We Must Remember That Our World Contains Hell
This is a crosspost from my blog post. It’s meant as a bit of an introduction to an extreme-suffering focused worldview.
We spend most of our lives caught up in the boring details of our everyday life—thinking about what we’ll have for lunch, how to complete that assignment for work, and what we’re going to tell our friend after that awkward interaction from a couple of days ago. From this perspective, our world looks a bit better than purgatory. It has its ups and its downs, but the ups certainly outweigh the downs, and there’s almost always enough hope to go around.
But, despite this, we must remember that our world contains hell.
Every year, five million children under the age of five pass away. This means that, every six seconds, parents have the worst thing that could ever happen to a person happen to them. They have the most special and important thing in their entire life irreversibly and permanently taken away. And, as much as we want to help them, we know that there’s nothing we can do to lessen their grief.
For another example, currently, there are three million adults worldwide who live with cluster headaches, which are widely regarded as the most painful experience one can have in their entire lifetime, far exceeding the pain of breaking a bone, getting shot, or giving birth. On a scale from one to ten, sufferers, on average, rate them a 9.7/10. And, because sufferers often attempt to kill themselves while experiencing them to escape the pain, they’re often colloquially known as “suicide headaches.”
And, that’s just within the realm of human suffering. If we’re focusing on animals, things look even worse.
Each year, more than 4.5 billion chickens are confined to cages, where they are given less space than a single sheet of paper to move around. Because they’re so severely confined, they live in a constant state of distress. And, worse, because they can’t exercise, they bones becomes brittle, causing extraordinarily painful keel bone fractures. The research on this is still developing, but our best guess is that they experience at least a couple hundred hours of pain so intense that they’re unable to focus on almost anything else. As you can imagine, virtually every person who has ever researched their lives in depth believes that they would be far better off dead.
And, in the wild, things are probably vast orders of magnitude worse.
To give just one example, the new world screwworm is a fly that lays its eggs in the wounds and body openings of warm-blooded animals such as cows and dogs. Its larvae, upon hatching, burrow in their host’s bodies, devouring from them inside out. This is so extraordinarily painful that the standard response for humans is to immediately give the patient morphine before cutting the screw worm out of their flesh. Since 2023, over 185,000 cases in animals have been reported in Latin America. And, since this is mostly just pets and farm animals, we can assume that it’s an extreme undercount of how many wild animals suffer from them too.
We all would really like to believe that the world is a good place, but we must also remember the vast suffering that it contains.
When we go about our daily lives, commuting to work, gossiping with coworkers, and eating lunch, there are living beings all across the world experiencing unimaginable suffering.
This is why I think that everyone should, at least once in their life, seriously consider giving a substantial amount of their income or their time to working to solve these problems.
It’s easy to want to pretend that they’re not happening, but, when you acknowledge them, the idea of working on them can be pretty motivating.
And, in fact, each of the problems that I’ve mentioned so far are completely solvable.
First, five million children die each year, but the vast majority of these deaths are from preventable diseases. Because developed nations give so little aid to the undeveloped ones, the marginal cost to save a life is currently around only $5,000. By making personal donations or working in global health, you could easily help to save tens if not hundreds or thousands of children’s lives in your lifetime.
Second, three million adults suffer from cluster headaches worldwide, but there are known and effective treatments for them. The main problem is that they’re simply illegal because they often make use of psychedelic substances. By supporting research or advocacy in cluster headaches, you could help to make them a thing of the past.
Third, 4.5 billion chickens are confined to cages, but the cage-free movement has had some incredible successes. In 2007, 3.2% of US chickens were cage-free, but now, as a result of corporate campaigns, only 45% are. By supporting these campaigns or otherwise working within the movement, you could probably, in expectation, help hundreds of thousands if not millions of chickens.
Lastly, at least millions of animals are devoured by screw worms each year, but, from 2006 to 2023, governments had completely eliminated the screw worm from North America. By supporting research and advocacy, you could help eliminate screw worms from the whole world for good.
And, even if you don’t have money to donate or time to spare, you can still bring these issues up to your friends.
I think this poem conveys my response better than I can:
A Brief for the Defense
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
Jack Gilbert, 2012
Thanks for sharing!
Short story: The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin
Most of these are political hells, not engineering problems or something like that.
The planned decline in vaccination for childhood diseases, federal preemption of state animal welfare laws (including California’s cage-free laws), and the recent cancellation of the screwworm monitoring program … those are all specifically Trump administration policies. Screwworm monitoring was cancelled by Elon Musk’s DOGE; antivax is an RFK Jr. policy preference, and animal welfare preemption was a Trump DOJ lawsuit before it was the “Save Our Bacon Act”.
