70 karma · joined November 27, 2021
On current projections human world population peaks at 10 billion in 2086 [0]. If, for the sake of argument, microplastics were to lower reproduction somewhat so that "only" 9.5 billion people came to exist in 2086, would that be bad? We're already putting a lot of pressure on many of earth's scarce resources in ways that have harmful effects on the welfare of many existing humans. Increasing population increases that pressure.
... in rare, exceptional cases which are extremely unlikely given the teamwork and papertrails of modern day health care systems, as others have already pointed out to you, but which you keep dropping. Once that context is added your claim (the one I quoted in my previous reply) does not follow.
> No perhaps about it, secrecy is part that can only really be discarded in non-iterated settings, in the endgame.
No idea what that means.
> Of course you know that "habit" ... is a categorically weaker insurance against rule-breaking than habit plus belief in the principle ...
Actually I don't know that. Do you have empirical evidence for it? Evidence with regard to moral views with norms in a multi level structure, like what act utilitarianism tends to have, compared to views with a single or fewer such levels?
> Yes, for example the effective altruism movement is comprised of generic totalitarian scum ...
I hear you reporting your contempt and your intuition. I'm waiting for supportive evidence, studies.
> SBF
A bad-behaving billionaire. But I don't know if his behaviour is worse on average than billionaire peers who hold other moral belief systems.
> Jaywalking isn't what the "pivotal act" theory entails, and your theory about total death is specious and motivated by the political benefits of such an act.
No idea what that means.
> I believe that lying is wrong qualitatively too, so for me, the logic of habitually being honest applies in the way it cannot apply to a utilitarian, even if you can design a hypothetical where I would have to agree that lying is justified.
What does "wrong qualitatively" mean and how does it differ from "wrong non-qualitatively" or "wrong" simpliciter? I so far don't see anything in the sentence that gets you out of the bind of the hypothetical I presented.
edit: It is clear that you contempt the "EA consensus position on AI safety". But it isn't clear what you think that position is nor what other position you think is better nor how you think that other position is reached from intuitive deontology or some other normative theory.
Nothing in your reply now, nor in any of your other comments, supports that claim. Your claim does not follow from the fact that in rare, exceptional cases rule-breaking, perhaps in secret, is what an agent has most reason to do according to act utilitarianism, a well-known feature of the view. The act utilitarian reasons to be honest, not defect and so on are on philosophical reflection instrumental to the core utilitarian goal but such virtues, once habitualized, are nonetheless real features of the utilitarian person's psychology just like in other people.
Do you possess any empirical evidence showing that real world utilitarian adherents are less upholding of everyday norms against lying, stealing, and so on? In my experience real world utilitarians (I've known a bunch of them so far in life) tend to be overrepresented in working for or donating to effective charities or organizations that work to eradicate global health problems, poverty and factory farming and at the same time no less conscientious with regard to common sense norms about honesty, keeping your word, not stealing and so on.
You haven't described what alternative moral view you yourself adhere to. Does it have an absolute prohibition against secret rule-breaking? If the only way to prevent the end of the world and the death of everyone would be to secretly break some everyday rule once then you'd think your obligation in the case is to let the world end? If not then we have identified a case where your own moral view promotes secret rule-breaking. Would that warrant saying that your own view obligates you to have a "fundamentally untrustworthy and conspiratorial mindset"? If not, why not?
1. The context is Cowen posing a quirky, ice-breaker kind of question that entertain some counter-factual assumptions to get a conversation rolling. Not unusual in these kinds of pod conversations. The quirky setup and the laugh is evidence that strict realism about real world dolphins is not assumed by Singer and Cowen there. For example Cowen says "We explain to the dolphin that you’re Peter Singer, right?", but from Singer's other work it is clear that he doesn't think science into any dolphin so far has found cognitive capacity necessary to understand the concept of a well known academic moral philosopher who has written the kind of arguments Peter Singer is well known for. The best interpretation is that what is happening at the start of the conversation is merely a loose way to imagine and talk about an outside view on the harm humans do to other animals.
2. Setting 1 aside you ascribed a view about not just Dolphins but "anything non human" to Singer. What's your basis for that?
3. As for the "moral superiority" ascription, Singer imagining a dolphin asking him "Why have you failed to stop humans treating animals so badly?" doesn't imply that Singer thinks dolphins (in general, or that imagined kind) have "moral superiority". For one, real humans have already asked that question so the imaginary dolphin is at most on par, not superior, in asking it. Secondly a moral thinker (real human or imaginary dolphin) may be able to point out some moral problems or ask moral questions while at the same time be unable to refrain from harmful behaviour and unable to understand other moral problems, including those where they're themselves part of the problem. So nothing Singer says there implies that he thinks dolphins (real or imagined) are morally superior in the sense of never causing any harm or understanding all moral problems better than humans or anything like that.
That's a misreading of the paper and a misrepresentation of the position that Singer holds. It is also a misrepresentation of what utilitarians more generally think about practical ethics and the virtue of truth-telling. The following text is in my experience fairly representative of the views held by real world utilitarian philosophers: https://www.utilitarianism.net/guest-essays/virtues-for-real...
