"Why I Support One Step for Animals"

Excerpts from a message from one of your fellow One Step supporters:

What is the best marginal message for reducing farm animal suffering?

The average American kills ~24 factory-farmed chickens vs ~1 for all other land animals combined. In addition, industrial chicken production is, “in both magnitude and severity, the single most severe, systematic example of man’s inhumanity to another sentient animal.”

So what if Americans stopped eating chicken, as urged by One Step’s compelling message? 

Dropping the average American’s land animal consumption to ~1 per year is the equivalent of making all Americans vegan for 11+ months per year.

This is why I support One Step For Animals. So if you have a few extra dollars and would like to contribute to an important opportunity for farm animals, largely unprioritized by other groups, please click here.

Attention, Frames, AI, Math & The Downfall of (many) Effective Altruists

Totally unrelated, but: Ansel Adams!

From The Art of the Question, here is:

1. Why I will try to always be asking how you and I can be happier and how we can reduce the most intense suffering;
2. Why so many smart people leave the real world and go off to shrimp-land.

[T]he modern deluge of information, where an endless stream of commentary and data creates a seductive illusion of completeness. In this environment, the bottleneck is no longer access, but attention. 

The arrival of large language models does not solve this. In fact, it intensifies it. We now have a machine that will produce a plausible answer to almost any prompt instantly. But that speed does not remove the upstream burden of having to decide what matters. It cannot choose the frame. It can only elaborate the frame you give it.

In that sense, AI is not a replacement for good judgment. At best, it audits it and at worst, it accelerates our confidence in a flawed frame. A vague question invariably yields noise, and no matter how eloquently the response is delivered, it remains futile without usable clarity. If the age of information made attention scarce, the age of AI makes good inquiry paramount. ...

[T]he seductive comfort of math often betrays the sophisticated mind.

Good News from 2025

Lewis has ten big wins for farmed animals.

Also here (video embedded below). And if you want less environmental news and more techno-optimism, see here.

Imagine Peace on Earth

Lennon's Imagine.
U2's Peace on Earth (lyrics below - they still give me shivers and bring tears to my eyes).

Heaven on Earth
We need it now
I'm sick of all of this
Hanging around
Sick of sorrow
Sick of the pain
Sick of hearing
Again and again
That there's gonna be
Peace on Earth

Where I grew up
There weren't many trees
Where there was we'd tear them down
And use them on our enemies
They say that what you mock
Will surely overtake you
And you become a monster
So the monster will not break you

It's already gone too far
Who said that if you go in hard
You won't get hurt

Jesus, can you take the time
To throw a drowning man a line?
Peace on Earth
Tell the ones who hear no sound
Whose sons are living in the ground
Peace on Earth
No whos or whys
No-one cries like a mother cries
For peace on Earth
She never got to say goodbye
To see the colour in his eyes
Now he's in the dirt
Peace on Earth

They're reading names out
Over the radio
All the folks, the rest of us
Won't get to know
Sean and Julia
Gareth, Ann and Breda
Their lives are bigger than
Any big idea

Jesus can you take the time
To throw a drowning man a line
Peace on Earth
To tell the ones who hear no sound
Whose sons are living in the ground
Peace on Earth
Jesus in the song you wrote
The words are sticking in my throat
Peace on Earth
Hear it every Christmas time
But hope and history won't rhyme
So what's it worth?
This peace on Earth

Peace on Earth
Peace on Earth
Peace on Earth

On incentives, status, and the erosion of moral seriousness

I’ve written ad nauseam about the cruelty of climate cultists (if you have 7 or 8 hours, search on “climate,” or just read this, or Hannah Ritchie). And I’ve also written how the loudest EAs create more suffering by trying to one-up each other in their Expected Value game.   

A New Line Crossed

But I just came across a vegan who is planning to torture animals to “save the Earth.”   

