You go badly wrong in giving a concatenation of implausible beliefs into a generalized misanthropic conclusion (i.e. the future will suck, people on xrisk rationalise this away and just want status, etc.)
1) Wildly implausible and ill-motivated axiological trade-off ratios
You suggest making the future vastly bigger may be no great thing even if the ratio of happiness:sadness is actually very high, as the sadness dominates. Yet it is antinatalist/ânegutils who are outliers in how they trade-off pleasure versus pain.
FRI offers a â1 week torture versus 40 years of happinessâ trade-off for an individual to motivate the âcare much more about sufferingâ idea (about 1:2000 by time length). Iâd take this, and I guess my indifference is someone between months and years (~~1:100-1:10). Claims like âwouldnât even undergo a minute of tortureâ (so ~~ 1:10^8 if you get 40 years afterwards) look wild:
Expressed preferences are otherwise. Most say theyâre glad to be alive, that their lives are worth living, etc.
Virtually everyoneâs implied preferences are otherwise. Iâd be happy to stand in the rain for a few minutes for a back concert, suffer a pinprick to have sex with someone I love, and so on.
In essence, we take ourselves to have direct access to the goodness of happiness and the badness of suffering, and so we trade-off these at not-huge ratios. A personal example. One of the (happily, many) joyful experiences of my life was playing games in a swimming pool at a summer camp. Yet I had a very severe muscle cramp (worst of my life) during the frolicking. The joyful experience (which lasted a few hours) greatly outweighs the minute or so of excruciating pain from the cramp
I donât propose âbad muscle crampâ even approaches the depths of suffering humans have experiencedâso maybe thereâs some threshold between pinpricks and âtrueâ torture where the trade-off ratio should become vast. Others have suffered the torture which you think (effectively) no amount of happiness can outweigh. Michelle Knight was abducted at the age of 21 and beaten, raped, starved, and many horrendous things besides, for eleven years. I quote from her memoir:
I want to bless other people as much [sic] Iâve been blessed. Whenever I say that, some people seem surprised I see my life as a blessing after all the terrible things I went through. But the blessing is that I made it out alive. Iâm still here. Still breathing every day. And Iâm able to do something for other people. There is no better blessing than that.
I take it she thinks the happiness has outweighed the suffering in her life, and suspect she would say her life has been on balance good even if she died tomorrow. This roughly implies a trade off of 1:3. Her view is generally shared by survivors of horrendous evils: the other two women in the Cleveland Kidnapping say similar things (ditto other survivors of torture). I hope, like I, you have much worse access to the depths of how bad suffering can be compared to these people. Yet the they agree with me, not you.
One could offer debunking defeaters for this. Yet the offers tend to be pretty weak (âBecause of Buddhist Monks and meditation really all that is good is the tranquil lack of experienceâânah, meditation is great, but I would still want the pool parties too; âMaybe the âpleasureâ you get is just avoiding the (negative) cravingâânah, I often enjoy stuff I didnât crave beforehand). Insofar as theyâre more plausible (e.g. maybe evolution would make us desire maintain a net-bad life), theyâre also reversible: as Shulman notes its much worse for our fitness to get killed than it is good for our fitness to have sex, and so weâre biased into thinking the suffering can go lower than happiness can go higher.
The challenge is this:
Ultra high trade-offs between bad experiences like torture and happy bits of life is a (marked) minority position across the general population. Epistemic modesty implies deference.
When one looks at putative expert classes (e.g. philosophers, âelite common senseâ, the âEA cognoscentiâ) this fraction does not dramatically increase.
Indeed, for some expert classes the update perhaps should be common-sense leans too negative: my impression is being tortured for 11 years would make my life of (expectedly) around 80 years not worth living, but people who have been tortured for 11 years say otherwise; my impression is life with locked in syndrome is hellish and better off not lived, yet those with locked in syndrome generally report good quality of life.
The undercutting defeater that would transform this to think antinatalists/âwhoever really are the expert class cannot be found. Especially as one could throw in debunking explanations against them too: depression seems to predispose one to negative leaning views, and a cardinal feature of depression is anhedoniaâso maybe folks with high trade-off ratios just arenât able to appreciate the magnitude of a happy experience in a typical person.
2) Most life isnât wrongful, and expectedly worth the risk
Despite the above, it would overreach to say that everyone has a life worth celebrating no matter what happens to them. Although most quadriplegics report a life worth living, some on reflectionopt for euthanasia.
