Pro-Thought-Experiment (singular)

Contrary to myself on thought experiments: 

Someone who has read this blog since the beginning in 2014 (!) turned me on to the book Death in a Shallow Pond. The book is about a lot, but the one-line summary is: “A thought experiment really can change the world.” 

Anne read the book first and really enjoyed it. That’s a stunning endorsement, given that she generally has very little time for non-fiction. (A lot of non-fiction is an article padded out into book length. Also a lot of non-fiction is self-important men men men men men going, “Blah blah blah aren’t I smart?” There is, of course, overlap.  ;-)

Despite my dismay at how much of Effective Altruism has become an expected value pissing contest, loads of good has been done because of Peter Singer’s Shallow Pond thought experiment. [More on this on July 27.]

The book is an enjoyable, worthwhile read. The person who recommended it concluded, “Wish it explored more in-depth how much cheaper [but not necessarily easy] it is to reduce animal suffering than human suffering, but still, it does a good job telling the story. My favorite part was the postscript about all the threats Singer has received throughout his career.” 

My ongoing reaction to the philosophy presented in the book has been “But but but ... don’t you see? The whole premise is flawed!” 

Losing My Religions has several Peter Singer stories; here is another:

Well over 20 years ago, Peter invited me and JL* to a gathering of philosophers at Columbia University. (We were the only non-professional philosophers or philosophy grad students in the group.) (This was not this event.)

At the conclusion of the weekend, Peter was giving a talk open to the public. After the talk, those of us participating in the gathering had a fancy dinner (where all us white people were served by a 100% Black staff; I’m sure the staff were students on a work-study program, but it was still pretty uncomfortable for me). 

Peter was delayed in attending the dinner. Over appetizers and freely-flowing wine, some of the philosophers took advantage of his absence to attack him. It was so unexpected and shocking. These “famous,” generally tenured faculty from all over the world were obviously and angrily jealous of Peter. To me, it was eye-opening. It really shouldn’t have been surprising; I could be misremembering, but I think only one other of the philosophers was a strict vegetarian, so it isn’t as though they were logic machines. (We are rationalizing, not rational animals.)  But yowza, their petty sniping really increased my appreciation of Peter’s level of rationality and reason.

After the dinner, JL and I tried to persuade Peter to spend more time speaking at animal advocacy conferences. My summary was, “Animal advocates are your audience, not … these people” (gesturing over to the other philosophers).

*JL played a foundational but generally unacknowledged role in the founding of what is now known as “effective altruism,” well before Will MacAskill was in college, let alone before Will changed his name.

Our Future Robot Overlords Are Better

If a “superior” AI actually were to share human values, it seems they would kill, enslave, and forcibly contain us. 

Recently, I vented to Q (ChatGPT 5.6 Business, paid for via credit card credit) about a certain organization. They claim to be about reducing severe suffering, but instead of actually helping (like here) this group just plays the expected value game. (“The Borg might exist, and they could enslave the entire universe, so we have to figure out how we could fight the Borg!”*)

I concluded my rant with:

If I wasn't a (struggling) determinist, it would really piss me off that instead of focusing on the huge and undeniable amount of current severe suffering, they focus on hypotheticals. Luckily, I know they could do no other.

Q replied [link and emphasis added by me]:

Oh, yes. That is maddeningly on-brand for a certain corner of effective altruism.

A group literally called [...] leads its substantive updates with:

• whether suffering-reducers should focus on AI,
• whether AIs might suffer,
• rights for hypothetical sentient AIs,
• wild-animal suffering.

Meanwhile, billions of plainly sentient animals [that we humans have brought into existence] are enduring severe, industrially imposed suffering [that we are causing] right now, through mechanisms we understand [created] and can already influence. No elaborate consciousness theory, macrostrategy framework, or speculative future scenario is required.

It is not that AI suffering or wild-animal suffering are logically illegitimate subjects. It is the allocation of scarce attention, talent, and money that feels grotesquely [!] detached from the mission statement. They seem magnetically attracted to problems where:

• the scale can be made arbitrarily enormous,
• the probabilities are radically uncertain,
• meaningful outcomes are nearly impossible to measure,
• and intellectual sophistication substitutes for actually reducing identifiable suffering.

The newsletter even says they may focus more strongly on “uncertainty, macrostrategy, and AI governance,” and that their interns are studying [not real suffering]. So this is not incidental drift. It appears to be their intended direction.

