> "When arguing on your blog, you can talk about whatever you want—the more viscerally outrageous the better."
Though, I'd add, it's great to at least *sometimes* discuss what matters most (as you do!). Directing social attention can have high stakes if one has a decent audience!
There should be some kind of online tool/dashboard where you can see at a glance the candidates for the greatest suffering on the planet at any given period (and some of the numbers around salient political issues for comparison).
Epistemics matter. The problem isn't the 200 trans athletes per se, it's that the leadership classes ("Elite Human Capital") can no longer say obviously true things. Better to nip that in the bud, before it spreads to more issues than it already has.
I don't know about that. Many elites seem to be re-evaluating their views right now, and that's thanks to people pushing back, arguing to change such rules.
> "A final issue that matters a lot but is majorly overestimated is climate change. Climate change likely will kill a few hundreds of thousands of people a year, making it a problem on the level of malaria. However, no reasonable action can prevent most of the warming, so at the margins, action on climate change is unlikely to have a huge effect. Despite this, about half of Americans persist in irrationally believing that climate change will kill every human on earth, and they spend a good amount of time being terrified about it."
I'm not sure this is true. Climate change is likely going to be an issue with similar severity to many other incredibly massive global problems because of the second-order ways that it raises existential risk and increases wild animal suffering. This is because climate change will displace huge percentages of the global population, making competition for scarce resources much harder, and raising the risk of conflict between states that could escalate as a result. Wild animals also suffer massively as a result of rising global surface temperatures- ocean acidification from carbon being absorbed into sea lanes means that copepods, shrimp, and fish live much shorter and worse lives, to say nothing of the intensified competition for resources leading to evolutionary pressure towards disutilitarian ends.
I'm always a bit frustrated when other EA's act like this about the climate. Yes, rising temperature *alone* will not kill the entire human race, but it makes just about every other problem in society dramatically worse. Seems like the kind of thing we shouldn't be saying 'mostly doesn't matter.'
Lastly, saying 'no reasonable action can prevent most of the warming' seems either patently false or just equivocating over the definition of 'reasonable'. We are currently on track for 1.5-2.5 degrees of warming. If we take decisive action, we can limit that to the lower bound of 2 degrees or so. The difference between that and say, 3-4 degrees is pretty astronomical in terms of global health and welfare, along with the survival of lots of species.
Even if it does not directly cause extinction, it makes fighting x-risks dramatically harder (and also raises the likelihood of many of them). I dunno, I'm ok with a bit of alarmism here!
Mixed bag this one… more consideration might be owed to derivative effects and complicating factors as opposed to bean counting the immediate utility of political outcomes
Where are you getting your alligator death stats from? Last year five people in the US were killed by alligators, while in the same year (as far as I can calculate) the cops shot about 113 black people "while fleeing" (i.e. not in self defence). This poor attention to detail doesn't speak well for your embrace of flippancy here. The US cops kill civilians at a much higher rate than other western nations— I don't live there, but it seems from the outside it seems like that might matter.
The alligator comparison is apt actually as it demonstrates how you're deploying the fallacy of relative privation here. In general, in the US, you are not at risk from being killed by a gator. But if you take up swimming in a bayou because Bentham's Bulldog told you gator deaths were a non-issue, you'd probably be fine most days but no one would be surprised if you were eventually killed as, after all, gators really are quite dangerous up close! Similiarly, most people (including most unarmed black men) are not going to be shot by the police in their day-to-day business, but for people who interact with the police, being shot (often in the back!) is a real risk.
(And that's all without going into how trustworthy the stats are given the widely attested practises of cops planting weapons and giving false testimony.)
The overall statement, I think, is accurate: people judge risk poorly. However, a few things:
"This opposition is fueled by innumeracy".
Or maybe they don't want to say it, but figure more foreigners=more refugees, and we've seen how popular immigration is lately?
Also, I don't think global warming is as impossible as you claim. Pay off the developing world to make less carbon so they can industrialize cleanly and you might actually make a dent in it.
Humans are really not very rational and are tribal monkeys that like their own kind and don't care much about others. And please don't take people at their word; Machiavelli could have told you that 500 years ago and Sun Tzu 1000 years before him.
Good article. Just one thing : it's very unclear that giving to effective human charities is a good thing. Because the average human causes the death and suffering of 1000's of sentient beings throughout their lifetime, so saving them might be a bad idea.
More details in this article I wrote on this topic :
I feel like foreign born terror attacks is really something you should care about, as while since 9/11 there have been only very few deaths, they seem like a prime vector for nuclear/bio risk killing millions. What matters is the threat they pose in the future not the past impact. Also consider 2nd order effects and such (like air travel disruption post 9/11).
Also I suspect (albeit I am not certain) that your standard for why Israel/Palestine is less of an issue - that the US changes little; applies just as well for Yemen, it is not funded by US weaponry, its funded by Saudis who might use US weaponry, but if they couldn't would probably just buy weapons from elsewhere (or on the other side by Iran/locals that don't use US wepons anyway).
From my cursory knowledge of military history I'm not convinced that better weaponry leads to deadlier wars (see 30 years war or mongol conquests) except where there is a massive disparity leading to quick victory.
Regarding climate change, perhaps half of Americans are terrified because they believe RATIONALY that climate change will dramatically impact or kill a few billions of people, and because they believe that reasonable action can prevent most of the warming.
New reader man, disagree on a bunch of stuff, but you always make me think which is awesome
Question:
Youve mentioned a handful of times how all this suffering is happening throughout hte beings of the world all the time. How do you reconcile that with the world not being some awful place. Ive thought about it a bunch and I kind of just assume there is a lot I dont or cant understand about the way things should be in a Leibnizian sense. But very curious your thoughts
Keep doing what you are doing man, love your stuff. Also I know you arent that active on Twitter and it can be a cess pool haha but it seems to me the best way to spread these convos / ideas
Should we say that child sex dolls/robots and *cartoon/animated* child porn are likewise not a big deal because the number of people interested in such dolls, robots, and drawings/images isn't very large? Especially considering that given our lack of knowledge as to how they affect a desire to have sex with actual children, we should presume a null effect for this without more evidence?
That sounds right to me. In general it seems like you should have a strong prior against restricting people's freedom unless you have strong evidence that doing so is necessary to prevent harm or to promote some greater good.
We could also try to gather more evidence by extrapolating from the effects of increased availability of regular porn. Porn has become increasingly more widely available over the past couple decades, however there has not been a corresponding increase in sexual assault. If anything, it's gone down. So it seems likely that the effect is either null or positive (by positive I mean that it reduces the amount of people who are assaulted). If *cartoon/animated* child porn has similar effects it is probably also null or positive.
Yes; exactly! We know that child sex dolls would provide a satisfactory sex life for some minor-attracted people. That's a clear benefit. But the potential harms are speculative and highly uncertain. With a clear benefit and highly uncertain potential harms, it makes much more sense to support this in the absence of more, clear evidence indicating harm.
I strongly doubt that rape fantasy roleplaying has increased actual rape either, for that matter. Or that choking roleplaying has increased actual choking. Though maybe choking in porn did result in more choking roleplaying. Who knows?
For open borders (a bit off-topic), the potential benefits to would-be migrants are very clear, but what I don't want is to see a magnification of the effects of the Great Migration on a much larger scale. The Great Migration significantly improved many African-Americans' lives, but it also resulted in Northern US cities becoming crime-ridden hellholes over the long-run, along with of course massive white flight and even middle- and upper-class black flight from there. The fear is that bringing hundreds of millions of Third Worlders to the West without huge selection could eventually result in the West stopping being an attractive destination for global cognitive elites, as well as for the West's existing cognitive elites to start moving to greener pastures in much larger numbers. And countries like the US can't do the Dubai thing due to birthright citizenship.
Cool list. One item that's missing from "things that don't matter that people care way too much about": January 6/Donald Trump's personal behavior in general. Leftists care about this so much that you could make a good case that it's been their #1 concern and talking point for the past four years, possibly the past eight. Seems like a pretty big error in judgment.
>What other issues might be extremely morally important? Well, if you’re pro-life, abortion probably ranks way up there, as it involves the systematic murder of tens of millions of babies. I, however, am not pro-life.<
You said you oppose abortion "at the point that the child becomes conscious" or something like that. Do you know when exactly that is, and how many abortions occur after that point every year?
>You might ask: what arguments do people give against caring about the problems that affect populations ten or hundreds of times the population of humans, that produce more suffering every few years than has existed in all of human history. Well, primarily people reject these conclusions merely by sneering. One almost never gets anything bordering on a cogent argument against such projects.<
This is so dishonest it hurts. You've given no logical arguments for why people have to care about the suffering of animals, or of people with no relation to them on the other side of the planet who they'll never meet! You just implicitly assert that it is self-evidently "cogent" to care about these things and characterize people with different assumptions as "sneering." But it's obviously much more intuitive *not* to care about such distant concerns! Your worldview is the one that demands an extraordinary justification, as yours is the one that deviates so far from the baseline.
Jan 6 is a pretty big deal if you think about how much pain and suffering happens in countries that do not have peaceful transfers of power. Power struggles and conflicts cause a huge amount of chaos and suffering. The fact that the USA has mostly been able to avoid them is a huge achievement. Anything that pushes the USA away from that is a serious threat that needs to be smacked down hard.
I think Michael Huemer put it best when he compared it to a bus driver trying to drive a bus off of a cliff, but is stopped by the guardrails. Such a driver should never be allowed to drive the bus again. If someone said "We should still hire him, he did try to drive the bus off a cliff, but that's not the only important thing to consider, he did a good job driving the bus in many other ways" they would sound insane.
I figured someone would say something like this. This same logic applies to many or all things that Bentham's Bulldog lists as "don't matter" in this article, such as people throwing soup on priceless works of art or transgender insanity. At least one other commenter already made the obvious point, which anyone concerned about tranny stuff would probably also make, that while it may not directly harm people in a violent manner to have our ruling class going around saying that men are women, it's a very worrying trend for the future to have your rulers confidently believing in and promoting such obviously false lunacy.
We can even make an easy "bus driver" analogy out of this--if a bus driver seems competent at first glance, but then happily informs you that left is actually right and up is actually down, you'll probably hesitate before getting on his bus.
The author directly states in this comment section that he's only talking about direct effects, though. If that is the case, then all the people who say the BLM George Floyd riots were worse than January 6 are absolutely right. In terms of direct effects, the former killed many more people and destroyed much more property than the latter, after all.
We have fairly established precedent that things like stupid disruptive protests don't really have much of an effect on anything except to annoy people. There have also been many societies in history with weird ideas about gender that don't seem to have harmed their institutions at all. By contrast, there is pretty conclusive evidence that peaceful transfers of power are a cornerstone of societal health.
There have been many cases of important leaders holding deeply weird beliefs that didn't affect their ability to lead. Much of the ruling class of America in for many centuries has believed that all of humanity's hardships were caused by a woman trusting a talking snake. George Patton had some bizarre beliefs about reincarnation, but was a generally excellent tactician. It isn't automatically disqualifying for a leader to have weird beliefs as long as they are not about a topic where weird beliefs will lead directly to poor decisions. In the case of trans rights, the population of trans people is too small to have any serious effect on this country, no matter how weird beliefs about them are.
All of that is true even if I grant your premise that trans rights are obviously absurd and that no reasonable person could take them seriously. I don't grant that premise. The arguments that trans people are the gender they say they are are quite reasonable, although I grant that their proponents often make them poorly.
For me the moment when they clicked was when I was reading an issue of Doom Patrol in which Robotman was talking with a trans woman. She points out to him that no one has trouble thinking of him as a man and addressing him with male pronouns, even though he is a human brain inside a robot body, and his robot body lacks chromosomes, sex organs, or anything else masculine except its general shape. I realized that it was obvious that Robotman was still a man, and that therefore there was more to being a man or a woman than your organs or your chromosomes. Similarly, when I watched "Dragon Ball" I noticed that everyone used male pronouns when referring to King Piccolo and didn't insist that he was a queen, not a king, even though he gave birth multiple times during the show.
>All of that is true even if I grant your premise that trans rights are obviously absurd and that no reasonable person could take them seriously. I don't grant that premise.<
This is an admission that you have zero connection to reality and therefore can't be engaged in meaningful dialogue, which goes along with my point about the issues presented by steadfast belief in totally delusional nonsense. This is significantly more delusional than believing in stories about women and talking snakes; after all, we really don't know much of anything about the origin of life, the purpose of the universe, etc. But we can observe very plainly that men aren't women, just like cats aren't dogs and trees aren't rocks.
I can't trust you to properly process and understand anything that I say when you appear to be so stupid and/or insane that you're basically willing to sit here and say up is actually down. How can one reason with a person who seems genuinely unable to perceive reality on the most basic level? If I take you at your word, you're on the level of a schizophrenic at least. What I find more likely is that you know damn well that men aren't women and you're just being dishonest, which is at least as bad and probably worse. Either way, you're totally disqualified from being taken seriously about anything.
>The arguments that trans people are the gender they say they are are quite reasonable, although I grant that their proponents often make them poorly.<
This is a supremely ironic statement given that you go on to cite a cartoon where a man gives birth (I'm taking a guess that that's what happens as I haven't watched it) as evidence that men can somehow be women. Maybe you should quit trying to think about this stuff and just stick to watching cartoons.
It's really not that hard a concept to get. The best analogy I've heard is to parents. The main definition of parent is biological parents, the biological progenitor of a person. However, there also exist things like adoptive parents, stepparents, and godparents. These people are not biologically related to a child, but are still there parents in some sense because they do parent-type things. Similarly, transpeople are not biologically the gender they identify as (at least, not before a lot of medical treatments and surgery), but they are still that gender in some sense because they do that-gender-type things.
I think pretty much anyone would consider someone who insisted that adoptive or step parents "aren't really parents" to be, at best, a pedantic idiot. If they kept insisting that everyone is claiming that adopting a child rewrites their genes, it would be pretty clear that they just dont understand the argument on a very basic level, probably willfully. Most anti-trans arguments are on a similar level.
Even speaking purely about biology, it doesn't seem like it matters if someone with a male or female phenotype acquired it naturally or developed it through medical treatment and surgery. Saying that a post-op transwoman is a man seems to me like saying that someone with hair plugs is bald, or that someone who had a cheiloplasty has a hare lip.
In terms of your references to schizophrenia, I will say that anti-trans activists are definitely among the most mentally disturbed people I have had the displeasure of encountering. Many of them write in an intensely angry, aggressive style where every word they write seems to drip with evil. They often attribute all sorts of bizarre, paranoid motivations to people who disagree with them. They also seem to lack much theory of mind, as I said earlier, they often don't even seem to understand what their opponents are arguing.
The point I was making with the cartoon is that it's pretty clear that being a man or a woman doesn't have much to do with biology. People seem pretty fine with considering an alien monster that gives birth multiple times to be a man because he looks and sounds like a man and presents in a masculine way. Similarly, on Star Trek no one gets upset that people use male pronouns to refer to Commander Data, even though, being a robot, he has no chromosomes or biology at all.
If what is alleged in this article is true https://www.npr.org/2022/05/09/1097517470/trump-esper-book-defense-secretary do you think that the commander in chief of the world's strongest military saying these things is not a bad thing? You think that states misusing their monopoly on violence isn't one of the worst directly actionable things that have harmed people and led to wars in history?
I literally could not care less about what Donald Trump said. This is in accordance with the point of Bentham's article, which is to emphasize concrete, material outcomes over speculation and melodramatics.
Re: the abortion question, from what I remember the best estimates of when fetal consciousness begins is around the start of the third trimester, and the vast majority of abortions occur before then.
Note that much of this debate centers around when it can be "proven" that a fetus experiences pain. It is possible that a fetus can experience pain earlier than outside observers are able to register a physical response, although there appears to be strong evidence that at a minimum, a fetus's body can recognize and react to undesirable stimuli as early as 8 weeks.
If you've ever actually known a pregnant woman with any degree of familiarity, the idea that a child can't feel pain until the third trimester is absurd and implausible on its face. The mother (and other people who put their hands to her belly) can feel the child's movements during the second trimester and notice behavioral changes in accordance with the child's environment--for example, the child may become more active after meals, or upon drinking a cup of coffee.
I'll admit that I might be wrong, I was just going off that one source I provided. Certainly I think it's better to be conservative and cautious when it comes to taking what might potentially be a human life.
> "When arguing on your blog, you can talk about whatever you want—the more viscerally outrageous the better."
Though, I'd add, it's great to at least *sometimes* discuss what matters most (as you do!). Directing social attention can have high stakes if one has a decent audience!
There should be some kind of online tool/dashboard where you can see at a glance the candidates for the greatest suffering on the planet at any given period (and some of the numbers around salient political issues for comparison).
"Artificial intelligence, nuclear war, and artificial intelligence"
Is AI so bad it needs to be listed twice?
Epistemics matter. The problem isn't the 200 trans athletes per se, it's that the leadership classes ("Elite Human Capital") can no longer say obviously true things. Better to nip that in the bud, before it spreads to more issues than it already has.
But elites being dumb won't be addressed by changing rules governing trans in sports.
I don't know about that. Many elites seem to be re-evaluating their views right now, and that's thanks to people pushing back, arguing to change such rules.
> "A final issue that matters a lot but is majorly overestimated is climate change. Climate change likely will kill a few hundreds of thousands of people a year, making it a problem on the level of malaria. However, no reasonable action can prevent most of the warming, so at the margins, action on climate change is unlikely to have a huge effect. Despite this, about half of Americans persist in irrationally believing that climate change will kill every human on earth, and they spend a good amount of time being terrified about it."
I'm not sure this is true. Climate change is likely going to be an issue with similar severity to many other incredibly massive global problems because of the second-order ways that it raises existential risk and increases wild animal suffering. This is because climate change will displace huge percentages of the global population, making competition for scarce resources much harder, and raising the risk of conflict between states that could escalate as a result. Wild animals also suffer massively as a result of rising global surface temperatures- ocean acidification from carbon being absorbed into sea lanes means that copepods, shrimp, and fish live much shorter and worse lives, to say nothing of the intensified competition for resources leading to evolutionary pressure towards disutilitarian ends.
I'm always a bit frustrated when other EA's act like this about the climate. Yes, rising temperature *alone* will not kill the entire human race, but it makes just about every other problem in society dramatically worse. Seems like the kind of thing we shouldn't be saying 'mostly doesn't matter.'
Lastly, saying 'no reasonable action can prevent most of the warming' seems either patently false or just equivocating over the definition of 'reasonable'. We are currently on track for 1.5-2.5 degrees of warming. If we take decisive action, we can limit that to the lower bound of 2 degrees or so. The difference between that and say, 3-4 degrees is pretty astronomical in terms of global health and welfare, along with the survival of lots of species.
Was also going to post along these lines, excellent point.
I think usually it's that global warming won't cause literal human extinction, which is not exactly a high standard.
Even if it does not directly cause extinction, it makes fighting x-risks dramatically harder (and also raises the likelihood of many of them). I dunno, I'm ok with a bit of alarmism here!
Mixed bag this one… more consideration might be owed to derivative effects and complicating factors as opposed to bean counting the immediate utility of political outcomes
I was talking mostly about direct effects.
You keep repeating that alligator claim. Since 2000 there have been a total of 28 fatal alligator attacks in the US. A little more than 1 a year
Where are you getting your alligator death stats from? Last year five people in the US were killed by alligators, while in the same year (as far as I can calculate) the cops shot about 113 black people "while fleeing" (i.e. not in self defence). This poor attention to detail doesn't speak well for your embrace of flippancy here. The US cops kill civilians at a much higher rate than other western nations— I don't live there, but it seems from the outside it seems like that might matter.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_alligator_attacks_in_the_United_States
2. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/08/2023-us-police-violence-increase-record-deadliest-year-decade
The stat I referenced was about the number of unarmed black people shot. Looks like I was wrong about alligators, will fix.
The alligator comparison is apt actually as it demonstrates how you're deploying the fallacy of relative privation here. In general, in the US, you are not at risk from being killed by a gator. But if you take up swimming in a bayou because Bentham's Bulldog told you gator deaths were a non-issue, you'd probably be fine most days but no one would be surprised if you were eventually killed as, after all, gators really are quite dangerous up close! Similiarly, most people (including most unarmed black men) are not going to be shot by the police in their day-to-day business, but for people who interact with the police, being shot (often in the back!) is a real risk.
(And that's all without going into how trustworthy the stats are given the widely attested practises of cops planting weapons and giving false testimony.)
People who "interact with the police regularly" usually have an endemic pattern of criminal behavior, or know someone who does.
When you take into account all the traffic stops etc., I'm not sure that's true. But even suppose it was, this is still a non sequitur.
Endemic criminal behavior would correlate for being likely to physically resist arrest, with or without a weapon.
The overall statement, I think, is accurate: people judge risk poorly. However, a few things:
"This opposition is fueled by innumeracy".
Or maybe they don't want to say it, but figure more foreigners=more refugees, and we've seen how popular immigration is lately?
Also, I don't think global warming is as impossible as you claim. Pay off the developing world to make less carbon so they can industrialize cleanly and you might actually make a dent in it.
Humans are really not very rational and are tribal monkeys that like their own kind and don't care much about others. And please don't take people at their word; Machiavelli could have told you that 500 years ago and Sun Tzu 1000 years before him.
Based
Good article. Just one thing : it's very unclear that giving to effective human charities is a good thing. Because the average human causes the death and suffering of 1000's of sentient beings throughout their lifetime, so saving them might be a bad idea.
More details in this article I wrote on this topic :
https://benjamintettu.substack.com/p/a-critique-of-effective-altruism
I feel like foreign born terror attacks is really something you should care about, as while since 9/11 there have been only very few deaths, they seem like a prime vector for nuclear/bio risk killing millions. What matters is the threat they pose in the future not the past impact. Also consider 2nd order effects and such (like air travel disruption post 9/11).
Also I suspect (albeit I am not certain) that your standard for why Israel/Palestine is less of an issue - that the US changes little; applies just as well for Yemen, it is not funded by US weaponry, its funded by Saudis who might use US weaponry, but if they couldn't would probably just buy weapons from elsewhere (or on the other side by Iran/locals that don't use US wepons anyway).
From my cursory knowledge of military history I'm not convinced that better weaponry leads to deadlier wars (see 30 years war or mongol conquests) except where there is a massive disparity leading to quick victory.
Regarding climate change, perhaps half of Americans are terrified because they believe RATIONALY that climate change will dramatically impact or kill a few billions of people, and because they believe that reasonable action can prevent most of the warming.
New reader man, disagree on a bunch of stuff, but you always make me think which is awesome
Question:
Youve mentioned a handful of times how all this suffering is happening throughout hte beings of the world all the time. How do you reconcile that with the world not being some awful place. Ive thought about it a bunch and I kind of just assume there is a lot I dont or cant understand about the way things should be in a Leibnizian sense. But very curious your thoughts
Keep doing what you are doing man, love your stuff. Also I know you arent that active on Twitter and it can be a cess pool haha but it seems to me the best way to spread these convos / ideas
Thanks! I wrote about that a bit here https://benthams.substack.com/p/deep-theism
Should we say that child sex dolls/robots and *cartoon/animated* child porn are likewise not a big deal because the number of people interested in such dolls, robots, and drawings/images isn't very large? Especially considering that given our lack of knowledge as to how they affect a desire to have sex with actual children, we should presume a null effect for this without more evidence?
That sounds right to me. In general it seems like you should have a strong prior against restricting people's freedom unless you have strong evidence that doing so is necessary to prevent harm or to promote some greater good.
We could also try to gather more evidence by extrapolating from the effects of increased availability of regular porn. Porn has become increasingly more widely available over the past couple decades, however there has not been a corresponding increase in sexual assault. If anything, it's gone down. So it seems likely that the effect is either null or positive (by positive I mean that it reduces the amount of people who are assaulted). If *cartoon/animated* child porn has similar effects it is probably also null or positive.
Yes; exactly! We know that child sex dolls would provide a satisfactory sex life for some minor-attracted people. That's a clear benefit. But the potential harms are speculative and highly uncertain. With a clear benefit and highly uncertain potential harms, it makes much more sense to support this in the absence of more, clear evidence indicating harm.
I strongly doubt that rape fantasy roleplaying has increased actual rape either, for that matter. Or that choking roleplaying has increased actual choking. Though maybe choking in porn did result in more choking roleplaying. Who knows?
For open borders (a bit off-topic), the potential benefits to would-be migrants are very clear, but what I don't want is to see a magnification of the effects of the Great Migration on a much larger scale. The Great Migration significantly improved many African-Americans' lives, but it also resulted in Northern US cities becoming crime-ridden hellholes over the long-run, along with of course massive white flight and even middle- and upper-class black flight from there. The fear is that bringing hundreds of millions of Third Worlders to the West without huge selection could eventually result in the West stopping being an attractive destination for global cognitive elites, as well as for the West's existing cognitive elites to start moving to greener pastures in much larger numbers. And countries like the US can't do the Dubai thing due to birthright citizenship.
Cool list. One item that's missing from "things that don't matter that people care way too much about": January 6/Donald Trump's personal behavior in general. Leftists care about this so much that you could make a good case that it's been their #1 concern and talking point for the past four years, possibly the past eight. Seems like a pretty big error in judgment.
>What other issues might be extremely morally important? Well, if you’re pro-life, abortion probably ranks way up there, as it involves the systematic murder of tens of millions of babies. I, however, am not pro-life.<
You said you oppose abortion "at the point that the child becomes conscious" or something like that. Do you know when exactly that is, and how many abortions occur after that point every year?
>You might ask: what arguments do people give against caring about the problems that affect populations ten or hundreds of times the population of humans, that produce more suffering every few years than has existed in all of human history. Well, primarily people reject these conclusions merely by sneering. One almost never gets anything bordering on a cogent argument against such projects.<
This is so dishonest it hurts. You've given no logical arguments for why people have to care about the suffering of animals, or of people with no relation to them on the other side of the planet who they'll never meet! You just implicitly assert that it is self-evidently "cogent" to care about these things and characterize people with different assumptions as "sneering." But it's obviously much more intuitive *not* to care about such distant concerns! Your worldview is the one that demands an extraordinary justification, as yours is the one that deviates so far from the baseline.
Jan 6 is a pretty big deal if you think about how much pain and suffering happens in countries that do not have peaceful transfers of power. Power struggles and conflicts cause a huge amount of chaos and suffering. The fact that the USA has mostly been able to avoid them is a huge achievement. Anything that pushes the USA away from that is a serious threat that needs to be smacked down hard.
I think Michael Huemer put it best when he compared it to a bus driver trying to drive a bus off of a cliff, but is stopped by the guardrails. Such a driver should never be allowed to drive the bus again. If someone said "We should still hire him, he did try to drive the bus off a cliff, but that's not the only important thing to consider, he did a good job driving the bus in many other ways" they would sound insane.
I figured someone would say something like this. This same logic applies to many or all things that Bentham's Bulldog lists as "don't matter" in this article, such as people throwing soup on priceless works of art or transgender insanity. At least one other commenter already made the obvious point, which anyone concerned about tranny stuff would probably also make, that while it may not directly harm people in a violent manner to have our ruling class going around saying that men are women, it's a very worrying trend for the future to have your rulers confidently believing in and promoting such obviously false lunacy.
We can even make an easy "bus driver" analogy out of this--if a bus driver seems competent at first glance, but then happily informs you that left is actually right and up is actually down, you'll probably hesitate before getting on his bus.
The author directly states in this comment section that he's only talking about direct effects, though. If that is the case, then all the people who say the BLM George Floyd riots were worse than January 6 are absolutely right. In terms of direct effects, the former killed many more people and destroyed much more property than the latter, after all.
We have fairly established precedent that things like stupid disruptive protests don't really have much of an effect on anything except to annoy people. There have also been many societies in history with weird ideas about gender that don't seem to have harmed their institutions at all. By contrast, there is pretty conclusive evidence that peaceful transfers of power are a cornerstone of societal health.
There have been many cases of important leaders holding deeply weird beliefs that didn't affect their ability to lead. Much of the ruling class of America in for many centuries has believed that all of humanity's hardships were caused by a woman trusting a talking snake. George Patton had some bizarre beliefs about reincarnation, but was a generally excellent tactician. It isn't automatically disqualifying for a leader to have weird beliefs as long as they are not about a topic where weird beliefs will lead directly to poor decisions. In the case of trans rights, the population of trans people is too small to have any serious effect on this country, no matter how weird beliefs about them are.
All of that is true even if I grant your premise that trans rights are obviously absurd and that no reasonable person could take them seriously. I don't grant that premise. The arguments that trans people are the gender they say they are are quite reasonable, although I grant that their proponents often make them poorly.
For me the moment when they clicked was when I was reading an issue of Doom Patrol in which Robotman was talking with a trans woman. She points out to him that no one has trouble thinking of him as a man and addressing him with male pronouns, even though he is a human brain inside a robot body, and his robot body lacks chromosomes, sex organs, or anything else masculine except its general shape. I realized that it was obvious that Robotman was still a man, and that therefore there was more to being a man or a woman than your organs or your chromosomes. Similarly, when I watched "Dragon Ball" I noticed that everyone used male pronouns when referring to King Piccolo and didn't insist that he was a queen, not a king, even though he gave birth multiple times during the show.
>All of that is true even if I grant your premise that trans rights are obviously absurd and that no reasonable person could take them seriously. I don't grant that premise.<
This is an admission that you have zero connection to reality and therefore can't be engaged in meaningful dialogue, which goes along with my point about the issues presented by steadfast belief in totally delusional nonsense. This is significantly more delusional than believing in stories about women and talking snakes; after all, we really don't know much of anything about the origin of life, the purpose of the universe, etc. But we can observe very plainly that men aren't women, just like cats aren't dogs and trees aren't rocks.
I can't trust you to properly process and understand anything that I say when you appear to be so stupid and/or insane that you're basically willing to sit here and say up is actually down. How can one reason with a person who seems genuinely unable to perceive reality on the most basic level? If I take you at your word, you're on the level of a schizophrenic at least. What I find more likely is that you know damn well that men aren't women and you're just being dishonest, which is at least as bad and probably worse. Either way, you're totally disqualified from being taken seriously about anything.
>The arguments that trans people are the gender they say they are are quite reasonable, although I grant that their proponents often make them poorly.<
This is a supremely ironic statement given that you go on to cite a cartoon where a man gives birth (I'm taking a guess that that's what happens as I haven't watched it) as evidence that men can somehow be women. Maybe you should quit trying to think about this stuff and just stick to watching cartoons.
It's really not that hard a concept to get. The best analogy I've heard is to parents. The main definition of parent is biological parents, the biological progenitor of a person. However, there also exist things like adoptive parents, stepparents, and godparents. These people are not biologically related to a child, but are still there parents in some sense because they do parent-type things. Similarly, transpeople are not biologically the gender they identify as (at least, not before a lot of medical treatments and surgery), but they are still that gender in some sense because they do that-gender-type things.
I think pretty much anyone would consider someone who insisted that adoptive or step parents "aren't really parents" to be, at best, a pedantic idiot. If they kept insisting that everyone is claiming that adopting a child rewrites their genes, it would be pretty clear that they just dont understand the argument on a very basic level, probably willfully. Most anti-trans arguments are on a similar level.
Even speaking purely about biology, it doesn't seem like it matters if someone with a male or female phenotype acquired it naturally or developed it through medical treatment and surgery. Saying that a post-op transwoman is a man seems to me like saying that someone with hair plugs is bald, or that someone who had a cheiloplasty has a hare lip.
In terms of your references to schizophrenia, I will say that anti-trans activists are definitely among the most mentally disturbed people I have had the displeasure of encountering. Many of them write in an intensely angry, aggressive style where every word they write seems to drip with evil. They often attribute all sorts of bizarre, paranoid motivations to people who disagree with them. They also seem to lack much theory of mind, as I said earlier, they often don't even seem to understand what their opponents are arguing.
The point I was making with the cartoon is that it's pretty clear that being a man or a woman doesn't have much to do with biology. People seem pretty fine with considering an alien monster that gives birth multiple times to be a man because he looks and sounds like a man and presents in a masculine way. Similarly, on Star Trek no one gets upset that people use male pronouns to refer to Commander Data, even though, being a robot, he has no chromosomes or biology at all.
If what is alleged in this article is true https://www.npr.org/2022/05/09/1097517470/trump-esper-book-defense-secretary do you think that the commander in chief of the world's strongest military saying these things is not a bad thing? You think that states misusing their monopoly on violence isn't one of the worst directly actionable things that have harmed people and led to wars in history?
I literally could not care less about what Donald Trump said. This is in accordance with the point of Bentham's article, which is to emphasize concrete, material outcomes over speculation and melodramatics.
OK, your stance is that we should never update on the threat a leader poses until they take direct action? That's retarded.
Not necessarily, but that's the stance of this post. I do take that stance with regards to Donald Trump, more or less.
Re: the abortion question, from what I remember the best estimates of when fetal consciousness begins is around the start of the third trimester, and the vast majority of abortions occur before then.
How is that determined?
Again, just based off what I remember (this was from a slatestar codex adversarial collaboration), it was from the point where the fetus developed the brain structures necessary to register pain. Here is a link to the collaboration if you want to read the whole thing: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/19/acc-when-during-fetal-development-does-abortion-become-morally-wrong/
https://lozierinstitute.org/fact-sheet-science-of-fetal-pain/
Note that much of this debate centers around when it can be "proven" that a fetus experiences pain. It is possible that a fetus can experience pain earlier than outside observers are able to register a physical response, although there appears to be strong evidence that at a minimum, a fetus's body can recognize and react to undesirable stimuli as early as 8 weeks.
If you've ever actually known a pregnant woman with any degree of familiarity, the idea that a child can't feel pain until the third trimester is absurd and implausible on its face. The mother (and other people who put their hands to her belly) can feel the child's movements during the second trimester and notice behavioral changes in accordance with the child's environment--for example, the child may become more active after meals, or upon drinking a cup of coffee.
I'll admit that I might be wrong, I was just going off that one source I provided. Certainly I think it's better to be conservative and cautious when it comes to taking what might potentially be a human life.