Suffering should not exist.
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Intactivism as a potential Effective Altruist cause area?
Brian Tomasik’s article on the amount of suffering produced by various animal foods is worth reading. If you’re not willing to go vegan, it’s probably a good idea to generally eat meat/animal products from larger animals, namely beef and milk. Since fewer animals are needed per unit of meat/food, these foods cause far less animal suffering. It may also be a good idea to eat less bread/rice/pasta/cereal and more beans, nuts, and potatoes.
Would you consider reviewing the Center for Reducing Suffering? They are an organization similar to the Center on Long-Term Risk in the sense that their main focus is reducing S-risks, i.e. risks of astronomical suffering, but are less focused on AI. CRS is currently Brian Tomasik’s top charity recommendation.
I appreciate the breakdown of importance, tractability, and crowdedness here, but I don’t think this post uses scout mindset; it’s written to persuade, and leaves out a lot of contradictory evidence while overstating the strength of other evidence.
I did link to a number of resources that address the arguments from circumcision proponents though, such as Eric Clopper’s lecture. I also mentioned the possibility of infants not being sentient, which would weaken the case for it as a cause area.
In the end, I decided to downvote; once I’d spent ~90 minutes reading evidence from both sides, I found that this post linked to weaker resources than most others I found, and with a strong bias that made it hard to trust anything I was reading.
Most things have pros and cons. There will occasionally be cases where every argument and consideration lines up on one side of a question, but they are rare, while confirmation bias is common and produces the same impression. (See also “surprising and suspicious convergence”.)
Keep in mind that the circumcision proponents may also have confirmation bias. Since circumcision is a highly profitable industry for hospitals, there may be economic incentives for medical/academic institutions to be biased in favor of it. For example, the AAP Circumcision Task Force 2012 operated as a way of preserving third party payment. The task force also apparently did not have a single member with an intact foreskin, and thus did not have informed opinions on the foreskin and its functions. Some circumcised men may also be emotionally invested in defending circumcision for cultural reasons, or since they may be uncomfortable with the possibility that they are missing out on the increased sexual satisfaction they may have had if their foreskins had remained intact.
The linked study refers to the circumcision of adult males, which seems extremely rare and isn’t the target of intactivism. I was expecting to see a comparison of men who were circumcised as babies and men who weren’t; the use of this study makes me wonder whether the study I “expected” actually exists, and if so, what the results were. (I then found this literature review, which seems like reasonably strong evidence of weak-to-nonexistent differences in pleasure.)
Regarding your literature review, I found this article written in direct response to it. It’s virtually impossible to study the differences in subjective sexual pleasure between men who were circumcised as infants compared to those who remain intact as adults, simply because two individuals cannot access each other’s memories and subjective experiences in order to make an accurate comparison. It’s far easier to study men who were circumcised as adults, simply because they remember being intact and can more easily make a comparison. Eric Clopper also talks extensively about many of the methodological flaws in many of the studies used to defend circumcision in his lecture. Regarding the author of your meta-analysis, Brian J. Morris, IntactiWiki has quite a lot to say about him.
If you believe that there is no significant difference in sexual pleasure between intact men and men who were circumcised as infants, that would seem to imply that there is some mechanism by which the penis/brain compensates for the lost nerve endings and keratinization of the glans. Since thousands of nerve endings are physically removed, that would seem to imply that either the remaining nerve endings somehow become more sensitive, or that new nerve endings regrow to make up for those that are lost. Do you have any strong evidence that this happens? Alternatively, what could happen is that the nerves simply atrophy, or that the severed nerve endings could grow into amputation neuromas instead of new pleasurable nerve endings.
11 million men in this dataset chose to become circumcised, leaving 110 million infants. There are 3.15 billion seconds in a century, so an infant circumcision happened roughly every 29 seconds. This is still very bad if circumcision is bad, but the division mistake leaves me questioning everything else just a bit more.
I probably could have worded that better, I apologize. I edited the post to state it a bit more clearly. The statistic I cited was the circumcision rate at its peak, not the average circumcision rate throughout the entire century. Here’s the direct quote from the article I linked:
During 20th century, more than 120 million foreskins were severed from American penises, more than in any other country in the world. At the height of the circumcision frenzy, a foreskin was being sundered, and a penis crippled, every 17 seconds.
The peak in the number of circumcisions performed per year according to the article was during 1955-1965. Here’s also some data on the number of births per year in the US, apparently peaking during 1957.
