Strong advocate of just having a normal job and give to effective charities.
Doctor in Australia giving 10% forever
Henry Howardđ¸
Karma: 1,466
âFrom the sumatriptan RCT: 3% were pain-free at 10 minutes after placebo.â
This is an irrational comparison. Youâre comparing your best case scenario anecdote to the results of an RCT.
Itâs possible that one of those 3% of people would have an anecdote for sumatriptan as convincing as yours: causing rapid resolution of their headache. That anecdote would not be representative.
Iâm not saying youâre wrong about psychedelics and cluster headache. I desperately hope youâre right and there is an easy fix. Anecdote leads people astray constantly and we have to have a high suspicion of it.
âThe effect size is incredible and the percentage of people for whom itâs effective for is very largeââWhatâs the source for this?
Impressive anectodes, but we see a lot of those in medicine. Trial or it didnât happen.
Because development has been the human project for the last 10,000 years and if we accept that it has been and continues to be a mistake then the conclusion is⌠what? anarcho-primitivism/âregressing to pre-industrial hunter-gather life/âReturn to Monke. That doesnât seem very practical.
Fair, I really mean pessimism rather than nihilism. On what basis can you reject philosophical pessimismâa self-consistent and valid belief that is seemingly impossible to prove/âdisproveâother than that it is just not pragmatic or constructive at all.
None of that suggested work seems very clarifying
The welfare ranges are extremely broad for the animals they do cover, and thatâs with questionable assumptions. I donât see how extending these to microbes would clarify anything.
Doing âmore researchâ on the day-to-day experience of nematodes and how they respond to noxious stimuli or calculating their neural energy consumption as a proxy for their ability to suffer also doesnât seem clarifying. Imagine you knew all this information about nematodes. Still the fundamental question will remain how their âsufferingâ or âjoyâ compares to ours and how morally important it is. A lot of animal ethics is driven by our ability to relate to animals (âI can relate somewhat to a chicken and I wouldnât want to be a chicken in a cageâ) but this falls apart by the time we get to nematodes, so you have to rely solely on your numbers, which will be extremely uncertain.
I remain very puzzled how you ever see us getting low enough error bars on the joy/âsuffering of microscopic worms that we could make decision based on it.
How would you get the âFurther human economic developmentâ ânecessary to build the knowledge and resourcesâ to build a better world without supporting the development of developing countries?
Are you talking a top-heavy approach where we keep poor countries poor until fake/âcultured meat is cheap enough to supplant farmed animals?
I guess. Can you formulate an argument against nihilism thatâs any more substantial than that?
The theory that human development has been evil is nihilistic and could well be true, much like the nihilistic theory that the existence of biological life itself could is net evil. On what basis do you reject this other than: âwe canât do anything with thatâ.
It will probably lead to increased suffering of animals (at least for a time) and this is necessary for the greater good of technological development. Weâre forced to consider the technological development a greater good because the alternative is to accept that the last 10,000 years of development was a mistake, which is not a viable belief.
This was named the Meat-Eater Problem in this article in the Journal Of Controversial Ideas by @MichaelPlant (as comments point out, there are many earlier examples).
I think we need to be extremely suspicious of the conclusion that development is bad because of animal suffering. Development has given us everything that makes life better (as most would see it) than in pre-industrial times: antibiotics, vaccines, surgery, food security, shelter, cheap and plentiful access to knowledge and entertainment.
I donât see how you can accept the Meat-Eater Problem without also concluding that all human development in the last 10,000 years has been a mistake in light of the horrible toll weâve demanded of the workhorses and mulesed sheep and caged chickens that we tortured along the way. The Ted Kaczynskiist view that the development of society has been overall bad is internally consistent and valid but also crazy and just not compatible with any sort of continued functioning of society.
To avoid this absurd conclusion that would lead us all to nihilism or posting explosive letters, I think we have to accept that development so far has been worth the costs, and that further development, for similar benefits, will be worth the additional costs.
Can you give some examples of what research you could do to improve our understanding about either 1. whether soil microbes are sentient, or 2. whether their average life experience is net positive or negative?
These both seem completely unanswerable. with a billion dollars and no other interests I wouldnât know where to begin answering these questions.
