I continue to find this very funny and I won't be made to feel bad about it.
Consider: what you are describing as mockery was me posting two screenshots of essays you yourself wrote, and a picture of your face currently on the front page of your substack publication. My entire commentary was limited to "Checking in on the rationalists." That's it! That's the dunk!
The reason it was a dunk is because this content is self-ridiculing. I didn't even need to explicitly mock it, just calling attention to it was enough for over 1,600 readers as of the time of this writing to come to their own conclusion about its absurdity.
Also by your own logic, since I have 20x as many followers as you on twitter, you should be thanking me for the exposure. Happy to help any time.
It obviously does not. Declining to expend the time and effort to engage you on the level you demand is simple preference. You don't have a right to my time and energy, and the standard you have invented here is just that, your own invention.
What's funny about this is you're exactly echoing a string of young earth creationists in the 90s (I know you weren't alive yet, alas) who would constantly call out scientists to debate them and declare them cowards and frauds (and themselves correct) for declining.
Now, I agree that my behavior was rude. But it was also funny. I was having a good time. And it brought joy to lots of people on twitter as well. Can you state with certainty that you suffered more than I and others enjoyed ourselves at your expense?
Well as I said, I don’t really mind the ridicule. But the combination of ridicule plus be unwilling and unable to defend the wrongness of a view in debate is pretty embarrassing. It’s just weaponising the fact that lots of people reject a view!
To be fair to you, my argument that I wouldn’t enjoy debating someone with such an alien value system and with whom I disagree strongly on fundamental principles and didn’t want to spend time on it, now looks much weaker given how much time I have spent talking about this. I could have written a pretty persuasive counter essay in this time!
But to be fair to me: I still categorically reject the demand to perform at someone else’s command as a matter of iron principle. If this requires you to imagine this is simply an excuse for incompetence on my part, you are free to do so. In fact I encourage you to imagine that the pleasure I derive from sticking to this principle is several orders of magnitude larger than the frustration you feel in being unable to pin me down. We all came out ahead in the end, goodness has been served.
No, sure, I mean, one or both of you might be self-deceived about who performed better for reasons of ego, pride, etc. But would you grant that if you did debate him (granting that this isn’t the reason you won’t debate him), you would in fact bellyflop performance-wise, independent of who is closer to being right on insects?
Obviously I would not grant that, no. I won't make any claims here to being a world class debater, but I feel confident I could deliver a performance well above bellyflop territory. I am an expert shitposter and can express myself well in writing.
But again, who would even declare a fair winner in such a contest? I have the massive advantage of arguing against an extremely unpopular opinion that nearly everyone finds alienating and gross even if they accept the logic of the argument to some extent. Surely the overwhelming majority of twitter observers would declare me the victor of such an exchange, but one supposes that mere popular vote isn't what you mean by "win" in this context.
This is truly one of the most hilarious threads I’ve seen. Are you sure this isn’t a performance staged for the benefit of readers? Thanks for the utility
I don't think you can write comments like these and retain the "non-sneering" high ground. If you engage in morality via linear algebra across a quintillion-row-sparse-matrix and end up at a kind of absurd place, like you did in your insect welfare piece, you have to be able to laugh at yourself a little!
Well as I said in the article, I think insulting people is fine if they're particularly noxious, so long as it's in addition to substance rather than in place of substance.
These takes that Bentham would win in a debate read as: "since everyone is fine using utilitarianism as a moral starting point, I believe that Bentham would win in showing the internal consistency of his view that we should apply some moral calculus to insect suffering." Of course he would win an argument where everybody accepted his starting moral framework!
Not to put words in Kitten's mouth here, but I think many people simply don't accept that premise in the first place. Even in the theoretical argument with a meat-eater in his piece, his strawman debater is arguing on what the right number is to apply a calculus of value of humans vs. insects. A lot of people just fundamentally disagree that you can / should / need to apply any sort of calculus whatsoever to insect utility vs. humans.
You can have a moral philosophy which is entirely self-contained in a human-centric frame. What is good for the world is what is good for humans. And you could even apply some utilitarian thinking within that (i.e., preventing the death of all insects in the world might be worth a few people dying in the abstract, but from a consequentialist view of impacts on humans / humanity as a whole).
Further, from a consequentialist point of view, you could (and I would) argue that rationalist types spending their chips arguing for shrimp welfare just makes the moral philosophy behind it even less popular with people writ large and might even be explicitly self-defeating.
1. I don’t understand why you’re attempting to make this about utilitarianism/consequentialism. On almost any reasonable view of ethics suffering is bad and reducing a lot of it is good. If we have good reason to believe insects suffer, then that’s bad too. Plenty of non-consequentialist philosophers, such as Michael Huemer, understand and accept this.
2. You say that “A lot of people just fundamentally disagree that you can / should / need to apply any sort of calculus whatsoever to insect [and non-human animal] utility vs. humans.”
Well yes, I agree. I know a lot of people think this. This is what we’re trying to debate. Bentham listed many *arguments* as to why he thinks this view as wrong. If you wish to continue holding that view while arguing in good faith you must actually *address* the specific arguments Bentham made; you cannot just reassert your original claim!
Here are some examples of the sorts of argument you must address directly:
Bentham says that pain matters not because of the level of intelligence of the being that’s experiencing it but because it hurts. He gives many intuition pumps about this, referring to severely mentally disabled people and babies. He also points to many biases that warp peoples’ intuitions about insect welfare.
> 1. I don’t understand why you’re attempting to make this about utilitarianism/consequentialism. On almost any reasonable view of ethics suffering is bad and reducing a lot of it is good.
If we remove the word "reasonable", which begs the question, not really. Some popular ethical codes say that suffering is a necessary part of life, or that it helps humble us and make us better.
You don't even need to go religious to get those views. Even someone like Nietchze, opposed to religion, would say that life without a certain amount of suffering is meaningless. Or some hardened guy would say it's good because it "builds character". To a certain degree of course - but that's already an acknowledgement that not "all suffering is bad and reducing it is always good".
And a meat lover could say that life without the slaughter of real pigs (no lab meat would do) for his daily breakfast bacon is worse than one with that in it. That's totally utilitarian - for him and his goals.