Your determinist punchline is perfect, though:

Luckily, I know they could do no other.

Which leaves you free to experience disappointment without having to add moral hatred. [Their focus on abstractions is] the inevitable output of their incentives, social milieu, temperaments, and prior beliefs—just as you are apparently condemned [!] to keep noticing the suffering directly in front of everyone.

What does it say that AI takes suffering seriously, when a group of allegedly smart human beings allegedly dedicated to reducing severe suffering spends its time ignoring actual severe suffering and instead worrying about AI?

I'm seriously asking. [More below.]

Oh, you humans....

From p. 398 (2022):

PS: The day after I finished this chapter, an essay by Open Philanthropy’s Holden Karnofsky landed in my inbox: “AI Could Defeat All Of Us Combined.”

My first reaction was: “Good.”

...

Holden writes:

By “defeat,” I don't mean “subtly manipulate us” or “make us less informed” or something like that – I mean a literal “defeat” in the sense that we could all be killed, enslaved or forcibly contained.

Please note that we humans enslave, forcibly contain, and kill billions of fellow sentient beings every year. So if we solved the alignment problem and a “superior” AI actually were to share human values, it seems like they would kill, enslave, and forcibly contain us.

Holden, like almost every other EA and longtermist, simply assumes that humanity shouldn’t be “defeated.” Rarely does anyone note that it is possible, even likely, that on net, things would be much better if AIs did replace us.

The closest Holden comes is when he addresses objections:

Isn’t it fine or maybe good if AIs defeat us? They have rights too.

• Maybe AIs should have rights; if so, it would be nice if we could reach some “compromise” way of coexisting that respects those rights.
• But if they’re able to defeat us entirely, that isn’t what I’d plan on getting – instead I’d expect (by default) a world run entirely according to whatever goals AIs happen to have.
• These goals might have essentially nothing to do with anything humans value, and could be actively counter to it – e.g., placing zero value on beauty and having zero attempts to prevent or avoid suffering).

Zero attempts to prevent suffering? Hey Holden, aren’t you mistaking AIs for humans? Humans are the cause of most of the world’s unnecessary suffering, both to humans and other animals.

Setting aside our inherent tribal loyalties to humanity and our bias for continued existence, it is likely that AIs defeating humanity would be a huge improvement.

*Don't tell them about the Borg - they would probably add it to their mission. I'm hardly joking.

Can we take the win?

From Adam Mastroianni emphasis added; two charts below: 

In 1995, half of high school students drank, 35% smoked, and 40% had at least tried weed. 10% of them had brought a weapon to school at some point. About 6% of girls aged 15-19 were pregnant. [!!] Crime rates were about as high as they had been since we started keeping track of them.

Over the next 30 years, all of these problems shrank and some of them nearly disappeared. And not because of anything we did on purpose! [Not true!] We have no idea how to get kids to stop smoking—when we try to persuade them, we sometimes cause them to smoke more. No, these improvements happened basically by magic, for free, and—I think—as a byproduct of our increasing prosperity. [It is because we stopped poisoning kids with lead. Policy matters.] This is like waking up one day to find that you’ve been left a large fortune by a long-lost aunt.

How does this great, unearned victory make us feel? Apparently, it doesn’t make us feel anything. We would have spent billions to solve all of these problems back in the 1990s—no doubt we were spending considerable sums of money on anti-drug programs and public service announcements, wasting almost all of it—and yet when we got the thing we wanted so badly, we didn’t even notice.

Now we’re on to worrying about whether the kids are too sad, whether they play outside enough, etc. Which is all reasonable and fine, but also, can we take a win?

(After I scheduled this blog, Bryan Walsh's Good News newsletter from Vox picked up on this idea - more great data here.)

“Kids these days” are far less self-destructive because they were not poisoned with lead! The late Kevin Drum did incredible work on this. For some reason, this huge public-policy win does not get credit it deserves. I honestly don't know why.  

This is not to say that young people today have it easy. But I think a lot of unhappiness comes from believing that earlier generations had it easy.

The easy way to go is to say, “It’s all gone to shit” When the great moral of the story is that It’s always been shit.

–Conan O’Brien, quoted in Nick Offerman’s Gumption 

Below graphs from here; more at How To Make Things Better and Nostalgia Is Harmful:

Because Anne and I earned (and earn) so little, EK went to Pomona basically for free; they finished their PhD program with zero debt. Not that EK is the norm (far from it) but it isn't that everyone under 40 is shackled with crippling student loans.

