I'm up for committing to the first week and then continuing if it seems useful. :)
It actually seems pretty difficult to see how having children would, on average, be anywhere near as strong an option if your outcome measures are (1) number of children who would otherwise would not exist/reach adulthood and (2) number of children produced using your (presumably much better than donor-average) genetic material.
There are a lot of factors that influence the cost to raise a child (e.g. family income, number of children in a single household), but the USDA's figures suggest that even a relatively low-income family ($0-60k combined household ...
Is there any good reason for having children you don't particularly want to have rather than (a) donating lots of high-quality gametes and (b) giving some or all of the money you would've spent on child-rearing to an organization that prevents the premature deaths of other children?
This could be changed by promoting efficient altruism, creating local meetups of efficient altruists, etc. It's not only to find new altruists, but to give some social bonus (= warm fuzzies) to both existing and the new ones.
There's a significant difference between selling effective altruism to non-EAs and selling a specific effective charity to non-EAs. I suspect that the former is both more valuable (in the long term) and more difficult. Upping the warm-fuzzies seems to me like it would work toward both (as well as EA retention, although I know of no ...
Yes!
Tangentially related: I've wondered whether there might be high expected value for creating an organization (perhaps a temporary one, or one existing within a larger existing org) dedicated to figuring out how to sell EA charities effectively. There is already a growing body of research on charitable giving, but the opportunities are hardly tapped out. There seems to be an understanding that donating to EA charities tends to provide fewer warm-fuzzies than giving to their (most successful) non-EA counterparts, but few people talking about it seem to consider this very dire or changeable.
It's an interesting theory, but I'm hesitant to give much weight to weakly-supported hypotheses intended to explain very broad and inclusive phenomena, like "murders (or a lack thereof) occurring within these arbitrary geographical borders." This is especially true when there's no shortage of plausible theories and a lot of potentially-useful information is missing.
The changeling myths seem to serve the purpose of guilt-relief only insofar as they also aid shame-relief, so I''m not sure they're all that helpful. (Am I missing something?)
Basically, this reads to me like an interesting but not particularly credible just-so story.
This seems irresponsible and unwise when you have substantial fixed costs, all necessary for core activities, and not much in the way of back-up resources. I can see it feasibly leading to a bunch of problems, including (a) the incentive to save up financial resources rather than put them to use toward high-EV activities and (b) difficulty hiring staff smart enough to realize that the resources from which their salaries are paid out will be highly variable month-to-month.
I just googled it. I suspect that the "refined" in "refined carbohydrates" is a stand-in for "bad, for reasons left unspecified."
Having spent a fair amount of time around CFAR staff, in the office and out, I can testify to their almost unbelievable level of self-reflection and creativity. (I recall, several months ago, Julia joking about how much time in meetings was spent discussing the meetings themselves at various levels of meta.) For what it's worth, I can't think of an organization I'd trust to have a greater grasp on its own needs and resources. If they're pushing fundraising, I'd estimate with high confidence that it's because that's where the bottleneck is.
I think donating ...
I'm not sure what you mean by "valid" here - could you clarify? I will say that I think a world where beings are deriving utility from the perception of causing suffering without actually causing suffering isn't inferior to a world where beings are deriving the same amount of utility from some other activity that doesn't affect other beings, all else held equal. However, it seems like it might be difficult to maintain enough control over the system to ensure that the pro-suffering beings don't do anything that actually causes suffering.
It strikes me as folly, too. But "Let's go kill the sharks, then!" does not necessarily follow from "Predation is not anywhere close to optimal." Nowhere have I (or anyone else here, unless I'm mistaken) argued that we should play with massive ecosystems now.
I'm very curious why you don't feel any need to exterminate or modify predators, assuming it's likely to be something we can do in the future with some degree of caution and precision.
Yes, I'm using "natural lifespan" here as a placeholder for "the typical lifespan assuming nothing is actively trying to kill you." It's not great language, but I don't think it's obviously tautological.
The shark's "natural" lifespan requires that it eats other creatures. Their "natural" lifespan requires that it does not.
Yes. My question is whether that's a system that works for us.
If you eliminate some species because you think they're mean, you're going to damage a lot more.
