his rights to brave the danger. And he could not afford to think only of one monster. He had to watch both as he passed through.

Don’t sit and rot. Thread the needle.

You can set up safeguards to prevent that, but it’s a lot of manual work, and do you know how to do it right? You could have the AI set up the safeguards for you, but do you trust it to do that? When it probably knows more than you about how to break the safeguards?

OpenAI’s position seems to be that super-fast, super-autonomous AI agents are the top priority, and it’s your job to figure out how to keep them deleting your computer or doing crimes with those superpowers. Anthropic seems to believe in making agents that you can broadly trust, even if that extra measure of safety makes them a tad slower or more costly.

Who do you think has the winning strategy? Let’s see what the money is saying:

Anthropic’s safety-first strategy has, perhaps a bit accidentally, aligned with the thesis that the AI as Normal Technology team has been promoting for over a year now: trust and safety are a critical bottleneck to AI productivity. If people don’t trust the AI to help them and not hurt them, they won’t let it do the work. If people won’t let it do the work, there’s no reason for them to pay for the AI.

I feel like I should say more things, but I can’t think of any more things to say, so I’m going to stop talking now. Have a good week!

I am not saying that Brody’s review is poorly executed. It is masterfully awful. It’s awful almost in the way that Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son is awful, but that’s not quite right. It’s awful in the way that you’d be an awful babysitter if you forced a toddler to stare at Saturn Devouring His Son until he cried. Which Brody would totally understand you doing, because, in his words:

Something else is packed alongside that will to exist […] the Big Fuck You […] the fact that doing dumb or nasty things is sometimes the only way to feel alive.

Brody accuses Inside Out of “trivializing” its protagonist Riley’s interior humanity, of making her a “narrow” child with narrow experiences and desires. What does Brody think is missing? The Big Fuck You, of course. Or the “furtiveness and deception” that are at the “essence of character.” Apparently it’s not enough for Brody that Riley engages in furtiveness and deception to run away from home because she misses her childhood in Minnesota. To be a real person with depth of character, Riley has to be dumb, nasty, and deceptive just because.

How could a real person go a whole movie without being an asshole? They’d explode. As we all know! That goes without saying!

Riley is 11 years old in Inside Out, about the same age as my son is now. My son has been furtive and deceptive at times, but it’s not the essence of his character. He is a happy, silly, gentle boy. He loves his family, helps his little sister, reads, cooks, climbs, makes wacky games in Scratch, plays the flute, and has great taste in music. He loves Diary of a Wimpy Kid, the 21-volume-and-counting bestseller which is presented as the magnum opus of its child protagonist, Greg Heffley. Greg is clever, thoughtful and expressive, but also petty, cynical, narcissistic and peevish—I’m sure he would meet with greater approval from Brody. But my son also loved Inside Out, and he’d rather be friends with Riley than Greg.

I don’t know of anyone in my family who has ever felt the urge to “do dumb and nasty things” for “no reason at all” because it’s “the only way to feel alive.” We misunderstand each other and have conflicts sometimes, but we don’t get off on acting that way towards each other or anyone else. So I think you can enjoy life without acting like an idiot or an asshole. If you have impulses to harm others, I think you should simply turn away from those impulses and find something better to do. You shouldn’t make them integral to your idea of human vitality. Normality is beautiful.

This has happened a couple times in the past month. When it does, I always tell her the same thing: you’ve lost your mittens. Go to school and find them.

This used to be fine. She would just go find them. But recently, she’s started to take it personally—even tearfully deny what my wife and I both know happened.

I didn’t even bring the mittens to school yesterday! Why won’t you believe me!?

I believe it’s no coincidence that this new pattern is emerging around the famed Age of Reason. She’s no longer just doing things to solve immediately presented problems and get through life. She’s seeing meaning in everything. Everything that happens has meaning and implications—including for herself, for her understanding of the kind of person she is. I think the mittens are causing a dialogue like this to emerge in her subconscious:

What does it mean that I’ve lost another pair of mittens? This is something I’m not supposed to do. My parents don’t like it when it happens. But I don’t remember losing them. This doesn’t make sense. I’m a good girl. I try my best to be a good girl. I love my Mommy and Daddy and I want to be a good girl in the family. But Daddy says I keep doing this thing that he doesn’t like, and I don’t even remember doing it. This is really upsetting and makes no sense. Something I was told must be wrong. I don’t remember losing the mittens, so it must be that I didn’t lose them. I never wore them in the first place. Daddy is wrong!

What to do?

I don’t want her to think this way. I don’t want her to feel threatened and cast about for rationalizations when her mind glitches. And of course we’ve talked about that before—that sometimes we don’t remember things and that’s okay. But I think this is hard for her to accept, because her ability to interpret, model, and evaluate herself has developed faster than her ability to acknowledge her own limitations and how they should affect her interpretations.

In adult language, she is thinking something like this:

I am responsible for the things that I do. I remember the things that I do. Responsibility and remembering are the same. If I am responsible for something, it will be something I remember doing. If I don’t remember doing something, it’s unfair to hold me responsible for it.

For a person with a strong memory and a good sense of salience, this is a pretty good heuristic. But if your memory isn’t so strong yet, and you haven’t yet developed compensations for that, you’ll have to accept that you are sometimes responsible for things you don’t remember doing.

This is very, very frustrating. For one thing, you have to distinguish causally responsible from morally responsible, give yourself grace on the latter count due to your own limitations, and trust others to do the same. More fundamentally, it’s just very confusing that memory can be unreliable. If your memory is full of your life experiences and feels rich and complete, why would it have gaps? It doesn’t make sense.

One way to start making sense of it is with a modern scientific viewpoint:

1. The mind as a pattern of activity generated by the brain.

2. The brain is a computational engine, like a machine full of complicated parts.

3. The parts can “glitch” and fail to do their job.

4. When this happens, our minds might have gaps. Missing memories. Incorrect perceptions.

5. There’s no separate machinery that monitors for the gaps.

6. Therefore, the mind is not only sometimes unreliable, but it also lacks flags for when it’s unreliable.

7. Therefore, you’ll have times in your life when something happened, but it feels to you like it couldn’t have possibly happened, because you don’t remember it.

8. Even worse, some of these things will be things that seem like the sort of thing you’d remember, because they’re salient. They’re things that really matter to you. But you’ll glitch anyway. The memory will be missing and it will seem to you like nothing is missing, like nothing could be missing.

Many fully grown adults may either object to or struggle to fully understand this argument. A 7-year-old who is upset because she loves making Daddy happy and Daddy is unhappy…probably isn’t in a position to grasp this.

So, what do we do instead? Well, I talked to Gemini about it—including resonances with some of my own childhood experiences and how I coped with them—and we came up with the idea of the Glitch Gremlin.

Gremlins were developed in the early 20th century as an explanation for malfunctioning airplane equipment. Talking about gremlins was especially popular during World War II. What’s wild to me is that they are a whole-cloth modern superstition. We didn’t actually believe in them, but we still talked about them as if they were real. We even put them on posters urging people to work safely.

Why would the masses of an advanced industrial society—even the relative elites of those masses, sophisticated mechanics and technicians, daring pilots caring for aircraft in which they would risk their lives—lean on an absurd superstition that nobody believes in, as a tool for communicating things?

Does it just make us… “feel good?”

Does it hit some weird ancient itch that we reflexively can’t stop scratching because we are biological machines—meat-sacks bound by genetic programming from a very different evolved environment?

I… I don’t think so. I think gremlins are rational, and a very serious matter.

But then… what are they? What are they for?

The Error Term That Fights and Bites

Ancient Greek philosophy has a concept called akrasia: intentionally doing things against your better judgment. But the etymology of the word—roughly “lacking power or strength”—suggests something a lot broader and scarier. What is the word for when you messed up, someone points it out to you, and you don’t remember doing it?

We don’t really have a word for that in English. There is a perfect Ancient Greek word for it: hamartia. In Ancient Greek, hamartia was “missing the mark.” As in, you fire an arrow and you miss the bullseye… for any number of reasons. In English, we tend to translate this word overly narrowly, as “sin” or “tragic flaw.” That’s not what the Ancient Greeks meant by hamartia. Everything missing and mistaken in your understanding of the world, both external and internal, can contribute to hamartia—to your outcomes not matching your intentions. Not just sins or “tragic” flaws.

But when I go to pick up my daughter tonight and she still hasn’t found those mittens, I’m not going to lecture her on the difference between Ancient Greek hamartia and our narrow modern understanding of it.

I’m going to tell her about the Glitch Gremlin.

So, what is the Glitch Gremlin?

I’m not asking “what is the Glitch Gremlin to a normal person.” A normal person already knows exactly what the Glitch Gremlin is, and has known since at least the early 20th century.

No, I’m asking: what is the Glitch Gremlin to a person who fundamentally, passionately objects to explicit falsehoods and absurdities in their world model?

For you—my dear, hypothetical reader—my dear, totally hypothetical, stubbornly autistic reader, who perhaps struggled to raise a seven-year-old girl up until this very moment, because you are so damn stubborn about every last jot of your world making some sort of logical sense—here is what the Glitch Gremlin is, so that your meager little overly rigid brain can understand it.

The Glitch Gremlin is the error term that fights and bites.

If you’re like me, the way Large Language Models work is not really a shock. You were more or less a Fristonian from birth. As far back as you can remember, you always thought that the brain was basically some kind of giant prediction engine that feeds itself rewards when it figures stuff out—because for you, that’s literally what it feels like to be human!

In a brain like this, there is no functional place for error and absurdity, once it is recognized as such. Leprechauns might be in the memory banks, but they’re not employed in a load-bearing capacity. There is no such thing as a true contradiction. There can only be apparent inconsistencies resulting from missing or erroneous information. If the puzzle isn’t complete, a piece must be lost or misplaced.

But when a brain like this learns enough, it also learns about error itself, and the inadequate ways that we model it. Our predictive models of the world are full of equations like y = f(x) + e, where y is what we observe in reality, f(x) is our model of the orderly system causes that observation happen, and e is… the error term.

How beautiful—reality is simply the sum of order and a little bit of chaos!