I disagree with BB on a whole host of issues. But when somebody argues (with some plausibility) that there's a very serious moral issue which most of us are neglecting, it seems a bit weird to respond by laughing at them. It's not immediately obvious how this differs from somebody responding to articles about climate change with "lol these people think that cow farts are going to destroy the world!" If you think that would be a silly response, then you should see why one might find your response to BB a bit silly as well.
What's the serious moral issue with insect suffering when it comes to my own actions? I am neither responsible for nor able to stop the vast majority of insect suffering - the vast majority of it happens at the whim of other insects, plants, or animals. It's not clear what one is supposed to do to help here. Arrest insectivorous mammals? Try to eradicate parasites that afflict insects (many of which are also insects)? Spray herbicides to kill all carnivorous plants?
This is like positing that there's a planet out there where billions of human-tier animals suffer every day and then asking me to care about this "serious moral issue".
Something that seems to be left unsaid is that the easiest way to end insect suffering would to eradicate all insects. But then we've arrived at the efilist idea of morality and I'm happy to reject that without further consideration or comment. Call me a moron if you wish.
One of the recommendations in that article is to avoid composting in favor of throwing out food in airtight bags which are then incinerated. This is to avoid the tragedy of the compost pile heating up and killing microorganisms growing in the food waste. I mean, it's beyond parody.
Firstly, the claim isn't that you should avoid composting just so as to save the microorganisms. The claim is that you should avoid worm-bin composting to avoid possible suffering for worms and other bugs (which are not microorganisms). Here's the link from the article: https://reducing-suffering.org/food-waste/
Microorganism suffering is mentioned, but the main focus is on bigger organisms (e.g. worms and bugs)!
Secondly, I fail to see why this is "beyond parody": if there's some chance that these creatures can suffer (which BB provides evidence for), and you can avoid doing things which might cause them to suffer (with no major inconvenience to yourself, mind you), then why in the world wouldn't you do it?
I'd also like to mention - I visited your substack and at a glace I saw a lot of very thoughtful and insightful posts. I am trying to hold back on insulting you or BB or the other commentators here unfairly. I'm sure that if we met in physical space we would get along well.
However, the particular "large N small probability" type of moral reasoning that leads one to ruinous conclusions.
I was imagining worms and bugs as belonging to the category “microorganisms”, sorry for the imprecise language. Replace "microoganisms" with "small invertebrates and worms" in my original comment and I will stand by it equally strongly.
The linked article lists worm bin composting as the worst option, but *all other composting* as worse than the gold star option of sealing food waste in plastic bags bound for the incinerator.
It’s not just a minor inconvenience. Were this idea to be taken seriously, all food waste would be destroyed instead of allowing the nutrients to be recycled into nature.
I want to stress: I do understand the argument, I just think it’s wrong.
> Secondly, I fail to see why this is "beyond parody": if there's some chance that these creatures can suffer (which BB provides evidence for), and you can avoid doing things which might cause them to suffer (with no major inconvenience to yourself, mind you), then why in the world wouldn't you do it?
Because they place insignificant value in their suffering or not, and understand opportunity costs.
BB's content may be "self-ridiculing" for the same reason heliocentrism was "self-ridiculing" in the past. So the screenshots plus the caption "Checking in on the rationalists" might not register as a traditional "dunk," but the "dunk" is still there; it's just communicated by invoking a wider cultural intuition instead of being directly stated.
Nonsense. Heliocentrism had some serious conceptual problems which were debated at the time. They were resolved, but the sort of fairy-tale we're told that it was obvious, is just wrong if you study the history.
Yeah but you can play this game with any argument and example. Maybe BB is right, or maybe he’s self ridiculing in the same way that flat earthers are and not worth engaging
Not really. All I sought to prove with the analogy was the presence of a "dunk" contra the original comment. When you propose that BB's views are akin to that of a flat earther's, you are talking about the validity of his claims—a different issue entirely.
To determine if some view is worth discussing, you can consult various heuristics. For example, BB is studying philosophy while flat earthers are often random people. BB has written intelligently on a number of subjects, whereas flat earthers rarely if ever contribute any meaningful to any conversation.
That a claim is "self-ridiculing" alone says little about the claim itself.
Sure and I guess that’s my point, you’re interpreting the fact his claim is self ridiculing in the most charitable way possible saying BB is right because he’s a smart philosopher not some dumb random person. This elitism is often found among philosophers and it’s often justified, but modern philosophers really are mostly sophists and seen as useless by most of the public. While I think that’s not totally fair when you deny or explain away consciousness w/o explanation, have stupid ethical arguments using fake units anyone can make up, and appeal to “intuitions” which any normal person can all see are totally dumb then I have to say the ridicule is more “flat earth” than Copernicus
I did not do anything of the sort. My comment was only to establish the presence of a "dunk" beyond mere self-ridicule. The analogy to heliocentrism was just to illustrate a point. If you reposted the content of a flat earther with a caption that would read as neutral in other contexts you would be dunking on them as well.
You're talking about the validity of BB'S claims which are, again, a different issue entirely.
Perhaps you're saying the comparison to heliocentrism lends BB undue credit. This might be true, but the comparison to a view crazy in the past but accepted today was necessary to establish that the subtle dunking of seemingly self-ridiculing ideas is still dunking. Like, if I had used flat earthers as my example, a simple retort might go "yeah, BB's views and that of flat earthers are intrinsically self-ridiculing. No dunking is present."
Your critique is left wanting. It doesn't provide much substantively—you simply assert sophistry and fake numbers.
That’s fair that I sort of asserted sophistry without much backing up here but that’s a larger conversation about modern v classical philosophy. However I also think you’re incorrectly separating the truth of the claim from the aspect of “dunking.” You say that flat earthers are intrinsically self dunking but provided no evidence as to why BBs aren’t except the fact he’s a philosopher. You’re also conflating scientific progress, which is objective and discovered with the scientific method, with moral progress, which is not validated in the same way and thus prone to errors.
Honestly, I have a very hard time agreeing with the importance of insect suffering, but I don't get the reason for dunking in it. It's still a thought-provoking argument that doesn't really have an easy rebuttal when you read it. I'd be worried if we genuinely started to organise society around insect welfare, but as a hypothetical philosophical argument, why are you so dismissive and antagonistic to it?
Accurate non-dunk application of "postmodern right" in a essay against dunking is the most meta thing I've read today. I'd "heart" this essay twice if I could.