I'd just like to point out that (a) "mean" is a very poor descriptor of predation (neither its severity nor its connotations re: motivation do justice to reality), and (b) this use of "damage" relies on the use of "healthy" to describe a population of beings routinely devoured alive well before the end of their natural lifespans. If we "damaged" a previously "healthy" system wherein the same sorts of things were happening to humans, we would almost certainly consider it a good thing.
For the record, the chicken that survived had retained most of the brainstem. He was able to walk ("clumsily') and attempted some reflexive behaviors, but he was hardly "functional" to anyone who knows enough about chickens to assume that they do more than walk and occasionally lunge at the ground.
The chicken's ability to survive with only the brain stem isn't shocking. Anencephalic babies can sometimes breathe, eat, cry, and reflexively "respond" to external stimuli. One survived for two and a half years. This was a rare case, but...
I like Beyond Meat, but I think the praise for it has been overblown. For example, the Effective Animal Activism link you've provided says:
[Beyond Meat] mimics chicken to such a degree that renowned New York Times food journalist and author Mark Bittman claimed that it "fooled me badly in a blind tasting".
But reading Bittman's piece, the reader will quickly realize that the quote above is taken out of context:
...It doesn’t taste much like chicken, but since most white meat chicken doesn’t taste like much anyway, that’s hardly a problem; both a
If AMF can add about 30 years of healthy human life for $2000 by averting malaria and a human is worth 40x that of a chicken, then we'd need to pay less than $1.67 to avert a year of suffering for a chicken (assuming averting a year of suffering is the same as adding a year of healthy life, which is a messy assumption).
This might be a minor point, but I don't think it's necessarily a given that one year of healthy, average-quality life offsets one year of factory farm-style confinement. If we were only discussing humans, I don't think anyone would consider a year under those conditions to be offset by a healthy year.
Do you consider young children and very low-intelligence people to be morally-relevant?
(If - in the case of children - you consider potential for later development to be a key factor, we can instead discuss only children who have terminal illnesses.)
We're treading close to terminal values here. I will express some aesthetic preference for nature qua nature.
That strikes me as inconsistent, assuming that preventing suffering/minimizing disutility is also a terminal value. In those terms, nature is bad. Really, really bad.
I also recognize a libertarian attitude that we should allow other individuals to live the lives they choose in the environments they find themselves to the extent reasonably possible.
It seems arbitrary to exclude the environment from the cluster of factors that go into living &...
That strikes me as inconsistent, assuming that preventing suffering/minimizing disutility is also a terminal value.
Two values being in conflict isn't necessarily inconsistent, it just mean that you have to make trade-offs.
We need to value the species as a whole, not just the individual members; and we need to value their inherent nature as predators and prey.
Why?
While zoos have their place, we should not seek to move all wild creatures into safe, sterile environments with no predators, pain, or danger any more than we would move all humans into isolated, AI-created virtual environments with no true interaction with reality.
Assuming that these environments are (or would be) on the whole substantially better on the measures that matter to the individual living in them, why shouldn't we?
That seems plausible, though PETA already has a million-dollar prize for anyone who can mass-market an in-vitro meat product. Given their annual revenues (~$30 million) and the cost associated with that kind of project, it seems like they're going about it the wrong way.
From a utilitarian perspective, wireheading livestock might be an even better option - though that probably would be perceived by most animal activists (and people in general) as vaguely dystopian.
I'm really curious why all of the major animal welfare/rights organizations seem to be putting more emphasis on vegan outreach than on in-vitro meat/genetic modification research. I have a hard time imagining a scenario where any arbitrary (but large) contribution toward vegan outreach leads to greater suffering reduction than the same amount put toward hastening a more efficient and cruelty-free system for producing meat.
There seems to be, based just on my non-rigorous observations, significant overlap between the Vegan/Vegetarian communities and the "Genetically Modified Foods and big Pharma will turn your babies into money-forging cancer" theorists. Obviously not all Vegans are "chemicals=bad because nature" conspiracy theorists, and not all such conspiracy theorists are vegan, but the overlap seems significant. That vocal overlap group strikes me as likely to oppose lab-grown meat because it's unnatural, and then the conspiracy theories will begin. A...
