Brian_Tomasik

Karma: 1,692

Brian_Tomasik Apr 11, 2023, 5:32 PM
12 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Scale of the welfare of various animal populations
Thanks. :)

I plausibly agree with your last paragraph, but I think illusionism as a way to (dis)solve the hard problem can be consistent with lots of different moral views about which brain processes we consider sentient. Some people take the approach I think you’re proposing, in which we have stricter criteria regarding what it takes for a mind to be sentient than we might have had before learning about illusionism. Others might feel that illusionism shows that the distinction between “conscious” and “unconscious” is less fundamental than we assumed and that therefore more things should count as sentient than we previously thought. (Susan Blackmore is one illusionist who concludes from illusionism that there’s less of a distinction between conscious and unconscious than we naively think, although I don’t know how this affects her moral circle.)

It’s not clear to me whether an illusion that “this rubber hand is part of my body” is more relevant to consciousness than a judgment that “this face is Jennifer Aniston”. I guess we’d have to propose detailed criteria for which judgments are relevant to consciousness and have better understandings of what these judgments look like in the brain.

illusions that things actually matter to the system with those illusions

I agree that such illusions seem important. :) But it’s plausible to me that it’s also at least somewhat important if something matters to the system, even if there’s no high-level illusion saying so. For example, a nematode clearly cares about avoiding bodily damage, even if its nervous system doesn’t contain any nontrivial representation that “I care about avoiding pain”. I think adding that higher-level representation increases the sentience of the brain, but it seems weird to say that without the higher-level representation, the brain doesn’t matter at all. I guess without that higher-level representation, it’s harder to imagine ourselves in the nematode’s place, because whenever we think about the badness of pain, we’re doing so using that higher level.

Brian_Tomasik Mar 31, 2023, 1:48 AM
22 points
6 ∶ 1
on: Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down by Eliezer Yudkowsky
I’m not particularly well informed about current EA discourse on AI alignment, but I imagine that two possible strategies are
1. accelerating alignment research and staying friendly with the big AI companies
2. getting governments to slow AI development in a worldwide-coordinated way, even if this angers people at AI companies.
Yudkowsky’s article helps push on the latter approach. Making the public and governments more worried about AI risk does seem to me the most plausible way of slowing it down. If more people in the national-security community worry about AI risks, there could be a lot more attention to these issues, as well as the possibility of policies like limiting total computing power for AI training that only governments could pull off.

I expect a lot of AI developers would be angry about getting the public and governments more alarmed, but if the effort to raise alarm works well enough, then the AI developers will have to comply. OTOH, there’s also a possible “boy who cried wolf” situation in which AI progress continues, nothing that bad happens for a few years, and then people assume the doomsayers were overreacting—making it harder to ring alarm bells the next time.

Brian_Tomasik Mar 27, 2023, 2:18 AM
7 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ren Ryba’s comment on: Reminding myself just how awful pain can get (plus, an experiment on myself)
I agree that animal-welfare charities are a good choice. For s-risks, there are the Center on Long-Term Risk and Center for Reducing Suffering.

Personally I’m most enthusiastic about humane slaughter because
1. as you note in the post, excruciating pain seems vastly more important than lesser pains, and I imagine that slaughter—along with other physical traumas like castration, branding, dehorning, and tail docking—are generally the most excruciating experiences for most food animals
2. compared with other welfare reforms, and especially compared with meat reduction, slaughter improvements have fewer complicated side effects on wild animals that make the analysis much harder (although work to promote less horrible slaughter can still change consumer demand and prices for animal products, as well as having various other social/etc impacts).
Is there a charity working on fish-slaughter reform? The Humane Slaughter Association does some work in this area, but I wonder if there are other charities doing it. My impression is that most of Fish Welfare Initiative’s work is on welfare during life rather than at slaughter?

Brian_Tomasik Mar 26, 2023, 12:38 AM
10 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Scale of the welfare of various animal populations

these random particle movements could sometimes temporarily simulate valence-generating systems by chance, even if only for a fraction of a second

I see. :) I think counterfactual robustness is important, so maybe I’m less worried about that than you? Apart from gerrymandered interpretations, I assume that even 50 nematode neurons are vanishingly rare in particle movements?

