Reducing Suffering

More on Humane Insecticides from Jeff Lockwood

2011-12-10T23:53:00.000-08:00

Below is an email conversation with Jeffrey Lockwood on the subject of humane insecticides. Thanks so much for the insights, Jeff!

[me:] What's your tentative rank order for the humaneness of insect-control methods?

Also, I'd like to support research on this question in more seriousness within a few years. How would you recommend beginning that process? Would I contact professors and grad students to see if one of them would be interested in writing a paper on the topic? (Maybe for an ethics journal or maybe a more science-based one.)

Suppose the effort got a little more traction. How would we then go about advocating for the use of humane insecticides? For example, imagine that the Humane Society got interested in the cause and wanted to run a campaign. What could they do? Maybe find and support farms willing to switch to the better methods? Ask schools to buy from those farms (similar to the current cage-free-egg campaigns)?

[Jeff:] As for a tentative rank order for the humaneness of insect control methods, that's a real challenge! But let me try a very 'soft' ranking:

Cultural control: Preventing insects from occupying a resource (e.g., habitat modification) seems the most humane approach as no beings are directly harmed (at least [when] this is possible).

Physical control: [... Some] forms of physical control would likely cause suffering (e.g., picking and crushing) but the duration would be relatively brief.

Biological control - predators: Death from predators is often relatively rapid, although this is not certain. Larger predators (e.g., birds or skunks) are rather more efficient in their killing than small predators (e.g., ants or beetles).

Chemical control - neurotoxins: Depending on the dose, it appears that death comes quickly. Of course, at low doses the individual may be rendered physiologically and behaviorally dysfunctional and prone to a slow death. It should also be noted that many non-insect species are likely to be intoxicated, and these non-target species would substantially lower the ranking of this approach if taken into account. [me: This assumes they're not better off dead. I think killing non-target organisms may be a bonus because their lives probably aren't worth living.]

Chemical control - growth regulators: The insect, in my observations, often dies very slowly in a protracted state of dysfunctionality during which the individual is highly susceptible to scavengers and small predators.

Biological control - pathogens: The type of pathogen matters a great deal. Many viruses, for example, don't appear to inflict substantial suffering. However, various fungi appear to work rather slowly and erode the capacity of the insect.

Biological control - parasites: As with pathogens, there are many different parasites. However, it does not appear that death is quick and the quality of life appears to slowly erode. It has been noted, however, that some parasitized insects appear to act normally for much of the period of parasitization.

These are really brainstormed rankings and I'd be very open to refutation of my simplistic rationales.

As for moving the discussion into a wider venue, I can offer a few ideas. It might make sense to begin with a symposium as part of a national meeting. Perhaps the Entomological Society of America would be an interesting venue. Or you might go with a more philosophical setting for the discussion. There are also some organizations that fund/host workshops -- and I can imagine that a 1-week meeting to gather people together to hash out ideas, argue about positions, and exchange perspectives could be extremely exciting. Some journals are open to proposals for "special issues" (Psyche and Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics come to mind), and you might also approach some academic publishers with this concept (this would be particularly viable following a symposium or workshop).

In terms of taking the concept into the realm of application, I would think that the Human[e] Society might be a fine organization. The concept of human[e] pest control/management is very intriguing. Of course, most people won't put a great deal of energy or thought into the matter. However, if there were alternatives that were no more (or even less) expensive AND more humane, then it could well matter to many people. In the best of all worlds, the Humane Society might provide a scoring or ranking system for methods and products (and even provide some explicit endorsement for consumers). The Freedom Foods label through the RSPCA would be one such model (perhaps insects could even be incorporated into the considerations for producers who seek this label). I suspect that some of the "what to do?" possibilities might make a most interesting session in a symposium or workshop.

Lockwood on Insect Pain

2011-11-27T01:15:00.000-08:00

Jeffrey Lockwood is an entomologist with whom I've had several email conversations about insect suffering. He defends the possibility of insect sentience in several pages of Lockwood, J. A. 1987. The moral standing of insects and the ethics of extinction. Florida Entomologist 70: 70-89.

He has a new blog post, "Do Bugs Feel Pain?," presenting three lines of evidence that the answer to this question may be "yes."

After this, he says:

So, given that we can’t be sure whether insects experience pain, how should we treat these creatures? When I was teaching insect anatomy and physiology I insisted that the students anesthetized insects before conducting experiments that we would expect to inflict pain on a mouse. My rational[e] is two-fold.

First, it seems ethically obligatory to guard against the possibility that insects feel pain. If we use anesthetic and it turns out that insects don’t experience pain, the material cost of our mistake is very low (a few extra minutes to apply cold or carbon dioxide). However, if we don’t use anesthetic and it turns out that the insects were in agony, then the moral cost of our mistake is quite high.

Second, I think that treating insects as if they can experience pain cultivates an attitude of respect toward living organisms. And this seems like a good thing. We learn the methods of dissection through practices—and we also learn virtues such as compassion through practice. Perhaps we become overly careful in our actions by including animals that aren’t sentient, but world that is more mindful of other beings than is strictly necessary is okay with me.

Of course, there are circumstances in which we are justified in crushing, poisoning, or otherwise harming insects. Nobody wants to suffer hunger or malaria. We must protect our food and bodies. And so inflicting suffering and death is part of life; we live with the existential dilemma that we must kill to live. But we are also obligated to minimize the harm that we do—and insects are a part of this duty.

I agree that killing insects isn't necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, if I were an insect, because my lifespan would be so short, I would prefer to be killed with minimal pain now rather than die by parasites, dehydration, or in a spider's web a few weeks later. (This assumes that life itself would be pleasant, which is dubious.)

However, this killing should be as painless as possible. Jeff endorses euthanasia in the case of laboratory experimentation, but I maintain that it's quantitatively orders of magnitude more important in the case of insecticides on crops. There's a broad spectrum (pardon the pun) of painfulness in the realm of insect-control methods. Some insect-killing practices, like spraying Bt or introducing natural predators, would seem to be very unpleasant. Others, like pheromone disruption or insect-growth regulators, are nearly free of suffering for the targets, and as a bonus, they reduce insect populations for the future, preventing many lives of suffering before those lives get started.

I hope eventually to do more research and perhaps advocacy in the realm of encouraging farmers to adopt more humane methods of pest control that simultaneously continue to prevent insect lives that aren't worth living. Suggestions from readers on how to begin this are welcome!

Matched Donations for Vegan Outreach through 30 June 2011

2011-05-29T22:36:00.001-07:00

Since 1 May 2011, Vegan Outreach has been matching donations dollar-for-dollar, and the matching drive continues through the end of June. One way to donate is to sponsor someone on the Team Vegan page, although contributions to the general fund will be matched as well. I encourage you to donate!

Below is a powerful video about factory farming from February 2011. The information is nothing new, but the footage and presentation is very compelling. Keep in mind, of course, huge quantitative difference between milk/beef and chicken/fish. (You can even observe the contrast visually from the shots of huge numbers of small fish being harvested.)

It's heartening to see how much suffering we can prevent by just a little bit of money donated on our part.

Ask for donations for Christmas

2010-12-05T17:03:00.000-08:00

Economists are fond of pointing out the dead-weight loss of holiday gifts, and based on personal experience, I have to agree with the complaint. Considering how much suffering can be prevented by a single dollar, it's tragic to consider what the money is used on instead.

The economically ideal approach would be to transfer cash, and utilitarians would most benefit from this as well, since they could then use that cash for the purpose they consider optimal. However, cash donations may not be received well by many people -- cash doesn't feel "gift like," because people tend to put money into a mental category of "cold-hearted greedy stuff" rather than "a sincere expression of caring."

Instead, I suggest asking your family and friends to make a charitable donation on your behalf. I sent an email to those who might give me gifts requesting that, if they do give anything, please make it a donation to Vegan Outreach in my name. I encourage readers to consider trying this as well.

Macro- vs. Micro-Optimization

2010-05-10T07:18:00.000-07:00

Say you're trying to add up a 10,000 numbers. You need to get the answer as soon as possible, so you think about how best to go about the task. You might say, "Well, getting the job done quickly is important, so let me squint my eyes, roll up my sleeves, and concentrate really hard, so that I can have as much mental focus as possible while I get through this." You then proceed to use a pencil and paper to add the digits, sweating and wrinkling your brow as you focus your concentration for the next 10 hours until the task is complete. Meanwhile, your friend downloads the digits to a computer, pastes them into Excel, and figures out the answer a minute later.

Ah, the power of macro-optimization! I've noticed a number of instances recently in which I and other people tend to get overly caught up in thinking about micro-level decisions on a day-to-day basis, without spending enough time thinking about higher-level structural choices. For instance, Should I procrastinate for another X minutes? Should I keep exercising or stop? Do I go for one more brownie or not? Shall I spend money on purchasing this particular item that I could live without?

These are all important questions, and their answers are not irrelevant. It is important to avoid procrastinating, not to waste money on luxuries, and so forth. There is a place for exerting effort in these decisions. But if you find yourself burning up willpower on such questions on a regular basis, then you're probably doing something wrong. In general, life doesn't have to be a day-in-day-out struggle to "do the right thing" by sheer force of effort. Very often, there are high-level structural changes and/or rules that you can put in place such that the micro-optimizations become minor or altogether unnecessary.

One case where this applies is with food choices. I've found that if I buy junk food and have it around the house, the day becomes a constant willpower struggle with the question, Shall I go ahead and eat another cookie or not? But if I don't buy the junk food in the first place, and if I go for a long enough period that my cravings for it subside, then the question vanishes from my mind, and I don't think about cookies at all. Similarly, many people find that going completely vegetarian (say) is easier than going almost-vegetarian, just because the question, "Should I eat meat on this particular occasion?" doesn't constantly arise. (That said, I personally find that near-vegetarianism works well for me, since I don't find avoiding meat difficult in the first place. And of course, it's important to consider the widely variable impacts of different types of animal foods.)

In other cases, the best solution may be not to set a rule to do the right thing but, rather, to allow oneself to do the wrong thing with the bargain of doing the right thing in another area of higher value. For instance, I sometimes feel guilty about not doing some tangible action that would prevent a little bit of immediate suffering -- e.g., looking for injured worms stranded on the sidewalk that could be put out of their misery. Sometimes I do stop to help the worms, but at other times, I instead promise myself to put in extra effort later toward another action (like promoting awareness of the general problem of worm suffering in the wild) with arguably much greater value. I also sometimes feel guilty about spending money to buy chewing gum, because it's a "junk food" that I could clearly live without; but I've noticed that there are a number of other areas of my grocery budget where I could more painlessly reduce costs, and I promise myself that I'll make bigger cuts there in return keeping the gum. Similarly, a number of people I know have noted that rather than going vegetarian, many people might find it easier to continue to eat meat personally and to instead donate, say, an extra $100 a year to Vegan Outreach, with the latter action having an arguably bigger total impact on animal suffering.

Similar thinking applies in many other areas. For instance, say you're persuaded by Singer's argument in "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" but don't want to live at the level of a Third-world peasant. You could probably do better by continuing to live a normal lifestyle in a First-world country, taking a high-paying job, and donating your earnings. Chances are that even a spendthrift investment banker will have more cash left over to donate (to, say, the Singularity Institute, or toward promoting concern about wild-animal suffering) than the most frugal of secretaries or farm workers. In addition, rather than hyper-optimizing your own income, it's worth considering whether you could achieve more total donations for a given cause by spending less time on work and more time networking with friends and colleagues who might contribute.

Finally, the same sorts of logic apply with respect to where one donates. To use a slogan of Givewell, "Don't give more; give well." If you can use a fifth of your donatable funds to double the cost-effectiveness of your final donation by researching the best charities, you will have made more total impact. Or if you spend slightly less time earning money in order to have a bit more time to assess your values and options for donating, you're making a wise tradeoff.