(Prohibition of the serotonergic drugs that treat cluster headaches is also political, but is not a distinct policy choice of one administration or political movement. The War on Drugs has been a bipartisan moral catastrophe.)
As with AI safety, energy policy, military readiness, etc., getting good federal policy on these issues is downstream of political change in the country. An administration with policy directly aligned with these hells is not going to start opposing them if you ask nicely.
And you didn’t even mention all the global healthcare aspects, perhaps because it’s too obvious
Probably not so many more OOMs, unless you count insects or fish or worms without discount. Not so long ago, I made a guesstimate that half of all the bird deaths per year on this planet are chickens.
Ah, thanks for letting me know! I’ll have to look into the numbers more. I probably wouldn’t discount fish as much as you so that’s where we’d likely disagree.
I just got onboard the train to Prague from Vienna, with a 70-minute delay. My Eurail experiences remain forever cursed.
Before boarding, I had picked up a pack of hemp cigarettes to try out, basically a pre-rolled CBD joint, nothing much interesting to it. As I was sitting down at the far end of the platform smoking it, a man came up looking for bottles to pick up for the deposit to cash in. We chatted a bit, and I learned about his past and about how the deposit in Austria is 25 cents per bottle, as opposed to 15 in the Netherlands, and in Slovakia, where he’s from.
We chatted quite a while. I think he wasn’t really looking for much besides company. He was pretty uninterested in my offer to buy him some food, though considerately pleased by it. He’d had a rough life, having emigrated away from Slovakia when he was around 19 or so. He said he’d been to the UK and had a couple of kids called T… and B… (tattooed on his right arm). For some unexplained reason he left the UK; he didn’t really give me a straight answer besides having had to come back to Slovakia and not really being able to go back (Brexit?). I gave him a couple of puffs of my joint and we talked a bit more. He talked about the cars he used to have, the money troubles he’s going through in Austria, how his ID card got stolen, and how he doesn’t have a phone, so he’s really struggling to navigate. He’d actually opened the conversation asking about a labour bureau where he could find work. He needed a contract to be able to find a place to stay and get his life back together. There always seem to be opportunities to scavenge for clothes or gear, but in the end, without a stable place to work, or an apartment to stay in, it’s pretty much impossible to get anything back together.
We related over having been homeless, the struggles of emigrating away from home, how it feels to be in the company of other people’s families, girlfriends, and more. He seemed like a good guy. He didn’t seem to have much of a goal besides getting his life back in order. At some point I decided to give him the 100 euros I had lying in my wallet in cash. He didn’t really look at the note clearly, probably thought it was a 10 or a 20. He’d been talking about how he needed to sort out a replacement for his ID card, and how that costs a lot: paying someone to drive him back to Slovakia, the gas, the replacement itself. I don’t know. I complain about the simplest garbage, and then feel sad about children in Africa or climate change or whatever, and in the meantime this guy’s lost his kids, his mother’s apartment was seized because she’s addicted to sleeping pills and chugs them down with alcohol, and his brother’s in jail or something. I really don’t know.
Yes, there’s hell everywhere. I don’t know who lives in it, why they ended up there, whether by choice or by mistake. I got another post in the newsletter, FAQ: Isn’t AGI coming too soon for reprogenetics to help?. It’s strange living in all of these worlds at the same time. One where the solutions are going to be found inside masterfully crafted simulations searching for cures to the most challenging diseases, and then, during the day, seeing not only the hells of the masses (x-risk, climate change, famines, screwworms…) but also the hells of individuals.
I was about to head to my train when he excused himself, gave me a fist-bump, and started walking away. My train got delayed again. I looked off into the distance. His posture had changed, he was waving his arms, excited. I think he’d realised it was a hundred euros.
I have to get more serious about how I live. For all the privileges I’ve been given, I should both cry at my mistakes and try harder to be better. That’s the only way I’ll end up somewhere different at 34. Five years to lose all my hair, so I’ve got to get steady and never take anything for granted. Got to find ways to make a difference for the macro and the micro both.
People are powerfully blinded to these hells by the unconscious mechanisms of Motivated reasoning.
I think it’s very hard to acknowledge them because they produce too much sorrow and imply too much of a demand of us.
From “His Master’s Voice” by Stanislaw Lem, translation mine:
That’s intense. Thanks!
Yes, that’s the motivation. The remainder is that negative emotions direct attention away from a topic fast enough that we’re likely to remain unaware or non-conscious of it happening, let alone why.
The existence of Kim’s regime in North Korea reminds me of this point everyday.
Our world contains hells, but the hells are shrinking.
In 2007, 97% of US hens were in battery cages, today it’s under 60% and banned in the EU.
