I used to think denigrating modern art was just reactionary BS, but many modern artists did rebel against beauty as an objective standard for art which was a mistake.

I used to assume empathy was basically always good, but it can override more rational modes of assessing harm. Our empathy is highly identity-loaded and therefore sometimes pushes us towards bigotry.

I used to think it was amusing when people said they think too much because I thought thinking all the time was just how minds work, and that they were really just complaining about the content of their thoughts. But really most thoughts are needless suffering and our minds should be a lot more still and quiet.

It’s actually probably more ethical to avoid buying fair trade stuff than to seek it out. It’s best to buy from the poorest countries you can and fair trade stuff often comes from less poor countries.

I used to think ‘while we shouldn’t “throw” unnecessary money at anything, if we’re going to throw money at anything do education’. In reality, there is very little causation from education spending to good outcomes: It’s the subculture of the student body that matters most.

John Rawls didn’t come up with the ‘veil of ignorance’ thought experiment and the conclusions he drew from it were highly questionable.

I’m a big defender of modernity but I now concede pre-modern people may actually have been happier than modern people despite being dirt poor and dying early because they Selfed way less hard. Further progress can get us out of this local minimum.

“Just as theory” is not actually not the dumbest thing you can possibly say in that it does at least suggest an understanding that the consensus of the experts may be dead wrong.

Perhaps I judged NIMBYs too harshly: It’s not clear wanting to keep people you think are substantially more likely to be criminals out of your family’s neighborhood is beyond the pale on the selfishness scale.

Imperceptible increases in pain are still bad (Parfit). Or idk, maybe ‘imperceptible’ is overloaded/ambiguous in a way that makes this seem more counterintuitive than it needs to be.

“Poor people make bad decisions because they’re poor” probably makes more sense than I gave it credit for. Abundance mindset vs scarcity mindset is probably real to some extent.

I thought conscientiousness meant being nice.

I went from thinking calling dogmatic but non-supernaturalist ideologies ‘religions’ was deep, to thinking doing so is shallow, to okay maybe some of these trendy political ideologies are filling a God-shaped hole in our psyches.

Inequality is probably somewhat more corrosive in and of itself than I gave it credit for. It can increase the risk of perverse expenditure cascades as signaling f.e.