Andaro

Karma: 21

Andaro Oct 18, 2018, 11:30 PM
3 points
0
on: Do Animals Have Rights?
I agree with other commenters that the slavery framing is unhelpful. However, I mostly do agree with Jordan Peterson otherwise.
Human rights set expectations how we treat each other. From my perspective, respect for them is conditional on reciprocity. I will not respect the rights of an individual who doesn’t respect mine. Their function is to set standards of behavior that make everybody better off.
A benefit of human rights, rather than mammal rights or just smaller-identity rights is that they benefit everyone who can understand the concept, so they’re memetically adequate to cover the basics in a globalized world without incurring the huge cost of including the very large number of nonhuman animals. Basically, everybody who can participate in the discussion should be able to agree on the concept—and benefit from that agreement—without having to commit to universal species-independent collectivism.
For this reason, I don’t see the suffering of animals as a problem except for empathy management and perhaps creating a culture of anti-cruelty, if we need it for other purposes.
One problem with human rights is that they are not necessarily well-defined in all contexts, and sometimes people can do strategically better by respecting the rights only of a subset of people. A possible solution would be to insist on minimal standards for the very basic expectations, e.g. don’t randomly torture or murder people you dislike, while setting higher standards only for subgroups, e.g. citizenship transferring the right to live and work in a certain territory.

Andaro Oct 11, 2018, 10:24 PM
6 points
0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: We can all be high status
I have no idea what toonalfrink’s goals for the conversation are. But when someone writes something like,
>So you find yourself in this volunteering opportunity with some EA’s and they tell you some stuff you can do, and you do it, and you’re left in the dark again. Is this going to steer you into safe waters? Should you do more? Impress more? Maybe spend more time on that Master’s degree to get grades that set you apart, maybe that’ll get you invited with the cool kids?
then the only sensible option from my perspective is to take a step back and consider why you’re seeking status from this community in the first place. What motivations go into this behavior. At this point, I think it’s well worth reflecting
1) Why altruism in the first place?
2) Given 1, why EA?
3) Given 2, why seeking status?
Community norms tend to be self-reinforcing. It’s worth pointing out that there are people with a genuinely different perspective, and that this perspective has a reason.

Andaro Oct 11, 2018, 4:15 PM
−10 points
0
on: We can all be high status
>We all want to save the world, right?
No. This is your first mistake, I think. You take the ideology’s authority for granted. You shouldn’t. Dropping altruism outside of self-based reciprocity was the single best decision I have ever made. The world is not worth saving. It’s not worth destroying either.
If you’re suffering from being low-status in the EA movement, you should not be a part of the EA movement. EA as an ideology has deep flaws, and as a social dynamic, it’s outright horrible. Politically, it’s parasitic.
The last part is the only part I still care about. I went through a curve from caring about making the world a better place and therefore supporting EA to wanting to make the world a better place but being skeptical about EA’s consequences to not wanting to make the world a better place.
If EAs weren’t politically parasitic, we would be free to simply ignore them, and this would be the correct answer. Unfortunately, we can’t ignore them, because they push policies and influence politics in a way that makes us worse off. This is why I’m willing to actively oppose their goals.
I distinguish two aspects of status. One is to feel good about being accepted by others. That’s nice, but I don’t think it’s central. There are many ways to feel good and many options to substitute for acceptance of any particular person or group.
The second aspect is “getting things done”. Unfortunately, we live in a world filled with people who can harm us. Coercing or convincing them not to do so is unfortunately an important practical necessity. This is why we can’t simply ignore the EA movement, or organized religion, or neonazis or any other ideology that wants to extract value from our lives or limit our personal choices.
I really do recommend that you stop supporting the EA movement. Nothing good will come of it.

Andaro Sep 8, 2018, 5:52 PM
1 point
0
on: Resurrection of the dead via multiverse-wide acausual cooperation
If the required kind of multiverse exists, this leads to all kinds of contradictions.
For example, in some universes, Personal Identity X may have given consent to digital resurrection, while in others, the same identity may have explicitly forbidden it. In some universes, their relatives and relationships may have positive prefrences regarding X’s resurrection, in others, they may have negative preferences.
Given your assumed model of personal identity and the multiverse, you will always find that shared identities have contradicting preferences. They may also have made contradicting decisions in their respecting pasts, which makes multiverse-spanning acausal reciprocity highly questionable. For every conceivable identity, there are instances that have made decisions in favor of your values, but also instances who did the exact opposite.
These problems go away if you define personal identity differently, e.g. by requiring biographical or causal continuity rather than just internal state identity. But then your approach no longer works.
I personally am not motivated to be created in other Everett branches, nor do I extend my reciprocity to acausal variants.

