PSA: Crawling Is Better Than Dying

As I've said before, I've two bad falls. In the past year, two younger friends (who are both in the book and know my stories of falling) have fallen and suffered bad injuries (although neither of them ended up in the hospital). Also, a not-old person with one degree of separation fell and actually died. 

Last week, I had a bad reaction to a vaccine, and was in great pain, light-headed, and nauseous. So when I was getting around at night, I crawled to keep from falling. Was it "dignified"? Who cares? Discretion is the better part of valor.

Be careful.

Warning: News. In Memorium

What a world that we ended up on the same side. Crazy.

REM's song about him.

If you are following the news

This report by John Oliver is good.  

If you are smart and not following the news, this is insightful on several levels:

Forever Winning!

Article recommendation: Paul Bloom's Are women unsuited for the pursuit of truth? My comment: "The problem seems to be the assumption that the pursuit of 'truth' is what matters. Why would that be? Why not reducing suffering? Why not increasing human flourishing? (Or flourishing for all sentient individuals.)

"Personally, I think 'the pursuit of truth' is a cop-out to let people off the hook for actually making the world a better place."

These palm trees burned several years ago (see the blackened trunks) but have come back!

As a follow-up to this, is the below something you've seen in SuzieVegan's feed or JamieV's substack:

That [vegetarian] movement has during the last ten years advanced more and more rapidly. More and more books and periodicals on this subject appear every year; one meets more and more people who have given up meat; and abroad, especially Germany, England, and America, the number of vegetarian hotels and restaurants increases year by year.

This sentiment has been expressed consistently (including by me) during my almost 40 years since giving up meat. But this particular quote is from Leo Tolstoy's First Step, published in 1891.

Two bits (health and wealth and pigs)

 This has been making the rounds and it is pretty illuminating:

And a follow-up to this ("Broiler mortality has increased from 3.7% to 6% over the last 12 years") here is another hard fact showing that the industry does not treat animals "well"; from Inside Animal Ag:

Just skip. You don't want to read about someone else winning the lottery.

I am happier than the average person (and way happier than Matt 33+ years ago) in part because I have, for over 12,000 days, marveled at my unfathomably and entirely unreasonable good fortune in meeting Anne. 

It is human nature to acclimate to everything good (the hedonic treadmill), but October 1992 was, for me, like winning the lottery and being given proof of a personal loving god (who, for some reason, happens to hate most other sentient beings).  

I think this is the first picture I took of Anne, which was two days after we wed.

From you know where:

The truth, with love, is that the heart knows straightaway

–Hervé Le Tellier, The Anomaly

(Oct 16, 1992)

Because of weird scheduling issues – e.g., I was out of town a lot for an ecology class, and she was busy teaching and looking for jobs – Anne and I didn’t meet to “discuss outreach” until a Friday in mid-October. She came over to my place, which despite my efforts at cleaning and improving, was a poor-man’s bachelor pad that smelled of cat pee.

Maybe I cooked something, but neither of us remember. What I do remember is that we didn’t talk much about animals. We got right down to “outreach.” At one point, I leaned back and asked, “What do you want to do now?” She replied, “I’d like to give you a backrub.” “Oh,” I gushed. “Will you marry me?”

Let the record show that she just giggled. ...

This might be as good a spot as any to list some of the things we have in common: From a redneck, small-minded, cow-forsaken cowtown; easily high school valedictorian; raised Catholic (goes without saying by this point) and Catholic schools; male and female siblings; father a pharmacist, mother worked in the school system. 

...

Sunday, October 18, Anne went out for a run and stopped by my place. As she told me later, she was doubting that things could really have been what they seemed to be. (Before we met, she had decided she was never going to marry and made peace with it.) By the time she left to continue her run, she was certain she was falling in love. (As was I! Wheeeeeeeee!)

The next Students for Animal Rights meeting was Wednesday the 21st. She came over before, and on the famous futon, we were sorely tempted to … just skip the meeting. But we pulled back. ... That Thursday night, October 22 1992, was the last night we willingly spent apart.

We were scheduled to go to a concert by Ellis Marsalis and Marcus Roberts on Friday [October] 23rd [1992]. Again on the famous futon, again terribly tempted to skip, but again we went, left early, and rushed back. That night is when we declared we were wed. And we began our life of sin.

