Former tech entrepreneur (co-founder of the music software company Sibelius). Among other things I now play the stock market, write software to predict it, and occasionally advise tech startups. I have degrees in philosophy.
bfinn
Karma: 431
The game world could include a sign stating the rules/objective of the game in English. Presumably then (perhaps helped by GPT-3) the agents might well learn to find & read it, as the best shortcut to working out what to do. And figure out both the meanings of individual words (nouns, adjectives, verbs) and grammar (word order, conjunctions, etc.) so as to understand whole sentences.*
And thus make the leap from GPT-3 as clever spinner of meaningless symbols like R, E and D to those symbols having a real-world meaning like ‘RED’. Or even ‘Keep the red cube within line of sight of the yellow pyramid, but don’t let the blue agent see either of them’.
Hence leaping from Chinese Room to something more mind-like?
(*Though they might need help, e.g. a pre-coded ‘language instinct’, as trial and error may take a v long time to figure these out.)
They do use context, surely—viz. the immediate verbal context, plus training on vast amounts of other text which is background ‘information’. Which though not tantamount to meaning (as it’s not connected to the world), would form a significant part of meaning.
It occurs to me glycemic load may be a factor. This is only a small study but it suggests an effect of high glycemic load (eg from poor diets) on depression and maybe fatigue. Also that these are worse for obese people, and poor diet causes obesity.
Cf very surprisingly, a few years ago Princess Anne, a noted horse-rider who competed in the Olympics, called for horses to be eaten so as to improve their welfare. (I.e. so those unsuitable, or no longer suitable, for riding still have a value.) She said this in a speech for the World Horse Welfare charity, of which she is president.
Indeed. I think it’s pretty clear there are a few basic prepping things (such as water storage) which are well worthwhile whatever the risk, because they’re cheap and potentially life-saving. And some useful halfway houses—eg re wilderness survival, buying a book (but not going on a survival course) is a cheap option.
Indeed, they sent fewer trucks as a result of correct planning. The predictions seemed to assume supermarkets wouldn’t plan.
I didn’t mean make them extinct. I meant not let them reproduce freely, and control their numbers by sterilisation and culling. If done to a severe extent (which may not be necessary in the case of food animals) I can see an analogy with genocide.
(Cf though I’m not an animal rights activist in any way, even as a child I thought there was something odd about the mass extermination of coypu in the UK merely because they ate crops.)
Societies have collapsed before. Plenty of data on eg civil wars presumably. So one could make a useful ballpark estimate of the annual risk of this. Which I suspect is surprisingly high even for rich countries; if we factor in covid as a near-miss. And things like the BLM protests/riots could also lead to local civil breakdown with resulting shortages. Oh, come to think of it it did—CHAZ. In which IIRC the protesters ran short of food and had to request outside supplies.
Here in the UK many people did basic prepping against Brexit, by buying lots of canned food in case there were import shortages. (Not surprisingly these were Remainers, ie opposed to Brexit, so more inclined to believe doom-laden narratives about it.)
As it turned out there were no such shortages, nor indeed the predicted miles of food trucks from Europe held up at customs, because supermarkets had planned adequately.
There was also of course a lot of hoarding at the start of covid. A friend of mine bought a second freezer and filled it with a month’s supply of pizzas etc. He also made serious plans to (illegally?) decamp to another part of the UK (and asked me to join him) so as to be very near a major hospital. He researched which hospitals had the most available intensive care beds.
2 is similar to my reply above about ‘right to reproduce’. Sounds like you mean the right not to go extinct (re which arguments for biodiversity would also apply); though it’s not likely that cows & chickens would actually go extinct if meat production were banned.
Not sure what you mean by ‘both uses can coexist’ - i.e. a chicken treated as a pet then eaten? Unlikely.
You may have more of a point re people owning a hen as a kind of pet (i.e. well treated) in order to lay eggs, rather than be eaten; as some people of course already do. I can see that could become more widespread.
I’d split the first case into two:
(a) Current meat production: 1000 animals poorly treated and killed young for cheap meat
(b) My ideal: (say) 200 animals very well treated and killed, preferably not quite so young, for expensive meat.
Then if we call your 50 wild animals case (c), my claim is that:
b > c (as more animals, better conditions, and maybe not much shorter lifespan, but probably more total life-years anyway, and more happiness x years); and
b > a (assuming (a) involves conditions worse than, or not much better than, non-existence).
My position is in the penultimate paragraph.
OK it looks like I didn’t understand what people mean by ‘right to life’ - probably because I’m inclined towards consequentialism, so don’t understand or believe in rights-talk.
However I think an analogous argument could be made along the lines of a ‘right to reproduce’ (which I suspect many might reckon exists). Non-existent animals don’t have the right to exist per se, but their parents have a right to reproduce, which would make them exist.
Cf in the human sphere, mass forced sterilization (of an ethnic group, say) would no doubt be deemed a form of genocide—i.e. infringing something similar to a right to life.
Cf ‘right to family life’
Well it’s true you do feel perpetually under pressure, and maybe behind in that there’s always far more you could do than hours in the day. (This only finally ended when I sold my first business.) So that is a level of stress, though not necessarily a very high level. Hence ‘pressure’ is perhaps the better term.