The questions about willpower and personal effort may seem different than those about allocation of time and money. On the inside, it often feels as though we should be able to make the right individual choices all the time. Sure, we can't blame people for having limited budgets or a finite number of hours in the day, but when they expend money on a product they could have lived without, or when they waste time on a fun activity instead of working more, it sometimes feels like they're blameworthy, because "they could" have done differently. But the fact of the matter is, willpower, energy, and motivation are themselves finite resources, and sometimes "wasting time" on having fun is the right choice.

And for yourself: Rather than feeling guilty about every little apparently sub-optimal decision that you make, try to direct your guilt toward those areas that you rationally observe have the highest value. For instance, as mentioned above, rather than feeling guilty about every $0.10 stick of gum that I chew, I've worked toward eliminating more expensive processed foods that I buy and, better yet, spending extra time thinking about long-term career and lifestyle choices that will have much more significant financial impacts.

In many ways, this relates back to the post on salience and motivation. The micro-optimization choices that we make are clear and immediate: It feels morally important to make the right decision in those cases, and we feel bad about ourselves when we don't. Yet -- as the case of adding 10,000 numbers illustrates -- many times there are solutions beyond sheer force of will that can end up making a bigger real-world impact. Moralizing isn't the answer to every problem. And indeed, because willpower is limited, expending guilt should only be a last resort: In general, there are other structural changes you can make (to your work environment, your purchasing habits, your topics of mental focus, your health choices, and so on) that will eliminate the willpower dilemmas altogether. In other words, focus on finding the right rules more than on forcing yourself to do the apparently optimal thing in each situation; the latter is a recipe for burnout.

(I suppose this discussion is relevant to the act- vs. rule-utilitarianism debate, among other things.)

Research on Insect Consciousness

2010-04-19T21:36:00.000-07:00

An old blog post on the blog "Intelligent Life is All Around Us" drew my attention to a fascinating Discover Magazine article, "Consciousness in a Cockroach." I've included some quotations from that piece below. I wonder: What are the best ways to support further research like this?

"Many people would pooh-pooh the notion of insects having brains that are in any way comparable to those of primates," Strausfeld adds. "But one has to think of the principles underlying how you put a brain together, and those principles are likely to be universal."

The findings are controversial. "The evidence that I've seen so far has not convinced me," says Gilles Laurent, a neuroscientist at Caltech. But some researchers are considering possibilities that would shock most lay observers. "We have literally no idea at what level of brain complexity consciousness stops," says Christof Koch, another Caltech neuroscientist. "Most people say, 'For heaven's sake, a bug isn't conscious.' But how do we know? We're not sure anymore. I don't kill bugs needlessly anymore."

Heinrich Reichert of the University of Basel in Switzerland has become more and more interested in "the relatedness of all brains."

[...]

"Attention," says van Swinderen, "is a whole-brain phenomenon. A thing is not purely visual, not purely olfactory. It's a binding together of different parts that for us signify one thing. Why couldn't the fly's mechanism [of attention] be directed to a succession of its memories?" he asks. "That, to me, is just a short hop, skip, and a jump away from what might be consciousness." The difference between the memories of a fly and a human might be a matter of degree. The human can store a lot more memories and can therefore maintain a more sophisticated personal narrative of his past and present. But van Swinderen believes "it could be exactly the same mechanism in a fly and a human." Although there is still no evidence to decide either way, the result could be consciousness.

"Probably what consciousness requires," says Koch of Caltech, "is a sufficiently complicated system with massive feedback. Insects have that. If you look at the mushroom bodies, they're massively parallel and have feedback."

Chemical clues confirm that at least some fundamental brain processes are the same in humans and insects. Van Swinderen and Rozi Andretic, a neuroscientist at NSI, have found that mutant flies producing too little of the neurotransmitter dopamine have impaired salience responses. Feeding the mutant flies methamphetamine—a chemical related to drugs used to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder—relieves the dopamine shortage and normalizes the flies' attention. But give meth to a normal fly and it cannot attend as well. "Similar mechanisms are present in vertebrates and flies," Andretic told me.

When you consider that neurons themselves are strikingly similar across the animal kingdom, it all begins to make sense. "You have the same basic building blocks for vertebrates and invertebrates," says Strausfeld, "and there are certain ways you can put these building blocks together [into brains]." So when it came to building a brain center like the hippocampus that can recognize places, there might have been only one way to wire those quirky neurons together to do the job—and evolution arrived at that same solution multiple times independently, just as the genetic instructions for wings evolved multiple times in distinct lineages.

Salience and Motivation

2010-04-17T13:42:00.000-07:00

There are a few basic life activities (eating, sleeping, etc.) that cannot be ignored and have to be maintained to some degree in order to function. Beyond these, however, it's remarkable how much variation is possible in what people care about and spend their time thinking about. Merely reflecting upon my own life, I can see how vastly the kinds of things I find interesting and important have changed. Some topics that used to matter so much to me are now essentially irrelevant, while others that I had never even considered are now my top priorities.

The scary thing is just how easily and imperceptibly these sorts of shifts can happen. I've been amazed to observe how much small, seemingly trivial cues build up to have an enormous impact on the direction of one's concerns. The types of conversations I overhear, blog entries and papers and emails I read, people I interact with, and visual cues I see in my environment tend basically to determine what I think about during the day and, over the long run, what I spend my time and efforts doing. One can maintain a stated claim that "X is what I find overridingly important," but as a practical matter, it's nearly impossible to avoid the subtle influences of minor day-to-day cues that can distract from such ideals.

Needless to say, subtle cues are the reason advertising works so well. They're also why people are correct to warn against corrupting influences -- e.g., when fundamentalists discourage their children from attending liberal colleges. To an individual person, it feels so impossible that her concerns, attitudes, and emotional states could possibly change -- they just feel so right and necessary and inevitable -- but taking the outside view, even with respect to one's own life, clearly proves otherwise.

I have been fortunate that, for the past ten years or so, I've never lost an idealized commitment to the overriding goal of reducing suffering (though I have grown much wiser about how exactly that task is best attempted). Still, on a day-to-day basis, what I accomplish toward that goal has varied tremendously; there have been days or even weeks when I've found myself completely distracted by other concerns. To some extent, this is necessary and important. For instance, those who take the approach of making money to prevent suffering need to find their alternate occupations intrinsically interesting or else will give up rather quickly. Creating subgoals with their own instrumental payoffs is essential for accomplishing any sort of long-term project. (Hence why people set deadlines, give homework assignments, schedule exams, perform periodic reviews, and so forth.) But from the standpoint of goal stability, it's also crucial not to let these subgoals take over and become ends-in-themselves. (For there's no intrinsic reason they couldn't be ends in themselves -- as I suggested at the beginning, pretty much anything apart from basic self-maintenance can become a person's chief concern.)

In view of the impact of subtle, everyday influences on one's unconscious mind, I recommend the following (to myself as much as to others): Don't just claim to care about reducing suffering in the abstract. Also manipulate your environmental influences toward the same end. Surround yourself with people who share that purpose. Read about reducing suffering when you first wake up and are getting started with the day. Cancel email subscriptions to irrelevant newsletters and add subscriptions on topics of which you want to be reminded regularly. Same for the blogs you read with RSS. Make regular time to remember why suffering matters -- for instance, by watching videos that depict the seriousness of suffering. Get a picture of a snake eating a live rat for your office wall.

Even if you think these things are unnecessary or trivial ("Of course I care overridingly about suffering -- how could I feel otherwise?"), do it anyway. Emotions change like the wind, and one day's overriding concern is tomorrow's irrelevant cause.

Because these cues are so fickle and arbitrary, they rarely square with quantitative assessments of situations -- as evinced by, say, the tendency of many in rich countries to help moderately low-income people in their own neighborhoods over those completely destitute in the Third world, or the tendency of people to focus on human suffering even when that of other species preponderates by orders of magnitude. So it's important also to design one's environmental influences in a way that correctly represents the quantitative facts about a situation. Examples of this include hunger banquets or depictions like "If the world were a village of 100 people," in which quantitative data is translated into emotionally digestible form without losing its accuracy. It's for this reason that I hesitated to suggest the snake-eating-rat picture above, because in quantitative terms, the potential suffering of insects outweighs that of other animals by orders of magnitude in expected value. Similarly, it may be that recondite details of physics, cosmology, and anthropics imply vastly non-intuitive conclusions about the distribution of suffering in the multiverse and how best we can ameliorate it.

That's basically the theme of this blog, as well as the reason that basic research by groups like SIAI is so crucial. First do the math, and then come up with the "marketing" (feel-good images and unconscious persuasions) to back it up. But don't neglect the marketing: Math alone can't sustain motivation on a day-to-day basis. We also need the help of appropriately designed social and environmental surroundings to keep our emotions in line with our fundamental values.

The Rational Futurist

2010-03-06T05:02:00.000-08:00

Tom McCabe has a new website called "The Rational Futurist" with personal information and writings on various topics, including friendly AI. The site is definitely worth checking out.

I particularly enjoyed the link to one of Tom's blog entries on religion. Still, I do have to agree with the comment by Starglider on the original forum:

Unfortunately I'd have to be utilitarian about this and say that if there's genuinely no chance of overthrowing the celestial tyrant, then everyone should act to minimise suffering, which if we're talking about genuine eternity is a exercise in transfinite mathematics (not that 99.999% of religious morons have any real concept of what they're invoking when they throw around the words 'eternal' and 'infinite'). Under the (ludicrously unlikely) premise as stated, that presumably means biting the bullet, drinking the kool aid and following the dictates of the evil god.

Remembering Why Suffering Matters

2010-01-03T19:46:00.000-08:00

By way of this excellent blog post on paperclipping by Roko, I came across the following video:

It's good to watch things like this from time to time so that we remember why the rest of what we do matters. This is what "Reducing Suffering" is really all about.

More on Preventing Eternal Torment

2009-12-27T01:16:00.000-08:00

I've written previously on the question of what types of simulators or other hell punishers we ought to fear most. Over time, I've grown slightly less worried about conventional religious-type scenarios of eternal punishment. While I do think the fact that people have made religious claim X breaks the symmetry between "obeying X will prevent eternal torment" and "obeying X will bring about eternal torment," I generally see the amount of the asymmetry as being rather small in comparison with other scenarios that should probably demand far more attention.

Perhaps an avenue where Pascalians might better apply their resources is in preventing human-type punishers of a more bland variety from gaining access to simulation capabilities. For instance, Pascalians might form an organization with the mission of identifying and defusing attempts by sadists to acquire power and computational resources with which they could create hell simulations. A friend of mine put it this way:

if somebody says "i'm gonna make me an AI that'll turn turn the earth into hell, with fires everywhere and demons with little pitchforks", you could say to them "no, don't do that" or maybe pay somebody else to build a good AI instead, that sort of thing. Become a vigilante and hunt down evil techno-prophets with a sawed-off shotgun, not that there are any evil techno-prophets. But I suppose you could keep an eye out.

Since Christian and Islamic fundamentalists are in fact some of the people most likely to support turning the earth into hell with fires and demons, there might be value in aiming to take away power from such organizations. This could include simply trying to reduce the number of people who ideologically support the notion of eternal punishment.

This last point almost turns Pascal's wager on its head. Obeying a punishing god -- or a malevolent ruler of any type -- is basically adopting the stance, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." But if those malevolent powers may themselves originate from groups of humans who can be stopped, maybe you can "beat 'em" after all. (Of course, I don't think it's necessarily impossible to take action against the ideology of eternal torture while simultaneously trying to submit to some sort of deity who imposes it, even if the situation is a bit awkward.)

I write all of this partly as an update to my thinking and partly in response to the following email that I received. The author has given me permission to reproduce his/her text anonymously; it comprises the quoted sections below. I've interspersed my own replies.