In your post on counterfactual robustness, you mention as an example that if we eliminated the unused neural pathways during torture of you, you would still scream out in pain, so it seems like the unused pathways shouldn’t matter for valenced experience. But I would say that whether those unused pathways are present determines how much we should see a “you” as being there to begin with. There might still be sound waves coming from your mouth, but if they’re created just by some particles knocking into each other in random ways rather than as part of a robust, organized system, I don’t think there’s much of a “you” who is actually screaming.

For the same reason, I’m wary of trying to eliminate too much context as unimportant to valence and whittling the neurons down to just a small set. I think the larger context is what turns some seemingly meaningless signal transmission into something that we can see holistically as more than the sum of its parts.

As an analogy, suppose we’re trying to find the mountain in a drawing. I could draw just a triangle shape like ^ and say that’s the mountain, and everything else is non-mountain stuff. But just seeing a ^ shape in isolation doesn’t mean much. We have to add some foreground objects, the sky, etc as well before it starts to actually look like a mountain. I think a similar thing applies to valence generation in brains. The surrounding neural machinery is what makes a series of neural firings meaningful rather than just being some seemingly arbitrary signals being passed along.

This point about context mattering is also why I have an intuition that a body and real environment contribute something to the total sentience of a brain, although I’m not sure how much they matter, especially if the brain is complex and already creates a lot of the important context within itself based on the relations between the different brain parts. One way to see why a body and environment could matter a little bit is if we think of them as the “extended mind” of the nervous system, doing extra computations that aren’t being done by the neurons themselves.

Brian_Tomasik Mar 25, 2023, 11:39 PM
10 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Scale of the welfare of various animal populations
Thanks for the detailed explanation! I haven’t read any of the papers you linked to (just most of the summaries right now), so my comments may be misguided.

My general feeling is that simplified models of other things, including sometimes models that are resistant to change, are fairly ubiquitous in the world. For example, imagine an alert on your computer that says “Warning: RAM usage is above 90%” (so that you can avoid going up to 100% of RAM, which would slow your computer to a crawl). This alert would be an extremely simple “model” of the total amount of “attention” that your computer’s memory is devoting to various things. Suppose your computer’s actual RAM usage drops below 90%, but the notification still shows. You click an “x” on the notification to close it, but then a second later, the computer erroneously pops up the notification again. You restart your computer, hoping that will solve it, but the bogus notification returns, even though you can see that your computer’s RAM usage is only 38%. Like the Müller-Lyer illusion, this buggy notification is resistant to correction.

Maybe your view is that the relevant models and things being modeled should meet various specific criteria, so that we won’t see trivial instances of them throughout information-processing systems? I’m sympathetic to that view, since I intuitively don’t care much about simplified models of things unless those things are pretty similar to what happens in animal brains. I think there will be a spectrum from highly parochial views that have lots of criteria, to highly cosmopolitan views that have few criteria and therefore will see consciousness in many more places.

Even if we define consciousness as “specific ways information is processed that would lead to inferences like the kind we make about consciousness”, there’s a question of whether that should be the only thing we care about morally. We intuitively care about the illusions that we can see using the parts of our brains that can generate high-level, verbal thoughts, because those illusions are the things visible to those parts of our brains. We don’t intuitively care about other processes (even other schematic models elsewhere in our nervous systems) that our high-level thoughts can’t see. But most people also don’t care much about infants dying of diseases in Africa most of the time for the same reason: out of sight, out of mind. It’s not clear to me how much this bias to care about what’s visible should withstand moral reflection.

but there doesn’t seem to be much reason to believe it’s conscious at all

If its being conscious (whatever that means exactly) wouldn’t be visible to our high-level thoughts, there’s also no reason to believe it’s not conscious. :)

Furthermore, the generation of consciousness illusions below awareness seems more costly compared to only generating them at the level of which we are aware, because most of the illusions would be filtered out of awareness and have little impact on behaviour, so there should be evolutionary pressure against that.

The generation of a very specific type of attention schema other than the one we introspect upon using high-level thoughts might be unlikely. But the generation of simplified summaries of things for use by other parts of the nervous system seems fairly ubiquitous. For example, our face-recognition brain region might do lots of detailed processing of a face, determine that it’s Jennifer Aniston, and then send a summary message “this is Jennifer Aniston” to other parts of the brain so that they can react accordingly. Our fight-or-flight system does processing of possible threats, and when a threat is detected, it sends warning signals to other brain regions and triggers release of adrenaline, which is a very simplified “model” that’s distributed throughout the body via the blood. These simplified representations of complex things have huge impact on behavior (just like the high-level attention schema does), which is why evolution created them.

