I started out as a professional basketball player, then became a writer, and for the last 8 years I’ve done sales for tech startups.
I would like to find a way to help an EA-aligned org one day.
I am especially interested in animal welfare, consciousness research, and reducing suffering.
I think there is room for modeling multiple approaches to reducing unethical meat consumption, and one of them is the “80% is good enough” approach that I’m trying to practice. Big tent meat reduction?
Just in case it wasn’t clear in my post, I am very interested in this approach as well! I applaud you for thinking along these lines. Every little bit helps. This Future Perfect article titled “the difference you make when you eat less meat” does a great job of showing how eating less meat can make a big difference in terms of animal welfare and climate concerns.
I think basically all of veganism is just degrees of this harm reduction approach. Someone like Brian Tomasik might look at my supposedly vegan lifestyle and weep, seeing that I crunch springtails underfoot when I walk in my lawn, I buy some produce that was grown with pesticides, and I buy non-vegan products for my wife and other family members.
If more people took your 80% approach there would be far fewer conscious animals tortured in tiny cages. Which would be a huge win.
Done, thanks for the nudge.
Excuse the delayed reply, but I wanted to make sure to say this comment made me happy!
While a running physique might perpetuate a frail stereotype to the untrained eye, I know that y’all are actually packing a very strong punch in a smaller package :)
‘be fitter than almost every meat eater they know.’
Love this. Great workout motivation.
Thanks for the interesting comment and dialogue!
This part stood out to me, because I had the opposite reaction:
When meat eaters are trolling vegans, they sometimes justify their meat consumption by saying “meat is delicious!” On reflection, I actually do think that’s the explanation for why I continue to eat it—food’s one of the few hedonic pleasures I can access regularly in my otherwise spartan and sober lifestyle, I hate cooking, and it’s easy to make meat taste delicious while using it as the primary protein source in a healthy, balanced diet.
I used to love eating meat. When I went vegan I realized I could get just as much satisfaction from any protein rich, umami-filled, sauce covered or well seasoned food. My pet theory is that what everyone mostly likes when they eat animals is the added sauces and seasonings, not the meat. Bland, unseasoned chicken breast is terrible.
But like I said in my post, I don’t have a refined palate, so maybe to those with better taste buds meat really is that delightful.
This is great, thanks for sharing. The jacked influencer memeplex is soooo focused on animal protein, it can be really hard to step out of that sphere of influence.
I was also highly sensitive to the reports I read from people who stopped being vegan because it didn’t work for them. There’s a good lesson in there about making sure to try things for myself in the real world instead of reading endless reports and then simply assuming I’d have a certain outcome.
I look forward to reading your post about eating more plants!
I had the same thought. I enjoyed this, and I super appreciate the author writing it all up! Fascinating stuff. But it sort of felt like a home inspector telling me, “So your foundation is definitely going to crack and cause your house to fall into a sinkhole. I might tell you how to fix that in a few weeks. In the meantime, here’s an incredibly detailed analysis showing your roof is in good shape!”
That’s a good point, thanks
The likelihood of having a strong rebound effect when stopping THC use seems really bad, thanks for pointing it out. There’s definitely a lot to explore in this area.
Can you explain more about what you mean when you say people are wrong about their subjective experience? To me, what you feel in your internal world simulation is what matters, whether or not time is objectively speeding up or down.
And when referring to people, do you only mean humans? Seems like animals can have totally different subjective experiences of time that we should take into consideration when thinking about harms being done to them.
I am basing that on an article linked to in the above Applied Divinity Studies blog post called The Subjective Experience of Time: Welfare Implications, where the author states:
“convergent evidence from their neurology, behavior, and the temporal resolution of their senses indicates songbirds and honeybees experience 2-10 times as many subjective moments per objective unit of time as humans.”
I liked that post a lot, thanks for sharing. I wholeheartedly agree with your first footnote — “The moral importance of time-dilation turns out to be an absolutely fascinating question”
It’s something I want to learn more about.
Ha, that’s great, points for a novel earning to give strategy. Some of the stuff that happens to Dream Drew would not be out of place in a Rob Zombie film or the Saw franchise, so I see where you’re coming from.
When watching shows or movies now I usually look away from anything even a little gory out of fear that the images will find a way into my dreams.
Thanks for sharing. I’m so glad you were able to find relief. I’ll have to take a closer look at EMDR.
I started reading The Body Keeps the Score a couple years ago but set it aside because the writing style grated on me. Maybe I should give it another go.
Thanks, yeah, I think starting with the simples possible thing is usually a good idea.
Unfortunately, I could not build the app myself nor could I supervise a bright high schooler building it. But I am brimming with enthusiasm and would love to help out in other ways if I could!
I just got a forum DM from an EA-aligned mental health charity saying they might be able to recruit volunteers to build some digital tools to help in this space. I look forward to having a call with them and seeing how I can contribute.
I’ve worked in tech basically my whole career but it’s always been on the growth/sales/marketing side of things.
Oh and thanks for calling out my mistake on imagery reversal / imagery rehearsal, that is now fixed that in the post.
I liked that a lot, thanks for the share. This reminds me that I wanted to note that I also have incredibly positive dreams as well. I have higher dream highs, I am pretty sure, than most of my friends. This is especially true if I am able to lucid dream.
There are so many interesting things to note in that post and in Gwern’s comment.
