Florian
Is Your Sustainable Contribution Simply Substituted Away?
Why your switch to Hydropower, Sustainable Palm Oil, or better Fish may be futile, but Solar PV and Organic Chicken have an effect— A Tale of Good Intentions, Economic Market Effects, and Greenwashing Labels. I speculate you at times aim to make a social contribution by purchasing the right variety […]
Practical AI resources
Random collection of helpful resources, maybe only helpful for myself. Some may be specific to the environment: Ubuntu 16.04, Python 3.5.2, Tensorflow/keras, PyCharm, CPU i7. Theory & UnderstandingBest, detailed LSTM description incl. intuitions and reasons: https://r2rt.com/written-memories-understanding-deriving-and-extending-the-lstm.html Keras setup in Tensorflow in PythonCustom Tensorflow builds for your environment: https://github.com/lakshayg/tensorflow-build (if you […]
Animal welfare equally important as clean air – why even liberals should embrace welfare standards
On 30 June 2018 the NZZ am Sonntag published my article explaining why individual consumer decisions and meat labels are not enough to protect animals; why even a liberal view warrants standards for animal welfare just as much as for e.g. air quality, and why we thus should prohibit today’s […]
Offsetting is egoistic – but less egoistic than you, so (kind of) embrace it!
If correctly interpreted, the common objections against environmental (and maybe other types of) offsetting are not valid critiques of offsetting, but instead more generally of our consumerist lifestyle. Rather than bad, offsetting is the very least to do, given that we anyway don’t abstain from spending money on inessential things while millions starve and […]
Is “Substrate-ism” as problematic as Speciesism?
Many of us are afraid of intelligent machines to eventually take control. But here a thought: Is this fear partly based on what we could call an ethically problematic “Substrate-ism” limiting our empathy and care to humans as well as to – for those not too speciesistic – fellow biological […]
The interesting case of altruism studies – No serious utilitarian out there?
Experimenters studying altruistic contributions regularly interpret it as clear sign of egoism when participants opt for money as opposed to things like saving the life of mice or increasing the payoff of fellow participants. From a utilitarian perspective this seems odd: I might well take the money, simply to donate it later to where I get the most bang for […]
Grundeinkommen – Befreiung mit Nebenwirkungen
Befürworter des bedingungslosen Grundeinkommens haben das Herz am rechten Fleck. Existenzsichernd ist diese Umverteilung aber kaum finanzierbar. Das Konzept stützt zudem darauf ab, dass Freiwilligenarbeit eine höhere Art der Beschäftigung sei – eine Sichtweise, die der zentralen Rolle von Geld und (Arbeits-)Preisen nicht gerecht wird. Unabhängig vom gewünschten Grad der […]
Ökonomie und Massenmigration
Sehr gelungener kurzer “Versuch eines Leitfadens durch Mythen, Trugschlüsse, Viertel- und Halbwahrheiten” über ökonomische Effekte von Massenmigration auf Ursprungs- und Zielländer und deren Einwohner von Franz R. Hahn auf Ökonomenstimme: Ökonomie und Massenmigration.
Altruism, Religion and Self-Enhancement in a Framework of Ad-Hoc Evolutionary Adaptation
We review evolutionary explanations for three major puzzles of the human mind: altruism, religiosity and self-enhancement. Human altruism reaches beyond reciprocity or close-kin care readily explained by game theory and genetic kin selection. Group selection is widely seen as too weak to lead to substantial altruism as it struggles to contain selfishness favored by within-group selection. Yet, reciprocity and punishment leverage the effectiveness of altruism within a group, and genuine altruism is testified to be weak, leaving scope for explanation even by a force as weak as group selection. Moralistic religious culture appears tightly linked to altruism, yet the fitness advantage of a defector within a religious society makes it difficult to conceive religion or related genetic predisposition as an evolutionarily stable strategy. Self-enhancement has direct links to altruism and religiosity, leading to warm-glow altruistic contributions and increased receptiveness to comforting narratives of heavenly justice. Suggested intra-personal and inter-personal benefits of self-enhancement do not detail how the trait should be competitive against more direct behavioral adjustments that yield similar personal benefits but avoid the fitness costs of misperception. We explain religion and bias as imperfect ad-hoc evolutionary adaptations rather than perfect evolutionarily stable strategies. The scant time available for fine-tuning the mind since the emergence of higher cognitive capabilities means near-perfect traits were unlikely to appear, and the extraordinary evolutionary pressure induced by the rapidly evolving environment favored a broad range of genetic novelties despite extra costs.
Carbon Leakage: A Medium- and Long-Term View
Future market developments determine the fate of fossil fuel carbon currently conserved unilaterally. Dynamic fuel depletion naturally suggests leakage rates approaching 100%. Reasons for lower leakage differ from what limits rates in previous studies. Discounting reduces present-value leakage as global emissions are delayed. Containing climate change requires future global political or technological breakthroughs to conserve some carbon forever. Early breakthroughs limit leakage but with late breakthroughs most unilateral emission reductions may be negated abroad. Future coal liquefaction suggests negative leakage rates for current mitigation, but a perfect backstop allows leakage above unity. Leakage rates and suggested taxes vary across fuels.
