Timothy Chan

In­ver­te­brate pain and suffer­ing: What do anal­gesic stud­ies tell us?

• Timothy Chan 24 Sep 2021 5:47 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: In­ver­te­brate pain and suffer­ing: What do anal­gesic stud­ies tell us?

  That’s an excellent point. If analgesics also reduce reflex responses towards noxious stimuli, then in some cases analgesics could be diminishing nociceptive responses while not inhibiting conscious (reportable) pain.

  I don’t know much about how analgesics affect nociceptive reflexive responses in humans. According to the abstract of this study on non-human primates (haven’t looked into the study in detail), “depending on the dose, nociceptive reflexes [are] facilitated or inhibited” by morphine. So this possibility might prevent us from updating too much to “analgesics are preventing pain when they inhibit nociception” to the extent that the analgesics are inhibiting reflexive nociceptive responses.

  One way this might not be an issue is if someone thinks consciousness is “smeared spatially and temporally” or if they think nested minds are possible. For them, through analogies in function, they might think the reflexive responses themselves could be in pain. But then again, there are probably fewer people who think like this than people who think invertebrates feel pain.

• Timothy Chan 21 May 2022 9:32 UTC

  35 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Ar­gu­ments for Why Prevent­ing Hu­man Ex­tinc­tion is Wrong

  I agree there should be more reflection (moral or factual) into the assumption that we should prioritize preventing human extinction. :)

  That being said, we should emphasize that some of the risk factors for extinction also seem to be risk factors for more suffering and s-risks—which suggests that negative utilitarians as well as s-risk reducers wouldn’t support shifting focus away from those dealing with those risk factors—unless there are better opportunities for impact. Examples of these risk factors include more conflict, polarization and the unsafe development of AI, especially without concern for cooperative aspects to prevent potential conflict between different AI or their operators.

  Of course, this might not apply to all risk factors of extinction. Still, s-risk reducers and suffering reducers might think that it’s bad to (intentionally or otherwise) act in a way that results in people trying to bring it about (see https://​​www.utilitarianism.com/​​nu/​​nufaq.html#3.2 ) which might raise the question of precisely how much emphasis to put on this as a community.

  More considerations include whether other civilizations exist (e.g. aliens), and if so, how many. This also makes it unclear what antinatalism suggests. If the focus is on fewer births then we need to find out whether human civilization would increase or decrease the total number of births in the future compared to alternative scenarios where, e.g., aliens own the resources humans would have owned.

  Also remember that an existential risk (x-risk) is a “risk of an existential catastrophe, i.e. one that threatens the destruction of humanity’s longterm potential”. This means existential risks aren’t the same as extinction risks. S-risks that destroy humanity’s longterm potential are also x-risks.

• Timothy Chan 24 May 2022 17:33 UTC

  10 points

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  in reply to: Anthony Fleming’s comment on: Ar­gu­ments for Why Prevent­ing Hu­man Ex­tinc­tion is Wrong

  To add to the other comment, (to my knowledge) Brian Tomasik coined the terms s-risks and suffering-focused ethics, established foundational research into the problem of wild animal suffering, and had a part in co-founding two existing organizations that have a strong focus on reducing s-risks, i.e. the Center on Long-Term Risk (CLR) and the Center for Reducing Suffering (CRS).

  Suffering-focused ethics refers to a broad set of moral views focused on preventing suffering (e.g. some Buddhist ethics might fall under this category).

  While Brian Tomasik’s writings are written from a “suffering-focused perspective”, most of them are in the form of in-depth analyses relevant to how to reduce suffering, rather than ethical theory—which makes the work possibly relevant even if someone isn’t as suffering-focused as he is but has at least some concern for suffering. For the moral views themselves another researcher, Magnus Vinding, has written a book on suffering-focused ethics.

  None of the researchers/​research organizations I mention above endorse bringing about human extinction. In general, how to best reduce suffering is (rightfully, in my view) seen as quite complex in this community (as another comment hinted at).

• Timothy Chan 13 Jun 2022 8:15 UTC

  5 points

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  in reply to: Tobias Häberli’s comment on: New cause area: bi­valve aquaculture

  Do you have any sense of exactly how unlikely it is that bivalves suffer?

  Brian Tomasik wrote this analysis of bivalve suffering. I think it offers some good reasons not to conclude that it’s super unlikely.

  It might be that how much weight/​likelihood to place on bivalve suffering is ultimately quite subjective though (e.g., I think I would place more weight on it than as expressed in the article because of different intuitions about how much different processes matter as evidence of suffering).