This report from 2006 has similarly high numbers of surveyed people saying that psilocybin or LSD aborted their headaches https://ââpubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ââ16801660/ââ
Thatâs 19 years for someone to do a controlled trial of cessation of cluster headaches using psilocybin or LSD vs placebo or triptan control. Wouldnât have to very big numbers either if the anecdotes are to be believed.I guess your theory is that there have been too many funding and legal blocks to get this done in that 19 years. Seems hard to believe. Terrible if true.
If it is true, would recommend you focus on this as your core advocacy point: we need a placebo-controlled cluster cessation trial of psychedelics (rather than just prophylaxis). Saying âThe Best Treatment for the Most Painful Medical Condition Is Illegalâ is an unproven statement and makes you seem unserious
Inspiring
I saw so many people who wanted a âjob in EAâ. They wanted to directly do the good. Have they really thought through the bitter truth? Why do you believe you are uniquely good at an EA job, why ignore the simple premise of earning to give?
I think thereâs a large number of EAs who earn to give and spend their time focusing on their career rather than spending time reading another 5,000 word forum article on shrimp or going to EA meetups. This is probably the right move if the goal is to earn as much as possible.
People who want âEA jobsâ are more likely to be involved in the forum and in community events.
Then it should be quite easy to show this benefit in clinical trials and itâs suspicious that it hasnât happened
I think the fact that the term didnât add anything new is very bad because it came with a great cost. When you create a new set of jargon for an old idea you look naive and self-important. The EA community could have simply used framing that people already agreed with, instead they created a new term and field that we had to sell people on.
Discussions of âthe loss of potential human lives in our own galactic supercluster is at least ~1046 per century of delayed colonizationâ were elaborate and off-putting, when their only conclusions were the same old obvious idea that we should prevent pandemics, nuclear war and SkyNet (The idea of humans not becoming extinct goes back at least to discussions of nuclear apocalypse in the 40s, Terminator came out in 1984).
patients can report going from experiencing the worst possible pain to being completely pain free within seconds of inhaling DMT
If that were reliably true then it wouldnât be hard to show it in a clinical trial. Instead the results seemed to show a little reduction in attack frequency, rather than episode cessation.
Other factors that skew anectodes to be unreliable:
The placebo effect is powerful and everyone underestimates it
People tend to exaggerate for effect (even when not intending to deceive). Someone saying âit got better in secondsâ they might mean they started to feel it getting better within seconds but it didnât totally resolve for minutes or hours.
people tend to take things when symptoms are especially bad, which means whatever they do, things are likely to get better afterwards (regression to the mean, peaks and troughs)
From a medical perspective this seems a bit daft
âPatients have reported anecdotally that vaporized DMT, another psychedelic drug, aborts attacks seconds after they begin (there are no published studies of this effect)â.
In medicine you quickly learn that anectode is extremely unreliable and the average person is positively busting to attribute cause and effect to whatever they just experienced. Every homeopathic remedy/âenergy healer/âprayer/âcrystal/âsnake oil has its die-hards who will give you convincing anectodes of immediate success, so doctors become rightly extremely skeptical about these stories.
The actual evidence he provides is this review of some case studies and surveys and 4 clinical trials but which have pretty low numbers. The review itself says:âThe small number of participants in each study limits reliability and generalizability of the findings. Even with ongoing work, differences in dosing regimens and outcomes among studies will limit the consolidation of findingsâ
Combined with the small risk of psychosis from psilocybin I understand why health systems wouldnât want to rush into mainstreaming them as treatment.
Great question
Based on conversations Iâve had, I believe the focus in EA on longtermism has been off-putting for a lot of people and has probably cost a lot of support and donations for other EA causes.Was it all a terrible waste?
Environment is an interesting example because you go from complete poverty (no environmental impact) to middle income (rampant growth, environment not a priority, think Brazil/âIndonesia and their rainforests, or manifest destiny USA and their forests) so impact worsens, then at high income concerns about environment become more of a priority so you get environmental protections.
Unless the goal is to prevent people rising out of poverty entirely (it shouldnât be) the best outcome comes from faster development
âdirect altruistic focus strategically so as to be of positive utilityâ
Vague and evasive. Say what you mean. If you want to keep poor people poor until some new technology comes out, you should say that. If you donât think further development will ever be justified, you should say that (so that your contention can be discarded as absurd and impractical)