Yet preventing such cases should not be lexically prior to any other consideration: we should be willing to gamble utopia against extinction at the chance of a single terrible life of 1/âTREE(9). Similar to the above, myself (and basically everyone else) take our futures to be worth living for on selfish grounds, even though it must be conceded thereâs some finite chance of our lives becoming truly horrendous.
Given it seems most people have lives worth living (as they tell us), it seems the chances of a typical person who is born having a life worth living is very good indeed. If I had a guardian angel who was solely advocating for my welfare, they should choose me to be, even if they only have vague reference class steers (e.g. âHeâll be born into a middle-classish life in the UK; heâll be born to someone, somewhere in 1989; etc.â)
Statistical outliers say life, even in the historically propitious circumstances of the affluent west, is not good for them. Their guardian angels shouldnât actualize them. Yet uncertainty over this, given the low base-rates of this being the case, doesnât give them right of veto across the innumerable multitudes who could rejoice in an actual future. Some technologically mature Eschaton grants (among any things) assurance we only bring into existence beings who would want to exist.
3) Things are getting better, and the future should be good
Humanityâs quantitative track record is obviously upward (e.g. life expectancy, child mortality, disease rates, DALY rates, etc.).
Qualitatively, it looks like things are getting better too. Whatever reprehensible things Trump has said about torture would look anodyne from the perspective of the 16th century where it was routine to torture criminals, dissidents, etc. Quantitatively, ones risk of ending up a victim of torture has surely fallen over the millennia (consider astonishingly high rates of murder in pre-technological human groupsâone suspects non-death harms were also much more prevalent). We also donât take burning cats alive as wholesome fun.
There remain moral catastrophes in the periphery of our moral vision (wild animal suffering), and I would be unsurprised that the future will see more weâve overlooked. Not going extinct grants us more time to make amends, and capture all the goods we could glean from the cosmic endowment whilst avoiding terrible scenarios. Limiting x-risk, in essence, is a convergent instrumental goal for mature moral action in the universe.
4) Universal overconfidence
I am chary to claim knowledge of what the morally best thing the universe should be optimised for (you could do with similar circumspection: there have been ~ 10^11 childbirths in human history, do you really your account makes it plausible that not one was motivated by altruism?) Yet this knowledge is unnecessaryâone can pass this challenge on to descendants much better situated than us to figure it out.
What is required is reason that the option value of a vast future is worth preserving. It seems so: If it turns out that the only thing that makes things good is happiness, we can tile the universe in computronium and simulate ecstasy (which should give amounts of pleasure to pain over the universeâs history not â10% higherâ, but more like 10^10:1, even with extreme trade-off ratios). If thereâs other items on an objective list (or just uncertainty about what to value) one can divvy up the cosmic endowment accordingly. If our descendants realise you were right all along they can turn the whole thing offâor perhaps better use the cosmic endowment as barter for acausal trade with other universes to reduce the suffering in those. Even some naĂŻve sci-fi scenario of humans like us jumping on space ships and jetting around the cosmos looks good to me.
Cosmic hellscapes are also possibleâbut their probability falls in step with our moral development. The âdonât care about X riskâ view requires both that humans would fashion some cosmic hellscape, and that they couldnât fix it later (Iâd take an existence lottery with 10^18 torture tickets and 10^35 wonderful life ticketsâmy life seems pretty great despite > 1â100 Quadrillion chance of torture). Sufficient confidence in both of these to make x-risk not a big deal looks gravely misplaced.
Canât help but feel this thoughtful and comprehensive critique of negative utilitarianism is wasted on being buried deep in the comments of a basically unrelated post :)
Eh, I think a lot of this requires the context of previous replies, and Iâm hesitant to signal boost a reply addressed to a not-that-great proponent of the view being critiqued. I might try and transfigure this into a more standalone piece when time permits, but probably not soon.
Except I never argued for Negative Utilitarianism. Misrepresenting the arguments I made as such is a complete strawman.
For example, I donât believe thereâs a moral reason to prevent people who want pain and consent to it, from having pain.
Neither do I believe that thereâs a moral reason to prevent suffering for the guilty who have forced it on nonconsenting innocents. You, for example, have actively worked to cause it for a very large number of innocent nc victims, and therefore I do not believe there is a moral reason to prevent your suffering or victimization, even if it is nc.