From the article: The annual number of circumcisions was highest between 1955 and 1965. During that decade, 1.8 million males were circumcised every year—almost 5,000 every day.
Meanwhile, the discussion of HIV differences between the U.S. and Europe left me cold. There are many, many differences between those two parts of the world — sexual mores, sex education, demographics, access to preventative care, prevalence of high-risk clusters… even if circumcision did reduce HIV transmission rates (I acknowledge that the positive evidence there has sometimes been overstated), those other factors could easily overwhelm that single protective element.
You could make the same argument about Africa. One argument I’ve heard from circumcision proponents is that northern/central Africa (which has higher circumcision rates) has lower HIV rates than southern Africa, and this is evidence that circumcision reduces HIV transmission. Yet there are also many, many cultural differences between different parts of Africa. For example, the Sahel is predominantly Muslim whereas southern Africa is predominantly Christian. Lesotho and Eswatini, the 2 African countries with the highest HIV rates in the world, have cultures with a high rate of multiple concurrent partnerships. In Lesotho, there is a practice known as bonyatsi, which involves people of both genders maintaining many sexual partners, even after marriage. In Eswatini, there is also a traditional culture that discourages safe sexual practices.
There are also other parts of the world besides Europe that don’t circumcise and have low rates of HIV. Latin America, India, and East Asia all have fairly low rates of HIV infection despite having populations that are mostly intact. India, for example, has an adult HIV prevalence rate of only 0.2%, despite being far poorer than the US or Europe. The US, by comparison, has an HIV prevalence rate of 0.3%. China is even lower, at 0.09%.
I’m disinclined to force permanent surgery on infants without strong evidence of benefit, and I’m dubious that current evidence is strong enough. I’m also curious about the difference between American and European medical norms. Overall, I’m open to the idea that male circumcision is net-negative and that reducing rates around the world is a reasonable “normal” charitable cause. And I respect the views of people who don’t want their tax dollars to pay for a nonconsensual surgery with uncertain benefits.
But the quality of intactivist argumentation that I’ve seen (linked from this post and elsewhere) is… mixed. And given that circumcision has clear health benefits (UTI risk, penile cancer risk) and remains the subject of active debate, I find it hard to imagine this cause area stacking up against something like malaria prevention.
If you believe that circumcision has significant health benefits, you still have to explain why the foreskin evolved in the first place. If the foreskin was net harmful, evolution probably would have gotten rid of the foreskin long ago. Yet almost every species of mammal has some form of foreskin or penile sheath. Aposthia exists at a low rate within the population, but any genetic predisposition towards it has evidently not undergone any degree of positive selection pressure. If you accept evolution, this seems to imply that the foreskin has historically been a net evolutionary benefit, and any health effects resulting from it are insignificant.
The argument about penile cancer is just grasping at straws. Eric Clopper actually mentioned penile cancer risk and UTIs in his lecture. Penile cancer is a rare cancer in the first place, and almost entirely affects old men. Even if you believe reduced risk of penile cause area is a significant benefit of circumcision, it involves performing tens of thousands of circumcisions to prevent a single case of penile cancer. If you still believe that reducing the rate of an already rare cancer is a legitimate reason for amputating a body part, you should also advocate for removing many other body parts if you want to be consistent, such as removing girls’ breast buds to prevent breast cancer, amputating the toes to prevent toe cancer, etc.
On the topic of UTI risk, UTIs can sometimes result from forced retraction of the foreskin. This can easily be prevented by not retracting the foreskin before the balano-preputial lamina has dissolved. The lifetime UTI risk for intact men appears to be only very slightly higher compared to circumcised men, with the risks being 1.29% and 1.27%, respectively.
For other potential EA causes like malaria prevention, these causes may also have significant drawbacks and unintended consequences. For example, Nassim Taleb believes that the Gates Foundation is repeating the errors of Mao Zedong. Malaria nets may also often go unused, or could also cause local net manufacturers to go out of business. Africans may also view malaria as a minor ailment, similar to how we view the cold of flu.
I don’t know enough about the cultures and internal workings of Australia, Canada, the UK, etc. to give you a good answer for how precisely this shift took place. But the fact of the matter is that something took place in these countries that caused the practice of circumcision to be abandoned en masse.
The point I’m trying to get at is that there’s a risk that circumcision won’t decline in the US as it has in other countries, and that it will keep being practiced for centuries. The longer circumcision continues, the more culturally entrenched it will get, and the harder it will be to get rid of. Plenty of people who are part of genital cutting cultures defend it because it’s “part of their culture”. For example, here are some quotes from Andrew Freedman on why he defends circumcision:
“I circumcised him myself on my parents’ kitchen table on the eighth day of his life. But I did it for religious, not medical reasons. I did it because I had 3,000 years of ancestors looking over my shoulder.”