I agree. I think in general the way to dunk on your view of shrimp and bug welfare is to point out all the other ways we can waste time with what I call "small odds large N" hacking. This genre is just fundamentally flawed as a way to deploy concern and scarce attention in the world.
For example, we could use the Drake equation to suggest there are enormous numbers of living beings outside our purview on Earth. This unthinkable number of creatures with a capability to suffer, are out in the universe, suffering and reproducing themselves and thus their conscious suffering. They easily rival all bugs, hell, even all microscopic organisms on Earth that are suffering. Their N size is just that much bigger.
Given the main person who is really pushing the envelope to actually travel to these planets with living beings suffering and end their misery is Elon Musk, you have no choice but to ignore his decisions on PEPFAR. In fact, you have a moral obligation to shut up every single person complaining about the consequences of Elon Musk on PEPFAR or anything else in American society, so that Musk retains more popularity than he otherwise would with casual investors and can work to delivering us actual access to these suffering creatures, most of which are not on Earth. The odds mixed with the large N size of most living creatures suffering not being on Earth compel you to prioritize them to this extent.
"Well I don't like this selective assumption of the Drake equa-" nope, as long as I can theorize there is a reasonable small % odds it is correct that most living beings exist outside Earth and suffer, you have to go along. Sorry, those are the rules!
You can see how this is a dorm room pot conversation and nobody serious should stop complaining about PEPFAR on these grounds. Yet it's fundamentally of a genre with the bug ethics where we have to make claims about suffering we simply do not have much serious evidence to suggest or comprehend on par with our own experiences and then use the low odds to large N hack to make this the biggest moral problem on Earth. In fact, our time and resources are scarce, and we can only declare so many things the biggest moral problem.
The Drake equation should easily qualify to suggest Elon Musk could behave *much worse* than he currently does, and you have to support him or whoever is building rockets to eventually access most of the suffering beings to stop their suffering one day anyways. Of course, this kind of theorizing is exactly why some lay people think of utilitarians as superhero comic villains and generally unserious people. I think that's overkill; utilitarianism can be helpful to making moral choices. But it is worth spelling out why the folk wisdom against it has a point; you can simply deploy small odds large N hacking to all kinds of fancifully drawn out stories, to justify ridiculous and dehumanizing behavior. It doesn't take too much thought, and in fact, being smarter makes it easier to cook up more of them all the time. Smart people should deploy their intelligence to better things instead!
EDIT: Softened my anti-util remarks here, it is useful.
"It’s easy to mock the insect welfare people, but much harder to explain why we should be totally indifferent to a quantity of agony that outstrips all the suffering in human history every single week."
I mean, I'm a selfish POS, but for the rest of us:
1. Seriously taking insect welfare into account, outside of cases like shrimp (who are crusteaceans, but I digress) and other food animals where we could just switch to veganism (something that's already argued by many EAs and is practiced already), would require major sacrifices by humanity. Theoretically we should take down those malaria nets, because the suffering of the mosquitoes denied their blood is greater than the people they infect with malaria, not to mention locusts eating crops and cockroaches eating our garbage. We should all live in roach-infested dwellings, because the welfare of the roaches outweighs our own. It suddenly matters a lot whether an insect is worth 1/1000 a human or 1/1,000,000 a human, and I wonder whether the small fraction of people disposed to care could agree on that.
2. Pragmatically speaking, as you point out, people have a major disgust response to insects (and arthropods in general), similar to that with feces, corpses, or spoiled food, and for the same reason: they spread disease. This makes sympathy for them much more difficult and is the reason 'shrimp welfare' is seen as ludicrous whereas people worried about cows and chickens are simply stereotyped as oversensitive and people who don't care about cats or dogs are seen as coldhearted. I don't think you're going to be able to shift the moral universe on insects the way people did on things like slavery and domestic abuse. Veganism has strong climate change arguments for it as well--factory farming makes a lot of CO2.
" In contrast, effective altruists never argue by cheap dunks, and are consistently among the smartest and most thoughtful groups on the internet."
I actually agree, but how effective are they? You guys were gaining a bunch of momentum and then SBF said he liked you, he got arrested for fraud, and nobody likes the movement anymore. Not that SBF's choice of EA as his moral smokescreen of choice has any real relevance to the truth value of EA's statements, but simply being logical isn't enough for most people.
FWIW I overall prefer EA to other forms of altruism; if you're going to save the world might as well be rational about how to do it. But this shrimp thing just seems to bring ridicule for no reason.
It brings ridicule because the shrimp thing is a very evocative image (which is why BB presumably chose it in the first place). Its similar to how scholasticism still gets crap about debating if angels can dance on the pin of a needle, which though now ridiculed because it was being debating rather than focusing on physics, is actually an interesting question given the nature of angels being pure intellects with no embodied nature.
I hadn’t realized you started writing at 17,I can’t imagine writing and posting it and I’m at that age right now. Speaks to their character that kitten grabbed a post from 3 years ago to criticize you!
> Collective meat eating causes as much suffering every few
> years as all the suffering that has ever existed in human history
Here's another example of a claim that might be unintuitive but correct: There is no morally relevant distinction between eating meat and consuming other animal products (eggs, dairy, fish). If you imply otherwise, you run the risk of lulling ovolactovegetarians (and/or pescatarians) into thinking that their job is done. You (BB) actually have a Substack post on this subject ("Ethical vegetarianism makes no sense"):
Out of curiosity (mostly unrelated), what’s your position on donating instead of becoming vegan? It’s so much easier for me to donate yearly to save the equivalent amount of animal suffering rather than stop eating meat and eggs and cheese, and if it saves the same amount of animals that’s good right?
I can understand that there’s also value on becoming vegan to normalize it, especially if you’re influential, but I’m not, and I’m a little suspicious claiming the signaling value is huge enough that I couldn’t overcome it if I, say, donated 2x as much. Also, I’ve convinced one of my friends to do the same as me, which seemed easier than convincing him to be vegan probably would be.
Eventually, this won’t work because the charities hit a point of diminishing returns if everyone keeps eating meat, but we can probably both agree we’re not there yet.
I also have some other thoughts but maybe I should make a full Substack post soon, just curious what you think about it.
> It’s so much easier for me to donate yearly to save the equivalent amount of animal suffering
It's great that you're thinking about animals. But there's a fundamental issue with substituting donations for veganism: most animal charities focus on welfare reforms (slightly bigger cages, 'humane' slaughter) rather than challenging the underlying assumption that animals exist for our use.
