Max_Carpendale

Karma: 893

Max_Carpendale Dec 22, 2021, 1:43 PM
54 points
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on: World’s First Octopus Farm—Linkpost
Really unfortunate development. Compassion In World Farming recently released a report on the subject and why it’s a terrible idea.
I want to make a couple of points here:
1) Since octopuses are carnivorous, a much larger number of fishes will be used to feed them
2) Since this is such a new development, it’s an important time to oppose this and try to nip it in the bud

Max_Carpendale Dec 20, 2021, 7:07 PM
7 points
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in reply to: Agrippa’s comment on: Countering imposter syndrome
I get quite bad imposter syndrome, and I can take a stab at this.
Here are some general points I’d make here.
1) My imposter syndrome seems to come from a quite separate psychological process. So I could have my rational assessment of the situation (including some beliefs that work against imposter syndrome) but still feel the imposter syndrome quite strongly. Obviously they aren’t completely unrelated, but they often do seem quite separate.
2) Imposter syndrome for me isn’t just the belief that I am the least competent person in the room/org, it is the belief that I am uniquely awful at the work or task. The part of me that feels like an imposter might sometimes acknowledge that I can maintain a veneer of competence, but that I have critical faults that undermine any ability to contribute in the end. That appearance of competence feels utterly hollow.
3) It has been valuable for me to imagine (in sober moments) if my worst fears are true and how bad that would really be. But when I am in the grips of imposter syndrome I’m liable to catastrophize and think that it would be absolutely awful and think that those worst fears are true.

Max_Carpendale Nov 27, 2021, 4:56 PM
3 points
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in reply to: saulius’s comment on: When to get off the train to crazy town?
I had a similar journey. I still think that utilitarian is a good description for me, since it seems basically right to me in all non-sci-fi scenarios, but I don’t have any confidence in the extreme edge cases.

Max_Carpendale Nov 27, 2021, 10:07 AM
9 points
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in reply to: kokotajlod’s comment on: New intuitions for cultured meat
Adam Shriver has a few papers on breeding animals with the pain genes knocked out. See this paper for example.

Max_Carpendale Nov 26, 2021, 9:30 PM
12 points
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on: Sentience Institute 2021 End of Year Summary
This Awesome! I’m a big fan of your work. There really aren’t any other organizations like Sentience Institute, so it’s a pity you’re not getting more funding .
I’m curious about your reasoning for the greater focus specifically on artificial sentience? Does it seem like the right time now?
What links here?
- A selection of some writings and considerations on the cause of artificial sentience by Raphaël_Pesah (Aug 10, 2023, 6:23 PM; 49 points)

Max_Carpendale May 13, 2021, 8:53 PM
3 points
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on: Animal Welfare Fund: Ask us anything!
Congrats on being the new fund chair, Kieran!
I notice you’ve made a huge grant to Wild Animal Initiative. That’s great!
With work on this subject, I’m curious how you would prioritize between research to inform future interventions, advocacy to raise concern about the subject, and current interventions to improve wild animal welfare?

Max_Carpendale Mar 2, 2021, 6:33 AM
19 points
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on: Killing the ants
Thanks for writing this. While doing research on invertebrate sentience I’ve wondered about this kind of thing. I don’t deliberately harm arthropods, but I haven’t stopped hiking (where I’ll probably step on many arthropods), and I definitely haven’t stopped washing. It’s true that you could give a means ends justification that help more animals by continuing to work I’m doing without disrupting my lifestyle by worrying about these things, but I’d be horrified if my normal life involved harming even a fraction as many large animals—I just don’t feel the same way about arthropods I guess.
It would be convenient if mites happen to have minuscule moral weight to justify our everyday behaviour, but I don’t think the arguments are good enough to be confident enough in that. People just seem to feel very definitely about these cases, whether or not there exist any good moral justification for it.

Max_Carpendale Jan 15, 2021, 9:11 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Michael St Jules 🔸’s comment on: Why I’m focusing on invertebrate sentience
Yeah, even the information for total number of neurons is absent for many invertebrates. More specific information like that would rarely be available.

Max_Carpendale Jul 12, 2020, 5:22 PM
7 points
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in reply to: Jason Schukraft’s comment on: What was the first being on Earth to experience suffering?
There is also the excellent book length treatment of the subject, The Ancient Origins of Consciousness.

Max_Carpendale Jun 23, 2020, 10:12 PM
10 points
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on: How should we run the EA Forum Prize?
In my case at least, I can say that both the money and the reputation for winning was extremely valuable. Thanks for that!

Max_Carpendale Jun 23, 2020, 10:05 PM
6 points
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on: Is it suffering or involuntary suffering that’s bad, and when is it (involuntary) suffering?
I’m a hedonistic utilitarian, and I think that even voluntary suffering is be intrinsically bad, as long as it’s still suffering at that point. Here the reasons I explain the phenomena that you note in your question. My answers are partially overlapping but some of the solutions you suggest.

- I personally mostly listen/watch/read media that deals with negative emotions. When I do this I sometimes have a twinge of the negative emotion, but I don’t think I would really describe it is negatively valenced. Sometimes it may involve a bit of negative valence, which may be outweighed from the aesthetic appreciation that I get from it.
It seems like ‘negative emotions’ can sometimes not have negative valence in this way even though they retain their other features. I think this is similar to how ‘pain’ from exercise can sometimes have a neutral or even positive valence (at least that’s how I characterize it). It seems like the secondary resistance to emotions can be generating some or all of the negative valence associated with them.

