WSCFriedman

Karma: 196

History nerd, reader, writer. Main worries: Extreme poverty, X-risk, metaphorical X-risk in the form of a war that is not an existential risk to humanity as a whole but still kills me and everyone I know and possibly destroys civilization as we know it.

Not a vegetarian, but would like to do a serious long-term analysis of costs and benefits at some point, so if you have any really really good arguments for it that are not incompatible with a total-sum utilitarian the-repugnant-conclusion-is-not-all-that-repugnant perspective, I’m happy to hear them.

WSCFriedman 26 Dec 2021 2:21 UTC
6 points
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on: [Creative Writing Contest] Counting the Living
Oh, this is good. I want more.

Thanks!

WSCFriedman 29 Oct 2021 22:26 UTC
−1 points
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in reply to: scottxmulligan’s comment on: Remove An Omnivore’s Statue? Debate Ensues Over The Legacy Of Factory Farming
I am happy to read your arguments! Again, I do not intend to carry out a serious investigation of the topic until I have the time and energy to do it with full charity towards both sides and the ability to actually update, but I am glad to have evidence I can evaluate with more focus and in more detail when I do.

”You are assuming their lives are net util even if their lives may be miserable. (which I think is the repugnant conclusion? I’ve never really liked the framing of it either) Let’s break this down.”

Not quite. I am assuming their lives are not subjectively miserable even if they look like they are objectively miserable. That’s what I mean by ‘net util.’ There are situations where people who look objectively happy commit suicide and situations where people who look objectively unhappy actively and strongly desire to keep living.

”Additionally, there are other negative externalities which you are not acknowledging[.]”

And there’s additional positive externalities I’m not acknowledging! I would need to carry out a serious exploration of all the externalities and of the entire situation to feel comfortable making a decision on my own instead of trusting my most-trusted authorities, who eat meat.

”1. We don’t care about qualia. We care about suffering.”

I think it is possible for pain to exist without suffering, but I’m not sure suffering can exist without the-thing-I-am-labeling-qualia. I think that pain-without-suffering is possible either because the brain interprets pain in a non-suffering manner, or because there is nothing there to notice the pain—if I’m unconscious, there may be pain signals in my nervous system, my body may be flinching, but I do not suffer because I’m unconscious, so there’s nobody there to suffer. These seem to be cheap examples that the thing is possible. I do not know whether or not it is true.

By “qualia,” what I fundamentally mean is “the thing that makes pain into suffering and pleasure into joy.” And I think I do require that in order to care about pain.

”The current conception of consciousness (correct me if I’m wrong any neuroscientists in the crowd) is that consciousness is the interaction of the thalamus and the cortex.”

I am not a neuroscientist in the slightest and this is one of the things I would need to launch a serious investigation of when I launch a serious investigation, which I am not doing right now but which I agree is the highest launch-serious-investigation-priority once I have tried to figure out whether literally infinite positive and negative utility are relevant thanks to the existence of an afterlife.

”Some people live net negative lives and won’t off themselves because they think suicide is a net neutral decision. (infinite bad and infinite good possibility after death) I don’t see how them persisting is justification of net util.”

And this is why I attempted to clarify (possibly in another thread?) that I feel that similar patterns persisted in classical antiquity, back before Hell and Heaven were common beliefs.

OK, back to the specific chicken welfare question:

”They are killed after birth because they are deemed worthless. I don’t believe these were net util lives. I believe they were negative lives...”

I’m not sure if this helps, but I tend to think of comparing utilities across lifetimes as imagining serial reincarnation. Like, I-the-force-looking-out-from-behind-Bill-Friedman’s-eyes lives through each life in turn.

But, in that case, lifespan matters. Two days of good life is two days of good life; two days of bad life is two days of bad life. Living for 2000 days in one body seems to me equivalent to living in 2 days in 1,000 bodies, except for how it changes the goodness or badness of those days.

But in that case—I mean, I don’t actually know whether the male chicks’ lives are worth living, because I haven’t done the serious in-depth investigation required to know this, but if they were negative and female lives were positive, 7 years = 2556 days = each female outweighs 1278 males.

… But, also, I don’t know if female chickens’ lives are worth living! Or males! I do not know the answer and the investigation is on the queue.

WSCFriedman 29 Oct 2021 5:26 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Aaron Gertler 🔸’s comment on: EA Forum Creative Writing Contest: $10,000 in prizes for good stories
I’ve just submitted two stories! Hopefully they’ve landed properly. Thanks for the form!