Since I have read your essays about hell, my worldview has changed dramatically. I think it is important to find out much about possible hell-punishers even if we risk finitive losses. But I have one problem with Pascalian reasoning: Ignoring all evidence of agnosticism and always assuming the worst.

Just suppose we have immortal souls. To experience a totally god or bad version of the hereafter say heaven and hell is only one (or a few) possibilities among ambivalent or less extreme forms of the afterlife (LEFA).

What if we make ourselves unhappy for a lifetime by thinking about hell and beeing afraid of, then die and with high probability not going to hell but to heaven or most likely to the LEFA where there is nothing to despair but also not to rejoice. If we continue to despair ourselves by pascalian reasoning and we live forever in the LEFA (of course we could still go to hell but the probability that we would exactly do what makes us avoid hell (and not the opposite!) is quite low) we would make ourselves suffer infinitively and create our own "hell in heaven". Of course you can't say that heaven or LESA with the fear of hell is as bad as the worst forms of hell themselves but the second thing is far more likely. So perhaps pascalian reasoning is in the utilitarian view the worst thing you can do to yourself.

This argument would be invalid if in heaven or in the LESA we had no influence on our own feelings but this may even be so on earth.

Thanks for the interesting point.

Surely it would be much worse to be in hell than living my egoistic pascalian life on earth or in the LESA but it is already bad enough that I want to die, what I am not trying to do because of the fear of hell.

I'm very sorry to hear that! However, I can't say the feeling is unfamiliar: Life under religious fundamentalism is very often not worth living.

Maybe I should rather care about the earthly problems than making my mind up about hell. Certainly, I would become less selfish if I wouldn't always fear to loose time, energy that could be used to calm the hell-punisher.

You're right to point out that Pascalian obedience is fundamentally selfish. For instance, if fundamentalist Catholicism were true, the most altruistic response might be to disobey god in an attempt to reduce the number of births as much as possible -- perhaps by promoting contraception in non-Catholic countries.

Always when I think I should do something because I could go to hell if I failed to do it, I revolt against the order of my rationality by doing nothing and excuse myself by suddenly believing in fate. If I didn't fear hell I had also some positive motives as self-confidence and enjoyment to develop my talents and my willpower. If I wouldn't always ignore every worldview without an avoidable hell I could more likely find out what God is like (what does not mean you can't be punished eternally for not doing so) or I could maybe even adhere to a religion (I was a Christian until I considered if Islam was more likely) or something like that (I pray to a religionless deity every day for universal salvation but actually I DON'T HAVE FATITH).

Wow, I can sympathize completely -- fear of religion is indeed painful. And I completely know what you mean about praying to a religionless diety for universal salvation. :)

I hope things get better for you. Take care!

SIAI Matching Challenge: Choose Your Own Research Project

2009-12-25T21:16:00.000-08:00

Between now and 28 Feb. 2010, SIAI is offering a matching-funds challenge up to $100,000. Intriguingly, donors can choose particular grant proposals to fund -- including, e.g., papers on the following topics:

"The Coherence of Human Goals" (related to my own concerns about friendly AI and "coherent extrapolated volition");
"AI Risks Philanthropy: How Many Lives Can We Save per Dollar?"
"Digital Intelligences and the Evolution of Superorganisms"
"Anthropic Reasoning and Decision Theory: What We Don't Know, and Why It Matters" (highly relevant to just about anyone concerned with making a difference in our multiverse).

In addition, the page explains that donors contributing at least $1K can contact Anna Salamon to discuss the possibility of a new research topic. So, utilitarians: If you're interested in donating and have a project in mind, do contact Anna and see what can be done. SIAI might, for instance, fund an exploration of the types of suffering computations we decide to care about. Or perhaps a paper assimilating research on some aspect of mathematics, physics, computer science, economics, psychology, or cognitive science that is crucially important to know about when trying to reduce large-scale suffering.

Each paper has an associated expected cost figure, like this one for the anthropics article:

Total budget: $5,960, including:

Conference fees, air travel, motel: $1,400

Costs for researcher time: $4,560

How research costs are estimated:

Person-months for research and writing: 1.9 (obtained by taking our standard estimate[1] of 1.25 person-months per conference paper and multiplying by 1.5, since this paper requires thinking through and aggregating many different topics).

Dollars required to support one skilled full time researcher-month[2]: $2,400

The two footnotes are particularly enjoyable and illustrate the utilitarian mindset of the organization. Indeed, the entire grant descriptions read rather like a GiveWell summary report on the cost-effectiveness of a charity's work. (How long until GiveWell itself considers research charities like SIAI, I wonder?)

Excellent Introduction to SIAI

2009-12-25T19:42:00.000-08:00

I quite enjoyed Anna Salamon's talk, "Shaping the Intelligence Explosion," from the Singularity Summit 2009. Unlike many futurist speakers and authors, Salamon presented basic statements about what motivates the Singularity Institute (SIAI) in a fashion free from a lot of the unecessary transhumanist baggage (pet concerns like life extension or multiple-universe hypotheses) that can turn away people from other backgrounds who fundamentally care no less about these issues.

Salamon presented (~1:17 in the video) "Four Key Claims":

1. Intelligence can radically transform the world.
2. An intelligence explosion may be sudden.
3. An uncontrolled intelligence explosion would kill us and destroy practically everything we care about.
4. A controlled intelligence explosion could save us, and protect practically everything else we care about. It is difficult, but worth the attempt.

I'm personally rather skeptical that an intelligence explosion will ever occur -- indeed, I may assign the scenario a very low probability. On the other hand, if one did occur, the magnitude of its impact on our region of the cosmos would be so profound that I think focusing our efforts preparing for such possibilities has high expected value. (Think about why you wear a seat belt the next time you drive to your friend's house down the street.) I liked the way Salamon explained SIAI's core mission as something that almost anyone, even skeptics like me, ought to care about -- not just computer geeks and sci-fi aficionados. (As far as the potential plausibility of intelligence explosion itself, I do think the discussion around 18:00 of whole-brain emulation and the Hansonian takeoff scenario was well done.)

Of course, SIAI is fundamentally an academic organization, and most of its research is highly valuable whether or not an "intelligence explosion" ever occurs. Indeed, I encourage donations to SIAI mainly to fund projects that will help us better understand how to reduce massive amounts of suffering in our multiverse. SIAI explores fundamental questions about physics, Bayesian statistics, anthropics, decision theory, infinitarian consequentialism, consciousness, and cognitive science need to be studied regardless of what happens with AI.

By the way, I found this quote from ~8:30 particularly intriguing: "[The theoretical intelligence] AIXI could, for example [...], look at a video clip of this auditorium and deduce our laws of physics with high probability from the way objects are colored and standing. It could deduce that you are made of proteins, and as it watches your face, it can get a probability distribution as to your evolutionary history, your social relationships, your in-most fears." Listen to the surrounding video for more details. Solomonoff induction is pretty cool!

Finally, readers may be interested in this other post on SIAI's matching-grant challenge, in which donors can choose their own research projects to support.

Reducing-Suffering Wiki

2009-12-25T01:06:00.000-08:00

I've mentioned that I find wiki pages a convenient place to save references in a format that's easy to edit quickly and also available to others to see. Unfortunately, many of the quick notes and personal ideas that I want to record don't fit into Wikipedia articles, so I decided to try a separate wiki page for those: A "Reducing-Suffering Wiki".

I'm not yet sure if I'll find the site useful in the long term, but it'll be an interesting experiment. Right now, the content is rather sparse, so if you're interested in reading but not contributing, you might check back in several weeks or months.

The site isn't intended to be for my personal use only, so please contribute if you're interested!

Procrastination: "Being in the Mood"

2009-12-05T16:58:00.000-08:00

Feeling Good by David Burns has a nice discussion of why people procrastinate. I particularly enjoyed this piece of advice:

Motivation does not come first, action does! You have to prime the pump. Then you will begin to get motivated, and the fluids will flow spontaneously. [...] Individuals who procrastinate frequently confuse motivation and action. You foolishly wait until you feel in the mood to do something. Since you don't feel like doing it, you automatically put it off. (qtd. in Bonnie Runyan McCullough, Totally Organized: The Bonnie McCullough Way, p. 52)

I proffer some additional notes. They're all pretty obvious, but I find that I benefit from reminding myself of them frequently.

Decide on goals and tasks; then act. The point of avoiding procrastination is to get important things done. This requires that you know (1) what you consider important (your objective function) and (2) how best to achieve your goals (what your tasks are). Decide those first; then use Burns's anti-procrastination technique to do the highest-value tasks.
Update your to-do list over time. There's no need expending willpower to accomplish unimportant tasks, even if they're included on a to-do list. As you learn more and as priorities change, update the ordering of the to-do list. Drop old tasks that you once found important but now do not.
Don't "save work for later" unless you're sure you'll get it done later. This is the old "never do tomorrow what you can do today" maxim. There are times when I'm tempted to put off a high-value task for later (like checking emails) because I know it'll be fun. This is sometimes a good idea, but not if it causes a backlog of tasks to build up over time. Then finishing them all becomes a chore. And in general, I've found "there's plenty more where that came from," i.e., I can pretty much always find some high-value task for which I'm in the mood, and I don't need to save particular fun tasks for that purpose.
Avoiding procrastination allows for more time when you don't need to override your mood. In many cases, if there's no hard deadline or stark difference in productivity value between several actions, you ought to do the one that you most want to do, knowing that you'll probably want to do others later on. And if not, you can expend some willpower to get yourself started on them at a later point. Such is the luxury afforded by not being late in finishing time-sensitive tasks: You don't need to constantly expend willpower in forcing yourself to do the next put-out-the-fire item on your list.

Which Intuitions to Trust?

2009-09-21T17:05:00.000-07:00

Why do I believe that the table in front of me exists? Well, I have a sense perception of light reflected from the table entering my eyes, and I hypothesize the existence of the table as an explanation of what caused that perception.

Now suppose I have a perceptual intuition about the existence of, say, a hell world in which people who steal are punished. What do I conclude? I assume that the belief is most likely a figment of my imagination, invented by my brain as a result of various cultural images and ideas that have been developed over the ages.

There are important, practical differences that may justify the divergence here. For instance, nearly everyone's perception of the table in front of me agrees to a large extent, while intuitions about punishment in the hereafter diverge wildly, if they're present at all. But suppose it were otherwise; suppose 99.9% of humans shared an intuitive impression that, yes, people who steal will be punished in a hereafter of a particular sort. Does this make it justified to conclude that such a hereafter exists, and that its existence is impressed upon human minds by some physical mechanism like the photons which impress upon our eyes the existence of the table? What if we found a region of the brain that seemed to produce the hell-world intuitions? Would we take that to be the receptor of this other-worldly signal, in the same way that the eyes and vision-processing regions of the brain are taken to be the receptors of the table signals?

Perhaps it's more complicated to assume that another world exists and sends these signals than to assume that they're generated by our own minds. That may be. But why is it also not more complicated to assume that an external table exists than to assume that our brains are confabulating that sensory input as well? (I suppose this is the usual question, Why assume that I'm not dreaming?)

Perhaps we're in a simulation, and the table impression is being fed to me by the program that's running my brain. But then why not suppose that the hell intuition is also being fed to me by that program, rather than supposing that it's something my own brain generated on its own? In that case, why couldn't the hell world be, from the perspective of things-inside-the-simulation, as "real" as the table? My intuition would just be a warning from the simulator about what he has in store for my future. If we think a simulator exists for other reasons, then such a conclusion doesn't seem outlandish or terribly complicated.

I suppose I've essentially just recapitulated Alvin Plantinga's argument that certain religious beliefs can be properly basic, so I waive any claims to originality here. Unlike Plantinga, though, I would make no distinctions about what sorts of beliefs can be properly basic. There's no difference in principle between other-worldly intuitions and an overwhelming impression that, say, an invisible Great Pumpkin flies over the pumpkin patch each Halloween.