It appears I was downvoted to â10 karma by people who didnât even read my posts.
I also canât help but note accusations about status are generally a double edged sword. Maybe whatâs really going on here is youâre making a bid for status by accusing others of being status seeking, thus pronouncing judgement and diagnosis on their petty motives, and for implying you (of course!) are above such things.
Grandiosely overconfident and really edgy stuff like âThere was not even one altruistic childbirth in all of historyâ also seems more apt for getting iconoclastic status than âstrategic vaguenessâ (i.e. not being sure in the face of moral and empirical uncertainty).
Yet preventing such cases should not be lexically prior to any other consideration: we should be willing to gamble utopia against extinction at the chance of a single terrible life of 1/âTREE(9).
I disagree; it is lexically, deontologically more important not to cause an innocent rape or nc torture victim than to cause any amount of happiness or utopian gain for others; also the number is absurd, terrible lives in the millions are a stochastical inevitability even just on Earth within each generation. Just look at the attempted suicide rates.
Statistical outliers say life, even in the historically propitious circumstances of the affluent west, is not good for them. Their guardian angels shouldnât actualize them. Yet uncertainty over this, given the low base-rates of this being the case, doesnât give them right of veto across the innumerable multitudes who could rejoice in an actual future.
I disagree; the right not to be tortured or raped without oneâs consent is lexically more morally important than the interest of others to rejoice in a good future. Rape doesnât become moral even if enough spectators enjoy the rape video; nc torture doesnât become moral even if enough others rejoice in the knowledge of the torture. Victimizing nc innocents in this way is not morally redeemable by the creation of utopias populated by lucky others. There is no knowledge that our descendants could discover that would change this.
I often read rape and torture scenes in fictionâyou could also watch Game of Thrones for the same effectâand while I enjoy the reading, I am often horrified by the thought that equivalents are real. If you want a good example, read this. (content warning: rape and torture, obviously). Now, I love these story as much as the next guy, but they also make me reflect: If I could choose to create a universe where this happens once and also intergalacitc utopias filled with happy life exist, or a universe that is empty, I would choose the universe that is empty. And I think itâs utterly morally absurd to choose otherwise. Itâs churched-up evil.
Of course, you donât have to look for fiction, just remember that actual nc child torture is still legal in the US, the UK, and France, among other countries. Or read the piece about North Korea on this forum. Humanity has no redeeming qualities that could morally justify the physical reality of these systems. It never will.
Similar to the above, myself (and basically everyone else) take our futures to be worth living for on selfish grounds
I donât. Plus, for those who see it your way, itâs consensual (though not necessarily rational). Those who disagree, are of course victimized by the anti-suicide religionists and their anti-choice laws. Itâs not like people have an actual right to exit from this shitshow.
Humanityâs quantitative track record is obviously upward (e.g. life expectancy, child mortality, disease rates, DALY rates, etc.).
This can turn around as per-capita incomes fall, which inevitably happens in a Malthusian scenario. And Malthusian scenarios are not outlier probability scenarios, but expected with high (mainstream) probability, because any fast reproduction technology without global centralized suppression predicts a near-inevitable Malthusian outcome (any fast reproduction tech, not just ems).
Moral progress is not a robust law of nature, but could be contingent on other factors that can turn around, or it could simply be a random walk with reversals to the mean to be expected, combined with distortions of perception (any generation will consider its values superior to prior generations and therefore see moral progress, no matter what directions the values actually took or why).
If it turns out that the only thing that makes things good is happiness, we can tile the universe in computronium and simulate ecstasy (which should give amounts of pleasure to pain over the universeâs history not â10% higherâ, but more like 10^10:1, even with extreme trade-off ratios).
Several problems here. (1) the numbers are absurdly overoptimistic, you assume lots of hedonium with near-zero torture. Hedonium doesnât carry its own economic weight and the future will likely be dominated by Malthusian replicators who are not optimized for ecstasy, but competitive success in replication,
(2) you assume our descendants will be rational moral beings who implement our idealized moral values (far mode), when in reality they will almost certainly be constrained by intense competitive pressures and implement selfish incentives (near mode); they would use victimization as a means to an end just as likely as current people are to eat factory-farmed meat; indeed value drift makes it even more likely that they wonât share our already-meager humane values, e.g. their altered psychology may have optimized empathy and justice instincts out completely.