• Timothy Chan 1 Jul 2022 15:57 UTC

  17 points

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  in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: The Fu­ture Might Not Be So Great.

  Could you

  1. Quote where in the linked text or elsewhere ‘he admitted to several instances of sexual harassment’?

  2. As someone asked in another comment, ‘provide links or specific quotes regarding his claim of being a founder of EA?’

• Timothy Chan 1 Jul 2022 16:39 UTC

  28 points

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  in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: The Fu­ture Might Not Be So Great.

  1 - CEA says that the complaints relate to inappropriate behaviour in the sexual realm which they found ‘credible and concerning’ and which he pretends to apologise for in the apology post, presumably to avoid a legal battle

  I still don’t see where ‘he admitted to several instances of sexual harassment’ as you’ve claimed.

• Timothy Chan 1 Jul 2022 22:04 UTC

  22 points

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  in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: The Fu­ture Might Not Be So Great.

  Then I think it’d be more accurate if you write ‘he admitted to several instances of what I consider to be sexual harassment’.

  At the moment, your claim that ‘he admitted to several instances of sexual harassment’ seems very misleading. You haven’t provided evidence that supports the claim that he confessed to committing such crimes.

  EDIT: I’m approaching this issue with much less lived experience than some of the other commenters here. There appear to be more individuals than just John who are confident in the allegations, so perhaps ‘what [John considers] to be sexual harassment’ is not enough, and instead ‘what [X, Y and so on...] consider to be sexual harassment’ is better. (From what I can tell, the apology post also features some comments that push back on that confidence, to varying extents, and it may be worth mentioning that too. I’m not following this issue extensively and I don’t know if there have been any updates since that post.) I still think John’s comment, as it stands, (‘he admitted to several instances of sexual harassment’) is misleading and harmful to community norms. I think people should point out bad epistemics despite possible social pressures to do otherwise.

• Timothy Chan 2 Jul 2022 14:35 UTC

  35 points

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  in reply to: James Özden’s comment on: The Fu­ture Might Not Be So Great.

  Honestly, I’m new—I only just became aware of all this. I think I haven’t had enough time to make a judgment myself.

  But what I do know is that John’s initial claim that Jacy ‘admitted to several instances of sexual harassment’ seemed misleading, and I decided to point that out because there was a lack of people who did so, which seems harmful to community norms.

  Note: Some of the replies below conflate the more stringent notion of ‘judgment’ that I’m referring to, with a less stringent notion of ‘update’. The evidence should certainly update us, but there is a higher bar for judgments.

• Timothy Chan 4 Jul 2022 19:09 UTC

  14 points

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  in reply to: James Özden’s comment on: The Fu­ture Might Not Be So Great.

  Thank you for being more charitable after reading my comment, and for your effort in a detailed response.

  Again, I agree there are some epistemic benefits to calling out statements that don’t seem correct, but I think there are also some large downsides to this in this case.

  I think I still prefer to challenge a claim that quite blatantly (but probably unintentionally) misleads people into thinking that someone confessed to committing a crime, a claim placed in the highest upvoted comment on a post receiving a lot of attention. I think we should be suspicious of thinking ‘let bad arguments persist because criticizing them would be bad’.

  I lean towards disagreeing with your claim that it’s net negative overall to point out that inaccuracy but caveat that I’m not certain of how confident I should be in that position.

  One reason I think there are positives is that there are indeed cases in which allegations don’t hold up, and innocent people get hurt (note I’m not saying that this necessarily applies to this case, and from what I can tell it seems to constitute a low percentage of cases). It makes sense to consider the interests of those accused but innocent, in addition to the interests of sexual harassment victims and potential victims.

  I think ensuring we aren’t overzealous requires us to uphold certain norms, even when it’s challenging to do so socially. For context, I’m not in the Anglosphere at the moment—but I do see some trends there involving strong emotions and accompanying criticisms that do worry me, and I don’t think this community should be overly concerned with potential criticism so as to not speak up to uphold those norms.

  I had to make several comments following up on the misleading statement because John didn’t deliver on the statement, nor take note and rephrase his writing to be less misleading. Unfortunately, he still hasn’t done so.

  is that it brings about an element of questioning

  On how I’ve phrased a possible rephrasing (and the updated possible rephrasing in the edited part of the comment) of John’s statement, to reduce the misleadingness, I wasn’t as aware as you were of your concerns and didn’t know it has risks of making people feel questioned/​not taken seriously when I wrote that. Your concerns make sense and I’ll keep them in mind. But I also haven’t made up my mind on the extent to which it’s important to be mindful of how I should present what I consider truthful statements (i.e. we are the ones deciding on what to make of the available evidence—so we are in fact the ones who ‘consider’ whether it constitutes sexual harassment) - in order to reduce the risk of such feelings.

