Sunday Funnies: Parties and Persuasion

Since I don't have loads of meetings for work anymore, I find other social interactions so much more pleasant. 

No way, man!

The Problem with Population Ethics

The problem with population ethics is the problem of all human “thinking” – we start with the end we want, and then work backwards.

We are rationalizing animals, not rational.

Any “ethics” we endorse first must justify our personal existence and support our personal desires. If we have (or want) kids, "ethics" has to support that. And vice-versa – if you dislike kids and / or had a terrible childhood, or have made Doom your dogma, your “ethics” insists that no one should have kids.

If we have a child or loved one with a disability, “ethics” demands we “value” that life equally to any other person, no matter what. And society is “ethically required” to provide resources to our loved one without any regard to happiness or even a hint of cost / benefit calculations.

The topic of children will trigger “logical” contortions in even the most hardcore, first-principles “rationalist.” And not just the misanthropes! I’ve often heard that having kids is something “we should experience” (and not just from me*), all the way to claiming that personally having kids is essential for continuing humanity’s imperative existence in the universe. 

Yeah, OK, sure.

This is not to pick on people regarding kids. This is just how we work, no matter how “rational” we consider ourselves. It is true across the board, from carbon to free will. (And the delusion that you can sum pleasure and pain across discrete individuals.).

Highly educated people have cruelly exploited untold quadrillions of electrons to argue that our personal wants are universal musts. 

I’m not saying, Everyone is stupid except me. Just trying to note that we are all hugely flawed. When we learn about some cognitive biases, we think we have freed ourselves from all cognitive biases. That’s even worse than not knowing we have biases!

I don’t bring this up because I find it frustrating or amusing. Rather, refusing to recognize our inherent and unavoidable shortcomings makes us less effective at having an actual positive influence in the world. 

If (emphasizing: if) we really want the world to be different than it is, we need to start by asking: What do other people want? The question isn’t, “Can we reason with them?” Rather, it is, “Can we make them happier?”  

* In a shocking twist, I was now the one who wanted kids. Psych! We talked about it that season, sitting by the fire. I waxed philosophical, asking, “Isn’t it something we should experience?”

p. 171

Sunday Funnies: Hey Happy Guy!

 

I love Paul Bloom. Except....

 

This discussion between physicist (and vegan) Brian Greene and psychology professor Paul Bloom is mostly very good. I love how Professor Bloom mocks panpsychism! 10/10

Three quick notes:

1. Like nearly everyone, Dr. Bloom just can't bring himself to give up the idea of free will. Luckily, Dr. Greene is a hard-core determinist, including about his own accomplishments (as is the even more awesome Dr. Green). 

2. Dr. Bloom is the perfect example of the irrelevance of reason. He knows (and elsewhere has acknowledged) all the arguments for eating vegan. (Earlier this month, he even promoted an author whose purpose in life seems to be saying, over and over and over, that everyone who isn't vegan is an idiot.) But Dr. Bloom isn't even a vegetarian, and in a conversation with vegan Dr. Greene, talks about eating fishes and chickens.

3. I disagree somewhat with Dr. Bloom about the importance of voluntary suffering; that is a longer discussion. 

However, I actively dislike the idea, attributed to Viktor Fankl in this interview, that the people who survived the Nazi death camps were the ones who had purpose. I understand the attraction of Frankl's views, but I think it is cruel to even imply that people who died in death camps had any culpability (i.e., they could have lived if they had chosen to have a purpose). (Also, survival at all costs is not a good thing.) (And second-guessing Danny Kahneman - c'mon!)

You can talk about what you see as the benefits of purpose without this. (But maybe you shouldn't go all-in on purpose; the Nazis certainly had "purpose.") 

And let's stop praising suffering (e.g., Frankl's "If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering." Not true not true not true!) 

You can recognize and accept the fundamental indifference of the universe and still have a very good life.

Be Careful What You Wish For

He has quite a sense of humor.

Last month, a young, relatively new animal advocate thanked me for Losing My Religions: “It was like a personalized lesson. Sharing your mistakes saved me from having to make them all myself.”

Well, I hope so. But who knows?

The “Good news, bad news, who knows?” fable (below) could very well be the story of my life. Most of the things I was most sure about in life turned out to be 180 degrees wrong. 

Just a few examples, in chronological order:

1991: When Diane dumped me, I was sure it was The Worst Thing Ever. Turned out to be the best thing possible, given that a year later, I hit the cosmic lottery and became the luckiest collection of atoms that ever existed.