- Similarly, for an emotion like grief, I think it’s either the case that I don’t experience it as really negatively valenced or I’m getting immediate counterbalancing positive emotions from it (like a sense of meaning and connection).

- Sometimes negative events can be cathartic, meaning that they provide relief from the negative emotion. I often find crying to do this and crying sort of feels good for this reason (or at least it feels much less bad than the alternative in that situation).

- I think sometimes I also irrationally pursue negatively balanced emotions. For example, by ruminating. Not sure that I have anything insightful to say about why this happens.

It seems to be hard to figure out exactly which of these is happening in a given situation.

Max_Carpendale Mar 2, 2020, 7:26 PM
2 points
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in reply to: eca’s comment on: COVID-19 brief for friends and family
I get frequent muscle pain in my head and face and I normally believe that by massaging them. I’ve started to use use a part of my shirt or maybe another object as a barrier to let me do this without touching my hands to my face, but I guess my shirt could also pick up some of the virus, and I could be infected that way. Not sure what my other options are.

Max_Carpendale Feb 9, 2020, 10:23 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Kirsten’s comment on: Who should give sperm/eggs?
I think you can travel to another country to donate eggs there. I think in general you get paid more in other countries if you are of certain demographics.

Max_Carpendale Jan 26, 2020, 7:52 PM
2 points
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on: In praise of unhistoric heroism
There’s is a trap that consequentialists can easily fall into that the author describes beautifully in this post. I think the solution solution within consequentialism is to see that consequentialism doesn’t recommend that we we only praise the highest achievers. Praise and blame are only justified within consequentialism when they produce good consequences, and it’s beneficial to praise a wide variety of people, most especially people who are trying their hardest to improve the world.

For a fuller spectrum account of what it is to live a moral life, you can add ‘virtue consequentialism’ to your consequentialism. This position is just the observation that within consequentialism, virtues can be defined as character traits that lead to good consequences, and it’s useful to cultivate these.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5489019-uneasy-virtue

Max_Carpendale Jan 25, 2020, 5:06 PM
8 points
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in reply to: Aaron Gertler 🔸’s comment on: Doing good is as good as it ever was
I’ve been in the community since about 2011, and I’ve also noticed this happening in myself and quite a few others who have been in the community for a long time. I’m not aware of any data on the subject. Denise’s explanation of this and this post sounds right to me.

Max_Carpendale Nov 23, 2019, 5:36 PM
19 points
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in reply to: Kirsten’s comment on: EA Hotel Fundraiser 7: Pitch focusing on case studies with counterfactuals
I came to the hotel as I was finishing a contract for Rethink Prioritites, worked for them there for one month, then did indepenent research. Now I am employed at an EA org again, and I am paying cost price.

Max_Carpendale Nov 19, 2019, 8:44 PM
3 points
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in reply to: Jason Schukraft’s comment on: Opinion: Estimating Invertebrate Sentience
I agree that sentience, at least as we’ve defined it, is an all-or-nothing phenomenon (which is a common view in philosophy but not as common in neuroscience).

What do you think of the argument that there may be cases where it’s unclear if the term is appropriate or not. So there would be a grey area where there is a “sort of” sentience. I’ve talked to some people who think that this grey area might be taxonomically large, including most invertebrates.

Max_Carpendale Oct 28, 2019, 8:08 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Will Bradshaw’s comment on: How worried should I be about a childless Disneyland?
Yeah, I meant it to be synonymous with agent.

Max_Carpendale Oct 28, 2019, 7:05 PM
3 points
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on: How worried should I be about a childless Disneyland?
Do you mainly see these scenarios as likely because you don’t think there is likely to be many beings in future worlds or because you think that the beings that exist in those future worlds are unlikely to be conscious?

I had some thoughts about the second case. I’ve done some research on consciousness, but I still feel quite lost when it comes to this type of question.

It definitely seems like some machine minds could be conscious (we are basically in existence proof of that), but I don’t know how to think about if a specific architecture would be required. My intuition is that most intelligent architectures other than something like a lookup table would be conscious, but don’t think that intuitions based on anything substantial.

By the way, there is a strange hard sci-fi horror novel called Blindsight that basically “argues” that the future belongs to nonconscious minds and this scenario is likely.

Max_Carpendale Oct 28, 2019, 5:54 PM
2 points
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in reply to: gavintaylor’s comment on: Is there a clear writeup summarizing the arguments for why deep ecology is wrong?
Thanks!

I personally would disagree that variety of experience is morally relevant. Obviously, most people enjoy variety of their own experiences, but that’s already waded into the total hedonistic utilitarian equation because it makes us happier. So I don’t think that we need to add it as a separate thing that has intrinsic moral value. Looking at diversity can also be aesthetically pleasing for us, but that gets waited in to the equation because it makes us happy, and so, again, I don’t think we need to say it has intrinsic moral value. I don’t think our aesthetic appreciation of biodiversity is a very significant source of happiness, though, compared to the well-being of the much larger number of animals involved.

I think what you said makes sense given that moral position. I haven’t heard a name for the position that diversity of experience is intrinsically morally significant, but I have a friend who I think argued for a similar position, and I’ll ask him.