  I think the fact that you also said “I think I haven’t had enough time to make a judgment myself.” adds to this… To not update towards this after even a short consideration...

  I think we have different understandings of the term ‘judgment’ here. In this quite serious context (which sometimes involves the law), I take ‘judgment’ to mean much more (as in ‘pass judgment’) than updating beliefs. I didn’t say that the evidence didn’t update my views (actually I think it’ll be absurd if it didn’t), nor did I imply that the views of one accused ‘deserves equal or greater weight’ than the testimony of multiple accusers (as Khorton wrote). That multiple people have made complaints should indeed update us towards thinking that sexual harassment happened.

  But again, I take ‘judgment’ to mean much more than ‘updating’. When I said that “I think I haven’t had enough time to make a judgment myself”, I meant there wasn’t enough time to make a solid conclusion about these especially troubling allegations (edit: time isn’t the only thing you need—it also depends on whether there’s sufficient information to analyze). This might not be the approach some people take, but there are huge personal costs at stake for the parties involved, and I don’t want to condemn anyone so quickly. Also, realize that I wrote that “I think I haven’t had enough time to make a judgment myself” within one day of learning of the allegations. I think it’s reasonable to be cautious of confidence.

  Unfortunately, I won’t be able to comment much more. I’m a slow writer and I’m exhausted from having to follow up so much. I only wanted to make that point about John’s comment and get him to follow better practices—but that’s been unsuccessful. I hope our future interactions could be under better circumstances.

• Timothy Chan 28 Aug 2022 17:35 UTC

  8 points

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  on: Robert Long on Why You Might Want To Care About Ar­tifi­cial Sentience

  Thanks for posting this. I think “Brian Thomastik” should be “Brian Tomasik” :)

• Timothy Chan 1 Nov 2022 11:59 UTC

  20 points

  8 ∶ 2

  in reply to: David Mathers’s comment on: In­sect farm­ing might cause more suffer­ing than other an­i­mal farming

  Agreed.

  Also, those views are surprisingly common even though it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of justification to be certain (or actually even, let’s say, ~>90% confident) of them—which a lot of people seem to be.

  Humans making the claim that there’s “less sentience” or less intense pain in insects only have their mental experiences, combined with knowledge of their own nervous systems, as a reference.

  Some relevant posts:

  https://​​reducing-suffering.org/​​is-brain-size-morally-relevant/​​

  https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​H7KMqMtqNifGYMDft/​​differences-in-the-intensity-of-valenced-experience-across

• Timothy Chan 3 Nov 2022 19:00 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: ishankhire’s comment on: In­sect farm­ing might cause more suffer­ing than other an­i­mal farming

  So if by measuring sentience, you mean to ask ‘is X sentient?’ and mean something like ‘does X experience at least something, anything at all?’, then one view is that it’s a binary property. All or nothing − 0 or 1 - the lights are either on or off, so to speak. I think this is why David scare-quoted “less sentience”.

  In this case, we might be able to speak of probabilities of X being sentient or not sentient. I find that Brian Tomasik’s idea of a ‘sentience classifier’ (replace the moral value output with P(X is sentient)) to be a useful way of thinking about this.

  There is a view that there could be fractional experiences. I myself don’t understand how that would be possible but there is speculation about it.

  However, if by sentience you instead mean intensity of experiences etc. (given that at least something is experienced) then the 2020 moral weight series is a good starting point. I personally disagree with some of their conclusions but it’s a really good framework for thinking about it.

  My own view, which is similar if not identical to Tomasik’s, is that when thinking about any of these, it’s ultimately ‘up to you to decide’. I would add that human intuitions weren’t evolved to find the ground truth about what is sentient and the content of such experiences. Instead, they developed due to the need to analyze the behavior of other agents. Our intuitions could be exactly right or entirely wrong or somewhere in between but there’s no way to really know because we aren’t other minds.

SBF in­ter­view with Tif­fany Fong

• Timothy Chan 30 Nov 2022 9:52 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: Evan R. Murphy’s comment on: SBF in­ter­view with Tif­fany Fong

  That’s a good point. I hadn’t thought about that. I’ve added your observations to that part.

• Timothy Chan 30 Nov 2022 10:12 UTC

  6 points

  7 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Lorenzo Buonanno’s comment on: SBF in­ter­view with Tif­fany Fong

  It might be useful to note that from the context of the Kelsey Piper interview, “ethics” might have referred to the ethics of ’rule-following/​deontology” (also noted here: https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​vjyWBnCmXjErAN6sZ/​​kelsey-piper-s-recent-interview-of-sbf?commentId=ZqbYkJrmeRNnmaoio). The part where he sounds like he’s talking about EA (he doesn’t mention EA directly in the video) would be consistent with that particular interpretation of “ethics was mostly a front”.