I see no evidence in the podcast transcript of Singer making such a claim. What exactly are you basing your assertion on? Quote the transcript please.
Do you have evidence for those claims? Or are you reporting your hunch?
You didn't answer the individual level questions I asked you.
Precisely! If there was established scientific knowledge of a mTORC1 problem with eating vegan then the leading nutritional science organization's position paper would cover it. It didn't so everyone, including you, have strong reason to doubt your initial claim. If new research of such a problem gets published in top journals in the field the next position paper will reflect that. Until it does laymen like you and me have strong epistemic reason to side with the position paper.
As for possible corporate interests distorting the position paper, do you have any specific evidence about such distortion with regard to mTORC1? Saying that it is merely possible that such a distortion could happen, without any specific evidence about such distortion, is not a useful argument in this discussion because distortions in the opposite direction are equally possible. The meat and dairy industry are among the corporate actors that the AND has received money from.
Not sure I understand. What are some examples of "radical options" in policy you think have been attempted and failed? What are examples of "non-radical" options you think there's evidence would yield better outcomes?
With "not the time for half measures" I meant that if only half measures are deployed now then it seems likely millions of humans, many from regions least responsible for climate change, will be harmed, killed or displaced.
The idea of pricing in costs is already very familiar to people in their everyday lives. There are social norms like "you break it, you pay" and various regulations that price in costs.
> Going vegan because climate change and animal suffering is going to be a hard sell.
Keep in mind the distinction between policy level and individual level. The policy suggestion was remove meat industry subsidies, price in externalities, subsidize plant based foods. On the individual level the best outreach approach varies case by case depending on where the recipient is at. Are you already vegan or in the process of switching to vegan? If not then feel free to lift any individual level objections or obstacles you personally have and we can discuss them.
The idea that negative externalities should be priced in is the standard view in economics. I think most people, if provided the reasoning for it, would accept such pricing in when it comes to such serious global problems as climate change, antibiotics resistance, pandemic risk and air and water pollution.
We already did, in the sense that we'd need more earths to let everyone on earth eat the kind of diets prevalent in rich countries today. https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets
Current enourmous land use by meat industries has many negative effects. We should individually switch to plant based (if you haven't already) and in public policy rapidly remove all subsidies from meat and animal industries and fully price in all negative externalities (GHG, antibiotics risks, pandemic risks, air and water pollution). At the same time subsidize plant based alternatives. As a result plant based alternatives would be several times lower in cost than the meat versions, which in turn would drive consumption changes.
https://www.wired.com/story/carbon-neutral-cows-algae/ "What’s more, feeding cattle algae is really only practical where it’s least needed: on feedlots. This is where most cattle are crowded in the final months of their 1.5- to 2-year lives to rapidly put on weight before slaughter. There, algae feed additives can be churned into the cows’ grain and soy feed. But on feedlots, cattle already belch less methane—only 11 percent of their lifetime output. ... This means that even if algae diets on feedlots worked perfectly, it wouldn’t help with the 89 percent of cows’ belches that occur earlier in their lives."
No. The article reports on scientific evidence. Are you a scientist doing scientific work on the climate impact of the meat industry or a scientist studying meat industry lobbying? If no then on what evidence do you base your scepticism about what the linked article says?
What you say about mTORC1 is not supported by the leading academic researcher organizations in the field of nutrition.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27886704/ "It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. These diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, older adulthood, and for athletes."
If you think you have greater scientific expertize about this then I urge you to pursue a career in the related fields, publish your scientific evidence in the top journals and eventually change the recommendations. Until you accomplish that me and everyone else reading this should rely on the position cited above.
> political panels who are sticking their finger up in the air ...
That is not the situation here. The climate policy recommendations on eating are based on the best current scientific evidence. See https://eatforum.org/eat-lancet-commission/
Yes, annoying. I've set Firefox to export bookmarks to .html each time it closes and then use scripts to search in that HTML for folder names. Messy, but beats manually scrolling around in a very long list of bookmark folders in the Firefox UI.
Degrowth as used in the OP article is about macro level policy. For example solar panel subsidies, taxing coal and investments in public transportation.
Individual actions performed in the name of "growth mindset" (whatever that means) can like any other actions be stopped, and likely will be stopped if they cause harm to others.
Seems to me it is often portrayed that way by opponents strawmanning it or by media simply very lossily compressing it into a few sentences/seconds chunks. But I'm not sure how many of the proponents really have that view. Even in cases where degrowth writers have "simple life forever!" type phrasings my impression is that that's not really the focus of their work and they're not really strongly wedded to such a vision for the long term. Their core focus is the imminent (as in 100 years) negative externalities, not the long future after that.
I think Jason Hickel is an interesting case. I've learned a lot from reading both his work and that of his critics. His "What does degrowth mean? A few points of clarification" is a good intro to his thinking[0]. I think very little there is really incompatible with expansion into space in the longer term.
[0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.2020.1...