Actively and intentionally seeking to expand the factory farming of chickens – the practice that is “in both magnitude and severity, the single most severe, systematic example of man’s inhumanity to another sentient animal” – that’s a new one. 

Applause and Silence

When this vegan announced his “torture more chickens” company, nearly 100 people gave it a thumbs up (as of the time of this writing). Only one person – Dr. Amit Tewari – publicly pushed back, making the obvious but ignored point about “the Earth” vs actual suffering.  

Abstract causes, planetary or cosmic narratives, and feel-good moral identities have long been used to ignore or excuse concrete cruelty to real individuals. “Let’s torture more chickens” is just the latest, and perhaps most naked, example of that pattern.

Incentives Reliably Rot Moral Judgment

Vegans want to think Veganism is The One Truth, and many will repeat lies and exaggerations to feel superior. (And will attack anyone who dares to question The One Truth.)

Effective Altruists will lie to show just how big – so very, very massive – their expected value is.  

Doomers want to believe they just happen to live at The Vital Moment, that their actions will have cosmic consequences. 

And liberals know, consciously or not, they can get clicks, status, and money by worshiping “the Earth.” 

The Work that Actually Helps

It is not all bad, of course. There has been real progress for farmed animals, including meaningful wins that rarely make headlines. 

But the work that actually reduces suffering usually happens quietly, incrementally, and without applause. It doesn’t generate viral posts, moral grandstanding, or dopamine hits.

The algorithms don’t reward boring, behind-the-scenes work that pushes the peanut forward. They reward spectacle, certainty, and stories that flatter the people telling them. 

So if you care about reducing real suffering, you have to actively seek out serious efforts – not just the emotionally satisfying and flattering ones.

But whatever you value, please don’t support work that actively causes cruelty for some abstract “Greater Good.”

Two Graphs against the Doom Narrative / How to Not Be Fooled by Viral Charts

The middle class is "shrinking" because many more people are wealthy; fewer households are poor.

Beware viral graphs. (The outlier on the left is the one every young Doomer has shared.) 
How to Not Be Fooled by Viral Charts: Part 1  |  Part 2

My Christmas Cunk for you

Hilarious, even though I don't get the UK-specific jokes. (Also, Hank Green on what Jesus really looked like. And Billy Bragg's King James Version, Lyrics - beautiful).

Summary of 2025

It's funny 'cuz it's not funny:

 

The One Thing We Have in Common

“Everyone dies. That’s always been how it is. You got now and you got the second your lights go out. Meantime is the only time there is. All that matters is what we do during it.”

Another topic I've failed to clearly explain: I don't care about death. 

This came up in response to my regular criticism of individuals wasting time and resources on "wild animal suffering." A reader brought up roadkill, building strikes, outdoor cats - the things humans could do to reduce human-caused wild animal deaths.

I understand that we are sad when an animal dies. We are angry when an animal is killed.

But our reactions distract us. Every animal dies. Something kills every animal. 

The ethical question we should care about is how much suffering each individual life contains.  

I would rather be run over by an SUV than die a slow, "natural" death of disease. I would rather die young than have a drawn-out, miserable, "natural" end.

There is an irrational liberal fetisization of "nature" and "natural." But there is nothing desirable about "nature." Just the opposite.

Conscious life didn't evolve in order to create joyful, meaningful lives. Sentience only evolved* to compel creatures to survive and get their genes to the next generation in an increasingly-complex, resource-limited, predator-infested world. Negative emotions (hunger, fear) and the pursuit of positive feelings (orgasms, eating tasty food) serve this purpose.

"Natural" selection actively selects against lasting happiness and contentment. 

Natural selection's earth wasn't a bucolic paradise before humans evolved. Just the opposite.

The problem of humanity isn't that some wild animals now die in different ways. The problem is that humans intentionally bring more sentient individuals into existence in order to torture them. 

As animal scientist John Webster pointed out, humans have bred birds to be in chronic pain. And then we bring billions and billions into being and cram them in horrible conditions - an existence so bad it makes a wild animal's life look bucolic in contrast.   