(“Wed” being the commitment, “marriage” being a formal legal contract. I didn’t know this distinction until writing this book. We didn’t care about words; we just knew. October 23 is the primary date we celebrate, inasmuch as we celebrate anything.)

They say youth is wasted on the young. But yee-haw – for the next year, we took full advantage of our youth and vigor. It was Time the First: The first time my life was truly and completely wunderbar and I recognized and appreciated it as so.

This is neither rational nor objective

Autumn in Arizona

 To be an EA is to find out, again and again and again, that what you thought was the best thing to do was wrong. You think you know what [has the] highest impact, and you’re almost certainly seriously mistaken.  

–Kat Woods, “The most important lesson I learned after ten years in EA” (quoted in Losing My Religions)

Preface
I’m not accusing anyone of bad faith.

Everyone is just following their programming. More importantly, the people I “vilify” in this piece are trying to be good people. However, they are suffering from myopic arrogance that is making the world worse than it needs to be. I spent decades with the same affliction.

Frame
Last month, I spent time out-of-town with friends. My pneumothorax buddy told me how she had two groups of  friends / acquaintances. One was the group we were with at that moment – long-time animal advocates whose time together is filled with laughter, and who spend their professional lives trying to make things better at the margin. (Sometimes this involves simply trying to prevent regression.)

The other group are angry and judgmental “Vegans.” They spend their time saying how stupid, cruel, and hypocritical non-Vegans are. My buddy’s partner refuses to spend time with them.

Caveat

Like in nearly all online communities, I know that the loudest, most verbose voices in both the Effective Altruism (EA) and Vegan communities are not a representative sample. However, they wield enormous influence.

For example: Despite the delusions of the “We’re winning!” crowd, as I document in “The End of Veganism,” veganism hasn’t increased as a percentage of the population in basically forever. (It has actually gone down in recent years in the U.S.) This is because almost everyone who goes vegan goes back to eating meat:

Why? One survey of former vegans found that the top reason for quitting was that they couldn’t take the pressure to maintain the level of purity demanded by [the loud] Vegans. Vegans are “the greatest impediment” to the growth of veganism.

IOW, by constantly explaining why they are right, and everyone else is wrong wrong wrong, Vegans are not only failing to make things better – they are making things worse.

The Point Is This 

The problem … of all human “thinking” [is] we start with the end we want, and then work backwards.

We are rationalizing animals, not rational.

Any “ethics” we endorse first must … support our personal [subjective] desires.

Both Vegans and EAs recognize some of the cognitive flaws and biases and prejudices in others. In and of itself, this insight is great! But it leads many Vegans and EAs to believe that they are free of flaws and biases and prejudices. They are objective and rational and in possession of The One Truth.

The problem, of course, is that it is impossible to be truly objective and rational. We are all driven by emotions, desires, wants. Biases are inherent; religion is inevitable. 

Of course, the biggest problem with Effective Altruism is that utilitarianism itself is wrong. But the second biggest is that EAs think they are objective and can find The One Truth. (Meanwhile, Vegans are sure they have found The One Truth.)

The One Truth is, by definition, an illusion
In addition to the universal inability to be totally rational and objective, it is impossible to find The One Truth because anything that matters is inherently subjective.

The only thing that matters is subjective experience. “Subjective” is right there!

We don’t, and can’t, know what it is like to be a bat, a chicken, a shrimp, an 8-week-old fetus, a nematode, an amoeba, or an electron. And we can’t know how to compare a human suffering from crushing depression to a chimp in a deprivation cage (or to a pig in a gestation crate, or to a chicken starving to death because their leg broke beneath their unnatural weight).

And what do we do if we recognize our lack of knowledge and unconquerable uncertainty?

We just make shit up! And then prattle on and on about Bayesian statistics as if it is Objective Truth, when we are actually just pulling priors out of our asses!

How, exactly, do we choose which priors to pluck from our derriere? However we want.

Be suspicious of what you want. -Rumi
It’s not that we want to be “la la la la la happy.” Rather, evolution has left all of us, without exception, with a bunch specific wants:

• We want to think we’re smart (rational, unbiased) / have others think we’re smart, etc.