“I didn’t make any excuses that this was to avoid a UTI, or for medical reasons. My rationale was this: As a Jewish male in a long line of tradition, I didn’t want to be the link in a chain that broke.”
What do you think the unintended consequences of these efforts to stop malaria could be? Nassim Taleb argues that the Gates Foundation is repeating the errors of Mao Zedong. It’s also possible that donating malaria nets could cause local net manufacturers to go out of business, which could increase African dependence on foreign aid in the long run.
The Gates Foundation is financing a campaign to genetically engineer the mosquito population in order to control malaria. He compares it to Mao Zedong’s Four Pests Campaign, and how Mao’s attempts to wipe out the sparrow population resulted in the Great Chinese Famine. Taleb argues that there may be similar unintended consequences, and something similar could happen with genetically modifying mosquitoes. He also talks about processes that are too fast for nature, and he draws a graph comparing the speed at which the ecosystem changes and the corresponding risk of harm, and how harm scales non-linearly in proportion to speed.
Brian Tomasik wrote this article on his donation recommendations, which may provide you with some useful insight. His top donation recommendations are the Center on Long-Term Risk and the Center for Reducing Suffering. In terms of the long-term future, reducing suffering in the far future may be more important than reducing existential risk. If life in the far future is significantly bad on average, space colonization could potentially create and spread a large amount of suffering.
Even if you value reducing suffering and increasing happiness equally, reducing S-risks would likely still greatly increase the expected value of the far future. Efforts to reduce S-risks would almost certainly reduce the risk of extreme suffering being created in the far future, but it’s not clear that they would reduce happiness much.
If one values reducing suffering and increasing happiness equally, it isn’t clear that reducing existential risk is justified either. Existential risk reduction and space colonization means that the far future can be expected to have both more happiness and more suffering, which would seem to even out the expected utility. More happiness + more suffering isn’t necessarily better than less happiness + less suffering. Focusing on reducing existential risks would only seem to be justified if either A) you believe in Positive Utilitarianism, i.e. increasing happiness is more important than reducing suffering, B) the far future can be reasonably expected to have significantly more happiness than suffering, or C) reducing existential risk is a terminal value in and of itself.
There is still the possibility that the Pinkerites are wrong though, and quality of life is not improving. Even though poverty is far lower and medical care is far better than in the past, there may also be more mental illness and loneliness than in the past. The mutational load within the human population may also be increasing. Taking the hedonic treadmill into account, happiness levels in general should be roughly stable in the long run regardless of life circumstances. One may object to this by saying that wireheading may become feasible in the far future. Yet wireheading may be evolutionarily maladaptive, and pure replicators may dominate the future instead. Andrés Gómez Emilsson has also talked about this in A Universal Plot—Consciousness vs. Pure Replicators.
Regarding averting extinction and option value, deciding to go extinct is far easier said than done. You can’t just convince everyone that life ought to go extinct. Collectively deciding to go extinct would likely require a singleton to exist, such as Thomas Metzinger’s BAAN scenario. Even if you could convince a sizable portion of the population that extinction is desirable, these people will simply be removed by natural selection, and the remaining portion of the population will continue existing and reproducing. Thus, if extinction turns out to be desirable, engineered extinction would most likely have to be done without the consent of the majority of the population. In any case, it is probably far easier to go extinct now while we are confined to a single planet than it would be during the age of galaxy-wide colonization.
Sure, and there could be more suffering than happiness in the future, but people go with their best guess about what is more likely and I think most in the EA community side with a future that has more happiness than suffering.
Would you mind linking some posts or articles assessing the expected value of the long-term future? If the basic argument for the far future being far better than the present is because life now is better than it was thousands of years ago, this is, in my opinion, a weak argument. Even if people like Steven Pinker are right, you are extrapolating billions of years from the past few thousand years. To say that this is wild extrapolation is an understatement. I know Jacy Reese talks about it in this post, yet he admits the possibility that the expected value of the far future could potentially be close to zero. Brian Tomasik also wrote this article about how a “near miss” in AI alignment could create astronomical amounts of suffering.
Maybe, but if we can’t make people happier we can always just make more happy people. This would be very highly desirable if you have a total view of population ethics.