What exactly would a good Occam-abiding Bayesian say here? Is the distinction between table impressions transmitted through photons and hell impressions transmitted through some other physical means merely one of degree (e.g., wider agreement on what the table impressions tell us, better understanding of what photons are for other reasons) rather than kind? I would guess so, but perhaps there's another point I'm missing.

Maybe we need to make our beliefs pay rent by anticipating particular future outcomes. For afterlife questions, we have to wait a while to test some of the predictions, but perhaps there are other predictions that the hell-world hypothesis makes which could be examined more immediately. For instance, if we think the hell world will be run by our simulator, we might imagine that he would issue forewarnings about that world whenever we steal, by causing us to execute a cognitive algorithm for the sensation of guilt. I guess it's more simple to postulate that our own minds trigger the guilt algorithm on their own, without needing external activation. But then consider this analogy. When I see someone's fingers hit keys on a piano, I perceive a sensation of sound. My hypothesis to explain this is that the piano sends sound waves to my ears, which receive the signal and trigger cognitive operations that we refer to as "hearing the sound." But why not suppose instead that, whenever I see someone hit a key, my brain automatically triggers those "hear the sound" operations -- with appropriate confabulations to account for the fact that, say, I don't see every key that the piano player's fingers hit, or I may hear the music on the radio instead?

It seems the difference with the hell scenario comes principally from the fact that sound waves are a useful hypothesis in other contexts; for instance, their existence accounts for the results of certain physics experiments. Absent such data, belief in "sound waves" would, apparently, be just as absurd as belief in ghosts due to an overwhelming sense impression that they exist. (I wonder: Are there entities or phenomena in which most scientists do believe that have not been shown to be useful theoretical constructs in other ways? Skeptics claim that so-called supernatural beliefs are of this type, but are there others -- like sound waves or photons -- that similarly don't pass this test?)

On the other hand, what if we have other theoretical reasons for believing in the existence of a simulator with motives for punishing people and a desire to forewarn them about it. Then couldn't pangs of guilt and associated fear fairly naturally be interpreted as messages from the simulator? Of course, the "your brain did it on it's own" explanation is also strong, but perhaps not overwhelmingly so? Could responding directly to such warnings be a safer course of action than acting in response to more elaborate scenarios about other, stranger conditions for punishment that our simulators might impose?

Reflecting on Your Cognitive Algorithms

2009-09-20T17:52:00.000-07:00

This post is largely a personal musing; the substantive content has been discussed elsewhere by many other authors.

One of the things that has most transformed the way I look at the world has been cognitive science, specifically the philosophical understanding that grounds it: Seeing the brain as a collection of cognitive algorithms running on biological hardware. This focus on not just what the brain does but how it might do it is fundamentally transformative.

For as long as I can remember, I had known about the types of psychological facts commonly reported in the news: For instance, that this particular region of the brain controls this particular function, or that certain drugs can treat certain brain disorders by acting in certain ways. And it's basic knowledge to almost everyone on the planet that operations inside the head are somehow important for cognitive function, because when people damage their brains, they lose certain abilities.

While I knew all of this abstractly, I never thought much about what it implied philosophically. I saw myself largely as a homunculus, a black box that performed various behaviors and had various emotions over time. Psychology, then, was like macroeconomics or population biology: What sort of trends do these black boxes tend to exhibit in given circumstances? I didn't think about the fact that my behaviors could be reduced further to particular cognitive-processing steps inside my brain.

Yet it seems pretty clear that such a reduction is possible. Think about computers, for instance. Like a human, a computer exhibits particular behaviors in particular circumstances, and certain types of damage cause certain, predictable malfunctions. Yet I don't think I ever pictured a computer as a distinct inner self that might potentially have free will; there were no ghosts or phantoms inside the machine. Once I had some exposure to computer architecture and software design, I could imagine what kinds of operations might be going on behind, say, my text-editor program. So why I did I picture other people and myself differently? My conceptions reflected how an algorithm feels from inside; I simply stopped at the basic homunculus intuition without breaking it apart.

Picturing yourself as a (really complicated and kludgey) computer program casts life in a new light. Rather than simply doing a particular, habitual action in a particular situation, I like to reflect upon, What sort of cognitive algorithm might be causing this behavior? Of course, I rarely have good answers -- studying that is what cognitive science is for -- but the fact that there is an answer soluble in principle gives a new angle on my own psychology. It's perhaps like the Buddhist notion of looking at yourself from the outside, distanced from the in-the-trenches raw experience of an emotion. And, optimistically, such a perspective might suggest ways to improve your psychology, perhaps by adopting new cognitive rituals. That is, of course, what self-help books have done for ages; the computer analogy (e.g., "brain hacks" or "mind hacks," as they're sometimes called) is just one more metaphor for describing the same thing.

Related is the realization that thought isn't a magical, instantaneous operation but, rather, requires physical work. Planning, envisioning scenarios, calculating the results of possible actions, acquiring information, debating different hypotheses about the way the world works, proving theorems, and so on are not -- as, say, logicians or economists often imagine them -- immediate and obvious; they involve computational effort that requires moving atoms around in the real world. For instance, the fact that you considered an option and then disregarded it is not a "wasted effort," because there's no other way to figure out the right answer than actually to do the calculation. Similarly, you're not at fault for failing to know something or for temporarily holding a misconception; the process of acquiring correct (or at least "less wrong") beliefs about the world requires substantive computation and physical interaction with other people. Changing your opinions when you discover you're in error isn't something to be embarrassed about -- it's an intrinsic step in the algorithm of acquiring better opinions itself.

Pain-free Animals?

2009-09-12T16:58:00.000-07:00

The current Vegan Outreach newsletter contains a link to a New Scientist piece (as well as an unfortunate editorial) based on a fascinating article: "Knocking Out Pain in Livestock: Can Technology Succeed Where Morality has Stalled?" by Adam Shriver. The moral urgency of such a proposal seems to me obvious, so I was most interested in the discussion of its scientific plausibility.

Shriver presents two example proposals for what might be done. First, we might

create knockouts of other mammals (cows and pigs for starters) lacking the AC1 and AC8 enzymes. Interfering with the cAMP cycle in the brain reduces the affective dimension of chronic or persistent pain, rather than pain full stop, but this would still be an improvement over current circumstances. If we could eliminate the sensitization that occurs as a result of painful or traumatic experiences, the animals would still be better off than they are now.

Secondly,

Zhou-Feng Chen and colleagues searched the Allen Brain Atlas to find genes that were highly expressed in the ACC but not other areas of the brain [29]. One strong candidate was the peptide P311. The researchers created knockout mice lacking the expression of P311 and found that heat and mechanical sensitivity were normal in the animals. However, they then performed a conditioned place aversion test on the animals and found that the knockouts no longer demonstrated the conditioned place aversion caused by formalin injections, in stark contrast to control rats. Thus, at first glance, it appears that knocking out P311 in mice strongly diminishes the affective dimension of pain while keeping acute responses intact.

Furthermore, P311 is likely to play a similar role in all mammals (Chen, personal communication), so one presumably could engineer other mammals that have a reduced affective dimension of pain while maintaining the sensory dimension of pain.

Since I'm even more interested in wild-animal suffering than farm-animal suffering, in view of the vast difference in numbers of animals involved, my immediate question was whether similar techniques might one day be applicable there. Doing so is a lot trickier, because evolution produced the badness of pain for a reason. Shriver mentions this concern:

Since it seems likely that the affective dimension of pain played some role in determining the evolutionary fitness of organisms, we might question whether knockout livestock could really survive up through the point where they are normally slaughtered. However, it appears that the experimental rats were able to survive without complication at least in their cages (Chen, personal communication). This would be a good model for sows or veal calves who spend most of their lives confined in small pens where they can’t do much of anything that would injure or otherwise harm themselves.

Producing genetically fit wildlife without pain might require not just knocking out pain but replacing the "pain" - "pleasure" axis with a "less pleasure" - "more pleasure" axis, which could be much more difficult.

I mentioned that Shriver's proposal seems obviously valuable from my perspective, but unfortunately this isn't necessarily the case among the general public. As the New Scientist article notes:

[Alan] Goldberg also contends that public attitudes may make pain-free livestock a non-starter. He and colleague Renee Gardner conducted an online survey on the use of pain-free animals in research and found little public support, even among researchers who experiment on animals (Alternatives to Animal Testing and Experimentation, vol 14, p 145).

This underscores the importance of public outreach to change hearts and minds about wild-animal suffering and how it could be prevented.

Ham and Eggonomics, Part 2

2009-07-16T16:49:00.001-07:00

Below are some quotes from and comments on Ch. 8 of the Ham and Eggonomics book introduced in Part 1.

The authors begin with a discussion of the fallacy that "my individual purchases don't matter." They give a nice illustration:

Suppose that we take 5,280 [one foot] rulers and placed them in a straight line, end to end. This line of rulers would then be one mile long. It would appear as one long line, and if you could view the entire mile of rulers from above, you would not be able to see one single ruler. If you removed one ruler, the line would grow shorter; there is no doubt as to that. Viewed from above, removing one ruler would not appear to have any effect on the line—but again, it does.

Of course, the analogy to food purchases isn't quite accurate. In practice, as discussed here, an individual's purchasing choice is extremely unlikely to change the number of animals raised, because food is produced and sold in bulk units. However, in the event that a consumer does have an effect, that effect will be huge. Thus, in ignorance of whether a particular purchase is the one that "breaks the camel's back," the expected values of each purchase do add in the same way as the rulers. (To the extent that this reality may be de-motivating for potential vegetarians, perhaps it's better not to mention it too much?)

Pages 3-4 contain a nice discussion of the relevance of elasticities to the question of how an individual's purchases affect the quantity supplied by the market. The authors argue that the supply curves for beef, and to a lesser extent milk, are likely inelastic, while those for pork, and probably also chicken and eggs, are probably relatively elastic. More elastic supply means a bigger change in production when consumer behavior changes. Thus, for instance, abstaining from eating 1 kilogram of chicken has a bigger expected impact on the kilograms of chicken produced than abstaining from 1 kilogram of beef has on the kilograms of beef produced, other things being equal. As far as demand elasticity, the studies that the authors have done suggest a slightly bigger kilogram-for-kilogram impact of abstaining from chicken, pork, veal, and milk relative to beef or eggs. The total results--combining information about supply elasticities and demand elasticities--are shown in Figure 8.2 (see this document for the Chapter 8 figures), which I've reproduced below in sorted order:

If [someone] gives up Total Consumption of ... the Product Falls By ...
One Pound of Milk 0.56 lbs
One Pound of Beef 0.68 lbs
One Pound of Veal 0.69 lbs
One Pound of Pork 0.74 lbs
One Pound of Chicken 0.76 lbs
One Egg 0.91 egg.

Of course, this is not the end of the story. Other (often more important) factors to consider when deciding on dietary purchases include the quality of the lives of animals of different types, and the number of animals required to produce a given quantity of meat, counting both the animals themselves and their parents. Pages 5-6 explain Bailey's own views on the quality of life of various farm animals on a scale of -10 to 10 (see Figure 8.4).

In particular, Bailey thinks some farm animals have lives worth living. Looking at only the non-breeder animals, these are cows (+6), AWA-certified pork (+4), broiler chickens (+3), and cage-free hens (+2). On broiler chickens, Bailey says they "have a life worth living, but because of their leg problems and confined environment, do not fare as well as beef cattle" (p. 5). I'm more skeptical that broilers on average enjoy their lives, but even if they do, I would still be wary of giving them positive welfare because the painfulness of slaughter has to be considered. I personally wouldn't want to live even a mildly pleasant life for only 45 days if it meant that I would afterwards endure slaughter. This is probably true even if I were given electrical stunning and definitely true if I were one of the birds for which the stunning was not effective.

