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Pasquale Cirillo and Nassim Nicholas Taleb†
I am curious why you put the sign of the cross there. None of these people appear to be dead. (?)
I have not encouraged anyone to commit suicde, you lying piece of shit.
Do what? Commit suicide or talk about suicide?
As for the latter, the request is childish, and as for the former, I have yet to meet a person who would even pay the financial cost of living for another person.
Yet, for some reason, everybody feels entitled to judge whose life is worth living - even for total strangers. And why wouldn't you? You get to be morally superior AND you get to have higher social status AND you get the upvotes for being a nice person AND you don't have to go through the suffering AND you don't have to pay the cost.
Bravo. Well done. Thanks for the objective discussion.
The dominating distinction between our perspectives is that I don't think having kids in a warzone is an acceptable tradeoff, where you think it is.
This is probably just an intuitive disagreement about the relative harm and benefit of being born into a warzone.
I think it is clearly a very bad deal for the child, and to do it recklessly or out of selfishness in fact constitutes a form of child abuse. Of course, if you would actually rather be born into poverty or war, than not be born, you will disagree where the acceptable range lies.
We do not disagree about the rest of the argument.
His ethical guideline has nothing to do with how close humanity is to extinction.
Except I already wrote:
You can easily augment the underlying harm avoidance principle with a condition that it should not result in the extinction of intelligent life (assuming that intelligent life doesn't cause even more harm in the long run).
You don't even have to apply the principle of charity, you could just look at what I had literally written.
However, if practiced diligently, it can bring humanity to extinction in a few generations from any population size.
Nonsense. Most humans don't live in a warzone at any time now. And followed in extreme poverty, this principle would reduce local malthusian traps and probably reduce poverty; at least the suffering of children from poverty.
I know you are sincere, but you are understimating that getting rid of the unpleasantness is half the game for us depressives. Being dead objectively removes the unpleasantness, by destroying the parts of the brain that instantiate unpleasantness.
You deny this so strongly because you are offended by it, which is simply a mix of cultural programming and psychological death aversion on your part.
What you have to realize is that you are harming people by it, because this is the political foundation for the reduction in our suicide options. I would be objectively far better off if I could buy a deadly dose of barbiturates, drink it, fall asleep and then die. Society as a whole would also be objectively better off (an improved version would be one that allows me to donate my organs).
Facts don't go away because you don't like them; LessWrong is the one place where I would have expected people to understand that.
2 responses:
- It is possible that this would have been better overall.
- Even if we reject 1, humanity was no where near extinction for thousands of years now.
You can easily augment the underlying harm avoidance principle with a condition that it should not result in the extinction of intelligent life (assuming that intelligent life doesn't cause even more harm in the long run).
I only know it from SSRIs. I also know general anhedonia or perhaps hypothymia from depression.
Suicide is a reliable cure at least for the experience of it (unfortunately the best suicide options are also legally limited, plus of course it costs one's life).
Other cures, to my best knowledge, are not reliable, except for invasive stuff like literal wireheading. Related to depression, this piece by Yvain is good.
I personally wouldn't decide to have kids in a warzone...
...but it's okay if others do it? How is that different from saying, "I personally woudn't decide to abuse children..."
Is there any context outside of sudden, subjectively unlikely disaster where the quote is meaningful?
It was written by Michael Jackson. I don't think he was referring to sudden, subjectively unlikely disasters, but the personal material means of people deciding to become parents.
I think "unintended consequences" is a better analysis framework than "parasite response from the ecosystem".
It certainly sounds less cynical, unless we use strong charity and see it in the most technical way possible.
I think the most plausible use case for government-funded incentives to have extra kids is a wide consensus that a society doesn't have enough of them at the time, according to some economical or social optimum.
But even this requires a level of cynicism in seeing kids as a means to an end.
Even if we're willing to take it out of context like this, we might still consider it ethically undesirable to have kids in a time and place where military conflict or politically caused poverty is likely.
But does quantum physics really imply that food has no location and physicists don't need to eat?
I suppose it was because the original quote started with a negative framing, the assumption that the baby might not be fed.
I think both birth and death are stressful experiences that are not worth going through unless there are compensating other factors. I don't think infants have enough of those if they die before they grow up.
Also I suspect human life is generally overrated, and the positives of life are often used as an excuse to justify the suffering of others. I do not trust people to make a realistic estimate and act with genuine benevolence.
The difference is that babies suffer if they starve, but not if they don't have cryonics.
The badness of making an extra life comes from its suffering (+ negative externalities) [- positive externalities]
The state is not an omnipotent entity who can make arbitrary choices. Its institutions are made of people, and its power is affected by how legitimate it is seen to be. Private individuals can make it stronger or weaker through their political, economic choices or even by breaking the law and using physical violence.