This perpetuates a system where we pay to make exploitation marginally less awful while continuing to fund the system through our food choices. It's a bit like donating to anti-slavery organizations while still buying products made with slave labor.
Going vegan isn't just about reducing suffering—it's about rejecting the idea that animals are ours to use in the first place, regardless of how 'nicely' we treat them. The most effective thing you can do is align your daily choices with your stated values, rather than outsourcing your ethics to charity.
Animal rights lawyer/philosopher Gary Francione has been making this argument (convincingly, in my opinion) for decades.
People also exist for our use. Effective living happens when mutually beneficial using occurs. Other animals don't have much to offer humans so their lives will continue to be curtailed because e.g. they live in a habitat we want to use and they can't really offer us anything in return.
If you want something, and the other person isn't willing to give it or there is nothing you can offer in return, you generally don't just take it by force.
You don't rob an old lady when you want her ring but she doesn't want to mutually benefit by naming a price to sell it for.
Thank you. When I speak with vegetarians, the feeling I get is, "So close, and yet so far away...". It's hard to convince them to go vegan if they think they're already doing everything that is required of them.
Re: Your great, great, great, great…great grandfather was a single-celled organism [great post, as is this one, & thank you] ... but weren’t we all, at first, a single-celled organizsm?
If I remember correctly from biology in high school, a fertilized egg [zygote] is a single-celled organism until it divides.
When I was in my early 20’s I thought that people dunking on my ideas and not debating me was some kind of vindication of my beliefs. As I got older I realized that it meant no such thing. They just think it’s so stupid they don’t want to debate you. Which doesn’t mean they’re right but it also doesn’t indicate you’re right.
You don’t have a grasp on anything real in the world because you don’t have much experience. Everything you believe is based on abstractions. People with experience have knowledge you don’t have and often can’t articulate well. So when you start talking about these bizarre ideas that contradict their own experiences, they roll their eyes at you instead of going in to debate mode. Because they can’t explain to you what life is like.
Of course, you’re going to dismiss my comment and not listen to what I say because you’re young and arrogant but hopefully you learn better at some point.
Then why not engage with greater respect? I agree it goes both ways, but it would seem this merits an attempt to spark a race to the top in respectful conduct. That seems far healthier and productive.
I won't defend my bad behavior except to say it was funny and I enjoyed doing it. And I think there has to be a place for this kind of (mild!) ribbing in intellectual discourse. People say far meaner things to me all the time and I don't usually get all bent out of shape about it.
Hmm, are there any limits? If Holocaust Deniers come around, are we always to engage in extensive debate with them about survivor's memories and the possible killing capacity of concentration camps? Can one ever express contempt for "Race Science", or only if it's not expressed in an educated idiom? What about all the people who think killing authors like Salman Rushdie is a religious duty? Etc. etc.
I grant your point that these people are not doing detailed rebuttals. But what of the other direction? There is a lot of sheer craziness around (which I know is a derogatory term which does not engage their arguments, sigh).
Personally, I have very little patience these days for "debating" anti-vaccine lunatics. Am I a bad person for that?
> Having a serious dialogue about insect importance was clearly too much for him. He’s not in the business of giving arguments, and would get eviscerated in a debate on the subject. He merely feels visceral disgust towards certain positions, pulls together a hackneyed insult, and flees from real disagreement.
Insult and snark aside, that's not necessarily bad. Life is not a debate club, and that's a good thing.
And we should be viscerally disgusted towards certain positions. Rationality only gets you so far, it's a useless instrument without a non-rational starting point. Besides, you can rationalize and defend everything and anything.
The trick is they have to be the right positions to feel disgusted about.
The problem is that for a lot of important things, this can't be settled via debate. Getting it right is either instictive or cultural.
And the real kicker is that there's no final authority validating whatever you come up with.
I did not do anything of the sort. My comment was only to establish the presence of a "dunk" beyond mere self-ridicule. The analogy to heliocentrism was just to illustrate a point. If you reposted the content of a flat earther with a caption that would read as neutral in other contexts you would be dunking on them as well.
You're talking about the validity of BB'S claims which are, again, a different issue entirely.
Perhaps you're saying the comparison to heliocentrism lends BB undue credit. This might be true, but the comparison to a view crazy in the past but accepted today was necessary to establish that the subtle dunking of seemingly self-ridiculing ideas is still dunking. Like, if I had used flat earthers as my example, a simple retort might go "yeah, BB's views and that of flat earthers are intrinsically self-ridiculing. No dunking is present."
You critique is left wanting. You claim that anyone can pull this sort of "sophistry" using "made-up numbers". Well then, here's a simple test: engage in the sophistry and fake number generating yourself. Can you make an original but similarly robust argument for some unintuitive moral conclusion?
Also, your critique isn't actually substantive. It appeals to the same common sense used against Copernicus. You have yet to establish a robust metric to distinguish the flat earthers from the heliocentrists.
The people who point and sputter do so to enforce views as being morally unacceptable. If enough people stopped pointing and sputtering at something like "slavery is bad", they might start thinking slavery is good or just neutral, because there is nothing objective that says that slavery is bad. In the USA, the slave-owners were never convinced that slavery is bad because of really good and sound arguments, but because the non slave owners invaded and massacred and starved them until they were forced to agree on that point.
I continue to find this very funny and I won't be made to feel bad about it.
Consider: what you are describing as mockery was me posting two screenshots of essays you yourself wrote, and a picture of your face currently on the front page of your substack publication. My entire commentary was limited to "Checking in on the rationalists." That's it! That's the dunk!
The reason it was a dunk is because this content is self-ridiculing. I didn't even need to explicitly mock it, just calling attention to it was enough for over 1,600 readers as of the time of this writing to come to their own conclusion about its absurdity.
Also by your own logic, since I have 20x as many followers as you on twitter, you should be thanking me for the exposure. Happy to help any time.
We agree about your conduct. Our dispute is simply about whether, as I suggest, it makes you a coward and deeply unserious person.
It obviously does not. Declining to expend the time and effort to engage you on the level you demand is simple preference. You don't have a right to my time and energy, and the standard you have invented here is just that, your own invention.
What's funny about this is you're exactly echoing a string of young earth creationists in the 90s (I know you weren't alive yet, alas) who would constantly call out scientists to debate them and declare them cowards and frauds (and themselves correct) for declining.