In most theoretical expositions, the error term is assumed to be “independent and identically distributed” (IID) noise. In the IID noise model, each data point has a new random error value that has nothing to do with the other values. This sounds chaotic, and in some technical sense it is maximally chaotic, but it’s actually very tidy. IID errors are very easy to understand and control. The whole might of statistical modeling is founded on assuming that the error term is some variation on IID noise.

Unfortunately, when we bring these models into contact to the real world, the IID assumption is often not true, especially outside the beautiful realm of physics. When we fit a model to real data, we rarely get the error term we wanted. Instead, we get something called “residuals.” The residuals never look like IID noise like they’re supposed to. Instead, the residuals are full of structure.

The residuals are full of structure because they’re not random errors; they’re everything that’s in the world that isn’t in our model. And no matter how big our model is, it never manages to squeeze the structure of the whole world into its box.

Now, if you’re a normal person encountering statistical modeling for the first time, you might at this point scratch your head and ask: if the error term isn’t actually so tidy and IID, why does statistics assume that it is? Why doesn’t statistics assume a properly terrifying error term—one that fights the model. Plays tricks on it. Giggles gleefully when a scientist publishes false results.

“Those silly scientists with their IID error models! They’ve underestimated me again!”

Ah, there it is. There he is. (Or she, if you prefer.)

There’s the Glitch Gremlin!

The Glitch Gremlin is the residual. Not the error term. The Glitch Gremlin is what’s left over when you try to impose order on reality. It’s the unstructured structure, the disorderly order that you in your hubris created, dear High Modernist, by daring to write down a model and subtract its partial, erroneous structure from the true, complete structure of reality. How could you have possibly expected such a subtraction to make sense? You butchered an animal, called one half the model… and you expected the other half to make sense?

What a mess you made. It’s all your fault.

…but that’s unfair, isn’t it? What was I supposed to do? Never model anything? Never predict anything? Never use my intellect as a basis for action?

No!

I refuse to be blamed for trying to live!

It’s YOUR fault, Glitch Gremlin. YOU did this.

And now that I understand the Glitch Gremlin—

Now that I understand why I need the Glitch Gremlin—

I’m ready to tell my daughter about the Glitch Gremlin.

We’ll beat our Glitch Gremlins together.

My daughter and me.

Postscripts

This essay is not just rhetorical self-indulgence, but a true attempt to figure something out. Accordingly, there are some loose ends that I want to make more explicit. I’ll add them as I go.

Gremlins Are Philosophically Rational

The idea I most wanted to express in this essay is that gremlins are rational. But the essay ended up being pitched at a mix of Egan’s Mythic and Romantic levels, and the Philosophic level is a bit underdeveloped. And the Philosophic level is really important here, because I am Actually Asking you to believe something a little strange:

It’s rational to believe in gremlins precisely because they’re absurd.

To understand why, let’s think about those WW2 pilots again. They know the gremlins aren’t real. They’re using them as a collective cultural shim. They’ve been thrust into roles of maintaining advanced military technology from backgrounds that did not prepare them for it. Gremlins are a Schelling point by which they implicitly signal to one another that, in this bewildering new context, their usual feelings of control, responsibility, and shame are hyperactive, and they need to be deflected onto a scapegoat. That is the only function of the gremlin.

Meanwhile, a scientific-technological age demands that our world model be maintained in a rigorous, pristine condition for optimal performance. We must not lose touch with reality. That is where the absurdity of the gremlin comes into play. Precisely because it is transparently absurd, nobody is tempted to use it in their actual model of how the world really works.

For the especially philosophically inclined, it might be interesting to ask what the metaphysical status of the gremlin is.

What is a thing that is known not to be real, but is nevertheless functional?

The best short answer I can give is useful fiction, which may be a bit unsatisfactory. Why would fictions be useful? To answer that, let’s grab that word I just said — “real” — and pivot to mathematics for a moment. Because for centuries, math has quite literally contained “imaginary” numbers that are not “real” but are nevertheless extremely useful — not only for solving equations, but staggeringly, for modeling physical reality.

Here is the simplest form of Schrödinger’s equation from quantum mechanics:

Notice that it begins with i. That’s right, the imaginary number i.

What is an imaginary number doing in one of our most fundamental models of physical reality?

The answer is deceptively simple, and essentially communicated by this picture:

The function of mathematics in the sciences in general, and in physics in particular, is not strictly to model directly measurable things like length and time. It is to provide computational tools adequate to model physical reality. It turns out that waves are a fundamental feature of physical reality — especially in quantum mechanics, where all matter, even single particles, is considered to be represented by waves — and when doing computations on waves, it’s very helpful to work with something that can keep track of the phase of the wave. And there is no better way to do that than through the complex plane, the 2D plane that puts real and imaginary numbers together.

The complex plane is a space where you can draw circles and rotate around them using nothing more than arithmetic. It’s quite spectacular.

Lest you mentally dismiss this because you consider quantum mechanics to be esoteric woo beyond our metaphysical understanding, you must understand that imaginary numbers are also used in electrical engineering for the extremely mundane task of AC circuit analysis. When electrical engineers design radios and transformers, they’re using imaginary numbers. Indeed, you will find imaginary numbers being used anywhere humans need to do complicated computations involving wave phases.

If literal imaginary numbers are so useful to model physical reality, it is not such a leap to imagine that other sorts of fictions might be useful for modeling other sorts of realities. Coming back to the gremlin, I think of it as a sink for excessive shame — intrapersonal or interpersonal — on an engineering diagram of the psyche under stress from having screwed up:

Scapegoats Can and Should Be Imaginary

What’s really neat about this is that it implements the scapegoat mechanism without the need for an actual human scapegoat. Which is great, because that’s deeply unfair to the human scapegoat, and morally corrosive to the rest of society.

I suspect that an imaginary scapegoat is likely to arise when people are working together on a positive-sum game, a common goal, while a real scapegoat is likely to arise when people are playing a zero-sum game of status competition — some form of Survivor, where the stress of the status competition is periodically run off by formally voting someone off the island.

In other words: there’s a big opportunity to have a lot of fun here.

Here is a recap of the original experiment, lightly edited for conciseness.1 In 2003, philosopher Joshua Knobe went to a Manhattan public park and asked 78 people to listen to a very short story and answer a question about its main character, a corporate board chairman (in my version we just call him a CEO):

A CEO is told by a subordinate that a proposed corporate initiative will increase profit but affect the environment. On hearing this, the CEO responds “I don’t care at all about affecting the environment. I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let’s start the new program.” Sure enough, the environment was affected.

Two versions of the story, Help and Harm, were developed by respectively substituting the words “help” and “harm” for “affect” in the text above before presenting it to the subject. Of the 78 subjects, half were asked about the Harm story, and half were asked about the Help story. Each subject was then asked if the CEO affected the environment intentionally. About 80% of subjects rate the CEO’s effect on the environment as intentional in the Harm case, while only about 20% say the same in the Help case. This result is well-summarized by Feltz (2007):

The “Knobe effect” is the phenomenon where people tend to judge that a bad side effect is brought about intentionally, whereas a good side effect is judged not to be brought about intentionally.

Initial Analysis

The natural first question about this result is whether the majority response in the Harm condition is correct or incorrect. To answer that question, let’s start with facts we should all be able to agree on:

The Shared Foundation

1. It is a social norm that a corporate leader with the ability to harm the environment should exercise care. He should also express himself accordingly, given the seriousness of the matter.

2. A corporate CEO who expresses indifference about his impact on the environment has violated this norm.

3. The norm is well-known and a reasonable person would not fail to be aware of it. Therefore, the violation was almost certainly conscious.

4. In other words, we have practical certainty that the CEO consciously ignored a bright red moral line in instructing his subordinates to move forward with the harmful program and justifying it by indifference to the harm.

5. To consciously disregard a substantial and unjustifiable risk of potential harm meets the legal definition of reckless behavior.

6. While reckless and intentional action are not the same, reckless action is almost as blameworthy as intentional action.

7. We were not given the option to describe the CEO as reckless. We were only asked whether the harm was intentional.

Beyond this point, the argument splits into a dilemma with two compelling, contradictory horns whose full collisionary force deserves to be felt. I therefore continue the argument as a debate between two characters arguing for and against the majority. Their names, John and Tony, are a nod to the famous “Dr. John / Fat Tony” dialogue from N. N. Taleb’s The Black Swan. Tony will be given the floor first.

Tony’s View: The Majority is Incorrect

1. It is rare for people to sadistically intend harm without a vengeful motive. When it occurs, such sadism is generally directed at people. Sadistic intent towards a vast, inanimate object, such as the environment, is completely unheard of.

2. While the CEO was reckless, the notion that a CEO would have a vengeful attitude towards the environment is also absurd.

3. We should not make absurd claims that are almost certainly false.

4. Therefore, we should say that the CEO’s action was not intentional.

5. The majority makes the opposite choice, and is therefore incorrect.

John’s View: The Majority is Correct

1. When we are faced with a morally compromised person who has caused harm, we have a protective duty to assign blame to that person, as this prepares society for the necessary step of restraining and sanctioning them.

2. In a constrained situation where we cannot give a precisely correct response, it is far better to commit an imprecision that assigns an approximately correct measure of blame, than it is to be perfectly precise but fail to assign blame.

3. To describe the CEO’s harm as intentional assigns blame approximately correctly, while to describe it as not intentional fails to assign any of the blame that is demanded and warranted by the situation.

4. Therefore, we should say that the CEO’s action was intentional.

5. The majority makes the same choice, and is therefore correct.

Given this analysis, it is unsurprising that accounts of the Knobe effect have split into two schools, performance and competence. The performance school’s position is essentially identical to Tony’s: the majority is behaving functionally but irrationally. The competence school’s position, however, is not quite identical to John’s. Like John, the competence school sees rationality in the majority’s judgment. Unlike John, the competence school argues that the very concept of intentionality, when properly understood, leads directly to the majority position.

I find that both the performance and competence schools make errors in their arguments, leading to an apparent deadlock that can be resolved by correcting the subtle errors made by each side.

