Thought Experiments Are Harmful

Passionflower, SDBG

• Would you pull the trolley lever to kill one person and save five?
• Would you torture one person to save a trillion from stubbing their toes?
• Would you donate to prevent an unnecessary death today, or use that money have a one-in-a-trillion chance at creating a quadzillion happy robots over the next billion years?

While people have spent countless hours debating these and similar questions, people are suffering and dying from poverty and preventable diseases. 

While we one up each other with our expected value, individuals are being tortured - individuals we could help. 

Every hour we spend in mental masturbation is an hour we aren't reducing intense suffering. 

Suffering isn't hypothetical. It isn't an argument or a game or a debate.

Counterpoint:

If we just accept some standard philosophy or dogma, like utilitarianism or Veganism, we also do real harm. 

I did that for decades.

Recently, I saw this error in an article arguing against welfare reforms - specifically, slow-growing chickens. The author noted "The [slow-growing] birds experience fewer hours of excruciating, disabling, and hurtful pain than conventional broilers." But he [obv] goes on to note that more slow-growing birds would be needed to produce the same amount of chicken meat as today's torturously-fast-growing birds. 

This is another example of the fatal flaw of utilitarianism. Suffering does not sum. 

It doesn't matter if our mental sum of suffering across individuals is greater.

Reducing an individual's extreme suffering is what matters. 

However, it took writing of Losing My Religions - specifically the chapter "Biting the Philosophical Bullet" - for me to realize this. 

Sorry.

We live in a time of miracles

Steak & fries at Kindred, San Diego. Been about 40 years since I've had anything like this. Scary. (And we ate there on a credit card credit. Score!)

Works in Progress: "What’s new in biology: June 2026."

Derek Thompson podcast version. 

Incredible. And that's just one month of news! 

Three Quick Graphs

I saw a post recently replying to the fact that, on average, young people are richer than any previous generation at their age. And yet they are the unhappiest cohort ever. 

This person said it isn't vibes; young people are unhappy because housing in desirable areas is expensive. 

So that's now the standard: If there is something desirable you can't have right now, you should be miserable. 

• Don't buy the narrative. 
• Don't take anecdotes as data. 
• Don't give in to Doom. 
• Don't share or like negative posts.

Rather than resent others, we should appreciate what we have.

"In 1979, 24% of American households were lower middle class while 30% were poor or near poor. Those numbers have dropped to 16% and 19%, respectively while the upper middle class has seen its numbers swell from 10% in 1979 to 31% in the latest reading."

Outside the vibes / social media, there has never been a better time to be the average (or a random) US citizen (human, obviously). 

The reality of the job market.

Please Save Your Brain

Bonsai, Japanese Friendship Garden, San Diego.

Preface: Yes, you are very, very smart. 

 

But companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, TikTok, Netflix, OpenAI, etc. spend literally hundreds of billions of dollars every year and employ hundreds of thousands of the smartest people in the world to acquire, predict, rank, monetize, and retain human attention.  

 

It is simply irrational to count on your willpower to counter all that. 

As you know, I post a lot about why so many people are so unhappy (example). But what, exactly, to do about it? The tl;dr:

Don't let an algorithm determine what you see.

Don't have a "feed"* (think about it).
Don't scroll through Facebook or YouTube or Twitter or Reddit or Google News or even Substack.

Be entirely intentional about what receives your attention. 

If you are going to consume online content: 

Subscribe to people and outlets who produce interesting and useful content.

Go directly to their blog or Substack or Bluesky (etc.) page, rather than counting on coming across them amidst a sea of clickbait.

If you come across a post that makes you think, "YES," click away quickly. 
If you come across a post that makes you think in terms of "smart, moral us" vs "stupid and evil them," click away quickly.

For more, please check out this by Charles Duhigg.
And Noah Smith: Are you finally ready to admit it's the phones?

*Or very carefully and ruthlessly curate your feed so it is only planes, cat videos, and whiskey reviews. 

Why People Don't Trust Scientists, continued

An amateur sleuth is singlehandedly demolishing dangerous scientific groupthink

How Scientific American Went from Fighting Pseudoscience to Platforming It

These are follow-ups to this and this, and many stories I don't bother sharing.
(Older Paul Bloom article: Progressives should worry more about their favorite scientific findings)

I share these because people get so siloed that they assume everything on "their side" ("science") is obviously right and that anyone who disagrees is a fucking moron. That is both untrue and unhelpful.

San Diego Botanic Gardens

A Few Useful Thoughts for the Week

Chimichanga, Tacotarian.