Now, I agree that my behavior was rude. But it was also funny. I was having a good time. And it brought joy to lots of people on twitter as well. Can you state with certainty that you suffered more than I and others enjoyed ourselves at your expense?
Well as I said, I don’t really mind the ridicule. But the combination of ridicule plus be unwilling and unable to defend the wrongness of a view in debate is pretty embarrassing. It’s just weaponising the fact that lots of people reject a view!
To be fair to you, my argument that I wouldn’t enjoy debating someone with such an alien value system and with whom I disagree strongly on fundamental principles and didn’t want to spend time on it, now looks much weaker given how much time I have spent talking about this. I could have written a pretty persuasive counter essay in this time!
But to be fair to me: I still categorically reject the demand to perform at someone else’s command as a matter of iron principle. If this requires you to imagine this is simply an excuse for incompetence on my part, you are free to do so. In fact I encourage you to imagine that the pleasure I derive from sticking to this principle is several orders of magnitude larger than the frustration you feel in being unable to pin me down. We all came out ahead in the end, goodness has been served.
If you’re going to talk shit, you should bring the receipts.
That's a fair criticism in general
Granted your explanation of why you won’t debate Matthew, do you grant, in addition, that if you did you would lose very badly?
I disagree that he and I could arrive at a shared understanding of who won.
No, sure, I mean, one or both of you might be self-deceived about who performed better for reasons of ego, pride, etc. But would you grant that if you did debate him (granting that this isn’t the reason you won’t debate him), you would in fact bellyflop performance-wise, independent of who is closer to being right on insects?
Obviously I would not grant that, no. I won't make any claims here to being a world class debater, but I feel confident I could deliver a performance well above bellyflop territory. I am an expert shitposter and can express myself well in writing.
But again, who would even declare a fair winner in such a contest? I have the massive advantage of arguing against an extremely unpopular opinion that nearly everyone finds alienating and gross even if they accept the logic of the argument to some extent. Surely the overwhelming majority of twitter observers would declare me the victor of such an exchange, but one supposes that mere popular vote isn't what you mean by "win" in this context.
"it's not my job to educate you"
You get it
This is truly one of the most hilarious threads I’ve seen. Are you sure this isn’t a performance staged for the benefit of readers? Thanks for the utility
I don't think you can write comments like these and retain the "non-sneering" high ground. If you engage in morality via linear algebra across a quintillion-row-sparse-matrix and end up at a kind of absurd place, like you did in your insect welfare piece, you have to be able to laugh at yourself a little!
Well as I said in the article, I think insulting people is fine if they're particularly noxious, so long as it's in addition to substance rather than in place of substance.
I think you've drawn the lines of impoliteness directly in front of where your feet happen to be placed.
I did start it, I probably would be pretty mad in his shoes too
Still doing everything but providing an argument on the object level.
Well yeah, I'm too scared, didn't you read the article?
No but seriously why do you actually disagree with Bentham? Like what actually is your argument beside “it feels icky to care about bugs”?
Philosophy is hard and it’s not a forgone conclusion that Bentham is right!
These takes that Bentham would win in a debate read as: "since everyone is fine using utilitarianism as a moral starting point, I believe that Bentham would win in showing the internal consistency of his view that we should apply some moral calculus to insect suffering." Of course he would win an argument where everybody accepted his starting moral framework!
Not to put words in Kitten's mouth here, but I think many people simply don't accept that premise in the first place. Even in the theoretical argument with a meat-eater in his piece, his strawman debater is arguing on what the right number is to apply a calculus of value of humans vs. insects. A lot of people just fundamentally disagree that you can / should / need to apply any sort of calculus whatsoever to insect utility vs. humans.
You can have a moral philosophy which is entirely self-contained in a human-centric frame. What is good for the world is what is good for humans. And you could even apply some utilitarian thinking within that (i.e., preventing the death of all insects in the world might be worth a few people dying in the abstract, but from a consequentialist view of impacts on humans / humanity as a whole).
Further, from a consequentialist point of view, you could (and I would) argue that rationalist types spending their chips arguing for shrimp welfare just makes the moral philosophy behind it even less popular with people writ large and might even be explicitly self-defeating.
1. I don’t understand why you’re attempting to make this about utilitarianism/consequentialism. On almost any reasonable view of ethics suffering is bad and reducing a lot of it is good. If we have good reason to believe insects suffer, then that’s bad too. Plenty of non-consequentialist philosophers, such as Michael Huemer, understand and accept this.
2. You say that “A lot of people just fundamentally disagree that you can / should / need to apply any sort of calculus whatsoever to insect [and non-human animal] utility vs. humans.”
Well yes, I agree. I know a lot of people think this. This is what we’re trying to debate. Bentham listed many *arguments* as to why he thinks this view as wrong. If you wish to continue holding that view while arguing in good faith you must actually *address* the specific arguments Bentham made; you cannot just reassert your original claim!
Here are some examples of the sorts of argument you must address directly:
Bentham says that pain matters not because of the level of intelligence of the being that’s experiencing it but because it hurts. He gives many intuition pumps about this, referring to severely mentally disabled people and babies. He also points to many biases that warp peoples’ intuitions about insect welfare.
> 1. I don’t understand why you’re attempting to make this about utilitarianism/consequentialism. On almost any reasonable view of ethics suffering is bad and reducing a lot of it is good.
If we remove the word "reasonable", which begs the question, not really. Some popular ethical codes say that suffering is a necessary part of life, or that it helps humble us and make us better.
You don't even need to go religious to get those views. Even someone like Nietchze, opposed to religion, would say that life without a certain amount of suffering is meaningless. Or some hardened guy would say it's good because it "builds character". To a certain degree of course - but that's already an acknowledgement that not "all suffering is bad and reducing it is always good".
And a meat lover could say that life without the slaughter of real pigs (no lab meat would do) for his daily breakfast bacon is worse than one with that in it. That's totally utilitarian - for him and his goals.
I disagree with BB on a whole host of issues. But when somebody argues (with some plausibility) that there's a very serious moral issue which most of us are neglecting, it seems a bit weird to respond by laughing at them. It's not immediately obvious how this differs from somebody responding to articles about climate change with "lol these people think that cow farts are going to destroy the world!" If you think that would be a silly response, then you should see why one might find your response to BB a bit silly as well.