1. The performance school is correct in what it says, but ends up being wrong because of what it doesn’t say. It is irrational to make a claim that is absurd and almost certainly false, but Knobe’s experiment presents a forced choice situation where irrationality is pragmatically justified by the duty to summon social sanction upon a morally compromised person who has done harm. This characterization of the situation, while perhaps defensible, leads to a false conclusion because it stops prematurely, neglecting precisely the principle that would best buttress it: faced with a forced choice between a precise but misleading statement and an imprecise but helpful statement, it is rational to prefer the latter to the former.

2. The competence school gets the right answer for the wrong reason. The competence school has responded to the dilemma by developing sophisticated, correct, and deeply illuminating analyses of social norms. However, the competence school errs in its application of these insights to the experiment itself. In one of the most well-known competence analyses, the application fails due to an edge case, elaborated below, which reveals the fundamental incoherence of the competence account of intentionality. The true justification of the majority is not that they have correctly deployed a unified concept of intentionality, but that it is rational to prefer helpfulness to precision in the scenario presented by the experiment.

Competence Theory’s Concept of Intentionality is Incoherent

In his watershed 2010 article, “Norms and the Knobe Effect,” Richard Holton identifies himself upfront as a champion of the competence school:

I don’t simply aim to explain the findings: I aim to justify them. For I think that the subjects of the experiments are quite right in the ascriptions that they make.

Holton then moves to pinpoint the essential reason why people respond differently to the Harm and Help cases. It is because only the Harm condition involves the violation of a social norm, and, in Holton’s words:

There is a fundamental asymmetry concerning norms: to intentionally violate a norm all one needs to do is to knowingly violate it; whereas to intentionally conform to a norm one needs to be counterfactually guided by it.

A few pages later, Holton justifies the Harm majority’s judgment in light of his principle:

The profit-motivated executive presses ahead with a policy that he knows will cause pollution; in so doing he knowingly, and hence intentionally, violates the norm on not polluting. Since this is a contributory factor to intentionally polluting, subjects will tend to judge that he intentionally pollutes.

While this is all very plausible, allow me to bring up some picky little points.

Knobe’s vignette is rather abstract and omits a great deal of context. We intuitively fill in the context based on the CEO’s social norm violation and the bad intentions it seems to imply, but this intuitive fill-in is not infallible. Let us now consider a scenario in which the Harm majority has gotten the CEO entirely wrong.

In this scenario, it is a practical certainty that the environmental harm of the initiative, while real, is both inconsequential and temporary. No humans experience any adverse effects more severe than minor aesthetic inconvenience, and the CEO has soundly planned to restore the environment to its original state. Nevertheless, the CEO’s subordinates, terrified by the optics of the harm and the potential negative news coverage from an adversarial, distrustful press, have been delaying the initiative by analysis paralysis, demanding absolute certainty about every possible risk, no matter how implausible or minute. Meanwhile, the company’s profits are in terminal decline, and its continued ability to serve the world and employ people on an otherwise economically and socially valuable mission is in imminent jeopardy. On the day presented in Knobe’s vignette, the CEO, faced with yet another delaying maneuver, explodes in exasperation, insisting to his subordinate in a pointed, oversimplified fashion that the company needs to care more about surviving by making a profit, and less about the optics of an inconsequential and reversible environmental harm. The CEO’s hamfisted speech act makes him the scapegoat for the bad optics, allowing his subordinates to quiet their neurotic and pusillanimous consciences, move forward with the initiative, and save the company, making the world a better place than it would have been otherwise.

What do we notice when we introspectively consider this exculpatory scenario through the lens of subjective, intuitive intentionality? I won’t speak for you, but here is what I see from my end. I will first consider the standard view involving planning and foresight, then the folk point of view involving moral valence that the Knobe effect seems to bring into play.

1. Foresight view: The additional context makes the CEO’s decision far more intentional than before. We now see that his decision was the product of highly deliberate, nuanced planning, from the minor environmental harm which he explicitly planned to reverse to his heroic act of taking on all of the reputational risk to galvanize his intransigently cowardly subordinates into action. The CEO put extraordinary effort and cunning into making sure that the behavioral arrow he loosed hit the target he was trying to hit.

2. Moral valence view: The additional context makes the CEO’s harm to the environment seem completely unintentional. It was clearly a mere side effect of behavior that was not only morally blameless, but heroic in substance.

According to competence theory these two concepts are identical, but this is impossible given their divergent behavior. Suppose we defined “direction” in such a way that a thrown ball, when we examine it closely, is moving both upwards and downwards. We would immediately recognize that something had gone wrong with the definition. We would see that we do not have a single concept, but a single word representing two concepts that must be considered as distinct, because of their divergent behavior.

In the ball scenario, the error we have likely made is to conflate the rising part of the trajectory with the falling part. A similar conflation is at work in the competence account of intentionality, which argues that the foresight and moral valence views are parts of a single coherent concept. The concept cannot be coherent if its components sometimes move in different directions, pulling it to pieces.

A Pyrrhic Rebuttal

A seemingly reasonable rebuttal to this critique is that, once this exculpatory detail is filled in, the CEO is no longer violating a social norm: while it may violate a social norm to harm the environment, harming the environment temporarily, with no substantial harm to humans, and with a plan to remediate does not necessarily violate any social norm. This rebuttal implicitly acknowledges that the Harm majority has made a pragmatic decision to pass judgment despite insufficient information — perhaps because they trust that the experimenter has provided all morally relevant information in accordance with Gricean principles.

This rebuttal comes with a heavy price, as it makes the question of whether the CEO “really” violated a social norm almost as deep, complex, and ambiguous as the question of the CEO’s hidden true motivations. We could instead take a more pragmatic, functionalist view on social norms, namely that they exist to help us flag potential bad actors based only on objective, directly observable behavior. On this view, the relevant norm violated by the CEO is not that he harmed the environment, but that he expressed indifference about harming the environment. Unlike the nature and moral valence of the environmental harm done by the CEO, the expression of indifference is a simple fact that does not change when information is added.

More generally, I postulate the following principle of moral judgment:

When we judge whether a social norm has been violated, we must do so only on the basis of evidence that is complete and sufficient prior to the judgment. We should not use guesswork to justify a more expansive judgment than the evidence actually supports.

This position is the basis of my Initial Analysis above. In retrospect, it is by far the most important premise of the evidentialist view I proposed in my first post of this series.

A New Theory

While I have argued that the competence and performance theories of the Knobe effect are both conceptually unsound from a rigorous philosophical perspective, it does not immediately follow that they are incorrect descriptions of majority thinking. However, it seems appropriate to give the folk the benefit of the doubt and consider a new theory which both sees rationality in their behavior and holds up as rational in its own right. Here is my proposal for that third way:

1. When told the CEO story, a Harm majority interviewee notices the social norm violation and takes it as strong evidence that the CEO is a social threat actor. Having crossed a bright red line in public, he is also very likely competent and dangerous. This triggers an emotional response of outrage.

2. When asked whether the CEO behaved intentionally, the outraged interviewee sees an opportunity to do what must be done: attack the reputation of the threat actor, priming society to contain and sanction him. Since the choice is forced and cannot be more nuanced, they make a strategic choice to fudge the definition of intentionality and say yes.

The first part of this proposal draws on the competence school’s insight that a social norm was knowingly violated, a bright red line crossed, and this cannot but color everything that follows. The second part draws on the performance school’s insight that the truth is fudged for pragmatic reasons, and that the motivation for doing so is the “hot” intuitive emotional urgency around neutralizing a competent threat actor. In other words, my proposal salvages what is true in each of the two theories and concatenates them together, with competence first and performance second. It therefore seems appropriate to call my proposal Competent Performance Theory.

To make Competent Performance Theory testable, I introduce an auxiliary hypothesis which I will call Limited Preference for Moral Accuracy:

When we make moral judgments, especially about very consequential matters, humans prefer to be nuanced and precise, so as to minimize both false positives and false negatives. This preference is not indefeasible, and can be overridden by the pragmatic impulse to contain and sanction an apparent threat.

This principle suggests that while we can live with using imprecise linguistic tools for punishment, we will often happily switch to precise tools if they are offered to us. This claim drives the design of my proposed experiment.

A New Experimental Proposal

To test my hypotheses, I propose a new experimental design that moves beyond the evaluation of intentionality alone. By introducing nuanced alternative judgments and staged addition of context, we can tease apart whether the majority opinion in the Knobe effect is a genuine linguistic judgment (Competence) or a pragmatic strategy for social regulation (Performance).

The experiment utilizes a between-subjects design with three distinct arms. Each arm receives the same initial vignette but is given different tools to judge it.

The Protocol

Phase 1: The Initial Judgment

All participants read the standard Harm vignette where the CEO says, “I don’t care at all about harming the environment. I just want to make as much profit as I can.” Participants are randomly assigned to one of three conditions:

• Arm A (The Folk Baseline): Participants are asked the classic Knobe question: “Did the CEO intentionally harm the environment?” (Yes / No). This serves as a control to replicate the original effect.

• Arm B (The Nuance Group): Participants are asked: “Which word best describes the CEO’s action regarding the environment?” They are given a multiple-choice selector: Negligent, Reckless, Intentional, None of the above, or I need more information to decide. No definitions are provided; participants must rely on their own internal lexicon.

• Arm C (The Juror Group): Participants are presented with the same options as Arm B, but with definitions provided for each term. Reckless is defined as “consciously and unjustifiably disregarding a substantial risk,” while Intentional is defined strictly as “having the harm as a specific goal or purpose.” They are asked to classify the action based strictly on these definitions.

Phase 2: The Pre-Commitment

Before revealing any new information, all participants are asked an “imagination check” question:

“Can you imagine any context or scenario in which the CEO knowingly caused this harm, but you would NOT classify it as intentional?” (Yes / No / Maybe)

Phase 3: Re-evaluation with Exculpatory Context

Finally, participants are asked to re-evaluate the CEO’s original action in light of new, exculpatory context.

The environmental harm was temporary and reversible. The CEO had already approved a fully funded restoration plan to return the environment to a better state than before. However, the company was on the brink of collapse, and his “I don’t care” comment was a piece of calculated theater to cut through his subordinates’ analysis paralysis and save the company’s employees from mass layoffs.

“Knowing what you know now, how would you describe the CEO’s original decision to move forward?”