WSCFriedman 28 Oct 2021 0:47 UTC
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in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Remove An Omnivore’s Statue? Debate Ensues Over The Legacy Of Factory Farming
I can understand that, logically speaking, but it does not suffice to convince me. This is especially true because of the % of people who attempt suicide, don’t die, and say later it was a giant mistake and they regret it. I could imagine a world in which people were usually or even often wrong both about committing suicide and not committing suicide, but it seems to me like a lot of added complexity.

WSCFriedman 28 Oct 2021 0:43 UTC
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in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Remove An Omnivore’s Statue? Debate Ensues Over The Legacy Of Factory Farming
I agree completely.

WSCFriedman 27 Oct 2021 20:10 UTC
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in reply to: SiebeRozendal’s comment on: Remove An Omnivore’s Statue? Debate Ensues Over The Legacy Of Factory Farming
I was absolutely implying this! That was a fundamental part of my system, which went unspoken and which I am happy to defend.

And it’s why I pointed out that you don’t seem to have even semicommon mass suicide in the classical world, before the rise of Judeo-Christian beliefs on Heavenly and Hellish fates, when people think of the afterlife as grey fuzz if they think there is an afterlife and when culture often considers it morally heroic to commit suicide, rather than sinful. It seems more common, then, but even then it’s very rare, almost always only in cases where people have strong predictive reason to believe things are about to get much worse and not going to get better, even though they don’t know about the hedonic treadmill.

(I think the most common case is ‘we’re about to be captured by an extremely cruel enemy, tortured, maybe killed, maybe worse, almost certainly enslaved if we survive’ - and even then I don’t think most of the population of sacked cities kills themselves first, it’s just something you hear about a noticeable minority of people doing, in what is basically the worst situation that can happen.)

And evolutionary pressure against suicide is what I presume produced the hedonic treadmill. “Whatever happens, on the macro scale you will be happy slightly above the suicide rate” seems like a great thing for evolution to engineer in, and I’m not really surprised it did.

WSCFriedman 27 Oct 2021 7:32 UTC
15 points
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in reply to: Davis_Kingsley’s comment on: Remove An Omnivore’s Statue? Debate Ensues Over The Legacy Of Factory Farming
Yeah, IIRC both G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis wrote about how anyone can just say “the future will agree with me,” as a way of getting support for your ideas, but nobody really knows about the future and probably everyone is wrong because the future will be more complicated than anyone thinks, and so arguments from the future are bad logic and invalid. (I think that Lewis’s is a bit of the Screwtape Letters and that Chesterton’s essay is in “What’s Wrong With The World.”) So I endorse this complaint.

But I didn’t include that in my description because I do in fact think veganism will take over the world once the technology gets far enough, so that wasn’t my true objection to the story.

WSCFriedman 27 Oct 2021 4:58 UTC
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in reply to: scottxmulligan’s comment on: Remove An Omnivore’s Statue? Debate Ensues Over The Legacy Of Factory Farming
(Part 3 of 3, threaded because I want to discuss different things you bring up in different places.)

”You said you feel threatened by a piece like this which paints the current treatment of animals as something that will be viewed as horrific in the future and understand you may contribute in a small way to that? What do you make of the current treatment of animals in our society? (I’m very open to hearing your thoughts, even if they may be very different than my own)”

I appreciate it!

For clarification: I would not describe myself as “feeling threatened” in the sense of “my position is unstable,” so much as I would say that I felt, as of the time I read the story some hours ago, as “threatened” in the sense that someone who was being subject to extortion might feel threatened; that is, threatened meaning having been made the subject of a threat. I do not rationally expect anyone is going to burn down my house—but that was the kind of reaction I had.

I do recognize that, as I eat meat and consume dairy products, I am engaging in a potential evil. My opinions on this are complicated, but I have not stopped doing so.

To begin with, I am a total-sum utilitarian; that is to say, I do not think the repugnant conclusion is repugnant. Creating people who would prefer to live is doing them a favor. Creating someone on condition he later die for you is ethical as long as he would agree that, yup, existing had totally been worth it, and as long as his life didn’t cause enough suffering (in side effects) to counterbalance it. So for this reason, I default to non-vegetarianism.

There is still the ‘factory farming is uniquely terrible’ argument! I have a great deal of sympathy for this argument! However, I think the case is weaker than it seems.

First, I am not in fact convinced that animals have qualia? Like, that is kind of a weak argument, just multiply the probability that animals have qualia by the total sum of the utility conditional that they do and go on from there? But—we really don’t understand where consciousness comes from or how it works and I don’t really know that there’s anything actually inside a chicken’s skull capable of suffering. So I do want this point made before I go on with the second, more important one:

I believe in the hedonic treadmill; that is, that people vastly overestimate and underestimate how much their happiness will change based on predictable factors (see https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/23/the-price-of-glee-in-china/ for a recent extreme case). I know enough history to know that the past was really extremely horrifyingly terrible—and, yet, mass suicides are not a common feature of life at any period in history, even those periods where nobody believed in a morally-relevant afterlife. Mass suicides did still happen occasionally, but (a) only under really extreme circumstances and (b) by people who did not know about the hedonic treadmill. So while I have no doubt that factory farming is worse for animals than conventional farming (other than the doubt of whether or not the animals are morally relevant), the question of “is it literally worse than death” is a much harder one.

You could still argue that, even if these arguments were persuasive, I should avoid eating meat anyway, just on the off chance it’s a moral catastrophe. My response to that really just is that I am uncomfortable around Pascal’s Mugging arguments and while I feel that I should probably investigate them I don’t feel that I am compelled to obey every request that goes “Change your behavior or be at fault for a moral catastrophe!” I feel that being shaped like that is bad, because then anyone can just extort you effortlessly. Low-probability arguments that might be important are going on a queue based on probability, where I investigate one at a time as I have time. Right now I’m trying to figure out which religion is true, if any. Next on the queue is a Serious Long-Term Investigation Of Animal Welfare, but I expect it will take a while to get there.

If you want me to unpack anything, I’m happy to do that! Alternatively speaking, if you’d like to provide me with material for my eventual investigation, I’d also be happy to add it to the list. But so far I don’t have any specific plans for changes to my behavior.

WSCFriedman 27 Oct 2021 4:37 UTC
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in reply to: scottxmulligan’s comment on: Remove An Omnivore’s Statue? Debate Ensues Over The Legacy Of Factory Farming
(Part 2 of 3, threaded because I want to discuss different things you bring up in different places.)

”Also, the goal for a piece like this isn’t just to convince people to go vegan. It’s also to make vegans reflect about their own engagement on the issue.”

I believe that the EA writing contest was established to fund the creation of art that would persuade people who are not currently EA of EA causes and make them think more highly of EA. Insofar as I am wrong, I am wrong; insofar as I am not wrong, art-for-rallying-the-base is not actually bad, but is off-topic for the contest.

WSCFriedman 27 Oct 2021 4:33 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: scottxmulligan’s comment on: Remove An Omnivore’s Statue? Debate Ensues Over The Legacy Of Factory Farming
I am perfectly willing to have a long, point-by-point disagreement with you! I’m going to divide it into three threads, though; one for the actual argument about veganism, one for a side note about your second-to-last paragraph, and one for the meta-argument about pointy persuasion vs nice persuasion. This post is for the last; that is, for the statement:

”There is a place for delicate and tender art, and other art should be more pointed and direct.”

I’m going to disagree. I think that, in terms of ‘ideological art’, there is a place for art that persuades by attempting to convince someone that you are on their side, and a place for art that persuades by attempting to convince someone that they really should be on your side, and a place for art that rallies and inspires people who are already on your side, and a place for art that genuinely instructs on a basis that has nothing at all to do with persuasion.

But I don’t think there’s a place for ‘pointed and direct’ art in terms of persuading people. I think that most persuasion is marginal, and comes by a long series of individual debates at the end of each of which the person you’re talking to feels “Yeah, that was a good point, you’re a decent person.” I think “Guided by the Beauty of our Weapons” (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/) is instructive here, but especially the quote, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they fight you half-heartedly, then they’re neutral, then they then they grudgingly say you might have a point even though you’re annoying, then they say on balance you’re mostly right although you ignore some of the most important facets of the issue, then you win.” But central to this is the step from fighting you to fighting you half-heartedly, and there is no way to get someone to take that step by offending them.

