posted on September 12, 2022 05:36 PM by
u/JohnPaulJonesSoda
70
u/Mus_Rattus39 pointsat 1663011094.000000
Okay so I’ve never got the chance to ask this question to a
longtermist but maybe someone here knows the answer.
Don’t you have to discount the value of those future lives heavily
due to the uncertainty that they will even come into being at all? Like,
the whole planet could be wiped out by a meteor in a year. Or the
universe could be destroyed by a vacuum metastability event. Or
something else unexpected could happen that drastically reduces the
number of human lives.
How can it be that hypothetical future lives have anywhere near the
importance of someone who is alive to experience joy and suffering right
now?
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Pfft, trying to use logic.
They don't even care that e.g. climate change would make it less likely that those future lives would ever come into being.
I think a bigger problem is that our confidence in predictions decays rapidly with time, with few exceptions (humanity going extinct -> no future humans). Sort of reverse butterfly effect; as the impact of the flap of butterfly wings grows exponentially with time up to a hurricane, our ability to predict this impact shrinks to literal, exact zero in a matter of minutes.
Without predictability, of course, the expected far future utility is identical on both sides of most decisions, much as the probability of a hurricane is identical whether butterfly flaps its wings or not.
So one has to make decisions based on their impact within the planning horizon, not outside of it, regardless of what one thinks of 10^50 people in the future. 10^50 * a - 10^50 * b is still 0 if a = b. (They're well aware; the trick is to argue that a equals to b for events like global warming or even nuclear war, but aren't equal for minor events like giving a grifter a few dollars to waste).
Exactly. Our ability to predict the future over even a hundred years is so childishly inept as to be basically nonexistent. It really puzzles me that people are trying to plan their lives now to cause the greatest good in the distant future for their 10^50 descendants or whatever.
Like, who fucking knows what it will be like then? You could be a brain in a vat, man.
Yeah but we’re autodidactic fizix minors so like, if the exponents look right who cares if the sign flips from positive or negative? It’s log log scale baby, that’s the graphics departments problem to clean up!
In general, for any sort of policy selection problem you either have to set a finite time horizon on the reward function or add a discounting factor that causes exponential decay for rewards further in the future. Things farther in the future are more uncertain, and even if they weren't, summing the reward over an infinite time horizon is computationally intractable.
Another problem is the repugnant conclusion-esque way in which the reasoning works. We don't owe existence to people who don't yet exist. We can say that it is unethical to fail to stop climate change because we can be very certain that there will exist people in the next few decades or centuries who will suffer from it. This would not mean that failing to bring about a quadrillion person galactic empire is unethical. If everyone in the society of the future voluntarily decided not to have kids and go extinct, it would be their business, and we have no ethical obligation to try to prevent such an outcome from here.
Oh yeah.
Then there's another issue. So you have two idealized sums with many terms in each, and you need to find which sum is greater. Okay, you discounted things enough, the sums don't diverge.
If you can't go over all the terms, then you'd need some unbiased mechanism to sample the terms and apply SEVERE discounting due to sampling related error.
The rationalists's idea of how you should do it, is to just sum what ever terms happen to be available. If they told you of a term for giving them cash, it would be extremely irrational not to add that term in, like, right away ("taking ideas seriously", "shut up and multiply" and all that).
And since they are mostly just LARPing math, they haven't got the foggiest idea that what you summed and the sum you're approximating are two different things.
edit: now Bostrom et all, I think may be of somewhat worse variety; they aren't Yudkowsky; they did get some education, they may well be competent enough to understand the problem with that kind of BS they're peddling.
Yeah. Also irritating like when scifi decides to ineptly delve into some actual tech or give some random numbers (like I dunno 30 tons of ice at 5mm/s or 5 g burn for a week and then a naval battle in space and not "OMFG they threw some sand and we're going at a fucking 0.1c", except that one time when to save the plot it is "OMFG they threw some sand"). Except without any of the fun parts. Just the irritation.
You're just left to be annoyed at how you literally done more work on their stupid idea than they ever did.
The scifi that styles itself as "hard" can be very selective about which fields of science it needs to show its work in, as well. Like it will describe an interstellar colonization mission that's supposedly near-term scientifically realistic because they worked out the exact delta-v needed for the orion drive and showed you can hit it with modern fusion bombs, but when it gets to the new star system it's like, "and then once the unfrozen embryos were birthed from the artificial wombs, the robots raised them all to happy, well-adjusted adulthood."
Writers are liars. Science writers that don’t read Hume or understand Scottish isn’t English are objectively so and I offer my cane and hearing aids as an ingenious proof of this to the Georgian Berkeley stans.
If you’d like the philosophical answers to this you should look up the controversies between rule based Utilitarianism and consequentialist Utilitarianism along with the critiques provided by people like Richard Rorty, Quine, Dewey, and Kuhn to the idea of providing closed forms as answers to ethical quandaries. Positivism comes from a nice place but Russel can tell you how hard it is to shave that habit from yourself.
It would. Because of that, If such event happened close enough to us to be able to reach the Earth, we would learn about it pretty much at the same time as it would annihilate us. It is also possible that this may happen so far away from us that the expansion of space would prevent it from ever reaching the Earth.
> It is also possible that this may happen so far away from us that the expansion of space would prevent it from ever reaching the Earth.
This is still Bad News for all the potential n^^^10 people living in the future. Lot less living space for them. Im writing the EA article right now to warn them.
I had a shower thought a while ago that vacuum collapse combined with MWI could be pretty expressive, in the sense of allowing to e.g. use unstable field equations and express some observed properties (gravity?) as survivor bias, since the one surviving world has to have observed that the field hadn't gotten away from the unstable equilibrium.
>Don’t you have to discount the value of those future lives heavily due to the uncertainty that they will even come into being at all?
You would have to consider it, but it depends on one's own beliefs in the stability of civilization, and the limits of humanity. Even if there's a 99% chance humanity goes extinct by 2100, but a 1% chance humanity survives and multiplies 100000000x fold, you would still get a higher total expected value from the people who have a 1% chance of existing because even discounted 99% they're still a larger block overall.
>Like, the whole planet could be wiped out by a meteor in a year.
Some longtermists support space colonization for this reason. The risk of loosing humanity is too great if we're all in one basket, and if we were all wiped out we would loose all the future value. This is called existential threat reduction.
>How can it be that hypothetical future lives have anywhere near the importance of someone who is alive to experience joy and suffering right now?
Depends what you mean by "important". People in the present are more important as without them we can't have the future. As for ethical weight, we don't discriminate over time. 2 potential people with a 50% chance of existing have the same weight as one person today. Because (in our beliefs) that there are so incomprehensibly many future people, as long as there is a non-trivial chance humanity thrives, the unborn will always come out on top.
The unborn sound like utility monsters in this way of thinking. You’re never justified in doing what would make yourself happy if it would reduce the chance of producing successful offspring.
Inconveniently for utilitarians, the suffering caused to me by utilitarian long termism thinking far outweighs any possible happiness of future generations, so we are rationally forced to conclude that I should exterminate all of humanity
The idea that I have a moral obligation to reproduce is pretty grotesque. I would have a hard time accepting any moral framework with such a disregard for bodily autonomy. I guess a counter-argument might be, "you don't have to have kids, you just have to do something to offset the fact that you're not having kids." But even that feels vaguely seedy. I got enough of that in my evangelical days.
As I alluded to, it’s a violation of bodily autonomy. It would be like saying it’s immoral to wear eyeglasses or drink a glass of wine. Luckily I’m a trans person and so nobody wants me to pass on my genes, but I resent the idea that I’m committing a moral sin simply because I don’t want to destroy my body or cease hormone regimens.
> the unborn will always come out on top
Except they don't, because as soon as they are born longtermism says they had better deprioritize themselves in favor of even more descendants, just as distant to them as they are to us. What a wretched position.
Technically not always, just for the near future. Eventually we will reach a time where all prep work for the heat death of the universe will be done, and then we can relax.
Shouldn’t those newly flexible efforts then be devoted to the +epsilon chance of breaking physics in whatever manner is necessary to allow for eternal expansion?
> May as well pray to God for infinite utility
But you already have essentially infinite utility in the 10^-30 chance that humanity expands by 10^50 . Why not go for the 10^-300 chance for 10^5000 utilitons?
Don't you see how these ridiculous and extremely speculative numbers are, well, ridiculous? What are the chances that humanity's growth continues its current trend and stabilizes at about 10^0.3 expansion? Can we prioritize currently living people in that case?
>What are the chances that humanity's growth continues its current trend and stabilizes at about 10^0.3 expansion?
What do you mean by this? I do not comprehend it
10^0.3 is about 2x. Meaning population doesn't explode in size, but stays about the same.
Population could also decline. Maybe Earth slowly (or rapidly) decreases to 1 billion or 100 million people and stays at that level.
I'm trying to ignore that you suggested prioritizing preparing for the heat death over present day concerns, because that's 100 trillion years out and not even confirmed as the model for the universe.
Thanks for the detailed response to my question!
I guess I just live in a state agnosticism about such long term, high level things. I don’t know how I’d even begin to calculate the chance of humanity surviving and multiplying enormously. It’s not like you can run randomized controlled tests of such things. Likewise I am skeptical of our ability to predict the impact of many of our choices into the very distant future. It just seems like a wash to me. But this it’s certainly interesting to think about.
Perhaps I should clarify a few things about my own position. I agree you don’t need to be certain to make political decisions. I don’t have a problem with making such decisions without certainty, and I do so all the time.
I don’t think randomized controlled trials are the only way to arrive at information about the world. I just threw it out as an example, and as a way of saying there’s no way for us to examine the far future to see if our ideas about it were wrong or not.
Regarding climate change, I agree we should limit its effects. But I do so not because I am worried about what impact it will have on the 10^50 humans living in the year 9999, and more because I’m worried about its impact on the next generation and the one after it. It that benefits the year 9999, great. But I have a lot more confidence that we can predict the impact of climate change on people living in the next 100 years, and much less confidence that we can work out its impact on people living thousands of years in the future.
I agree with the basic premise that we should take reasonable steps to benefit people in the future. I probably agree with much of what longtermists want. I am not so sure about some of their more extreme positions like the idea that having as many children as you can is a moral imperative because it increases the future population.
Correct. An honest analysis would look like what they do in finance - where they discount future cash flows. So the current value of future monies vs the future value of current monies. It would Be the same thing. Discounted value of future lives.
Thanks for the thoughtful response!
