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Rain comments on Open Thread: July 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong
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Day-to-day question:
I live in a ground floor apartment with a sunken entryway. Behind my fairly large apartment building is a small wooded area including a pond and a park. During the spring and summer, oftentimes (~1 per 2 weeks) a frog will hop down the entryway at night and hop around on the dusty concrete until dying of dehydration. I occasionally notice them in the morning as I'm leaving for work, and have taken various actions depending on my feelings at the time and the circumstances of the moment.
What would you do, why, and how long would you keep doing it?
How often do you find frogs in the stairwell? Could it make sense to carry something (a plastic bag?) to pick up the frog with so that you don't get slime on your hands?
If it were me, I think I'd go with plastic bag or other hand cover, possibly have room temperature water with me (probably good enough for frogs, and I'm willing to drink the stuff), and put the frog on the lawn unless I'm in the mood for a bit of a walk and seeing the woods.
I have no doubt that I would habitually wonder whether there are weird events in people's lives which are the result of interventions by incomprehensibly powerful beings.
2: I would put the frog in the grass. Warm fuzzies are a great way to start the day, and it only costs 30 seconds.
If you're truly concerned about the well-being of frogs, you might want to do more. You'd also want to ask yourself what you're doing to help frogs everywhere. The fact that the frog ended up on your doorstep doesn't make you extra responsible for the frog; it merely provides you with an opportunity to help.
Also, wash your hands before eating.
The goal of helping frogs is to gain fuzzies, not utilons. Thinking about all the frogs that you don't have the opportunity to help would mean losing those fuzzies.
There's no utility in saving (animal) life? Or is that only for this particular instance?
Edit 20-Jun-2014: Frogs saved since my original post: 21.5. Frogs I've failed to save: 23.5.
I don't consider frogs to be objects of moral worth.
Why not?
Seconded, and how do you (Eliezer) rate other creatures on the Great Chain of Being?
Are there any possible facts that would make you consider frogs objects of moral worth if you found out they were true?
(Edited for clarity.)
"Frogs have subjective experience" is the biggy, there's a number of other things I already know myself to be confused about which impact on that, and so I don't know exactly what I should be looking for in the frog that would make me think it had a sense of its own existence. Certainly there are any number of news items I could receive about the frog's mental abilities, brain complexity, type of algorithmic processing, ability to reflect on its own thought processes, etcetera, which would make me think it was more likely that the frog was what a non-confused person of myself would regard as fulfilling the predicate I currently call "capable of experiencing pain", as opposed to being a more complicated version of neural network reinforcement-learning algorithms that I have no qualms about running on a computer.
A simple example would be if frogs could recognize dots painted on them when seeing themselves in mirrors, or if frogs showed signs of being able to learn very simple grammar like "jump blue box". (If all human beings were being cryonically suspended I would start agitating for the chimpanzees.)
I am very surprised that you suggest that "having subjective experience" is a yes/no thing. I thought it is consensus opinion here that it is not. I am not sure about others on LW, but I would even go three steps further: it is not even a strict ordering of things. It is not even a partial ordering of things. I believe it can be only defined in the context of an Observer and an Object, where Observer gives some amount of weight to the theory that Object's subjective experience is similar to Observer's own.
Links? I'd be interested in seeing what people on LW thought about this, if it's been discussed before. I can understand the yes/no position, or the idea that there's a blurry line somewhere between thermostats and humans, but I don't understand what you mean about the Observer and Object. The Observer in your example has subjective experience?
I like the way you phrased your concern for "subjective experience" -- those are the types of characteristics I care about as well.
But I'm curious: What does ability to learn simple grammar have to do with subjective experience?
-- David Pearce via Facebook
I'm surprised. Do you mean you wouldn't trade off a dust speck in your eye (in some post-singularity future where x-risk is settled one way or another) to avert the torture of a billion frogs, or of some noticeable portion of all frogs? If we plotted your attitudes to progressively more intelligent entities, where's the discontinuity or discontinuities?
Hopefully he still thinks there's a small probability of frogs being able to experience pain, so that the expected suffering of frog torture would be hugely greater than a dust speck.
You'd need to change that to 10^6 specks and 10^15 frogs or something, because emotional reaction to choosing to kill the frogs is also part of the consequences of the decision, and this particular consequence might have moral value that outweighs one speck.
Your emotional reaction to a decision about human lives is irrelevant, the lives in question hold most of the moral worth, while with a decision to kill billions of cockroaches (to be safe from the question of moral worth of frogs), the lives of the cockroaches are irrelevant, while your emotional reaction holds most of moral worth.
I'm not so sure. I'm no expert on the subject, but I suspect cockroaches may have moderately rich emotional lives.
Depends. Would that make it harder to get frog legs?
Would you save a stranded frog, though?
Yeah, trying to save the world does that to you.
ETA (May 2012): wow, I can't understand what prompted me to write a comment like this. Sorry.
Axiom: The world is worth saving.
Fact: Frogs are part of the world.
Inference: Frogs are worth saving in proportion to their measure and effect on the world.
Query: Is life worth living if all you do is save more of it?
I don't know. I'm not Eliezer. I'd save the frogs because it's fun, not because of some theory.
As a matter of practical human psychology, no. People cannot just give and give and get nothing back from it but self-generated warm fuzzies, a score kept in your head by rules of your own that no-one else knows or cares about. You can do some of that, but if that's all you do, you just get drained and burned out.
Three does not follow from 1. It doesn't follow that the world is more likely to be saved if I save frogs. It also doesn't follow that saving frogs is the most efficient use of my time if I'm going to spend time saving the world. I could for example use that time to help reduce existential risk factors for everyone, which would happen to incidentally reduce the risk to frogs.
