Strong advocate of just having a normal job and give to effective charities.
Doctor in Australia giving 10% forever
Henry Howardđ¸
Karma: 1,205
Appeal to absurdity is a reasonable objection and shouldnât be discouraged. We need to be able to say clearly why idea X doesnât also imply some similar absurd idea Y.
I didnât say anything about the tractability of insect welfare interventions but Iâm sure there are many things you could do to help insects. Almost all of those things will be at the direct or indirect cost of people. There are very few worlds in which you can consider insects sentient and not go completely off the rails sacrificing human welfare to insect welfare.
If we do say that helping insects is tractable and conclude that other pursuits are relatively meaningless, we can still acknowledge that on an absolute scale those other pursuits are incredibly meaningful
In a world with limited resources, meaningfullness is necessarily measured on a relative scale to triage resources. A toddler dropping their ice cream is âabsolutely importantâ but I donât spend much time daily preventing that when there are families struggling to put food on the table, or 600,000 people dying of malaria annually, or chickens in cages. When one moral issue is magnitudes greater than any existing moral issue it requires a similarly large reorientation of attention and resources. I think youâre too flippant in dismissing how disruptive this would be.
Agreed Nick. One of my recent comments has 7 agrees, 11 disagrees but â10 karma. If 7 people agree with a comment itâs unlikely to be disruptive trolling that needs to be buried.
Clear misuse of voting and evidence of heavy forum bias that I sense but canât prove.
Iâm doubtful that any of those are conscious
Why? The average person says that same thing about insects.
Two points:
1. Why stop at insects, why not write this same article about demodex mites, earthworms or krill?
2. I think thereâs a big reason why the concerns of insects and smaller animals are dismissed that you havenât touched on, which is that any consideration of these animals leads to absurd conclusions, like that every moral pursuit of humanity up to now is actually meaningless compared to improving the lives of insects. Most people can see that this is not a fruitful avenue of thinking.I think youâre underestimating the average person by suggesting that the only reason theyâre not interested in insect welfare is entrenched social norms. Whereas there were reasonable alternatives to slavery, and there are reasonable alternatives to factory farming, I think the average person can intuit that thereâs no reasonable alternative to just politely ignoring the suffering of the quintillions of insects, worms and mites on the planet.
This post demonstrates the reductio ad absurdum of these sorts of calculations.
âCaged chickens might be better than free range because it means there are more insects living in the soilâ is the sort of conclusion that most people can discard as being too absurd to consider, but if youâre earnestly attempting a utility calculus-based approach like this you are forced to conclude that it is a serious option.
This is paralysing. You could use the same logic here to lead yourself to conclusions like:
we should prevent economic development in the poorest parts of the world because they might eat more chickens or reduce the numbers of insects in the soil
we should kill whales to prevent the harm they do to krill
the primary moral concern of Earth is the rights of demodex mites
Iâd encourage you to stop making these sorts of posts. I think theyâre off-putting for people that might otherwise engage more with more reasonable EA ideas. Expressing uncomfortable truths is important when itâs useful, but these calculations are so riddled with uncertainty and so lacking in actionable conclusions that this post and posts like it are probably net harmful.
I have big concerns about this making development more difficult by adding further evaluation and reporting requirements to the construction of new housing and infrastructure.
I have visions of a future in which NIMBYs at council meetings wave WILD documentation to oppose new apartment buildings and train lines so as not to bother the local pigeon population.
Consequentialists should be strong longtermists
Disagree on the basis of cluelessness.
Uncertainty about how to reliably affect the longterm future is much worse than uncertainty over our effects on the near-term.
I find the Hilary Greaves argument that neartermist interventions are just as unpredictable as longtermist interventions unconvincing because you could apply the same reason to treating a sick person (maybe theyâll go on to cause disaster), or getting out of bed in the morning (maybe Iâll go on to cause disaster). This paralysis is not tenable.
Vote power should scale with karma
Risks groupthink (this is hard to prove). Also bad optics to outsiders (looks liable to groupthink, cultish).
The benefit that it makes sock-puppeteering harder means Iâm a little ambivalent
Poll: Should peoÂple with more foÂrum karma have more powÂerÂful votes?
Thereâs a distinction in theory but in practice the vague definition of âsentienceâ is so tied to moral relevance I donât think you can argue for one without also arguing for the other.
The question âdoes a worm feel painâ isnât really asking âdoes the worm have nociceptors and some degree of integration of those nociceptive signals that causes learning and behavioural changesâ. Itâs really asking, at the core, âdoes a worm âfeel painâ in a way thatâs morally importantâ
Uncertainty about the net utility of wild animals is also true of human life. Itâs an open question whether the average human life is net negative or net positive.
Would you therefore also say that propagating human lives on other planets is âextremely badâ?
You could ask the same question about worms, mites or nematodes.
I think the reductio ad absurdum that if any of these things matter even slightly, then all human moral concerns become completely irrelevant, means we need a high bar for believing this
Thatâs a verbose way of saying: âlooks like it feels pain, probably feels painâ. Invoking Bayesâ Theorem gives the argument a false depth.
Being unnecessarily verbose comes across very negatively in EA communication, important to avoid it
âit at least somewhat increases the risk of animal life being propagated on more planets. This seems extremely bad, since we have no idea how to ensure that those animals will live good lives.â
Do you assume that wild animal life is net negative?
If given a magic button that instantaneously wiped out all wild animals, ignoring the consequences for humans of doing this, would you press it?
âItâs clear that at least some insects, such as fruit flies and bees, have valenced states. Entomologists test for the presence of these states using cognitive bias tests, which involve training animals to associate one stimulus (like the color red) with a reward and another stimulus (like the color blue) with something aversive. Then, the animals are presented with an ambiguous stimulus (like the color purple). Relative to baseline, bees rewarded before encountering the ambiguous stimulus are more likely to approach it, whereas bees given something aversive are more wary.â
How is it âclearâ from this that insect have âsentienceâ or âvalenced statesâ?Several similarly long stretches made here
Maggots and fruit flies reacting to or avoiding painful stimuli = ?evidence for sentience
Ants using tools = ?evidence for sentience
Bees showing âplay behaviourâ (rolling wooden balls around for some reason) = ?evidence for sentience
These results attest that reward/âpunishment pathways exists. Do they tell us anything else?
Based on what?
Thereâs no clear definition of consciousness or suffering so how do you draw a clear line between insects and mites?
This post could just as well be:
âDemodex mites are not moderately importantâ
or
âNematodes are not moderately importantâ
âThere are only two options. You can think that the cause of most of the worldâs suffering is not very important or you can think that nematode suffering is the biggest issue.â
Nah
I think this is a bad idea for the same reason that starting a cigarette company that donates its profits to charity is a bad idea.
I think itâs reasonable to say that loudly pondering uncomfortable ideas is not useful if it returns an answer with error bars so wide that you might as well have not written the post at all.