I think I phrased my point rather poorly when I said discount the value of future lives. What I’m really trying to get at is that I think the whole calculation needs to be discounted. Whether it’s 10^50 future people or 10^100, those numbers are made up. We don’t have any reliable way of knowing if they will ever come to pass. Likewise for our actions we have no reliable way of knowing how they will impact the far future. So whatever you plug into the variables, the whole calculation is folly, to my view.
There’s just so many things that could happen. The human race could be wiped out by an external force before those numbers come close to fruition. Or our distant descendants could form an evil empire that would make us regret empowering them if we knew about it. Or they could all be assimilated into machine entities that don’t experience joy or suffering. Who knows? It just seems absurd to assume that we can predict and influence the distant future with the extremely limited means available to us.
Isn't a fairly standard approach just to introduce a penalty term (like a prior / hyperprior) that regularizes naive estimates away from extraordinary effect sizes?
Like, there exists some distribution of "future lives" that any given individual (of whatever appropriate reference population) is able to meaningfully affect, whose counterfactual experiences that individual is "responsible for".
Claims of causal effects way in the tails of that distribution need to be bolstered by sufficient evidence to overwhelm our prior skepticism of their plausibility. If someone's claiming their actions will affect 10^50 or w/e lives, but the typical person's actions affect only 10^1 +/- 10 lives (or 800 +/- 100 person-years), then the prior we've learned corresponding to those might put way less mass in that tail (depending on how fat or skinny it is) than whatever optimistic one-in-a-million probability they're offering to make the "multiply a big number by a small number" game go whirr. Even if the MLE does indeed lie at 10^50 (after all, universes where a claim is true may be most likely to produce the relevant claimants), it'll still get swamped by the strength of that prior.
That said, I have no idea how to begin measuring "how many lives a person's arbitrary actions affect" without, like, a full-scale replica of the world. That's one "longtermist" frontier where more work needs to be done imo.
Then the other issue is that the expected difference caused by an action declines over time, even if the actual effect may grow - e.g. in a month a flap of butterfly's wings may cause a hurricane, or stop a hurricane; and yet the impact on any reasonable calculation, no matter how precise, would fall to literal zero in the matter of minutes (once the air motion from the flap dissipates below other uncertainty in measurements of initial conditions).
Note that for the butterfly the decay isn't to some infinitesimally tiny number or anything; it is a literal zero, because past a certain point any prediction is equally likely with and without the flap. It does taper off smoothly, but it hits a literal zero in finite time.
I think same usually applies to actions like "moving money from one pocket to another" and similar where no bulk change was done to the model, just a probable grifter got a little more cash, and a probable true believer got less and perhaps will have less left for another grifter. edit: like being able to control the value of 1 bit that will be XORd with a bunch of random bits you don't know. Even if 10^50 people's lives are at stake, the expected value is exactly the same for either alternative; the 10^50 cancelled out.
I’ve listened to a few of his interviews. He was on Sam Harris, etc. I’m not sure I’m interested enough to actually buy and read his book, based on the interview content. I mostly started talking about it because it keeps coming up on reddits I’m subscribed to.
I assumed he would try to address this stuff in the books. He doesn’t seem to be an idiot to me. I’d hoped if there was an answer that would seem solid to me, someone here would provide it pretty quick.
I'm reading his book right now, and he says upfront that he's not claiming that future lives are more or even equally important than current lives. He doesn't seem to be making a case for prioritizing either way, but rather just saying the future is something that we can influence and that it's worthy of attention, consideration, and moral value.
they don’t have anywhere near the same value, but they do have some value and we should be willing to sacrifice some utility now if we care at all about future lives.
I think that it is simply a reactionary ideology along the lines of
climate change denial.
Rather than denying climate change, or human impact on climate
change, or the like, they set to deny importance of climate change on
the far future of human species.
They are only concerned with 10^50 or whatever other large number of
future humans, to the extent that it lets them create a new context
where to fallaciously argue that climate change does not matter.
That really is all there is to it. They also can’t conceal this too
much, less they run the risk that someone with money might mistake them
for climate activists, and not pay one of them to come and speak about
it at an event.
(Of course, the far future is entirely defined by the state of the
planet in say 2100 which in turn is defined by each year’s carbon
emissions until then. In so much that anyone would actually care about
some far future 10^50 people, all they could get out of it would be
arguments for caring about climate change since causing a mass
extinction would of course fuck up any future chances for humanity as
well. But their argument would be weakened and muddled by entirely
unnecessary speculation)
Another interesting similar movement, albeit not as prominent, and
largely failed, is various “suffering minimization” related “work”
passing as ethical philosophy. That ideology concerned itself with human
pain during the opioid epidemic (pushers of addictive drugs needing an
ethical justification), but has since moved onto general anti
environmentalism along the lines of how we must kill all badlife and
feel good about it because it was suffering anyway.
>Of course, the far future is entirely defined by the state of the planet in say 2100 which in turn is defined by each year's carbon emissions until then
They think there will be a super-AI by then, which will either a) fix climate change through the power of the singularity or b) kill/enslave all of humanity.
You can't really understand longtermists without understanding that almost all of them buy into the omnipotent AI narrative. They barely even argue for omnipotent AI anymore, they just take it as an assumption. A significant portion (like yudkowsky) think the omnipotent (through self-improvement) AI is coming soon, like in the next 10 years.
> A significant portion (like yudkowsky) think the omnipotent (through self-improvement) AI is coming soon, like in the next 10 years.
Someone's getting older, I see.
wonder if it would have changed anything to anything if i had bothered to write some sort of "progressive longtermist manifesto " 20 years ago. probably not.
Sorry to be the annoying person here who is trying to defend the rationalist-adjacent stuff, but why exactly is the suffering reduction stuff leading to anti environmentalism bad? I've been reading that stuff for the last few years and have been horrified by it because it really does seem like by how evolution works most of existence is just lives of almost pure suffering that would be better off not coming into existence, and if you have a good argument to how that is wrong and isn't real "work" or "philosophy" I'd love to hear it (not in an asking in bad faith way, in an "I'd love to hear why this is wrong because I get stressed about it every day" way).
I’m also worried about wild animal suffering in some vague sense. But be extremely weary of the motives of people focusing on this stuff. As far as I can tell, it’s either extremely abstract philosophy (great!) or nefarious. Surely you can follow that Trump worrying about windmills killing birds is disingenuous
I am weary about these people's motives, that's why I posted here, because I am always looking for people to question or disprove beliefs that seem plausible to me and you guys, who I really respect, seemed to think this stuff was very illogical and evil. It's just that to me, the possibility of an ulterior motive is only enough to make me suspicious, I need to see an actual problem with the argument as is to believe it is wrong. Like the longtermism stuff makes me suspicious because it seems like a too-convenient way for the rich to focus on the extinction events (something that could affect them in particular, however improbably) over issues that don't affect them in particular and only affect the less privileged. But the real reason I think longtermism is stupid isn't that, it's that people are so in the dark about such things that no matter how much they try to attach fake probabilities to make the math work out, they have no way of knowing whether their actions will actually make a difference, compared to the concrete action they can do. Similarly, while the possibility of such arguments being used to justify environmental destruction that people already wanted to do for selfish reasons makes me suspicious (though as I pointed out the people making these arguments are hardly big corporations themselves), I need to see an actual problem with the argument to be convinced against it, and I was hoping people here would explain that.
More to the point it's hard for me to worry about wild animal suffering in only a vague sense when the majority of sentient experience of life is in the form of wild animals. In the same way that I care more about climate change than about a rare disease due to more beings being affected, while still acknowledging both are horrible and something should be done about them, I care more about wild animal suffering than other issues, and I wish humanity as a whole would care about answering these questions rather than just taking that the life of wild animals will always be this way and nothing can be done about it for granted.
That just seems like whataboutism - you can't start caring about one thing until you deal with another thing first. One can care about the suffering of wild animals AND farm animals, in the same way, to use the example I used last time, you can care about climate change AND a rare disease, without thinking one concern is silly because of the existence of the other.
They're in the same category. If you care about animal suffering, you shouldn't be supporting the industry. You can't own a plantation and work to improve human working conditions elsewhere without being somewhat of a hypocrite, right?
Omnivores support factory farming, pretty much as a rule. When you get animal products out in the world, you are supporting factory farming. Unless you're the .00001% of omnivores that are vegan except for a locally sourced, grass fed, grass finished slab of beef once per month.
Uhm because the only reason these people get funded to write that shit is that someone wants to do some strip mining?
Saying they make a great point is like saying Hitler makes a great point (give or take uncertainty over environmental destruction related deaths). Edit: or Goebbels perhaps, hand picked by Hitler.
Also, get less gullible. If I want to kill some animals (and some poor third world people too) and I hire someone to make convincing stories why it is achtually a good thing, maybe you should not try to fall for it.
The arguments are flimsy in the fucking extreme, to the point of a complete lack of any actual argument - we have no idea how evolution balances pain and pleasure in other animals. Maybe pain is less actionable for animals who cant do much to lessen their pain, so maybe they suffer less (because as we know from our own personal experience, pain also interferes with your ability to act upon other drives). Who the hell knows. They just make a bunch of assertions and fallacies to support a predetermined outcome (strip mining).
You could probably be equally persuaded by one sided account of literally any other viewpoint.
Funded to write? From what I've seen this type of rhetoric/philosophy is way too obscure for big environment-destroying companies to actually notice and fund them, it's just the occasional person on the internet writing an essay. Do you have an example of this kind of person actually being funded by some big company motivated to destroy the environment for their own gain? Also from what I've seen what at least some of them are advocating isn't "uncritically stick with the status quo of people destroying the environment for purely selfish reasons", but "include the experience of sentient beings that live in the wild in one's moral calculus rather than only caring for them as part of the aesthetic of their environment", which would probably lead to an ultimate conclusion that is NEITHER "act towards the environment motivated by the interest of big corporations" or "preserve the environment at all costs without any consideration to how beneficial that status quo is to the actual beings who experience it, and are inherent moral subjects in a way a species or ecosystem isn't".
I just am horrified every day by how there is a whole class of sentient beings, that makes up the vast majority of sentient beings, with lives set up to be full of constant and extreme suffering with little to no redeeming value, and nearly everyone thinks the best action is to do nothing (not "wait until we have the scientific knowledge to actually interact with nature in a way that is moral and won't accidentally cause more harm than good", not even bothering to try or look into it), and the world is going to be like that forever and even in a time where we humans solve all our own problems and make some kind of utopia, the world will still be on the whole a place of pure torture, and no one will ever care and it will always be this way. This just haunts me and since I respect this sub, when I saw you dismissing those arguments that paint the world that way as obvious bunk I was really hoping you had a good reason that it wasn't, but instead it just seems to be an ad hominem type of "there could be an ulterior motive for these arguments, therefore whether they are right isn't even worth looking into". I know I'm sounding like one of those annoying bad faith rationalists who frequent this place and I hate that I am sounding like one, but I want so badly for this horrible truth about the world to not be true...
