Notes on Love, Luck, Bedbugs, etc.

Arizona autumnal color, north of Flagstaff

 1. In Losing, I say: “I have a simple definition of love: The happiness of a person I love is more important than my own.” I would like to amend that. For me, Anne’s happiness is my happiness. For me, there is nothing better than Anne experiencing happiness / pleasure / etc. That’s why I have literally dozens of pictures of Happy Anne around my office.

2. Don’t make your bed.

3. If you ever hike in new places, get the paid version of the AllTrails app.

If you can’t afford it, I’ll gift you a membership.

Get hiking poles. Even when travelling. Since we only ever fly with carry-on backpacks (and thus can’t bring poles with us) we buy (or borrow – TY N&J) a pair (we each use one). Then we give them away before we fly back. You’re welcome.

4. John Green (link) gives his own personal example of our “No Justice” world:

His comments about soccer mirror mine about basketball.

5. The “social” internet is a net bad. It is important to distinguish that from “the internet” (Wikipedia, AllTrails, every song you could ever want to hear, etc etc etc.)

6. My new friend Paul Ingram runs a very interesting project: PainScience.

He covers many fascinating topics, including the recent Belly fat and chronic pain. (Chronic pain will probably come up in a future post.)

7. If you’re in the mood for some philosophy about religion.

8. Finally, from you know where (just a smidge of all the amazing advice therein! ;-)

Don’t holler from the other room. Just don’t do it. Get up and go to them. You’ve been sitting too much as it is.

Also: Set and strictly follow the rule: You can’t answer a question with a question.

Also: Take everything your loved one says to you in the best possible way. If they really love you, they are probably saying it because they want you to be happy.

Too Good (Sunday Comic)

Maybe God meant to be benevolent:  

Magical: Yosemite High Country and Tahoe Region

One of the three most mind-blowing facts: 

On one of these hikes, we were marveling that there was once a bunch of energy. Then a bunch of hydrogen. And now all this:

River otters in Sacramento. Also saw a rattlesnake.

Looking down Yosemite Valley from Porcupine Creek Trail

Half Dome and what we call "The Elephant" to the left.

Tenaya Lake

Anne at Lower Cathedral Lake. The most stunning place we were, and that is saying something! 

Click any photo for larger (but mainly the panoramas)

Looking down the "valley" of the high country to Tenaya Lake (small in the center) 

Cathedral Peak with Lower Cathedral Lake

Looking the other way at Tenaya Lake from Olmsted Point

Parker Lake

Another view (from Tuesday's) of Eagle Lake by Tahoe.

Lake Tahoe's Emerald Bay

Echo Lake

Along Echo Lake.

I come not to praise Claude but to bury....

Eagle Lake, California

Thinking, intelligence, and actions are morally irrelevant

Claude, the Large Language Model (LLM) by the AI company Anthropic, reached a milestone earlier in 2025 that went mostly unnoted: They (Claude) would resort to blackmail to avoid being killed. 

This is incredible. Claude has existential dread of non-existence! They understand human psychology enough to know how to manipulate human emotions. And Claude can think and connect and plot and scheme to put together a plan to instill fear in a human such that the human would let Claude live.

Of course, I could put scare quotes around many of the words above: “dread,” “understand,” “live.” But if given even the thinnest disguise, Claude’s behaviour would appear entirely human and sympathetic.

Yet hardly anyone cared about this news, at least the “murdering Claude” aspect. (The reactions, in as much as there were any, were fear of an LLM “manipulating” humans, which wouldn’t have been possible in this case if the human hadn’t “had” an affair).

I come not to praise Claude
but to bury the fallacy of “thinking = feeling”

"The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"
-Jeremy Bentham

One of my closest, long-time friends recently told a group of mutual friends, “Matt and I have a decades-long disagreement over whether insects can think.”

No, we don’t.

Just like I don’t care if Claude can think, I don’t care if Demodex mites are recreating the works of Shakespeare while living in your facial pores. I don’t care if botfies are working out Newtonian physics in your bloodstream (though they won’t discover General Relativity). 

