If you'd like to review the new pdf of Losing My Religions, please contact me or click here. TY!
This whole thing (video or transcript) is great. Pinker is a very well-read, highly-informed, broadly-respected, non-dogmatic scientist, not some blogging mathlete out for clicks. Anne* and I cheered while listening to this. I wanted to kiss* Pinker by the end.
tl;dr: Don’t impose serious, known, concrete suffering (on individuals who have a clear ability to suffer) just so you can supposedly hedge against future entirely speculative suffering in hypothetical entities whose mere sentience (let alone capacity for serious suffering) is wildly uncertain.
History shows we should actually help those suffering (#1 below and here) rather than wring our hands and whine about imaginary doom.
Two comments:
1. Pinker says we should wipe out mosquitoes that carry malaria. To humans, those specific species of mosquitoes are the deadliest creatures in the world - even deadlier than other humans. It still amazes me that so many people squeal at the very mention of eradicating malaria! The pro-malaria crowd are all rich, healthy individuals not in danger of suffering from malaria.
2. Pinker admits to having changed his mind. Imagine that! I have changed my mind, too (a key point of Losing My Religions). For example, I've changed my mind about LLMs. The ethical evidence is actually in their favor. As is the cultural evidence.
*Happy 34th Anniversary to the greatest collection of atoms that ever existed! 🩷
I've always been a fan of Popper's piecemeal progress (well, not "always" probably not when I was 7) which takes this line. The thing that gets me is that people often see this in zero-sum terms—that short term concerns are necessarily at odds with long-term concerns, but there are loads of short term concerns that have positive long-term outcomes—eradicating malaria eradicates it for future generations too, it also raises perhaps a billion people out of a situation of precariousness, so they can better contribute so society, it reduces infant mortality, which actually results in the reduction of over-population in developing countries. It also reinforces the value of caring about your fellow sentient beings, which also has knock on effects. And all of this with pretty close to 100% certainty, no gambling with our present or our future.
ReplyDeleteIt's also entirely possible to make predictions about what actions now would be good for the future that actually turn out to be detrimental to the future, like "Let's use more plastic so we don't have to cut down trees", or "Let's cut corporate taxes (and the corresponding public services paid for by those taxes) so profits will trickle down later, promise".
Our track record on these sorts of predictions is either not good, or obviously clouded by special interests in the short term.