I assume Bailey has included the painfulness of death in his numbers, but it would be good to make this explicit. Otherwise, many readers will just imagine what a broiler chicken looks like during a typical moment of its life, multiply that by ~42 days of life, and conclude that the total experience is positive. An explicit mention of the relevance of lengths of lives would be helpful as well; indeed, this consideration makes Bailey's numbers seem a little odd. How can a beef cow, which lives for 402 days (see the "Beef" section here) have only twice the total happiness (+6 instead of +3) of a broiler chicken that lives 42 days? If Bailey's calculations do involve multiplication of his welfare numbers by lifespan, I missed that part of the text. In any event, doing straight multiplication in that way would still be misleading because it ignores the painfulness of death at the end of a life, unless stress during transport and slaughter has been implicitly incorporated into the per-day average.

Pages 6-7 discuss the impacts of farming on wild animals. In my view, this is the most important part of the calculation, especially if we give more than vanishingly small probability to insect sentience. Of course, if insects' short lives aren't worth living, then it's not clear that pesticide use in crop production represents a net harm (though whether it is or not, the chemicals could still potentially be made less painful).

As they did in Chapter 6, the book authors comment on the possibility that bigger wild animals also suffer enormously:

Animal rights groups tend to romanticize the life of animals in the wild, but anyone who has watched wildlife documentaries can attest to the cruelty of nature. We ask you, the reader, would you rather be a Wildebeest in Africa who must constantly roam for food, always in pursuit by lions and crocodiles, or would you rather be a cow in the U.S., or a hog in the U.S.? (pp. 6-7)

The authors continue with a discussion of the consideration, How many animals does it take to produce a given quantity of meat? This is the primary variable of interest in my own calculations of suffering per kilogram of meat, but the book authors do a more thorough job, by including numbers of parent animals that need to be raised, as well as the efficiency of production under various conditions. An example of the latter is that cage-free hens produce fewer eggs per week than caged hens.

In fact, this last point is rather important to the question of whether to purchase cage-free eggs (or, at least, whether to encourage others to do so). As the authors explain (p. 11), if you believe that both caged and cage-free hens suffer and that cage-free hens suffer at least ~2/3 times as much as caged hens, then for efficiency reasons, caged-hen eggs entail less total suffering than cage-free-hen eggs. However, Bailey's personal opinion (see Figure 8.4) is that cage-free hens have net happy lives, in which case cage-free eggs would clearly be preferable.

The chapter continues with interesting discussions of public attitudes toward factory farming as assessed by a nationwide telephone survey, as well as how one could compute willingness-to-pay for animal welfare by different consumers. The Appendix describes the mechanics of how elasticities can be used when assessing changes in the quantity of a good supplied, as well as the detailed calculations of how many animals need to be raised to produce a given amount of meat.

Toward the end of the main chapter, the authors make a disturbing comment, though perhaps not one that comes as a surprise:

There is evidence to believe that many Americans simply do not care very much about the well-being of farm animals. In our conversations with 300 individuals from three cities in the U.S., one-third told us that they would rather not know how farm animals are raised. They simply want to continue consuming their delicious, safe, and inexpensive food without worrying about whether the animals that provide that food suffer. (p. 17)

I hope to get a chance to read more of the book at some point; it contains lots of high-quality and thoughtful discussion. Thanks to the authors for writing it!

Ham and Eggonomics, Part 1

2009-07-04T12:02:00.000-07:00

Bailey Norwood is a professor of agricultural economics at Oklahoma State University. Much of his recent research on food preferences and farm-animal care is of interest to the animal-welfare community. For instance, one of his papers examines economic impacts of switching to vegetarian diets, giving consideration to the supply-and-demand interrelationships of the chicken, pork, beef, and corn markets.

One of Norwood's recent projects is a website called Ham and Eggonomics, which includes an associated blog. In the page's own words:

This website is intended to be an information source for consumers about the food they eat, with specific emphasis on the welfare of farm animals. Finding good, useful information is difficult. Scientists are objective but often to timid to make general statements. Food industries have their obvious bias. Even authors who write books about food generally distort and sensationalize the truth to scare consumers.

Ham and Eggonomics states the facts plainly and is not scared to tackle an issue head-on. The website only desires to provide you with the information you require for your food choices, and has no desire to tilt your political leanings or recruit you into a specific cause.

The page features the a book with the same name as the site. The book is in draft form, and "comments are welcome," so I'll make a few remarks on Chapters 1 and 6 below. In Part 2, I comment on Chapter 8.

Chapter 1 lays out the slant from which the authors approach animal welfare: Namely, the economics of revealed preferences, rather than philosophical prescription.

Whereas ethicists and philosophers will argue about the morality of treating animals in certain ways, the economic approaches assumes that each person is entitled to their own view of animal welfare. (Ch. 1, p. 11)

The economic approach is to instead treat peoples’ views on animal welfare as preferences. That is, instead of arguing with you about what is right or wrong, or trying to persuade you to adopt a particular system of moral beliefs, we simply ask you, and your fellow citizens, what you think is right and wrong and make that the goal of society. For example, if instead of animal welfare we were dealing with the contentious issue of abortion, we would not try to persuade you to be for or against abortion. Instead, we would poll the public, and if a majority of Americans was against abortion, we might would conclude that public policy should outlaw abortion. That is just an example, an example to illustrate that we seek to determine how animals should be raised, based on the moral and ethical beliefs of you and your fellow citizens. (Ch. 1, p. 3)

Needless to say, I don't agree with this approach, because it conflates prescription about what should be done with description of the desires held by an arbitrary group of agents (adult Americans, in rough proportion to their voting / purchasing power). I demur at the suggestion that "animals matter because people care about them" (Ch. 1, p. 5). But my objection here is no different from my disagreement with the standard economic approach in general, and I'm glad the authors make their bias explicit. In addition, I appreciate the authors' aim to make reasoned decisions based on academic research into the costs and benefits of particular actions, without being afraid to upset standard ideological positions. (We merely differ on what to measure when assessing costs and benefits.)

The tone of the book is very "mainstream":

In this book, we offer no grand moral philosophy that makes your food choices straightforward. We do not believe ourselves so smart and knowledgeable that we can dictate to you the choices you can make. We can, however, help you understand the consequences of your choices, and help you better form your views on farm animal welfare. (Ch. 6, p. 20)

This may ultimately prove beneficial, because the message is not off-putting to majority of Americans in the way that much animal-rights literature is.

I largely agree with the authors that "the study of animal welfare is, for all practical purposes, the study of farm animal welfare" (Ch. 1, p. 4) because farm animals vastly outnumber those used in labs or for fur. Indeed, I would go further and say that the study of animal welfare is, for all practical purposes, the study of chicken welfare, because the number of pigs and cows slaughtered is tiny by comparison.

I do wish this point were recognized more by animal-welfare organizations, which -- even when they recognize the importance of farm animals -- often continue to focus resources on, say, welfare standards for veal calves and sows. Even the authors of Ham and Eggonomics fall into this, by giving roughly equal time to welfare questions about the raising of cows, pigs, and chickens. Really, the only animals people should think about when discussing land-based factory farms are broiler chickens and laying hens.

The above statement ignores fish and crustaceans, which may also suffer in huge numbers. And of course, it ignores wild animals. The book authors are not silent on this point, however:

It would also be foolish romanticism to believe that the lives of all domesticated animals are inferior to their ancestors or to modern animals that live in the wild. Domesticated animals live without the fear of predators and have ample supply of food and water; one need only turn their television to the Discovery channel to see that wild animals live in constant fear of being mauled and are no strangers to hunger and starvation. (Ch. 1, p. 9)

Some animal rights groups are even opposed to the owning of animals as pets. They only wish animals to exist in their wild state, which as any avid watcher of nature shows can attest, has its own distinct forms of cruelty. Wild animals, though adapted to their environment, face many obstacles to receiving adequate nutrition, and most face constant pursuit as prey. In our opinion, wild animals do not have a high level of well-being. (Ch. 6, p. 19)

The authors go on to cite my piece on wild-animal suffering on p. 19. (The blog mentions it as well.) They suggest an interesting conclusion, one that I probably agree with:

It is possible, and to us likely, that the only manner in which animals can enter this world and for their species as a whole to experience more happiness than suffering is for them to be under the stewardship of humans. Whether they are pigs destined for slaughter or dogs destined for doting, nature’s hand has no choice but to be cruel, while humans have the choice to become compassionate stewards. If an animal species is to exist, between [sic.: better] for them to exist under the care of humans, generally speaking. (Ch. 6, p. 19)

This is perhaps unsurprising: Evolution does not optimize an objective function of cumulative happiness minus pain. (Of course, neither do almost all breeders of farmed animals.) Human engineers with the specific goal of reducing suffering and promoting wellbeing ought to be able to do better, unless they are too incompetent to succeed at the task. In practice, incompetence may very well prevail with respect to wild animals at the moment (evolution, for all its "blind, pitiless indifference," may do a better job at currently evolved optima), but this needn't be the case indefinitely, as human technology and intelligence progress.

Reactions to Animal Suffering

2009-07-03T12:31:00.000-07:00

The forum of the Vegane Gesellschaft Österreich or Vegan Society Austria features an interesting discussion of wild-animal suffering from September-October 2008. Here is the link to the first page in German. Below I've copied some comments that I thought were worth highlighting, converted to English using Google Translate.

The topic was raised by "mars mensch":

I'm vegan because I do not want the animals to suffer. I think veganism and animal rights, the idea is to spread a very effective way the suffering of farm animals (and perhaps humans) to be reduced.
But what about wild animals? I can hardly anything on the Internet can find. There are most probably suffering in wilderness. Wild animals suffer from all kinds - hunger, thirst, cold, disease, parasites, injuries, .. depending on the type and probably also fear, grief, stress, sexual frustration ..
Somehow, nobody seems to be wondering about it. I do not think of people suffering caused is worse than "natural", as some seem to perceive. Suffering is suffering.
So the question is: What can be done against the suffering in the wilderness do I have to honestly have no clue.

here are two interesting links on the topic, but also without any real answers:
http://utilitarian-essays.com/wild-animals.pdf
http://www.felicifia.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=161

Some respondents suggested that wild animals may not need help:

I think animals are in the wilderness pretty well. You can provide for themselves or a family, have an enormous amount of space to move and they die at some point. The fact that they are not always made great must simply accept, as people in affluent societies, which have sufficient food and shelter often beyond problems. (Heavy Heavy Low Low, p. 1)

but the few animals are still wild eg: on an island, does not need our help, because the suffering or death keeps everything in balance. (The Andi, p. 1)

I like the reply that mars mensch gave (p. 1):

I think some here have a rather romantic idea of the transformed nature or seem to think that nature is good and man is the source of the evil in the world. This is also anthropozentisch and is not true. Nature is cruel.
Animals are not perfectly adapted to the environment. Many survive the winter because they do not starve or freeze. Dry periods and droughts regularly delete almost complete populations. Diseases and parasites are widespread. There are predators, etc., etc.
We encourage vegans to get us to that calves are taken away from their mothers. But also in the freedom of pups lose their parents and vice versa.
I really do not know what one against the suffering of wild animals can do, but we should in any case, start thinking about it. Perhaps the best thing you can do at the moment, to disseminate that anything should do.

