And the ideal number of suicides is 0, and the ideal amount of spyware is 0, etc. All of these are targets, but an ideal doesn't give you further information on how to prioritize
My thoughts exactly. My overall takeaway from sleep research is that although there are some health risks with undersleeping, there are (possibly greater) health risks with oversleeping, plus the prevalence of sleep deprivation is greatly overestimated.
Insofar as I can tell, thermostats have a 0% chance of feeling pain (or as close to 0 as is logically possible), so I see no need to afford them moral consideration. If we had evidence suggesting that AI who could suffer currently existed, and if there was any overlap between the suffering-relevant pieces of that AI and thermostats, I'd start to worry about "killing" thermostats. It still seems like the chance of insects subjectively suffering is orders of magnitude greater than the chance of modern thermostats suffering.
I really enjoyed the ACX article; thank you for the recommendation! I agreed with a lot of the general points he was making.
Not sure about the "dignity" of e.g. plants, as I think there are plenty of ways to harm plants and animals that is helpful to humans. It's an interesting idea, though, and I do like the attempt to make a practical argument instead of a moral one.
In any case, while (to some extent) I care about the possible suffering of insects who are farmed in the trillions, I'm not particularly morally concerned about thousands killed for greater scientific gain. Could I ask generally what work you're doing with them? I'd be interested in learning more about it
I do think there's a big moral difference between species. I care about protecting a human from suffering much more than a dog, a dog more than a mouse, a mouse more than a cricket...
But I see no reason for some cutoff, where I arbitrarily decide to care for everything above a certain level of complexity, and decide not to care about anything below. "Vertebrates and octopuses" does not seem like a group that share any exclusive traits, i.e. any moral reason I have to care about an octopus seems like it would lead me to care about an insect, just maybe to a lesser extent.
Even if you value insect lives extremely lowly - if there's any moral value to them at all, mass farming them in the trillions or, possibly someday, quadrillions would be a moral travesty, even of their moral value is extremely small per individual, right?
I feel like "there seems to be a reasonable possibility that insects suffer" implies that we should have some level of interest in preventing their excess suffering, where practical.
It seems sensible to say - these creature with nocicepters and familiar aperture for feeling pain, who react to to bodily damage in ways that suggest that they can suffer, and for whom pain can obviously serve the same evolutionary benefit as it does in humans - they have a moderate to high chance of feeling pain and being conscious to some degree, so we should be careful.
Plants may release chemicals in response to physical threats, but they don't have the pieces of the nervous system we attribute pain to, don't seem to have any level of consciousness, and don't have an evolutionary benefit to subjective suffering. Therefore, morally, there's no reason to treat them as more than an inanimate object.
I feel like AI could theoretically someday have the potential to suffer, but that isn't really a current concern.
Based on all available evidence, the article's argument for at least being careful about insects' potential suffering seems sensible, but the plant argument strikes me as absurd.
Generally speaking, the highest birth rates aren't in the types of counties overrepresented on HN. Our best shot for reducing the global birth rate is improving education in developing nations (particularly women's education[0]), improving access to contraception, and reducing child mortality.
I agree socializing developed nations' economic systems isn't having a huge effect on the global population growth. Focusing on the real problem means investing in the health & development of those with the actual highest birthrates, not making U.S. colleges cheaper.
Rimworld itself is amazing and I highly recommend it, but I'm lukewarm on how much value I've gotten from the Royalty expansion. It's cool, but the mods are not only more in-depth but also more customizable to specific playstyles/interests.
It feels like profoundly missing the point to sell NFTs (with their associated heavy environmental costs) in the name of ecological preservation.
Besides that, I still fail to see the use case. If I download an image of the bird from the internet, that serves me the same amount as having the NFT; why would I need to prove that I "own" a copy of the image?
If people are really willing to pay for crappy phones that come installed with political apps and news feeds meant to flatter their ego instead of providing any actual news, I'd say commemorative coins and etc are only scratching the surface of what you could potentially market to them.
People paying money for a physical echo chamber could probably as financially beneficial as politically beneficial, since you now have a platform with lots of access to a decently-sized market with known interests and easy keywords that'll trick them into overpaying.
I think this is such a massive and fundamental restructuring of the US's historical way of doing things (and the popular conception of "how it should be done") that pushing for incremental change like livable minimum wage is probably more effective in the short-run.
In the long run, if UBI continues proving its success in real-life trials and we're able to get a larger share of the population on board, I'd vote in favor of trying it.
As in UBI? That's the only experiment I know of (or at least, politically feasible experiment) trying to decouple physical necessities and employment.
I guess you bring up an interesting point here, that UBI would make minimum wage obsolete.
It seems like you're arguing for changing "anyone who works full time should be able to afford necessities like safe housing and adequate food" to just "anyone should be able to afford necessities like safe housing and adequate food." I'm not opposed on principle, but I think this is a harder goal to hit in practice.
So basically it's existing hardware/software doused in snake oil and sold at a $350 upcharge?
A terrible product, if this review is accurate. But you have to at least admire their boldness in trying to blatantly manipulate a very opinionated and possibly underserved market.
For the sake of my own sanity, if nothing else, I am going to choose to believe that this isn't the majority opinion. I don't think Objectivism is quite that popular.
In your opinion, what is the minimum standard of living that someone who works full-time deserves? ( / what is the minimum that someone who works full-time and has dependents deserves?)
We've tried the no-minimum-wage experiment before.[0] A lack of minimum wage tends to lead to extremely exploitative wages for workers without skills in high demand.
If you agree with the statement "anyone who works full time should be able to afford necessities like safe housing and adequate food," a minimum wage is required.
If you disagree with that statement, I guess you could argue for no minimum wage, but your moral system will be different enough from most people to make you the minority position.
What are the best ways to feed advertisers incorrect data? If they already have valid data on who I am and what I do, what could make them overwrite this knowledge?
The most obvious issue would be that the 6,000 figure in the article was pre-pandemic, so it might be much higher now.
Also, I don't know the economics of homelessness, but I feel like as supply of homeless shelters increased, demand for the beds would increase as well, right? How elastic is local demand, with people in RVs moving in/out of an area?
Not that it shouldn't be done, but it seems like if all it took to "solve" homelessness was building enough beds, we would already be doing that.
I'm glad they're trying to work on offering these people services to help them get safe housing, rather than just kicking them off the land to be homeless somewhere else. Obviously homelessness has too many thorny side-issues for there ever to be a clean solution, but this seems to be a pretty okay one.
I'm not surprised these people are unable to afford housing in the center of the Silicon Valley (even if it's the "area they grew up in"), though.
No, obviously vegans think arresting bears is dumb. This same "lions tho" argument has been made enough times to become a meme.