RichardKennaway comments on Open thread, 11-17 August 2014 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: David_Gerard 11 August 2014 10:12AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (268)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Username 11 August 2014 01:33:45PM 2 points [-]

My brain spontaneously generated an argument for why killing all humans might be the best way to satisfy my values. As far as I know it's original; at any rate, I don't recall seeing it before. I don't think it actually works, and I'm not going to post it on the public internet. I'm happy to just never speak of it again, but is there something else I should do?

Comment author: RichardKennaway 11 August 2014 02:27:40PM 13 points [-]

is there something else I should do?

Find out how your brain went wrong, with a view to not going so wrong again.

Comment author: zzrafz 11 August 2014 04:20:42PM 0 points [-]

Playing devil's advocate here, the original poster is not that wrong. Ask any other living species on Earth and they will say their life would be better without humans around.

Comment author: Nectanebo 11 August 2014 05:26:11PM *  9 points [-]

Apart from the fact that they wouldn't say anything (because generally animals can't speak our languages ;)), nature can be pretty bloody brutal. There are plenty of situations in which our species' existence has made the lives of other animals much better than they would otherwise be. I'm thinking of veterinary clinics that often perform work on wild animals, pets that don't have to be worried about predation, that kind of thing. Also I think there are probably a lot of species that have done alright for themselves since humans showed up, animals like crows and the equivalents in their niche around the world seem to do quite well in urban environments.

As someone who cares about animal suffering, is sympathetic to vegetarianism and veganism, and even somewhat sympathetic to more radical ideas like eradicating the world's predators, I think that humanity represents a very real possibility to decrease suffering including animal suffering in the world, especially as we grow in our ability to shape the world in the way we choose. Certainly, I think that humanity's existence provides real hope in this direction, remembering that the alternative is for animals to continue to suffer on nature's whims perhaps indefinitely, rather than ours perhaps temporarily.

Comment author: zzrafz 11 August 2014 06:31:37PM 0 points [-]

Never thought of it this way. Guess in the long term it makes sense. So far, though...

Comment author: Lumifer 11 August 2014 04:44:25PM 7 points [-]

Ask any other living species on Earth and they will say their life would be better without humans around.

Let's ask a cockroach, a tapeworm, and a decorative-breed dog :-)

Comment author: DanielLC 11 August 2014 09:45:09PM 1 point [-]

Humans are leading to the extinction of many species. Given the sorts of things that happen to them in the wild, this may be an improvement.

This is too distant from the original argument to be an argument for it. I'm just playing devil's advocate recursively.