One way of thinking about offsetting is using it to price in the negative effects of the thing you want to do. Personally, I find it confusing to navigate tradeoffs between dollars, animal welfare, uncertain health costs, cravings for foods I can't eat, and fewer options when getting food. The convenient thing about offsets is I can reduce the decision to "Is the burger worth $x to me?", where $x = price of burger + price of offset.
A common response to this is "Well, if you thought it was worth it to pay $y to eliminate t hours of cow suffering, then you should just do that anyway, regardless of whether you buy the burger". I think that's a good point, but I don't feel like it helps me navigate the confusing-to-me tradeoff between like five different not-intuitively-commensurable considerations.
Not to mention that of all of the hunter gatherer tribes ever studied, there has never been a single vegetarian group discovered. Not. A. Single. One.
Of the ~200 studied, ~75% of them got over 50% of their calories from animals. Only 15% of them got over 50% of their calories from non-animal sources.
Do you have a source for this? I'm asking more out of curiosity than doubt, but in general, I think it would be cool to have more links for some of the claims. And thanks for all of the links that are already there!
It is sometimes good to avoid coming across as really weird or culturally out of touch, and ads can give you some signal on what's normal and culturally relevant right now. If you're picking up drinks for a 4th of July party, Bud Light will be very culturally on-brand, Corona would be fine, but a bit less on-brand, and mulled wine would be kinda weird. And I think you can pick this sort of thing up from advertising.
Also, it might be helpful to know roughly what group membership you or other people might be signalling by using a particular product. For example, I drive a Subaru. Subaru has, for a long time, marketed to (what appears to me to be) people who are a bit younger, vote democrat, and spend time in the mountains. This is in contrast to, say, Ram trucks, which are marketed to (what looks to me like) people who vote Republican. If I'm in a context where people who don't know me very well see my car, I am now aware that they might be biased toward thinking I vote democrat or spend time outdoors. (FWIW, I did a low-effort search for which states have the strongest Subaru sales and it is indeed states with mountains and states with people who vote democrat).
Recently I've been wondering what this dynamic does to the yes-men. If someone is strongly incentivized to agree with whatever nonsense their boss is excited about that week, then they go on Twitter or national TV to repeat that nonsense, it can't be good for seeing the world accurately.
Sometimes what makes a crime "harder to catch" is the risk of false positives. If you don't consider someone to have "been caught" unless your confidence that they did the crime is very high, then, so long as you're calibrated, your false positive rate is very low. But holding off on punishment in cases where you do not have very high confidence might mean that, for most instances where someone commits the crime, they are not punished.
If you want someone to compress and communicate their views on the future, whether they anticipate everyone will be dead within a few decades because of AI seems like a pretty important thing to know. And it's natural to find your way from that to asking for a probability. But I think that shortcut isn't actually helpful, and it's more productive to just ask something like "Do you anticipate that, because of AI, everyone will be dead within the next few decades?". Someone can still give a probability if they want, but it's more natural to give a less precise answer like "probably not" or a conditional answer like "I dunno, depends on whether <thing happens>" or to avoid the framing like "well, I don't think we're literally going to die, but".
He says, under the section titled "So what options do I have if I disagree with this decision?":
But beyond [leaving LW, trying to get him fired, etc], there is no higher appeals process. At some point I will declare that the decision is made, and stands, and I don't have time to argue it further, and this is where I stand on the decision this post is about.
1Yeah, seems like it fails mainly on 1, though I think that depends on whether you accept the meaning of "could not have done otherwise" implied by 2/3. But if you accept a meaning that makes 1 true (or, at least, less obviously false), then the argument is no longer valid.
This seems closely related to an argument I vaguely remember from a philosophy class:
- A person is not morally culpable of something if they could not have done otherwise
- If determinism is true, there is only one thing a person could do
- If there is only one thing a person could do, they could not have done otherwise
- If determinism is true, whatever someone does, they are not morally culpable
For what it's worth, the sentiment I recall at the time among Americans was not that (almost) everyone everywhere thought it was terrible, just that the official diplomatic stance from (almost) every government was that it was terrible (and also that those governments had better say it's terrible or at least get out of the way while the US responds). I think I remember being under the impression that almost everyone in Europe thought it was obviously bad. To be fair, I didn't think much at the time about what, e.g., the typical person in China or Brazil or Nigeria thought about it. Also, that was a long time ago, so probably some revision in my memory.