All of Benquo's Comments + Replies
Your hypothetical seems to be anticipating an argument that farming mentally disabled humans would be repugnant even with slightly net-positive lives, so that therefore something similar must apply to animals. Let's consider a concrete case: Someone hires a mentally disabled person to provide warmth to their blanket-averse toddler at night, instead of the 'vegetarian' solution of turning up the heat (or 'vegan' if fossil fuels aren't involved). If they don't worry much about their employee's other living conditions as long as they seem willing to perform t...
The clearest evidence of discontent is the unprecedented fertility decline across developed nations. Humans are increasingly choosing not to reproduce at replacement rate when given modern conditions. This isn't just about discomfort - it suggests our large-scale coordination systems (markets, governments, corporations, media) are actively hostile to the welfare of the governed in a way that factory farming isn't.
Nearly no one wants to torture broiler chickens at massive and increasing scale. If we're doing that, this suggests our interlocking coordination...
The framing of inequality as 'systemic violence' and altruism as 'control of aggression' assumes rather than demonstrates that wealth differences primarily reflect exploitation. This fails to address the central question I posed: whether and when inequality reflects productive allocation versus extractive behavior.
While moral sensitization may affect how we feel about others' suffering, this doesn't help us understand the causes of that suffering. Defining inequality as violence or aggression is effectively a stance in favor of violence, because it makes it impossible to discuss alternatives.
Wealthy people who primarily engage in wasteful consumption become less wealthy over time. Those who maintain or grow wealth must be doing something else with it. You brought up slavery; the antebellum South required massive coordinated violence to directly maintain internal power imbalances, and state-backed territorial expansion to support its economic growth. This illustrates why we need detailed models of how extractive systems actually operate, rather than reducing everything to market mechanisms.
Enclosure acts seem like the correct analogy. And I'd say the enclosure acts and 20th century Soviet modernization were along some relevant dimensions more similar to each other than either is to a decentralization of economic decisionmaking.
The distinction I'm trying to draw attention to in this post is one between unironically believing microeconomics and modern academic finance as descriptive theories that help one interpret the environment in which one lives and has real embedded experience of - treating them as stage 1 simulacra - and, on the other ha...
My understanding of the term “privatization” is that it generally refers to the voluntary sale of state assets, by the state. That doesn’t seem like quite the same thing as the state expropriating and possibly selling assets that were previously understood to be owned and administered by some smaller community within the state. Am I missing some important detail here?
The applicability to animal welfare is relatively complex, because it has to do with biases in how we project our agency onto animals when trying to sympathize with them. The applicability to global development is relatively straightforward, as frequently success is defined in terms that at least partially include acceptance of acculturation (schooling & white-collar careers) that causes people to endorse the global development efforts.
You haven't addressed my question about how this post differs from other abstract theoretical work in EA. It's a bit o...
I'd like to better understand your criteria for relevance. Are you suggesting that EA relevance requires either explicit action items or direct factual support for current EA initiatives? If so, what makes this post different from abstract theoretical posts like this one on infinite ethics in terms of EA relevance?Â
The relevance to EA is that we have this problem where we try to help people by looking at what they say they want (or even what they demonstrate they want), but sometimes those preferences are artifacts of threat models rather than actual desires. Like how in the post's primate example, low-status males aren't actually uninterested in mating - they're performing disinterest to avoid punishment. This matters because a lot of EA work involves studying revealed preferences in contexts with strong power dynamics (development economics, animal welfare, etc). If we miss these dynamics, we risk optimizing for the same coercive equilibria we're trying to fix.
Ben_Todd, it seems to me like you're saying both these things:
GWWC is very busy and can’t reasonably be expected to write up all or most of the important considerations around things like whether or not to take the GWWC Pledge.
Considerations around the pledge are in GWWC's domain, & sensitive, so people should check in with GWWC privately before discussing them publicly, and failing to do so is harmful in expectation.
I'm having a hard time reconciling these. In particular, it seems like if you make both these claims, you're basically saying that...
The decision theory argument isn't just about ability to retaliate - it's about ability to engage in reciprocal decision-making and honor agreements. Most animals can't make or understand explicit agreements or intentionally coordinate based on understanding others' choices. Maybe some corvids and a very few other nonhuman animals can try to imagine our perspectives and take actions based on predictions of what we're likely to decide, on levels of abstraction that might give us some basis for ongoing noninstrumentalizing cooperation.
This matters more in ou... (read more)