That should be our concern. 

*In humans, self-awareness led to a fear of death and "valuing" our own existence above all else. And then we can't help but project our inner lives into anything that moves, including objects on a screen. All this makes it basically impossible to think clearly about addressing actual, tractable, severe suffering.

12/17/12 What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World

Video; More; lyrics:

What a gift, what a gift you can give me
Here with my heart so whole
While others may be grieving
Think of their grieving

And, oh, my boy
Don't you know you are dear to me
You are a breath of life
And a light upon the water
A light upon the water

And, oh, my love
If you only knew how I long for you
How I waste my days wishing you would come around
Just to have you around

And what a dear
What a sweet little baby
This cannonball in the bosom of your belly
It's just a kick in your belly

And, oh, my god
What a world you have made here
What a terrible world, what a beautiful world
What a world you have made here
What a world you have made here
What a world you have made here
What a world you have made here

Zach Does It Again

 In one comic, he makes a point I've tried repeatedly to make!

I am always in pain

1992

Song: Bob Geldof's Thinking Voyager 2 Type Things, from The Vegetarians of Love. Brilliant and profound. I wish I could produce something so lovely and meaningful.

tl;dr - If I could live my life over again, I would rather remove a few hours of my most intense suffering (the "Worsts" in Losing) than my constant daily pain. 

This was written before my recent three-part series (1, 2, 3). It is a follow-up to this 2016 post.

Writing "Biting the Philosophical Bullet" chapter in Losing My Religions was a difficult process. 

At that point in 2022, everything in my professional life to date, and most of my friendships, were based on pretty classical utilitarianism. Writing that chapter crystalized that was all based on an illusion. ("Please tell me where I am factually wrong. Seriously, I’m asking. My life would be much easier and happier if you did." p. 387) 

Other than Anne, pretty much no one I know agrees with me. (One person comes kinda close.) After publishing, I discovered another person (who I've never met) whose writing indicated a similar thought process. But then I found out they had written extensively against my specific posts about insects. <sigh>

What is weird is that people who have known me for a long time, read this blog, and have read (and reviewed) Losing don't (always? sometimes?) seem to understand my position.

An example: I shared a recent draft post with a longtime friend and reader. In it, I mentioned cluster headaches as one area deserving of our concern. (Cluster headaches in context.) They objected that only 0.1% of the human population suffers from cluster headaches.  

But the number of people suffering from something is irrelevant. What matters is the intensity of suffering an individual is experiencing. I would rather relieve one person's cluster headache than prevent a trillion people from stubbing their toe. 

Or within myself: Every moment I am awake, parts of my body (my back, my left hand, etc.) are sending pain signals to my brain*. (Additionally, tinnitus isn't necessarily painful, but certainly an unpleasant signal.) This has been true for most of my adult life, and uniformly true since January 2021. 

If I got to relive my life with one change, instead of taking away my daily chronic pain, I would rather erase any of my worst suffering; e.g., Day 30, starting on p. 527 (if you've not read it already, please just skip all of the Day 30 chapter; I now regret writing it as it is). 

Suffering does not sum. 

*Having constant pain doesn't mean I'm constantly suffering.

From Derek Thompson: The 26 Most Important Ideas For 2026

Javelina

Lotsa great stuff here. 

One comment, though: I don't think the "Life Often Feels Meaningless" graph supports the idea that conservatism and religion make life more meaningful. At the start of the graph, people are all kinda grouped together. And even in 2019, one of the "conservative" lines is second highest. At least at the national level, secular countries are generally the happiest.

I think the more important explanation is Derek's #25: "Negativity bias rules everything around me." Whenever I see what is popular with young "liberals" today, it is all Doom. "We'll never have a good job, we'll never own a house*. Climate change will kill us all if AI doesn't first." 

I know old people always complain about every new thing that comes along. But I really think "social" media is That Thing.