I think if it haunts you that you can’t literally move heaven and earth to save sentient creatures from suffering who never asked anybody else to help them, whose internal states, desires, etc. you have no access to, you rather need to grow up and remember your own and humanity’s limited place in the world
What’s the alternative: you get to make decisions for the living of the planet because you’re smarter than a crab?
But that just seems like the logic that right-wing people use to be complacent with the current state of the world - telling everyone who dreams of things being better and saying it doesn't have to be that way that they are being uppity and don't know their place. "Don't try to change poverty, it will always be that way, you individual humans are limited because of the economic system". "If you change this one aspect of society that seems like it will make things better, it will actually have some unintended side effect, so therefore instead of avoiding the pitfall and changing the system on a deeper level we should just sit on our hands and accept it can't be changed". "Don't try to cure this disease, us humans are limited and it would be hubris to try to make the world better, also doing it in a careless way can lead to side effects so clearly it's better to not try". This is the kind of logic rationalists use a lot too, and that's why I love to read this site and see you sneer at it. How is it that you guys are so good at recognizing how noxious this logic is when applied to humans, or to animals on a factory farm, but when it comes to wild animals you just parrot it?
"who never asked anybody else to help them" - so one needs to be capable of speech for one to recognize that their suffering is bad and they should be helped? So I guess you shouldn't care about, say, dogs in puppy mills, or even humans who are incapable of communication and being mistreated, because you need to talk about your suffering to show your suffering is bad?
About thinking I can decide the fate of the planet, that's not what I think at all. I recognize I'm a limited human who can't begin to understand those complex systems. I don't ask for everything to be destroyed blindly, all I ask for is that humanity starts caring about wild animals as sentient beings enough that they start asking questions and doing research about these things, trying to get to a point where they can better understand animals' experiences and answer the question of what, if anything, can be done to better their lives and alleviate the suffering in a way that won't make things worse, in the same way humanity has spent decades researching other complex issues that cause a lot of suffering to find a way to make things better without making things worse. Because right now the accepted wisdom is that everyone is so sure that doing nothing is the best choice that they aren't bothering to spend a minute of their time learning about the world to find out if that's really the case. Which makes them seem like the intellectually arrogant ones, not me.
Well if you put words in somebody’s mouth, it sounds like that’s what they’re saying!
I’m going to ignore your first paragraph because I simply don’t believe any of those things. That you infer it from what I briefly said rather resembles your presumptuousness about the internal states of animals in the wild! You built a hell of a sandcastle on that tiny foundation and it flattered your personal point of view to boot!
I’m also going to ignore your ludicrous jab about dogs in puppy mills, because I never remotely implied that we shouldn’t care about animal suffering. You do yourself a disservice much more than you do me by planting such a vicious, irrelevant, imputation into what could have been a reflective look at the important differences between wild animals in complex ecosystems versus captive animals, and the ethical role of human beings in each. I do get it though, it must be very hard being the only person on Earth with a soul.
——
Your final paragraph makes a point worth actually replying to. I actually agree with you that asking deep scientific and philosophical questions about animal experiences in the wild is a worthy endeavour, and that that there is a strong ethical compunction to pursue that enterprise in a far more sophisticated fashion than has been allowed by our strongly anthropocentric society. It would be really nice if that’s what you wanted.
You don’t want that. I’m mostly sure that you’re walking that path with this comment as another conversational feint because you’d rather play the role of the lone moral crusader than anything else. You have *already staked your claim* that animals in the wild are consigned to lives of suffering and that something must be done to stop it:
> I just am horrified every day by how there is a whole class of sentient beings, that makes up the vast majority of sentient beings, with lives set up to be full of constant and extreme suffering with little to no redeeming value, and nearly everyone thinks the best action is to do nothing (not "wait until we have the scientific knowledge to actually interact with nature in a way that is moral and won't accidentally cause more harm than good", not even bothering to try or look into it), and the world is going to be like that forever and even in a time where we humans solve all our own problems and make some kind of utopia, the world will still be on the whole a place of pure torture, and no one will ever care and it will always be this way.
If we were to pursue your enterprise on the assumption that animal life in the wild is at all or almost all levels a utilitarian problem to be dealt with, we would be consigning the vast majority of the work you propose in this most recent comment to the silence.
That’s breathtaking moral and epistemic arrogance and it’s why I responded by telling you to grow up.
> have already staked your claim that animals in the wild are consigned to lives of suffering
I got curious and looked at his post history and apparently they even have an entire circlejerk subreddit about that. Not about trying to save nature, of course.
I was watching a little lizard in my backyard, and it struck me that while of course I've no clue what the little lizard is feeling, it is moving around with great determination and skill. It doesn't take a very large leap of faith to assume that *at least* it's not being a sad fuck and isn't trying to find some perverse solace in imagining that the ladybug larva on another plant has it worse.
I can see why it came off like I didn't "really" want scientific research and just was using it as a conversational feint. The truth is I really want research done into wild animals and what our interactions with them should be, and I'm glad you feel the same rather than being one of the people who is like "we already know the answer, it's that doing nothing is best, without even trying to look at it from a non-anthropocentric viewpoint". The reason it seemed like I had "already staked my claim" is that I was expressing that right now, that's how it seems to me and it horrifies me, however, I would never act on my current beliefs because I recognize the danger of moral and intellectual arrogance and I think looking into how we should handle this moral issues is a project that should be undertaken by humanity as a whole (and right now is being sorely neglected) rather than just me. The only way I would act on my beliefs is use them as fuel to try to work with other people on answering these questions, in the same way that before the dangers of anthropogenic climate change became pretty much fully accepted as fact, scientists who believed it was a concern used that belief as motivation to do research on it to prove or disprove it, but didn't recommend action to the world until they had indeed proven it. I'm willing to be open minded, the whole reason I replied to this post in the first place is because you all seem convinced that this logic is very flawed and has holes in it and I wanted to find out what you thought those holes were, because I wanted my beliefs to be challenged and the implications of these particular beliefs are so horrifying that I desperately don't want to believe them.
About all of those quotes, I wasn't putting words in your mouth and saying I thought you believed all of those things, I was just saying that these statements, which I see a lot or right-wing people make, have the same logical structure as what I thought you were saying with regards to animals (that it would be arrogant to try to change anything), and I thought pointing out the similarities would make you see how you were using this same logic. I now understand that you weren't actually saying that thinking it's worth seeing if and how things should be changed is arrogant, but just the idea that jumping to the conclusion that exterminating everything is the solution is arrogant, which I agree with. I have encountered the former idea (that thinking nature can ever get "better" for animals, even in an epistemically cautious way after decades of research, is arrogant and the ways you can mess up means it's better not to try) before, so I think I jumped to conclusions that you also believed that when your comments on the relationship of humanity and wildlife being an important topic of discussion and research rather than something to be taken for granted clearly show otherwise. I would love to have a deeper discussion with you on the morality of how humans should treat life within wild ecosystems as opposed to within isolated conditions controlled by humans!
About the puppy mill thing, that was solely a response to your quote about how the animals didn't ask for help, which seemed to imply to me that you believed you should not help any sentient being unless they are capable of some kind of communication that lets them say they do not like their suffering and want help, which seems like a ridiculous conclusion so I was pointing out how not caring about puppies in puppy mills or humans incapable of communication being mistreated would be the logical conclusion of that idea. I'm sure that's not what you meant, but that is how that quote came off and I was trying to point that out.
I have no idea where you got the idea that this subreddit as a whole think that “this logic” is flawed because I don’t know what “this logic” refers to. You’re evidently intent on carrying on your whole thing by making assumptions about what other people think or are saying which bear no relation to what they’ve expressed, and getting defensive when people correct you on this imaginative posture. Enjoy.
I mean the logic of the people this whole conversation was about, those talking about wild animal suffering as an issue, some of whom say this justifies environmental destruction. This whole thing started because I responded to a person criticizing those people out of curiosity as to why they thought the idea was bunk - not in a "bad faith" way but in a "I hate that this seems so believable so I'd love to hear arguments against it" way. You're right, I did make assumptions, and I apologized for that in my last post and tried to start over on a new footing, and offered to maybe talk to you in a calm way where I wouldn't mess up as much as I did last time. I don't see why you are still treating me like I'm being aggressive when I've tried to make amends in my last post.
That person - who was *one person*, not “you guys” (plural) or whatever - made the claim that a specific group of people were arguing in bad faith
Nobody is responsible for your absurd defensive extrapolations that got us into this mess afterwards but you
And I keep saying I'm sorry about that and trying to make amends! How many times do I have to say I was wrong and I want to turn over a new leaf before you stop acting like I'm still being aggressive?
Maybe we can chat properly next time when and if you jump in by *first* reading and reflecting on what people have actually said, instead of this ridiculous cat and mouse game fouling up all the gears of conversation
How's about you name 3 examples of what you see, and we'll try to figure out how it came that they quit their day jobs? Thiel for one example funds that kind of evil shit on principle. And he is very much into completely obscure things.
Brian Tomasik for one example, is literally one of the founders for that longtermism we're talking about. He mucked around with the evil "kill all life" shit, that didn't work out very well (you are correct that large companies fail to take notice, although there's some very online billionaires), now it's mostly longtermism.
> I just am horrified every day by how there is a whole class of sentient beings, that makes up the vast majority of sentient beings, with lives set up to be full of constant and extreme suffering with little to no redeeming value
Why in the world do you think that? If you had tinnitus, would you also think animals live lives of constant and extreme tinnitus, too?
Pain is a stimulus that masks other stimuli. Do you think it's very useful for animals to have their hearing and vision impaired all the time by a competing stimulus?
Now, do animals suffer pain at times? Sure they do. They also presumably are capable of joy, fulfillment, and so on, along with (in case of animals with color vision) the qualia of color red, in some proportion to the pain. We have no idea what that proportion is, and no reason to expect it to be worse or better than ours.
If you make up an answer to the unknown, such as to arrive at an "evil" conclusion (kill wildlife), you're not trying to figure anything out, you're just being evil.
The "with little or no redeeming value" part, that's where instead of falling for some fairly dubious conjectures about evolution, you switch to parroting an incredibly evil ideology. I'm sure you're well aware that this ideology does have a big focus on extermination, and extends to h-sapiens.
