Henry Howard🔸
Bio
Strong advocate of just having a normal job and give to effective charities.
Doctor in Australia giving 10% forever
Posts 12
Comments238
Fair, I really mean pessimism rather than nihilism. On what basis can you reject philosophical pessimism - a self-consistent and valid belief that is seemingly impossible to prove/disprove - other than that it is just not pragmatic or constructive at all.
None of that suggested work seems very clarifying
The welfare ranges are extremely broad for the animals they do cover, and that's with questionable assumptions. I don't see how extending these to microbes would clarify anything.
Doing "more research" on the day-to-day experience of nematodes and how they respond to noxious stimuli or calculating their neural energy consumption as a proxy for their ability to suffer also doesn't seem clarifying. Imagine you knew all this information about nematodes. Still the fundamental question will remain how their "suffering" or "joy" compares to ours and how morally important it is. A lot of animal ethics is driven by our ability to relate to animals ("I can relate somewhat to a chicken and I wouldn't want to be a chicken in a cage") but this falls apart by the time we get to nematodes, so you have to rely solely on your numbers, which will be extremely uncertain.
I remain very puzzled how you ever see us getting low enough error bars on the joy/suffering of microscopic worms that we could make decision based on it.
How would you get the "Further human economic development" "necessary to build the knowledge and resources" to build a better world without supporting the development of developing countries?
Are you talking a top-heavy approach where we keep poor countries poor until fake/cultured meat is cheap enough to supplant farmed animals?
I guess. Can you formulate an argument against nihilism that's any more substantial than that?
The theory that human development has been evil is nihilistic and could well be true, much like the nihilistic theory that the existence of biological life itself could is net evil. On what basis do you reject this other than: "we can't do anything with that".
It will probably lead to increased suffering of animals (at least for a time) and this is necessary for the greater good of technological development. We're forced to consider the technological development a greater good because the alternative is to accept that the last 10,000 years of development was a mistake, which is not a viable belief.
This was named the Meat-Eater Problem in this article in the Journal Of Controversial Ideas by @MichaelPlant (as comments point out, there are many earlier examples).
I think we need to be extremely suspicious of the conclusion that development is bad because of animal suffering. Development has given us everything that makes life better (as most would see it) than in pre-industrial times: antibiotics, vaccines, surgery, food security, shelter, cheap and plentiful access to knowledge and entertainment.
I don't see how you can accept the Meat-Eater Problem without also concluding that all human development in the last 10,000 years has been a mistake in light of the horrible toll we've demanded of the workhorses and mulesed sheep and caged chickens that we tortured along the way. The Ted Kaczynskiist view that the development of society has been overall bad is internally consistent and valid but also crazy and just not compatible with any sort of continued functioning of society.
To avoid this absurd conclusion that would lead us all to nihilism or posting explosive letters, I think we have to accept that development so far has been worth the costs, and that further development, for similar benefits, will be worth the additional costs.
Can you give some examples of what research you could do to improve our understanding about either 1. whether soil microbes are sentient, or 2. whether their average life experience is net positive or negative?
These both seem completely unanswerable. with a billion dollars and no other interests I wouldn't know where to begin answering these questions.
This report from 2006 has similarly high numbers of surveyed people saying that psilocybin or LSD aborted their headaches https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16801660/
That's 19 years for someone to do a controlled trial of cessation of cluster headaches using psilocybin or LSD vs placebo or triptan control. Wouldn't have to very big numbers either if the anecdotes are to be believed.
I guess your theory is that there have been too many funding and legal blocks to get this done in that 19 years. Seems hard to believe. Terrible if true.
If it is true, would recommend you focus on this as your core advocacy point: we need a placebo-controlled cluster cessation trial of psychedelics (rather than just prophylaxis). Saying "The Best Treatment for the Most Painful Medical Condition Is Illegal" is an unproven statement and makes you seem unserious
Because development has been the human project for the last 10,000 years and if we accept that it has been and continues to be a mistake then the conclusion is... what? anarcho-primitivism/regressing to pre-industrial hunter-gather life/Return to Monke. That doesn't seem very practical.