• Timothy Chan 1 Dec 2022 6:30 UTC

  3 points

  3 ∶ 0

  in reply to: wayne’s comment on: SBF’s re­cent live in­ter­view at the DealBook Summit

  I guess there are multiple aspects to this. While he might seem to be open at the cost of personal legal risk, it might be that he’s also telling an inaccurate story of what happened. (EDIT: slightly edited the wording regarding openness/​good faith in this one paragraph after reading Lukas’s take)

  (Heavy speculation below)

  A crucial point given SBF’s significant involvement in EA and interest in utilitarianism is whether he actually believed in all of it, and how strongly.

  There are some signs he believed in it strongly: being associated with EA rather than a more popular and commonly accepted movement, being very knowledgeable about utilitarianism, early involvement, donations etc.

  If he did believe in it strongly, it could be that this is just him “doing [what he believes is] the most good” by potentially being dishonest about some things (whether this was due to bad intentions), in order to, perhaps (in his mind), deflect the harm he’s caused EA and the future, at the cost of personal legal risk (which is minor in comparison from the utilitarian perspective). (Then again, at the same time, another (naive) utilitarian strategy might be to say “muhahaha I was evil all along!” and get people to think that he used EA as a cover and that he isn’t representative of it? If that also works (in expectation, to him), I’m not so sure why he picked one over the other.)

  This is all speculative, and a bit unusual for the average defendant, but SBF is quite unusual (as is EA, to be fair) and we might have to consider these unusual possibilities.

• Timothy Chan 11 Dec 2022 22:59 UTC

  15 points

  3 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Henry Howard’s comment on: Kurzge­sagt’s most re­cent video pro­mot­ing the in­tro­duc­ing of wild life to other planets is un­eth­i­cal and irresponsible

  I’m not sure eliminate is the right way to put it. Reducing net primary productivity (NPP) in legally acceptable ways (e.g. converting lawns into gravel) could end up being cost-effective, but eliminate seems too strong here.

  Doing NPP reduction in less acceptable ways could make a lot of people angry, which seems bad for advocacy to reduce wild animal suffering. As Brian Tomasik pointed out somewhere, most of expected future wild animal suffering wouldn’t take place on Earth, so getting societal support to prevent terraforming seems more important.

• Timothy Chan 12 Dec 2022 6:12 UTC

  21 points

  7 ∶ 4

  in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Kurzge­sagt’s most re­cent video pro­mot­ing the in­tro­duc­ing of wild life to other planets is un­eth­i­cal and irresponsible

  I think in context, i.e. following OP’s sentence “If the key decision makers of the future decide they have to bring animals to other planets … introducing herbivores would be preferred …”—by ‘every individual animal’, OP means every individual animal brought to other planets—not every single animal in existence. OP also seems to focusing on terraforming rather than space colonization.

  So I’m not sure why you think that it’s “an unreasonably demanding standard”. There are certainly ways of assigning value that would say that creating additional lives with negative experiences makes it worse for those lives compared to refraining from creating them (e.g. minimalist axiologies). These may be rarer within the EA community, but they definitely exist outside of it (e.g. some forms of Buddhist ethics). If that’s the case, and we’re only talking about the lives created, then opposing bringing animals will indeed help every single animal involved.

  The implications of this is only that we find it preferable not to terraform—which isn’t paralysis—just opposition to that particular policy.

• Timothy Chan 17 Dec 2022 11:52 UTC

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: confused_puppy’s comment on: I’m a 22-year-old woman in­volved in Effec­tive Altru­ism. I’m sad, dis­ap­pointed, and scared.

  Anecdotally, as another person from a non-Western country—currently living in the West, it’s quite disconcerting to me that (certain parts of) Western cultures have become as you described, and I come from a very Westernized city of that country/​continent and grew up being taught by Western teachers in Westernized schools where I spoke to everyone in English.

  This isn’t just limited to EA. It looks like this has and seems likely to continue to increase tensions between Western/​non-Western cultures. I can’t say for sure that the primary reason that EA would split (perhaps into a more rationalist-leaning side and a more progressive-leaning side) is because of this, but I’m also pessimistic about cooperation/​reaching compromises.

  What links here?

  • Timothy Chan's comment on Thread for dis­cussing Bostrom’s email and apology by Lizka (16 Jan 2023 22:31 UTC; 12 points)