Andaro Aug 18, 2018, 11:46 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: philh’s comment on: The ever expanding moral circle
To be precise, this seems like a cost to Alice of Bob having a wide circle, if Alice and Bob are close. If they aren’t, and especially if we bring in a veil of ignorance, then Alice is likely to benefit somewhat from Bob having a wide circle.
Yes, but Alice doesn’t benefit from Bob’s having a circle so wide it contains nonhuman animals, far future entities or ecosystems/biodiversity for their own sake.
and my reaction is that none of that stops children from dying of malaria, which is really actually a thing I care about and don’t want to stop caring about
The OP asks us to reexamine our moral circle. Having done that, I find that nonhuman animals and far future beings are actually a thing I don’t care about and don’t want to start caring about.

Andaro Aug 15, 2018, 2:39 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Oscar_Cunningham’s comment on: The ever expanding moral circle
But an expanding circle of moral concern increases value differences. If I have to pay for a welfare system, or else pay for a welfare system and also biodiversity maintainance and also animal protection and also development aid and also a Mars mission without a business model and also far-future climate change prevention, I’d rather just pay for the welfare system. Other ideological conflicts would also go away, such as the conflict between preventing animal suffering and maintaining pristine nature, ethical natalism vs. ethical anti-natalism, and so on.

Andaro Aug 15, 2018, 12:22 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Oscar_Cunningham’s comment on: The ever expanding moral circle
Yes, it certainly cuts both ways. Of course, your country’s welfare system is also available to you and your family if you ever need it, and you benefit more directly from social peace and democracy in your country, which is helped by these transfers. It is hard to see how you could have a functioning democracy without poor people voting for some transfers, so unless you think democracy has no useful function for you, that’s a cost in your best interest to pay.

Andaro Aug 14, 2018, 9:50 PM
3 points
0
on: The ever expanding moral circle
The moral circle is not ever expanding, and I consider that a good thing.
A very wide moral circle is actually very costly to a person. Not only can it cause a lot of stress to think of the suffering of beings in the far future or nonhuman animals in farming or in the wild, but it also requires a lot of self-sacrifice to actually live up to this expanded circle.
In addition, it can put you at odds with other well-meaning people who care about the same beings, but in a different way. For example, when I still cared about future generations, I mostly cared about them in terms of preventing their nonconsensual suffering and victimization. However, the common far-future altruism narrative is that we ought to make sure they exist, not that they be prevented from suffering or being victimized without their consent. This is cause for conflict, as exemplified by the −25 karma points or so I gathered on the Effective Altruism Forum for it at the time.
Since then, my moral circle has contracted massively, and I consider this to be a huge improvement. It now contains only me and the people who have made choices that benefit me (or at least benefit me more than they harm me). There is also a circle of negative concern now, containing all the people who have harmed me more than they benefit me. I count their harm as a positive now.
My basic mental heuristic is, how much did a being net-benefit or net-harm me through deliberate choices and intent, how much did I already reciprocate in harming or benefitting them, and how cheap or expensive is it for me to harm or benefit them further on the margin? These questions get integrated into an intuitive heuristic that shifts my indifference curves for everyday choices.
The psychological motivation for this contracted circle is based on the simple truth that the utility of others is not my utility, and the self-awareness that I have an intrinsic desire for reciprocity.
There is yet another cost to a wide circle of moral concern, and that is the discrepancy with people who have a smaller circle. If you’re my compatriot or family member or fellow present human being, and you have a small circle of concern, I can expect you to allocate more of your agency to my benefit. If you have a wide circle of concern that includes all kinds of entities who can’t reciprocate, I benefit less from having you as an ally.
When people have a wide circle of concern and advocate for its widening as a norm, this makes me nervous because it implies huge additional costs forced on me, through coercive means like taxation or regulations, or simply by spreading benevolence onto a large number of non-reciprocators instead of me and the people who’ve benefitted me. That actually makes me worse off, and people who make me worse off are more likely to receive negative reciprocity rather than positive reciprocity.
I love human rights because they’re a wonderful coordination instrument that makes us all better off, but I now see animal rights as a huge memetic mistake. Similarly, there is little reason to care about far-future generations whose existence is never going to overlap with any of us in terms of reciprocity, and yet we’re surrounded by memes that require we pay massive costs to their wellbeing.
Moralists who advocate this often use moralistic language to justify it. This gives them high social status and it serves as an excuse to impose costs on people who don’t intrinsically care, like me. If I reciprocate this harm against them, I am instantly a villain who deserves to be shunned for being a villain. This dynamic has made me understand the weird paradoxical finding that some people punish what ostensibly seems to be prosocial behavior. Moralism can really harm us, and the moralists should be forced to compensate us for this harm.