I argue they haven’t read enough Buddhism 😆. I know my opinion isn’t super popular here. I am willing to take the downvotes.
honeybee
Karma: 185
That’s my take too like, exactly! People may say “I want candy” or “I want a boyfriend” but that’s not really what they want. I’m going to be the most annoying person and leave this comment there, I think the rest is worth sitting with rather than me typing out.
Am I the only one (one of the only ones) who likes the hedonium shockwave?
Western culture loves identity and personal narratives, likely more than any species or culture in the history of the known universe, and I find it interesting how much this preference hasn’t escaped the scrutiny of Lesswrong-ish folks.
I would imagine an inside view of blissful personhood transcendence would be of utmost epistemic value here. Dissolution of personal narrative is not only something that could be tolerated, but seems to be the explicit highest good of many cultures. Nature-worshipping indigenous peoples, Buddhists, contemporary psychonauts.
My inside views here, and many years of deeply studying alternatives to western humanistic egocentrism have led me to believe there is something valuable here.
So yes I like it. I also like a universe of embodied humans who have transcended just the western-conditioned suffering-inducing aspects of their personal identities, but live mostly in a state of interconnection that LinkedIn profiles, accumulations of objects riddled with a felt sense of ownership and “mine”, and instagram-likes-optimizing lifestyles just aren’t getting us.
I still like the piece though, the human aspect and sadness are real, I only believe they’re part of a greater context.
In rationalist words: The meta-crisis needs to address problems at the meta-level, so what what are the meta-problems? In normal people words: There are a lot of problems right now, but trying to solve each problem individually is likely not going to work, as many of the same underlying patterns probably cause a lot of these problems. So what are these underlying patterns?
Rationalists talk about many of them. Incentive structures first, and memetics second, are the two I have probably heard the most around here. Here are some others:We create problems, often (at mass) not realizing they will be problematic, and then spend a ton of time and energy reversing them. For instance, waterway pollution was a huge thing in the mid-1900s United States, and once our culture caught up to the problem, we really did reverse a lot of it. Whatever incentive structures exist had enough give for that (note: many humans are incentivized to note like bad health). We created plastic and rushed it out, and now we’re finally like “Oops yeah no, this is bad”, and I believe with enough time, humanity would correct course here too. But by that point, all the other humans out there “innovating” or in some way changing the landscape of things so quickly, and pushing forward without really evaluating, will have created so many new problems. With technology the new problems are created so much faster than the old ones can be fixed. Obviously people will think of AI here and, yeah. But I’m looking at meta-issues, not object-level. So people who hate plastic, or whatever existing catastrophe that came from going too fast without thinking, might instead want to invest more energy in what might it take to slow down and get super, super careful, sooner, about whatever is currently in the pipeline. If the incentive structures can give rise to reversing pollution to the extent they have, I imagine they can give rise to this.
The spiritual crisis. Although thinking more, this is super linked to memetics and maybe just is a meme. But it’s a specific kind of memetic that I think is really important to address. People are operating under culturally-conditioned ideas about what will make them happy. And those ideas are just, wrong. Well, most of them. More correct ideas will make these people happier, and other beings on the planet will also be better off, at large. I think most or at least a lot of these false ideas about happiness fall under either wanting more materially or wanting more status. I know people here (in my opinion sometimes too much) love studies, so let’s just point to the scientific consensus that over a super middle-class income happiness barely increases. First, imagine a world where no one ever pursued more than a middle class income. I mean, I don’t want to fill in the details of this thought experiment because I think the people here are smart enough to do that themselves but this would be awesome. But also note that I don’t much data at all points to material-induced happiness. A middle class income can keep us safe from constant financial worry, from super mundane or meaningless jobs, or from only being able to afford housing in terribly not-suited-for-apes places. Now consider how much data points to nature creating happiness, meaningful connection — with humans, companion animals, wild animals, nature, God or “something greater” — creating happiness. So why are people buying so many things they don’t need? Why does anyone live in a house with more bedrooms than there are people? Why do most people want to buy things shiny and new when the world already has an abundant surplus of that exact item, but already used a bit by someone else, and otherwise headed to landfill? Why do people choose fancy cars over bikes rides under vast blue skies? Maybe I’m biased towards this particular memetic failure because I live in the United States, but the shopping addiction is just so unchecked.
There are more but I want to go eat dinner so, yeah, just some food for thought (no pun intended). Thank you to the potentially maybe 1 person who reads this.
Oh and note: none of this was written or informed by AI.
By the utilitarian principles this post rests on, assuming that the proposed data on the health of eating meat is true (although this is debatable), wouldn’t the logical outcome be:
Eat only plants, fungi, and bivalves (clams, oysters, etc. with no centralized brain)
...?
I don’t see how the the transition from ‘Okay, I’ll try eating bivalves to see if I feel better and thus more productive towards reducing suffering of animals’ to ‘Fund corporations to create an enormous amount of suffering in beings that share neural networks very similar with ours, and likely experience pain in a very similar way to us’ could be justified without mental gymnastics.
–––
This alone, I believe, undermines 90% of the post entirely, and so I almost refrain from undermining several other points of reasoning I do not (may not) see to hold. But here is an additional quick take, because from a meta perspective good reasoning is good.
The appeal to utilitarianism towards animals only holds if: the person is directly working in animal welfare, on a project that is effective + has some health issues (including mental health, yes) undermining productivity + tries a non-vegan diet, sees their health issues improve, and sees their productivity improve. I do wonder what percentage of people on Lesswrong even the first criteria applies to. Admittedly, the article seems to have been amended from when the post was first published and now transitioned a bit towards a sort of appeal to self-interest, and I am less interested in debating whether an appeal to self-interest is justified. But still, to the extent the appeal to utilitarianism is made, the acknowledgement about how narrowly this appeal will apply to the Lesswrong population, and how easily the appeal can be sloppily transitioned to a completely different set of variables is important.
I feel ambivalent about the nutritional science presented. You definitely make some good points that undermine the current scientific consensus which, overall, at majority, overwhelmingly points towards veganism as healthier along the metrics of reduction in heart disease, reduction in diabetes, reduction in cancer, longevity. In fact I’m not interested in debunking your point completely, I will rest in some humility on this one. But a few important things to consider:
Beware the Man of One Study, by Scott Alexander. The health assertions I point to come from systematic reviews, not single studies — and several. From what I remember, every single systematic review on the first page of Elicit.
Your points regarding extra variables and vegan correlations are clever and yet, wouldn’t a scientist whose job it is to tease out variables and get to the truth, have considered and accounted for this? I imagine at least one of the scientists who spent 1+ years on a systematic review would have accounted for this. If the results of the review came to contradict the consensus, and point to plant-based diets as less healthy, I imagine it would have shown in one of the reviews on the first page of Elicit.
That’s true, this story did not specify what the hedonium shockwave was. I was referencing my conception based off conversations with people in this community I’ve had outside the context of this story, as well as the pattern of “greatest utilitarian maximization of positive valence for the universe”. I would imagine, for instance, if a superpowerful AI decided to create a hedonium shockwave because they are maximizing positive valence, they would not create something unfulfilling. That seems like a pretty low-level error (and one humans do seem to make a lot)! It is interesting how your definition of happiness could be compatible with unfulfilling. This is semantics, but my semantics intuitively would say, if it’s not fulfilling it’s not happiness. I think the term positive valence is this best way around semantics.