All of Teo Ajantaival's Comments + Replies

Greetings. :) This comment seems to concern a strongly NU-focused reading of the nonconsequentialist sections, which is understandable given that NU, particularly, its hedonistic version, NHU, is probably by far the most salient and well-known example of a minimalist moral view.

However, my post’s focus is much broader than that. The post doesn’t even mention NU except in the example given in footnote 2, and is never restricted to NHU (nor to NU of any kind, if the utilitarian part would entail a commitment to additive aggregation). For brevity, many e... (read more)

I like how the sequence engages with several kinds of uncertainties that one might have.

I had two questions:

1. Does the sequence assume a ‘good minus bad’ view, where independent bads (particularly, severe bads like torture-level suffering) can always be counterbalanced or offset by a sufficient addition of independent goods?

• (Some of the main problems with this premise are outlined here, as part of a post where I explore what might be the most intuitive ways to think of wellbeing without it.)

2. Does the sequence assume an additive / summative / Archim... (read more)

Related:

• Reply by Vinding (2022)

Perhaps see also:

• A visualized comparison of repugnant conclusions between different views: “Minimalist extended very repugnant conclusions are the least repugnant”

It seems like in terms of extending lives minimalist views have an Epicurean view of the badness of death / value of life? The good of saving a life is only the spillovers (what the person would do to the wellbeing of others, the prevented grief, etc).

Solely for one's own sake, yes, I believe that experientialist minimalist views generally agree with the Epicurean view of the badness of death. But I think it's practically wise to always be mindful of how narrow the theoretical, individual-focused, 'all else equal' view is. As I note in the introduction,

in

Regarding the existing measures of 'life satisfaction' (and perhaps how to reinterpret them in minimalist terms), I should first note that I'm not very familiar with how they're operationalized. But my hunch is that they might easily measure more of an 'outside view' of one's entire life — as if one took a 3rd person, aggregative look at it — rather than a more direct, 'inside view' of how one feels in the present moment. And I think that at least for the experientialist minimalist views that were explored in the post, it might make more sense to think of ... (read more)

Thanks, and no worries about the scope! Others may know better about the practical/quantification questions, but I'll say what comes to mind.

1. Rather than assuming positive units, one could interpret wellbeing changes in comparative terms (of betterness/worseness), which don't presuppose an offsetting view. For some existing measures, perhaps this would be only a matter of reinterpreting the data. A challenge would be how to account for the relational value of e.g. additional life years, given that experientialist minimalist views wouldn't consider them a... (read more)

Maps are great!

I also love the Maps of Science, by Dominic Walliman (@Domain of Science): https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOYRlicwLG3St5aEm02ncj-sPDJwmojIS

Offtopic: This post was a joy to read. Would love to read if you have any thoughts to share about writing in general, but no worries if not. :) Welcome to the forum.

Just listened to it! The pleasant and thoughtful narration by Adrian Nelson felt perfect for the book. I might even recommend the audiobook version over the text version to people who might otherwise find it distressing to think about s-risks. :)

Thanks for the screencast. I listened to it — with a ‘skip silence’ feature to skip the typing parts — instead of watching, so I may have missed some points. But I’ll comment on some points that felt salient to me. (I opt out of debating due to lack of time, as it seems that we may not have that many relevantly diverging perspectives to try to bridge.)

Error One

I didn't read linked material to try to clarify matters, except to notice that this linked paper abstract doesn't use the word "quality". I think, for this issue, the article should stand

Hey, I had PM'd you that I've been busy and will reply once I've checked out the longish recording. It's on my list for next week. :) Edit: Unfortunately I fell ill with a lot of urgent stuff piling up, so I'll just reply to this once I get to it.

Sounds interesting. Can we submit our own writing? If so, I'm curious what might be important errors in this post.

Relevant recent posts:

https://www.simonknutsson.com/undisturbedness-as-the-hedonic-ceiling/

https://centerforreducingsuffering.org/phenomenological-argument/

(I think these unpack a view I share, better than I have.)