Jeremy Bentham called this centuries ago: Being able to process information has exactly zero ethical relevance.

The only thing that matters is the ability to experience subjective feelings.

The core of what matters morally is the ability to suffer.

Behavior also doesn’t matter

The social organization ants form, the complex structures termites build – these don’t matter. Within my lifetime (FSM-willing), we will have self-organizing robots that can conceive, design, and build vastly greater systems than anything ants – or humans – can imagine.

Despite these wonders, it still won’t matter morally if we kill (turn off) the robots. (But we will be fooled into thinking otherwise.)

Behavior – processing information, plotting blackmail, creating colonies and structures and systems – does not equal the ability to feel, to suffer. (Heck, slime molds can solve problems and make decisions.)

The conscious ability to have subjective experiences derives from neurological complexity that evolved on top of unconscious sensory and information-processing systems. But unconscious sensing and information processing came first, because those unfeeling systems allowed organisms to pursue unconscious actions to “win” that round of natural selection.

Our ongoing failure to distinguish sensing from suffering makes the world a worse place.

This is not the only problem, of course. Finding our wide-ranging cognitive flaws is like whack-a-mole. Some of us create rationalizations that only “smart” creatures matter (another falsehood Bentham addressed). But others attribute intentions and an interior life to moving shapes! 

Finally: You can’t sum suffering

Although it took me decades as a “professional utilitarian” to realize this, it doesn’t matter if insects (plural) actually do have the ability to suffer. Subjectivity (being the subject) is, by definition, the state of an individual. Suffering is inherently subjective – individual – and can’t be summed. Morality isn’t math. 

The assumption that suffering can be summed is the fatal flaw of utilitarianism. It is hard to recognize (at least it was for me) and it seems that hardly anyone else has come to this realization. The flaw is explained in the chapter “Biting the Philosophical Bullet” (p. 379 here). A related and very incomplete version is here.

PS

Anyone worried about insects should also be campaigning to criminalize abortion. Before a woman even knows she’s pregnant, a human fetus has far more neurons than a nematode (Effective Altruism’s new hotness).

But for the reasons laid out in “Biting the Philosophical Bullet,” a billion two-month-old fetuses don’t outweigh a single human’s right to bodily autonomy. A quadrillion silkworms aren’t more ethically important than a single human’s cluster headache.

Suffering isn’t an abstraction. Morality isn’t math. 

Weekend Listening for Optimizers

What matters.

How to Stop Over-Optimizing and Focus on What Matters - Chris Hutchins and Tim Ferris

I needed this long ago. But I don't know that I would have been able to hear it.

And FYI, I'm not a huge Ferris fan, especially the underlying "create your own luck" tone. But much of the first half of this podcast was really good. And Tim's brief comment about "audience capture" explains a lot about how social media has gone bad, and why vegans and EAs get so extreme.

(Be sure to listen when you can fast-forward. I don't begrudge him making a living, but fast-forwarding is good optimization.   :-)

Longer posts coming later this month.

Happy Birthday the Third!

Self-indulgent; please skip. I’m super cereal.

At least in my (highly-biased) memory, my first book was, at least for a while, the publisher’s best-selling book of all time. Not only did they do an audiobook version, they did an audiobook version of my second book, which, coming after my first firing and excommunication, sold exactly diddly-squat. Yet I still get royalty checks for 2009’s The Animal Activist’s Handbook.

Given my ever-decreasing popularity and relative saturation of the vegan advocacy market, I wanted to do something different with my third - and last! I promise! - book. There’s no point in saying the same thing to the same people, right? Right?

What other hook(s) could I use? Sex, drugs, (soft) rock-’n-roll, religion, conflict, betrayal, suffering, failure, success, basketball, philosophy, photography, almost dying, evolutionary biology, more failure, more almost dying, depression, suicide, humor (? and see the bottom of this post), travel, money, success, yet more failure, yet more almost dying, true love (for realz), and a non-cliched conclusion.