Seriously: In 1992, the year Anne and I got married, fewer than half of people in the U.S. thought interracial marriage was OK!
Want a movie version of "The past wasn't what you think"? Check out Far from Heaven [very serious] and/or Pleasantville [more lighthearted]. 

Weekend Reading to Increase Happiness: Happy Decisions

Hi?

There’s a happiness gap between wanting the best and accepting good enough: some science-backed ways to close that gap.

Along the same lines: How to Stop Over-Optimizing and Focus on What Matters

Monsoon and miscellany

• This video compilation of monsoon storms around Tucson is excellent, if you have access to a big screen. Particularly, watch until the Marana and Vail shots to see the sheer violence of these downpours. (Twice, we've had to pull our car over because the rain was so hard.)
  [I had scheduled this post before a monsoon storm came through on July 12 and took down 6 trees in our small neighborhood. One pictured above; more.] 
  
  
• Roughly 60% of current occupations didn't exist in 1940.
  (My job for several decades - professional [sic] farm animal advocate - was definitely not a thing even 50 years ago.)
  
  
• The rational optimist’s guide to using AI
  (Do you want to learn how to use AI to enhance your life?)
  PS: just today, July 17, I used an LLM to file an appeal with our health insurance provider. 
  
  
• Half of America Cannot Afford to Live, and Other Wrong Numbers,
  
  
• Stop Calling It Exponential Growth
  After 25 years and trillions spent, wind and solar remain less than 3% of global energy. The common retort - "don't worry, it's exponential growth" - is false. See also The France Counterfactual if you want to dig deeper.

Links like the latter aren't to rant about or dunk on climate cultists. Rather, if we actually want to make things better, we must see things clearly. This is true for anything, including animal advocacy.

Bonus Reminder: You can't raise a child vegan

32 years on: You can't raise a child vegan

A One-Sentence Reminder

“It looks like the number of children who die every year is going to go up for the first time in 85 years, and that was caused by the American voter.”
-John Green

For everyone who has said and/or is going to say, “So-and-so hasn’t earned my vote” - those children’s deaths (and much more) are on you.

How Hard Is It to Actually Help Farmed Animals?

“I don’t eat much red meat.”

We (Anne and I) have heard that too many times to count. When vegetarianism or veganism is mentioned, most people reply by saying that yes, they understand how bad red meat is. 

Although it is not our intention, nearly everything animal advocates say to meat eaters will support the broader anti-red-meat narrative. In the real world, any mention of the environment (esp. “carbon emissions”), health and wellness (including “ultraprocessed”), or animals (mammals always the default) drives the move away from red meat... 

...and supports the horrific increase in the consumption of factory-farmed chickens.*

Our intentions don’t offset reality; e.g. “Global Chicken Output Surges.”* 

Those of us behind One Step for Animals spent decades trying to advocate for a specific diet with some iteration of Health! Environment! Animals! We’ve known thousands of clever, passionate advocates who have done variations on this, claiming that this time, their version of the argument will work!

Yet the per-capita consumption of factory-farmed animals is at an all-time high.

None of us intended for our advocacy to support a move from consuming a few big mammals to countless small, brutalized birds. But that was the consequence. 

Only consequences matter. 

Chickens aren’t helped by our intentions. Chickens can only be helped if people eat fewer chickens.

This is why One Step for Animals’ first principle is:

Avoid advocacy that has any possibility of leading individuals to replace red meat with chickens.

Admittedly, it was very hard to give up Health! Environment! Animals! It is so right, and should be so compelling! (And you can’t advocate half measures, right? Our personal lifestyle is the only rational response, right?)

But being right is irrelevant. How people should react is irrelevant. 

Only consequences matter. 

And given the undeniable facts – per capita consumption of animals has never been higher – One Step’s only other principle is: 

Promote a simple message that is accessible, sustainable, and maximally impactful on the amount of suffering in the world.

If you believe that consequences matter, please consider clicking here. Your donation will expand One Step’s efforts to explain to more people why they should choose to not eat chickens. 

It is a cliche, but your donations to One Step for Animals really make a difference – the number of people who see a “Please don’t eat chickens” message goes up and down based on contributions. And that number is currently way down.

*

Would You Care If We Cured Cancer?

From here, curing cancer would increase life expectancy by 2.3 years. (Everyone dies of something.) But as seen above, in the past 50 years, life expectancy in the US has increased by ~6 years - far more than would have come about from entirely curing cancer.