*Our kid may well never own a home. Odds are even better that they'll never own a car. Happiness isn't to be found in owning things, it is found in meaningful work and/or relationships. Hard to have healthy, happy relationships if you view everything as terrible. (Also one of the reasons Vegans are the most disliked group.)

A Meaningful Life for the Super-Smart (Part 3)

(Part 1, Part 2)

Are you smarter than all the yutzes around you, but not sure how to focus your life? 

Have I got a deal for you!

Here’s the plan, which I've watched many follow, endorsed by many of the most praised people online:

Step 1: Look at all the unnecessary and acute suffering in the world, including, but not limited to: 

• Terminal cancer patients w/o access to the strongest pain meds
  (not just a problem in other countries). 
• Cluster headaches, or depression, or many others. 
• Factory farming pigs. 
• The dehumanization of women. 
• All the death and suffering caused by the shutdown of USAID. 
• The classic: still widespread extreme poverty.

Ignore all that. 

Only normies care about those obvious bummers. You are so much smarter than them!

Instead, Choose Your Own Adventure:

A. Spend your time and resources on something you will have no impact on, like AI or future robots. Or wild animals. [More on the latter next week.]

B. Spend your time and resources on something that has no actual positive impact in the world. Like spreading a specific religion. Or microscopic bugs on our skin or other bugs and nematodes. (BTW, the human digestive tract alone has a million times more neurons than a nematode.)

But wait! There is so much more!

Step 2: Find the Pavlovian language for other people who are also so much smarter (and not distracted by ever having really suffered). Expected value, Bayesian priors. That will prove how brilliant and objective and rational you are, unlike the hypocritical, biased sheeple. 

And if you have to … bend the truth a bit … that’s OK. You can lie about shrimp – your expected value is just so big! And you get so many clicks and so much love from other super-smart people!

But the fun doesn’t stop with just taking time and resources from the non-math causes!

Step 3: Make sure the masses know just how much smarter you are!

Advocate bombing data centers. Say it is immoral to wash your face. Equate the exploitation of bugs with confining a calf in a crate for his entire brief and brutal life. Insist on following the math wherever it goes, all the way to prioritizing electrons.    

Vox's Dylan Matthews illuminated your path years ago:

The common response I got to this was, "Yes, sure, but even if there's a very, very, very small likelihood of us decreasing AI risk, that still trumps global poverty, because infinitesimally increasing the odds that 10^52 people in the future exist saves way more lives than poverty reduction ever could."

The problem is that you could use this logic to defend just about anything. Imagine that a wizard showed up and said, "Humans are about to go extinct unless you give me $10 to cast a magical spell." Even if you only think there's a, say, 0.00000000000000001 percent chance that he's right, you should still, under this reasoning, give him the $10, because the expected value is that you're saving 10^32 lives. Bostrom calls this scenario "Pascal's Mugging," and it's a huge problem** for anyone trying to defend efforts to reduce human risk of extinction to the exclusion of anything else. 

**That is not a “problem”! It is a feature, not a bug!

As the normie writer Michael Lewis' put it in Going Infinite:

One day some historian of effective altruism will marvel at how easily it transformed itself. It turned its back on living people without bloodshed or even, really, much shouting. You might think that people who had sacrificed fame and fortune to save poor children in Africa would rebel at the idea of moving on from poor children in Africa to future children in another galaxy. They didn’t, not really—which tells you something about the role of ordinary human feeling in the movement. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the math. 

And voila! In three easy steps, you will have become a modern-day useful idiot, living a life filled with super-smart math, not squishy “feelings”! Abstractions are so much more pure and neat than trying to impact the chaos of the real world. 

Bonus: you will have endless opportunities for community with other mathletes. You’ll never run out of words to write! Now you need to get the rest in line.

Tyson and Trump and TB will thank you.

Comic Interlude 2

Mary Chapin Carpenter: I Feel Lucky. Hilarious!