But failing is a different, far worse experience.
This is speaking from my own case. No doubt, as you mention, some people experience unwarranted anxiety/depression even when succeeding.
In my personal experience, FWIW, any startup involves a certain amount of stress due to all the work & uncertainty involved. But this is fine for a startup that’s succeeding, and all part of being an entrepreneur; but a startup that’s failing adds lots of anxiety & depression.
Which is kinda obvious—success is good though somewhat stressful, failure is just bad all round—but worth spelling out.
Re Stone Age suffering, as you probably know, violence has been in long-term big decline, and much higher in non-states than states:
https://slides.ourworldindata.org/war-and-violence/#/title-slide
Life expectancy at birth in Afghanistan is 64, which is 2 or 3 times in the Stone Age. Suggesting worse general health back then, with attendant suffering. (Infant deaths are of course a substantial part of the lower life expectancy, but by no means all.)
Indeed there’s a wider ranges of potential causes of suffering now, but I’m not convinced they’re worse overall. E.g. being shot is not clearly worse than being stabbed. People are rarely burnt at the stake now. Chemical pollution is fairly new, but there were plenty of other poisons before. Disease/death from air pollution is predominantly a problem of non-industrial societies (from cooking over open fires), not cars etc.
And of course modern medicine provides ways of alleviating suffering, via treatments and anaesthetics, mostly unavailable in the Stone Age (though at least to some extent available in Afghanistan).
Re your first point, indeed, though if one believes in deontology, hence in rights, you may also think there’s something iffy about denying many sentient beings happy lives (ended by painless deaths), which is what I argue they should have. (And there is no plausible middle ground in which cows & chickens would be bred in large numbers and well treated but not eaten—i.e. get to live the lives of pets.)
Re your second point, I can envisage a scenario in which factory farming (i.e. conditions that make animals unhappy) is outlawed, and/or meat is mostly superseded by lab/plant products, but much smaller amounts of expensive happy animal meat are still produced, because (a) it tastes better (or has better texture etc.) to most people, or (b) to a few people, or (c) has sufficient cachet & signalling value (e.g. due to rarity/price) that it is treated as if it tastes better.
OK I guess this is the ‘person-affecting view’ I’ve heard slightly about—that nothing is lost by animals/people not being brought into existence. No doubt this is gone into far greater depth in population ethics etc (of which I know little), but my gut response would be that by not being brought into existence the potential animals in question are missing out, even though they don’t know they are. As their potential happiness is being prevented. We might say, the world is missing their happiness.
If Stone Age people were happier than wild animals, that only strengthens my case. And I expect in the Stone Age they weren’t happy at all, by modern standards, if we consider the least happy current country in the world (Afghanistan), whose people rate themselves 2.5 on a 0-10 scale, which is around ‘barely worth living’ (worse than death being considered below about 2). I assume levels of suffering from violence, disease, injury, cold and starvation were typically higher in Stone Age societies then in present Afghanistan, hence happiness lower. And wild animals’ ‘happiness’ lower still.
There seems a big contradiction in the position of environmentalists who support animal rights (as almost all do). They say we shouldn’t eat meat because animals, and animal feed, contribute to CO2 emissions. But if we didn’t eat meat, the animals we breed for that purpose wouldn’t exist.
Surely animal rights include the right to life. So denying billions of cows & chickens any life at all seems a strongly anti-animal position.
While meat production involves killing animals, at least they get some life. And if (a big ‘if’) they were well treated, so they’d enjoy the life they do get, that’s a good deal for the animals. Because they’d be much better off than in the wild—a grim existence of starvation, disease, fear, and being torn to bits by predators. And they’d also be better off than not existing.
(The environmentalist assumption that life in the wild is good—because ‘nature is good’ - doesn’t follow. Life in the natural state—e.g. the Stone Age—is nasty, brutish, and short. Human history is the struggle to escape the natural state.)
So, CO2 aside, my position is that meat eating is fine as long as the animals are well treated. Which would mean more expensive meat, and less of it, but that’s OK. Happy cows are better than no cows.
(At this point some people object that ‘the demand for meat is so high that it can’t be met while treating the animals well’ - but that ignores that demands don’t have to be met; if supply is restricted by a welfare requirement, prices will rise accordingly, so only those who can afford to pay for happy cows will eat steak. It’s like saying ‘billions of people would want a private jet, so unless we ban private jets they’ll all get one’. Well, they would if they cost $10, but not if they cost $10 million.)
A v interesting analysis. That diagram is quite illuminating.
Recent editions of the bestselling careers advice book What Colour Is Your Parachute? have a long exercise on identifying your skills and brainstorming niche careers located at their intersection. Presumably there’s a certain amount to be said from economic theory about careers that aren’t at the Pareto frontier but are nonetheless near it. And possibly heuristics about identifying them, i.e. promising regions.
Me me me reading your analysis I realized how well it applies to me. I was a good programmer as a teenager, and a competent classical musician (though could barely have made a career of it as it’s so competitive). And had absorbed entrepreneurial know-how from my parents. So I was above average, but not stellar, at all three. But (unplanned) I put them together to be a music notation software entrepreneur—of which there are only a handful in the world. Yet a niche big enough to be very successful if you’re the best of that handful.