Cluster headaches got their first FDA-approved drug in 2019, and 76% of patients said it halved their attacks.
In 1800, 44% of children died before age five, today this number is under 4% globally.
Global extreme poverty halved between 1996 and 2017.
90% of the world’s one-year-old children are vaccinated against at least one disease.
Smallpox is gone. Polio is down 99.9%.
We have so much access to all the world’s unjust news and sometimes we forget that, by many statistics, we are living in the best time in history.
I strongly agree.
This post combines two drastically different things: human suffering and chickens. I think you are in a bubble if you think they are not only comparable, but so comparable that you can take their similarity as just the natural way everyone is supposed to believe.
To anyone outside the bubble, this is arson, murder, and jaywalking.
I think this is very false, a lot of people will agree when asked that chicken-suffering is very bad, maybe comparably bad to humans. See e.g. this paper.
I see a $40 gate there.
Out of curiosity, how relatively bad do you think human and chicken suffering is?
I also think a chicken being tortured is much less bad than a human being tortured, but I wouldn’t rush to weighting a chicken’s torment at, say, less than 1/1000th of a human’s. That lower bound gets me to the naive conclusion that 4.5 billion chickens experiencing some form of suffering is likely at least as bad as 4.5 million humans experiencing something analogous. From that perspective the comparisons in the post seem pretty reasonable to me.
Edit: Follow up question—do you actually think the human/chicken suffering comparison is irrational or confused, in addition to being symptomatic of the author’s bubble?
I treat it as exactly zero, even if you can argue otherwise. If I don’t, I am vulnerable to questions like “if there were ten quadrillion chickens, would you murder a human to save them?” I would not murder that human, so 1/1000 or any number you can come up with is too high.
Isn’t that just the trolley problem with chickens? Absent context I value five humans more than one human, that doesn’t necessarily mean I would murder one human to save five. I don’t see why saying that chicken suffering is bad necessarily traps you or obligates you to kill humans to protect even a very large number of chickens.
Yes, but the reason I’d refuse is different. In the case of the chickens, I’d refuse because I think the human is more valuable than the chickens; I’d do this no matter how many chickens you increased the number to. This also applies in a scenario without murder—if I had to save a lot of chickens or one human, I’d save the human every time (ignoring questions of how the chickens are useful to humans), and my answer won’t change no matter how many chickens it is.
It follows that I value the chickens at zero, not at 1/1000.
I don’t think your child dying is the worst thing that can happen to you. It’s not torture, it’s not horrible pain. It’s not hell. If what you wrote about cluster headaches is true, then that might be hell. But children dying is not.
Depends on how long the pain/torture is, and whether you recover from the damage afterwards. The dead child remains dead forever.
I think you misplaced the word “only” in this sentence?
Another poem:
So few grains of happiness.
measured against all the dark.
and still the scales balance.
“The Weighing”, by Jane Hirshfield.
The scales balance for human beings that have the freedoms to strive for a meaningful life even among all the pain. I don’t see how they balance to the chicken who only know unbeliavable pain and stress their whole life.
I recently asked a philosopher of welfare biology if he thought that nature was net negative for animals, and he said he was unsure. Also, from what I’ve read, humans generally consider their lives to be net-positive. And, factory farming does seem quite net negative. So, overall, I think it’s hard to say.
For sentient animals? I don’t even know what the argument would be for a net positive. Wild animals are at the mercy of food and water insecurity, parasites, predators, injuries, and disease with no analgesics or anesthesia. Biology provides some mitigation in extreme circumstances, but those do not last long and do nothing for chronic suffering. Just think about typical interventions pet owners make to keep them well-fed and parasite/disease/injury free, along with euthanasia. Wild animals have none of that.
I haven’t looked into it too much, but, generally, I would guess that a hunter gatherer human had a net positive life since their life involved lots of positive things (eating food, seeing the beautiful world, having time for relaxation, making music, spending time with loved ones, etc.) This would make me think that it’s plausible that there’s lots of positive aspects of other animal’s lives. They may enjoy eating food, being around animals of the same species, or engaging in play.
When I go out into nature, it also seems like animals are having a good time. I don’t feel like I almost ever see animals that look underfed, diseased, or injured. And, I would expect that their deaths at the hands of predators are relatively short.
That said, I completely understand your perspective. If I learned that most animals are constantly hungry or suffering from serious disease or parasites, that would change my perspective a bit.
Overall, it seems like we need just a lot more data to have any strong conclusions.
