Welcome back to the 1st Law Newsletter.

The Categorical Imperative

A philosophical and mental model to make decisions. When weighing doing an action or not, universalize the maxim. What if everyone followed this principle?

For example, to vote or not to vote. Yes, one vote does not make the difference, but if everyone thought this way, nobody would vote and democracy would break down.

Another example; you should vote for who you want to win and not worry about ‘wasting your vote’ on a candidate unlikely to get elected due to the party they belong to. Vote for the most trustworthy and competent candidate. If everybody voted this way, there would be no two party system.

Other places to apply this thinking are: cheating on tests, lying, recycling, slacking off at work. Act as if you were the role model for the whole world. If everyone acted like you, what would society look like? Would it be truthful, hardworking and clean, or would it be full of liars, cheats, crime and littering?

The Origin of Peer Review

When there was only one academic journal, all papers that got published were scrutinized so heavily that if they made it into the journal, they were legit. The editors were simply too smart and selective to allow bad or misleading papers to be published. This created a high barrier of entry to being a published academic, but it kept everyone honest and upheld a high standard of work.

The internet would have made peer review required eventually, but initially it was established when Ghislaine Maxwell’s father set up so many academic journals that there were not enough good editors to go around anymore. The editors could not be trusted to vet and select ethical/ truthful/ correct papers, so the academics own peers were forced to review and edit the papers prior to submittal to uphold the quality of published science. From the publishing side of things, this was very profitable since every university had to subscribe to every journal or admit that it had incomplete information. Google Pergamom Press to learn more.

In the age of the internet and decentralized information, peer review is now necessary due to information coming from many individual agents rather than a single source. There are no trustworthy central authorities and nobody knows who to trust. A decent solution is twitter’s (X’s) community notes, which is essentially peer review.

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Thanks for reading!

Lucas