I think that’s way too low to donate a bunch of money and be an activist about a cause that involves opposing millions of other people who disagree with you, and also involves trying to make large changes to the status quo. Does that make sense to you?
I don’t think animals have “sentience” or “subjective feelings”, and I also don’t think that “sentience” or “subjective feelings” could enable suffering without ideas/wants/etc.
90% chance of doing good is too low? Damn.
I wonder what you’re donating to that has more than a 90% chance of doing good? I mean, most charities aren’t even sure what their impact is - and many, many backfire or have low impact in comparison to effective ones.
I thought of myself as risk averse, but you might be even more risk averse than me.
My other estimates on other “how to do good” topics are much lower.
Ok. Is it possible to answer the questions in message 78, but by replacing “subjective feelings” by “sentience” (since this term suits you better)? Because I want to know your opinion on that before going back to the topic of whether you need wants and knowledge creation to have suffering.
It’s too low to fight with people over a controversial issue. Avoiding fights is really important. It sounds like you don’t value things, nearly as much as I do, like social harmony and cooperation with others, instead of working against others and having them work to undo your work.
Have you read these?
Curiosity – Controversial Activism Is Problematic
Curiosity – Harmony, Capitalism and Altruism
Curiosity – Conflicts of Interest, Poverty and Rationality
Liberalism: Reason, Peace and Property · Elliot Temple
I’m not sure where the disagreement is, like if you think social peace and harmony is impossible, or not that valuable, or you have some kind of other major objection to classical liberal attitudes, or you’re just unfamiliar with them, or what.
I’m not sure that’s it. If you do animal activism, you have a ~100% chance to fight against people who are on the other side of the issue and work against you. That’s more like a guarantee rather than a small risk. I think it’s really bad when people use creativity to thwart the creativity of others, so that their creativity, as a very loose approximation, cancels out and they both lose. And it’s very bad to spend money that gets cancelled out with money spent by opponents, which just makes humanity poorer.
If you were in charge of a country, would you ever go to war when you thought there was a 10-20% chance that you would be the bad guys in the war, or is that way too risky? For simplicity, assume the war would be on another continent from where your country is.
Nothing. I only donate ideas not money. But if I had to donate money to an existing charity I’d pick vitamin A or childhood vaccines for rural Nigerians or deworming or something like that which helps human beings and lacks a large opposition. Do those seem to you like they have better than 90% odds that they’re good things?
I don’t know what questions you mean.
War very rarely gives good results, even when it’s fought for “good” reasons (and it rarely is). Invading Irak, for instance, would still have been a disaster even if it had not been done for oil.
Vitamin A is pretty good. For deworming there’s still a lot of debates as to what extent this really works - there’s been some very good results in some places, but it’s seen as more “risky” than some other things.
About the other things, I’ll try to ask in another way. Let’s imagine that you are 100% sure that animals are suffering in ways similar to humans (I don’t know what argument could lead you to have this conclusion, but let’s say you have found one).
This would mean that in the world right now, there are billions of humans, many of them suffering. But there are also hundreds of billions of animals in terrible pain because of factory farming and aquaculture with 90% of them in terrible conditions.
What changes would you make in your daily life following this?
How would you try to resolve this apparent “conflict of interest” while trying to keep social harmony?
I don’t think I’d change anything, because I think those problems are downstream of bad philosophy, and the best way to work on them is via philosophical research and education. I consider this kind of intellectual work the most important regardless of which specific causes turn out to be correct. I think people should do way more to analyze the root causes of problems instead of trying to fix symptoms.
If you specified that each animal suffers in the same amounts and ways as a human – equivalently to a human – then I’d have to at least go vegetarian if not vegan.
If I was going to work on these issues directly, as some kind of activist, then I would work on making a plan that doesn’t involve engaging in the current, standard, ongoing tribalist battles, which I think are not only unproductive but destructive. I would not leave the planning stage of my activism without having a plan that either:
or
It’s broadly bad to do anything which involves both fighting with others and also incrementally or gradually helping your side. You shouldn’t just help your side fight 1% harder or more effectively. You should look for decisive, game-changing solutions instead in order to minimize the fighting. And you should also be extremely confident you’re right and do everything you can to triple check that. Like 99.9999% credence about being right would be more appropriate, not 80-90% (the credence that your plan will succeed can be lower than your credence that you’re actually on the right side, especially if failures simply won’t affect much rather than causing disasters).
I’m not aware of any animal activism that fits (2) – that can reasonably expect to actually win and get their way in short order. If you must fight with people, you need a plan to win as quickly and decisively as possible. Most people engaged in activism on controversial politicized issues don’t even believe they have that but they proceed anyway. They also haven’t bent over backwards to do everything possible to study the other side’s reasoning, engage in discussion, make peace, etc. People on both sides don’t mind fighting nearly enough. And many of them are 99% sure they’re right, and many of those people are of course actually wrong. And ~all of them, on all sides, are wrong to fight in the way that they are. Whatever specific goals you have for society, ongoing tribalist fighting is a really bad way to try to get there.
Would that fit your definition of activism that isn’t unreasonable ?
They directly target big companies, in order to push them to move away from the worst practices in the field, like cages and boiling chicken to kill them. This doesn’t solve the problem entirely, of course, but these reforms improve the life of many animals. Only a few people in big companies are targeted.
Most people are against factory farming (at least from the polls I’ve seen in France and the US). This doesn’t mean they act on it but at the very least they don’t like seeing the pictures of how animals are raised and would prefer it not to be a thing.