I find it difficult to explain, but know that I disagree with you. The world is worth saving precisely because of the components that make it up, including frogs. Three does follow from 1, unless you have a (fairly large) list of properties or objects in the world that you've deemed out of scope (not worth saving independently of the entire world). Do you have such a list, even implicitly? I might agree that frogs are out of scope, as that was one component of my motivation for posting this thread.
And stating that there are "more efficient" ways of saving frogs than directly saving frogs does not refute the initial inference that frogs are worth saving in proportion to their measure and effect on the world. Perhaps you are really saying "their proportion and measure is low enough as to make it not worth the time to stoop and pick them up"? Which I might also agree with.
But in my latest query, I was trying to point out that "a safe Singularity is a more efficient means of achieving goal X" or "a well thought out existential risk reduction project is a more efficient means of saving Y" can be used as a fully general counterargument, and I was wondering if people really believe they trump all other actions one might take.
I'm surprised by Eliezer's stance. At the very least, it seems the pain endured by the frogs is terrible, no? For just one reference on the subject, see, e.g., KL Machin, "Amphibian pain and analgesia," Journal of Zoo and Wildlife Medicine, 1999.
Rain, your dilemma reminds me of my own struggles regarding saving worms in the rain. While stepping on individual worms to put them out of their misery is arguably not the most efficient means to prevent worm suffering, as a practical matter, I think it's probably an activity worth doing, because it builds the psychological habit of exerting effort to break from one's routine of personal comfort and self-maintenance in order to reduce the pain of other creatures. It's easy to say, "Oh, that's not the most cost-effective use of my time," but it can become too easy to say that all the time to the extent that one never ends up doing anything. Once you start doing something to help, and get in the habit of expending some effort to reduce suffering, it may actually be easier psychologically to take the efficiency of your work to the next level. ("If saving worms is good, then working toward technology to help all kinds of suffering wild animals is even better. So let me do that instead.")
The above point applies primarily to those who find themselves devoting less effort to charitable projects than they could. For people who already come close to burning themselves out by their dedication to efficient causes, taking on additional burdens to reduce just a bit more suffering is probably not a good idea.
Maybe so, but the question is why we should care.
If only for the cheap signaling value.
My point was that the action may have psychological value for oneself, as a way of getting in the habit of taking concrete steps to reduce suffering -- habits that can grow into more efficient strategies later on. One could call this "signaling to oneself," I suppose, but my point was that it might have value in the absence of being seen by others. (This is over and above the value to the worm itself, which is surely not unimportant.)
What about dogs?
Once per two weeks? I would go with 1+3 for maximum fuzzies. If the frog is alive, that is.
Have you collected any data on how often the frog would find its own way out if left alone? Setting up an experiment that could reliably distinguish this from it being eaten by a bird or moved by another passing human might be tricky.
It is impossible for the frogs to escape from the stairwell without human intervention. The stairs are fairly high and only slabs of concrete with air below them. The most I've seen a frog succeed at is making it halfway underneath the door to the maintenance area also located in the stairwell. I have never observed another human helping a frog.
From my memory (not the best experimental apparatus, but it is what I have), the ratio of frog corpses after work to live, unrescued frogs in the morning has thus far been 1:1.
Is there any possibility of constructing some kind of frog barrier at the top of the stairwell or amphibian escape ramp (PVC pipe?) or does the layout of the public space make that impractical? My preference would be for an engineering solution if I hypothetically valued frog survival highly. A web-cam activated frog elevator would be entertaining but probably overkill.
Of course this may not be optimal if the warm-fuzzies from individual frog-assisting episodes are of greater expected utility than automated out-of-sight out-of-mind frog moving machinery.
I think the warm-fuzzies from an engineering solution could be quite significant.
Throughout the day, if I had encountered a live or dead frog in my stairwell, my mind might return to the subject of frogs caught in stairwells several times. If I had saved the frog by hand, I would feel some satisfaction (tinged with some cynicism, see here) but also anxiety that I could not always be there for every frog. With the engineering solution, I would feel proud about human ingenuity and happy about all the potential frogs I could be saving any moment. Lots and lots of warm fuzzies.
I would not be able to alter the stairwell in such a fashion. This is a commercial apartment complex with many other people living in the building. The mailboxes are also in this bottom-level stairwell, meaning it gets quite a bit of traffic aside from myself. I reiterate I have never seen another person help a frog, and the ratio has always been 1:1.
Other buildings in the apartment complex apparently also have this problem, as I asked someone who lived in another building if they'd ever seen a dead frog, and they said yes, on occasion, they see them when getting the mail. I did not ask if they saw any live frogs. There are at least 4 identical stairwells per building, and at least 6 buildings adjacent to a pond. This adds to my feelings of "this problem is too big for me."
When I was a young child my dad was building an extension on our house. He dug a deep trench for the foundations and one morning I came down to find what my hazy memory suggests were thousands of baby frogs from a nearby lake. I spent some time ferrying buckets of tiny frogs from the trench to the top of our driveway in a bid to save them from their fate.
The following morning on the way to school I passed thousands of flat baby frogs on the road. I believe this early lesson may have inured me to the starkly beautiful viciousness of nature.
How wide is the entrance to the stairwell? Could you add a ramp at the sides so the frogs have a chance of getting up without inconveniencing the other people? It would also enable people with bikes to wheel them in easier (if any of the residents store bikes in their flats).
Is there any group/person who represents the views of the residents of the building(s)? Perhaps write a letter to them with the best solution to the problem you think of and let them sort it out?
Otherwise I would probably devise some form of frog capture device, so I could quickly and cleanly remove frogs (alive or dead). Some form of hinged box controlled by a line on a pole.
Edit: Err, read the frequency. Once every 2 weeks doesn't justify taking a tool with you, Probably just take some gloves and rescue the frogs.