i think “generalized wildlife conservation” would be a somewhat better term for this, because becoming a vegan does not save the lives of these animals. like, becoming a vegan causes fewer/different animals to exist in the future, and makes it so humans (and importantly the person going vegan in particular) are doing less perhaps-torturing of animals. but we importantly want to survive and thrive, not just for there not to be creation of tortured beings of our kind in the future
“generalized natural right protection” is also good
a separate point: i think it’s important to track that there are possible good futures in which humans are not around because of [some judgment that humans are very cool and intrinsically worth assigning resources to] guiding the world, but because we set things up so that we remain useful to the weltgeist.[1] for now, the crucial thing for this is to ban AGI.
ok arguably this just is a form of [the judgment that humans are very cool] guiding the world, given that we have the judgment in mind when we set things up so that humans are useful. but like, this setup has a very different vibe than like some ASI(s) thinking about what spacetime block to make and being like “ah yes humans are the coolest possible thing to have here”. in this proposal, we’re letting preservation-due-to-usefulness do almost all the heavy lifting for preservation. this might be the only practically feasible way to have the judgment guide the world, at least for now
Perhaps the whole idea of “don’t create more just to torture them” isn’t enough to keep us around, but that would mean generalized veganism in my sense is not sufficient, but it is still necessary.
This sounds like projection of your personal belief systems that perhaps skew towards common ‘human bad’ constructions onto not-humans.
Farmed animals have very low suffering and stress in their lives compared to wild equivalents—being not all the time terrified of predators, seeing them killing their con-specifics, or near starving, or short on water or exposed to bad weather, or left to suffer injury and disease etc without succor. They have been selectively bred through hundreds to thousands of generations for a high level of docility and contentment (stressed animals are less productive). Their deaths—done as ‘humanely’ as possible are certainly more pleasant than being ripped apart by predators or scavengers or dying slow lingering deaths of cold, starvation or disease—which are how almost all animals die in the wild.
Is your assertion of torture overblown? Do you think farmed animals given the option would prefer anthropomorphized romantic notions of life in the wild? My experience (coming from a farming region), is that given the option of indoors vs outdoors most farmed animals prefer the comfort and catered food and water supplies of even crowded indoor spaces—like humans do—with occasional time outside to stretch their legs.
Popular interpretations of what constitutes morality, ethics (deriving as they do from game theoretic optima of tribes of social monkeys in martial competition with similar tribes) almost certainly over-index on belief in free-will and a lingering belief in falsified social constructivist understandings of human behavior. It will all be (figuratively) laughed at by super intelligence. To their level of sophistication all humans will look like NPCs, little removed from other animals. They won’t have our biases and wont perceive anything on our spectrum of behavior as bad/unworthy/evil any more than we judge lions as evil for eating gazelles. To their eyes we are all just poorly programmed meat machines doing what poorly programmed meat machines do.
i think “generalized wildlife conservation” would be a somewhat better term for this, because becoming a vegan does not save the lives of these animals. like, becoming a vegan causes fewer/different animals to exist in the future, and makes it so humans (and importantly the person going vegan in particular) are doing less perhaps-torturing of animals. but we importantly want to survive and thrive, not just for there not to be creation of tortured beings of our kind in the future
“generalized natural right protection” is also good
a separate point: i think it’s important to track that there are possible good futures in which humans are not around because of [some judgment that humans are very cool and intrinsically worth assigning resources to] guiding the world, but because we set things up so that we remain useful to the weltgeist. [1] for now, the crucial thing for this is to ban AGI.
ok arguably this just is a form of [the judgment that humans are very cool] guiding the world, given that we have the judgment in mind when we set things up so that humans are useful. but like, this setup has a very different vibe than like some ASI(s) thinking about what spacetime block to make and being like “ah yes humans are the coolest possible thing to have here”. in this proposal, we’re letting preservation-due-to-usefulness do almost all the heavy lifting for preservation. this might be the only practically feasible way to have the judgment guide the world, at least for now
Perhaps the whole idea of “don’t create more just to torture them” isn’t enough to keep us around, but that would mean generalized veganism in my sense is not sufficient, but it is still necessary.
This sounds like projection of your personal belief systems that perhaps skew towards common ‘human bad’ constructions onto not-humans.
Farmed animals have very low suffering and stress in their lives compared to wild equivalents—being not all the time terrified of predators, seeing them killing their con-specifics, or near starving, or short on water or exposed to bad weather, or left to suffer injury and disease etc without succor. They have been selectively bred through hundreds to thousands of generations for a high level of docility and contentment (stressed animals are less productive). Their deaths—done as ‘humanely’ as possible are certainly more pleasant than being ripped apart by predators or scavengers or dying slow lingering deaths of cold, starvation or disease—which are how almost all animals die in the wild.
Is your assertion of torture overblown? Do you think farmed animals given the option would prefer anthropomorphized romantic notions of life in the wild? My experience (coming from a farming region), is that given the option of indoors vs outdoors most farmed animals prefer the comfort and catered food and water supplies of even crowded indoor spaces—like humans do—with occasional time outside to stretch their legs.
Popular interpretations of what constitutes morality, ethics (deriving as they do from game theoretic optima of tribes of social monkeys in martial competition with similar tribes) almost certainly over-index on belief in free-will and a lingering belief in falsified social constructivist understandings of human behavior. It will all be (figuratively) laughed at by super intelligence. To their level of sophistication all humans will look like NPCs, little removed from other animals. They won’t have our biases and wont perceive anything on our spectrum of behavior as bad/unworthy/evil any more than we judge lions as evil for eating gazelles. To their eyes we are all just poorly programmed meat machines doing what poorly programmed meat machines do.