“The Train to Crazy Town” by Richard Y Chappell🔸

Subtitle: How to Ride Without Losing Your Mind Five years ago, Ajeya Cotra memorably described Effective Altruist reasoning as a “train to crazy town”—with longtermists in particular staying on the train for longer than their nearterm-focused colleagues. It's not a perfect metaphor, but what I suspect resonates for a lot of people is the sense that EA-style abstract reasoning can push you in directions you may not antecedently want to go (i.e., against your natural sympathies), and there's something potentially alienating or even threatening about that.[1] Earlier still, back in 2015, Scott Alexander wrote about the dilemma that either we shouldn’t care about non-human animals at all, or they should totally swamp every other moral concern. There's no realistic chance that the correct moral weighting conveniently turns out to be that precise value needed to justify a balanced approach on first-order grounds. His response was to “safeword out” of that whole line of abstract reasoning for the sake of his sanity. I actually think that's a pretty good response, but would like to try to give it a more principled backing—one that turns out to carry a surprising upshot: that moral theories may not be meant to guide us [...] --- Outline: (05:46) Moral Uncertainty (09:42) Comparing Risks (15:08) Wrapping up The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: June 30th, 2026 Source: --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO . --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts , or another podcast app.