Tobias Leenaert:

• YANYA - You Are Not Your Audience - Most people don't want what you want. Start from where they are.
• The real question isn't "Am I right?" but "Does this work?" Pragmatism means choosing what the evidence says is effective - not what feels truest to us. 
• Kindness usually outperforms guilt and shame.

Aidan Kankyoku:

Watching people fuel their self-absorbed lives by chowing down on tortured animal carcasses makes my blood boil. I want to scream at these people. I wish that taking a strong moral stance around veganism as the moral baseline was working. But it just is not. It’s failing spectacularly, with rates of veganism stagnating as the number of animals in factory farms skyrockets.

Sobering but right. Why we came to this 12 years ago.

And just for laughs, here is a reply to a comment I made on a travel rewards thread. I was thanking someone for taking responsibility for a bad decision they made, noting that taking responsibility is rare on the internet:

OK then!

Skip - Repetitive. Sorry.

Cardiff Beach

 

Yes, I harp on liberal dogma and how harmful it is that we can't have honest conversations about facts and solutions. I believe there is a lot more suffering in the world because of this.

Nothing new, but two more bits to emphasize this - things you'll never see in a liberal media feed:

Scott Grout: The true cost of replacing nuclear with wind and solar. (Short version. A good addition to this.) 

Roger Pielke: Not only does the media exaggerate climate doom, the IPCC does as well.

How I Use LLMs, June 2026

the above to:

Nano Banana;
Gemini recognized and remembered Dusty's name, but didn't remember Cody's. 

Nothing below really takes full or deep advantage of what LLMs can do. Here is a new bit from Andy Masley on working with Anthropic's Claude Fable. That piece really gets to some of what can be done at the (current) frontier. 

Here is a good Reddit thread: What is the most underrated use of ChatGPT in daily life?

I use ChatGPT Business (free via a credit card) and Gemini Pro (free because I bought a Google Pixel phone). I don't inherently trust an LLM. Even today - June 2026 - hallucinations are quite prevalent, at least for me. Their memory pretty much sucks, and they insert random things. Knowing I'm vegan leads them both to assume I'm hyper-green / love the Earth / care about eating organic, etc. Ugh.

Anything important I double check. I often ask both ChatGPT and Gemini the same question and play them off against each other. They frequently disagree. 

I've done several big projects with AIs:

1. An animated vertical video for One Step for Animals. This took days.
   
   
2. Designing, promoting, and analyzing a survey for One Step's Spanish-language campaigns. This was done for the donor who currently underwrites that campaign (along with the donation match). The results were very similar to the English survey.
   
   
3. A big research project last year attempting to compare the relative efficacy of nonprofits in a space unfamiliar to me (not directly animal related, and coming out of an ongoing conversation with a long-time friend).
   
   
4. Ongoing discussion of our personal asset allocation of retirement savings, given my general distrust of bonds, as well as our need to keep our income well within the ACA subsidies cliff and keep One Step alive as long as possible.

Other projects / ongoing threads in ChatGPT include: 

• Four upcoming or hopeful vacations over the next four years (I also used it extensively to plan and prepare for our 2026 trip to Japan).
  
  
• Catch-all Sleep / Health. Dozens of threads here, including:
• A specific ongoing conversation regarding a bizarre, major medical screw up last year.
  
  
• Scotch (and other whiskies, including when I was in Japan). 
  
  
• Car issues (e.g. do I need new tires / which tires to buy from where, when to replace our current vehicle, what's coming down the pike and what current cars have that our old one doesn't).
  
  
• How to replace a light fixture in our garage, and many other house threads (roofing and carpet cleaning companies comparisons, what to check to make sure our fridge is optimally placed, installing a camera doorbell, etc.). 

But on a day-to-day basis - and I use it every day - I turn to LLMs for many things; a random collection from my ChatGPT sidebar:

• Possible purchases (comparisons, alternatives) 
• Eye twitching causes
• Substack and profanity
• Bird or plant identification
• Plant diagnosis and care
• What credit card to get next 
• What credit card points to hoard for a specific "unicorn" future flight 
• Sokal Affair explanation (I couldn't remember the name - just the general event - but it was a friend who told me about Sokal Squared) 
• CO2 impact on crop yields (for this)
• Itchy arm diagnosis help
• Recovery from (and writing about) back injury
• Writing feedback (don't generally like that feedback - LLMs would hate this post, I think)
• Checking server configuration and Mailchimp settings to improve email delivery
• Drafting messages to doctors, insurance companies, and customer service
• Summarizing long pieces that aren't important / worth my time
• Bernoulli Principle clarification (super-interesting - not what I learned in my undergraduate Aerospace program; research prompted by a pilot friend)
• Best local movie theater for seeing Project Hail Mary (we hadn't gone out to see a new movie since the pandemic - I had no idea some theaters had gotten so fancy!)
• Where to get something (OJ, wine, vegan take-out) near our hotel or Airbnb
• Troubleshooting computer problems (e.g., replacing a failing harddrive)
• Vitamin C and other supplement questions
• Cat photo manipulations

Much (but not all) is basically using them as a meta-search engine. LLMs are good at compiling and summarizing information from diverse sources, saving me a lot of time. 