Edit: For tranquilist and Epicurean takes, I also like Gloor (2017, sec. 2.1) and Sherman (2017, pp. 103–107), respectively.

To modify the monk case, what if we could (costlessly; all else equal) make the solitary monk feel a notional 11 units of pleasure followed by 10 units of suffering?

Or, extreme pleasure of "+1001" followed by extreme suffering of "-1000"?

Cases like these make me doubt the assumption of happiness as an independent good. I know meditators who claim to have learned to generate pleasure at will in jhana states, who don't buy the hedonic arithmetic, and who prefer the states of unexcited contentment over states of intense pleasure.

So I don't want to impose, fro... (read more)

I kindly ask third parties to be mindful of the following points concerning the above reply.

(1)

• It calls a part of my comment extremely misleading based on an incomplete quote whose omitted context provides a better sense of what I am talking about. Specifically, the omitted beginning clarifies that I am discussing “strong pessimism [i.e. the view that there are no independent goods]”, and noting how I personally find it a perfectly valid view to equate my positive value with whether my life has overall positive roles under that view. And the omitted ending

Would an agent who accepted strong pessimism [i.e. the view that there are no independent goods]—which I absolutely believe we should reject—have most reason to end their own life? Not necessarily. An altruistic agent with this evaluative outlook would have strong instrumental reason to remain alive, in order to alleviate the suffering of others.

I agree that life can be worth living for our positive roles in terms of reducing overall suffering or dukkha. More than that, such a view seems (to me at least) like a perfectly valid view on what constitutes eval... (read more)

Thanks for compiling this! The structure feels very approachable. The bar for engagement is also greatly lowered by your inclusion of the recap, the comparison of theories, and the pointers for discussion and feedback.

Regarding the linked sections, the strongest consensus about the definition of flourishing indeed seems to involve an emphasis on relationships, purpose, and meaning. To me, this emphasis seems to be in tension with the tendency of standard (welfarist) population ethics to only count welfare as a kind of isolated "score" that applies to each ... (read more)

(Continued)

Your comment above makes all sense regarding the literal questions (even if not the implicit worries that I intended to respond to); thanks for elaborating. :)

Still, I would not reduce my (theoretical) response to the implicit worries all the way down to "yes, but actually that's fine and you shouldn't be worried about it". The "yes" is buried in the middle in 2.3 because it's not the end of the theoretical response. After that, the following sections 2.4–2.6 still address a lot of points that may be relevant for our potential intuitions (such a... (read more)

Hi Rohin; I apologize for being vague and implicit; I agree that the first question is not complex, and I should've clarified that I'm primarily responding to the related (but in the post, almost completely implicit) worries which I think are much more complex than the literal questions are. You helped me realize just now that the post may look like it's primarily answering the written-down questions, even though the main reason for all my elaboration (on the assumptions, possible biases, comparison with offsetting views, etc.) was to respond to the implic... (read more)

In relation to purely suffering-focused views, I also argue here that people may sometimes jump to hasty conclusions about human extinction due to certain forms of misconceived (i.e. non-impartial) consequentialism, and argue (drawing on the linked resources) that an impartial approach would imply strong heuristics of cooperation and nonviolence.

Only semi-interested or want to rest your eyes? The Nonlinear Library’s auto-narration reads this post quite well, though I recommend checking the diagrams in 2.3 and 2.5.

(Spotify | Apple | Google | Duration of main text: 45 minutes.)

Thanks for summarizing it.

The worries I respond to are complex and the essay has many main points. Like any author, I hope that people would consider the points in their proper context (and not take them out of context). One main point is the contextualization of the worries itself, which is highlighted by the overviews (1.1–1.2) focusing a lot on the relevant assumptions and on minding the gap between theory and practice.

To complex questions, I don't think it's useful to reduce answers to either "yes" or "no", especially when the answers rest on unrealistic assumptions and look very different in theory versus practice. Between theory and practice, I also tend to consider the practical implications more important.

a reason to focus more on these other important traits relative to IQ — at the level of what we seek to develop individually and incentivize collectively — is that many of these other traits and skills probably are more elastic and improvable than is IQ

+1. To the extent that IQ may be difficult to improve, it seems good to focus on improving the other important virtues. Yet perhaps people might (for some roles) select heavily for IQ precisely because it — unlike the more improvable virtues — can not so easily be improved after the selection.