> This just haunts me
What haunts *me*, is this ideology of pure evil that was trying to take root. That one, thankfully, was too obviously mask off for most people's tastes, and they toned it down to this longtermism, and arguments how nuclear war today is actually not that dangerous to 10^50 future people. That is literally the toned down version of this "let's kill other beings whenever our own motivated reasoning can lead us to believe they're suffering".
edit: and as for what happens when we build an utopia, I'll leave worrying about what the utopia must do about wildlife, to those people in the future. Presumably they would be less prone to motivated reasoning with regards to "value" of other beings, than the sad, planet destroying fuckers that we are.
If that utopia comes around, they'll simply be better equipped to make a correct decision, therefore even if we could influence that decision, we would maximize chances of a correct decision by refraining from influencing it *. It's not for us to decide how the future utopians will treat animals; there's nothing constructive we can do about it. It is however for us to decide how we treat the environment now.
This is about the bleached coral reefs, this is about insect population decline, all in the year 2022. None of it is about future utopia.
\* a position rationalists find impossible to contemplate. They literally can't process "if you're blind and the driver is sighted, don't yank the steering wheel" type logic. Surely you should have an estimate of where the steering wheel should be and you should yank it towards that position.
Listen, I'm genuinely coming here to ask for help. I here you believe this is all evil, that I'm evil, but I want to know why, why exactly do these arguments fall apart when you look at them, it's not enough to just say it's motivated reasoning when you can't actually explain what's wrong with the argument. If you really have the magic bullet to dissuade me from these arguments that have been making me miserable for years, show it to me! I don't want to be evil, but I feel evil only exists as far as how things effect sentient beings and not how things affect something like a coral reef that doesn't have feelings and just look pretty, if destroying it is evil it's because of the sentient beings being affected negatively by it, not something inherent about the environment that makes it special - that's just a proxy, in the same way when we say it's bad to destroy a house it's not because of any moral value of a house but because it would harm the people living in it. These people's arguments are (not saying agreement with them, just saying what they are) is that due to the way r-selected evolution works, making it so the vast majority of sentient beings don't have a chance to experience much of normal life that doesn't consist of the suffering likely to be associated with death, most of the animals living in, say, a coral reef, are going to have an objectively bad experience of life that isn't worth living. (I don't see how this ideology says anything about wanting to exterminate humans, though, because humans are long-lived, k-selected species to whom none of this logic actually applies, in fact I hate when people try to apply this logic to humans as if the situations were the same and argue with anyone who does so). And there seems to be a double standard where people do not treat the killing and suffering of individual animals anywhere near the moral importance of the killing and suffering of humans, but treat a theoretical extermination of a species as equivalent to a human genocide. You say this is dubious and evil with horribly flawed logic, and I desperately want to hear what the flaws in the logic are, because I've been thinking about this for years desperately trying to figure out a way to prove this isn't true. I really don't want to be evil and like Hitler
As for what you said about the utopia, see my response to noactuallyitspoptart where I go over this in more detail: I'm trying to not be all hubristic and saying I know what is best for the environment, all I want is for society and scientific researchers to take the question of wild animals' experiences seriously enough that they try to research and answer the questions of what, if anything, can be done to improve their lives, rather than arrogantly assuming that doing nothing is the best option without trying to do any research or even think of these animals' experiences as having any value besides what they provide aesthetically or resource-wise to humans.
> it's not enough to just say it's motivated reasoning when you can't actually explain what's wrong with the argument.
What argument? This stuff?
> These people's arguments are (not saying agreement with them, just saying what they are) is that due to the way r-selected evolution works, making it so the vast majority of sentient beings don't have a chance to experience much of normal life that doesn't consist of the suffering likely to be associated with death, most of the animals living in, say, a coral reef, are going to have an objectively bad experience of life that isn't worth living.
That feels like trying to reason you out of a position you didn't reason yourself into.
I don't see any actual argument here. All I see a rhetorical trick where you take an assertion you want to argue for, you take a true enough assertion, and then you assert that one follows from the other. Throw a misplaced word "objectively". Now you got something that sounds like an argument.
The people who thought this up, they had their reason - bullshitting up some potential upside to the ecological destruction.
But what's your reason to believe any of that?
How does it even matter whether it's "r selection" or "k selection"? We all die eventually. Humans die after decades of decline. Humans are social animals who hurt when other humans die, too. We experience all sorts of pain that other animals probably don't even experience.
A duckling in the pond that got eaten by a snapping turtle, lived for a week and died in seconds, and a few seconds later, nobody cared (except for the turtle who didn't need to eat for another month). Why in the world would you think short lives are less worth living?
The answer is motivated reasoning, probably. edit: And construction of bullshit towards some morally dubious conclusion, that's the root of most evil in the world. If you want to be concerned about something, maybe be concerned to be less supportive when someone does that kind of thing.
> all I want is for society and scientific researchers to take the question of wild animals' experiences seriously enough that they try to research and answer the questions ...
Science can not leapfrog over fundamentals. Only bullshit can. Scientists are working hard to understand nervous system better, build the fundamentals so perhaps we are able to one day progress towards the question.
This is again the typical rationalist bullshit. The scifi-addled brain wants answers *now*. It wants to make decisions *now*. Kill the front lawn and fill it with gravel, *now* (literally something Tomasik discussed). Actual science? Who needs it when we got sci-fi.
What the future utopia will do with wild animals, really isn't something you can productively influence.
About the "short lives being less worth living" thing, that's not actually the argument these people are making. They are arguing that death is usually unpleasant and contains extreme suffering (which as far as I can tell is usually true), and while someone with a longer life gets to have pleasant experiences that make that suffering "worth it", if you only live a day that might not be the case.
I keep saying I don't want answers now and to make decisions now, just for people to start looking for answers in a measured way rather than the status quo of wild animals not being a priority whatsoever and the accepted wisdom being to do nothing without any looking into the question. However, one has to actually work towards changes in the value system of society rather than accepting that you can do nothing and counting on people in the future to become more moral than people now. Slavery didn't end because everyone sat on their hands and decided "most people besides the slaves themselves think slavery is ok now, and there's nothing I can do to change the consensus so I should just use magical thinking and hope people in the future will be more enlightened". So while I agree we shouldn't just jump to conclusions and destroy everything, I feel like people can do their part to make society's values shift to thinking wild animals are important morally as individual beings, that the status quo involves another suffering, and we should at least try to do the research necessary to see if there is anything to be done about that that won't lead to worse consequences.
> They are arguing that death is usually unpleasant and contains extreme suffering (which as far as I can tell is usually true), and while someone with a longer life gets to have pleasant experiences that make that suffering "worth it", if you only live a day that might not be the case.
Surely how long it takes to die should also matter? Humans decline for years.
Are you sure your life got a better ratio than a mayfly? It died quickly. It's stupid so there's not a whole lot of point trying to bend its little brain into pretzels trying to solve for "staying alive", in the first place.
You, on the other hand. You got a brain big enough that if pain gives it a good solid kick once in a while, you might be more scared of dying, and thus survive better.
> just for people to start looking for answers in a measured way rather than the status quo of wild animals not being a priority whatsoever
People are looking for answers! It's just that scientists do not want to *bullshit up an answer* which happens when there's not enough fundamental knowledge to get an answer. Fundamental knowledge like, I dunno, one coming out of a serial blockface scanning microscope, just to give a specific example of the kind of knowledge we have to work on right now.
> I feel like people can do their part to make society's values shift to thinking wild animals are important morally as individual beings, that the status quo involves another suffering, and we should at least try to do the research necessary to see if there is anything to be done about that that won't lead to worse consequences.
Frankly, and I don't mean to offend, but I think you're incredibly naive about this. The only part you can do here is the one for furtherance of bullshit: you already made up your mind that the animal lives are not worth living, and you didn't even reason yourself into it. The only thing you can contribute to here, is "balanced" centrist opinions in mainstream press of say 2030, bringing this up when discussing a dead coral reef, or insect population collapse. Which is wholly counter productive.
This isn't about any kind of a value shift. It's about adding some "nuance" to "destroying nature is bad", which is something we already are doing.
I keep explaining, right now this stuff seems convincing to me, but I would NEVER act on it, my only goal is to make wild animal suffering something people care enough to find answers to on a measured, scientific level, not just making up answers. To look for the fundamental knowledge. Of course I have my own opinions, and worries, and emotions thinking about just how much suffering goes on, I can never look on all this suffering with a totally clinical and non-emotional and empathetic way, but I know when it comes to actually taking action you can't rely on these things. Maybe I am naive, and that's why I won't let my naivety influence actual policy decisions. Surely I can also contribute trying to nudge society towards caring enough about these things to actually put in the work and research, not for policy decisions right now but in the future. Considering that researching into wild animals for themselves with the aim of reducing suffering (and not with the aim of preserving the ecosystem's status quo or helping humans) is not a popular thing right now, I do think there is something meaningful we can contribute in putting wild animals high enough in our value system that we as a society think it's worth it to strive, over a long period of time, to come up with something better than a "bullshit answer". I don't see why my current opinion matters that much as long as I'm reasonable enough to not act on it unless we have way more knowledge and evidence than we have now, and I'm willing to change it if presented with said evidence opposing it? Why do you think it's naive to believe questions about the moral way to treat a certain class of beings can be better answered if we as a society actually care about those beings enough to strive, slowly and painstakingly, to answer questions about them, then if we as a society just don't care and don't bother? I'm actually studying neuroscience right now with the goal of better understanding the consciousness and experience of animals, and I would like to believe that that goal is something that has some worth rather than me being dumb and naive to think it would change anything...
> I keep explaining, right now this stuff seems convincing to me, but I would NEVER act on it, my only goal is to make wild animal suffering something people care enough to find answers to on a measured, scientific level, not just making up answers.
Sure, you'd prefer a real answer, but you will also accept a made up one.
The real answer in this case is obviously very distant for the lack of fundamental knowledge. We'll get to that real answer in the course of scientific progress, one foot in front of the other; there's no shortcuts.
And as for changing anything, I know what you can change. Make it more likely or happen sooner that an article about a dead coral reef or an extinction of a butterfly species, is balanced out with this bullshit, to make for a nice centrist balanced both sides article. That is literally the only thing your supposed "concern" for wildlife can accomplish at this point in the history of mankind.
If you want to actually contribute, that would be by working on fundamental knowledge which does not even seem connected to suffering.
edit: also, frankly, you could stop eating factory-farmed meat. We don't know much about wild animals one way or the other, but we do have all reason to believe that caged animals do suffer - they are put in conditions where pain would normally be useful for getting them to get out of said conditions.