Some further posters expressed the view that humans should leave wildlife alone:

And I personally will not if I now beginning with a game to feel compassion, precisely because it is free in nature can live and also the natural circumstances is exposed!
For me, this is just nature and wilderness: The life enjoy, with all its vagaries and dangers [...] I've also someday read a quote from someone: A world without suffering is a dead world! So somehow related to the natural sorrow which is not vermeitbar has this quote already in my opinion. (leather, p. 2)

when Veganism is not yet a matter of principle, suffering-free world to create (yes this is absolutely not in the range of our options), but only a question of our behavior to be corrected, so that we are sentient beings do not expect further suffering and cruel treated, just because we are stronger than they are. in their nature but we have already sufficient interfered - I personally think that the wildlife rather want us to leave, instead of us even in their affairs. (spaghetti, p. 2)

I appreciated this sentiment from "Mercy" (p. 1):

Whenever I am on television reports about natural disasters can see, such as earthquakes, floods, forest fires, then I think to the animals as victims! Of course, I also find the fate of the people who are affected gaaanz awful, no question, but then I always think that anyone who cares for the animals?

Famine and disease are "natural" in humans, yet most people seem to care about preventing them. Why is there a difference when these occur in animals, apart from the difficulty of the task?

mars mensch offered a nice concluding thought (p. 4):

Human rights are sometimes divided into several generations:

"Rights of the first" generation "refer to the classic civil and political freedom and participation rights, as established by the French Revolution were formulated. They are inter alia in the UN civil pact, or even in the European Convention on Human Rights established. The pact includes a civil general prohibition of discrimination as well as basic defensive and rights (right to life, prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, prohibition of slavery and forced labor), the vital for the protection of human dignity are more then Civil freedom and political participation rights (personal freedom and security, thought, religion, expression, assembly, freedom of association, etc.) and justice-related rights (equality before the law, presumption of innocence, fair trial, etc.). The national and international protection for civil and political rights are still the most developed.

Rights of the second "generation" include Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (in short: WSK-human rights or social rights), which since the 19th Century in the wake of the industrial revolution emerged. The central point of reference of these rights is the UN social pact, which includes rights and labor, social security, nutrition, housing, water, health and education anchored. Long time these rights were not "real" human rights, but rather as a political target views, which - in contrast to civil and political rights - legally not sufficiently identifiable and judicially reviewable hardly had. Since the 1990s, however, the content and the violation of human rights, social events significantly concretised. Social human rights are now widely deemed to be politically and are by their nature as enforceable (tangible justiciability). "Http://www.fes.de/handbuchmenschenrechte/03-menschenrechte-einstieg.html

Maybe it will be in the animal rights as well give something. Only defensive rights against the people, or the right not to be imprisoned and tortured, as response to factory farming, etc. And then to also claim rights to help those whose suffering is not caused by humans. If the species boundaries in ethics exceeded only once, it's just logical.

It's nice to get a sense of how people in the animal-rights movement respond to the idea of wild-animal suffering. Though some are uninterested, there are probably more sympathetic souls among this community than the general population. Raising the topic in forums like this does seem to be a good way of making people think about the issue.

Creating vs. Destroying Souls

2009-06-07T21:34:00.000-07:00

A reader of my Essays on Reducing Suffering wrote to me with some notes on the piece "Hell and Numbers of Births." The anonymous reader said, "I allow you to copy or to use my mail in any case you want," so I thought I would reply to the email in a public forum, where blog readers can add their own thoughts. (Many thanks to the anonymous reader for prompting the discussion!)

Here is the original email:

Dear mr Darwst,

I enjoyed to read about the inresponsabillity to give birth to children, but in my opinion there is false reasoning because you took for granted that firstly a person's immortal soul did not exist before the person's generation so secondly you have to conclude that human sexual intercourse has something to do with the creation of immortal souls. For example that mortal human beeings are able to create immortal souls only with the help of their mortal bodies (are we God?). Or that God only creates souls when a pregnant women delivers the fetus to incarnate the soul.
Here is my positon against:(position b) Let us suppose that the souls exist before the human beeing is generated and with a probabillity of x% they are in hell. But if they are born as human beeing and then they die there souls are destroyed and do not not return to hell.
In your scenario (position a) every living human being will go to hell with a propability of x%.
In my scenario (position b) the x% of the souls of all living human beings will be saved from hell.
If you create (the bodies of) y human beeing in scenario a y*x% would go to hell in scenario b y*x% would be saved from hell.

I don`t know if both scenarios are equally possible.
If this would be the the case if would not matter if we generate human beeings or not.
Perhaps you will think that scenario b is not realistic. The difference is: position a pretends humans can create souls position b says life on earht can kill the souls.
What if (position c) souls come from hell are born into human beings who die and make the soul go to heaven with a probability of x % (if not they go to hell)?
What if (position d) souls come from heaven are born into human beings who die and make the soul go to hell with a probabilityof x%(if not they go to heaven)?

Considering all these 4 scenarios, would it be better to be born or not to be born?
If all scenarios were equally possible it would not matter, if we create children to save their souls.(But then it would be nevertheless better not to be born as a human becaus live on earth can be painful, too.) If some scenarios are more possible it would be very unresponsable not to decide wheter human beeing shall be generated or not.

Please try to explain me reasonably why one of the scenarios could be more propable than the other.
Would if make a differnce if you doubt the existence of God but not the existence of an afterlife?

Maybe there are much more possible explanations why we should generate people to save their souls("To get out of hell, you have to drink Coca-Cola and you can only do this as a human being" (Who Knows? Just expect.)) or why we should not generate them. ("If you see Late-Night-Shows on TV your soul will be damned"(Who know's? Just expect.))
If we cannot think up all the possible arguemants (see above) isn't it useles to discuss this theme?

I am attending your response
Yours Sincerely,

Anonymus from Germany (that's probably why my english is so bad)

Let me say first of all that I think there are conceptual philosophical problems with traditional notions of an immaterial soul, but they needn't affect the point at hand. We can, for instance, just assume that we're talking about an immortal material soul.

The reader's last main sentence -- "If we cannot think up all the possible arguemants (see above) isn't it useles to discuss this theme?" -- summarizes the central point: For any given action A, isn't there symmetry between the hypothesis that A will cause an immortal, potentially hell-bound soul to exist vs. the hypothesis that A will cause an otherwise immortal, hell-bound soul to disappear? Giving birth to a child is an example of such an action A.

Structurally, it does seem that the hypotheses are symmetric and hence deserving of equal prior probability. However, I don't think the symmetry is preserved when we consider the evidence of what people in our world believe about the matter. The idea that a damnable soul is created exactly when a woman conceives or gives birth to a child is held by billions of people, including many adherents of Christianity and Islam (which among widely held human religions are the big two to fear as far as eternal hell is concerned). At least prima facie, this evidence shifts probability mass away from the giving-birth-destroys-a-soul hypothesis to the giving-birth-creates-a-soul one.

Of course, there are many people who subscribe neither to creationism nor traducianism (both soul-creation doctrines) but rather to perpetual existence. However, I'm not aware of a culture that has believed the relevant opposite hypothesis here: That giving birth destroys an otherwise immortal soul. In fact, I hadn't even thought of the possibility until the reader's email.

The above reply is tentative, because I agree these issues are not obvious, especially when we broaden the scope of hypotheses under consideration. For instance, maybe earth, heaven, and hell are run on a computer by simulators with a fixed amount of computational power. Creating an additional life on earth would then potentially take away resources from lives that would have been in hell.

The reader asked one additional question: "Can you say that it is more probable that humans have immortal souls than that animals plants or thing have them?" I think it is clearly more likely that humans can suffer in hell than that plants or inanimate objects can, if only because it's far more likely that humans can suffer at all. With sentient animals, the matter is less straightforward. Again deferring to certain existing religious beliefs, I would put the probability of human souls going to hell somewhat higher than that for, say, dogs. But the reader is right that the matter is not obvious, especially since some religions do attribute souls to the dogs as well (though, of course, some also attribute souls to trees and rocks...). Further, the fact that many more animals than humans are born each year does potentially make the expected value of damned animal souls very high. My original piece didn't address this issue, but I agree it's important to ponder.

Caring about Animal Suffering

2009-06-04T10:07:00.000-07:00

What are some examples of experiences that lead people to give serious concern to the suffering of animals? For Peter Singer, as he describes his experience in Animal Liberation, it was logical argument by vegetarian friends that persuaded him to think about the issue. For Josh Balk, it was watching a video containing scenes of animals being killed. Some people discovered animal cruelty by being stuck in traffic behind trucks bringing animals to slaughter. Many others have been affected by Vegan Outreach leaflets. In my own case, I simply needed to realize that animals could feel pain, a point that somehow escaped me until I came across Singer's discussion of the subject.

I ask this question because it seems to me that serious attention to animal suffering is one area that is perhaps most lacking from the mainstream intellectual sphere of moral concern. Everyone in the modern western intelligentsia seems to care about racism, homophobia, poverty, disease, and other conventional issues, yet many still fail to think twice about eating a turkey sandwich for lunch. I worry somewhat about how animals might fare in a post-human technological society -- not because I think many people would favor deliberate harm to animals, but simply because decisions with vast consequences for animal suffering might be made without giving animals a second thought.

The worst source of animal suffering is undoubtedly predation, disease, and death in the wild. A serious solution to this problem appears far off, perhaps requiring superintelligence. Therefore, it may be that animal-welfare supporters can best address the wild-animal problem by promoting concern for animal suffering generally, both to ensure that animal welfare does have a place within the scope of concern of future humans and to hasten the development of technologies that might address the issue. (Of course, in view of the human track record of technological backfire when interfering in complex systems, any such proposals would need to be met with great skepticism.)

It's important, though, that utilitarians promote the right kind of concern for animals. Many in the animal-rights movement feel that animals inherently deserve to live in nature without disturbance from man; it would be a shame to promote "animal liberation" as a general concept if the result was to increase the number of people demanding preservation of animals in their natural state because this is "the way things are supposed to be." Similarly, it's important that concern for animal suffering be linked with a mindset of cost-effectiveness analysis, lest well meaning people spend their lives opposing a few circuses and zoos while billions of farmed chickens suffer, to say nothing of the orders of magnitude more wild animals.

What are some ways to promote this kind of utilitarian concern for animals? I think Vegan Outreach pamphlets are effective, and the organization is largely utilitarian in its approach and outlook. On the other hand, I wonder whether the exclusive focus on suffering due to factory farming fails to achieve the kind of longer-term change in philosophical perspective that's needed to cause people to include animals in their sphere of moral concern even if, say, in-vitro meat makes factory farming unnecessary. (On the other hand, perhaps the possibility of producing meat without factory farming would free people up to care more about animals than before, just as the advent of industrial technologies to replace slave labor may have facilitated moral opposition to slavery. How many people resist giving moral consideration to animals precisely because of the undesirable consequences of doing so on their diets?)

I also think videos can be effective, and I find watching them to be one of the most effective ways to trigger the release of chemicals in my brain that motivate me to want to do something to prevent animal suffering. Perhaps one could make a video that includes images of brutality in nature. An important challenge would be finding a way to avoid leaving people feeling merely depressed, or leading them to conclude that concern for animals is hopeless because the suffering of wild animals is overwhelming and intractable. Indeed, arguments about "how far do you go with concern for animals?" are often used as reductios against vegetarianism. I do fear that talking about the possibility of insect suffering would entirely put off many people who are just beginning to consider the idea of extending some moral concern to chickens.

Sentience and brain size

2009-05-04T20:40:00.000-07:00

I've started a thread on sentience and brain size at the Felicifia Forum. Readers should feel free to post comments there directly.

Formalizing "Shorter Programs"

2009-05-04T09:32:00.000-07:00

The following started out as a comment / question in reply to Carl's note on the previous blog entry, but it became long enough that I turned it into a separate post.

Carl said:

With respect to Occam assigning exponentially diminishing probability to special miracles, I tend to think of this in terms of the broad set of hypotheses to be considered: if my probabilities are to sum up to 1 I can't coherently assign all my 'the world is a lie' probability mass to whatever hypothesis has been brought to my attention in the last five minutes. The code of a short program can be contained in astronomically many ways within a larger program. An indifference principle gets you going from there.