Freedom of religion is already a constitutional right in most western democracies and it is not at all futile to insist on it when religious lobby groups try to undermine it.
If you think of yourself as a slave who has no rights nor influence against the people who comprise "the state", then you are factually wrong. But I'm sure those people are happy if you belive it, as it makes power use (or abuse) easier for them.
It means they're lying about their motivation and you give them false respect for it.
The practical reality is that they will use arguments as soldiers in a religious culture war and innocent people are going to be the victim of the practical social consequences of it.
Practical ethics implies practical memetics; if you are faced with a culture war you would do well to remember it's a war, not a benevolent debate in good faith.
You're right that the logical structure of consequentialist arguments are not inherently bad. The argument you mention is the class of argument that I find relevant, and many other people too.
But my point is that this is why we can expect endless rationalization in this form.
It is very easy to turn your argument upside down: "Allowing the state, rather than the private individual, to decide about the time and manner of the individual's death sends the wrong kind of cultural message around and makes those people who don't think logically but rather associatively more likely to violate people in other ways and other areas of life against their will, as they will not see the destruction of the informed consent principle in itself as bad, but only the mere end of a life whose span was limited anyway."
You can make the same framing for making people suffer against their will, and even murdering people if you frame it in terms of "ownership of life" (the government decides who has to live and who has to die).
The religious people who honestly say, "It's a sin", can be countered with, "That is your right to believe, but freedom of religion says you can't ban something for everyone just because you think it's a sin. If you want freedom of religion for yourself, you have to accept it for others, which means you have to try to convince people instead of coercing them."
That is the cultural foundation for a peaceful existence in a pluralistic society.
I have no doubt that this is true in some cases, but it is not true in others.
If you stage a "debate" between evolutionary scientists and creationists, give both sides equal speaking time, treat both with the same respect and social credibility signals, pretend that both are equally interested in the scientific truth, then you are doing the common good a disfavor.
Because the very framing of the debate is happening in the wrong terms. It just allows people whose true rejection is "it's in the bible" or "God said so" to pretend that they're interested in something else, such as the common good or the scientific truth.
If we had true freedom of religion, the debate about voluntary euthanasia would be over (*). Logically, it's a total no-brainer. To pretend that Catholic spokespeople give two shits about the common good, and calculate some kind of utilitarian calculus and then conclude one way or another, is total bullshit.
This is not their true rejection, and everybody knows it. To let them publicly pretend otherwise is doing the true common good a disfavor, because it allows them to implicitly attack other people's freedom of religion, without explicitly having to say, "Look, that freedom of religion thing is fine as long as everybody obeys our religious demands - but not otherwise."
Because the latter is an open attack on the Schelling point of basic human rights and implies a form of defection that they do not want the rest of society to reciprocate. They are rational, instrumentally, in lying about this and pretending otherwise, but we are irrational, instrumentally, in letting it happen.
(*) There would still be discussion about euthanasaia's legal details, but the fundementals would be obvious. Perhaps it would be illegal for voluntary members of religious organizations who decide it, but that is just another form of consent.
It's a fascinating link and nice idea, but I think it's ultimately useless.
In my experience, there is no point in "debating" religious people on topics that are obviously dominated by religious belief: They think there is an absolutely flawlessly moral invisible alpha male who has already given them the answer.
Sure, you could debate them on apologetics of theism and supernaturalism first, but this debate is pretty much dead for decades or centuries now. At least for informed people. There are no new arguments or new evidence.
In fact, this is why I don't debate religious people. Their clinging to indefensible religious beliefs is evidence they're not going to change their minds on social issuses that depend on them either. Such as the ethics of suicide and euthanasia. It's fruit of the poisonous tree.
Sure, it may look nice and not arrogant to "debate" them on these matters. But to expect anything other than a post-hoc rationalization circlejerk from them is delusional.
First, I would question if it's the most effective thing (on the margin) someone could to to maximize pleasure. If not, prioritize other things.
Second, I would question whether the suffering outweighs the pleasure in wild animals. Reasonable activities here could be research and awareness raising.
Finally, there's a level of activities many professions are already engaged in, such as maintaining and monitoring deer populations when their natural predators have been displaced by humans, or welfare-related activities in dedicated wildlife parks. Other ideas are vaccinations for some wild animals, or research into softer ways to control wild animal populations, e.g. affordable depot contraceptives. David Pearce has even suggested a welfare state for elephants. I think costs are a limiting factor here.