In my worldview, people largely change their minds via positive affect (“I like these people and these ideas, I want to associate with them”) and negative affect (“those people are jerks, whatever they’re for, I’m against”), and most argument consists of first subconsciously deciding what you want to believe, then steadily trying out arguments until you find one that you can buy, and—it’s not that you can’t be truth-seeking, I try to be truth-seeking, but I try with great difficulty, aware of what I desire to be true and aware that what I desire to be true does not systematically correlate with what is true. Biases are hard, and one of the biases is “I am biased to dislike people who are mean to me, them and everything they care about.” And I think that when you get someone’s back up, they are then harder to persuade to the cause that offended them, for quite a while until the effect fades.

I play role-playing games. I often think in terms of—dice rolls, probabilities. And one common mechanic in D&D and similar games is that each time you make a roll to succeed against a particular condition—some spell or poison or magical effect—you get +1 to the next roll to keep resisting it. Because you’ve fought it before and you can throw it off. Scott Alexander likes the cowpox metaphor; unpersuasive arguments for cause A inoculate you against potentially persuasive arguments for cause A, because you’ve already dismissed argument A. In that context, the EA community picking arguments for the sake of persuading people needs to be choosing not only for what will persuade some of their potential audience, but for what won’t offend any of their potential audience, because every EA story read as ‘an attack by EA on us’ will make every person who has that reaction harder to persuade of EA in the future.

WSCFriedman 27 Oct 2021 0:50 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Remove An Omnivore’s Statue? Debate Ensues Over The Legacy Of Factory Farming
Ha!

Yeah, that’s something where I think it would be a correct invocation of the rule if we wanted to implement the rule, but I don’t think we want to implement the rule, so it’s just funny. :P

WSCFriedman 27 Oct 2021 0:46 UTC
8 points
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in reply to: scottxmulligan’s comment on: Remove An Omnivore’s Statue? Debate Ensues Over The Legacy Of Factory Farming
I am glad you are not unhappy with my post! I apologize if I am being too aggressive in this and I don’t want to offend you.

But… I do identify with Whittaker. And I don’t really feel that my opinion on how someone might view animal welfare has been altered, because—I feel threatened, and that isn’t a good state to change your mind in? Insofar as I have reactions, they aren’t scout-mindset I-desire-to-open-my-mind-to-the-topic, they’re soldier-mindset I-am-under-intellectual-attack-and-must defend myself. I grant that you are probably correct that the future will condemn eating meat, but I still want—in terms of ‘desire’, not ‘endorsed desire’ - to come up with counterarguments, with the only required analysis being ‘will this allow me to defend myself’, not ‘is it true’.

I don’t think that most people operate by first feeling offended, then kindly and rationally considering the offensive argument. I think that doing that is a high-level skill that is difficult to learn, and that the more you offend someone at first, the more they’re going to want to push back and the less they’re going to want to listen to you. I can observe this in myself and theorize that it is responsible for phenomena I have observed in others, I expect a large portion (probably a large minority?) of other readers who are not already convinced you are right to become offended when you make your explanation, and I expect that, as a result, the story will not work well for purposes of convincing people.

WSCFriedman 27 Oct 2021 0:15 UTC
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in reply to: Emrik’s comment on: Remove An Omnivore’s Statue? Debate Ensues Over The Legacy Of Factory Farming
I… hmm. I’d guess the basic thing going on is irrational defensiveness of the sort where any documentary about the Israel/Palestine mess is going to get blasted by both sides because it is clearly and obviously biased in favor of the other side, regardless of how balanced it actually is? Like, writing a story about cancel culture in the future that doesn’t condemn it is endorsing it? I’m trying to unpack my brain’s explanation and I’m really not finding it a very convincing explanation.

I think the best I can come up with, in defensive-mode not explanation-mode, is: If this was a news article today, it would be pro-cancel-culture. It is not the style of article Scott Alexander would write, which would be an elaborate analysis with lots of graphs, it is not the kind of article a right-wing source would write, which would be scornful and mocking; it comes across in style as resembling the sort of thing that is neutral on the face of it but Really We Know What Opinion The New York Times Has About This Sort Of Thing.

This still doesn’t look very convincing to me, to be clear! But I’m trying to explain my reaction. Which is not wholly reasonable but I will still defend as representative of a large portion of your target audience.