“I would guess that a hunter gatherer human had a net positive life since their life involved lots of positive things”
Maybe I’m just a glass-half-empty kinda guy, but when I think about pre-industrial societies, I think of all the things I mentioned with non-human animals (lack of medical intervention, food insecurity, etc), but I also think of infant mortality rates, which were outrageously high. It’s difficult to imagine a happy life where something like half the children you had didn’t make it past the age of 5, and many of those died horrible deaths. I suppose you could say I’m viewing this through a modern lens and these people were mentally tougher or whatever, but good god, that just seems like a rationalization of an enormous amount of grief (or of a life where because of those stats children’s lives were heavily devalued). Neither of those sound particularly pleasant to me.
That seems like something worth recalibrating, since people in that position (extant hunter-gatherers) have generally described their lives as worth living.
Who needs to do the recalibrating? Am I mischaracterizing the facts? Are you disputing extremely high mortality rates, food insecurity, and large amounts of suffering due to lack of basic medicinal intervention for things like broken bones, dental issues, parasites, etc.?
Humans, like all organisms, are essentially replication aids for genes. They’re built and programmed for gene reproduction. Is it possible at all that they find ways to rationalize their own suffering due to their biases?
What does “rationalize their own suffering” mean? If you prioritize an abstract idea of “lives worth living” over individuals’ own desire to continue living, you open up many dangerous possibilities (eg justified euthanasia).
I mean use cognitive or cultural tools to convince themselves that conditions are not as bad as they actually are. Possibly they’re using religion to justify bad conditions (god has a plan). Or maybe they’re saying there’s nothing they can do about it, so it’s not worth complaining about (even though it is actually very bad).
There are studies such as this one on LIS (Locked-In Syndrome): https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/1/1/e000039.full.pdf
We see some weird disconnects between self-reported life satisfaction and do-not-resuscitate orders:
168 were invited
91 responded
47⁄91 (52%) reported they were happy
18⁄91 (20%) reported they were unhappy
Here’s the weird part: Roughly half of those who reported they were happy also indicated they did not want to be resuscitated in the case of cardiac arrest.
How are we explaining that?
Robert Trivers as a lot of work on deception and self-deception. I’m making at least two points here:
1. We can often delude ourselves about our own welfare.
2. We can often lie to others about what we really think about our own welfare.
It’s easy to imagine a human from a world where suffering was entirely eliminated to use your argument to say that my life must currently be net negative. I would disagree.
I would imagine people of earlier ages taking deaths/suffering as a fact of life in the same way I for example see the death of my grandparents to Alzheimers or any other pain I must endure.
That doesn’t follow. Someone from a world that has eliminated suffering could justifiably say my life has more suffering, but where are you getting net negative? We’d need some sense of measurement of positive and negative, along with weighting, in my life to make a net negative judgment.
But yeah, let’s look at objective standards in those situations to see what’s going on:
1. world with no suffering
2. our current first-world society with lots of medical interventions, dental care, and low infant mortality
3. pre-industrial societies with high infant mortality, and very few interventions for physical suffering
Let’s say all three of these sets of people have roughly the same life satisfaction scores. How are we reconciling that? There really is no difference in their quality of life? Or the people in worse worlds are rationalizing/justifying clearly worse lives (which is pretty close to what your last point was, which actually seems to be in agreement with what I’m saying)?
I find it pretty funny that I’m optimist here, when my post is literally arguing that our world contains hell.
I totally get your perspective though. I’d have to look into this a lot more.
Each year we needlessly force billions of sentient beings to experience a life in hell. We choose to do so merely to get some nutrients we could easier produce by other means and for short-lived pleasures we could find elsewhere. If we happen to extingiush ourselves through a mix of greed and delusion about ASI, at least this ongoing catastrophy will end with us.
Two important sayings that reduce suffering (and can reduce joy as well, but we’re focused on suffering in this post):
Memento Mori
This too shall pass
Life is significantly different from most conceptions of Hell, because it’s finite. I do support most death-with-dignity and bodily-freedom initiatives. If, in the strong beliefs of the sufferer, their remaining life is negative-value, they should be allowed to end it.
I also support many human-life-improvement causes and mechanisms (not so much animals, but I appreciate everyone who is pursuing their best estimates of positive impact) mechanisms; improving the living does call to me more strongly than allowing exit for those who don’t expect sufficient improvement.
All this while disagreeing that this is hell, or that the suffering outweighs the joy for the VAST majority of people.
Wasn’t this fact roughly the underlying motivation for rushing to the singularity, at least for a lot of people before the stark risks became clear? I think there are still several arguments that the risk of extinction is small (most species go extinct) against the potential for solving so much suffering (which, incidentally, is also removed by extinction). Certainly leaning toward negative utilitarianism.
Now we have to grapple with the tradeoff of solving suffering vs. risking extinction. Personally, I might be okay with x-risk if many-worlds AND P(s-risk) / P(x-risk) ~= 0.