Hi, I am Julian. I am studying Physics and Philosophy in Göttingn Germany, and co-running the EA group here.
Current Goal: Finding out, where my personal fit is best.
Achievements so far: I once Rick-rolled 3blue1brown, I don’t think I´ll ever be able to connect to that success.
I really like this accessible format. However, I think it would be helpful, if there would at least be footnotes to the course of your information, whenever something is an interesting claim (for example “One in three children has dangerous levels of lead in their bloodstream”).
I fear that without a tractability of information within official EA contexts, a lot of half true hear say seeps through the cracks.
I don’t expect any of the information in this post to be false, however.
I completely agree with you. This whole reasoning seems to heavily depend on using causal decision theory instead of its (in my opinion) more sensible competitors.
I am not sure, if no one is getting the joke, or just down voting, because they don’t wand irony-jokey content on the EA Forum..
Would you rather be one or two dogs?
Interesting questions. Although I don’t think i know the answer to any of them better than you do, I have another possible reason, why the suffering in your situation might not be bad:
You could argue through the lens of personal identity, that if you would self-modify, not to feel pain via sympathy anymore, that the person you would turn into would not be you anymore in the morally relevant sense.
This reasoning however would only apply, if you have ethics, that care about personal Identity (for example, by caring about you or your loved ones surviving in some sense). Having preferences like that seems to be pretty intuitive, but before embracing this view I would recommend having a look at the counter arguments by Derek Parfit ( https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-ethics/#IDM ).
Imagine you play cards with your friends. You have the deck in your hand. You are pretty confident, that you have shuffled the deck. Than you seal the deck, and give yourself the first 10 cards. And what a surprise: You happen to find all the clubs in your hand!
What is more reasonable to assume? That you just happen do dray all the clubs, or that you where wrong about having suffeld the cards? Rather the latter one.
Compare this to:
Imagine, thinking about the HoH hypothesis. You are pretty confident, that you are good at long term-forecasting, and you predict, that the most influential time in history in: NOW?!
Here to, so the argument goes, it is more reasonable to assume, that your assumption of being good in forecasting the future, is flawed.
Interesting Idea. Although I fear we might not like what we find....