I was at a philosophy conference for a lot of this weekend, so I wasn’t really following the Twitter goings-on. Apparently, a great deal of note was happening. My article on insects has now been seen 1.5 million times on Twitter (there are half a million people in Wyoming). The ratio of people who wrote the blog to people who read it is now only 66 times less extreme than the ratio of insects to people on Earth. Elon Musk even weighed in!
Some people replied thoughtfully:
Others less so:
I also found it funny that lots of people were replying with comments like “THIS is the logical implication of atheism,” even though I’ve written more than almost anyone on the planet about why I think God exists.
If I knew that the post was going to be read by the entire internet, I’d have written it a bit more carefully. I wrote it in like an hour between classes. There are some typos, some things loosely phrased, some arguments I should have included but didn’t. I also probably would not have written it at all—while I think I’m right here, my sense is its main effect on the world has been bad, polarizing people against EA :(.
So worth noting officially: I am not the spokesman of EA. I am a 22-year-old with an internet blog. The view I expressed is an extreme minority among EAs. So if you read the post and your response was “see, these are the ridiculous things those EAs believe,” that would be an error. And if you took to the internet to say that, then you are bullshitting.
When analyzing EA, I think people tend to get a bit too lost in the sauce. They spend too much time thinking about the weird counterintuitive galaxy brained things that a few EA bloggers believe, and spend little time thinking about what EAs actually do: most of it is uncontroversially good. Most EA spending goes to preventing children from dying of horrible diseases, helping animals not be tortured in factory farms, and trying to prevent the extinction of humanity from AI and bioterror. It would be a huge mistake to conflate unrelated philosophical controversial views that a few EAs have with the obviously good stuff that EAs do.
EA efforts have prevented around 300,000 deaths, spared 100 million chickens from cages annually, and taken major strides to reduce extinction risk. Whether that stuff is good is obviously totally separate from the philosophy hot takes of a single internet blogger, and to treat one as being informative about the other is to cease to think seriously.
I don’t want to relitigate all the issues in the post. This is in part because most of them have not even been litigated. The response overwhelmingly of my critics was to ignore my arguments and sneer. For example, it is notable that for an article that’s been seen 1.5 million times and replied to hundreds of times, about half of the arguments in the post haven’t been responded to a single time.
My guess is most of the people who were sneering didn’t read the article but instead hallucinated its contents. For example, a common reply was suggesting that my arguments assume utilitarianism. But, of course, none of them do and if you read the article you would know that.
But as I said, not planning on relitigating every issue—for there are too many replies to address them all. Instead, what I want to defend here is that the right attitude towards arguments for a counterintuitive conclusion isn’t the sneering and dunking that has been standard. Instead, I think we should generally strive to take ideas seriously, even if they’re for weird conclusions. If your response, every time you see a weird argument, is to sneer and dunk and suggest that the person who made it should be shot, then you will never believe anything surprising about reality.
And there are a lot of surprising truths.
Quantum mechanics is very surprising. Evolution by natural selection is very surprising. Many moral beliefs taken seriously today, like the intrinsic wrongness of slavery, were rejected throughout almost all of human history. Newton, who invented calculus, was famously kind of a weird guy. If humans collectively rejected every idea invented by a weird nerd that sounded surprising, most intellectual advances in human history would never have happened.
Socrates believed a bunch of strange things. He thought that you could deduce a priori that a happy and virtuous person would be exactly 729 times happier than a tyrant. Nonetheless, it is good that the world took his ideas seriously. The people who killed him are the bad guys, even though he thought some crazy things. If you want to know the truth even when it’s counterintuitive, rather than just signal on the internet, then you have to be open to weird ideas.
I found this reply particularly funny because obviously my argument doesn’t assume moral nihilism. An argument for a moral conclusion can’t assume that there aren’t any true moral conclusions. But insofar as we’re *not *moral nihilists or cultural relativists, we’ll think that there are sometimes truths about morality that we don’t know. To find these truths, we’ll sometimes have to entertain weird conclusions.
