Pain and Suffering and Oceana 1

Taken shortly after the sneeze mentioned below.

I've written a lot about the distinction between pain and suffering (like here). Our recent points-powered #1 bucket-list trip Down Under provides another example.

At one point on the trip, I fractured a rib. It affected my sleep (not in a good way!), made it hard to get out of bed, etc. One time I sneezed and felt like I might pass out from the Owww. 

However, I did not suffer. I was incredibly happy nearly the whole trip (especially considering what was happening back here in Crazy Town). Every single day, I was far happier than a "normal" day with my "normal" pain. 

(But I don't recommend fracturing your rib. Also: this WaPo article claims that not only can the placebo effect work when the patient knows it's a placebo, but it can even work when the patient knows and thinks the placebo won't work!!!)

Now: 

More than any other type of post, readers say they like my picture posts. Yet I feel almost guilty about posting so many pictures of the adventures we've been able to take because of points and miles. I thought about just doing a link, but then I can't give any contextual notes. So I'm going to break this trip up by geographical area and try to be much more discerning in which ones I use. 

Here are pictures from the trip down, Melbourne, and our time on the Great Ocean Road with Vincent, one of three cool people we have known online and were able to meet in person on this trip! I quote Vincent in Losing My Religions, and he used to blog at The Animalist, where he wrote some excellent (and inflammatory to Vegans) pieces.

I'll leave the pictures small; you can always click to see them bigger.

The Arizona desert by the California border. Weird, no?

Free plant-based chicken (far right) and drink at Delta's LAX lounge.

Not a view of the earth you see normally.
Video. #Waterworld

Flying Foxes in the middle of Melbourne; see next

Melbourne definitely won for cool architecture. 

Roos! Video

"Dances with snakes"

Koala! For mah sistah....

More on The End of Veganism

As a follow-up to this (originally a chapter in Losing) and this, researcher Vasco Grilo has published Cost-effectiveness of Veganuary and School Plates at the Effective Altruism Forum.

Personally, I am a big fan of Veganuary's Wendy Matthews, with whom I used to work closely and who wrote this (flattery will get you everywhere with me when it comes to the book). I also knew Veganuary's co-founder Matthew Glover. More importantly, Veganuary's funder is why One Step for Animals has existed for over a decade and has reached many millions of people with the message "Please don't eat chickens." 

No One Believes in God

 
A more accurate title would be "Almost no one really believes in god."

I've experienced moments of extraordinary ecstasy. If I truly believed that when I died I would feel like that all the time, I would look forward to death. Heck, I would pretty actively yearn for death! And while I would be sad when someone important to me died, that would be offset by my joy for them. 

God aside, I would jump at the chance to be in Nozick's Experience Machine, assuming Anne would be able to be in an experience machine too.

Just sayin'

What do they know–all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world – about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. 

In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.

–Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Letter Writer

Also:

Not that I'd rather be a wild animal.

 

Wk'end Reading: The Mind Is Fragile (long edition)

The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians

A truly crazy story. Not happy or encouraging but illustrative. Yikes.

When I first got involved with the Animal Rights Community of Greater Cincinnati in the late 1980s, it became apparent that animal rights / veganism attracted more than its share of people with some form of mental instability. The same is true for effective altruism. (And probably every "out there" philosophy / religion / dogma.)

Tyler Cowen on AI take-off

Candycorn!
(But seriously - a weird plant)

Why I think AI take-off is relatively slow

Not to be the cranky old man, but if AI is around, how come so little really works smoothly? I'm not upset - it doesn't really matter to me so much. 

Making Things Better Better

I still can't believe everything we know about these tiny lights in the sky.

No excerpts - entire thing is worth a skim.

Sunday Funnies: AI ROTFL

I asked Google's AI about punctuation and degrees. It told me the below. Holy chicken! 

When listing degrees on a resume, use periods in abbreviations like B.A., M.A., and Ph.D., but not in abbreviations like BA, MA, and PhD. 

Here's a more detailed explanation:

• Periods are used for abbreviations of two letters: B.A., M.A., J.D., M.S. 
• Periods are not used for abbreviations of three letters: BA, MA, PhD 

😆

But not quite as funny as this picture by Anne:

Weekend Reading: Royalty and Self-Help

True happiness

We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It 

Of course, evolution has programmed us to take everything good for granted. Content organisms were out of the gene pool. [ed]

Why self-help books are terrible and wonderful

...the best experimental research about what makes you happier and what doesn’t:

Our review … points to the value of expressing gratitude, being more sociable, acting happy, and spending money on others. In contrast, we found surprisingly little support for many commonly recommended strategies for promoting happiness, including practicing meditation, doing random acts of kindness, or engaging in volunteer work. Most happiness research has focused on practices that individuals can add to their lives, but some recent studies provide hints that removing some of our daily habits could also improve happiness; specifically, individuals may benefit from giving up social media use for an extended period or buying themselves out of unpleasant daily tasks.

When was America great?

Seriously: 

Music Monday: Only for Tears for Fears fans (sorry)

You might want to check out this post if you know and like the songs Everybody Wants to Rule the World (performance on Colbert), Head Over Heels, Sowing the Seeds of Love, etc.  

We are flying home today.

Solving Life

The Horror of Climate Change (updated from 2023)

Know someone scared about "increasing extreme weather"? In addition to the below, please share this (and this, linked within the first). They are long and thorough. 

The below is from 2023.

Lin Manuel Miranda - Hurricane

It is clear from media reports that climate change is making the planet uninhabitable. The list of tragedies is simply incredible, including an unprecedented hurricane that wiped out Galveston, Texas, killing over 10,000 people. That made it the deadliest natural disaster ever in the United States, beating out the worst heatwave and flood.

But that is nothing compared to China's Yangtze–Huai River floods. Those killed somewhere between hundreds of thousands and millions.

Don't these events prove that climate change is already humanity's worst crisis, demanding all of our attention and sacrifice? 

Umm...

The Galveston hurricane was in 1900 (the deadliest heatwave was in 1936; the deadliest flood in 1862). The Chinese floods were in 1931.

The climate was never "safe." 

The world was not better in the past.

Look just at hurricanes. On the chart of the 10 Deadliest Hurricanes in the United States, only two are in this century, despite the vastly larger population living on the coasts. 

The deadliest Atlantic hurricane was in 1780 - again, even though the population was a small fraction of what it is today. After Galveston, the third deadliest was Mitch in 1998, killing thousands in Central America.

I understand that for many people, doom gives life meaning. But in reality, the problem isn't the climate is going from benign to hostile. What kills people is poverty - a lack of development and protection. That is why so many more people died from natural disasters in the past. 

If we want to make life better for humans, we shouldn't be destroying people's mental health with exaggerations and lies. We should push for development, which is, by far, the best answer to any climate ... if you care about human misery. But development is explicitly what the crueler climate fanatics oppose.

Bonus reading from Matt Yglesias: "The two kinds of progressives."

Outsourced to share: If you want to make a difference, log off and take action

By Matthew Yglesias in 2024: Negativity is making everyone miserable

The point of my chapter, "Very Little Really Matters," in which I quote ... Matt Yglesias.

Don't ask, "Is this upsetting?" Ask, "Is getting upset helping anything?"

As a wise person once noted:

But taking in horror after horror doesn’t make you a good person. Making a difference makes you a good person.

excerpts (from Matt's new piece, not Losing, although it could be!):

People who are living in the United States of America in 2024 are living in what is indisputably one of the richest countries on the planet, at a time of unprecedented global prosperity.

And yet, even in a mass culture that’s increasingly consumed by questions of privilege, you rarely hear expressions of gratitude for the reality of that basic good fortune. It’s more common to hear expressions of apocalyptic levels of alarm about living in “a world on fire” or through a series of “unprecedented” traumas. ...

The world, including the United States of America, obviously has problems, and some things really are trending in a bad direction. And yet this has always been the case. The main thing that has actually changed is that the media landscape has become much more competitive and people (yes, people like you) prefer to click and share on negative stories. So a lot of people spend time doomscrolling, amping up negativity on their social media feeds to maximize engagement, and propagating a worldview that says the best way to be a good citizen is to engage in performative sobbing or raging.

This is all, I think, a mistake. ...

Trends are broadly positive and have been for a long time. Many bad things continue to happen, but that has always been the case, and problems can generally be solved more effectively by trying to slice them down into specific, narrow pieces rather than lumping everything together. Most negativity results from conscious or unconscious framing choices that compete evolutionarily in a “survival of the most downbeat” framework. The best thing to do to live a happily life is to feel like you are a person with agency and the ability to exert control over the world. And the best way to do that is cut down on the doomscrolling and try to think of specific ways you can take action to help with tractable problems. ...

A better world is not only possible, it’s something we are living through. But to make it even better, you need to do stuff, not talk about how bad everything is. ...

In the current economic recovery, wealth has grown most rapidly at the bottom and so have wages. ...

Back when homicide was, in fact, surging in 2020-2021, I thought “things were worse in the 1990s” was a lame response. But we’re now living through the third straight year of falling murder, the drop appears to be accelerating, and the fact that the spike peaked at a lower level than we saw in my childhood does feel relevant to me. It’s not just that the murder situation is getting better, the overall policy feedback loop has improved — that, not “spiking rates of gun violence,” seems like the story to me. ...

Obesity is a genuine problem, but the rate has been rising as far back as we can find records (i.e., the 1880s and possibly earlier), so this is hardly a reason to feel like the world is suddenly in disarray. The actual big news on obesity is that we, for the first time ever, have a new class of drugs that appear to be highly effective in treating it. There are more GLP-1 agonists in development, and it looks like they have benefits beyond treating obesity.

Something that I do note about the GLP-1 drugs is that the media coverage of them has been oddly negative, almost obsessively focused on downsides, to the point that Rachael Bedard’s piece arguing that actually it’s good that we had a medical breakthrough on a serious problem counts as a contrarian take. ...

Problems just don’t get nearly as much attention when they are ameliorated. ...

[A] lot of people used to spend a lot of time talking and worrying about these worst-case scenarios. They were considered a really big deal! But the good news today has been almost totally ignored. ...

Consuming negative news in the morning impairs your job performance and leads viewers to catastrophize about their personal life. When news consumption makes you anxious, the natural response is to monitor the situation even more closely, which is good for ratings and engagement. ...

[In addition to chickens on factory farms...] There are hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees living in Egypt in dire conditions, and UNCHR needs your money to help take care of them. You can turn money into lives saved very directly via GiveWell’s top charities fund. You can transfer cash directly to some of the poorest people in the world via GiveDirectly. The Israel-Palestine conflict is in a kind of discourse sweet spot where it relates to a lot of identity-linked issues that people feel passionately about but also has extremely low tractability — there isn’t much you, personally, can do about it except post, with the convention being that the more extreme your posts, the more it shows you care. This is, in a sense, convenient. You’re not challenged to put your own money on the line the way you would be if you chose to get invested in something else. But it’s psychologically disempowering and does little good for the world. ...

2024's #1 You can be happy and still make a difference.

January 22, 2023  

Yeah - a 2023 post was most popular in 2024. At least it is good, unlike #2

 Song: Sade "The Sweetest Taboo"

This Twitter thread (not an endorsement! post from 2023) makes an important point: Environmentalists often make claims that are misleading at best. In this case, the claim is that our food system is terrible because things get shipped from other countries. But driving a few blocks to your local farmers' market releases more carbon dioxide than shipping pears all around the world. 

(Wherever you spend time online, be sure to follow Hannah Ritchie and see her Wired article, which makes the point I make in the Greta Thunberg chapter in Losing My Religions).

The more important point is that we should stop paying attention to - let alone obsessing about - minutia, like the carbon footprint of a banana. (Please read "Very Little Really Matters" in LMR.) 

Instead, focus on issues where you can help bring about more systematic change that will have an impact: 

• Few people advocate for the most abused animals, so please support One Step for Animals. 
• Most people who care about climate oppose things that can make a difference: nuclear power and development. Advocate for those.
• In general, most people who care about anything are focused on something that moves them personally (children, dogs, their personal church / religion / philosophy). Advocate instead for taking suffering seriously.

Or, as I conclude in that Losing My Religions chapter:

Choose where you can make a difference. You don’t need to know everything. You don’t need to read or watch everything. As Nobel Laureate (and one of Anne’s colleagues at Carnegie Mellon) Herb Simon said: “[A] wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” (Quoted in our fellow Illini Nick Offerman’s Gumption.)

Relatedly, as Matthew Yglesias said, “One shouldn't be complacent about the problems in the world, but one should avoid frustration about them.” (Offered even though you should never trust anyone named Matt.)

You don’t need to be depressed. You don’t deserve to be depressed. You can be happy and still make a difference. Indeed, I would contend that being happy makes it easier to make a difference over the long haul – both in your ability to work constructively and in the example you set for others.