Wild animal suffering is just so much more convenient to be concerned about, because all you get out of it is being less concerned about the ongoing environmental collapse.
So yeah the other evil angle of this is distraction from a real problem that's actionable, to a made up one that isn't.
I agree that the priority is to work on fundamental knowledge, I disagree that it should be disconnected from suffering in general, because whether we investigate animals' conscious experiences and their ecosystem from a perspective of wanting them to live better lives with reduced suffering vs. a completely self-serving desire to let only humans benefit somehow (or perhaps ecosystems as a whole but still because of the aesthetic value to humans) does affect what questions get asked scientifically, if the motivation is solely the latter important questions might not get asked because they aren't relevant to the human benefit/the preservation of the ecosystem for its own sake rather than that of the animals in it (this does not mean the alternative is destroying the ecosystem, just that there may be the potential to intervene in ecosystems to reduce suffering in the future where we have more knowledge), so I think it would be unwise for research even at this time in history to be completely disconnected from the goal of helping animals for their own sakes. I feel there are two things that are necessary, to gain fundamental knowledge and to get the moral consensus of society at a point where when/if we have that knowledge, we will think using it for animals' sakes is a valuable goal rather than having already decided to do nothing no matter what we find out, which seems to be the dominant opinion in this time.
> does affect what questions get asked scientifically,
Does it already? We're many steps away from actually asking questions relevant to specifically wild animal suffering. edit: also, when people come to science to make a value judgement, like, uhm is another animal's life worth living, the results are gonna be pseudo-scientific in the direction of what ever benefits the big money.
> rather than having already decided to do nothing...
If only. We're have already decided that we're going to *cause a mass extinction*.
That is the reason some people have already determined that animal lives are not worth living, which let me recall from earlier in the thread, you found rather persuasive.
Step back from it, there wasn't any sort of sensible argument whatsoever. Yeah the duckling lived only a week, then got eaten by a snapping turtle in seconds. You can live for 80 years and get chewed on by "old age" for years.
From where I'm standing, I'm thinking ducklings get a much better ratio than you do. There's over half a million seconds in a week. Not to mention that as a social animal you can feel all sorts of prolonged pain that most animals simply won't have at all.
That factory animal you ate for breakfast, that one we know enough to reason about without any fancy neuroscience, plus a much more solid moral impetus due to us being directly responsible. What'd you do about that animal, go vegan?
Why are you assuming that those animals that live a short time are dying in seconds? There are a lot of ways animals can die in the wild that aren't that quick - starvation, disease, parasites, all of the predators that kill animals in a way that isn't that quick like venom or being eaten alive, getting injured and dying slowly rather than immediately from it...). If you can conclude that an animal in a factory farm suffers due to the things done to it without needing neuroscience, I don't get why it's hard to conclude that the animals who go through the things I listed just now in the wild also suffer (assuming we are talking about the same types of animals i.e mammals and birds rather than insects or something).
Yes, I wasn't clear enough when I meant "having already decided to do nothing", I meant "having already decided that doing nothing is the best moral option, even if we don't always live up to it".
> I don't get why it's hard to conclude that the animals who go through the things I listed just now in the wild also suffer
That seems like a goalpost shift, I mean, not an unwelcome one, but you started off arguing that wild animal lives just wholesale weren't worth living and that it was some valid position and so on, not that some of them suffer (just as some humans suffer). edit: to quote myself, "Now, do animals suffer pain at times? Sure they do. "
> I meant "having already decided that doing nothing is the best moral option, even if we don't always live up to it".
Well, and some people decided that the best moral option is to bullshit the reason why wildlife has negative moral worth, and then that got popular for all the wrong reasons. And without said people we wouldn't be having this conversation.
You aren't in any way unique about being concerned about some wild animals suffering. That's pretty common.
It's where you start parroting an obscure but highly threatening ideology that describes wild animal lives as not worth living, where you go way off the mainstream.
Anyways, as I said, worrying about wild animals is convenient and worrying about the factory farm is not.
Ok, the goalpost shift was unintentional, what I mean is that your argument against the argument that animals who live a very short time and then die have lives worth living is that the death itself happens only in a few seconds, and I was pointing out that that isn't always or probably usually the case.
I feel like you are overestimating the extent to which people care about the suffering of wild animals. Most people are reluctant to even eradicate a parasite from wild animals if it doesn't also help humans, and the common opinion tends to be that it is obvious that all interventions in nature are evil or counterproductive, that people should not bother doing research into ecosystems and the experience of wild animals because it is not worth answering the question if some intervention is possible, and not only that you shouldn't accept uncritically that their lives aren't worth living but that you shouldn't bother finding out and even if they weren't, nature is valuable in its own right independent from the sentient creatures who live in it and animals should keep living for our aesthetic enjoyment even if it turns out those lives are not worth living. Maybe among people you talk to they care more about these things and are willing to keep an open mind on the possibility of the lives of wild animals being improved in the future and devoting effort towards research to find out if and how that could be done, but in my experience that doesn't seem to be a common view people hold. Therefore I think it's important that society shifts towards asking these questions' for the animals sake rather than our own, because the motivation of why we ask these questions determine what questions get asked.
Well, is it about the future, or is it about here now?
The future, the next generation's growing up watching octonauts on netflix, so yeah, forgive me if I'm not too worried that they need Tomasik's "what if Saberhagen's evil genocidal alien robots had to justify themselves" writing prompt exercise to set them on the right path.
As for now, this evil obsession with the possibility that "it turns out those lives are not worth living" is getting tiresome. There's no particular reason to suspect it would turn out this way. It's not your place to decide for other animals. The whole ethical framework you're using for this stinks, but that's another issue.
That kind of obsession, it excludes the middle. It *could* come from benevolence, in a vegan hippie who would be far more concerned with far more actionable issue of a factory farm.
Or it can come from the other place, at best, as an invention of a non-actionable issue to displace actionable ones with.
edit: as for wild animals with parasites, they've been co-evolving with those parasites for a long time, there's nothing much you can get out of having chronic pain about it, other than distraction - in an animal that has to stay alert to survive. This all comes off as grasping at straws hoping for the big judge in the sky to agree that us destroying nature now isn't so bad after all.
Well, there's no big judge in the sky, although the punishment will be self inflicted and severe.
With regards to parasites I'm talking about cases where the parasites actually weaken the animal to the point of death, not just when they are living with them but functioning. Also from what I've seen humans with parasites it can really make their quality of life worse, I don't see why other animals would be any different.
I'm not saying the future generation would be better off believing everything Tomasik says or whatever, just that they would be better off with a paradigm shift against thinking everything in nature is untouchable and as good as it's ever going to get, and wild animals don't matter as beings per se but only as aesthetic features of an environment that you are trying to protect instead, because that will in concrete ways affect our motivation to answer questions that may one day allow people to do something about this in the future.
I'm hardly looking for excuses to destroy nature, I was super into preserving nature and maybe wanted to make it my career until I was 18, and when I started reading this stuff I desperately didn't want to believe it. I was depressed for years about it, this is not something I want to believe to make myself feel better about being an environment-destroying human. I'm not just some big-money corporation person looking for an excuse. To me the idea that the lives are not worth living seems logical from the premises that the vast majority live very short lives that consist disproportionately of their deaths, and the existence and commonality of drawn out and extremely painful deaths, though I agree no one should be taking action based on my view of things and we should instead focus on getting more knowledge.
> I'm hardly looking for excuses to destroy nature, I was super into preserving nature and maybe wanted to make it my career until I was 18, and when I started reading this stuff I desperately didn't want to believe it. I was depressed for years about it, this is not something I want to believe to make myself feel better about being an environment-destroying human.
Well, I mean, maybe that's just an intrusive thought for you, kind of like how some people lost their sleep over the most ridiculous "basilisk"? Like when as a child you may have some fear of monsters under your bed, or a scary story from a friend, or something like that. You have no reason to believe there's a monster under your bed. You don't want to believe there's a monster there. And yet it bugs you. The philosopher's version, with a (dis)utility monster in your backyard.
An earworm doesn't have to be the best music, and the idea counterpart needs not be well composed either.
I simply don't see how other animal's lives could be *possibly* described as "consisting disproportionately of their deaths". What animals? Cicadas in my backyard? Squirrels? Ducks in the pond? Monarch butterflies?
Parasites or no parasites, I'd say in terms of proportion they're doing better than humans where the age eats you alive, very slowly. Whether I do or don't count the larval stage.
Even the poor lizard that the cats played their cruel game with, probably didn't last an hour, and it must've lived for like a year. You're gonna get old, with medical care your ratio's gonna be way worse than that of the poor lizard.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course, pain is a damage signal to keep you from damaging yourself, you don't have to "minimize your pain" if you have something else worth living for. It's not like this is a contest where you have to out-hedonism a little lizard.
Then there's great many types of prolonged pain you can feel (having to do with you being a social animal that recognizes specific peers) that most of animals very certainly can not feel.
Another thing that seems obvious to me is that "conversion factor" between pain and positive feelings, is going to be quite arbitrary - it's like trying to convert between greenness of green and redness of red. So of course if you want to decide that some animal's life is "not worth living", it's not like I or any science could ever stop you from choosing a number that makes it so.
Stepping back from it, why in the fuck do the animals have to "redeem" their lives to you?
I think for the society as a whole, this is kind of like... let's say there's a nurse in an elderly home, and that nurse has a history of being cruel to the elderly, and you catch the nurse mumbling something to herself about lives not worth living. Here I see mankind, with all its history, starting to mumble a yet another evil idea to itself. There's absolutely nothing good about that. It's truly disturbing.
Anyways, say they get someone who was interested in animal conservation, and got to somehow mess up their view with this scary story, that's 1 for the bad guys, 0 for the good guys. That's how it works.
Yeah, I would say it's an intrusive thought. And it has come with a lot of other intrusive thoughts about whether lives are worth living, whether my own life is worth living (despite me definitely thinking it was before I started thinking about everything like this...) You make a good point about there being lots of kinds of pain humans can feel but other animals can't, though on the other hand one has to be wary of thinking that your particular kind of pain is the worst it gets because you are the one experiencing it (I see this a lot, people who have experienced a particular kind of suffering and not others thinking it's the worst possible thing). And there are some ways in which other animals' suffering would be greater than humans in the same circumstance, such as their possible inability to know when it will end and that things will get better, make rationalizations for it, etc. like I remember once reading some personal near-death experience article from [Cracked.com](https://Cracked.com) where the person described losing all sense of time or explanation for their suffering so that they were effectively like an animal, and it made the suffering much worse to the point of being unimaginably bad and severely traumatizing him.