(This might also in part explain how commenters might be sometimes talking of different things, i.e. "what to cultivate" versus "what to select for".)

The latter might refer to this one: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jmbP9rwXncfa32seH/after-one-year-of-applying-for-ea-jobs-it-is-really-really

Re: community, people have discussed potential downsides of the name 'effective altruism'.

(Independent of any wishes to change the name of existing EA things, I think it's good to be aware of those potential downsides.)

A normative critique to which I would love to see responses:

nil: some concerns with classical utilitarianism

Thanks; I (too) briefly tried imagining other categories, but was quite happy with those four!

Regarding the first distinction, there is this recent (free) book that argues for the possibility of better politics by more strongly keeping normative and empirical assumptions separate from each other (which is called "the two-step ideal" in Chapter 1, pp. 9–17). I read the book twice and found it very illuminating on that distinction. Note that the book itself takes no normative step until Chapter 7, so it's not all about reducing suffering.

Red team: What non-arbitrary views in population axiology do avoid the “Very Repugnant Conclusion” (VRC)?

Context/Explanation:

According to Budolfson & Spears (2018), “the VRC cannot be avoided by any leading welfarist axiology despite prior consensus in the literature to the contrary”, and “[the extended] VRC cannot be avoided by any other welfarist axiology in the literature.”

Yet surely we need not limit our views to the ones that were included in their analysis.

Bonus points if the team scrutinizes some assumptions that are commonly taken as unquestio... (read more)

the theory that only suffering [independently] matters. But this theory is transparently false/silly.

A more intuitive phrasing of essentially the same idea may be found in tranquilism (2017), to which I have never seen a reply that would show how and where it is transparently silly. (In population axiology, many people would find views that imply the "Very Repugnant Conclusion" transparently silly.)

In case anyone missed it, there was a popular AMA about psychedelics research and philanthropy in May 2021.

For this forum, I would agree that it seems best to present the original question in maximally neutral terms, and then separately post your own examples as separate answers, so that the answers can get their own votes and/or discussion threads.

Regarding CRS, we are actually in the process of registering in the US, have received more donations, and are open to applicants for remote roles.

Pleasures of learning may be explained by closing open loops, which include unsatisfied curiosity and reflection-based desires for resolving contradictions. And I think anticipated relief is implicitly tracking not only the unmet needs of our future self, but also the unmet needs of others, which we have arguably 'cognitively internalized' (from our history of growing up in an interpersonal world).

Descriptively, some could say that pleasure does exist as a 'separable' phenomenon, but deny that it has any independently aggregable axiological value. Tranquil... (read more)

Ditto for Creating Hell to Please the Blissful?

Which examples of pleasure cannot be explained as contentment, relief, or anticipated relief?

Those are how I currently think of pleasure as being inversely related to craving to change one's experience. Below are some perhaps useful resources for such views:

• Tranquilism — Axiological view by Gloor (2017).
• Pleasure does not exist how you think it does (positive valence explained as an anti-phenomenon) — 15-minute video by a meditator, who claims to have done all the jhanas and other phenomenological investigation, and concluded that pleasure is an 'anti-pheno

More recent arguments for lexical views are found here:

• Clarifying lexical thresholds
• Lexical views without abrupt breaks

Also, if we are comparing additively aggregationist NU with additively aggregationist CU, then we should arguably compare the plausibility of their (strongest) repugnant conclusions with each other:

• Comparing repugnant conclusions

For me, the core issue is the implicit assumption of all else being equal and what it implies for the metaphor of counterbalancing. Specifically, I don’t think any torture is positively counterbalanced by the creat... (read more)

Thanks for the reply!

Re. 1 (ie. "The primary issue with the VRC is aggregation rather than trade-off"). I take it we should care about plausibility of axiological views with respect to something like 'commonsense' intuitions, rather than those a given axiology urges us to adopt.