By "short program," Carl is presumably referring to something like the minimum description length (MDL) principle for explaining our observations. I'm curious to know how exactly he's envisioning its application, though.

For purposes of illustration, consider this fictional scenario. My friend Joe calls me in the evening with a worried tone in his voice. He says, "I've got something to tell you. I was just brushing my teeth, when I heard a voice. It said, 'Joe, I have an important message. You need to write a special number on your toothpaste tube, or else your toothpaste will cease to work properly. That number is 2835023981. Do as I say and all will be fine.' Then the voice disappeared."

Now, there are lots of hypotheses we can imagine here. In particular, I'll consider 10^10 + 1 of them:

(0) My friend imagined the whole thing. Writing a number on the toothpaste tube will accomplish nothing.
(1) In fact, my friend needs to write a number on the tube, but that number is not the one he was told, but rather 0000000001.
(2) My friend needs to write not the number he was told, but 0000000002.
...
(2835023981) My friend needs to write the number he was told, 2835023981.
...
(10^10) My friend needs to write not the number he was told, but 1000000000.

Obviously, there are lots more hypotheses to consider -- e.g., that my friend needs to write a number bigger than 10^10, that it needs to include decimals, that he needs to write it on his forehead instead of his toothpaste tube, that he needs to eat green cheese instead of writing a number, and so on. But just these 10^10 + 1 hypotheses give a sense of the literally exponential number of potential complicated scenarios.

How does MDL evaluate each of these hypotheses? One suggestion I can imagine is as follows.

(0) This hypothesis just involves ordinary physics -- things like Maxwell's equations, or perhaps rules of string theory -- plus maybe some physical constants. Given those initial conditions, it would be possible in principle to compute the entire history of the universe, including the evolution of humans, the birth of my friend, and my reception of his phone call. (If the "data" to be explained here are my personal observations, then perhaps the program would also have to specify who I am. It could then compute the pattern of perceptual inputs I receive throughout my lifetime, including the auditory waves from the speaker of my phone with my friend's voice.)
(1) This hypothesis involves mostly ordinary physics, including all of the same information as before. However, it includes an extra specification that, contrary to ordinary physical law, my friend should start getting cavities unless he writes 0000000001 on his toothpaste.
(2) Ditto as above, except with 0000000002.
...
(10^10) Ditto as above, except with 1000000000.

I think this illustrates what Carl meant about a shorter program being contained within astronomically many longer programs.

However, there's a problem here. It may be that computing program (0) would allow one successfully to determine my pattern of observations, including my friend's delusion of hearing a voice and the specific sequence of neuron firings that caused him to pick the number 2835023981. But I don't have the computing power or time to test whether that's the case. For all I know, the laws of physics could predict that my friend would imagine he had to write the number -17.6 on his mirror instead. For practical purposes, the level of abstraction here is too fine-grained to be useful for ordinary humans. It's like trying to predict the stock market by modeling quark-level interactions in traders' brains.

So we move to a higher-level model, perhaps psychological. For example,

(0) The human brain is prone to certain kinds of imagined experiences. In order to explain all sorts of psychological phenomena throughout history, this hypothesis has a probability distribution over types of malfunctions that tend to produce weird sensations. Joe's experience corresponds to malfunction #611 combined with #28, plus a specific association with toothpaste and the number 2835023981.

Even this explanation assumes a more sophisticated model of psychology than we currently possess, but I think it gets at the idea of trying to explain the observation using fewer bits than just restating the entire account of what happened. In contrast, hypothesis (2835023981) still has to model most of human psychology, but it also includes the stipulation that "There is indeed an exception to ordinary laws of dental hygiene that will give Joe cavities unless he writes 2835023981 on his toothpaste, and moreover, this information will be communicated to Joe by a pattern of sound waves in his bathroom."

Of course, the other hypotheses seem even worse in description length. For instance, hypothesis (5928342301) has to model most of human psychology and then specify, "There is an exception to ordinary laws of dental hygiene that will give Joe cavities unless he writes 5928342301 on his toothpaste. Moreover, a pattern of sound waves in Joe's bathroom will give him a false message, telling him that the number is actually 2835023981." Here, we're encoding two ten-digit numbers instead of one, plus some extra linguistic information.

Carl, is this roughly the kind of reasoning that you had in mind? What should we do about the fact that, in practice, I don't have a good enough theory about the distribution of human mental abnormalities to say that Joe's experience corresponds to malfunctions #611 and #28? My actual description of his experience -- for instance, an email message I might send to you, written to be as short as possible but still understandable -- would require almost as many extra bits as hypothesis (5928342301) does, no?

Finally, here's a slightly tangential question that I'm also curious about. Basic Solomonoff induction, were it computable, would give us a prior distribution over finite or infinite binary strings. How would we transform our experiences of the world, like Joe's phone call, into binary strings in order to apply these prior probabilities? Or would we apply Solomonoff induction in a way that doesn't require predicting digits of binary strings?

Normal Beliefs: An Insanity Defense?

2009-05-02T17:00:00.000-07:00

I am a primate running patchwork cognitive algorithms on relatively fragile wetware. We know that brain devices fail at relatively high rates. 19% of the US population has a mental illness of some sort, with a small fraction of these cases involving serious insanity or delusion. In addition, some people simply lack certain normal abilities, such as the 7% of males who are colorblind.

I and many of my associates have extraordinarily strange beliefs. Many of these are weird facts -- e.g., that an exact copy of me exists within a radius of 10^(10^29) meters. But others are logical conclusions (e.g., that libertarian free will is incoherent) and methodological notions (e.g., that Occam's razor makes the parallelism solution to the mind-body problem astronomically improbable). These latter kinds of beliefs theoretically involve certainty or near certainty. For instance, the probability of a full, really powerful God of the type envisaged by ordinary religions is exponentially penalized in the Solomonoff-induction framework, relative to, say, hell-punishing simulations by what Carl Shulman called "evolved minds."

But given my understanding of the frailty of human beliefs in general -- to say nothing of the tempting possibility that correct knowledge is out of the question, or that all of these statements are entirely meaningless -- should I assign nonzero probability to the possibility that I'm wrong about these conceptual matters?

One answer is to say "no": We all start with assumptions, and I'm making the assumptions that I'm making. This is my attitude toward things like Bayes' theorem and Occam's razor. In the same way that my impulse to prevent suffering is ultimately something that I want to do, "just because," so my faith in math and Bayesian epistemology is simply something the collection of atoms in my brain has chosen to have, and that's that. (I wonder: Is there any sense in which it would be possible to assign probability less than 1 to the Bayesian framework itself? Prima facie, this would be simply incoherent.)

But what about other, less foundational conclusions, like the incoherence of libertarian free will? It's not obvious to me that the negation of this conclusion would contradict my epistemological framework, since my position on the issue may stem from lack of imagination (I can't conceive of anything other than determinism or random behavior) rather than clear logical contradiction. On this point itself I'm uncertain -- maybe libertarian free will is logically impossible. But I'm not smart enough to be sure. And even if I felt sure, I very well might be mistaken, or even -- as suggested in the first paragraph -- completely insane.

Can probability be used to capture uncertainties of this type? In practice, the answer is clearly yes. I've done enough math homework problems to know that my probability of making an algebra mistake is not only nonzero but fairly high. And it's not incoherent to reason about errors of this type. For instance, if I do a utility calculation involving a complex algebraic formula, I may be uncertain as to whether I've made a sign error, in which case the answer would be negated. It's perfectly reasonable for me to assign, say, 90% probability to having done the computation correctly and 10% to having made the sign error and then multiply these by their corresponding utility-values-if-correct-computation. There's no mystery here: I'm just assigning probabilities over the conceptually unproblematic hypotheses "Alan got the right answer" vs. "Alan made a sign error."

In practice, of course, it's rarely useful to apply this sort of reasoning, because the number of wrong math answers is, needless to say, infinite. (Still, it might be useful to study the distribution of correct and incorrect answers that occur in practice. This reminds me of the suggestion by a friend that mathematicians might study the rates at which conjectures of certain types turn out to be true, in order to better estimate probabilities of theorems they can't actually prove. Indeed, statistical techniques have been used within the domain of automated theorem proving.) When someone objects to a rationalist's conclusion about such and such on the grounds that "Your cognitive algorithm might be flawed," the rationalist can usually reply, "Well, maybe, sure. But what am I going to do about it? Which element of the huge space of alternatives am I going to pick instead?"

Perhaps one answer to that question could be "Beliefs that fellow humans, running their own cognitive algorithms, have arrived at." After all, those people are primates trying to make sense of their environment just like you are, and it doesn't seem inconceivable that not only are you wrong but they're actually right. This would seem to suggest some degree of philosophical majoritarianism. Obviously we need to weight different people's beliefs according to the probability that their cognitive algorithms are sound, but we should keep in mind the fact that those weights are themselves circular.

How concerned should we be that, say, people who believe in parallelism of mind and body are actually correct? What about people who, even within a Bayesian framework, believe that Genesis is a better authority to comment on the age of the earth than are scientists? (After all, I haven't done radiometric dating experiments myself; I'm just trusting sources I consider to be authorities.) Presumably evidence from other domains would shift weight toward the scientists. But I can imagine conspiracy-type hypotheses that consistently maintain nonvanishing probability on the scenario that Genesis is true and scientists are liars. What probability should this be, exactly?

Dealing with Contradictory Claims

2009-05-02T10:57:00.000-07:00

Consider the following scenario, inspired by a conversation I had with a friend on the topic of contradictory claims. You've lost your dog, and there are 100 equally likely places he may have gone. All of those places are rather far away, and it's getting dark, so you'll only have time to check one of them before you have to stop for the night. So, you decide to ask some people nearby if they have any suggestions. Some of them say, "I have no idea; sorry." However, one weird-looking guy says, "Oh yeah. I saw a dog looking just like yours in location X just a little while ago." This person doesn't look completely trustworthy -- he goes on to try and give you a pamphlet about the conspiracy to cover up the flatness of the earth -- but he seems sincere in his report about your dog. The sun is setting. Should you look in location X? Or should you pick another random location and look there? Does the strange guy's statement have any effect on the otherwise 1/100 probability you assign to finding your dog at location X? After all, his statement was just a verbal claim, not "hard scientific evidence."

I think you should look in location X first. The hypothesis that your dog is in location X places high probability on your having been told as much by the strange guy, despite his eccentricities. The hypothesis that he made the story up may plausible as well, but the a priori probability that he would describe location X specifically is 1/100, so the likelihood of the observed data D under this hypothesis is rather low. So the posterior probability of location X, P(X | D), is more than the 1/100 prior.

Now consider a slightly different case. Rather than coming across one strange guy, you meet 50 different strange people, each with different weird causes they're trying to promote through pamphlets. 5 of them say, "Oh yeah, I just saw your dog at location X." Another 10 of them say, "I was just at location Y and saw exactly the dog you described." And other groups of 15, 18, and 2 people tell you they saw your dog at locations U, V, and W, respectively.

What should you do now? Should your probability of finding your dog at, say, location X be higher than 1/100? The fact that you got lots of sincere but contradictory advice tells you that people are prone to giving inaccurate reports of what they saw. (Assume each of the 100 locations is far enough apart that your dog can't possibly have been at more than one.) On the other hand, for any given group of claimants, the hypothesis that your dog really is where they said does assign relatively high likelihood to the fact that they made their specific claims. So I'm still tempted to say that, e.g., P(X | D) > 1/100, though the amount by which this is the case is much less than before. As far as where to look for your dog, I suppose you should pick one of the locations X, Y, U, V, or W and search there. Maybe pick the one suggested by the people handing out the least strange brochures?

Do readers disagree? Are there any cases in which P(X | D) is actually less than 1/100? I find it implausible that P(X | D) would remain exactly 1/100, unless you were totally sure that no one could actually have seen your dog.

