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I'm not certain I understand. Are you saying that fewer species will go extinct if people eat meat? Or are you agreeing that being veg is the best way to preserve biodiversity, but that you don't care about biodiversity?
I don't particularly care about biodiversity, except if it offers some benefit to people. I suppose it might offer opportunities for increasing knowledge/understanding of biology/chemistry. Why do other people care about it?
You're right it might have been good to answer these in the core essay.
Present Triviality. Becoming a vegetarian is at least a minor inconvenience...
I disagree that being a vegetarian is an inconvenience. I haven't found my social activities restricted in any non-trivial way and being healthy has been just as easy/hard as when eating meat. It does not drain my attention from other EA activities.
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Future Triviality. [...] we should invest everything we have into making it as likely as possible that humans and non-humans will thrive in the distant future
I agree with this in principle, but again don't think vegetarianism is a stop from that. Certainly removing factory farming is a small win compared to successful star colonization, but I don't think there's much we can do now to ensure successful colonization, while there is stuff we can do now to ensure factory farming elimination.
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Experiential Suffering Needn't Correlate With Damage-Avoiding or Damage-Signaling Behavior.
It need not, which is what makes consciousness thorny. I don't think there is a tidy resolution to this problem. We'll have to take our best guess, and that involves thinking nonhuman animals suffer. We'd probably even want to err on the safe side, which would increase our consideration toward nonhuman animals. It would also be consistent with an Ocham's razor approach.
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Something About Sapience Is What Makes Suffering Bad.
This doesn't feature among my ethical framework, at least. I don't know how this intuitively works for other people. I also don't think there's much I can say about it.
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Aren't You Just Anthropomorphizing Non-Humans? [...] But this isn't evidence that the thing empathized with is actually conscious.
It's not. But there's other considerations and lines of evidence, so my worry that we're just anthropomorphizing is present, but rather low.
I don't think there's much we can do now to ensure successful colonization
Existential risk reduction charities?
In response to
comment
by
on
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 25, chapter 96
True Patronus couldn't look like a snake.
I see no justification for that statement. Perhaps True Patronuses can't take the form of an animal, but that says nothing about what they can look like.
Would a sentient snake wizard say a True Patronus can't look like an ape?
In response to
comment
by
on
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 25, chapter 96
Being a transhumanist, and being good at the kind of mental gymnastics that allowed him to do partial transfiguration, Harry might be able to change his Patronus into any form he likes if he tries hard enough. We know mental stuff can change Patronuses in canon: Tonks' Patronus changed due to her feelings for Lupin, though she didn't do it on purpose.
The episodic nature of this story is wearing on me a bit. I'm not talking about wanting to know what happens and having to wait for that knowledge to be doled out bit by bit. That's pretty much fine. It's the feeling that there's a grand overarching plot that's being distracted from by Plots of the Month. Even if the PotM do contribute to the overall plot--and they probably do--it feels like they do so in a rather meandering, patchwork way. Where's my beloved "use science to figure out the nature of magic, and use that to cure death for everyone" plotline? Will we finally get back to it now that Hermione's dead?
It strikes me as a little awful to only care about bad people inasmuch as they're likely to become good people. Maybe I've been perverted by my Catholic upbringing, but I was taught to love everyone, including the sinners, including the people you'd never want to hang out with. This appeals to me in part because I sin and people don't want to hang out with me, and yet I want to be loved regardless.
It's possible that I am the weird one here, but shows with complex but evil characters such as Breaking Bad do seem largely popular. There is a large current in modern adult TV of these sorts of villainous antagonists, and I think it's more than just false sophistication. I think it's people with the courage to see the dark parts of themselves reflected in fictional characters.
Yes, shows like that are very popular, and I'm getting really sick of it. I don't understand it, but I don't really think that it's false sophistication. Or courageous self-examination.
Well, he's saying that. I don't know which part of this is the part you're having trouble with.
I was confused by the way he was using the term "non-determinism". Then I read this:
It's important to understand that computer scientists use the term "nondeterministic" differently from how it's typically used in other sciences. A nondeterministic TM is actually deterministic in the physics sense
-Theoretical Computer Science Stack Exchange
Assuming that person was correct, then it seems like Aaronson is responding to an argument that uses the physics sense of "non-determined", but replying with the CS sense--which I'm thinking makes a difference in this case. But that's just what it seems like to me--I must be misunderstanding something (probably a lot of things).
In response to
Open Thread, June 2-15, 2013
I'd really like it if someone could explain to me what Aaronson is saying here:
I've often heard the argument which says that not only is there no free will, but the very concept of free will is incoherent. Why? Because either our actions are determined by something, or else they're not determined by anything, in which case they're random. In neither case can we ascribe them to "free will."
For me, the glaring fallacy in the argument lies in the implication Not Determined ⇒ Random. If that was correct, then we couldn't have complexity classes like NP---we could only have BPP. The word "random" means something specific: it means you have a probability distribution over the possible choices. In computer science, we're able to talk perfectly coherently about things that are non-deterministic, but not random.
Look, in computer science we have many different sources of non-determinism. Arguably the most basic source is that we have some algorithm, and we don't know in advance what input it's going to get. If it were always determined in advance what input it was going to get, then we'd just hardwire the answer. Even talking about algorithms in the first place, we've sort of inherently assumed the idea that there's some agent that can freely choose what input to give the algorithm.
In response to
Morality should be Moral
On #4, I'm fine with my morality existing for it's own sake. I don't need a justification for the things from which I derive justification.
[1] The level of simulation present in the Universe is sufficiently high that the only purpose of it would BE simulation, meaning that [2] our physical laws would necessarily be quite close to the laws of whatever universe overlies us.
[2] does not follow from [1]. The REAL real world might be sufficiently more complex than ours and it can be running thousand of simulations for a variety of reasons. I'm really not sure why you think that our level of simulation or physical laws are as complex as it gets but this is not a valid argument.
For a quick example of what I mean I would like you to think about us full-on simulating a 2 dimnesions(+time) environment.
In the absence of other evidence, could you not use some sort of complexity measure to estimate that, if our universe is being simulated, the simulating universe is more likely to have simpler laws than more complex ones? (And maybe even that having no simulating universe--meaning our universe is not a simulation--is even simpler, and therefore more likely?) But I have no idea what the actual difference in probabilities would be, if you could.
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What's the source of this claim? I hadn't heard that until today.
And someone people aren't either one. Polyamory isn't the only kind of non-monogamy, and of course there are those who don't do sexual and/or romantic relationships at all.