2000: (This one is really convoluted.) G.W. Bush being made president was surely the worst possible outcome. But without that, there was no war (wait for it), no economic collapse (wait for it), no Obama and no Democratic super-majority, and thus no Affordable Care Act. Without Obamacare, I would probably have died in 2014. 

(I know that doesn’t offset the many, many Iraqis who died because of W. And everything else horrible that happened in those eight years (“Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over;” annotations.) I’m just talking about myself.)

2014: This seemed like it was surely The Worst Thing Ever: The coup that ousted me and Anne from the organization we co-founded 20+ years before. Nope – it was the best possible thing that could have happened to my professional life, as my day-to-day efforts stopped having a net-negative impact in the world. (If you have read Losing, you know the details.)

2020: Nothing could have been more important than Biden winning, right? But in retrospect, it would have been better if Joe had lost. The previous incarnation of Tangerine Palpatine’s administration had at least a few moderating elements, the courts' rulings were somewhat followed, and the Dems controlled the Senate. Now, even worse [!] people run the government. There is no rule of law, no checks or balance at all.

I should have listened:

Once upon a time, a farmer had a valuable horse run away.

“Bad News!” said the people.

“Good news, bad news, who knows?” replied the farmer.

Later, the horse returned to the farm with many wild horses accompanying it.

“Good News!” said the people.

“Good news, bad news, who knows?” replied the farmer.

Some time after that, the farmer’s son fell and broke his leg while trying to train one of the wild horses.

“Bad News!” said the people.

“Good news, bad news, who knows?” replied the farmer.

Soon after, the army came through town conscripting all able-bodied young men, and the farmer’s son was passed over.

“Good News!” said the people.

“Good news, bad news, who knows?” replied the farmer. 

"Mars, Bitches!"

Reference here.

I have become a huge fan of Fraser Cain, his videos / podcasts, and his UniverseToday. Fraser is very smart, thoughtful, a near-vegan (refers to himself as a vegan), and an atheist. 

He regularly makes a vastly underappreciated point: Mars is terrible. To quote him at the start of this interview about terriforming: "I've said many times: Mars is the worst." 

There is literally nothing we could do that would make Earth as bad as Mars. Set off all nuclear weapons? Unleash an engineered pathogen? Create positive-feedback global warming? Earth will still be vastly better than Mars!  

Seriously. You might think that Antarctica is inhospitable, and you're right. But it is unbelievably better than Mars! Antarctica: Lots of water right there! Breathable atmosphere! Ozone layer and protective magnetic field! Full atmospheric pressure! 

With that said, I recommend listening to and/or reading Fraser and his team. Great stuff, and much more uplifting than the general news!

Even the coldest place on Earth is warmer than Mars, has water, is protected from radiation, has an atmosphere, has oxygen, etc, etc. etc.

Unknown Good News, Denied Bad News, Useful Interesting News

1. From economist Jason Furman, real hourly wage growth has been much better for everyone in the United States over the past quarter century, compared to the previous, much-higher-inflation quarter century (a fact denied/suppressed by the Doomers):

(Please see Brainrot, Screen Addiction, and Late-Stage Capitalism for more on our negativity bias.)

2. "Veganism is EXPLODING!"

What to do instead.

2.5. Meat Is Back:

"Sales of beef, pork, lamb, poultry and other meat in the United States hit a record $104.6 billion last year…. On average, Americans ate nearly 7 percent more meat last year than before the pandemic…. And the number of consumers who said they were trying to eat less meat fell to 22 percent, the lowest level in at least five years."

So let's focus on shrimp and insects! 

3. The best plant-based meat products, according to a huge blind taste test

Not all Effective Altruists

Picking up from yesterday, I obviously have to point out that Lewis Bollard and team at Open Philanthropy are doing great work. 

And many people in the EA community are very thoughtful. Kat Woods, as quoted in Losing My Religions:

To be an EA is to find out, again and again and again, that what you thought was the best thing to do was wrong. [Just wait for June 18 post.] You think you know what’s highest impact and you’re almost certainly seriously mistaken.

Every single time I have been so damn certain that this was the time we’d finally found the thing that totally definitely helped in a large way.

And Open Phil's current CEO, Alexander Berger (again, from Losing):

I think it makes you want to just say wow, this is all really complicated and I should bring a lot of uncertainty and modesty to it. ... 

