I really appreciate the kind of sensitivity and rigor that goes into this kind of post.

I also feel roughly that, since thinking about a few animals a little bit tends to create a few of these kind of moral gridlocks, thinking about all of them maximally (in order to avoid infinities-of-bad) would probably make human existence impossible, which also seems infinity-bad. The phenomenology of an insect is likely less sophisticated in terms of both agency and likely valence than a human in its faintest dream, within which distress seems possible but is sensibly regarded as on an incomparable scale to awake-human-suffering. I know this is a lot of short-handing of the underlying maths, but it helps me to see these questions from multiple angles of handwaviness. While compelling to think about bugs being lovely little guys I have to for my own sanity consider such exercises to be more like overprojecting theory-of-mind mixed with a little hyperscrupulosity-schizophrenia and mistaken for empathy.

Thanks so much for this thorough and thoughtful post and your incredible donation. I know it's a few years out of date now but anyone with an ongoing interest in the YIMBY issue is likely to find this post as a sensible Schelling point for discussion.

I imagine more EAs should be considering this as a cause. I cannot couch the strength of my belief in this into forum-appropriate language. I note that there are many plausible avenues to change - not just political, but activism too. People are not persuaded by robust economic arguments quite as much as evocative art that touches the right parts of the psyche. It feels like YIMBYism has a slim chance of shoeing-in to existing sentiments around poverty, which I believe find their way mostly expressed as useless left-flavored activism of its various stripes. There is big appetite for change but people may not see that unless it becomes glaringly obvious what the issue is.

To this end I consider things like creating a British sitcom based around some farcical arrangement of characters that is able to both neutralise the false-positive targets of socialist do-gooder sentiment, while bootstrapping somehow the economics of YIMBY into grokkability. I am aware these words don't quite parse together, but I believe there must at least be better attractor states of poltical consensus in the country than the current ones. I don't have anything productive to comment but eagerly solicit DMs from anyone vaguely interested in the arts, performing, improv. I also solicit comments from anyone with leads on esoteric comedy that manages to make nuanced political points.

At the beginning of this article and my first thought was how much my back hurts sitting in an office chair all day. But it's not just all day, I have had a few weeks of relative laziness, opting to placate my brain at the expense of my body. I've been home (UK) one month today, but was previously sleeping rough (in a warmer climate, having energy as soon as I woke up, in many bizarre ways "healthier" than my stasis here in a somewhat dingy council house). I was initially glad to be home, having the mental space to stop worrying about guarding my possessions, wondering where to get food (although I was only typically destitute for a few days at a time).

The suffering I would directly attribute to sleeping outside per-se was surprisingly minimal, or at least, in many ways what you wouldn't expect - stuff like the stiffness of benches, feet-moisture-versus-cold-management, baggage-weight-utility-tradeoffs (having a tent is nice, but is heavy; likewise sleeping cloth is cumbersome). Prior to this I had slept outside maybe a dozen times, about one week contiguously, and I had undertaken a week-long fast (separately) - all experiences which, at the times, were hard, but became easier, while also as expected eroding something indescribable but maybe alike to "will".

What suffering seems to train is an ability to ignore the valence of some part of your system, for example extreme cold or hunger. But when these things are smoothed over larger periods of time, I am unsure how to disentangle or enumerate the physical-pain of attachment to e.g. comfort or calories (two very different things to be fair) versus the psychological-pain of being powerless to dispel or ameliorate some unwanted sensation. The exertion of will required to perform this masking of experience is more extraordinary to me, while also phenomenologically inaccessible in the detail it was before, and there is a kind of despondence that accrues from this, which may just be the atrophy of learned habits and personality under unstable conditions. I return to homefulness even less sure how to manage altruistic trades.

I definitely appreciate the wisdom of things like GiveDirectly now because the subjective desperation of having nothing made me terrible with money, as well as the temporary empathy boost making me more generous. Newfound respect for those who do give, I think I basically accord with your end message there. Suffering is not poetic. At best you may have some philosophical or cosmic structure to impose on it, with which you are able to manage it, as if a sport or meditation.

I may be over-generalising / projecting this from inside of a traumatic experience, but I now basically understand schizophrenia as one result of an erstwhile domesticated personality confronted with the abyss of suffering stretching into the remainder of its life - to be more like a baby than anything agentic. This seems far more catastrophic than any physical pain. Negotiating the boundaries of my altruism amidst potentially unlimited demands on it led to some fracturing of my sense of self, and more than suffering it may take some time recalibrating interpersonal trust. Partly why I'm so fervently YIMBY as opposed to classic EA causes - food at least can be divided arbitrarily while preserving some vague pretense of capitalist autonomy, but shelter is discrete and entangled with protection of your self and extended property.

Hello everyone,

I'm Oli Beatson, south coast of England.

I came to EA sideways via LessWrong in the mid-2010s — attended a couple of conferences and a CFAR workshop. I'm a vegetarian since 2000, but I also think I might be a sociopath because if someone came to my door and said "wanna try fried NIMBY" I'd probably have a bite. Into political daydreaming (mostly housing/abundance these days).

I got deep into libertarian econ — I still think the EA community sleeps on Caplanian bullet-biting on housing and borders — but years of weed and life have left my "powerful economic intuition" mostly as instinctive recoil from anything coercive, without a fully coherent moral framework anymore. These days I'm basically a Western-civ-maximalist neoliberal who cares way more about personal survival and cultures-I-like than distant bednets.

I was pretty convinced of AI doom (or at least plan-obviating-world-changes from AI) around 2028-32; some stuff seems roughly on track, but I'm trying to quarantine the doom as latent irrationality/psychosis because I have not seen or generated a single plausible rigorous roadmap that goes from human-level to anything scary. After enough podcasts, it's clear most people are just throwing electrons at matrices. Still interested in x-risk but also kind of Buddhist about the idea of massive population decrease. I think it's unviable to try to control everything and unhealthy to even think about, so I will stay out of discussions my brain can't afford.

Tried breaking into EA orgs as a web dev because the culture/personality fit. "Earning to give" was mostly a polite cover for earning to live independently. A decade later I'm significantly closer to homelessness, which has flipped my personality: used to be oversensitive about "working outside the system," now a little more gung-ho. Still, I'm a little lonely, bad at collaborating, and wasting cycles on one-shot schemes to fix housing or grab arbitrary power/status as a pretext. I'd kind of like to be part of a utilitarian improv troupe or something but I'm terrified of putting stuff like this out there.

Think I'm dark-triad, so these days I'm mostly here to lurk drama, feel smug about dodging it, and track community evolution. Might eventually write about how taking applied utilitarianism too literally as a core "believed belief" sent me down surprisingly easy (and bad) psychological rabbit holes. For now, channeling remaining energy into music — the secret dream I've avoided forever. Expect a terrible hip-hop album or zoning-laws musical theater.

Hoping the Forum acts as an antidote to my inner edgelord. Looking forward to reading, lurking, and maybe dropping thoughts later. Nice to (re)meet you all.