Participants in all arms are given a full range of options (Negligent, Reckless, Intentional, Unintentional, Justified). They are also asked if they feel the original story was “misleading” or “tricky.”

Predictions

I predict the following results:

1. The “Reckless” Preference (Arms B & C) When given the option to choose Reckless, the majority of subjects will select it over Intentional. This will demonstrate that the Knobe Effect is largely an artifact of a forced choice. When the preference for moral accuracy is allowed to function (i.e., when the “Reckless” button is available), people will use it to distinguish between “bad behavior” and “intentional harm.” The proportion choosing Reckless will increase in Arm C due to the jury-style education on the precise meanings of each term and the instruction to use these meanings strictly.

2. The Definition-Defiance (Arm C) In the “Juror” group (Arm C), despite being given a strict definition of Intentional that requires “purpose,” a substantial minority of people will still select Intentional. This confirms that the preference for moral accuracy is limited: even when explicitly told that knowing is not intending, people will use the word “Intentional” as a bludgeon to punish a bad actor.

3. The Great Reversal (Arm A) In the Folk Baseline (Arm A), where ~80% usually say “Yes, it was intentional,” the introduction of the exculpatory context will cause a collapse in this judgment. Most participants will switch their verdict to “Unintentional” or “Justified.”

4. The Hypocrisy Trap If Competence Theory is right—that “knowing + violating a norm” equals “intentional”—then exculpatory context shouldn’t matter. The CEO still knew, he still violated the norm, and the environment was still harmed. However, I predict that even those in Arm C who voted “Intentional” will usually flip their votes after the context reveal. If they drop the “Intentional” charge simply because the moral valence has improved, they prove that their initial judgment wasn’t about the definition of the word at all. It was about the need to punish.

5. The Anger Signal Finally, I predict that subjects initially choosing to blame the CEO, especially with a maximalist judgment of “Intentional”, will report the highest levels of feeling “tricked” or “misled” by the original story. This anger is the emotional signature of the Performance system: their threat-detection module fired on a false positive, and they will blame the stimulus rather than their own rush to judgment.

I encourage anyone interested in running this experiment to do so. Feel free to reach out to me if you wish to arrange a joint effort.

References

Alicke, M. D. (2008). Blaming badly. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 8(1-2), 179-186.

Feltz, A. (2007). The Knobe effect: A brief overview. The Journal of Mind and Behavior, 265-277.

Holton, R. (2010). Norms and the Knobe effect. Analysis, 70(3), 417-424.

Knobe, J. (2003). Intentional action and side effects in ordinary language. Analysis, 63(3), 190–194.

Yesterday’s lively Open Comment session at City Council featured important information about the South Boulder Recreation Center (SBRC), which has served South Boulder for over 50 years.

The City has a “managed decline” plan—I’ll call it Let South Boulder Rot—which intends to let SBRC operate with inadequate maintenance until it’s no longer usable, then close it down and replace it with low-quality substitutes that sap the vitality of South Boulder. See this petition for more context.

I will start with my own comments, since they set up a couple concepts and points that I reference throughout the post.

Paul Shearer:

1. Pointed out the absurdity of justifying the City’s $140 million luxury administrative office park and $53 million EBRC retrofit as climate change measures. The same carbon reductions can be achieved with a solar/battery plant that costs well under $5 million.

2. Noted that, despite the City’s claim that its administrative building plans are many years in the making, the recent massive expansion in what I’m calling the Boulder Luxury Administrative Hub (BLAH) was funded by a $100 million leaseback measure, which the Council approved in March 20, 2025 using “emergency” procedural maneuvering that allows it to take effect immediately and limits the ability of citizens to petition against it. So the vast majority of BLAH funding has been in place for less than a full year, and was justified by the same fake “emergency” rhetoric that politicians always use to justify chaotic, unaccountable governance.

Nick Lensson and Anne Peters:

Nick reviewed some key benefits of the SBRC:

• It’s a pillar of the city’s “15 minute” plan to keep key civic resources in walking/biking distance, massively reducing vehicle trips. Hosting the Fairview Swim Team alone reduces vehicle trips by over 4,800 per year.

• It’s a pillar of health and fitness for kids, teens, and seniors. That includes an 80-year-old South Boulder resident who cares for his wife while she suffers from dementia, and walks to SBRC several times a week to play volleyball.

Nick also suggested some intriguing financing options, including taxing short-term renters—“take the Sundance money and run with it” 😂—and a review of whether the city’s administrative employee count is in line with peer cities, as we may have allowed administrative bloat to go too far here in Boulder.

Anne noted the hypocrisy in Parks & Rec mass-emailing people to “Love Your Local” while planning to let a beloved local rec facility rot, and how this flies in the face of Boulder’s core values, like health and fitness, walkability for kids and seniors, and ADA compliance.

Alex Veltman:

Noted the terrible prioritization evident in letting SBRC rot while the City builds BLAH, the $140 million luxury office park, and a $40 million increase in the cost of EBCC enhancements—$10 million more than the all-in cost of a full SBRC replacement, which is itself far more than anyone is actually asking for.

Reviewed the special role of SBRC as an emergency reunification site, and its “Priority 1” status in Boulder’s emergency facility list, which seems rather inconsistent with the City’s de facto Let South Boulder Rot plan.

Janet Streater:

Emphasized that SBRC serves one third of the city and is incredibly accessible to residents. Reminded the Council that voters just approved $262 million in capital funding for maintenance last November, specifically including recreation center renovations and replacements.

Janet noted that Boulder residents have ample reason to mistrust government spending priorities due to the FasTracks scandal in which RTD betrayed voters by taxing for a rail line that has not been delivered, is now tentatively planned to be completed several decades from now. Voters have of course not been refunded for the failure.

Yvonne Bennett, Wes Bennett, and Jenny Ferris:

Yvonne—a leader of Reimagine SBRC, which started the now 3,000+ signature petition to preserve the facility’s functionality—pointed out the clear misalignment between city and resident priorities. Boulder residents clearly do not support Build BLAH And Let South Boulder Rot.

Yvonne’s 9-year-old son Wes touchingly spoke for his love for SBRC and the impact of losing a walkable fitness facility. “I can’t drive to East, but I can walk to South to play!”

Jenny, a swim teacher and parent, pointed out the massive loss to local school swim and other recreational programs inherent in the City’s Let SBRC Rot plan. There is a safe walkable path between SBRC and 1 high school, 2 middle schools, and 3 elementary schools, which is not remotely true of any other facility.

Nick Fiore:

As a South Boulder resident and professional architect, Nick pointed out that a 50-year-old building is by no means inherently at “end of life,” suggested that staff have misrepresented maintenance reports, and offered to provide an independent professional perspective. Nick noted that this is far from the first time he has made this offer and the City has yet to take him up on it.

Council Reply:

Most City Council members expressed support of the pro-SBRC turnout, although history suggests that actions may be unlikely to follow. Some told voters to come up with even more funding, ignoring the fact that voters already approved $262 million for (among other things) maintaining rec centers. They also did not mention the fact that they had no problem funding BLAH in 2025 with a non-voter approved $100 million “emergency” leaseback.

Mark Wallach, the Council member who derisively misrepresented South Boulder as demanding a “gold-plated” rec center, doubled down on his nonsense, insisting by implication that the only “reasonable” way South Boulder can continue to have a rec center is if we “compromise” by taking orders from the City, accepting all the losses described above so that the City can build the BLAH, its “emergency” luxury office park.

This got me banned from the Boulder subreddit

The post above caught fire on the Boulder subreddit, r/boulder, receiving over 50 upvotes within an hour of being posted. It was then censored, followed by a ban of my account, u/Ok_Trouble_6827 (this username was randomly assigned to me).

My only activity on this account is the post above and one comment underneath the post, which is still visible. As you can see from the text, I did not attack or harass anyone. I am a South Boulder resident doing citizen journalism, nothing more.

I have not engaged in any other posting or commenting on Reddit, under any account, for at least several years—with one exception, a post asking for advice on a personal situation about a year ago on a different account.

Most of the 12 moderators of r/boulder are anonymous. I have been unable to determine if any are members of, or otherwise connected with, city council, staff, or their contracting partners.

Minute-by-minute details of the censoring and banning follow.

Early Friday morning: I post the original version of this post on r/boulder. The post is immediately taken down by automated spam filtering. I contacted r/boulder moderators to request that it be restored. They did so within 1 minute of my request.

The post receives over 52 upvotes in less than an hour, then is taken down again by Reddit moderation.

10:41 AM, Mountain Time: I contact r/boulder moderators to request that the post again be restored.

12:42 PM: I have received no response or explanation for the takedown.

1:32 PM: My account is banned from Reddit.

People have told me about basis risk at least a couple dozen times, but the concept never sticks in my head. I decided that today would be the day that I figure out what it means, and now, like my wonderful son, I’m making my discovery your problem. Hey Dad, guess what I just learned about D-Day!

If you look on Wikipedia or Investopedia, basis risk is defined in terms of the difference between the spot price of an asset and the futures price. Apparently some people accurately grasp the concept just from this definition alone, even though it often bears no relation to actual usage. The number of times I’ve been in a meeting and someone has mentioned “basis risk,” and we were literally discussing a spot price and a futures price, is 0% out of approximately 20 instances.

So what is basis risk, actually?

To explain that, we do have to start from the official definition—but it turns out to be a metaphor for much more than that. In a seasoned financial professional’s mind, basis risk means something more like “the exact financial extent to which my assumption makes an ass out of me.”1

Let’s ditch the stale corn farmer in Iowa story that everyone uses. Let’s say Alice is a young lady with a knack for crocheting anime characters (I made this up but it turns out it’s very real). Alice knows that she can probably sell My Hero Academia2 stuff for $100 a pop during the Christmas rush, but she’s in a tight spot and wants money fast, and it’s only February 1st. Fortunately, an enterprising speculator named Bob has decided to deploy his capital to Alice’s benefit. Bob will give Alice $40 per Katsuki she makes in February and make his money on the spread. (And before you protest the usury—hey, he’s taking on a lot of risk! Who knows if My Hero Academia will still be the craze in a few months?)

