shminux comments on Effective Altruism Through Advertising Vegetarianism? - Less Wrong

20 Post author: peter_hurford 12 June 2013 06:50PM

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Comment author: shminux 14 June 2013 09:03:52PM 3 points [-]

Have you read The Narrowing Circle?

I tried. But it's written in extreme Gwernian: well researched, but long, rambling and without a decent summary upfront. I skipped to the (also poorly written) conclusion, missing most of the arguments, and decided that it's not worth my time. The essay would be right at home as a chapter in some dissertation, though.

Leaving aside the dynamics of the Schelling point, did the rest of my reply miss the mark?

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 14 June 2013 09:51:12PM 3 points [-]

What I mostly got out of it is that there are two big ways in which the circle of things with moral worth has shrunk rather than grown throughout history: it shrunk to exclude gods, and it shrunk to exclude dead people.

Leaving aside the dynamics of the Schelling point, did the rest of my reply miss the mark?

I'm not sure what your comment was intended to be, but if it was intended to be a summary of the point I was implicitly trying to make, then it's close enough.