I personally am pessimistic that suffering causes like live predation can be outweighed by wild animal pleasure; I think it would probably be easier to make human lives better (e.g. better painkillers) and more humane (better vegan food), and then make more of them. Or just make happier domesticated animals. But I'm sure if you're looking you'll find something of value. I'd also keep an eye on Animal Ethics
I had nothing of value to add to the discussion, but I found the summaries and alternate views outlines useful.
Relatively speaking, yes. We have invented and/or improved water filtration and desalination techniques, hydroponics, synthetic pharmaceuticals, and many technologies to capture, store and use energy without photosynthesis. We even replaced horses in transportation with automobiles.
It's easy to imagine more efficient versions of many of these in the future. (I mentioned Star Trek because of its iconic production and energy technologies, especially the replicator.)
We also replaced a lot of nature, which tends to make the remaining nature more valuable, but this is relative.
Your position supports the argument that it could be a good thing -- it is inadequate for supporting the argument that it will be a good thing.
You're right; perhaps there will be e.g. more suffering than the whole thing is worth.
A "technological civilization" with enough resources can implement much better versions of all of these.
Yes, that's why I'd expect the value of nature to decrease as technology progresses. If you look to science fiction, the Star Trek Federation certainly had no need for any untouched nature for any purpose other than sentimentality.
Perhaps, except for sustaining and improving the technological civilization we have now, as well as all efforts to push against opposing values... that contains a lot of what humans do. (The rest is due to the fact that humans usually don't really maximize anything systematically.)
And as I said, there is probably a margin where nature is optimal; we want clean water, air, resilience of food production, tourism etc. anyway. But that margin is finite and it becomes smaller as technological know-how increases.
I think that precisely because natural ecosystems make possible - indeed require - very many relationships between components, they are not optimal for maximizing something we value, except for values tailored to their nature (status quo biased environmentalism, deep ecology).
They are unsuitable to maximize anything else, such as happiness, pleasure, even biodiversity. At least compared to what a technological civilization could implement, given enough dedicated resources.
As an example, take rodents, who have relatively high number of offspring but require stable populations in their niche most of the time (due to fixed carrying capacity). If you have 5 or more offspring, all capable of feeling pain, fear, starvation, thirst etc., and only 2 can survive to reproduce successfully, you have a strong prima facie argument for a suffering surplus.
It looks better, of course. The defenders of wild-animal pessimism usually point to r vs. K selection strategies, population dynamics and the relative asymmetry between peak sufferings and peak pleasures. Some of them are also negative or negative-leaning utilitarians.
But let's say you value animal pleasure and want to maximize it. Even then, there should be only a relatively small margin where untouched nature is most efficient (when it overlaps with other interests, such as political concessions to deep ecologists, ecosystem services, aesthetics and tourism etc.)
Because if someone really wanted to maximize pleasure, they would try to be more efficient at it.
If someone wants to maximize nonhuman animal pleasure, they could set up a foundation to breed the perfect pleasure animal - which could never survive in the wild - and then give it existence donations.
This is true for other values as well: Some say they value biodiversity - but none of them has suggested to set up a foundation for rapid artificial speciation + existence donations to a small number of individuals per new species. Instead they have associations of lush forests and beautiful wild megafauna in their heads.
Most humans don't actually try to maximize X, for any formal definition of X. They are scope insensitive by default, and come with a background of memes and associations that often are carried from early childhood onward.
Interesting discussion. Since I too am from Germany, I know the environmentalist culture here well. I grew up in it - including what I now think was bordering on propaganda - and in the recent years I somewhat grew apart from it.
Some random thoughts:
It was also mentioned humorously that one approach to minimize personal ressource consumption is suicide and transitively to convice others of same. The ultimate solution having no humans on the planet (a solution my 8-year old son - a friend of nature - arrived at too). This apparently being the problem when utilons/hedons are expluded.
I don't think that's it. There are two other problems:
If you care about utilons/hedons, you can't ignore wild-animal suffering. Assuming humans and arguably domesticated animals experience better lives than wild animals, and/or at different resource-per-experience-second ratios, a world without humans can contain more suffering and/or less pleasure (however, the possibility of space colonization probably dominates this question) Beware the idyllic view of nature that underlies a lot of environmentalism.
No more humans would mean the ultimate unsustainability of human culture and civilization. The question then is, what exactly it is you want to be sustainable, and to what end.
For mere resource consumption (where the prices are internalized by the consumers), most people here will probably assume The Market will take care of it. If resource X becomes rare, prices will increase and substitutes will be more attractive. This is often not reflected in German environmentalism, which tends to see capitalism as somewhat evil. Of course, this is not true of factors that are not internalized in the prices, such as climate change, but even then most people here would probably see it as a lower priority as other existential risks.
It's useful to remember that German environmentalism comes with a baggage of traditional biases.