• We want to think we’re special / have others think we’re special.

• We want to think we’re important / impactful / will leave a legacy.

• We want to think we’re superior / have others admire us.

• We want to be validated.

• We want to be popular with certain people.

Almost never do we want only to make someone else’s life better.

So we just make stuff up so we can get what we want.

And then our “certainty” makes others’ lives worse.

Again: there is only subjective experience

I say all this because I’ve done everything discussed here. As I lay out in Losing My Religions, my professional career has, on net, made the world a worse place. And that was in large part because I wanted to think I was smart enough to find The One Truth.

But that was a delusion. There isn’t The One Truth. It isn’t Jesus, or Buddha, or Veganism, or Expected Value.

There is only individual subjective experience.

And what my long and often painful experience has shown is that, to a first approximation, what matters is reducing suffering.

To live a meaningful life, we don’t have to know The One Truth so we can make The Difference. We just need to make a difference.

The first step to making a difference is truly wanting to. And then recognizing and giving up our other inherent wants. Then we can actually help real, suffering individuals.

We don't have to choose the Doom perspective (aka Don't Read The Comments)

Hannah Ritchie recently blogged about the miracle of modern agriculture. In the comments, I thanked her for sharing straightforward facts. To which someone replied that their field in the UK was producing less hay than decades ago. 

Um, what? Talk about finding the cloud water droplet in the silver lining.

I'm sure UK Doom wouldn't have been happy if his yield was up but the graphs above were inverted.

The worst thing about the social internet is that it is an outrage machine. Anger, outrage, doom, hatred - they drive "engagement." Being online leads us to think that most people are utterly miserable. 

Being in the real world, though, doesn't support this.

And neither does looking at balanced, unbiased facts:

From here - worth a look.

I hope this blog can, on balance, make your life better. I don't expect to convince any Doomer or Vegan, but I would like others to realize there are other views.

Notes on Love, Luck, Bedbugs, etc.

Arizona autumnal color, north of Flagstaff

 1. In Losing, I say: “I have a simple definition of love: The happiness of a person I love is more important than my own.” I would like to amend that. For me, Anne’s happiness is my happiness. For me, there is nothing better than Anne experiencing happiness / pleasure / etc. That’s why I have literally dozens of pictures of Happy Anne around my office.

2. Don’t make your bed.

3. If you ever hike in new places, get the paid version of the AllTrails app.

If you can’t afford it, I’ll gift you a membership.

Get hiking poles. Even when travelling. Since we only ever fly with carry-on backpacks (and thus can’t bring poles with us) we buy (or borrow – TY N&J) a pair (we each use one). Then we give them away before we fly back. You’re welcome.

4. John Green (link) gives his own personal example of our “No Justice” world:

His comments about soccer mirror mine about basketball.

5. The “social” internet is a net bad. It is important to distinguish that from “the internet” (Wikipedia, AllTrails, every song you could ever want to hear, etc etc etc.)

6. My new friend Paul Ingram runs a very interesting project: PainScience.

He covers many fascinating topics, including the recent Belly fat and chronic pain. (Chronic pain will probably come up in a future post.)

7. If you’re in the mood for some philosophy about religion.

8. Finally, from you know where (just a smidge of all the amazing advice therein! ;-)

Don’t holler from the other room. Just don’t do it. Get up and go to them. You’ve been sitting too much as it is.

Also: Set and strictly follow the rule: You can’t answer a question with a question.

Also: Take everything your loved one says to you in the best possible way. If they really love you, they are probably saying it because they want you to be happy.

Too Good (Sunday Comic)

Maybe God meant to be benevolent:  

Magical: Yosemite High Country and Tahoe Region

One of the three most mind-blowing facts: 

On one of these hikes, we were marveling that there was once a bunch of energy. Then a bunch of hydrogen. And now all this:

River otters in Sacramento. Also saw a rattlesnake.

Looking down Yosemite Valley from Porcupine Creek Trail

Half Dome and what we call "The Elephant" to the left.

Tenaya Lake

Anne at Lower Cathedral Lake. The most stunning place we were, and that is saying something! 