You have a point about the danger of ideas like that using the example of the nurse. Like you see biases like that in the ideas some have about euthanasia, where some people have proposed (and I think in some places it actually is that way) that you can get it if you have a severe but not deadly physical disability (even if other people with the disability have it and live lives they very much enjoy) while you can't get it if you have any other hardship in life, that just counts as suicide and is considered bad. Given most people with and without disabilities tend to change their mind about being suicidal if they live long enough, but there is an ableist assumption in that where basically, if you are disabled your life is not worth living objectively even if you think it is, and if you are not disabled your life is worth living even if you think it isn't, physical disability is just labeled as the worst possible experience independent of how the people experiencing it and other things feel.
But I can never really abandon the idea because although I recognize that such ideas can be dangerous, there's nothing about life that makes it inherently guaranteed to be worth living, life is a morally neutral thing that's only as good as that particular life happens to be, if most humans feel their life is worth living that's not a statement of an inherent quality of life but just a tendency. Even if it's employed for bad purposes, the idea of a life not worth living seems to me like a thing that actually exists and one has to take into consideration. And that's all well and good in the example of the nurse where you can ask humans about their lives, but when it comes to animals I'm constantly second-guessing. The thing is, to me, taking any action in either direction feels like a repulsive and heartless sacrifice. To exterminate creatures who live lives they overall enjoy is horrible, sacrificing others just to get rid of pain... but to accept as inevitable casualties the animals getting eaten alive over a 10 minute period where they just won't die when it looks like they should, or dying over days of an infected wound, unimaginable horrors all in a cold sacrifice for the joy you assume is experienced in greater magnitude, but don't know. For me, uncertainty doesn't point towards doing nothing, uncertainty points to agonizing it because either choice would be monstrous if it was wrong - thus the need to do research. EVERY choice feels evil.
And to me it seems intuitively obvious that 80 or so years of life with the last year spent in an old, decrepit, and discomforted state, though probably not pure agony until the very end of it (like with people with cancer, it becomes very painful at the end but for much of the progression of the disease the symptoms are mild), is preferable to two days of life with a 5-minute long but agonizing death, but maybe it isn't to you.
> And there are some ways in which other animals' suffering would be greater than humans in the same circumstance, such as their possible inability to know when it will end and that things will get better, make rationalizations for it, etc.
I dunno, I mean I think you're getting almost religious here, like God created pain. It's a damage signal, it's only useful if you can actually turn it into some action that would improve survival. It also has to do with learning, like you feel pain and then you don't do something again.
And it has to compound upon itself over time (like learning does), it's not like there's a giant integral in the sky summing things for you.
Bottom line is if we get into specific it starts getting quite dubious that invertebrates even have those aspects of pain that we find most damaging, since they wouldn't be particularly useful to an animal that does very limited or no learning. Do you think stubbing your toe on the way into a freezing pod from Futurama, makes for 1000 years of stubbed toe pain, making it better for Fry to never having been born? Of course not. There has to be a physical process to make the pain add up over time, it actually has practical applications, if we can block pain from adding up over time we use that for surgeries and whatnot. A static signal of "pain" without changes to your neurons, wouldn't be prolonged pain any more than the stubbed toe on the way to the stasis chamber could make millenia of suffering.
I also seriously doubt that rationalizing like you did that the backyard is also in pain when things aren't doing well for you, is all that helpful to alleviating your own suffering. Certainly doesn't sound like it. I don't think rationalizing pain helps you feel better, that's for sure.
Bottom line is, we make up something about animals, and the further we get from h-sapiens, the less likely it is that we are in any way whatsoever correct.
> is preferable to two days of life with a 5-minute long but agonizing death
Is that, like, some animal in particular, or just some general sentiment?
I mean, of course, it's probably all arbitrary anyway and you can just *decide* that the scaling factor on pain vs pleasure such that some 0.17% of the lifespan out-shadow the rest, but honestly to me this sounds like projecting depression / anhedonia onto other animals.
Maybe the idea that they are for the most part enjoying life (to what ever extent that's possible) is just rubbing salt into wounds.
I don't think most critters in my backyard would survive for long if their other drives besides pain malfunctioned. They don't have enough brains, or enough time, to derive their behaviors from pain avoidance.
The whole thing is garbage ideology, too, it's not just garbage (and far too generic) speculations about the critters.
You're assuming that hedonism is true and correct. It's not particularly seen as such, most people wouldn't want to be turned into "orgasmium". Humans may be *tempted*, for sure, but actually wanting to do that strikes me as some sort of human counterpart to overfitting in machine learning. We have other goals than avoiding pain or getting pleasure.
Then you're also doing hedonism quite inconsistently; if it's correct why do you bother worrying about the animals anyway? Go enjoy yourself. Maybe go outside in bright sunlight, for what ever reason that improves mood.
The "lives worth living" is an idiotic concept. Worth to who? A mining company? You? God of Hedonism who's just like Christian God except the commandment is to enjoy yourself, and the bugs aren't living up to the standard? We have to jerk off frequently enough and do enough heroin or the giant sky Tomasik is going to freeze us to death?
Turning hedonism into an obligation upon all life in the universe. Some gramps could live a happy life, and they slip and fall, and oh no, they undone all the good while trying to get better from a broken hip. What sense does that even make?
That's all completely fucking ridiculous. Mishmash of random ill fitting ideas, that someone made up. I assure you whoever made this shit up didn't feel any distress, they went and made themselves a more lucrative career from what they've been doing prior, because of the obvious practical applications.
And you're hoping *science* will answer something that's not even a question, and exceedingly unlikely could be turned into one?
Nope... reddit probably ate it, happens to me all the time.
Honestly, we probably need to have a deprogramming resource for tomasik-and-adjacent stuff like we have for roko.
The broad structure is rather similar: a large, LARGE number of completely unfounded assumptions get made, and then one's hit with the "what if".
Well what if the fireants in my backyards are pure orgasmium for some reason. Maybe eusocial insects simply aren't able to convert pain into behaviors that are helpful to the hive, after all they have to self sacrifice for the hive all the time in ways that pain would interfere with. Maybe evolution built nearly all their behaviors on pleasure. A fireant has like 300 000 neurons, a human 9*10^10 , that's 300 000 ants per human to match neuron count. See https://fireant.tamu.edu/learn/biology/ , "In areas with multiple queen colonies, there may be 200 or more mounds and 40 million ants per acre.". Maybe there's a really really happy utility monster in my backyard. So what? You can't put such propositions into your utility sums, you should try to get an estimate and having cherry picked terms (let alone adversary-chosen terms) is not helping you at all. (Another rationalist failing, preaching expected utility maximization while having literally zero knowledge about applied math and estimation and sums and convergence and so on).
Just give me some time to rewrite my reply to you, today or tomorrow. I really have a lot I want to say. I just will include part of it here - your whole criticism of this ideology has been and is here that it makes lots of assumptions without scientific backing. But yet you also criticized me for being naive enough to believe that science could answer these questions, of getting a sense of the nature of different animals’ conscious experiences. It feels like I can’t win here, if you criticize me for believing things without scientific evidence but then ridicule me for wanting to devote my life to finding those answers about the conscious experience of animals. So do you then think the best path is not to investigate these claims but to make the opposite assumption that all of this is wrong and every wild animal’s life is objectively a good thing that the world is made better for it’s existence, again without verifying these claims?
To give a very quick reply (I don't have much time today), the reason I think it's silly to be expecting the science to answer it, is that a large number of assumptions need to be made for the question to even make any sense in the first place.
The question arose of bullshit; someone wanted to rationalize something, and they made things up. How many bullshit-borne questions of 200 years ago would science answer? Number of angels on the head of the pin type of stuff. How did God create the universe in 7 days. That kind of stuff.
"Is the bug's life worth living" is squarely in that ballpark: dangling "worth" without a context, assumption that hedonistic utilitarianism is right and preference utilitarianism is wrong *while taking the interconvertibility of pain and pleasure from preference utilitarianism*, etc etc.
Even if the science gave you a table of some bug in the yard's various qualia, and some sort of hint how it should be valued, it is very clear from our conversation that even for the happiest bug you would probably set a small multiplier for it's "pleasures", point out to some part-per-million pain, and then convince yourself that you should be deeply concerned whether that bug's life is worth living.
You can already get far more solid arguments about factory farmed animals. They're already under our control and our responsibility, so we don't even need to go on ethically dubious ground of trying to save someone who wants nothing to do with you, like you're some atheist version of a mormon missionary. They're mammals, like you. They have homologous brain structures, we can stick you and them in an MRI and bridge our subjective to their subjective without understanding how the subjective works. The conditions they are in, are the kind of conditions that pain would normally drive them to escape, improving reproductive fitness, so we should assume pain. Conditions are monotonous, so we aren't doing this whole dubious routine of subtracting pains from pleasures. edit: hell we aren't even trying to determine if their lives are worth living, you can have the same number of animals living a happier life, and don't need any getting-in-ant's-head magic.
Does that help you do something differently for reducing suffering? Of course not. edit: in fact you even described that as whataboutism.
My point about whataboutism wasn't that I didn't care about factory farmed animals, just that I don't see why it has to be one or the other and you can't care about both. You seem to be saying that we shouldn't care about wild animals just because factory farmed animal exist, when really there is no limit on empathy where you have to pick and choose. Whataboutism is when you try to avoid discussion of whether an issue is worth doing something about by bringing up a different issue, which is also important, but is being used as a distraction. It's the same thing people do when they say we shouldn't care about factory farming when there are humans suffering, when really it's not a competition.
Obviously "whether a life is worth living" is something that cannot be easily scientifically answered, but I can believe that as the science of understanding consciousness advances we might better be able to identify pleasant and unpleasant states and have a better sense of the differences and similarities between how we experience these things and other animals do, and better be able to interact with animals in ways that benefit them accordingly. Even if science cannot give us the answers to ethical questions it can provide more context with which to answer them, like your hypotheticals about some of these animals not feeling pain as strongly due to fewer neurons or it being a learning mechanism, or ants that feel pleasure all the time. A better understanding of animals' consciousness could certainly tell us in the future whether these suppositions are true, and while that's not the same as telling us whether their "lives are worth living" it could help us make more informed evaluations than the "get the bullshit answer now" ethos you so criticize. I just don't buy your idea of "there is nothing to be done and nothing to be learned, so we should just give up and do nothing".