Sure, it’s possible that some form of eugenics or genetic engineering could be implemented to raise the average hedonic set-point of the population and make everyone have hyperthymia. But you must remember that millions of years of evolution put our hedonic set-points where they are for a reason. It’s possible that in the long run, genetically engineered hyperthymia might be evolutionarily maladaptive, and the “super happy people” will die out in the long run.
Thanks. Although whether increasing the population is a good thing depends of if you are an average utilitarian or a total utilitarian. With more people, both the number of hedons and dolors will increase, with a ratio between hedons to dolors skewed in favor of hedons. If you’re a total utilitarian, the net hedons will be higher with more people, so adding more people is rational. If you’re a total utilitarian, the ratio of hedons to dolors and the average level of happiness per capita will be roughly the same, so adding more people wouldn’t necessarily increase expected utility.
These aren’t entirely about AI, but Brian Tomasik’s Essays on Reducing Suffering and Tobias Baumann’s articles on S-risks are also worth reading. They contain a lot of articles related to futurism and scenarios that could result in astronomical suffering. On the topic of AI alignment, Tomasik wrote this article on the risks of a “near miss” in AI alignment, and how a slightly misaligned AI may create far more suffering than a completely unaligned AI.
Brian Tomasik wrote a similar article several years ago on Predictions of AGI Takeoff Speed vs. Years Worked in Commercial Software. In general, AI experts with the most experience working in commercial software tend to expect a soft takeoff, rather than a hard takeoff.
If you’re still trying to decide what to donate to, Brian Tomasik wrote this article on his donation recommendations, which may give you some useful insight. His top donation recommendations are the Center on Long-Term Risk and the Center for Reducing Suffering. Both of these organizations focus on reducing S-risks, or risks of astronomical suffering. There was also a post here from a few months ago giving shallow evaluations of various longtermist organizations.
Scott should definitely consider funding the Center on Long-Term Risk and the Center for Reducing Suffering. These organizations are focused on reducing S-risks, or risks of astronomical suffering. Brian Tomasik has also endorsed these organizations as his top charity recommendations. S-risks are highly neglected, so more funding for these causes will likely have more marginal impact compared to other causes.
Are they currently funded by any large EA donors?
The Center for Reducing Suffering is definitely underfunded. To quote them directly: “As a small, early-stage organisation, we currently operate on a very limited budget; in fact, we only recently started paying researchers at all. The marginal benefit of additional funding is therefore particularly large: we have much room for funding, and funding at this early stage is critical for enabling CRS to get properly off the ground. the same amount makes a much bigger difference at this stage, compared to a more established or less funding-constrained organisation.”
The Center on Long-Term Risk has significantly more funding. CLR has an annual transparency report where you can see their financial information. Open Philanthropy also recommended a $1 million dollar grant to the Effective Altruism Foundation, the parent organization of CLR.
Is funding a bottleneck, such that more funding would result in better results?
More funding for S-risk research could potentially result in these organizations being able to hire more people and acquire more top talent. In the case of the Center for Reducing Suffering, as mentioned above, they are an early stage organization with a lot of room for funding.
No, I am not affiliated with either. I have been mentioning them because reducing S-risks seems like an extremely important cause, yet S-risks seem to be highly neglected within the Effective Altruism community.
In the United States, Canada, and South Korea, the vast majority of circumcisions are secular and performed in hospitals. They persist for social reasons, hospitals operating for profit, and because of various health myths, rather than because of religion. Personally, I am circumcised, and my father is an atheist.
As for specific policy changes, I will admit that reducing religious circumcision among Jews and Muslims is much more intractable than reducing secular circumcisions among Americans, and an outright ban is almost impossible. Efforts toward reducing circumcision don’t necessarily have to involve any policy changes at all. Educating people and spreading the word would likely be effective at convincing a significant portion of the population to not circumcise their sons. I think the most realistic policy change that could bring down the circumcision rate in the US is to cease Medicaid/health insurance funding for circumcisions. Something similar already exists in Australia. Circumcision is banned in Australian public hospitals, but parents can still go to private hospitals to have their sons circumcised. Jews, for instance, would still be able to hold a traditional bris ceremony legally, but anyone who wants to circumcise their son would be forced to pay out of pocket for it. It could also potentially save taxpayers a significant amount of money.
For Jews, there’s an alternative to the traditional bris ceremony practiced by a minority of Jews called the brit shalom. For Christians, hereis a website I found with information about the Biblical view of circumcision. Historically, virtually no Christians practiced circumcision, and the practice only started becoming a common occurrence among American Christians during the late 1800s.