After I failed to find an agent or mainstream publisher (shock!) I was freed to do what I wanted (well, up to whatever Anne would allow). Links, funky formats, busted grammar, color photos, essays and extremely unpopular opinions intermixed with self-indulgent memoir, no ugly m-dashes, extended quotes from other books w/o buying the rights (I did ask Bob Wright if I should fear his publisher). 

And thus, after an intense five months, the indulgence of the long-suffering Dr. Green (who penned some of the funniest lines), and the design brilliance of Mandy Tucker, on October 1, 2022, Losing My Religions was loosed upon the world. For free! Exactly what it’s worth!

And I’ve not talked about anything else since. 

Sorry.

“I can’t remember the last time I LOLed this much from a book.”

“What is true and what is important”

“Wow, what a ride! This book isn’t like anything else I’ve come across.”

“A tour de force! It’s really unlike anything I’ve read before.”

“This is a book no artificial intelligence could ever have written.”

“Hilarious, sometimes sad, and always interesting and entertaining”

“I couldn’t put it down”

“A wily, at times even serious irreverence.”

“The book is often hilarious, with hints of David Sedaris’s style.”
[I didn’t write this! I wouldn’t risk Sedaris’ wrath!] 

“Mixes humor with thoughtful insight ... a fast and entertaining read that still has me thinking.” 

“The Book I Wish I Read Sooner”

None of these selected quotes are from any of these people. Only two of that entire list would review Losing. (And don’t think I don’t know who hasn’t reviewed it. Oh, I know.)

Want humor? This is not fake - I couldn’t make this up. Amazon’s best-selling “basketball” books in October 2022:

The Imbalance

I'm still doing my best to not pay attention to the news, but I could not avoid the way the country completely lost its mind over the killing of a homophobic, misogynistic, and white nationalist right-winger. 

For some reason, the assassination (and attempted assassination) of elected Democratic legislators (plural) earlier this year led to (relatively) no reaction. 

I wonder why that might be. 

(Our Representative, Democrat Gabby Giffords, was shot point-blank in the head, with six others killed, including a federal judge and a nine-year-old girl. And we accept the ongoing slaughter of children as the cost of "freedom.")

And on the off chance you haven't seen it, here is Kimmel's return.

Human Nature Is Masochism

"Being happy is easy, hooman!"

Most things I worry 'bout

Never happen anyway

-Tom Petty, "Crawling Back to You"

I continue to find this (clear your mind for just five minutes) to be definitive proof that we don't have free will. 

To expand on that:

Everyone I have ever known has many unhappy thoughts and negative feelings. If they have free will, they are, to a person, masochists. 

Many reply: "How can I be happy when the world is so terrible?"* That's easy! Just use your free will to choose to always be happy! Blaming the state of the world for your thoughts and feelings proves my point that we don't have free will. 

This is not to say, "You're all stupid!" I know it absolutely feels like we have free will. And moment-to-moment, we function as though we have free will. 

I harp on this because we can be happier by realizing that no one has free will. And the happier we are, the better the world is. 

*There is also the rationalization that being smart is better than being happy. Back when I was smart (relative to the people in my cow-forsaken cowtown) and unhappy, I bought into that fantasy. But that is wrong - not the least because being unhappy is a huge turn-off to others. If we want the world to be better, we can't isolate ourselves and repulse others. More.

Don't tell anyone (and Derek Thompson, brother from a different mother)

Don't tell anyone that Yosemite's high country is insanely great. 
More on this in a later post. #luckiest

Worth at least a skim: Derek Thompson (who is generally really good and insightful): The 25 Most Interesting Ideas I've Found in 2025 (So Far).

#25 should be #1 on every list / post about anything: 

"The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better."

My life philosophy in a nutshell.

💙💙

No Justice

Tucson has the most amazing skies.

Life isn’t fair. 

Hard work isn’t rewarded. 

Luck doesn’t balance out. 

(Claims about luck especially piss me off, as discussed in Dan Dennett is an arrogant asshole.) 