I assume you agree, and our disagreement is probably just about how many criteria a simplified model has to meet before it counts as being relevant to consciousness? For example, the message saying “this is Jennifer Aniston” is a simplified model of a face, not a simplified model of attention, so it wouldn’t lead to illusion about one’s own conscious experience? If so, that makes sense, but when looking at these things from the outside as a neuroscientist would, it seems kind of weird to me to say that a simplified model of attention that can give rise to certain consciousness-related illusions is extremely important, while a simplified model of something else that could give rise to other illusions would be completely unimportant. Is it really the consciousness illusion itself that matters, or does the organism actually care about avoiding harm and seeking rewards, and the illusion is just the thing that we latch our caring energy onto? (Sorry if this is rambling and confused, and feel no need to answer these questions. At some point we get into the apparent absurdity of why we attach value to some physical processes rather than other ones at all.)

Brian_Tomasik Mar 24, 2023, 11:55 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Scale of the welfare of various animal populations
Thanks. :) I’m uncertain how accurate or robust the 2.3/1.5 comparison was, but you’re right to cite that. And you’re right that human land-use changes (including changes to forest area) likely have big effects of some kind on total arthropod welfare.

also about the sign of the welfare of arthropods

Makes sense. I have almost no uncertainty about that because I measure welfare in a suffering-focused way, according to which extreme pain is vastly more important than positive experiences. I suspect that a lot of variation in opinions on this question come down to how suffering-focused or happiness-focused one’s values are, rather than empirical disagreements, though it’s also true that we lack a lot of empirical information about how invertebrates perceive and value various good and bad events.

It seems that most people agree that factory-farmed pigs and battery-cage hens have net negative welfare, so I guess there could be some possible empirical information that would persuade most people to take one or the other side of the issue. However, there’s disagreement about whether, e.g., factory-farmed beef and dairy cows have net negative or positive welfare. That seems to mostly be a difference in moral values.

Brian_Tomasik Mar 24, 2023, 11:31 PM
10 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Scale of the welfare of various animal populations
By “illusionism” do you have in mind something like a higher-order view according to which noticing one’s own awareness (or having a sufficiently complex model of one’s attention, as in attention schema theory) is the crucial part of consciousness? I think that doesn’t necessarily follow from pure illusionism itself.

As I mention here, we could take illusionism to show that the distinction between “conscious” and “unconscious” processing is more shallow and trivial than we might have thought. For example, adding a model of one’s attention to a brain seems like a fairly small change that doesn’t require much additional computing power. Why should we give so much weight to such a small computational task, compared against the much larger and more sophisticated computations already occuring in a brain without such a model?

As an analogy, suppose I have a cuckoo clock that’s running. Then I draw a schematic diagram illustrating the parts of the clock and how they fit together (a model of the clock). Why should I say that the full clock that lives in the real world is unimportant, but when I draw a little picture of it, it suddenly starts to matter?

Brian_Tomasik Mar 24, 2023, 10:48 PM
16 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Scale of the welfare of various animal populations
I see a huge gap between the optimized and organized rhythm of 302 neurons acting in concert with the rest of the body, on the one hand, and roughly random particle movements on the other hand. I think there’s even a big gap between the optimized behavior of a bacterium versus the unoptimized behavior of individual particles (except insofar as we see particles themselves as optimizing for a lowest-energy configuration, etc).

If it’s true that individual biological neurons are like two-layer neural networks, then 302 biological neurons would be like thousands (or more?) of artificial neurons. Perhaps we could build a neural-network RL agent to mimic the learning abilities of C. elegans, but that would likely leave out lots of other cool stuff that those 302 neurons are doing that we haven’t discovered yet. Our RL neural network might be like trying to replace the complex nutrition of real foods with synthetic calories and a multivitamin.

Even if we had an artificial neural network that could mimic all the cognitive abilities of C. elegans, I think the biological organism would still seem more sentient because it would have a body and would interact with a real, complex environment, which would make the abstract symbol manipulations of its brain feel more grounded and meaningful. Hooking up the artificial brain to a small robot body would feel closer to matching C. elegans in terms of sentience, but by that point, it’s plausible to me that the robot itself would warrant nontrivial moral concern.

Brian_Tomasik Mar 24, 2023, 3:27 AM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Scale of the welfare of various animal populations

I think net change in forest area is a major driver for the impact of humans on terrestrial arthropods.