Agreed, and this is also why I focus also on the psychological and practical implications of axiological views, and not only on their theoretical implications. Especially in the EA(-adjacent) community, it seems common to me that the plausibility of theoretical views is assessed als... (read more)

Thanks!

I'm curious about your takes on the value-inverted versions of the repugnant and very-repugnant conclusions.

I’m not sure what exactly they are. If either of them means to “replace a few extremely miserable lives with many, almost perfectly untroubled ones”, then it does not sound repugnant to me. But maybe you meant something else.

(Perhaps see also these comments about adding slightly less miserable people to hell to reduce the most extreme suffering therein, which seems, to me at least, to result in an overall more preferable population when repeat... (read more)

I wonder if people differ in how they interpret the all else being equal assumption. In the linked post, I suggest that we make sure to properly respect that (radically unrealistic) assumption, and think of the population-ethics lives as being isolated Matrix-lives that never interact with each other.

Thus, the standard framework of population ethics causes me to feel very differently about the addition of isolated happy lives (that never make any difference for others) vs. relational happy lives (that can and do make a difference).

When we give insufficient... (read more)

For NU (including lexical threshold NU), this can mean adding an arbitrarily huge number of new people to hell to barely reduce the suffering for each person in a sufficiently large population already in hell.

What would it mean to repeat this step (up to an infinite number of times)?

Intuitively, it sounds to me like the suffering gets divided more equally between those who already exist and those who do not, which ultimately leads to an infinite population where everyone has a subjectively perfect experience.

In the finite case, it leads to an extremely ... (read more)

(Edit: Added a note(*) on minimalist views and the extended VRC of Budolfson & Spears.)

Thanks for highlighting an important section for discussion. Let me try to respond to your points. (I added the underline in them just to unburden the reader’s working memory.)

This seems wrong to me,

The quoted passage contained many claims; which one(s) seemed wrong to you?

and confusing 'finding the VRC counter-intuitive' with 'counterbalancing (/extreme) bad with with good in any circumstance is counterintuitive' (e.g. the linked article to Omelas) is unfortunate -

Yeah, I guess some people use the names interchangeably. I agree that it can be useful to look at them separately, which was done in Fehige (1998). Their difference is also described in the following way (on Wikipedia):

[Parfit] claims that on the face of it, it may not be absurd to think that B is better than A. Suppose, then, that B is in fact better than A ... . It follows that this revised intuition must hold in subsequent iterations of the original steps. For example, the next iteration would add even more people to B+, and then take the average of th

That disclaimer for technical articles sounds good. :) Also, yeah, perhaps the authors themselves can pre-test their potentially tricky articles with some (similar enough) TTS, and then decide whether to opt out of the library. (Perhaps disclaimers could also exist for articles with a sufficient amount of hyperlinks, since many people use those instead of only explicit in-text references.)

On a side note, if for whatever reason you would not like your content in The Nonlinear Library, just fill out this form. We can remove that particular article or add you to a list to never add your content to the library, whichever you prefer.

Could post authors also get to first listen to what their post would sound like?

(For some posts, it might be perhaps difficult to know in advance whether the automatic narration would cause too many misunderstandings to be a net positive in audio form. This might be especially relevant for posts that were never meant... (read more)

Interesting! Of course, the experience might be, in some ways, quite confusing compared to a human narration. For example, the automatic narration does not seem to separate headings or quotes from the main text. Could the AI be taught to identify headings and quotes, and make them stand out?

(E.g., headings might be ideally narrated with longer pauses, and quotes perhaps even in a different voice.)

Another difference between automatic vs. human narration: The automatic narration does not notify the listener whenever they might miss some meaningful hyperlink ... (read more)

Great post, thanks! What are some related concepts for understanding this? Echo chambers and selection effects come to mind, but I wonder if there are other equally related concepts nearby.

You can send me anonymous feedback on this essay here.

Was there some evidence that some psychedelics may have anti-addictive efficacy even at sub-psychedelic doses, or do the anti-addictive effects depend on the psychedelic experience?