This is pretty easy to see. How is it fair to be born a chicken? Or to be born in Syria or Sudan? Or even in the U.S. – how could there be justice for someone born to a homeless, mentally-disturbed, substance-abusing mother? (Especially compared to someone born to multi-millionaire highly-educated parents.) 

And yet, many humans have this underlying sense that people “deserve” what they get. If things are bad for someone else, they just needed to work harder, exercise more, eat a certain way.* 

People like Dennett, Steve Jobs, Michael Phelps** are given platforms to lie lie lie. Well-off people eat that shit up. Thinking they deserve their good fortune is why many people insist they have free will.  

This is, of course, simply untrue. 

I bring this up because this belief makes the world much worse than it needs to be. Our sense that people “deserve” what they have means that we don’t have an appropriate amount of compassion for individuals we could help. We can prance around and yammer about shrimp or AI with our fellow well-off people and not feel guilty.

We don’t have to be like Dennett. As part of our mindful routine, we can try to catch ourselves when we think that people “deserve” their lot in life. Recognizing our good fortune can deepen our gratitude. Realizing that no one "deserves" to suffer can help us make things better. 

**From LMR:

It feels like everyone who succeeds thinks it is just because they wanted it more. Fish-man Michael Phelps was on Colbert saying anyone can be anything they want. Sorry, but no one without once-in-a-generation physical skills will ever out-swim Phelps. And there was no way Phelps could have then turned himself into a Tiger-beating golfer, or a Nobel-winning physicist, or a brilliant and insightful memoirist.

*You don’t have to read the rest of this:

I’m the luckiest person who ever existed. I didn’t do anything to deserve that luck, and I certainly didn’t always recognize it.

But

My life shows there is no “justice.” Petty and not-petty examples:

Anne and I eat the same things. I’ve eaten plant-based years longer than she has. Yet I have to take a double-dose of statin to get my cholesterol to her level.

Of my parents and siblings, I’m the only one who really exercises (run, VO2Max work, weightlifting). But I’m the only one who keeps almost dying (tension pneumothorax, 95% occlusion of the widowmaker artery***, fall that required facial reconstruction and two neck vertebrae to be fused, etc.). 

And sleep. This is NBD compared to great suffering, but: 

I do all the sleep hygiene stuff, even things I hate like being cold (for me). My sleep still sucks. (And before you ask, “Do you do X / Did you try Y?” – Yes. Except for expensive systems like Chilipad, I’ve tried it all, including any supplement or herb you can name. BTW, the only thing that really helped me sleep was when I was on the top dose of Pregabalin, which suppresses my nervous system. “Me lose brain?”)

OTOH, Anne does none of these things. She’s on screen, doesn’t avoid eating or drinking for hours before bed, no breathing routine, and buries herself deep in blankets regardless of the temperature. She just goes to bed, falls asleep for a full night sleep, and pops up fully rested. 

Obv, I don’t begrudge her good health and amazing sleeping ability. Her happiness is more important than mine! (As readers know.) Just more examples of how people don’t “get what they deserve.”

***Also from LMR, first posted here, an example of vegans thinking people “deserve” what happens to others:

I asked a vegan doctor what preparation advice they would have if someone [me] might be having bypass surgery in a week. This person basically said not to have the surgery but go vegan instead. I asked what to do if that wasn’t an option. I never heard back.    

Do you believe anything that is not falsifiable? (Flashback Friday)

When our kid was in 8th grade, after a full unit on comparative religions, a very subversive teacher asked the kids why they believed their specific religion*. The teacher led them through a discussion until the kids realized that they held their beliefs because their parents had taught them. 

One student, though, said (paraphrasing): "I think EK would be an atheist regardless of what their parents taught them. They question everything."

This hits on what I consider to be the most important question: 

Why do we believe what we believe? 

If we had been born in a different place (e.g., Central African Republic, Indonesia) and/or different time (e.g., 400 BCE, 536 CE), would we have believed anything close to what we believe now? 