Is that just a guess, or has someone said that explicitly? I also get the vague impression that forests have higher productivity than grasslands/etc, but that’s not obvious, and I’d be curious to see more investigation of whether/when forests do have higher productivity. (This includes both primary productivity and productivity in terms of invertebrate life.)

Brian_Tomasik Mar 24, 2023, 3:20 AM
7 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Scale of the welfare of various animal populations
Given the examples of cognitive abilities of nematodes mentioned here, I don’t see them as a mugging. For example, here’s a quote from that link:

The deterministic development of the worm’s nervous system would seem to limit its usefulness as a model to study behavioral plasticity, but time and again the worm has demonstrated its extreme sensitivity to experience

It’s not obvious to me why one would draw a line between mites/springtails and nematodes, rather than between ants and mites/springtails, between small fish and ants, etc.

Brian_Tomasik Mar 17, 2023, 5:35 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: rgb’s comment on: What to think when a language model tells you it’s sentient
No worries. :) The update looks good.

Brian_Tomasik Mar 8, 2023, 4:14 AM
11 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: rgb’s comment on: What to think when a language model tells you it’s sentient
Unlike the version of panpsychism that has become fashionable in philosophy in recent years, my version of panpsychism is based on the fuzziness of the concept of consciousness. My view is involves attributing consciousness to all physical systems (including higher-level ones like organisms and AIs) to the degree they show various properties that we think are important for consciousness, such as perhaps a global workspace, higher-order reflection, learning and memory, intelligence, etc. I’m a panpsychist because I think at least some attributes of consciousness can be seen even in fundamental physics to a non-zero degree. However, I personally would attribute much more consciousness to an LLM than to a rock that has equal mass as the machines running the LLM. I think it’s less obvious whether an LLM is more sentient than a collection of computers doing an equal number of more banal computations, such as database queries or video-game graphics.
What links here?
- rgb's comment on What to think when a language model tells you it’s sentient by rgb (Feb 27, 2023, 10:33 PM; 6 points)

Brian_Tomasik Mar 8, 2023, 1:24 AM
9 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Tiresias’s comment on: A statement and an apology
Ok. :) If the crush isn’t an EA, I probably would mainly think of her as “my friend’s crush”, though with some curiosity about her career and other attributes. If the crush is an EA, I would be more curious about the other aspects of her (such as wondering what field she works in), though you’re right that “my friend’s crush” would still be a main way to think of her until I learned more.

What I was getting at with my comment was that even merely being a friend’s crush can increase the salience of the person in general, making it more likely I would learn more information about her, including her personality and career pursuits. So my total amount of knowledge about her achievements would be higher than otherwise. And in some cases, people who started out interested in someone for superficial reasons may come to be primarily interested in the less superficial parts. TV Tropes gives this example:

This show with the cute lead character actually has an interesting side character with an in-depth story that you’re really getting into. [...] you end up really liking the show/movie/book/game/etc for a reason completely different from why you started to check it out.

Traditionally, this is even how many people approach dating: starting with superficial attraction to someone and then coming to like them on a deeper level. (Personally I think that if you ultimately want the deeper level in a relationship, it’s better to directly search for someone who is a good match in that regard. But this is a bit of a tangent.)

Of course, there will be some people who only ever notice the superficial level and don’t explore deeper, but I still think the total amount of deeper knowledge about something tends to be higher when there’s more superficial attention to it. There might be some exceptions where if something is perceived as too gaudy, then serious thinkers may be deterred from engaging with it to avoid appearing low-brow. For example, PETA’s old marketing tactics using nudity might make some elites less likely to engage with animal-rights philosophy for fear of appearing unserious.

Brian_Tomasik Mar 7, 2023, 12:07 AM
12 points
2 ∶ 2
on: EA, Sexual Harassment, and Abuse
One thing that could help with at least some of the milder cases mentioned in the article would be to have more spaces where EAs can go specifically for dating, so that there would be less flirting and asking people out in the gray zone between personal and professional interactions.

Buck’s reciprocity.io is one example of this, though it could be good to have a more complete EA dating website not tied to Facebook. A Tinder-style website requiring mutually swiping right would help with the problem of some women getting swamped with romantic interest, although many EAs (including me) have fond feelings toward a site more like OkCupid as of 2010 where you could see long profiles and message anyone. EA speed-dating sessions and matchmakers are also options. “Date me” docs are another way to ensure that both parties are interested in dating because the person with the doc waits for other people to reply, rather than asking people proactively.