What's the serious moral issue with insect suffering when it comes to my own actions? I am neither responsible for nor able to stop the vast majority of insect suffering - the vast majority of it happens at the whim of other insects, plants, or animals. It's not clear what one is supposed to do to help here. Arrest insectivorous mammals? Try to eradicate parasites that afflict insects (many of which are also insects)? Spray herbicides to kill all carnivorous plants?
This is like positing that there's a planet out there where billions of human-tier animals suffer every day and then asking me to care about this "serious moral issue".
Something that seems to be left unsaid is that the easiest way to end insect suffering would to eradicate all insects. But then we've arrived at the efilist idea of morality and I'm happy to reject that without further consideration or comment. Call me a moron if you wish.
BB has another post on this very issue (see section #3 in particular): https://benthams.substack.com/p/insect-suffering-is-the-biggest-issue
You'll notice that the recommended actions (i.e. donate to charities and support urbanization) don't involve adopting an "efilist idea of morality."
Again, it's one thing to disagree with a view, and another thing to neglect what the view's proponent(s) have actually said about it.
One of the recommendations in that article is to avoid composting in favor of throwing out food in airtight bags which are then incinerated. This is to avoid the tragedy of the compost pile heating up and killing microorganisms growing in the food waste. I mean, it's beyond parody.
Firstly, the claim isn't that you should avoid composting just so as to save the microorganisms. The claim is that you should avoid worm-bin composting to avoid possible suffering for worms and other bugs (which are not microorganisms). Here's the link from the article: https://reducing-suffering.org/food-waste/
Microorganism suffering is mentioned, but the main focus is on bigger organisms (e.g. worms and bugs)!
Secondly, I fail to see why this is "beyond parody": if there's some chance that these creatures can suffer (which BB provides evidence for), and you can avoid doing things which might cause them to suffer (with no major inconvenience to yourself, mind you), then why in the world wouldn't you do it?
I'd also like to mention - I visited your substack and at a glace I saw a lot of very thoughtful and insightful posts. I am trying to hold back on insulting you or BB or the other commentators here unfairly. I'm sure that if we met in physical space we would get along well.
However, the particular "large N small probability" type of moral reasoning that leads one to ruinous conclusions.
I was imagining worms and bugs as belonging to the category “microorganisms”, sorry for the imprecise language. Replace "microoganisms" with "small invertebrates and worms" in my original comment and I will stand by it equally strongly.
The linked article lists worm bin composting as the worst option, but *all other composting* as worse than the gold star option of sealing food waste in plastic bags bound for the incinerator.
It’s not just a minor inconvenience. Were this idea to be taken seriously, all food waste would be destroyed instead of allowing the nutrients to be recycled into nature.
I want to stress: I do understand the argument, I just think it’s wrong.
> Secondly, I fail to see why this is "beyond parody": if there's some chance that these creatures can suffer (which BB provides evidence for), and you can avoid doing things which might cause them to suffer (with no major inconvenience to yourself, mind you), then why in the world wouldn't you do it?
Because they place insignificant value in their suffering or not, and understand opportunity costs.
BB's content may be "self-ridiculing" for the same reason heliocentrism was "self-ridiculing" in the past. So the screenshots plus the caption "Checking in on the rationalists" might not register as a traditional "dunk," but the "dunk" is still there; it's just communicated by invoking a wider cultural intuition instead of being directly stated.
Nonsense. Heliocentrism had some serious conceptual problems which were debated at the time. They were resolved, but the sort of fairy-tale we're told that it was obvious, is just wrong if you study the history.
I know. My objection isn't contingent on heliocentrism's obviousness.
Yeah but you can play this game with any argument and example. Maybe BB is right, or maybe he’s self ridiculing in the same way that flat earthers are and not worth engaging
Not really. All I sought to prove with the analogy was the presence of a "dunk" contra the original comment. When you propose that BB's views are akin to that of a flat earther's, you are talking about the validity of his claims—a different issue entirely.
To determine if some view is worth discussing, you can consult various heuristics. For example, BB is studying philosophy while flat earthers are often random people. BB has written intelligently on a number of subjects, whereas flat earthers rarely if ever contribute any meaningful to any conversation.
That a claim is "self-ridiculing" alone says little about the claim itself.
Sure and I guess that’s my point, you’re interpreting the fact his claim is self ridiculing in the most charitable way possible saying BB is right because he’s a smart philosopher not some dumb random person. This elitism is often found among philosophers and it’s often justified, but modern philosophers really are mostly sophists and seen as useless by most of the public. While I think that’s not totally fair when you deny or explain away consciousness w/o explanation, have stupid ethical arguments using fake units anyone can make up, and appeal to “intuitions” which any normal person can all see are totally dumb then I have to say the ridicule is more “flat earth” than Copernicus
I did not do anything of the sort. My comment was only to establish the presence of a "dunk" beyond mere self-ridicule. The analogy to heliocentrism was just to illustrate a point. If you reposted the content of a flat earther with a caption that would read as neutral in other contexts you would be dunking on them as well.
You're talking about the validity of BB'S claims which are, again, a different issue entirely.
Perhaps you're saying the comparison to heliocentrism lends BB undue credit. This might be true, but the comparison to a view crazy in the past but accepted today was necessary to establish that the subtle dunking of seemingly self-ridiculing ideas is still dunking. Like, if I had used flat earthers as my example, a simple retort might go "yeah, BB's views and that of flat earthers are intrinsically self-ridiculing. No dunking is present."
Your critique is left wanting. It doesn't provide much substantively—you simply assert sophistry and fake numbers.
That’s fair that I sort of asserted sophistry without much backing up here but that’s a larger conversation about modern v classical philosophy. However I also think you’re incorrectly separating the truth of the claim from the aspect of “dunking.” You say that flat earthers are intrinsically self dunking but provided no evidence as to why BBs aren’t except the fact he’s a philosopher. You’re also conflating scientific progress, which is objective and discovered with the scientific method, with moral progress, which is not validated in the same way and thus prone to errors.
Honestly, I have a very hard time agreeing with the importance of insect suffering, but I don't get the reason for dunking in it. It's still a thought-provoking argument that doesn't really have an easy rebuttal when you read it. I'd be worried if we genuinely started to organise society around insect welfare, but as a hypothetical philosophical argument, why are you so dismissive and antagonistic to it?