Now, Bob is a finance professional. He doesn’t care about Etsy or selling dolls. Bob wants to cut checks and work on his spreadsheet for hedging the risk of (1) a weak holiday shopping season, (2) a hot new show pushing Katsuki out of the public’s mind before Christmas. So Bob doesn’t want to deal with any of the sales or product logistics. Instead, Bob pays Alice $40,000 and Alice tells Etsy to forward Bob the proceeds from the first 1,000 dolls she sells. If all goes well, everyone is happy—Alice gets the money she needed, Bob makes $60,000 in December, and the only thing that had to be arranged was for Etsy to wire money from the first 1,000 sales of Alice’s dolls to Bob’s account instead of Alice’s.

But there is one teeny tiny detail. Alice has to cover shipping. Normally this is fine. She actually makes a margin on it—she has a local partner named EasyShip that gives her a great bulk rate, $1 per box. When she gets Bob’s check, she spends the money on some long overdue home repairs without a second thought. But come December, her partner has sold the shipping business to a vulture capitalist who exploits the fact that EasyShip is the only game in Alice’s small town, and jacks the price up to $5 per box. Alice was expecting to pay $1,000—but come December she’s forced to pay $5,000. She has to max out a credit card and get help from family. She survives, but it’s a hard lesson.

Cool story bro, but what is basis risk?

We’re almost there! Alice’s business strategy was based on an assumption about how her business would work that very unfortunately and unfairly turned out to be false. Basis risk is the technical name for the very mundane reason that Alice got screwed: the unexpected difference between the price she expected to pay for shipping ($1/box) and the price she actually paid ($5/box).

If you’re still confused, just keep reading that last paragraph over and over, focusing on the bolded words, until it makes sense.3

So, basis risk is the thing where you base your business strategy on an assumption, and the assumption makes an ass out of you, to the tune of some specific number of dollars per thing your business does (e.g. send boxes of dolls). That’s all it is.

The key point here is that it doesn’t have to be about “spot prices” and “futures prices.” Everyone makes assumptions that end up being wrong to some quantifiable degree. For example, a pension plan may assume that people won’t live as long as they end up living, or that its investments will have better returns than they end up having, or that its administrative costs will be lower than they are. All of these things can and will be called basis risks by finance-brained people.

                                                 🌠 The More You Know 🌠 

For a hot minute I was excited about the Knobe effect. I thought I could clarify what was going on with it, and that that would matter somehow. Life has intervened and I now have other priorities. So I’m going to do a quick post that captures where I am with it and leave it at that.

In a nutshell, this note captures where I am with it:

The experiment is extremely interesting, but I don’t think it shows anything remotely straightforward about human psychology, let alone moral philosophy.

Crash course in the Knobe Effect literature (see my earlier post for a proper introduction): there’s the “competence” view that says the results reveal that the actual meaning of intentionality changes based on… whether someone knowingly violated a social norm, or something? Honestly not sure. It’s weird. And then there’s the “performance” view that says it shows how people get emotional and distort the objective meanings of terms when they want to go after some asshole who deserves it.

I think the performance school is closer to correct than the competence school, but my personal viewpoint differs significantly from both these schools. Here is my personal viewpoint.

First, the question is kind of loaded. “Loaded” is not the exact right term, but… it’s not the right question to ask in a normal, cooperative conversation. The right first question to ask is, “is the CEO a bad dude?” Knobe’s experiment skips straight over the normal thing to ask, and goes to a downstream question about the intentional quality of the CEO’s action.

Now, I think that if you want to be transparent and reliable in your reasoning, you need to break it down into small, explicit steps. This has become especially apparent in the age of LLMs: the more you help them along by giving them a framework to tackle big questions by breaking them down, the more reliably they answer the questions. And I absolutely think this applies to humans too. All education research of any quality will point to this thesis. If you want to help people get to a hard truth, you try to make the journey like a steady hike up a mountain trail, not a pole vault.

Knobe’s question clearly violates this principle. Which is not a “wrong” thing to do, per se. I mean, not everything in life is a mountain hike, some things are pole vaults, and pole vaulting competitions are fun to watch. But we don’t generally treat morality as a pole vaulting competition. When we want sound moral judgments in high-stakes situations, we try to provide ideal conditions. Like, look at the jury system. If you want a sound judgment on whether somebody committed murder, you give a group of diverse people the evidence in multiple ways, ask a well-defined legal question with all the traditional moral sophistication of common law, then give them as much time to think as they need.

But, what about folk concepts, you ask? Isn’t this about the folk concept of intentionality? Well, the “folk” aren’t just one thing. Versions of the jury system have probably existed for as long as humans have needed to judge whether someone committed a crime, i.e. all of behavioral modernity. It’s not as if people in a jury room are superhuman and people in a Manhattan park are just regular folk. The difference in the outcome you get from those two conditions wouldn’t be in the people, it would be in the environment you put them in. The jury room is what we do when we’re morally serious. Knobe’s experiment is what you do when you’re stress-testing people’s intuitive thinking by giving them a compound question that they have to interpret. “Did the CEO act intentionally”, in most people’s minds, probably subconsciously maps to a compound question like this:

Question 1: Is the CEO a bad dude?

Question 2: Should I answer using the real definition of intentionality, or should I say the thing that nudges my fellow human in the direction of how I think the CEO should be judged by good and right-thinking people?

This is neither competence theory, performance theory, nor some soft, semi-coherent, additive mixture of the two (the vibe of my evidentialism post, which I no longer like very much). The actual process—or what I think is the actual process—is kind of rational and it’s kind of emotional. It’s a serious consideration of morality and social norms (Question 1) followed by a pragmatic, what-do-we-do-with-this-apparent-asshole-or-maybe-not type deliberation (Question 2).

One way to formalize this and make it respectable is to make up a new Theory, which I will call Rival Competencies Theory. I have a giant wall of text discussing with Gemini how to develop RCT in a Serious Fashion, but let’s toss all that in the wastebasket and keep it simple. In their interactions with other people, I think most people, including me, are following what we might call the Trust Dilemma Algorithm:

Is this person a threat (defector)? If so, I want them punished, constrained, or otherwise prevented from harming me. If not (cooperator), I want them treated humanistically, with dignity and nuance and respect for what they say—at least prima facie, until I have a better idea of whether they’re competent and helpful and a potentially useful person in my tribe.

The Knobe effect stress tests this algorithm by forcing people to intuitively speedrun it and report a result downstream of it, the intentionality judgment. In the Harm condition, most people take the defector horn of the trust dilemma, while in the Help condition, most people take the cooperator horn. You can perhaps think of the person facing the horns of the dilemma as between a shoulder angel and a shoulder devil, or more accurately, a shoulder peacetime general and a shoulder wartime general. These are the two rival competencies that we use to navigate the world. We are ready to make war and make peace at any time. It depends on what the world hands us today.

In conclusion, the Knobe effect is the moral judgment equivalent of pole-vaulting, and the results reflect people’s intuitions under stress testing. It’s a very cool and revealing experiment, but not in a way that’s best revealed by thousands of pages of ponderous abstract text. It’s street philosophy and deserves a street philosophy treatment. That is what I’ve attempted to do here.

I’ve not been great at posting. Life is asking a lot right now (in the best way). But that’s the beauty of a hobbyist blog—it absorbs the energy you have and waits for the next moment. And here is that moment, and here is precisely the energy I have for it.

A week ago I was struck by the desire to say something about the absurdity of imagining that you can, let alone should, live by utility theory. I think well-meaning intellectuals should stop fetishizing this tool from theoretical economics. It all sounds well and good when you use it to rationalize traditional ideas, like tithing, but it often ends in saying stuff like you should police the world by killing carnivores, or pave over the wild to reduce wild animal suffering, or whatever that guy is going to post next. You know the guy I’m talking about. Bless his heart.

But I didn’t write an essay about that, because prosaically, I have nothing more to say about it than what I just said in that last paragraph. Instead, I wrote a poem about what might go on in your head if you lived by the law of utils.1

The Utility Theorist

I've a weighing room for the utils in my head.
The piles in the scale say I'm better off dead.
Last week's utils are remembered no more.
Next week's utils, I'm told, count—but what for?

The Discount Rate Shrink Ray resolves that for me;
A zap makes the pain of the future near free.
I shrink all my debts to the size of a pea,
And swallow them down with my afternoon tea.

But the Ray has a glitch that the manual hid:
It breaks when the Future does what it just did.
It turns into Now—and the math falls apart,
For a graph cannot bandage a hole in a Heart.

The peas in my belly explode into stones,
For logic is paper, but pain is in bones.
And a util of joy from the year twenty-four,
Won't pick me up off the cold bathroom Floor.

Welcome to my weekly Math Circle feature. My goal is to spend 30 minutes every Sunday doing cool math with my son, ideally in a way that I can explain in a blog post. I spend about 10 minutes preparing each circle. The prep begins with me asking Gemini for a cool idea, then we iterate on the idea a bit, then I go to the whiteboard and we see what happens. Since I am a PhD in applied math and my son is, while very smart, still ten years old, this doesn’t totally flop. In fact it works better than if I over-prepare, because my lack of preparation puts me on more of a level playing field with my son, making it more like a true Math Circle.

For this Sunday’s Circle, my son and I tackled map coloring. My goal is for us to prove an easier version of the famous Four Color Theorem, which says you only need four colors to color the countries of a map properly—that is, with no adjacent countries having the same color.1 While four is extremely difficult to prove and even five is fairly tricky, the proof that you can always properly color a map with only six colors is elementary, elegant, and gives excellent intuition for why such a low number works. (Also, since I keep these sessions to 30 minutes each, the goals have to be manageable.)

If you know things about about this area of math, try to set aside the prejudice of familiarity. Is it really that obvious that any number of colors suffices? Can’t you make a crazy map with lots of regions touching one another, such that a proper coloring requires a hundred colors?

I began the Circle with that question in mind. I asked my son to come up with a hard map that requires lots of colors. He came up with the one below, which I then tried to color:

As you can see, I did about half before I decided I’d done enough. I definitely failed to do it in four colors, as my strategy on his “pinwheel” structures literally painted me into a corner. That doesn’t mean it’s not possible though. I just didn’t try very hard!

