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Blueberry comments on My Childhood Death Spiral - Less Wrong
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Comments (106)
What will the cloned cow muscle cells think about the issue?
edit: I think you guys here over-focus on rational decision making and forget that what sets us apart from animals, in terms of intelligence, is our ability to invent solutions and solve problems. Including the problems like 'how to have a steak without killing a cow'. It's just that we as species are barely capable of invention, and so it takes us a great time to get there. There's no doubt that killing cows like we do now will be outlawed after we find another way to have the steak.
No doubt at all? I'd put money on this being wrong. Why would it be outlawed?
I'm not sure that's the relevant problem. The more important problem is "how can we get more and better steaks cheaper?"
There are various laws on treatment of animals already. Ineffective and poorly adhered to, but there are.
Yet more important problem is how we make the most profit. Once there's notable grown-in-a-vat steak industry, you can be sure that the ethics of killing cows will be explained to you via fairly effective advertising. Especially if it costs somewhat more and consequently brings better income for same % markup.
I don't want to eat anything steaklike unless it came from a real, mooing, cow. I don't care how it's killed.
I'm worried I'm overestimating my resistance to advertising, so I'm hereby precommitting to this in writing.
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Precommiting is useful in many situations, one being where you want to make sure you do something in the future when you know something might change your mind. In Cialdini's "Influence," for instance, he discusses how saying in public "I am not going to smoke another cigarette" is helpful in quitting smoking.
The whole point is that I want to remove that freedom. I don't want the option of changing my mind.
Another classic example is the general who burned his ships upon landing so there would be no option to retreat, to make his soldiers fight harder.
I think you overestimate how much you'll care about this post in few years.
On top of this - see, you are acting in a mildly self destructive manner. The vat grown steak can be considerably safer, or taste better, but you pre-commit anyway without even tasting it. Clearly this pre-commitment not to maximize the utility in the future, is a net expected loss of utility.
That's the issue. Evil is generally self destructive, the more evil, the more self destructive it is. I believe that's in part because it is hard to define self in such a way that the evil is only hurting the others like you but not self, future self, parts of self, etc. That's just not easy to define, and not easy to process. Take extreme example, psychopaths. They are very self destructive. They do things on spur of the moment at expense of their future selves - perfectly rational selfish action as the future selves are to some extent different people - but not effective for an agent. There is not much more reason to care about future yourself, than to care about anyone else.
Why?