There is perhaps no temptation greater to the amateur (or professional) historian than to take a set of historical facts and draw from them a grand narrative. This tradition has existed at least since Gibbon wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with its focus on declining civic virtue and the rise of Christianity.

Obviously, it is true that things in history happen for a reason. But I think the case is much less clear that these reasons can be marshalled like soldiers and made to march in neat lines across the centuries. What is true in one time and place may not necessarily be true in another. When you fall under the sway of a grand narrative, when you believe that everything happens for a reason, you may become tempted to ignore all of the evidence to the contrary.

Instead praying at the altar...

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I - Summary

The Righteous Mind follows an argument structure I learned in high school debate club. It tells you what it’s going to tell you, it tells you it, then it reminds you what it told you. This made it a really easy read and a welcome break from The Origins of Totalitarianism, the other book I’ve been reading. Practically the very first part of The Righteous Mind proper (after the foreword) is an introduction to its first metaphor.

Imagine an elephant and a rider. They have travelled together since their birth and move as one. The elephant doesn’t say much (it’s an elephant), but the rider is very vocal – for example, she’s quick to apologize and explain away any damage the elephant might do. A casual observer might think the rider is in charge, because she is so much cleverer and more talkative, but that casual...

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In utilitarianism, “remoter effects” are the result of our actions influencing other people (and are hotly debated). I think that remoter effects are often overstated, especially (as Sir Williams said in Utilitarianism for and against) when they give the conventionally ethical answer. For example, a utilitarian might claim that the correct answer to the hostage dilemma¹ is to kill no one, because killing weakens the sanctity of human life and may lead to more deaths in the future.

When debating remoter effects, I think it’s worthwhile to split them into two categories: positive and negative. Positive remoter effects are when your actions cause others to refrain from some negative action they might otherwise take. Negative remoter effects are when your actions make it more likely that others will engage in a negative action².

Of late, I’ve been especially interested...

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Recently, I talked about what I didn’t like in Dr. Cathy O’Neil’s book, Weapons of Math Destruction. This time around, I’d like to mention two parts of it I really liked. I wish Dr. O’Neil put more effort into naming the concepts she covered; I don’t have names for them from WMD, but in my head, I’ve been calling them Hidden Value Encodings and Axiomatic Judgements.

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