Regarding the concept of lives worth living, I don’t think it’s an inherently ridiculous concept just because we do find cases in humans, the only species we know about the subjective value of their life for sure, where they do in fact see the trade-off of positive and negative experiences to not be worth it, i.e someone with a terminal illness who decides they would rather die and thus forego all experience altogether for the next, lets say, 4 months they have to live, rather than have that experience that would largely consist of pain (I could certainly see a human concluding that they would rather die painlessly right now than to take the place of an R-selected animal living one week longer during which they slowly starve to death, for example). As long as life consists of parts perceived by the being as good and parts perceived by the being as bad, it is logical that there is potential for lives where it is preferable based on the being’s value system to exist and lives where it is not. If you counter by saying only humans have a value system, I would respond that animals cleaerly make decisions and behave in a way that they value certain things (food, the ability to run around outside, etc.) and disvalue others (physical pain, for example). My focus on a hedonistic conception of life is thus not, as you seemed to argue, a denial of all other potential values in the context of human life and therefore it would be better to focus on that above all else for myself, for example, just an acknowledgement that these are the values we know non-human animals have, so they are what is relevant when discussing their life experience.
Concerning your statement that you can never say a life is not worth living unless there is some omniscient god who declares it to be so, this seems to hold to a bit of a double standard. I assume you believe that the fact that there can be lives that are worth living and are a positive to exist to be something one can believe without needing a god to tell you (thus why you believe saving lives is a good thing) and you also believe that reducing suffering (without killing someone to do so) is inherently a good thing without being like the stereotypical religious person who says you cannot know these things for sure without God so therefore there is no morality without God. So unless you want to be a complete moral nihilist who believes nothing can ever be good or worth doing, you would either have to conclude that every life is morally good to exist and continue by some inherent property regardless of its content, even if the content is all torture (which is both far more of a “religious faith statement” than what I am saying since it requires you to believe in an inherent property that can’t be observed rather than extrapolating from the properties of certain things being valued and certain things not that clearly does exist in the world, as well as, as I mentioned, contradicting the experience of human beings who do not always experience their lives as worth living), or you accept that there is a possibility that a life could exist that would be morally better not to exist.
And this is where it turns into an intrusive thought to me, because once I acknowledge that the phenomenon can exist I started looking for it everywhere, constantly trying to judge if lives were worth living. It seems nonsensical for me for the reasons I described to treat lives as worth living by default (and leads to bad consequences like denying euthanasia for the terminally ill who request it), and morally repugnant to conclude nothing is of value, but those beliefs are a lot easier to get through life with, not constantly questioning if everything is worth it.
You make great points about how this whole ideology makes a lot of assumptions in declaring that these particular lives are not worth living, but I don’t think the very idea that this could be the case of a life is inherently ridiculous.
Concerning pain serving as a damage signal and a learning mechanism, this is true and it would potentially lead to pain not being as bad as it theoretically could be in some cases, though one has to remember that evolution doesn’t optimizing for lives being as good as possible with any suffering being a necessary sacrifice to that aim, but for survival and reproduction, and while that might align coincidentally at some times there’s no guarantee it will in all cases. I feel the experience of human accounts of horrific, unimaginably agonizing pain shows that the extent of pain at least that we are capable of experiencing goes beyond what anyone would consider a necessary sacrifice for learning and knowing we are injured, even if no pain at all would also be bad. As you well pointed out, though, just because this is the case for humans does not mean it would be the case for every animal.
I also feel like, separate from the whole “environmental destruction is good actually” thing, these people have a point in how the assumption that it is always bad to change undisturbed nature in any way for the benefit of animals is based on some biased and flawed assumptions. The first is anthropocentrism, basically thinking that the animals’ own experience doesn’t matter and animals and their environment only exist for humans to enjoy them – this is the type of impulse that leads to nature documentaries saying at the end “and the reason we should protect this species of animals is so our descendants will be able to see them when we go hiking”. The second is valuing nature in itself, and I’m immensely suspicious of the valuation of any non-sentient thing for itself rather than as a proxy for the sentient beings who would be affected by it, it leads to a depraved morality that cares more about beauty than compassion. All of which leads to the conclusion of most people (and this is most people I my experience, maybe your social circle is more “enlightened” with regard to caring about the suffering of wild animals) that even if it were possible, wild animals should never be able to live better lives because that would ruin the aesthetic of survival and things untrammeled by humans. As for the third reason, this is why I interacted with noactuallyitspoptart the way I did, because I misconstrued there comment on how I should “know my limited place and the limited place of humanity” to be advocating that view; the idea that the current state of nature is the best of all possible worlds and any alteration of it will inevitably lead to make things worse. To which people often site that previous ways humans have intervened in nature (for selfish anthropocentric reasons) have had unintended consequences due to it being a complex system, and I have always reacted to this idea (and this is what I was saying to noactuallyitspoptart) that this attitude is eerily similar to the right-wing rhetoric you often here where someone proposes a change to a complex system that is causing a lot of suffering, the right-wing person points out that the obvious changes to it will have unforeseen consequences, and then extrapolates from that through sleight of hand that all changes are bad, that you shouldn’t bother trying to do research and plan out how you could change things in acknowledgment of the complex system and should just give up. Often accompanied by ideas about the “hubris of humanity” in daring to think things could be better. So even if you criticize the extreme “exterminate everything” view, do you acknowledge the argument that we shouldn’t eliminate the possibility of interventions in nature in a theoretical future where we have the knowledge and understanding to do so? This is my point with regards to changing society’s morality and science’s goals; that none of that knowledge will ever be obtained if the questions found in research is always done with the aim of “how can we make nature more like its original state” and not “how can we make the welfare of animals in nature improved”, so the moral opinion of society is relevant in this case.
> It seems nonsensical for me for the reasons I described to treat lives as worth living by default (and leads to bad consequences like denying euthanasia for the terminally ill who request it
That's easily answered as a matter of personal freedom and bodily autonomy. If they don't think that their life is worth *to them* enough, well, they should be able to make that decision. That does in no way excuse murder charges for a nurse that would do it without patient's consent, based on nurse's own evaluation of whether their life is worth living or not.
It's not like I'm talking some fringe morality from the darkest corners of Thielnet here, there's countries with legal assisted suicide.
From this you somehow got this grand cosmic "worth" (really, whatever makes *you* feel good about their lives), you get this zeal like in a young religious person wanting to save people from the fiery pits of hell, except it's even more noble since it's all life.
Except factory farmed animals, of course. That's just garden variety hippie liberal thing. Not edgy enough for you. You need to focus on something that everyone's neglecting.
Look, for nth time. Someone's having fun justifying strip mining. Debate club - like exercise, plus Peter Thiel et all, resulted in us having this conversation.
> that this attitude is eerily similar to the right-wing rhetoric you often here where someone proposes a change to a complex system that is causing a lot of suffering, the right-wing person points out that the obvious changes to it will have unforeseen consequences
Well, except the change you're proposing is to kill wildlife based on some idiotic conjectures about their lives not being worth living. Simple as that.
> do you acknowledge the argument that we shouldn’t eliminate the possibility of interventions in nature in a theoretical future where we have the knowledge and understanding to do so?
That's not a question, that's a cheap rhetorical device. The stuff you've been obsessed with, is clearly the notion that animals are better off dead, their lives not worth living, etc. The pro strip mining stuff. You've argued it for pages.
Now you're inventing on the fly some other (very different) concerns, like
> that none of that knowledge will ever be obtained if the questions found in research is always done with the aim of “how can we make nature more like its original state” and not “how can we make the welfare of animals in nature improved”, so the moral opinion of society is relevant in this case.
Of course there's a lot of interest in reducing suffering in farm animals, in ourselves, in pets, and so on. As well as the interest in alteration or extermination of animals in the wild (e.g. invasive species, mosquitoes, etc). The concern that "science won't get done because of liberals", now that's a classic right-wing concern, and obviously misplaced in this case.
And of course we can't really do anything now to prevent the future people who have actually addressed the farm animals and pets and so on, from applying some of that magic to nature. Maybe it won't seem hubristic to them after having widely deployed that stuff. Who knows. Not exactly influenceable kind of thing.
As I said earlier, the next generation's growing up watching Octonauts (Kid show, episode after episode some talking animals are interfering in nature). I'm not particularly concerned that they need your favorite "Saberhagen's Berserker robot justifies itself" fanfiction to set them on the right path, and I don't think that was your concern either.
Then they'll raise another generation and so on, by the time the "interventions" are not just "let's kill some animals because they aren't worth enough to us", little we can do about the attitudes, as fun as it may be to imagine shaping the future.
edit: to summarize, honestly, the response to the whole "don't close the door on" and "but science won't get done" type *new* concerns from me is a yawn.
The "not worth living" crap I'll argue against, this really remote concerns invented to give some weak support to the former, eh think whatever you want about what some people in the year 2222 should be doing. They're gonna do their own thing anyway. And if they will care about nature, a 2032 or 2042 news article about the last coral reefs dying being balanced out with this fucking "lives worth living" garbage, will only make them less inclined to intervene in nature.
The whole "caring about wild animals means I must not care about factory farming" thing seems like the kind of logic when people hear "Black Lives Matter" and say "but all lives matter!". No, caring about one thing does not require not caring about the other. You can care about climate change and curing cancer, you can care about factory farming and wild animal suffering.
Concerning bodily autonomy and stuff, you are treating it as if there are two possible scenarios with regards to a life being worth living when there are actually three. 1. The being communicates that they believe their life is worth living and consents for nothing to be done to stop it 2. The being communicates they believe their life is not worth living and gives consent to end it 3. The being is incapable of either. Why should we treat case 3 as identical to case 1, there is no reason that when someone is not capable of making and announcing the decision that their life is or is not a beneficial thing to them that the "default" should be that it is. In fact often we know it isn't, like the case of people with advanced Alzheimers no longer capable of thinking in terms of whether they want to be alive, but who have said when they were capable that they would not want to live in such a state.