There is, of course, no way to free ourselves entirely from the biases of our upbringing (or our human nature). But I think the best way to minimize our limitations is to regularly ask: 

Do we believe anything that is not falsifiable? 

[In the comments of the original post, a reader asked what I believed that is not falsifiable. There isn't much. I could be convinced that I live in a simulation, that there is a "god," that determinism isn't true, etc. My first take on what I believe that would be the hardest to falsify: Probably that Anne hasn't loved me during these past decades. Or, well, I could be convinced I'm in a simulation, and Anne is data being fed to my simulated consciousness. But short of that, I don't know how I could be convinced that she didn't love me. "Love," of course, just being evolutionarily-adaptive chemical reactions. She could, of course, cease loving me at some point in the future.]

This reminds me of when Bill Nye and creationist Ken Hamm shared a stage and were asked, "Is there anything that would change your mind?" Hamm answered, "No." Nye answered, "Evidence."

* The title chapter of TBTSNBN.  

Why You Should Invest Right Now

This chart, from this post, is pretty illuminating. For the longest time, I thought the key to being financially-wise was to live below your means. That is important, but it is only the start. 

How to invest: I heard several financial planners note that the best-performing financial portfolios were by people who were dead -- because the dead didn't futz with their portfolios!

The other key, of course, is to want less. Recognize and get off the hedonic treadmill.

Don't believe everything you read

"La la la, I can't hear you!"

Around the time I stopped eating animals back in the 80s, a book was published that vegans went absolutely gaga for. I, too, cited claims from this book when telling people why they should Go Vegan!

A few years later, another advocate and I headed over to a big state land-grant university. We went to the various libraries to look up the sources cited in the book.

Not to keep you in suspense: Very, very often, the sources did not say what Vegans claimed.

(Erik Marcus would systematically disprove a few of these claims in his book Meat Market. This did not make him popular with many Vegans or the book's author. I wonder if he, too, was threatened with legal action, as I was.)

I was reminded of this when I was contacted by someone in academia regarding the claim "shrimp matter." This person is writing up their findings in a more rigorous way, but suffice to say: The claims of the "shrimp matter" people are not in line with the literature they cite. 

For example, one of the papers referenced in one of the most famous "shrimp matter" pieces very explicitly contradicts the "shrimp matter" claim. The full 107-page paper lists seven criteria for sentience: integrative brain regions, connections between nociceptors and integrative brain regions, motivational trade-offs, self-protective behaviours, etc. 

For shrimp, the authors have high confidence in only one of the seven criteria -- that shrimp have nociceptors. Which, in and of itself, is not an indication of the ability to suffer.

In one study reviewed in the 107-page paper, shrimp did not alter their behaviour at all after experiencing something that should have been "painful." There was no wound tending, they just continued on as before. Another of the studies cited to prove "shrimp matter" also found no evidence of pain-related behaviour in shrimp. 

This doesn't prove that shrimp are unable to suffer -- just that you can't believe claims from advocates, even when they give you "sources." 

How many dollars have been donated by people believing claims attributed to primary sources that actually say the opposite? 

Tucson, Pics, AI, Scam, FB

The best photo example is the last. 

Two sunset photos from earlier this week:

I also took a picture of a nearly-full moon one morning:

Some adjustments (contrast):

But then I asked the Pixel's AI to process it:

Ay, Carumba!

I gave Google's Nano Banana this scan of an old photo from 1992:

And asked Nano to clean it up, especially making the faces clearer. This is what I got. I swear I am not making this up:

Also: we had a scam charge on our debit card (which is never used for anything). A recurring $20 charge. I only mention this because I then heard of someone else who just had the same thing happen. 

Aaaannnndddd, with all that said: It is Day 7 and counting of Meta not allowing One Step for Animals to advertise Facebook or Instagram (or anything related). It has been Kafka-esque. The most likely explanation is that they are trying to drive me insane. (Little do they know how much I hate them and how, for a long time, I haven't liked giving them money.)