Famously, you can’t just believe the commonsense things about ethics. Philosophers have known this for a long time. Obvious ethical judgments are often in conflict with one another. This is true in population ethics, infinite ethics, and the ethics of comparing large numbers of small harms to smaller numbers of large harms. In fact, the following three things, each of which seems really obvious, are provably inconsistent:
No number of small harms (pinpricks, etc) are as bad as one very large harm (death, torture).
If A is worse than B and B is worse than C, then A is worse than C.
If some instance of intense suffering becomes a bit more mild and then is inflicted on a billion times more people, that makes things worse.
All of these seem right. They can’t all be. But just pounding the table and sneering at those who accept weird conclusions doesn’t help you make progress. If there’s a puzzle for everyone, refusing to play the game and sneering at those who do is intellectually shallow and stupid. We all have to say something weird. Like science, ethics is often weird and counterintuitive. If we want to make progress, we have to be willing to entertain strange conclusions.
In fact, a lot of true things about the world are much weirder than my views about insects. Remember, there are 100 million insects for every single human. Is it obvious that four people matter more than a number of insects equaling the human population of the United States? Is it obvious that 75 hours insects spend dying is less morally important than a single second of human life (for there are 75 hours of insect death for each passing second of human life)? Is it obvious that one second of human life matters more than infinity insects?
You can’t decide this from the armchair. To make judgments here, you’ll have to think about what it’s like to be an insect. Because obviously making judgments about the moral importance of a being depends on what its inner life is like. And you can’t infer that insects have no morally important internal states from the fact that they’re small and unsympathetic. You have to try to think hard about what it’s like to be a bug. Remember, almost all expected sentient beings on Earth are insects—you have to be pretty confident they don’t matter much to think that the overwhelming majority of sentient beings’ lives can be so easily written off.
Maybe you still think the non-importance of insects is obvious. But is it so obvious that one can dismiss any argument for the conclusion without reading it? Especially when there are specific reasons not to trust our intuitions on this subject—and many varied arguments for the conclusion? Ask yourself: is this kind of sneering dismissal the kind of thing that would have been useful for getting to the bottom of hard questions in the past? Would this attitude have led you to believe the truth when it was counterintuitive, or to join the sneering mob?
With that out of the way, I want to address three replies to my post.
Reply 1: “I reject that pain and pleasure are the only things that matter.” I agree that they’re not the only things that matter. But I think they’re *among *the things that matter. Suffering isn’t the only bad thing in human life, but it’s one of the bad things. So if something is the source of a million times more expected suffering than all the suffering experienced in human history so far, it is very significant. Analogy: imagine that there were caves with a trillion people being tortured. Even though pain isn’t the only thing that matters, that would be the worst thing in the world.
Reply 2: “I reject that lots of small pains can add up to outweigh one large pain. No number of dust specks can outweigh a torture.” I think this is the best objection to my thesis—I’ve now added a bit in the original article replying to it. But in short: I reject the moral claim as do a lot of philosophers, and I also think that even if it’s right, insects might just suffer very intensely—so still nearly all the intense suffering in the world, in expectation, will be experienced by insects. Even though insects have really small brains, I don’t think there are any knockdown arguments that make it extremely clear that a creature with a small brain has only mild experiences. It may be that just as a simple creature can see clearly, they can also feel intense pain. For a deep dive on this topic, see here.
Reply 3: “morality is a social technology that evolved to facilitate cooperation. To graft bugs in to the moral framework is to misuse a technology that evolved to facilitate human cooperation and apply it outside of its scope.” I’ve written elsewhere about the idea that morality is a social technology. I don’t really think that it makes any sense.
Suppose that the most efficient social arrangement horribly oppressed and killed disabled people. I would still think this was wrong. The fact that our moral beliefs evolved in part because they were conducive to passing on our genes doesn’t mean that what we should believe is what passes on our genes most effectively. This is like objecting that we evolved mathematical competence to pass on our genes, so solving calculus problems is useless unless they help you find people to impregnate.
A big chunk of progress in history has come from taking weird ideas seriously. It is easy to burn the taking ideas seriously commons for a cheap laugh. But insofar as you want to be one of the people who would have agreed with Darwinian evolution or democracy or quantum mechanics, then you have to take seriously the weird ideas of today.