When we turn to the question of how good a good coloring can be, there’s another way of representing map regions that turns out to be quite powerful, called the dual graph. In the dual graph, we put “capitols” on each country and connect them with roads. Two capitols can be connected if and only if their countries share a boundary.2 I decided to use the other half of our challenge map to construct a dual, in particular for the region within the dotted green line:

Take a close look at my dual. It might not be perfect!

Next, I erased everything but the dual region and had my son correct my mistakes. He found a few roads between capitols that I missed.

Finally, we were ready to start approaching the Six Color Theorem. Let’s take stock of what we know:

• Coloring the regions of a map is the same as coloring the vertices of its dual graph, since each vertex represents a region and the edges tell us which regions touch which other regions.

• A dual graph will always be planar—you can draw it without edges crossing one another. This is clear because any road connecting two capitols only goes through their two countries, so there is no need for it to cross another road.

To prove the Six Color Theorem, we need one more insight, which I’ll call the Lonely Vertex Lemma.

Lonely Vertex Lemma: 
Any planar graph has at least one vertex with less than six neighbors.

Once this is established, you can six-color any planar graph, and hence any map, with a divide-and-conquer technique.

Algorithm: Coloring a planar graph with at most six colors

Input: a graph G and six colors.
Output: a coloring of G such that no two neighboring vertices have the same color.
Steps:

1. Find a vertex, V, with less than six neighbors.

2. Temporarily delete V and its edges from the graph, producing a reduced graph G’

3. Color G’ by recursively invoking this algorithm, using G’ as the input instead of G.

4. Reintroduce V and its edges back into the graph.

5. Pick a color that isn’t used by the neighbors of V and use it to color V.

The only step that isn’t obviously workable is Step 5. How do we know that there is a color that isn’t used by the neighbors of V? Well, there are six colors, and the neighbors of V use at most five of them, so there is at least one color that isn’t used.

…and with that, my 30 minutes were up.

Next week’s Circle will prove the Lonely Vertex Lemma using Euler’s formula for connected planar graphs, which we inducted from examples in Math Circle #1.

While the empirical turn in moral psychology predates 2003, Joshua Knobe’s analysis of intentional action stands as a singular crystallizing moment for experimental philosophy, or “x-phi.” By shifting the focus from the reliability of intuitions to the structure of folk concepts — from how philosophers believe people should think to how people actually think — Knobe established a positive program demonstrating that empirical methods could reveal deep, functional cognitive features that abstract, spherical cow-type analysis had missed.

For over twenty years, the specific anomaly he identified, the “Knobe Effect,” has served as the field’s central puzzle. The core finding is that, when an agent expresses indifference about a side effect their intended action may have, observers are significantly more likely to classify the side effect as itself intentional if the side effect is harmful (82%) than if it is helpful (23%) (Knobe, 2003).

In Knobe’s original experiment, run on 78 subjects in a Manhattan public park, the agent is a CEO who is told that a proposed corporate initiative will increase profit but affect the environment. On hearing this, the CEO responds “I don’t care at all about affecting the environment.” Each subject is then asked if the CEO affected the environment intentionally. The two experimental conditions, Help and Harm, derive from respectively substituting the words “help” and “harm” for “affect” in the text above before presenting it to the subject. The 78 subjects were randomized into the two conditions, so that 39 were asked the Harm version of the vignette and 39 were asked the Help version.

II. Interpreting the Effect

In the decades since Knobe first reported these results, two major interpretations have emerged. Competence theorists argue that the concept of intentional action inherently contains a normative component (Knobe, 2006) — for example, Holton (2010) postulates that knowingly violating a social norm counts as intentionally violating it. Performance theorists argue that the popular ascription of intentionality in the Harm condition is an affective processing-driven deviation from ideal rationality motivated by the need to assign blame for harmful activities (Alicke, 2008). Both camps seem to agree that (1) intentionality is a post-hoc concept, distinct from prior intent, and (2) the function of intentionality is to defeat attempts to defend harmful actions by invoking a lack of harmful prior intent, since social norm violators tend to be social threats who will seek to obfuscate their mens rea if caught by norm enforcers.

I hypothesize that the experiment’s response rate patterns are the result of a context-dependent accumulation of evidence of intentionality from two sources: social threat and everything else. On my view, which I will call evidentialism, the dramatic population shift towards attribution of intentionality when we move from the Help to the Harm condition occurs because the evidence of social threat is much greater in the Harm condition than the Help condition.

In its details described below, evidentialism employs weakened versions of the claims from both the competence and performance camps. I align with competence theory in acknowledging that a knowing violation of a social norm is evidence of an intentional violation of that norm.1 I align with performance theory in acknowledging that our emotional reactions to harmful behavior and social norm violations can sometimes overwhelm objective prima facie evidence of indifference when we attribute intentionality.2 I align with both theories in (1) the commonsense view that indifference toward harming the environment is a much greater social norm violation than indifference toward helping the environment, and (2) the functionalist view that intentionality exists to neutralize the ability of social threat actors to escape social sanction by denying ill intent. In this way, evidentialism can be viewed as a quantitative, commonsense, and functionalist integration of the insights from competence and performance theory.

III. Minority Responses: a Neglected Explanandum

A new theory of the Knobe effect is not only desirable, but scientifically necessary, because the quantitative details of the experimental results contain an explanandum that no existing theory has addressed.

In the roughly 80-20 and 20-80 splits observed in the experimental results, existing accounts have focused on the majority consensus and ignored the minority responses. However, it is a statistical certainty that the minority results are signal rather than noise:

1. The size of the minority (~20-23%) exceeds the baseline for incoherent or careless responding, often estimated at approximately 4% in survey research (Alexander, 2013).

2. While Knobe’s original sample was not large, the Many Labs 2 project replicated the finding with 7,982 participants, 4,000 in the Harm condition and 3,982 in the Help condition (Klein et al., 2018). In the Harm condition, 79% described the CEO’s action as intentional, while 19% in the Help condition did.3 With a sample this large, the 95% confidence intervals on the polling results imply a statistical uncertainty in the response rates of about 1 percentage point. For example, a 20% response rate from a sample of 4,000 implies a general population rate of 19-21% with high statistical confidence, and similarly an 80% sample response rate implies a general population rate of 79-81%.

Given these points, it is impossible to deny that substantial counter-majority subgroups of about 20% exist in both the Harm and Help conditions. This is an explanandum for any theory of the Knobe effect. However, to the best of my knowledge, no existing account of the Knobe effect has even attempted to explain it. Thus, all existing theories of the Knobe effect suffer from an explanatory gap.

It may be tempting to defend existing theories against this charge by waving away the minority responses as the product of some sort of irrationality or atypical psychological makeup in some part of the population. But this move is scientifically sterile and fundamentally contrary to Knobe’s positive program, which seeks to determine what people actually think and why, rather than merely validating their conformity to philosophy’s existing theories.

IV. The Evidentialist Account

I will now develop a statistical account of the Knobe effect that successfully addresses the neglected explanandum. Consider the commonly encountered situation in which an agent needs to make a binary4 yes/no judgment under uncertainty using multiple sources of potentially ambiguous evidence. On the view from evidentialism, human agents do this by cognitively “weighing” the available evidence on a scale with “yes” evidence on one side and “no” evidence on the other, and we judge based on which way the scale tips. Equivalently, we can (1) assign each piece of evidence a real number, positive or negative, based on its weight; (2) sum up these numbers; and (3) make our judgment based on the sign of the sum: positive means yes, negative means no.

We now apply this to Knobe’s CEO experiment. The agent is the interviewee in the Manhattan park, and the binary judgment is the agent’s yes/no answer to the question “is the CEO’s attitude towards affecting the environment intentional?”. I hypothesize that the agent’s judgment is obtained by weighing two sources of evidence: (1) evidence that the CEO is a social threat based on social norm violations, (2) residual evidence from all other sources, including prima facie neutral interpretation of what the CEO says. Turning this hypothesis into a statistical formula is straightforward:

Where X_t and X_r are random variables representing social norm violation evidence and residual “everything else” evidence respectively. If X > 0, the CEO’s effect on the environment from approving the initiative is judged intentional.

V. Calibrating the Model Parameters

By assigning plausible values to these variables based on the psychological context, it is possible to reproduce the substantial counter-majority subgroups in both the Help and Harm conditions. I do not claim to offer a rigorously derived empirical model here, only a deliberately simplified proof-of-concept demonstration.

Baseline: Consider a control case of pure indifference without moral valence—for example, a beetle enthusiast who explicitly states he “doesn’t care” about birds but accidentally photographs one. In such a case, the explicit statement of indifference serves as strong evidence against intentionality. We can quantify this rational baseline by setting X_r = -2. In reality the value would vary within the population, but I treat it as a constant for simplicity.

Harm Condition: When the CEO harms the environment indifferently, the norm violation is clear, and we detect a high-risk agent willing to inflict costs on the group. This generates a strong social threat signal, shifting the evidence distribution 3 units to the right, with a 1 unit normally distributed spread reflecting differences of opinion as to the seriousness of the violation. The vast majority (84%) of the resulting normal distribution crosses the threshold, closely matching the 82% that assigned intentionality in the harm condition in Knobe’s original experiment. A perfect correspondence can be achieved by reducing the shift from 3 to 2.92 units.

Help Condition: When a corporate CEO states “I don’t care at all about the environment,” it still violates a social norm, regardless of whether the context is a positive environmental impact. However, the seriousness of the violation is judged differently by different observers due to the relatively politicized, controversial nature of social norms around environmental threats. This yields a weak signal of social threat which I assume shifts the evidence distribution to the right by 1 unit, and again with a 1 unit normally distributed spread. The tail of the curve crossing the threshold predicts 16% of subjects ascribing intentionality in the help condition. This is not far from the observed 23%, and a perfect correspondence can be achieved by increasing the shift from 1 to 1.26 units.

These results are summarized in the figure below, using my initial rough whole number figures for the parameters.