There’s one part of Gwern’s post I’d like to pull over here because I think it adds to the conversation around how bad nightmares are (or aren’t.)
I agree with Harri’s observation that some dreams can feel like they are lasting an incredibly long time. And if it’s a bad dream that’s obviously really bad.
Gwern brushes that concern aside by saying:
“You can’t remember or produce hours of experience corresponding to [the dream], and when you try to intervene by waking people up in lucid dreams or doing tasks, they seem to still be processing time at a normal 1:1 rate.”
It doesn’t seem relevant to me that the awake person is processing time normally. I care about the subjective experience of whatever person is suffering. And if someone has an awful experience that feels like it lasts hours or even days, I think that’s worse than a subjectively shorter bad experience. This kind of stuff happens with psychedelics, too.
I really enjoyed the Schwitzgebel post, thanks. When he says “We don’t really care that much about our hedonic states in sleep” it reminded me of the TV show Severance.
In the show (minor spoilers) a group of people get a procedure so that their working self has no memory of their self when they are not at work, and vice versa. The selves that work are treated almost like slaves by the selves don’t work, even though it’s technically the same person.
It’s weird to imagine that there is one version of me that routinely goes through torturous experiences. Meanwhile, the awake version of me is mostly just like, “Meh, whatever, dream Drew has been bitten by poisonous snakes before, one more time won’t hurt him.”
First off, thanks!
I agree that not all nightmares are equally intense. But I bet it’s more than your suggested 0.001% of people that occasionally have really awful ones.
I just did a quick Reddit search and found several long threads with hundreds of comments where people describe awful nightmares they’ve had. Examples:
“Had one where my skin was falling off and I kept trying to keep it on by sewing it.”
“I dreamed that I was a young Harry Potter and found out that Voldemort was trying to kill me every night by cooking me (as if the bed were a stovetop)”
”I dreamt that I fell off a cliff and slamed onto the ground. That was scary, but usually falling/dying wakes me up. This time I kept dreaming as a ghost after I had died.”
What about the existing medical system? In a developed country are there treatments/interventions that a person can get? If I go to a doctor and describe terrible nightmares, will I be referred to a sleep specialist who will give me what I need to solve the problem?
As discussed in other comments and in the ACT post, there does seem to be some promising pharmaceutical treatments, but they have not-so-great side effects.
I forgot to mention that I know a lot of people who regularly consume THC/cannabis who say that they no longer even dream, and so they don’t have nightmares either. Maybe that’s something to explore further for people who are really struggling with nightmares.
It seems similar to saying that “physical health” is important. That statement is true, but there is a vast variety in the types of physical health ailments that people suffer from. Preventing different specific issues would need different interventions, which would have different cost-benefit ratios.
I don’t think I agree, assuming I understand your argument. If we’re taking the worst nightmares, I see seeking treatment to be more akin to going to a doctor and saying, “I have really bad low back pain.” The medical systems isn’t great at addressing nightmares or low back pain, but both are very common and make up their own category of thing.
(also sorry for the bolded quoting, every time I try to quote it puts all text in a quote and I can’t figure out a better solution right now)
I love your thinking here. I was only considering dreams people remember. Now I’m wondering what affects a dream can have even if it’s forgotten, kind of like how things that happen to babies can affect them even though they can’t remember them, as MichaelStJules notes in an above comment.
Sorry to you as well. A brutal nightmare is dispiriting indeed. I totally agree, I hope there is an effective, low-risk, pharmaceutical + therapy combo that can knock out the worst of these things.
Wow, I thought I kept up on everything ACT related so I can’t believe I missed this! Thanks for sharing. There’s super interesting stuff in there. I’m glad he also mentions image rehearsal therapy so that I don’t feel way off base mentioning it in my post. I need to read more about the pharmaceutical treatment (prazosin) he mentions as being the standard of care.
Honestly, I’m glad I never read the article because it probably would have dissuaded me from posting here. I would have thought, “Well what’s the point of writing about something Scott already covered.” But that’s not the right attitude! We need a multitude of voices pushing things forward, even if some voices are far less talented at writing than others :)
Nice write up! Henry Bergh was awesome. I highly recommend a biography on him called “A Traitor to His Species”.
It’s a treasure trove of fascinating anecdotes about early animal rights advocacy. It’s been a minute since I read it, but these parts stuck with me:
Bergh didn’t start this work until he was like 52! Talk about a late bloomer. He spent the first 3⁄4 of his life drifting aimlessly about, dabbling in things but never making much of an impact or trying too hard at anything. That’s great inspiration for anyone who has ever thought it’s too late for them to make a change.
Bergh’s first attempt at stirring up popular opinion in favor of animals was by arresting people who were importing live turtles in disturbing ways (turtles flipped on their back with fins tied up.) I would have guessed he’d go to bat for a cute and cuddly animal first.
The ASPCA once got a big donation from a guy who was dying and was terrified of being reincarnated as a draft horse. He’d worked intimately with draft horses and knew how bad their lives were, and I guess he felt guilty. The shocking conditions for draft horses were some of the saddest portrayals in the book.
A “sport” where dogs competed to see who could kill the most rats was very popular in late 1800′s NYC.
At one point a method for euthanizing stray dogs involved rounding them up, putting them into a giant container, and lowering that container into the East River.