By the way. One question I always wanted to ask a pro-animal-rights type: would you support a program for the extinction/reductions of the population of predatory animals on the grounds that they cause large amounts of unnecessary suffering to their prey?
I've heard this posed as a "gotcha" question for vegetarians/vegans. The socially acceptable answer is the one that caters to two widespread and largely unexamined assumptions: that extinction is just bad, always, and that nature is just generally good. If the questioned responds in any other ...
This was my first reaction, too. I recall my car-buying experience consisting mostly of me trying to keep up with my impressions about seat-feel, head space, visibility, dash design, etc. and trying to somehow aggregate that information with numbers that I really didn't know how to process in the first place (e.g. safety ratings, scores from reviews, prices vs. upkeep costs). It wasn't until I'd pretty much picked out my car that I made an effort to mentally simulate a typical drive.
I'd like to see gamification components - a point system, leaderboard, badges/achievements, etc.
As with the original experiment, the "cat" would be far enough onto the shoulder that it would only be hit if the driver intentionally swerved off of the road. For safety reasons (and to reduce confounds), I'd set it up on a straightaway with wide lanes.
Frankly, if someone is going to regret making the decision to deliberately harm an animal, I'd rather they have their change of heart after "killing" a dummy and not the real thing.
I really, really want to repeat this test with something furry. Anybody know of an affordable toy mammal that might withstand getting hit by an SUV repeatedly?
I once hit some sort of large bird on the highway when it flew directly into my lane from a cluster of bushes off the shoulder. It was so close to me when it entered my lane that all that registered was "white, flying." There was no way I could have avoided hitting it, but I had to pull off the road to bawl over it for a few minutes. I don't expect people to react the same way I did, but I ...
I've become an insufferable list-maker. I've been meaning to start a blog, largely to improve my ability to organize and effectively communicate challenging concepts. Every time I sit down to "start work on the blog," I find myself ending up with a stack of lists - what needs to be done, topic ideas, features of the website design, people to partner/affiliate/guest blog with, hooks for a viral video blog, and so on. Rinse and repeat - a new stack of lists every time.
Thanks, daenerys! :)
I didn't dispute Eugine's argument - I just thought it worthwhile to point out that the evidence itself is obviously confounded. If we consider the confound itself - the gender-based training - evidence of the hypothesis, we're stuck in a tricky chicken-and-egg situation. It wasn't a refutation of Eugine's comment, but I hardly think it's irrelevant.
Do the test with cooks of both genders; their experience of using fridges is unlikely to differ significantly in length.
Unless female cooks are more likely to become professionals as the result of early an...
Even if you assume that societies are more likely to structure their gender constructs around innate psychological traits than physical traits (or that the former would result from the latter), you've got a major confound when assessing the strength of the effect.
It's not difficult to show that biological sex predicts some features of perceptual/cognitive ability. It is difficult to show that people of a gender that is generally trained to work with refrigerators have, as an innate feature of their psychology, an effective strategy for searching fridges.
One of the major challenges to evo-psych hypotheses about gender is never really tackled in the original comment thread: that women and men are conditioned differently in almost all current and historical societies, so it's almost impossible to differentiate effects of training from inborn psychological phenomena.
Basically: if you're the one who's always been expected to put the groceries away, do the cooking, and set the table, you've probably developed a pretty good strategy for getting the damn ketchup out of the fridge.
Of course, we could always argue ...
It seems that you could use this to argue that nobody ever ought to be born unless we can ensure that they'll never die (assuming they stay dead, as people tend to do now).
Could not agree more! I'm suggesting Luke to the new team - they're not particularly interested in the LW crowd, but I think I can probably tempt them by providing some of Luke's atheism-related writings/works.
No, not at the moment. I've passed Skepticon off to next year's crew (just successfully moved out of the area and on to new things), but I'll suggest that they contact speakers about making the slides public.
Bear in mind that even with the information on how to make this virus human transmitable available, it is probably rather difficult without the appropriate facilties to reproduce, so that rules out random lunatics, and realistically its simply not sensible for anyone else to do so.
I don't find this terribly comforting, given that I don't assume that everyone with an interest in biological warfare lacks the funding to create the appropriate facilities. What I do find comforting is the strong suspicion that neither the researchers nor the advisory board w...