Accurate non-dunk application of "postmodern right" in a essay against dunking is the most meta thing I've read today. I'd "heart" this essay twice if I could.
I agree. I think in general the way to dunk on your view of shrimp and bug welfare is to point out all the other ways we can waste time with what I call "small odds large N" hacking. This genre is just fundamentally flawed as a way to deploy concern and scarce attention in the world.
For example, we could use the Drake equation to suggest there are enormous numbers of living beings outside our purview on Earth. This unthinkable number of creatures with a capability to suffer, are out in the universe, suffering and reproducing themselves and thus their conscious suffering. They easily rival all bugs, hell, even all microscopic organisms on Earth that are suffering. Their N size is just that much bigger.
Given the main person who is really pushing the envelope to actually travel to these planets with living beings suffering and end their misery is Elon Musk, you have no choice but to ignore his decisions on PEPFAR. In fact, you have a moral obligation to shut up every single person complaining about the consequences of Elon Musk on PEPFAR or anything else in American society, so that Musk retains more popularity than he otherwise would with casual investors and can work to delivering us actual access to these suffering creatures, most of which are not on Earth. The odds mixed with the large N size of most living creatures suffering not being on Earth compel you to prioritize them to this extent.
"Well I don't like this selective assumption of the Drake equa-" nope, as long as I can theorize there is a reasonable small % odds it is correct that most living beings exist outside Earth and suffer, you have to go along. Sorry, those are the rules!
You can see how this is a dorm room pot conversation and nobody serious should stop complaining about PEPFAR on these grounds. Yet it's fundamentally of a genre with the bug ethics where we have to make claims about suffering we simply do not have much serious evidence to suggest or comprehend on par with our own experiences and then use the low odds to large N hack to make this the biggest moral problem on Earth. In fact, our time and resources are scarce, and we can only declare so many things the biggest moral problem.
The Drake equation should easily qualify to suggest Elon Musk could behave *much worse* than he currently does, and you have to support him or whoever is building rockets to eventually access most of the suffering beings to stop their suffering one day anyways. Of course, this kind of theorizing is exactly why some lay people think of utilitarians as superhero comic villains and generally unserious people. I think that's overkill; utilitarianism can be helpful to making moral choices. But it is worth spelling out why the folk wisdom against it has a point; you can simply deploy small odds large N hacking to all kinds of fancifully drawn out stories, to justify ridiculous and dehumanizing behavior. It doesn't take too much thought, and in fact, being smarter makes it easier to cook up more of them all the time. Smart people should deploy their intelligence to better things instead!
EDIT: Softened my anti-util remarks here, it is useful.
great comment
Agreed. Utilitarianism can always be hacked
"It’s easy to mock the insect welfare people, but much harder to explain why we should be totally indifferent to a quantity of agony that outstrips all the suffering in human history every single week."
I mean, I'm a selfish POS, but for the rest of us:
1. Seriously taking insect welfare into account, outside of cases like shrimp (who are crusteaceans, but I digress) and other food animals where we could just switch to veganism (something that's already argued by many EAs and is practiced already), would require major sacrifices by humanity. Theoretically we should take down those malaria nets, because the suffering of the mosquitoes denied their blood is greater than the people they infect with malaria, not to mention locusts eating crops and cockroaches eating our garbage. We should all live in roach-infested dwellings, because the welfare of the roaches outweighs our own. It suddenly matters a lot whether an insect is worth 1/1000 a human or 1/1,000,000 a human, and I wonder whether the small fraction of people disposed to care could agree on that.
2. Pragmatically speaking, as you point out, people have a major disgust response to insects (and arthropods in general), similar to that with feces, corpses, or spoiled food, and for the same reason: they spread disease. This makes sympathy for them much more difficult and is the reason 'shrimp welfare' is seen as ludicrous whereas people worried about cows and chickens are simply stereotyped as oversensitive and people who don't care about cats or dogs are seen as coldhearted. I don't think you're going to be able to shift the moral universe on insects the way people did on things like slavery and domestic abuse. Veganism has strong climate change arguments for it as well--factory farming makes a lot of CO2.
" In contrast, effective altruists never argue by cheap dunks, and are consistently among the smartest and most thoughtful groups on the internet."
I actually agree, but how effective are they? You guys were gaining a bunch of momentum and then SBF said he liked you, he got arrested for fraud, and nobody likes the movement anymore. Not that SBF's choice of EA as his moral smokescreen of choice has any real relevance to the truth value of EA's statements, but simply being logical isn't enough for most people.
FWIW I overall prefer EA to other forms of altruism; if you're going to save the world might as well be rational about how to do it. But this shrimp thing just seems to bring ridicule for no reason.
It brings ridicule because the shrimp thing is a very evocative image (which is why BB presumably chose it in the first place). Its similar to how scholasticism still gets crap about debating if angels can dance on the pin of a needle, which though now ridiculed because it was being debating rather than focusing on physics, is actually an interesting question given the nature of angels being pure intellects with no embodied nature.
I just disagree that the photo is unflattering — face card never decline!
I hadn’t realized you started writing at 17,I can’t imagine writing and posting it and I’m at that age right now. Speaks to their character that kitten grabbed a post from 3 years ago to criticize you!
> Collective meat eating causes as much suffering every few
> years as all the suffering that has ever existed in human history
Here's another example of a claim that might be unintuitive but correct: There is no morally relevant distinction between eating meat and consuming other animal products (eggs, dairy, fish). If you imply otherwise, you run the risk of lulling ovolactovegetarians (and/or pescatarians) into thinking that their job is done. You (BB) actually have a Substack post on this subject ("Ethical vegetarianism makes no sense"):
https://benthams.substack.com/p/ethical-vegetarianism-makes-no-sense
You’re right I should have probably said animal product consumption.
Out of curiosity (mostly unrelated), what’s your position on donating instead of becoming vegan? It’s so much easier for me to donate yearly to save the equivalent amount of animal suffering rather than stop eating meat and eggs and cheese, and if it saves the same amount of animals that’s good right?
I can understand that there’s also value on becoming vegan to normalize it, especially if you’re influential, but I’m not, and I’m a little suspicious claiming the signaling value is huge enough that I couldn’t overcome it if I, say, donated 2x as much. Also, I’ve convinced one of my friends to do the same as me, which seemed easier than convincing him to be vegan probably would be.