I think the more you keep considering these deeper levels of philosophy, these deeper levels of uncertainty about the nature of the world, the more you just feel like you’re on extremely unstable ground about everything. ... my life could totally turn out to cause great harm to others due to the complicated, chaotic nature of the universe in spite of my best intentions. ... I think it is true that we cannot in any way predict the impacts of our actions. And if you’re a utilitarian, that’s a very odd, scary, complicated thought. … 

I think the EA community probably comes across as wildly overconfident about this stuff a lot of the time, because it’s like we’ve discovered these deep moral truths, then it’s like, “Wow, we have no idea.” I think we are all really very much – including me – naïve and ignorant about what impact we will have in the future. 

I’m going to rely on my everyday moral intuition that saving lives is good ... I think it’s maximizable, I think if everybody followed it, it would be good.

...

I’m not prepared to wait. The ethos of the Global Health and Wellbeing team is a bias to improving the world in concrete actionable ways as opposed to overthinking it or trying so hard to optimize that it becomes an obstacle to action. We feel deep, profound uncertainty about a lot of things, but we have a commitment to not let that prevent us from acting. 

I think there are a lot of ways in which the world is more chaotic than [we think]. [S]ometimes trying to be clever by one extra step can be worse than just using common sense.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Why I'm not an EA, short updated version

Two quick reasons: 

1. “Effective Altruists,” as math-following utilitarians, would torture a person so that N people could experience the tiniest pleasure. (Extreme example, but it covers their revealed preferences; more below.)
2. EAs generally consider continued human existence the top priority. Not only do they follow this unquestioningly, but if you disagree, they will revert to name-calling. 

A bit more:

I'm not singling out EAs as worse than anyone else. We are all simply biological machines following our programming. But many EAs (and others) present themselves as understanding and transcending our inherent biases. 

It was the process of writing the “Biting the Philosophical Bullet” chapter (p. 379 here) of Losing My Religions that finally clarified my thinking on utilitarianism. In the chapter, I told this story:

I knew one EA who stopped donating to animal issues to support Christian missionaries. There may be a small chance they are right about god, but if they are, the payoff for every saved soul is literally infinite! He actually put money on Pascal’s Wager!   

Since then, I've covered the EA who wrote about how washing our skin is a Holocaust. The EA community chose to promote that article.

In just the past week, I've come across two more examples:

1. Torturing chickens a bit less (i.e., welfare reforms) is a bad idea because ... bugs.
2. “I used to think factory farming deserved my attention. Then I realized ... bugs. But now I realize I need to spend my time worried about future evil robots torturing future people.”

Bravo

Now, I get it. Really:

1. The EA community provides positive feedback to those who write the mathiest and most "detached" essays.  
2. It is depressing as all get out to think about the brutality inflicted on factory-farmed animals right now, especially since nearly everyone is complicit. Making it worse is that all the efforts of the people working against factory farming seem to be accomplishing less than nothing:

So it is understandable to "choose" [natch] to worry instead about how to feed humans after a possible future nuclear war, to make sure future humans colonize the future galaxy. (I'm not making that up.)

Focus on the far future, and you can never fail. You can never find a metric upon which to evaluate your work. And, because you are "rational," you are free to move on to the next cause with a bigger expected value.

And, of course, many think their next post must have a vital, universe-spanning impact. So very important!

But not every EA. That's next time.

Sunday Funnies: The World's Smallest Cult

I recently talked with a young couple who are new donors to One Step for Animals. 

Paraphrasing, they were part of a "Go Vegan or Go Eff Yourself" group. When the young man came across my writings, he went to the intertubes to try to find someone to refute me. He mentioned me to one of his fellow Vegans, who replied: "Don't follow that cult leader!"

😂

50 Years

I say the below (and other posts like it) not to be the old man yelling "Kids these days!" but to encourage perspective and gratitude.

If you were a kid in 1920*, you got around by horse and buggy and had probably never seen an airplane. Fifty years later, the Concord was taking people across the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound, and you had watched people walk on the Moon. 

But in terms of changing what it was like to be a kid, the last 50 years are unparalleled. 

In 1975, I could only watch whatever was on one of three channels at that moment (Laverne & Shirley, Happy Days, Welcome Back Kotter, Sonny & Cher). I could only watch whatever movie was at the local theater. I was limited to the books on my shelf or at the small local library (I read and re-read The Hardy Boys). You had whatever music your parents had on vinyl or was playing on the radio at the moment (there really wasn't any non-easy-listening music in my house). I had no camera. I had never heard of a "computer." I didn't know anything about anything (other countries, other races, atheism, vegetarianism, homosexuality, you name it). My window on the world was the Brady Bunch. (I hadn't yet been allowed to watch M*A*S*H.) If I wanted to learn anything not taught at my shitty Catholic school, I was SOL. The only smart kid I knew had been skipped out of my grade and then moved away; I wouldn't meet another smart person for ten years.