The last part of what I wrote was indeed changing the topic, but not as a manipulative rhetorical device to deflect from my original point, just to say, "ok, I feel like we've exhausted this topic of the stronger/more extreme point of wanting to destroy environments, but what is your opinion on the weaker point that intervening in nature for the benefit of animals isn't 100% wrong in all theoretical cases. So yes, I’m changing the topic, but only because I also wanted to discuss this related but different topic. Although you fortunately don’t believe it yourself, everywhere I go I see opinions along the line that the current state of nature is the best of all possible worlds for animals and that intervening in it is inherently wrong and will always be a negative regardless of context, for the reasons I described. I should have been clearer what I meant by interventions in nature – I don’t mean killing mosquitoes (that would be an intervention solely to benefit humans rather than for other animals’ own sakes), or removing invasive species (that isn’t seen by the people who do it as an intervention, just returning nature to its original state before humans messed with it, in fact while some invasive species are very damaging to the environment, people have also tried to exterminate invasive species which actually had a benign effect on the environment just because a state unaffected by humans is considered inherently better and more aesthetically pleasing, regardless of how many animals have to be killed to make this happen). I am talking about interventions that are for the animals’ own sake and will put nature in a state that is not identical to how it was before humans interacted with it, which are considered deplorable by most people. Your description of lots of people caring about wild animal suffering does not match at all with my experience, which is that completely separate from the question of whether their lives are worth living there is a strong aversion amongst most people to even the theoretical idea of intervention done in the future after many years of research, unless it fits one of the two categories I just listed. No, I don’t think spreading Tomasik et al.’s rhetoric is necessary to get people to care, but I do think the idea that the state of nature untouched by humans is to be considered the highest ideal for the animals living in it, not to be trammeled with unless for purely human-serving reasons, is an idea that is pervasive and ingrained in society, and I think it’s incredibly naïve of you to think that, just because of the existence of a TV show for preschoolers (which kids will grow up to understand is a fantasy and not a moral guide for interacting with real nature), we can expect these moral values to change in a society-wide level without putting in any effort to challenge them, just trusting that in the future things will get better. And I don’t see why it is such a ridiculous idea to you that the moral goals of a society determine the scientific questions that get asked. If we as a society did not have curing diseases as a value and should just accept them as a part of nature and only try to understand then on an intellectual level, then that would affect the questions we ask and experiments we perform about diseases, and even though we would get some information that would be useful for if we changed our societal values to wanting to cure diseases, we would not get as much information as if that was our goal all along. Again, this is separate from the “stronger” point of lives not being worth living, this is just about the “weaker” point of interventions in nature that don’t fall into specific categories not being inherently shunned being also not widely accepted by society at all. Spreading the latter idea, which is not nearly as widely assumed in society as you seem to think from my opinion, does. not require spreading the former, and does does not require spreading "dangerous" ideas that might be used to justify, say, wholesale destruction of a coral reef. And if you disagree with a value that most of society holds and think holding it will cause harm (in the form of what questions get asked and research is done), then you would want to try to advocate to change those values in the present rather than just trusting through magical thinking that people will become better in the future.
> The whole "caring about wild animals means I must not care about factory farming" thing seems like the kind of logic when people hear "Black Lives Matter" and say "but all lives matter!". No, caring about one thing does not require not caring about the other.
The point, to the contrary, is that you *should* care about factory farming. That you don't, is an observable here - you're obsessed with wild animals, you're circlejerking about how badly they live in a circlejerk subreddit for it, and others asked if you were vegan and you counter accused them of whataboutism.
From where I'm standing it's not at all clear that you or the rest of the anti nature circlejerk care about either one of those things.
> Although you fortunately don’t believe it yourself, everywhere I go I see opinions along the line that the current state of nature is the best of all possible worlds for animals and that intervening in it is inherently wrong and will always be a negative regardless of context, for the reasons I described.
And where do you go, one of those anti nature circlejerk subreddits, natureisterrible?
I'd say overall in the wider society there is a reasonable caution about the idea considering how little we know and our tendency to only fuck things up. Plus not being able to do any interventions finer grained than hunting something to extinction.
And of course, nobody's interested in what the future utopians should do about nature in the imaginary year of 2222; we only got there after exhausting the much more interesting topic of the critters today. I literally couldn't care less about that new topic. The basic science they'll need gets done regardless, and we aren't putting a micro-MRI onto a wild cockroach running around in the wild, anyway. Wild animals, living their lives in the wild, doesn't mesh well with neuroscience, and it's not just liberals fault.
> I am talking about interventions that are for the animals’ own sake
Well yeah, killing them ostensibly for their own sake because their lives aren't worth living. Either that or mock concern that I'm somehow preventing year-2222 utopians from addressing the problem in some other way, with some mock concerns about "just wanting science" like how rightwingers accuse the left of suppressing "racial science", except even more stupid, for the lack of a mini MRI you could put on a wild cockroach. At least racists only need calipers.
edit:
> this is just about the “weaker” point of interventions in nature that don’t fall into specific categories not being inherently shunned being also not widely accepted by society at all. Spreading the latter idea, which is not nearly as widely assumed in society as you seem to think from my opinion, does. not require spreading the former,
Who cares? You aren't interested in spreading the latter idea, other than literally as a subgoal popping up as a side effect of you defending the former. I already said I don't care about that latter idea because it is not actionable at all. Not even in the "what science to do" sense, since it just leads back to neurobiology done in the lab the way it's done anyway for other much more immediate reasons. edit: I think children's show is more than the adequate level of support for the latter, given where we are with regards to ability to actually do anything positive (its an utter fantasy, perfectly matching the maturity level of the children's show).
edit: it's like a discussion of a drone strike collateral damage devolving into asking someone to acknowledge that you can enjoy a loud beat, and the similarity of distant explosions to such.
I listened to a few podcasts about “longtermism” and while they do
mention climate change in passing, somehow it never gets the attention
it should, if truly “future generations” were to be very important in
decision making.
And we have already locked in immense harm to future generations,
heating the planet up by almost 1.5C and are locking in more harm with
every fraction of a degree more.
In March 2021, Torres is arguing that international law should be more longtermist and posting it on the EA Forum [https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DYFLJdumkJJyq5B9A/international-criminal-law-and-the-future-of-humanity-a](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DYFLJdumkJJyq5B9A/international-criminal-law-and-the-future-of-humanity-a)
By July 2021, Torres is arguing in Aeon that longtermism is "possibly the most dangerous secular belief system in the world today." [https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo](https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo)
That's impressively fast
Apparently Torres used to work at (or maybe visited?) the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) and the Center of the Study of Existential Risks (CSER). "I was at FHI and CSER. I know many people there now."
[https://twitter.com/xriskology/status/1561641444728881155](https://twitter.com/xriskology/status/1561641444728881155)
And on the EA Forum I found this argument between Torres and the head of CSER: [https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xtKRPkoMSLTiPNXhM/response-to-phil-torres-the-case-against-longtermism?commentId=AnZ7cC68TJSgdgecM#AnZ7cC68TJSgdgecM](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xtKRPkoMSLTiPNXhM/response-to-phil-torres-the-case-against-longtermism?commentId=z8i7q5hZJYZAQAXC5)
Doesn't really answer your question though - not sure how you go from working at FHI and CSER to crusading against them.
It is predestination for nerds. If you cns picture your actions as
part of an unbreakable chain onto the golden path no sin you commit can
matter. So if you wanna a beat a zebra to death it’s fine because that
will over a long enough period of time pay for itself in the
singularity
Alternatively, they could arise from individual digital minds with
superhuman moral status or ability to benefit from resources. Such
beings could contribute immense value to the world, and failing to
respect their interests could produce a moral catastrophe
This sort of reasoning seems uncomfortably close to realising that
the real digital minds are the billionaire friends these folks
have made along the way.
So one thing I was curious about as a lurker with this effective
altruism and long-termism thing is it seems like Peter Singer was the
original inspiration. It’s hard to see how he’d be on board with
focusing on stuff like this so it seems like it got really hijacked by
the guys willing to sell out for funding and I guess he isn’t. lol
Yeah, I held out in defence of EA for a long time because my introduction to it was via Singer and MacAskill before he went techno (not that I was ever a massive fan of either, particularly not MacAskill), and it got a certain amount of flack on here from people who either discounted or literally didn’t know there was that (originary!) side to it
Now, however…
i think the MIRI guys came up with the seed of the current incarnation, someone rediscovered Singer and he embraced them because who doesn't like having people tell you 20 years later "you were sooo right"
i'm not sure of the chronology quite, but I think this is it
Okay so I’ve never got the chance to ask this question to a longtermist but maybe someone here knows the answer.
Don’t you have to discount the value of those future lives heavily due to the uncertainty that they will even come into being at all? Like, the whole planet could be wiped out by a meteor in a year. Or the universe could be destroyed by a vacuum metastability event. Or something else unexpected could happen that drastically reduces the number of human lives.
How can it be that hypothetical future lives have anywhere near the importance of someone who is alive to experience joy and suffering right now?
I think that it is simply a reactionary ideology along the lines of climate change denial.
Rather than denying climate change, or human impact on climate change, or the like, they set to deny importance of climate change on the far future of human species.
They are only concerned with 10^50 or whatever other large number of future humans, to the extent that it lets them create a new context where to fallaciously argue that climate change does not matter.
That really is all there is to it. They also can’t conceal this too much, less they run the risk that someone with money might mistake them for climate activists, and not pay one of them to come and speak about it at an event.
(Of course, the far future is entirely defined by the state of the planet in say 2100 which in turn is defined by each year’s carbon emissions until then. In so much that anyone would actually care about some far future 10^50 people, all they could get out of it would be arguments for caring about climate change since causing a mass extinction would of course fuck up any future chances for humanity as well. But their argument would be weakened and muddled by entirely unnecessary speculation)
Another interesting similar movement, albeit not as prominent, and largely failed, is various “suffering minimization” related “work” passing as ethical philosophy. That ideology concerned itself with human pain during the opioid epidemic (pushers of addictive drugs needing an ethical justification), but has since moved onto general anti environmentalism along the lines of how we must kill all badlife and feel good about it because it was suffering anyway.
I listened to a few podcasts about “longtermism” and while they do mention climate change in passing, somehow it never gets the attention it should, if truly “future generations” were to be very important in decision making.
And we have already locked in immense harm to future generations, heating the planet up by almost 1.5C and are locking in more harm with every fraction of a degree more.
Is Torres one of the first people to go from sneered at on this forum, to sneering?
https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/c3rj17/some_choice_bits_from_phil_torres_book_morality/
Probably there are a lot of apostates from EA but Torres is a particularly hard 180.
It is predestination for nerds. If you cns picture your actions as part of an unbreakable chain onto the golden path no sin you commit can matter. So if you wanna a beat a zebra to death it’s fine because that will over a long enough period of time pay for itself in the singularity
This sort of reasoning seems uncomfortably close to realising that the real digital minds are the billionaire friends these folks have made along the way.
So one thing I was curious about as a lurker with this effective altruism and long-termism thing is it seems like Peter Singer was the original inspiration. It’s hard to see how he’d be on board with focusing on stuff like this so it seems like it got really hijacked by the guys willing to sell out for funding and I guess he isn’t. lol