Eventually, this won’t work because the charities hit a point of diminishing returns if everyone keeps eating meat, but we can probably both agree we’re not there yet.
I also have some other thoughts but maybe I should make a full Substack post soon, just curious what you think about it.
Ideally do both but donating is more important.
> It’s so much easier for me to donate yearly to save the equivalent amount of animal suffering
It's great that you're thinking about animals. But there's a fundamental issue with substituting donations for veganism: most animal charities focus on welfare reforms (slightly bigger cages, 'humane' slaughter) rather than challenging the underlying assumption that animals exist for our use.
This perpetuates a system where we pay to make exploitation marginally less awful while continuing to fund the system through our food choices. It's a bit like donating to anti-slavery organizations while still buying products made with slave labor.
Going vegan isn't just about reducing suffering—it's about rejecting the idea that animals are ours to use in the first place, regardless of how 'nicely' we treat them. The most effective thing you can do is align your daily choices with your stated values, rather than outsourcing your ethics to charity.
Animal rights lawyer/philosopher Gary Francione has been making this argument (convincingly, in my opinion) for decades.
https://responsibleeatingandliving.com/gary-l-francione-why-veganism-matters-the-moral-value-of-animals/
People also exist for our use. Effective living happens when mutually beneficial using occurs. Other animals don't have much to offer humans so their lives will continue to be curtailed because e.g. they live in a habitat we want to use and they can't really offer us anything in return.
If you want something, and the other person isn't willing to give it or there is nothing you can offer in return, you generally don't just take it by force.
You don't rob an old lady when you want her ring but she doesn't want to mutually benefit by naming a price to sell it for.
Thank you. When I speak with vegetarians, the feeling I get is, "So close, and yet so far away...". It's hard to convince them to go vegan if they think they're already doing everything that is required of them.
Re: Your great, great, great, great…great grandfather was a single-celled organism [great post, as is this one, & thank you] ... but weren’t we all, at first, a single-celled organizsm?
If I remember correctly from biology in high school, a fertilized egg [zygote] is a single-celled organism until it divides.
The thing that's counterintuitive is that your great great great grandfather was a single-celled organism for his entire life.
When I was in my early 20’s I thought that people dunking on my ideas and not debating me was some kind of vindication of my beliefs. As I got older I realized that it meant no such thing. They just think it’s so stupid they don’t want to debate you. Which doesn’t mean they’re right but it also doesn’t indicate you’re right.
You don’t have a grasp on anything real in the world because you don’t have much experience. Everything you believe is based on abstractions. People with experience have knowledge you don’t have and often can’t articulate well. So when you start talking about these bizarre ideas that contradict their own experiences, they roll their eyes at you instead of going in to debate mode. Because they can’t explain to you what life is like.
Of course, you’re going to dismiss my comment and not listen to what I say because you’re young and arrogant but hopefully you learn better at some point.
unfortunate drama—i quite like kitten's writing.
I like BB as well, I find him quite interesting and he's a good writer. Just happens to come to some absurd conclusions.
Then why not engage with greater respect? I agree it goes both ways, but it would seem this merits an attempt to spark a race to the top in respectful conduct. That seems far healthier and productive.
I won't defend my bad behavior except to say it was funny and I enjoyed doing it. And I think there has to be a place for this kind of (mild!) ribbing in intellectual discourse. People say far meaner things to me all the time and I don't usually get all bent out of shape about it.
Hmm, are there any limits? If Holocaust Deniers come around, are we always to engage in extensive debate with them about survivor's memories and the possible killing capacity of concentration camps? Can one ever express contempt for "Race Science", or only if it's not expressed in an educated idiom? What about all the people who think killing authors like Salman Rushdie is a religious duty? Etc. etc.
I grant your point that these people are not doing detailed rebuttals. But what of the other direction? There is a lot of sheer craziness around (which I know is a derogatory term which does not engage their arguments, sigh).
Personally, I have very little patience these days for "debating" anti-vaccine lunatics. Am I a bad person for that?
> Having a serious dialogue about insect importance was clearly too much for him. He’s not in the business of giving arguments, and would get eviscerated in a debate on the subject. He merely feels visceral disgust towards certain positions, pulls together a hackneyed insult, and flees from real disagreement.
Insult and snark aside, that's not necessarily bad. Life is not a debate club, and that's a good thing.
And we should be viscerally disgusted towards certain positions. Rationality only gets you so far, it's a useless instrument without a non-rational starting point. Besides, you can rationalize and defend everything and anything.
The trick is they have to be the right positions to feel disgusted about.
The problem is that for a lot of important things, this can't be settled via debate. Getting it right is either instictive or cultural.
And the real kicker is that there's no final authority validating whatever you come up with.
I did not do anything of the sort. My comment was only to establish the presence of a "dunk" beyond mere self-ridicule. The analogy to heliocentrism was just to illustrate a point. If you reposted the content of a flat earther with a caption that would read as neutral in other contexts you would be dunking on them as well.
You're talking about the validity of BB'S claims which are, again, a different issue entirely.
Perhaps you're saying the comparison to heliocentrism lends BB undue credit. This might be true, but the comparison to a view crazy in the past but accepted today was necessary to establish that the subtle dunking of seemingly self-ridiculing ideas is still dunking. Like, if I had used flat earthers as my example, a simple retort might go "yeah, BB's views and that of flat earthers are intrinsically self-ridiculing. No dunking is present."
You critique is left wanting. You claim that anyone can pull this sort of "sophistry" using "made-up numbers". Well then, here's a simple test: engage in the sophistry and fake number generating yourself. Can you make an original but similarly robust argument for some unintuitive moral conclusion?
Also, your critique isn't actually substantive. It appeals to the same common sense used against Copernicus. You have yet to establish a robust metric to distinguish the flat earthers from the heliocentrists.
The people who point and sputter do so to enforce views as being morally unacceptable. If enough people stopped pointing and sputtering at something like "slavery is bad", they might start thinking slavery is good or just neutral, because there is nothing objective that says that slavery is bad. In the USA, the slave-owners were never convinced that slavery is bad because of really good and sound arguments, but because the non slave owners invaded and massacred and starved them until they were forced to agree on that point.
Does this count as a dunk attempt: https://backcountrypsych.substack.com/p/misspecified-utilitarians-hate-existence
This could all be boiled down to "Never post about just a headline."