Thanks for coming!
Upvoted for the clarification. Thanks!
What about laws of physics, or evolution? While true (if technically vague) explanations for actions, they are not true cognitive reasons for actions.
"I don't want to die," for example, is obviously both an emotional preference and the result of the natural evolution of the brain. That the brain is an evolved organ isn't disputed here.
Goals seem to be indeed significantly determined by emotions in humans. But this is not a defining property of something being a goal, and even in humans not a necessary way of implementing goals.
I don't think she implies that emotions are necessary for implementing a goal - that was the point of mentioning a rationality "filter," which can aid in accurately translating emotional desires into practical goals that best fulfill those desires, and then in translating practical goals into effective actions.
Can we trace the flow chart back to any e...
Expect the next batch on Monday, including the panel on death (lovingly dubbed the atheist death panel by the moderator, Jesse Galef) featuring Eliezer Yudkowsky, Greta Christina, Julia Galef, and James Croft!
It's possible that they'll be up sooner, but as far as I understand it, our videographer (Rob Lehr) is taking a well-deserved break.
Kudos to Julia for not only introducing a solid take on the relationship between reasoning and emotion, but also for doing so in a way that had the audience eating out of her hand. Of all the Skepticon talks that dealt with rationality, I think this was received the most enthusiastically.
She handled the impromptu voice-over brilliantly, too! I nearly strangled the sound guy.
I met Jesse Galef last year, and we became fast friends - at which point he practically begged me to read Methods of Rationality and LW. Good on you, Jesse!
This year I was the organizer for Skepticon, a conference that has traditionally concerned itself with the atheist movement. Eliezer, Julia Galef, Richard Carrier, and Spencer Greenberg were kind enough to come speak on topics more pertinent to the rationalist community (Bayes' theorem saw lots of love, and LW was plugged in several of the presentations!). Attendance was just over 1,100, and many of the...
...First, you've got to sound like you're chatting with your reader, like you're giving them an unfiltered stream-of-consciousness access to your ideas as you think them. Second, on no account should you actually do that.
Eliezer is one of the masters at this; his essays are littered with phrases like "y'know" and "pretty much", but they're way too tight to be hastily published first drafts (or maybe I'm wrong and Eliezer is one of the few people in the world who can do this; chances are you're not). You've got to put a lot of work into ma
I'd like to know of a science - any science, social or otherwise - that can be optimally useful without utilizing mathematical analysis.
I think the problem here is that people can’t understand what is really important. Calculus, mechanical physics, chemistry, microiology, etc. are interesting to learn, perhaps. ... People don’t use them in daily life unless they are professionals. Why not learn things that we think about every day instead of those that will frankly be useless to most?
It is precisely this kind of thinking, fostered by a pretty low-par early education in math and physics, that led me to believe that knowledge in these areas is virtually useless to just about everyone. And...
Many of the examples in the table (especially "values," "bias," and "error") aren't the result of a knowledge gap, but of a simple definitional dispute.
It's not clear to me which is the case, actually. It would be difficult to dispute the assertion that the average layman is almost always primed to read "positive" as "good" rather than "present" or "upward," but that doesn't indicate whether or not he's actually aware of those alternate uses. Maybe he's never been exposed to scientific literature - that wouldn't exactly be shocking.
I wish I could access the original paper the table was published in. Alas!
I'm not sure how valid your point is in practice. Being enthusiastic about hunting does not necessarily indicate a willingness to face the consequences of one's actions, nor does it indicate any particular attitude toward factory farming. It may just indicate a lack of visceral discomfort when encountering animal suffering.
It is plausible that some/many/most hunters simply enjoy pursuing and eating prey, and that the comparative advantages to overall utility make little or no difference to them. In this case, I wouldn't say that the utility advantage says...
I'm much less (emotionally) motivated to try new things/deviate from my routine than I'd like to be, especially when an intervention's purpose is to improve something I'm currently not doing very well at. For example, I feel a lot more motivated to try something that might further improve a project that's already going very well than I am to try something that might turn around a project that's failing. I suspect that this is related to ugh fields. Any suggestions?