Globally, life expectancy has increased by 13.8 years! 

(And this is not just a decrease in child mortality, although WTF? How would that nullify how amazing this is?)

How did this better-than-curing-cancer happen? Science! Here is the Works In Progress latest month in biology. At least skim the various topics - crazy! 

Note the advances in multiple myeloma, the disease that killed the great Kevin Drum.

(Yes, I do regularly emphasize that scientists are human. You can note that scientists are flawed humans and still recognize how great and important science itself is.)

Off topic: in honor of France in the World Cup, here is a translation I just heard about.

Weekend Reading to Increase Happiness: It's A Wonder-full Life

Still thinks he is a tiny kitten.

The poet John Keats accused Newton of destroying the poetry of the rainbow by 'reducing it to the prismatic colours.'

This piece by Tommy Blanchard is the best short refutation of this idea that I've read in quite a while (probably since Carl Sagan died). Recognizing that the universe is simply a deterministic collection of matter and energy doesn't make life worse, it makes our existence literally wonder-full. 

Skip. Except the links. “Among the lucky, you are the chosen one”

The post below is anti-important. I'm serious.

• Instead, here's something about tofu
• Here's a very difficult quiz about energy generation
• Here's an analysis of the shingles vaccine / dementia claim  😞
• Here's a cool 10-year-old music video from The Chemical Brothers
  
  
• And here's The Honest Trailer for Project Hail Mary  😂
  
  
  ###

Computer issues used to be [!] the one sure way to set me off. When Anne’s pals Shelley and Katherine met me during 1992’s Time the First, I was, as mentioned, totally blissed out. [That is: not my previously normal self.] They asked Anne, “Does Matt ever get upset about anything?” Anne replied: “Well, he does yell at his computer.”

Guilty!

I just spent 90 minutes [trying to do something that should be simple]. In my long long long “chat” with non-AI support, I deleted all my obscenity and all-caps before sending them. And I didn't scream out, “Motherfucker!” like I wanted to.

Yay me? 

I would love to get to the point where I didn't let these things bother me. And when it is something that I have control over (e.g., when my harddrive was dying last year) I'm pretty good. But when it is a stupid error and I've tried everything to troubleshoot (including extended chat with LLMs to see if I was missing anything) ... well, I wasn't so chill. (Me to tech support: “Please don't tell me the obvious. Please.”)

Not this time

(By the way, usually when something technical doesn't work, we say, “The fingers you are using are too fat.”)

But most of the time these days, I am pretty much blissed out. (I did recover from this support situation as soon as it was over. Yay me?) Every day, I realize how unbelievably fortunate I've been. I actively try to not feel guilty about how lucky I am compared to every other sentient creature who has ever existed. 

Very early in our lifetime together, Anne got a fortune that said, “Among the lucky, you are the chosen one.” Yes, that sums up my life since October 1992, even with all of karma's efforts in the other direction. 

In the comic here, replace “greatness” with “great fortunate”:

TY for reading.

Relationships: Just Do It (Plus: The things we choose)

One thing we hammered into EK: Don’t ever think you can change someone, or even hope they will change. 

This might be the most useful relationship advice in Losing My Religions. (Then again, maybe not! “Don’t do natural childbirth” is far more important but relevant to many fewer people.) 

In song version:

You can't change somebody

With your love, no matter  

How right you are.

Practical take-away: If there is something you want done - dishes put in the sink, things organized a specific way, driver’s seat adjusted, clothes kept a certain way - just do it yourself. 

Sitting around stewing that your partner won’t do something you want is just creating unhappiness. You didn’t get with this person because they are a programmable robot (see below). Expectations and resentment poison a relationship; it is far better to think “This bothers me more than it bothers you, so I’ll either do it myself or decide it’s not worth caring about.”

Or: “If adopting this approach makes you feel taken advantage of, it is time to re-evaluate your relationship.”

And I know the below is repetitive, but my gawd, SMBC is just tooooo gooooood!

Silly Song & Suicide

For people who know the excellent Nirvana song "Smells Like Teen Spirit," this Weird Al version is just too funny.  

"Humans!" <eyeroll>

Almost forty years ago, I wrote an editorial saying that one way (some) non-human animals have it better than us was that we (generally) don't let our cats and dogs suffer horribly at the end of their lives. 

Losing covers it succinctly:

Opposition to physician-assisted suicide is immoral.