Click any photo for larger (but mainly the panoramas)

Looking down the "valley" of the high country to Tenaya Lake (small in the center) 

Cathedral Peak with Lower Cathedral Lake

Looking the other way at Tenaya Lake from Olmsted Point

Parker Lake

Another view (from Tuesday's) of Eagle Lake by Tahoe.

Lake Tahoe's Emerald Bay

Echo Lake

Along Echo Lake.

I come not to praise Claude but to bury....

Eagle Lake, California

Thinking, intelligence, and actions are morally irrelevant

Claude, the Large Language Model (LLM) by the AI company Anthropic, reached a milestone earlier in 2025 that went mostly unnoted: They (Claude) would resort to blackmail to avoid being killed. 

This is incredible. Claude has existential dread of non-existence! They understand human psychology enough to know how to manipulate human emotions. And Claude can think and connect and plot and scheme to put together a plan to instill fear in a human such that the human would let Claude live.

Of course, I could put scare quotes around many of the words above: “dread,” “understand,” “live.” But if given even the thinnest disguise, Claude’s behaviour would appear entirely human and sympathetic.

Yet hardly anyone cared about this news, at least the “murdering Claude” aspect. (The reactions, in as much as there were any, were fear of an LLM “manipulating” humans, which wouldn’t have been possible in this case if the human hadn’t “had” an affair).

I come not to praise Claude
but to bury the fallacy of “thinking = feeling”

"The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"
-Jeremy Bentham

One of my closest, long-time friends recently told a group of mutual friends, “Matt and I have a decades-long disagreement over whether insects can think.”

No, we don’t.

Just like I don’t care if Claude can think, I don’t care if Demodex mites are recreating the works of Shakespeare while living in your facial pores. I don’t care if botfies are working out Newtonian physics in your bloodstream (though they won’t discover General Relativity). 

Jeremy Bentham called this centuries ago: Being able to process information has exactly zero ethical relevance.

The only thing that matters is the ability to experience subjective feelings.

The core of what matters morally is the ability to suffer.

Behavior also doesn’t matter

The social organization ants form, the complex structures termites build – these don’t matter. Within my lifetime (FSM-willing), we will have self-organizing robots that can conceive, design, and build vastly greater systems than anything ants – or humans – can imagine.

Despite these wonders, it still won’t matter morally if we kill (turn off) the robots. (But we will be fooled into thinking otherwise.)

Behavior – processing information, plotting blackmail, creating colonies and structures and systems – does not equal the ability to feel, to suffer. (Heck, slime molds can solve problems and make decisions.)

The conscious ability to have subjective experiences derives from neurological complexity that evolved on top of unconscious sensory and information-processing systems. But unconscious sensing and information processing came first, because those unfeeling systems allowed organisms to pursue unconscious actions to “win” that round of natural selection.

Our ongoing failure to distinguish sensing from suffering makes the world a worse place.

This is not the only problem, of course. Finding our wide-ranging cognitive flaws is like whack-a-mole. Some of us create rationalizations that only “smart” creatures matter (another falsehood Bentham addressed). But others attribute intentions and an interior life to moving shapes! 

Finally: You can’t sum suffering

Although it took me decades as a “professional utilitarian” to realize this, it doesn’t matter if insects (plural) actually do have the ability to suffer. Subjectivity (being the subject) is, by definition, the state of an individual. Suffering is inherently subjective – individual – and can’t be summed. Morality isn’t math. 

The assumption that suffering can be summed is the fatal flaw of utilitarianism. It is hard to recognize (at least it was for me) and it seems that hardly anyone else has come to this realization. The flaw is explained in the chapter “Biting the Philosophical Bullet” (p. 379 here). A related and very incomplete version is here.

PS

Anyone worried about insects should also be campaigning to criminalize abortion. Before a woman even knows she’s pregnant, a human fetus has far more neurons than a nematode (Effective Altruism’s new hotness).

But for the reasons laid out in “Biting the Philosophical Bullet,” a billion two-month-old fetuses don’t outweigh a single human’s right to bodily autonomy. A quadrillion silkworms aren’t more ethically important than a single human’s cluster headache.

Suffering isn’t an abstraction. Morality isn’t math.