If we had thriving spaces where EAs went specifically for dating, there would be less need or temptation to ask people out in other contexts, which means people who came to EA without wanting any romantic attention could reduce the amount of it they receive.

An EA dating website like this one where you can list your mono vs poly preference could help people who aren’t interested in poly avoid being asked to join polycules.

If the OCB situation was a case of intentional flirting rather than just different conceptions of how much personal information is ok to share in what contexts, then it could also have potentially been avoided if people mainly did flirting in reserved dating spaces.

If you already have a crush on a particular person and that person isn’t on an EA dating website, there might still be a temptation to ask that person about their feelings, and it seems harsh to forbid that (except in certain cases like boss vs employee, as others have noted). I myself have proactively expressed romantic interest to a few people outside of an explicit dating space (though I try to do it sparingly and tactfully). But at least the frequency of bringing up such topics outside of reserved spaces could decrease a fair amount.

This proposal makes sense to me, but I don’t live near any other EAs in person, so maybe I don’t realize how much easier it is to just ask people out directly rather than having to use online platforms.

Brian_Tomasik Mar 6, 2023, 4:27 AM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Why I No Longer Prioritize Wild Animal Welfare (edited)
Maybe part of the brain just wants to be happy, and other parts of the brain condition rewards of happiness on alignment with various other goals like helping others or using spreadsheets.

Brian_Tomasik Mar 6, 2023, 3:29 AM
6 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: saulius’s comment on: Why I No Longer Prioritize Wild Animal Welfare (edited)
Good argument. It might not work if one maintains an act-omission distinction regarding harms to the environment. For example, imagine that
- value to farm animals of veg outreach = 1 util/$
- value to wild animals of veg outreach = −2 util/$ (due to reducing environmental impact).
If this were the case, we shouldn’t do veg outreach. It would seem that we should try to increase environmental impact by promoting beef consumption, but maybe our act-omission distinction prevents us from wanting to do that. It could also be difficult to explain why one is promoting beef production or get other people concerned for animal welfare on board.

(This example is just for illustration. In reality, if I could push a button to increase vegetarianism in the world, I probably would.)

Brian_Tomasik Mar 6, 2023, 2:15 AM
9 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: saulius’s comment on: Why I No Longer Prioritize Wild Animal Welfare (edited)
(Sorry for being slow to return here!)

Yeah, I think some ways of reducing plant growth are often supported by environmentalists, including
- less growing of crops in dry areas requiring irrigation (and instead growing more crops in regions where rain provides more of the water)
- less irrigation of pastures and lawns
- fewer artificial fertilizers
- less nutrient pollution into water bodies
- lowering atmospheric CO2 concentrations, which reduces the “CO2 fertilization effect” (though as you note, the overall impact of climate change on wild-animal suffering is unclear)
- not genetically engineering plants to have higher yields.
Some other activities like encouraging palm-oil production (which destroys rainforests) are bad for the environment but may reduce poverty. (I should note that I’m unsure about the net impact of palm-oil production for wild-animal suffering.)

I agree that the question of how to lobby for these things without seeming like weirdos is tricky. It would be easier if society cared more about wild animals from a suffering-focused perspective, which can be one argument for starting with philosophical advocacy regarding those topics, though it seems unlikely that concern for wild-animal welfare or suffering-focused ethics will ever become mainstream (apart from weak forms of these things, like caring about charismatic megafauna or Buddhist philosophy about suffering). These philosophical views would also help for various far-future scenarios. But from the standpoint of trying to reduce some short-term suffering, especially if we worry about cluelessness for longer-term efforts, then this approach of doing philosophical advocacy would be too slow and indirect (except insofar as it contributes to movement building, leading some other people to pursue more concrete interventions).

So overall I may agree with you that for short-term, concrete impact, we should plausibly focus on things like stunning of wild-caught fish and so on. This is why I feel a lot of fuzzies about the Humane Slaughter Association and related efforts. That said, it does seem worth pondering more whether there are ways to direct money toward opposing irrigation subsidies and the like.