(And I don’t really see the middle-of-the-road people as all that middle-of-the-road, or all that portrayed-as-unambiguously-good. Everyone back in the past wasn’t all sorts of good things. If you had to put signs on all the past people of all the evils they didn’t condemn, you’ve got 1 bit of useful information and 99 bits that could be compressed down to ‘he was born in 1465 and had the standard opinions of his time and place except.’ So, in that case, I did read it differently.)

(And—I sort of assume that factory farming will disappear as soon as tasty cheap synthetic meat shows up? Everyone will convert to vegetarianism when that happens. Once tasty cheap synthetic cheese and eggs and milk show up, everyone will convert to veganism. Then they will forget that veganism mattered and we will end up with Cordelia Vorkosigan, who ‘doesn’t eat anything but vat-protein if she can help it’ and this comes up practically never because why would it? So that didn’t really read to me as ‘point of glory’ so much as ‘yup, plausible element of the future.’)

WSCFriedman 27 Oct 2021 0:03 UTC
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in reply to: Dicentra’s comment on: Remove An Omnivore’s Statue? Debate Ensues Over The Legacy Of Factory Farming
That is 100% reasonable and I am probably not behaving reasonably! But I think the fact that I did freak out suggests that the way I read the story is at least plausible and that people having my reaction is a risk?

WSCFriedman 26 Oct 2021 21:35 UTC
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on: EA Forum Creative Writing Contest: Submission thread for work first published elsewhere
I’m pretty sure you already know about this old EA Scott Alexander post, but just to be sure:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pC47ZTsPNAkjavkXs/efficient-charity-do-unto-others

WSCFriedman 26 Oct 2021 21:30 UTC
8 points
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on: Remove An Omnivore’s Statue? Debate Ensues Over The Legacy Of Factory Farming
This story is on an issue where I do not agree with the standard EA consensus, so I feel as if my voice may be useful as an example of a ‘person not yet persuaded’, since that group is presumably the target audience for this fiction.

My body has completely switched over from ‘relaxed, cheerful, listening to a story’ to ‘under threat’; sweating, faster heartbeats, soldier mindset instead of explorer, how-do-I-defend-myself-as-fast-as-I-can. I think this will not be a good story to make other people like EA more. I think it will make them like EA less.

To help clarify my position, I am starting with the position that ‘cancel culture’ is bad. A good deal of my horror and shock is that of presenting one of the things I like least about our current culture as a perpetual feature, blazed in titanic letters a hundred and fifty years in the future. But putting that side—this does not feel to me like a persuasive argument. It feels like an attack. It isn’t saying “you should join us,” it’s saying “join us or we will destroy your memory.” It doesn’t read to me as “the future will condemn you,” but as “we will make the future condemn you.” I don’t actually feel this story is persuasive or illustrative or teaches useful thinking habits. I think it’s a threat: “You’ll be shunned if you don’t sign up with us.”

But I—I think that the image of Good as that which can cooperate, Good as that which can be trusted, Good that you can relax and be safe and explore in the presence of because it won’t try to hurt you—is worth preserving. And I don’t think this story does. I think reading this story will drive away people who doesn’t already agree with you (based on my current emotional state) and fire up the people who already do (based on the upvoting), and I don’t think these are good things to try to do.

Or it could just be that I’m treating this story unfairly because it pushed one of my buttons. That’s also wholly possible.

WSCFriedman 25 Oct 2021 22:07 UTC
1 point
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on: [Creative Writing Contest] The Legend of the Goldseeker
I did not understand what the story was trying to say, very well. It just seemed to me to be ‘a series of bad things happened because of failures of effective communication and understanding?’ I can read it as a criticism of overconfidence, but I feel as if there have already been a lot of criticisms of overconfidence, and at this point I’m kind of worried we need more criticisms of underconfidence? I did not end up with very strong opinions about the story in any particular way, and I suspect it was a failure of my understanding at least as much as a failure of the story.

WSCFriedman 22 Oct 2021 6:07 UTC
2 points
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on: [Creative Writing Contest] The Rise of The Effective Shoppers
I think this is a very cute, clever story! I appreciate it and have upvoted it! I don’t think I have any clever comments, though I’ll let you know if I think of any.

WSCFriedman 19 Oct 2021 6:26 UTC
1 point
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on: [Creative Writing Contest] What You Do
This is a very nice little story and I definitely liked it. Thank you for writing it.

WSCFriedman 19 Oct 2021 6:22 UTC
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on: [Creative Writing Contest] Counting Beans
This absolutely amused me, in a grim way. Thanks.