"If there's a 1% chance that shrimp feel pain, and we farm 440 billion of them annually, the expected harm is..." assumes access to a pretty weird way of thinking about what's good and bad
"Are we weird?" Yes, super weird! Case closed, ha ha. I think the reasoning can sound abstract or intangible to people (and by people I mean me, so this is all just me guessing because I find it interesting) but I wonder if there are some people who are able to "break through" in their conversations?
I bet there are, and that’s heroic, but heroes don’t scale (there’s a nice Marginal Revolution post about this called “Heroes are not Replicable” which Substack will not allow me to post). I’m also thinking about how to integrate our work into deeper theoretical questions with the intent of making our work more ‘respectable’ in econ, psych, etc. And I think the tradeoff between these two kinds of moral reasoning, how to activate one or the other, and what domains people can be drawn to apply them in are broadly interesting to people outside of our field, or at least I hope. I would call this ‘applied philosophy’ (harkening back to ‘natural philosophy’ as it was understood by Bacon et al.)
Thanks for this summary, Seth. I do think that this type of thinking tends to work for those with less-emotionally-coded thinking (although all thinking is emotional - feeling comes first, then reasoning). Probably more engineers than artists. (In general; obv degrees, etc.)
After decades of "standard" [sic] utilitarian approach, my thinking on this changed a ton a few years ago. E.g.
interesting, I rate utilitarianism more highly than you do. I think it’s “approximately correct” with a bunch of obvious counterexamples that I’m happy to concede. People I read — Yudkowsky, Huemer, both Rachels — are basically on the same page. But here I am also talking more about maximizing expected utility in terms of our own choices more so than a moral system that assumes this is correct everywhere always. In ‘The Problem of Political Authority,’ Huemer talks about Rawls’s Maximin principkle and how he has to contort himself to avoid the much more obvious decision rule of ‘maximize my expected utility’ — but that doesn’t mean we’d always choose such a rule for everyone.
"Are we weird?" Yes, super weird! Case closed, ha ha. I think the reasoning can sound abstract or intangible to people (and by people I mean me, so this is all just me guessing because I find it interesting) but I wonder if there are some people who are able to "break through" in their conversations?
I bet there are, and that’s heroic, but heroes don’t scale (there’s a nice Marginal Revolution post about this called “Heroes are not Replicable” which Substack will not allow me to post). I’m also thinking about how to integrate our work into deeper theoretical questions with the intent of making our work more ‘respectable’ in econ, psych, etc. And I think the tradeoff between these two kinds of moral reasoning, how to activate one or the other, and what domains people can be drawn to apply them in are broadly interesting to people outside of our field, or at least I hope. I would call this ‘applied philosophy’ (harkening back to ‘natural philosophy’ as it was understood by Bacon et al.)
Yeah, fair, I always go to the communications aspect, I suppose. I do think there are elements that can be replicable, albeit perhaps quite modestly.
Thanks for this summary, Seth. I do think that this type of thinking tends to work for those with less-emotionally-coded thinking (although all thinking is emotional - feeling comes first, then reasoning). Probably more engineers than artists. (In general; obv degrees, etc.)
After decades of "standard" [sic] utilitarian approach, my thinking on this changed a ton a few years ago. E.g.
https://mattball.substack.com/p/the-philosophical-bullet-bites-parts
interesting, I rate utilitarianism more highly than you do. I think it’s “approximately correct” with a bunch of obvious counterexamples that I’m happy to concede. People I read — Yudkowsky, Huemer, both Rachels — are basically on the same page. But here I am also talking more about maximizing expected utility in terms of our own choices more so than a moral system that assumes this is correct everywhere always. In ‘The Problem of Political Authority,’ Huemer talks about Rawls’s Maximin principkle and how he has to contort himself to avoid the much more obvious decision rule of ‘maximize my expected utility’ — but that doesn’t mean we’d always choose such a rule for everyone.
Yup, I understand. Pretty much only my wife agrees with me.
(If you want more - and I'm not saying you should! - from here https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
You can click to open the pdf, and search on "Biting the Philosophical Bullet" and the next chapter, "My Expected Value Is Bigger Than yours."
But I'm not saying it is worth your while.)