The relevance to the many-gods objection to Pascal's wager is immediate. But situations like this occur in a number of other areas, especially regarding claims about the paranormal, like near-death experiences.

Save Notes to Wikipedia

2009-04-17T20:56:00.000-07:00

When I'm reading a good book or important article, I sometimes want to jot down notes about a key idea or save a link to the piece for future reference. Bookmarking sites like Delicious are a convenient way to do this for quick website references, but often I want to save a particular piece of information in a way that I'll naturally return to it later on, which may not be very likely for notes in a Delicious bookmark. Plus, if I find the information useful or important, I want to share it widely.

In such cases, I sometimes use Wikipedia as a "personal notebook" of sorts. When I found some interesting studies on crustacean pain, I added a description and footnotes to the article on lobsters. When I noticed that the Wikipedia article on Givewell lacked the most important information from a utilitarian standpoint -- what organizations Givewell has recommended -- I added a section summarizing Givewell's top charities, with some cost-effectiveness statistics. And when I read an interesting perspective on qualia by Gary Drescher, I added it to the page on that topic.

In addition to having social value, this reference-saving system is convenient for me, because the Wikipedia page on a topic is often the first place I go to look something up. The main downside is that writing a note in a format readable by others and integrated into an existing article takes a fair amount longer than jotting down some quick notes.

One aspect of contributing to Wikipedia that I found slightly difficult was learning to use footnotes. The article on citing sources was useful here, as were tools like this one from Google Scholar for automatically generating footnotes in proper bibliographic format.

Religion, Punishment, and Obsequiousness

2009-04-13T19:12:00.000-07:00

If I had to choose one angle from which to characterize religion, or at least hell-and-brimstone religions, it would be submission: the obligation, above all else, to bow down before God's will. Indeed, "Islam" means literally "submission to God," and Judaism / Christianity have their fair share of similar sentiments (e.g., Romans 9:20, or the parable of the unworthy servant).

Now, it's true that such ideas are to be expected from religions: What better way for priests or prophets to assert authority and command obedience? (Still, it is odd that religious leaders themselves often claim to be subject to God's commands, and I would guess they usually feel that way sincerely.) But even if we grant little evidential value to religious-submission threats that have been made throughout history, the general principle of meekness still seems like a good Pascalian idea.

I can imagine gods that punish worship of a man as God, as well as gods that punish failure to worship such a savior; I can imagine gods that punish irrational belief, as well as gods that punish lack of faith; and I can imagine gods that punish violence against "infidels," as well as gods that punish refusal to take such action. But I have a hard time imagining a god that punishes excessive obsequiousness: That is, feeling too strongly that you're unworthy, in need of God's help, deserving of punishment for sinfulness, and constantly requiring repentance.

I simply can't conceive of the motivations behind a god who would say, "You were too meek, and you beat yourself up too much. To the fires with you!" Almost any human -- even the most aggressive, vengeful, macho male -- would, I think, in that situation either appreciate the submissiveness or, at worst, feel sorry that the person misunderstood the divine will. In other words, from a Pascalian perspective, it seems always better to be too cautious rather than not cautious enough -- to assume that God is harsher than you'd expect, rather than more lenient than you'd expect. Maybe the optimal course would be to follow the medieval monks who engaged in self-flagellation and mortification of the flesh, with perhaps 300,000 lashes for good measure. Even if one didn't commit this type of physical abuse, it would seem optimal to have the sort of mindset that would impel one to do such things.

This idea would seem to apply even if our simulator was an atheist who, annoyed by religious people, decided to punish them: It's hard for me to imagine such a simulator wanting to punish a person more because that person had been excessively humble and self-abasing. St. Simeon Stylites may have been odd, and probably disturbed psychologically, but he's hardly the kind of person I would find annoying enough to send to hell. (Of course, I have a hard time imagining wanting to send anyone to hell, which is part of what makes this analysis difficult.) And even if obsequiousness before a conventional God is a bad idea with an angry-atheist simulator, why not be obsequious before the simulator himself?

Needless to say, one wants to find justifications why the above isn't implied by Pascalian fear of hell. I can think of a few, but I would be very curious to hear the thoughts of readers.

1. "You're not trusting in Jesus / Allah / etc." This is essentially the Protestant way out: No amount of beating yourself up can save you, and in fact, the impulse to do so shows that you don't really have faith. This is a very convenient belief, but I still have a hard time picturing the underlying psychology of God on judgment day: "You were too cautious about trying to avoid offending me. Therefore, you must burn for eternity!" Perhaps it would sound more plausible if phrased in terms of idolatry: "You worshiped the idol of 'self-abasement.' To the lake of fire!" Indeed, the Qur'an includes a passage against monasticism on similar grounds.

2. Burnout. If one concludes that following religion X is optimal, it's more likely you'll make it to the end of your life as a successful adherent of X if you're a moderate than if you're overly extreme, because the latter may lead to psychological burnout. This is another convenient excuse, but I'm not sure how much water it holds. Often, pushing yourself just a little bit farther over time reinforces and strengthens will power, rather than drying it up. And at the extreme, you could establish an agreement that would bind yourself to a particular lifestyle (e.g., some sort of contract that would force you to live in a monastery for the rest of your life -- though I do have doubts about the legality of such arrangements). More realistically, becoming entangled in social situations of pressure to conform to religious submission (like a monastery) would likely have a similar effect.

3. Value of information. It's easier to improve your knowledge about the distribution of plausible hell-punishers if you don't have to bother thinking submissive thoughts all the time, much less going to a monastery and practicing austerities. There are much bigger fish to fry.

4. Value of power and money. Similar to (3). Escaping simulation hells in particular could be assisted by wealth and influence. Unfortunately, these are precisely the sorts of things that gods with human-type psychology are most likely to abhor. This relates to the next point....

5. Anthropomorphism. While I may have a hard time imagining a god who punishes excessive submissiveness, perhaps there are lots of plausible simulators who would do precisely that. I'm especially interested in reader comments on this: What kinds of scenarios would involve a punisher of obsequiousness?

Worms in the Rain

2009-03-28T10:07:00.000-07:00

It rained last night, and this morning, I was not surprised to see a number of earthworms strewn across a stone walking path. While a few of the worms appeared healthy enough to return safely to the soil, most were clearly either dead or sufficiently incapacitated that they would die within a few hours.

The sight is truly painful. When I'm not in a hurry, I feel obligated to stop and step on those worms that appear to be suffering but not yet dead. I make sure to slide my foot along the pavement so that the guts of the worm are stretched out, ensuring a quick and certain death. This is, I think, what I would most want someone to do to me if I were going to be transformed into a worm in such a situation. (It's the opposite approach, I assume, from what a Buddhist or Jain would do, which seems to me unfortunate given their supposed concern for all creatures. Sometimes reverence for life ends up causing more suffering.)

The task of squishing worms feels overwhelming, because there is a practically unlimited supply of nearby places I could go where I could find worms on pavement. It would probably not be optimal for me to spend my life seeking out worms so that I could put them out of their misery. But this is not because the expected reduction in suffering due to stepping on worms is small: Indeed, if we give worms, say, a 1/3 chance of being able to feel pain, and if only 1/3 of the worms I step on are not yet dead or unconscious, then in the five minutes it takes me to step on 25 of them, I will have averted roughly three expected experiences of slow, lingering death. Rather, the reason it probably is not cost-effective to spend my life on this task is that the stakes in other domains are so much higher: The expected amounts of suffering in nature as a whole, or due to lab-universe creation, or in hell are vastly higher, "beyond all decent contemplation."

In theory, it would be optimal for me to bypass the worms on the sidewalk so that I could have an extra few minutes to do more abstract work that has far higher expected returns. The reason I don't do so, apart from feelings of direct pity, is somewhat selfish: Thinking about how much I ought to be getting done in the five minutes I save is stressful and overwhelming. It's hard to go through life with the mindset that every five minutes you waste on trivialities amounts to (far) more than three expected worms suffering while they die helplessly. And yet this is true. The best excuse I can give is that humans are not built to handle emotional burdens on this scale.

By the way, if readers have suggestions on the worms-in-the-rain situation, I would be glad to hear them. As far as I can tell, the worms come out to escape drowning, though they may also use the moisture as a chance to mate. In either case, though, it's clear that many of the worms on the pavement are in no position to return back to the soil, as is demonstrated by their shriveled-up remains the following day. It's not obvious that the rain or pavement themselves are to blame, because, as Charles Darwin suggested, it may be that many of these worms "were already sick, and that their deaths were merely hastened by the ground being flooded." If that is the case, then worms in the rain represent merely a glimpse of the vast amounts of sickness and death that occur all the time among animals in the wild.

Note: Professor Jeffrey Lockwood wrote a nice reply to this blog post, which appears as the third comment below.

Carter Center and PSI

2009-03-06T10:15:00.000-08:00

Givewell has a new review of the Carter Center, focusing on its health programs, which comprise 80% of total spending. The summary chart includes a section "What does $100 do?" with some impressive figures, including one of the following depending on the program:

"Averts 12-25 cases of guinea worm," or
"Averts 10-50 years of serious debilitation (blindness, low vision, or irritating skin disease)," or
"Averts 1-30 years of blindness and another 1-30 years of low vision (surgeries); little or unknown (other components)," or
"Averts 15-85 total years of lymphedema (swollen limbs) and 25-165 total years of hydrocele (swollen scrotum)," or
"Enables ~29 additional years of school attendance by treated children," or
"Averts 10-47 malaria episodes (1 in ~320 is fatal)."

These are some excellent concrete scenarios to imagine when you're wondering, say, whether to spend $100 on a luxury or whether making an extra $100 is really that important.

Givewell's previous recommendation of Population Services International still stands. The 2007-2008 report concluded:

We estimate that it costs PSI $650-$1000 to prevent a case of HIV/AIDS and $500-$2500 to prevent a death from malaria; across the organization, we estimate that it costs PSI about $650-$1000 to save a life. These estimates do not include other benefits of PSI's activities, such as preventing unwanted pregnancies and reducing non-fatal malaria infections.

PSI is arguably a better choice than the Carter Center for international health, inasmuch as it devotes its entire budget to the task, rather than just 80%, but a specific examination of treatments would be in order. Either one seems like an excellent choice.

Horror movies

2009-03-03T20:04:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine mentioned the Hellraiser film series in passing during a conversation. It may be worth watching or reading, for the same reason that any literature on hell is worth studying: It gives me insight into ideas people have had about hell. To the extent that our main Bayesian evidence we on hell comes from the kinds of thoughts that people have about it (which are potentially entangled with what's true about it), movies like this seem nearly as useful as, say, the Book of Enoch.

In general, it might be worthwhile for me to force myself to watch more violent horror movies. I really don't like them, often feeling rather sick when I watch them; they're sort of like a miniature form of torture. But I think I generally feel more revulsion against pain afterwards. Just the few horror movies I have seen are probably somewhat responsible for my general disposition of wanting to prevent suffering.

It's interesting that a stereotypical horror movie watcher is perhaps the opposite of this: The usual image of such a person is a young person, probably male, and probably somewhat macho. (Maybe one has to be somewhat macho to enjoy the movies without having one's mirror neurons fire too strongly.) It's also likely that watching horror movies repeatedly leads to desensitization. So a strategy of aiming to make people care more about suffering by promoting the viewing of horror movies would probably backfire.

Watching violent films is a unique experience that has made me a slightly different person from who I otherwise would be. This isn't surprising, perhaps, because apart from being a victim of violence or torture oneself, there are no other ways to encounter cruelty so graphically and forcefully. I wonder: What other human experiences are similarly powerful, to the extent that I should seek them out in order to broaden my perspective on the world?

About this blog

2009-03-03T19:59:00.000-08:00

This blog contains some short ideas or notes that I want to record. However, my main site has generally more substantive content. I also post occasionally on the Felicifia forum.