Brian_Tomasik Mar 6, 2023, 1:31 AM
20 points
6 ∶ 0
in reply to: Tiresias’s comment on: A statement and an apology
Your Phoebe example is interesting and not something I had considered much before. :) The idea that discussion about her romantic/appearance aspects could crowd out discussion of her personality or talents would make sense if we assume that the total amount of talk about Phoebe versus the other man is the same. In practice, I suspect that if someone has a crush on Phoebe, he’ll talk about her way more than the other man to his friends, including about both romantic/appearance and personality/talent attributes. One might even expect Phoebe to get an advantage relative to the other man due to this.

A number of female political commentators and celebrity female politicians are unusually attractive, and this is probably because their appearance makes people more interested in all aspects of them, including their intellectual/policy contributions. The main unfairness here would then be to crowd out the less attractive women and men whose work is of equal quality.

Brian_Tomasik Feb 17, 2023, 4:21 AM
76 points
16 ∶ 1
on: Why I No Longer Prioritize Wild Animal Welfare (edited)
Great post!

As comments by Max and Vasco hint at, I think it might still be the case that considering effects on wild animals is essential when evaluating any short-termist intervention (including those for farmed animals and human welfare). For example, I remain uncertain whether vegetarianism increases or decreases total suffering because of wild-animal side effects, mainly because beef may (or may not!) reduce a lot of suffering even if all other meat types increase it. (I still hope people avoid eating chicken and other small farmed animals.)

In my opinion, the most important type of WAW research is getting more clarity on big questions, like what the net impact is of cattle grazing, climate change, and crop cultivation on total invertebrate populations. These are some of the biggest impacts that humanity has on wild animals, and the answers would inform analysis of the side effects of various other interventions like meat reduction or family planning.

I haven’t followed a lot of the recent WAW work, but my experience is that many other people working on WAW are less focused on these questions about how humans change total population sizes. Researchers more often think about ways to improve welfare while keeping population size constant. Those latter interventions may have more public support and are more accommodating to non-suffering-focused utilitarians who don’t want to reduce the amount of happiness in nature. But as you mention, those interventions also seem more subject to cluelessness (is vaccination net good or bad considering side effects? it’s super unclear) and often target big animals rather than invertebrates. From this perspective, I think efforts to improve the welfare of farmed chickens and fish may be more cost-effective (though it’s still worth exploring wild-animal interventions too, as you say). Research and advocacy of less painful killing of wild-caught fish also seems extremely important, and it’s unclear whether to count this as a farmed-animal or wild-animal intervention.

Apart from less painful killing of wild animals (fish, rodents, insect on crop fields), or maybe some other large-scale interventions like reducing aquatic noise, I think the cost-effectiveness of work on wild animals would come from trying to reduce (or avoid increasing) population sizes, via reducing plant productivity. Reducing the amount of plant growth in an ecosystem helps invertebrates (including mites, springtails, and nematodes, which are extremely numerous but also hard to help in ways other than preventing their existence) and is somewhat less subject to cluelessness problems because you don’t have to model internal ecosystem dynamics as much—you just have to reduce the productivity of the first trophic level. But I haven’t found a lot of people who are interested in working on population-reduction interventions. This apparent lack of interest in reducing populations is one reason I’ve done less thinking about WAW in recent years. Another reason is that I respect the efforts of WAW organizations to put a more mainstream face on the WAW movement, and I wonder if my continuing to harp on why we should actually be focusing on reducing populations would seem to them as counterproductive.

I compiled a list of possible interventions to reduce total invertebrate populations that could possibly be lobbied for at the government level in some fashion. Some of them don’t seem super cost-effective, but some might be, such as trying to reduce irrigation subsidies, which is an intervention that could be argued for on other grounds as well. Taxing fertilizer and/or water use on crop fields, pastures, and/or lawns might be pretty valuable if it could be achieved. (Some local regions do have subsidies for people who reduce their lawn’s water use.) If geoengineering to fertilize oceans ever happens, opposing it would be extremely important, though doing a campaign about that now might be net harmful via increasing the salience of the idea.

Brian_Tomasik Jan 23, 2023, 5:21 AM
23 points
5 ∶ 1
in reply to: lastmistborn’s comment on: Thread for discussing Bostrom’s email and apology
I see. :) I would think people would consider biological differences much more plausible in the gender case than the race case. I’ve heard several people say that when you’re a parent to both a boy and a girl, the differences between them are unmistakeable even in the first ~2 years. I think many American adults at least privately understand that there are big biological differences between the brains of men and women, while most American adults probably expect no non-trivial biological racial brain differences. But yeah, any particular gender difference, such as the language gap, could be mostly or all environmental.