Maybe whatâs really going on here is youâre making a bid for status by accusing others of being status seeking
Hahahaha. Iâm at â12 karma because I wrote what I think instead of what people here want to hear. And I knew well in advance that this would happen. If I wanted status, Iâd join a group in person and give lip-service to the community dogma. Probably the Catholic church, then I could sing hallelujah all day long and scoff at those filthy atheists while covertly grooming young girls for sexual use. And you know what, Iâd probably be happier that way. Problem is, Iâm not a good enough liar, and I despise gullible people far too much to play the pretend game.
You go badly wrong in giving a concatenation of implausible beliefs into a generalized misanthropic conclusion (i.e. the future will suck, people on xrisk rationalise this away and just want status, etc.)
1) Wildly implausible and ill-motivated axiological trade-off ratios
You suggest making the future vastly bigger may be no great thing even if the ratio of happiness:sadness is actually very high, as the sadness dominates. Yet it is antinatalist/ânegutils who are outliers in how they trade-off pleasure versus pain.
FRI offers a â1 week torture versus 40 years of happinessâ trade-off for an individual to motivate the âcare much more about sufferingâ idea (about 1:2000 by time length). Iâd take this, and I guess my indifference is someone between months and years (~~1:100-1:10). Claims like âwouldnât even undergo a minute of tortureâ (so ~~ 1:10^8 if you get 40 years afterwards) look wild:
Expressed preferences are otherwise. Most say theyâre glad to be alive, that their lives are worth living, etc.
Virtually everyoneâs implied preferences are otherwise. Iâd be happy to stand in the rain for a few minutes for a back concert, suffer a pinprick to have sex with someone I love, and so on.
In essence, we take ourselves to have direct access to the goodness of happiness and the badness of suffering, and so we trade-off these at not-huge ratios. A personal example. One of the (happily, many) joyful experiences of my life was playing games in a swimming pool at a summer camp. Yet I had a very severe muscle cramp (worst of my life) during the frolicking. The joyful experience (which lasted a few hours) greatly outweighs the minute or so of excruciating pain from the cramp
I donât propose âbad muscle crampâ even approaches the depths of suffering humans have experiencedâso maybe thereâs some threshold between pinpricks and âtrueâ torture where the trade-off ratio should become vast. Others have suffered the torture which you think (effectively) no amount of happiness can outweigh. Michelle Knight was abducted at the age of 21 and beaten, raped, starved, and many horrendous things besides, for eleven years. I quote from her memoir:
I take it she thinks the happiness has outweighed the suffering in her life, and suspect she would say her life has been on balance good even if she died tomorrow. This roughly implies a trade off of 1:3. Her view is generally shared by survivors of horrendous evils: the other two women in the Cleveland Kidnapping say similar things (ditto other survivors of torture). I hope, like I, you have much worse access to the depths of how bad suffering can be compared to these people. Yet the they agree with me, not you.
One could offer debunking defeaters for this. Yet the offers tend to be pretty weak (âBecause of Buddhist Monks and meditation really all that is good is the tranquil lack of experienceâânah, meditation is great, but I would still want the pool parties too; âMaybe the âpleasureâ you get is just avoiding the (negative) cravingâânah, I often enjoy stuff I didnât crave beforehand). Insofar as theyâre more plausible (e.g. maybe evolution would make us desire maintain a net-bad life), theyâre also reversible: as Shulman notes its much worse for our fitness to get killed than it is good for our fitness to have sex, and so weâre biased into thinking the suffering can go lower than happiness can go higher.
The challenge is this:
Ultra high trade-offs between bad experiences like torture and happy bits of life is a (marked) minority position across the general population. Epistemic modesty implies deference.
When one looks at putative expert classes (e.g. philosophers, âelite common senseâ, the âEA cognoscentiâ) this fraction does not dramatically increase.
Indeed, for some expert classes the update perhaps should be common-sense leans too negative: my impression is being tortured for 11 years would make my life of (expectedly) around 80 years not worth living, but people who have been tortured for 11 years say otherwise; my impression is life with locked in syndrome is hellish and better off not lived, yet those with locked in syndrome generally report good quality of life.
The undercutting defeater that would transform this to think antinatalists/âwhoever really are the expert class cannot be found. Especially as one could throw in debunking explanations against them too: depression seems to predispose one to negative leaning views, and a cardinal feature of depression is anhedoniaâso maybe folks with high trade-off ratios just arenât able to appreciate the magnitude of a happy experience in a typical person.