The Claude Delusion

Follow-up to my LLMs and our infinite capacity for delusion: 

Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion.

If you'd rather watch a video, check out Anil Seth's TED Talk. (I quote Anil in Losing's discussion of consciousness. Note: He seems very anti-LLM in general.)

This is just going to get worse going forward. 

More on How the Internet Is Destroying Society (Derek Thompson)

Better to have your head in a box than be on social media.

This AI summary pretty much covers it - offered as an argument to stay off algorithm-driven apps / websites:

In his journalism, The Atlantic contributor Derek Thompson frequently explores how the internet and social media weaponize psychology to foster an "in-group vs. out-group" mentality, creating hyper-polarized and "anti-social" digital environments. 

The "Four Dark Laws of Online Engagement"

Thompson, alongside psychologist Jay Van Bavel, outlines how algorithms exploit evolutionary group psychology to keep users hooked: 

• Negativity Bias: Negative headlines and catastrophic news consistently drive more clicks.
• In-Group Extremism: Taking extreme stances and holding rigidly to specific viewpoints strengthens community bonds among those who agree.
• Out-Group Animosity: Directing insults or hostility at competing groups (the "them") is mathematically one of the most effective ways to go viral on social networks.
• Moral-Emotional Language: Using language that evokes moral superiority or outrage ensures messages spread farther and faster. 

Impact on Politics and Society

Thompson argues that these dynamics are a primary driver behind modern political violence and hyper-partisanship. By rewarding us for attacking the "out-group," digital platforms shift the focus away from policy-based debates and toward emotional, tribal warfare. 

For a deeper dive into how algorithms manipulate our social instincts, you can read Thompson's article about terminally online behavior on Derek Thompson's Substack or check out his prior coverage in The Atlantic.

WTF Birds and Free Willy (SMBC)

Craziest headline of 2026: "Liver macrophages guide pigeons on cloudy days"

Also: 

This Blog Isn't Entirely Useless (George Carlin)

Short clip of the Amazing George Carlin in 1999.  

We are not informed | You can't trust anyone

Prompt: Isolate the two cats [Dusty and Cody] and put them in a silly situation.

A key point of my blog is: Don't pay attention to things that don't help you be a better person and/or reduce extreme suffering.

But another key point is to recognize that dogma has distorted, and mostly destroyed, objectivity. Dogma also silences any diversity of views, especially on Climate Doom. (A previously-linked-to example.)

"Reality has a liberal bias" might have been true at some point, but now, in the attention economy, only bias gets the eyeballs. 

Yet many of us on the Left think we are "informed." We are not. What we read from "objective" news sources is written to get clicks, not to inform or improve. This is just a recent example. (Video version of Dr. Pielke's story; un-paywalled Washington Post op-ed.)

The same is true for Vegan advocates. Here is ChatGPT's analysis of a recent claim about which people will "Go Vegan."

PS:

Michael Burry is one of the "heroes" of The Big Short - someone who foresaw the Great Financial Crisis. But just because you get one thing right doesn't mean you know everything. 

Useful and Actionable Information

Don't sleep on this opportunity.

Very, very little information you come across makes the world a better place. Much is just depressing data that you can do nothing about, adding to the unhappiness in the world. Other posts are just name-calling, and still others are ego-feeding net-harmful shouts into the void.

Sometimes, though, we get well-researched, meaningful, useful, and entirely actionable insights. From Abi Olvera and Alicia Plemmons at Positive Sum:

How to cut suicide rates, healthcare costs, crime, and prices

Excellent. Abi is one of only three people to whom I have a paid subscription. If you want to be a single-issue, squeaky-wheel voter, you could do far, far worse than gatekeeping / licensing reform. A few calls to your state representatives would be overweighted.... 

Meaning

I really like this post by our Kiwi pal James, especially the Free Guy clip (keeping with the "Worse than Hitler" chapter of Losing). But also James' kind but thorough take-down of Robert Wright's view. (That's my main disagreement with my old pal Bob.)

And, of course, SMBC has covered it: