Personal Updates

Graduating college and turning 22

Two personal updates:

1. I am done with my undergraduate degree. I took my last exam on the third, and unless something goes unexpectedly and horrendously wrong, I will have a degree soon.

2. I turn 22 today (I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling 22). If you are feeling generous, you can donate to the ongoing shrimp fundraiser with a 50% donation match, take the Giving What We Can pledge, and/or otherwise donate to effective charities.

It’s an odd thing to be graduating. It’s been a long time since high school—my memories of it are hazy. College is all I’ve known for a few years.

Overall, I enjoyed college. The philosophy classes were all interesting and the non-philosophy classes were all tolerable. I think at the start of my undergraduate degree I wrote badly and was very philosophically confused. Now I think I write better and am less philosophically confused. Probably relatively little of that had to do with my classes, and most had to do with thinking about philosophy.

I’ve changed my views on lots of things. I’ve become convinced:

• An intelligence explosion is plausibly imminent.

• Digital minds are where most expected future value lies.

• Shrimp matter a lot.

• Insects matter a lot.

• Probably most people’s impacts on wild animals swamp their impacts on farmed animals.

• The self-indication assumption is right.

• God exists.

• Objective-list theory is the right view of well-being, rather than hedonism.

• The bug farming industry is monumentally terrible.

• I’m more than 20 years old. Up until a few years ago, I was very skeptical of this thesis.

Some views I’ve gotten a bit less confident in but still think are right:

• The correctness of ethical veganism (it wouldn’t be shocking if reductions in wild animal number outweighed the benefits of veganism, but I think this is probably wrong).

• Most animals living bad lives (I was around 90% confident when I started college in this, and now I’m about 75% confident).

I have some weird ethical views. A lot of people told me—both years ago and more recently—that I’ll look back on those views in embarrassment and curse the day I said that bugs matter a ton! If anything, I think the trajectory has gone the other way. The more I’ve learned, the more I’ve concluded that morality is surprising and there are all sorts of weird ways our actions impact the world’s value. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards weirdness.

Some of my views have not changed. It still seems extremely obvious to me that factory farms are horrible. Even if they randomly end up better for the world because of their impact on insects—which again, I doubt—they will still be extremely pro-tanto terrible. We should all be concerned that we keep nearly all animals we eat in constant torment, forcing them to live in filth and feces, castrating them with no anesthetic, and so on.

It also seems obvious that the core ideas of effective altruism are correct. If we can prevent bad things from happening at small cost, we should do so. People on the other side of the world die because of inadequate medical care. It is cheap to save them. We should be doing far more, and the fact that we don’t is extremely bad. Failing to give to effective charities is much worse than comparatively minor sins like being rude.

My favorite year of college was the year I spent abroad in Oxford. I didn’t have very much school work that year. I just had to write three essays every two weeks about philosophy that weren’t egregiously terrible (as grading was fairly lax). If there is a single task I can perform well, it is writing philosophy essays quickly. As a result of not being busy with school, I had lots of time to read and write about what was of interest to me.

I also met a lot of amazing people when studying abroad. It’s amazing how much of a difference being surrounded by smart and capable people makes. I got to hang out with Amos Wollen, [redacted] who is a physics student who also is amazing at philosophy, [redacted] one of the few thousand best chess players in the world who is also great at philosophy, and many others. While I found the people at my home university disappointingly uninterested in philosophy and serious reflection on ideas, Oxford was full of amazing people.

When I started college, only about a hundred people read my blog. Now the number of readers is OVER 9000—and has really taken off in the last two years. Having people read my blog has been one of my favorite things about college, so thank you all! It’s particularly cool that I’ve been able to convince people of genuinely important things—the importance of shrimp welfare, the importance of insect welfare, and the importance of donating to effective human charities.

Most of my closest friends I’ve met in college. I met Amos Wollen, Noah Birnbaum, James Reilly, Joe Schmid, Apologetics Squared, and many others. I have pretty idiosyncratic interests, so being able to cast a wide net for finding friends has been very valuable. I think a lot of my friends are considerably smarter than I am, as well as morally motivated, which is a pair of excellent traits to have in friends.

What’s next? Most likely either an EA job or philosophy grad school. I don’t yet make enough money from blogging to do that full time (though you, dear reader, can help change that!) and I find my blogging doesn’t much decline when I’m busy with other things (it only takes me around 2 hours a day to blog at the high end).

All of this is to say that I’ve had the pretty typical college experience culminating—as is typical—in love of God, cod, and arthropod.