2) Most life isnât wrongful, and expectedly worth the risk
Despite the above, it would overreach to say that everyone has a life worth celebrating no matter what happens to them. Although most quadriplegics report a life worth living, some on reflectionopt for euthanasia.
Yet preventing such cases should not be lexically prior to any other consideration: we should be willing to gamble utopia against extinction at the chance of a single terrible life of 1/âTREE(9). Similar to the above, myself (and basically everyone else) take our futures to be worth living for on selfish grounds, even though it must be conceded thereâs some finite chance of our lives becoming truly horrendous.
Given it seems most people have lives worth living (as they tell us), it seems the chances of a typical person who is born having a life worth living is very good indeed. If I had a guardian angel who was solely advocating for my welfare, they should choose me to be, even if they only have vague reference class steers (e.g. âHeâll be born into a middle-classish life in the UK; heâll be born to someone, somewhere in 1989; etc.â)
Statistical outliers say life, even in the historically propitious circumstances of the affluent west, is not good for them. Their guardian angels shouldnât actualize them. Yet uncertainty over this, given the low base-rates of this being the case, doesnât give them right of veto across the innumerable multitudes who could rejoice in an actual future. Some technologically mature Eschaton grants (among any things) assurance we only bring into existence beings who would want to exist.
3) Things are getting better, and the future should be good
Humanityâs quantitative track record is obviously upward (e.g. life expectancy, child mortality, disease rates, DALY rates, etc.).
Qualitatively, it looks like things are getting better too. Whatever reprehensible things Trump has said about torture would look anodyne from the perspective of the 16th century where it was routine to torture criminals, dissidents, etc. Quantitatively, ones risk of ending up a victim of torture has surely fallen over the millennia (consider astonishingly high rates of murder in pre-technological human groupsâone suspects non-death harms were also much more prevalent). We also donât take burning cats alive as wholesome fun.
There remain moral catastrophes in the periphery of our moral vision (wild animal suffering), and I would be unsurprised that the future will see more weâve overlooked. Not going extinct grants us more time to make amends, and capture all the goods we could glean from the cosmic endowment whilst avoiding terrible scenarios. Limiting x-risk, in essence, is a convergent instrumental goal for mature moral action in the universe.
4) Universal overconfidence
I am chary to claim knowledge of what the morally best thing the universe should be optimised for (you could do with similar circumspection: there have been ~ 10^11 childbirths in human history, do you really your account makes it plausible that not one was motivated by altruism?) Yet this knowledge is unnecessaryâone can pass this challenge on to descendants much better situated than us to figure it out.
What is required is reason that the option value of a vast future is worth preserving. It seems so: If it turns out that the only thing that makes things good is happiness, we can tile the universe in computronium and simulate ecstasy (which should give amounts of pleasure to pain over the universeâs history not â10% higherâ, but more like 10^10:1, even with extreme trade-off ratios). If thereâs other items on an objective list (or just uncertainty about what to value) one can divvy up the cosmic endowment accordingly. If our descendants realise you were right all along they can turn the whole thing offâor perhaps better use the cosmic endowment as barter for acausal trade with other universes to reduce the suffering in those. Even some naĂŻve sci-fi scenario of humans like us jumping on space ships and jetting around the cosmos looks good to me.
Cosmic hellscapes are also possibleâbut their probability falls in step with our moral development. The âdonât care about X riskâ view requires both that humans would fashion some cosmic hellscape, and that they couldnât fix it later (Iâd take an existence lottery with 10^18 torture tickets and 10^35 wonderful life ticketsâmy life seems pretty great despite > 1â100 Quadrillion chance of torture). Sufficient confidence in both of these to make x-risk not a big deal looks gravely misplaced.
Canât help but feel this thoughtful and comprehensive critique of negative utilitarianism is wasted on being buried deep in the comments of a basically unrelated post :)
Promote to its own article?
Eh, I think a lot of this requires the context of previous replies, and Iâm hesitant to signal boost a reply addressed to a not-that-great proponent of the view being critiqued. I might try and transfigure this into a more standalone piece when time permits, but probably not soon.
Generating the perception of âdebateâ over fringe topics tends to increase the popularity of small minority viewpoints, besides.
+1 to this, making substantive comments easily findable is really valuable.
Except I never argued for Negative Utilitarianism. Misrepresenting the arguments I made as such is a complete strawman.
For example, I donât believe thereâs a moral reason to prevent people who want pain and consent to it, from having pain.
Neither do I believe that thereâs a moral reason to prevent suffering for the guilty who have forced it on nonconsenting innocents. You, for example, have actively worked to cause it for a very large number of innocent nc victims, and therefore I do not believe there is a moral reason to prevent your suffering or victimization, even if it is nc.
It appears I was downvoted to â10 karma by people who didnât even read my posts.
I also canât help but note accusations about status are generally a double edged sword. Maybe whatâs really going on here is youâre making a bid for status by accusing others of being status seeking, thus pronouncing judgement and diagnosis on their petty motives, and for implying you (of course!) are above such things.
Grandiosely overconfident and really edgy stuff like âThere was not even one altruistic childbirth in all of historyâ also seems more apt for getting iconoclastic status than âstrategic vaguenessâ (i.e. not being sure in the face of moral and empirical uncertainty).
I disagree; it is lexically, deontologically more important not to cause an innocent rape or nc torture victim than to cause any amount of happiness or utopian gain for others; also the number is absurd, terrible lives in the millions are a stochastical inevitability even just on Earth within each generation. Just look at the attempted suicide rates.
I disagree; the right not to be tortured or raped without oneâs consent is lexically more morally important than the interest of others to rejoice in a good future. Rape doesnât become moral even if enough spectators enjoy the rape video; nc torture doesnât become moral even if enough others rejoice in the knowledge of the torture. Victimizing nc innocents in this way is not morally redeemable by the creation of utopias populated by lucky others. There is no knowledge that our descendants could discover that would change this.
I often read rape and torture scenes in fictionâyou could also watch Game of Thrones for the same effectâand while I enjoy the reading, I am often horrified by the thought that equivalents are real. If you want a good example, read this. (content warning: rape and torture, obviously). Now, I love these story as much as the next guy, but they also make me reflect: If I could choose to create a universe where this happens once and also intergalacitc utopias filled with happy life exist, or a universe that is empty, I would choose the universe that is empty. And I think itâs utterly morally absurd to choose otherwise. Itâs churched-up evil.
Of course, you donât have to look for fiction, just remember that actual nc child torture is still legal in the US, the UK, and France, among other countries. Or read the piece about North Korea on this forum. Humanity has no redeeming qualities that could morally justify the physical reality of these systems. It never will.
I donât. Plus, for those who see it your way, itâs consensual (though not necessarily rational). Those who disagree, are of course victimized by the anti-suicide religionists and their anti-choice laws. Itâs not like people have an actual right to exit from this shitshow.
This can turn around as per-capita incomes fall, which inevitably happens in a Malthusian scenario. And Malthusian scenarios are not outlier probability scenarios, but expected with high (mainstream) probability, because any fast reproduction technology without global centralized suppression predicts a near-inevitable Malthusian outcome (any fast reproduction tech, not just ems).
Moral progress is not a robust law of nature, but could be contingent on other factors that can turn around, or it could simply be a random walk with reversals to the mean to be expected, combined with distortions of perception (any generation will consider its values superior to prior generations and therefore see moral progress, no matter what directions the values actually took or why).
Several problems here. (1) the numbers are absurdly overoptimistic, you assume lots of hedonium with near-zero torture. Hedonium doesnât carry its own economic weight and the future will likely be dominated by Malthusian replicators who are not optimized for ecstasy, but competitive success in replication,
(2) you assume our descendants will be rational moral beings who implement our idealized moral values (far mode), when in reality they will almost certainly be constrained by intense competitive pressures and implement selfish incentives (near mode); they would use victimization as a means to an end just as likely as current people are to eat factory-farmed meat; indeed value drift makes it even more likely that they wonât share our already-meager humane values, e.g. their altered psychology may have optimized empathy and justice instincts out completely.
Hahahaha. Iâm at â12 karma because I wrote what I think instead of what people here want to hear. And I knew well in advance that this would happen. If I wanted status, Iâd join a group in person and give lip-service to the community dogma. Probably the Catholic church, then I could sing hallelujah all day long and scoff at those filthy atheists while covertly grooming young girls for sexual use. And you know what, Iâd probably be happier that way. Problem is, Iâm not a good enough liar, and I despise gullible people far too much to play the pretend game.