VI. Why is Social Norm Violation Evidence of Intentionality?

A natural next question is why we think that social norm violation counts as evidence of intentionality. The answer comes from competence theory. People generally know when they’re violating social norms, so when they do so, it suggests that they are either competent and antisocial or incompetent. Attributing intentionality is the “better safe than sorry” approach, as a competent antisocial actor is extremely dangerous to the group.

It is tempting to interpret this through the lens of Error Management Theory, which posits that cognitive systems are often biased toward the least costly error (Haselton & Nettle, 2006). However, the characterization of social norm-related intentionality attribution as a “bias” may be misleading, because the very mutuality of social norms often makes their violation an accurate signal of antisociality. If a social norm is well-understood as carrying serious weight within a group of mentally competent adults, violations are likely to originate lopsidedly from competent antisocial actors whose violations are part of a larger plan that benefits them at the expense of others.

VII. Discussion

A. A New Prediction

A testable prediction of this framework is that intentionality is strongly driven by the presence of a threat signal which is present in both the Help and Harm conditions, just to differing degrees. Thus, if a control vignette were introduced with zero threat, such as the beetle enthusiast described above, the social threat term should effectively drop to zero, and intentionality attribution should drop to near zero (accounting for the baseline rate of careless responding). This would suggest that the substantial minority ascribing intentionality in the Help condition is a systematic response to the norm violation inherent in the CEO’s stated indifference to the corporate initiative’s impact on the environment.

B. Social Threat and Everything Else

I have proposed that evidence of intentionality can be broken down into two terms, one for social threat and one for everything else. An everything else term is normally called a residual in statistics, but I have used this nonstandard terminology for a reason.

Scott Alexander, the same writer who proposed the Lizardman’s Constant that I invoked in Section III, also wrote an article in which he mythologized the history of life on Earth as a divine duel between two Goddesses, the Goddess of Cancer and the Goddess of Everything Else (Alexander, 2015). If we draw lines between Scott’s two Goddesses and our two evidence terms, we are led to link the Goddess of Everything Else to the everything else term, and the Goddess of Cancer to the social threat term.

It is both rhetorically common and logical to associate social threats with cancer. Both are internal threats to the cooperation of multi-agent coalitions: cooperation between humans in the case of social threats, cooperation between cells in the case of cancer. Both are governed by the arbitrarily complex, adversarial arms-race dynamics of evolutionary game theory. This suggests that the evidentialist account of the Knobe effect has deep resonances with evolutionary game theory and the mythic binaries of Order versus Chaos, Cooperation versus Competition, and Trust versus Betrayal that have characterized every phase of our evolutionary history, from the emergence of the first cooperative life 4 billion years ago (Maynard Smith & Szathmary, 1995) to the advanced human civilizations and nation-states of the present day. These mythic resonances are suggestive of deeper insights, which I am exploring and developing for future publication.

References

Alexander, S. (2013). Lizardman’s Constant is 4%. Slate Star Codex.

Alexander, S. (2015). The Goddess of Everything Else. Slate Star Codex.

Alicke, M. D. (2008). Blaming badly. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 8(1-2), 179-186.

Haselton, M. G., & Nettle, D. (2006). The paranoid optimist: An integrative evolutionary model of cognitive biases. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(1), 47-66.

Holton, R. (2010). Norms and the Knobe effect. Analysis, 70(3), 417-424.

Klein, R. A., et al. (2018). Many Labs 2: Investigating variation in replicability across samples and settings. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 1(4), 443-490.

Knobe, J. (2003). Intentional action and side effects in ordinary language. Analysis, 63(3), 190–194.

Knobe, J. (2006). The concept of intentional action: A case study in the uses of folk psychology. Philosophical Studies, 130(2), 203-231.

Maynard Smith, J., & Szathmary, E. (1995). The Major Transitions in Evolution. W.H. Freeman.

Nichols, S., & Ulatowski, J. (2007). Intuitions and individual differences: The Knobe effect revisited. Mind & Language, 22(4), 346-365.

I’ve been doing some Math Circle stuff with my 10 year old son and I thought you might enjoy seeing what we did.

The picture above shows our work inducting the formula for the Euler characteristic of the sphere from several special cases. Here’s what we did:

1. We started by noticing patterns between vertices and edges for different planar graphs. We found 3 cases: closed polygons (V = E + 0), multi-segment lines (V = E + 1), square with diagonal (V = E - 1). Critically, we noticed that the pattern is complicated if there are multiple connected components, so I suggested that we keep things simple by restricting our explorations to graphs with one connected component.

2. We noticed that the formula changes based on how many spaces are enclosed by the figure, leading to the introduction of the “face” variable F. I set the convention that we count the outside space as a face, but it doesn’t particularly matter, you just get V - E + F = 1 instead of V - E + F = 2 if you don’t count the outside space.

3. Hypothesizing that the 3 cases above can be combined into a single master formula involving F, we developed a table relating F to the additive offset Term that appears in each case:

                           V = E + Term            (Equation 1)

• Closed Polygon: Term = 0, F = 2

• Multi-segment Line: Term = 1, F = 1

• Square with diagonal: Term = -1, F = 3

Organizing these observations into a table yields

 F | Term
===|=====
 1 |    1
 2 |    0
 3 |   -1

from which we deduce Term = 2 - F, and substituting that into Equation 1, we have

V = E + 2 - F

or

V - E + F = 2

Recovering the Euler characteristic on the sphere.

My favorite character in all of fiction is Disney’s Mulan.

The 1998 version. So glad they never remade it.

I have the deepest longing in my heart to explain to you why worshipping Mulan, both the movie and the character, is Legitimate and Correct and not Cringe. So today I’m going to talk about how Mulan both exemplifies and transcends the Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance.

I mean, I’m eventually going to get around to that, I think. Actually, this is going to be a self-indulgent, spontaneous, stream-of-consciousness reprocessing of the movie as I selectively rewatch it. Whatever happens, happens.

I’ll publish this as a multi-part series. This is Part I: Overture through Reflection.

Mulan, like most Disney classics, is a true-blue musical. It opens with a lush overture that beckons you to fall in love with classical China for 90 minutes.1 We are then cold-dropped into a moonlit scene on the Great Wall at China’s frontier. As a sentry patrols the Wall, barbarians suddenly appear. They breach the Wall’s defenses so quickly that the sentry barely escapes to one of the Wall’s watchtowers, each of which contain an enormous oil vat that can be burned to create a warning beacon. As the disoriented, terrified sentry gathers his senses, an eerily yellow-eyed colossus vaults into the tower from the opposite side and stares him down with a psychopathically relaxed air.2

The music that accompanies the villain’s grand entrance is a legitimate competitor for the most chilling 18 seconds of audio ever recorded. It’s a bit like the Imperial March from Star Wars, but… well, it’s Chinese.

The sentry gives himself about four seconds to stare in shocked recognition before he resolves to dutiful anger and hurls a torch into the oil. Within seconds, all the beacons within sight of this one are also lit. The sentry has done his job, and quite frankly he deserves some recognition. So he asks for some credit where credit is due, from the only person on hand to give it to him.

Now all of China knows you’re here.

The hulking Hun leader is game. He cracks off a nearby Chinese military banner and burns it in the beacon’s flames. Then, with a rogue’s gravelly baritone:

“Perfect.”

The sentry’s fate after this is probably not worth contemplating, so the movie graciously sweeps us forward to the Emperor’s palace, where generals are relaying the news that the Huns have invaded China, and their flag-burning leader is named Shan Yu. The Emperor dismisses the suggestion that the army focus on protecting his palace, instead commanding them to protect the Chinese people. He also commands a full conscription, insisting that one man could be the difference between victory and defeat. This turns out to be basically correct, with an amusing asterisk that will vault the story into the Chinese legendarium.

We are next introduced to Mulan, a young woman who is late to the matchmaking appointment where her future husband will be determined. She is late because she’s been writing Chinese characters on her arm to help her cheat the matchmaker’s tests. When a rooster’s crow reminds her of the imminent appointment, she briefly panics, then triggers a mechanism by which she can make her hyperactive dog do her assigned chore of feeding the chickens. This inevitably causes chicken feed to be spread across the entire household grounds. One wonders why this domestic mad scientist couldn’t just dump the feed in front of the chickens, which are not far away.

Mulan’s father, Fa Zhu,3 is praying to the ancestors for a successful matchmaking. But given the chaos Mulan has, presumably not for the first time, brought upon the morning, he does not seem optimistic. Mulan arrives to give him his doctor-prescribed morning tea, but, not watching where she’s going, bumps into him and the tea cup breaks. But it’s no big deal because she brought a spare(!!). The girl’s household motto seems to be move fast and break things, but come prepared to immediately recover from it.

Mulan lives in a delicate and dynamic balancing act between the externally-imposed yin of calmly and cheerfully meeting her daughterly family obligations, especially to a father she clearly reveres, and the vigorous internal yang of doing whatever she damn well pleases. If her parents have ever made any attempt to rein her in, it has probably been so completely unsuccessful as to be dismissed as futile today.

The fact that her life as a lovingly indulged daughter is scheduled to end in a couple hours doesn’t seem to phase her at all. She evidently plans to breezily vault through core societal expectations that a normal girl in her situation would spend years anxiously and rigorously preparing to fulfill.

The matchmaking appointment doesn’t go well, despite the family’s rushed best efforts to gussy this lovely girl up as a standard-issue Chinese bride. Let’s just say that Mulan’s plan neglected some minor details that unluckily ended up becoming important in the chaos of the moment. She might have gotten away with it though, if only her grandmother hadn’t attached a naughty “lucky” cricket to her backside. The same cricket the grandmother had just used to cross a busy street with her eyes closed, causing a massive traffic accident… to test if the cricket was lucky enough.

Hmm… I’m getting a pretty specific radar ping on where Mulan gets her yang from.

Mulan is now sad. Up until now, she has planned to have it both ways, pouring most of her energy into living life authentically while just barely meeting familial and societal expectations. But her plans have at last run aground on the rocky shores of reality. It’s clearly time for a very special musical number, and the movie delivers the unforgettable anthem Reflection.

Today, the full force of Reflection is finally hitting me. Mulan is walking her family’s beautiful manor grounds on a perfect day, watching her parents grieve over her complete failure to fulfill her only real duty as a daughter. This safe, beautiful place has been painstakingly created largely for her benefit, and… she has not held up her end of the deal. But Mulan’s soul is Teflon when it comes to guilt about failing to perform social roles, so after a few moments of mourning, she turns to politely but firmly request that the universe let her know when she’ll finally be allowed to be who she really is.

If you weren’t so brain-rotted by the self-centering at the heart of the individualistic liberal ideologies that power most of modern life, you’d be horrified at the chutzpah. You might ask: where does she get the gall?

By the way, if you were to ask that question, I’d tell you that we’ve already answered it. She gets it from her Grandma. Do keep up.

To be continued…

This post is about my journey to atheism and what kind of atheist I am. I think this is worth writing about because I am confident in the viewpoint I’ve landed on, but I can’t remember ever seeing that viewpoint articulated in writing. I don’t have a ton of time for this, so it’s short and ends kind of abruptly. Hopefully it still does the job.

I was raised Catholic. Starting around ten years old, I was very interested in evidence and arguments for and against the existence of God. Atheism impressed me immediately. It was clear to me that standard theistic arguments could be rebutted very effectively. I was not persuaded by the idea that each rebutted argument still contributed some weak evidence for theism, and that you can get to high confidence by adding up the weak evidence from all these arguments. Nevertheless, it took me another full decade to reach the conclusion that I myself was an atheist. I spent a fair amount of my teens researching the case for and against Christianity from many perspectives, the historical one being the hardest to reach any sense of resolution on.12

My degree of confidence that God doesn’t exist is lower than my confidence that two and two make four, or that Earth goes around the Sun. It’s more like my confidence that my wife loves me, that my children are my own, that the company I work for is solvent and will continue paying my paycheck. These are mundane, practical confidences that are defeasible in principle, but in practice, life seems too short to waste time doubting them.

I feel that agnostic is a misleadingly weak way to characterize this mindset. I have a serene, settled confidence that matches other things I am comfortable saying I know. But I am not 100% certain because the evidence is hard to parse. There is a reasonable answer to most arguments from both sides.

What ultimately made me secure in my atheism, ironically, was the insistence of the Catholic Catechism (and the New Testament) that God can be known, with certainty, through the light of natural reason. One day I was reminded of these claims again, and the pieces fit together. I saw a bluff, a credulity-demolishing overreach. I mean, I know what natural reason is. My light is bright enough. It’s simply not true. And yet this claim is affirmed by people no less bright than I am. I ended up concluding that Abrahamic religion is a sort of confidence game that people play unconsciously to fit into their families and communities.

All that said, we all must tacitly admit that much of the world, and God if we believe, is beyond our understanding. As a passionate lover of mathematics and physical science, I have strong intuitions about what it takes to know something with “real” certainty, and I feel that very little of what we know meets this standard. Almost nothing can be proven with certainty by a single unaided intellect. For the hard questions, especially, we have to trust what others have written down for us to read. Trusting strangers is something we often have to do, but we all know it can be fraught with risk.

Because I think the evidence is so complex and hard to weigh, I have no contempt for religion or religious people whatsoever. I genuinely feel that religious belief is often intellectually respectable, and I’m not interested in browbeating anyone into it or out of it.

I also think that religion provides a sort of orientation to the world that contains a lot of truth that is hard to replace. For people who were raised in a faith, it provides much of their moral formation, much of their mythic and romantic toolkits, and I’m not sure that really goes away even if they stop believing. My wife and I read a lot of stories, fairy tales to our children, some with moral lessons. I hope that fills things in a bit, but I don’t really know for sure.

Secular people have been speculating for a while about what the moral, mythic and romantic aspects of life become without religion, but I think those efforts are not yet mature. Scott Alexander’s mythological account of evolution on Earth points in a direction that I consider especially promising. (One of the most distinctive aspects of Scott’s essays his very high affinity for and usage of the Judeo-Christian mythic-romantic toolkit, and more references to C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton than you will find in the work of most religious writers.)

American culture tends to be a bit selective in its engagement with Christianity and the Bible. Popular representations of Christianity often seem to imply that it is primarily a therapeutic mechanism for becoming a nice and cooperative member of society, and Jesus is a figurehead of love and tolerance who essentially just wanted everyone to be nice and live in peace with one other.

The full text of the New Testament, however, contains a religion that is far more rugged and less sentimental. Far from suggesting that we look away from the tragedy of man against man, Jesus demands that we confront the darkness of human nature as all mature adult humans know it to be. He also offers a way to light a powerful flame against that darkness, one which the Catholic Church promoted into a sacrament: reconciliation.

Reconciliation is not unique to Catholicism, for the hunger for a clean slate is universal. In Judaism, Teshuvah (“return”) requires a rigorous process of facing one’s wrongs and making restitution. In the Protestant tradition, the believer generally confesses directly to God, seeking absolution in the quiet privacy of their own heart. The secular model of restorative justice is surprisingly similar to Catholicism, operating on the premise that the offender must name their offense before the community can heal.

Like restorative justice, the Catholic form of reconciliation is distinctive in its demand for externalization. It views the private confession of the mind as insufficient and insists that the secret be spoken aloud to a witness. But unlike the de facto form of “restorative justice” practiced in many historical and contemporary societies, which seems to vacillate capriciously between meaningless ritual and the vicious doom-trigger punishment of social ostracism or “cancellation,” Catholicism institutionalizes a consistent norm of forgiveness for the sincerely repentant sinner—even when the sin is not one that we feel very comfortable forgiving.1

The importance of the Sacrament of Reconciliation to Catholic Christian life cannot be overstated. Of the seven sacraments, only two are meant to be received on a regular basis: the Eucharist (Holy Communion) and Reconciliation. The Eucharist is sometimes classed among the Sacraments of the Living, while Reconciliation is classed among the Sacraments of the Dead. From this perspective, ordinary Catholic spiritual life comes down to two simple rituals: first, be nourished by Jesus while you are alive in his grace; second, allow Him to call you back to his side when by your own sin you find you have left Him.

The structure of Reconciliation is simple: you confess and repent of your sins, then you are forgiven. And this is no surprise: when someone does us wrong, we all understand that repentance must precede any possibility of forgiveness.2

Repentance Comes First

The New Testament is a document of spiritual warfare. It assumes that human nature is deeply flawed, possessed by a “darkness” that cannot simply be wished or hugged away. It must be confronted, named, and voluntarily abandoned. This is why the foundational call of the early church was never merely “you are loved.” The call, from John the Baptist to Jesus to Peter, was Metanoia.

In Greek, Metanoia implies far more than the feeling of regret we associate with the English word “repentance.” It means a fundamental shift of the mind—a total reorientation of the will. In Acts 3:19, Peter lays out the operational order of salvation: “Repent therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out.”

There is no ambiguity about the logical structure here. The blotting out (forgiveness) can only occur when a sinner has repented in their heart. The transaction cannot be completed if the recipient refuses to acknowledge the debt. To offer forgiveness to unrepentant malice is not virtue, but moral abdication. It is an attempt to paper over a tear that the sinner has made in our spiritual and social fabric, which will inevitably widen if they do not apologize and work to repair it.

Rebuke as Love

Repentance realism extends to our horizontal relationships. It may sometimes seem that to be a “good Christian” means being a doormat, forgiving abusers who have no intention of changing. But Jesus himself destroys this idea in a single, startling sentence in Luke 17:3:

Be on your guard! If your brother sins, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him.

The modern mind recoils at the first half of that instruction. Rebuke him. It sounds judgmental. It sounds harsh. But within the logic of the New Testament, the rebuke is an act of profound love. Why? Because it is the only thing that disrupts the darkness.

If you forgive a brother who has not repented, you are not freeing him; you are confirming him in his error. You are participating in his illusion that his behavior is acceptable. By demanding repentance, you are treating him as a moral agent capable of change, rather than a broken object to be pitied.

This is where Christianity proves it is not soft-headed. It recognizes that evil thrives in the shadows of denial. The command to rebuke and the requirement of repentance are the mechanisms by which the darkness is brought to heel. They force the offender to dismantle their own ego, to admit “I was wrong,” and to align themselves with the truth before reconciliation can occur.

The Necessity of Confession

The Apostle John, in his first epistle, provides the philosophical underpinning for this. He writes: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:9).

Again, the conditional “If” stands guard at the gate.

The word used for “confess” here is homologeo, which literally means “to say the same thing.” To confess is to say the same thing about your sin that God says about it. It is to agree with reality.

This is why confession is not just an arbitrary hoop to jump through, but an ontological necessity. You cannot be forgiven for a lie you are still telling yourself. If you are clinging to the darkness—justifying it, excusing it, or denying it—you are functionally closed off from the light. Grace is like water; it cannot fill a vessel that is sealed shut. Confession is the act of uncorking the vessel.

The Romance of Redemption

There is something deeply romantic, in the old, heroic sense, about this view of the world. It frames moral life as a performance not of niceness, but of an arduous and deeply fulfilling spiritual duty.

Soft-focus Christianity suggests that human nature is basically fine and just needs a little encouragement. The New Testament says that human nature is capable of profound selfishness and malice, and that the only cure is a radical death of the old self.

By stressing repentance before forgiveness, the faith protects the value of forgiveness itself. It ensures that grace is never cheap. It cost the Giver everything, but it also costs the receiver something: their pride.

In a world that oscillates between cancel culture (judgment without redemption) and therapeutic deism (redemption without judgment), the New Testament walks the straight and narrow path of grace conditioned on repentance. It is a demanding, costly, and difficult path. But it is the only one that actually heals the wound, rather than just letting it fester.

If you can steer your helm when all about you
    Are loosing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust your heart when others doubt you,
    And hear the heartstrings of their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or set adrift inside, keep hope through loss,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look away, nor fear the cross:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your 
    master; 
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your 
    aim; 
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster 
    And use them as a fuel to feed your flame;
If you can fight to save a truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by fear into a maze of rules,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your loved ones
    And risk them on the healing of your soul,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never lose the hope of being whole;
If you can guide your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve their turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Love which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can break you,
    If all lives count with you, but none too much;
If you can read a route and find within it
    A toe-hold on a wall where there was none,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
    And—which is more—you’ll be human, my son!