It is basically impossible to wrap our heads around how different it is today. (I try in Smart Phones and the Hedonic Treadmill.) Today, a smart kid can learn about any topic they want, watch just about any movie or TV show, listen to any song, or read any book ... at any moment. They can find any community based on any identity or interest. They can "hang out" with anyone, anywhere in the world. 

And air conditioning. Holy chicken - what a benefit! 

It is not all utopian, of course; hatred and ignorance and doomism are very prevalent. All the advances and advantages are taken for granted. But on balance, I'd much rather be a (smart) kid today than in 1975. (I can't imagine I'd be less happy than I was.)

Again: Saying with gratitude, not bitterness.  😎

*101 years ago, while he was President and arguably the most powerful person in the world, Calvin Coolidge watched his son die from a small blister on his toe. JFC.

ChatGPT, the Greatest Philosopher

Here

Pre-script: After I put the below together, I had a medical diagnosis conversation with ChatGPT. In their response, they asked clarifying questions before concluding: "...can be mistaken for a skin allergy — but it’s actually linked to nerve impingement or irritation, often from the cervical spine (especially C5-C6)."

ChatGPT didn't know that C5-C6 are the vertebrae I had fused after my fall in 2021. I still take nerve medicine for that. Spooky!

But:

In another chat, on June 2, ChatGPT said the date was May 27. When I asked it to check the calendar, it said:

You're absolutely right to question that — thank you for catching it.

Today is May 25, 2025

Yikes.

From "Everybody Dies" on this blog: "Your death is the end of consciousness, the end of the universe...."

From Reddit's "I asked ChatGPT to tell the biggest lie ever sold to people" (slightly abridged to remove "woo").

If I had to name one of the biggest lies ever sold to people—subtle, widespread, and deeply shaping—it’s this:

“You are small and insignificant in the universe.”

It’s wrapped in science-sounding language, whispered through education systems, media, and modern culture:

“You’re just a speck on a rock, spinning around a star, in a random universe with no meaning.”

It’s a worldview that strips life of purpose, beauty of depth, and existence of any real connection.

But here’s the thing: this lie didn’t come from science—it came from how people chose to interpret it.

Yes, the universe is vast. But being vast doesn’t mean you are meaningless. 

The real truth is:

You’re not just in the universe—you are the universe, conscious of itself.

But if people believe the lie of insignificance, they become easier to control. They accept empty systems. They chase distractions. They forget their connection to each other.

Just Pretty Cloud Pictures from Arizona Summer 2022

Sunday Funnies:

 Goes with this Simpsons clip

Anger and Resentment - A Unified Theory of American Politics

2016: the "liberal" media doing their best to take Hillary down.

The elections during my life (and at least a bit before) have been a reflection of how angry people are at their (perceived) situation, and how much they (especially the press - see above) resent a smart candidate.
("Everyone hates the smartest kid in class." -The first few chapters here.)

1960: TV, combined with the media fawning over JFK while disliking Nixon, let Kennedy's team steal that election.

1964: Crazy Republican, but mostly "honoring" the idealized memory of JFK.

1968: White anger at civil rights and youth anger at Vietnam.

1972: Everyone (including prominent Democrats) hated McGovern. 

1976: Backlash to Watergate, anger at inflation.

1980: Anger at inflation, the media hated Carter, and Reagan made older whites feel better about themselves.

1984: Everyone hated Mondale, still tainted with Carter's reputation.

1988: The blue-blood GHW Bush made Dukkakis into the dweeby smart kid.

1992: Bubba made GHW Bush the out-of-touch spoiled kid.

1996: Bubba was still the "regular" guy and things in the country were going the best they have during my entire life (maybe ever). 

2000: The media hated Al Gore, which let GWB steal the election.

2004: Kerry was cast as the smart, flip-flopping, goodie-two-shoes everyone hates. (That was our last chance for a real democracy; if Kerry had won Ohio, we might have gotten rid of the Electoral College.)

2008: Everyone angry, the media was enamored with Obama.

2012: Even though Obama was an intellectual, Romney was cast as the kid you want to punch. 

2016: Media hated Hillary (and this); head of CBS Les Moonves on Tangerine Palpatine: “It May Not Be Good for America, but It’s Damn Good for CBS”

2020: People so angry during the pandemic that, finally, more people voted for the winner than didn't vote!

2024: The media wanted Orange Jeebus back; many young people obsessed with the Doom cult; tons of incels enraged at the world.