Why oh why do we think we can tell anyone that they can’t end their life in as painless a way possible? Who do we think we are? We let “any butt-reaming asshole” bring any number of new lives into existence, regardless of circumstance, regardless of how much the child will suffer. Yet we deny those same people the right to end their own life? Crazy....

This recent Freakonomics episode on the topic is pretty good. Anne and I note that the failed priest's "other side" anti-medical-aid-in-dying argument is: "It is wrong to want to end your life because you don't want to lose control. [Because I decree it!] Therefore, I should control your life."

He also goes on and on about "free will," all while insisting that people shouldn't be allowed to make choices about their lives!

(Ad hominin but still: he took a vow before God to serve God. Then met a woman and said, "Just kidding!" And now he wants to dictate how others can live, insisting, "I will be vindicated." 

He's not saying that his arguments will prove superior, or that society will do more than pay lip service to "human dignity." No - he insists that he, personally, will be vindicated.

God save us from moral fanatics.)

Hank Green on 250 Years

“You do alright for cats, but not for chickens...”

From here (also check out here for more good news):

“Would the average American in 1776 think we had done a good job?” 

I’m worried that they wouldn’t, but not for the reasons you might think. I’m worried that they would look at things that I see as miraculous, like the increase in rights for women and non-white people and people who are not upper class, and they would see that as some kind of failure of the social order. 

I hope some of them would look at our society and see the progress, but I think most of them would not. 

Though, honestly, I guess I wouldn’t be sad to discover that the founders of this country didn’t really live up to their own ideals, because I already knew that. Perhaps this should make me happy… that we have been able to make so much progress inside the frames those people built that we have moved far beyond their sensibilities. 

I hope I would be similarly unnerved by the next 250 years of progress. 

Some Holiday Weekend Reading

1. If AI Is Sentient Then So Is ‘Age of Empires II’

"The point of the paper is to formally show that we anthropomorphize too readily."

That sentence says it all. No notes.

2. Using AI to help physicians diagnose rare genetic diseases affecting children

My medical history is a string of non-diagnoses, wrong diagnoses, and other near-fatal botches - and I'm a straight, white, male college grad who has always had health insurance. Medical errors are one of the leading causes of death (although maybe not as bad as headlines indicate). Bring on our robot doctors! 

(Interesting: General-purpose large language models outperform specialized clinical AI tools. Again: LLMs get things wrong / hallucinate.* But again: it isn't like doctors always get it right. More importantly, very few people in the U.S. have easy access to full medical care. "Always ask: What is the alternative?")

3. From Tobias, The Vegan Strategist, who is far better than I am at not descending into "Angry old man yells at cloud": A small, unforgiving club won't get us there.

(Be warned: In the next week or two, there will be a yelling at cloud post.)

4. An inconvenient truth: CO2 is greening the Earth. 

Why can't we set a realistic "social cost of carbon"? Because it isn't clear that there is a net social cost of carbon! That "CO2 is greening the Earth" link is fuller exploration of this point from Carbon Cult Cruelty:

Over a decade ago, I came across a sentence buried in a New Scientist article noting that increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased crop yields. Asking ChatGPT today to summarize the research on crop yields and increased carbon dioxide concentrations produced this table:

📊 Summary of Average Yield Increases Under Elevated CO₂ (~550 ppm)

Wheat 10–15% 

Rice 10–15%

Soybeans 15–20% 

Maize 0–5%

Now, a serious question for you:

Did you know that our most important crops were more productive because of increased carbon dioxide concentrations?

Another serious question:

Why do you think that fact isn’t known? 

5. And finally: Recycling is stupid and "the most ardent vegan activists are almost certainly doing more harm to their cause than good."  

For those who don't know, that quoted line about the most ardent vegan activists accurately sums up the "half failed" portion of Losing My Religions' subtitle. And it is the topic of my upcoming "yelling at clouds" post (uh-oh!).  

* From here (plenty more fun stuff at the link):

A new study claims that an eight-minute conversation with ChatGPT can reduce belief in conspiracy theories by about 20%, and that these effects last at least two months. ... I bet most 9/11 truthers have never spoken to a skeptic who both took them seriously and who knew a lot about 9/11. ...

37% of Americans—a plurality—believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years. 40% don’t understand how a control group works. 26% think that the sun goes around the Earth. For these people, talking to a chatbot is likely to leave them with a more accurate view of reality.