Want to dive into Scott Alexander's work and his thousands of blog posts? This fan website lets you sort and do semantic search through the whole codex. Enjoy!
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Scott explains how the brain presents socially acceptable desires as genuine values (ego syntonic) and unacceptable ones as external compulsions (ego dystonic) to improve social signaling, with willpower representing the balance between these forces.
Scott argues against negotiating with unconscious desires, distinguishing between behavior-executors (which have context-dependent urges) and utility-maximizers (which have stable preferences), and suggests we mistakenly model ourselves as the latter when we're actually the former.
A study shows people who do one good deed are less likely to do another soon after, suggesting moral behavior operates on a limited resource that gets depleted.