So this doesn’t oppose the majority of the population (unlike the “go vegan” message, which I would say is ineffective and often tribalist). It is much more consensual, because there’s often public support for companies changing. There is also a good track record of obtaining results here - since many companies did change, and rather quickly.
Plus, the number of animals affected per dollar is huge, at least 100x more than the number of humans I could affect by donating to a charity. These large numbers compensate for the 10% uncertainty I have and the eventuality that animals suffer less than humans.
Charities that do that focused on promoting veganism before, noticed this didn’t really work, so changed their way to something more effective.
Does that fit your criteria?
As for the rest of the discussion, I have trouble seeing what I could show you that would lean you are 99% certain that animals suffer.
(well, personally I’d probably be vegetarian even I were 20% certain, given the very, very large number of beings affected - the average US consumer kills about 20 land animals, including 19 chicken, so even at 20% this would leave an excepted 4 animals suffering).
The problem I have is that I don’t see how your point can be disproved, or even verified. You explain every observation of behavior associated by suffering, even pain, by something like “it’s just software”. But if we are not to use these observations, I don’t really see anything that we could use as actual data because we can’t get in the animal’s head to verifiy.
I’m not sure I could defend to another person that I feel suffering and joy and am sentient. I’m pretty certain that it’s possible to make a philosophical reasoning that would explain away all of my feelings. So explaining that others have feelings is pretty much impossible.
I’m also not certain of the solidity of your causal chain. I still don’t see why wants or preferences would require knowledge creation. It’s pretty easy to imagine preferences and wants that exist by default - that cannot be changed but they are selected for by evolution.
The analogy you are making ended up being closer to “we can make a mindless copy of your dog, so your dog is mindless” than I though. Of course, it’s not very good argument, but it’s surprisingly hard to argue against it - very hard to disprove, even though it feels like a syllogism. There’s a lot of analogy with robots but I still feel like comparison with humans would be more warranted on the topic of sentience and suffering.
I also feel that philosophical reasoning can be interesting to explain things that are in our minds and we can verify, but has little predictive power. If there is a property specific to living brains that leads to suffering but that is not present in robots, how would you know that? We don’t even know how sentience arises and at what point - how can we say that we know animal can’t be sentient?
So, I have trouble seeing how to make progress here.
I’m doubtful about those chicken campaigns, but skimming that article it looks very meta. Where do I get details of the specific plans and activist actions being done? (I was actually planning to ask about an animal activist charity you like soon, to try to get into some specifics; I think this is a good topic.)
I think it does. Deprioritization, inaction, ignorance, inattention, willful blindness, etc., are choices people make. Society is a certain way, and you want large changes, and most people are not trying to make large changes. Just because they will claim to agree with you if you get their attention, show them certain videos, and then ask them a question does not mean they really agree, see it like you do, care like you do, etc. They’re not the same as you and you’re doing stuff they would not do and demanding changes they do not demand or seriously want. In other words, many people say they agree if prompted, but they act like they don’t agree.
And it’s not like you’re operating in some niche field, like the history of Norway from 1804-1807, where most people simply aren’t involved or relevant. Most of the population is buying meat from the factory farmed chickens. That is the way they chose to interact with the issue.
Another way to look at it is: why is it hard to get your way? There appear to be powerful, large forces at work here which you’re opposing. (It’s not just raw numbers that matter btw. Opposing a large number of people, or a few powerful people, both involve a lot of fighting. But I think the masses keep taking actions to incentivize and support the chicken factory farming, rather than being neutral. So you’re against both a lot of people who disagree with you and also a lot of concentrated power.)
I also think that big companies being awful is a widespread problem affecting ~all industries, which is downstream of some other problems. So I think the chicken activism is working on a superficial, band-aid solution for some symptoms without trying to understand and address the root causes.
Realistically, I think you’d have to learn philosophy or cite someone who did. E.g. did Popper make a relevant mistake? Am I applying Popper incorrectly? Arguing with stuff downstream of that, while not knowing Popper, is very hard. And you shouldn’t even have a conclusion about Popper before knowing what he said (yourself or at least via some expert who knew it).
You can learn how to refute solipsism and various related ideas. You can learn how to argue that humans do suffer. You can learn how to criticize abstract or philosophical ideas. But it’s all a bunch of work. If no one does that work (as I have) and disagrees with me (and shares reasoning), then probably I won’t change my mind (about this issue, due to external influence). It’s possible to do things like share an example or argument with me and then I’ll look at it and judge for myself whether it contradicts my viewpoint, but that relies on my interpretations and integrity, and even if those are perfect, it’s still very hard because you’re guessing what examples or arguments to bring up without really understanding what will work.
But I have tons of relevant ideas which could be refuted, e.g. my Popperian belief that induction is a myth that doesn’t work at all. There are hundreds of pages written about that in which someone could potentially find an error. Change my mind about it and I’d have to reconsider animals in light of a new philosophy.
Is this okay ? https://founderspledge.com/research/fp-animal-welfare
I personally really like The Humane League, especially the corporate campaigns they do. I’d like to do stuff where everybody would harmoniously agree, but I haven’t seen anything like that in the realm of cost-effective stuff for animal welfare.
Oh, yeah, it is. It’s not a big mystery.
However, I tried looking at the root causes, and changing that is devilishly hard. The root causes are in the structure of the economic system, with its incentives, plus a mix of psychology, complexity, status…
Improving the average level of rationality of humanity seems even harder.
So I prefer working on band-aids that actually show some results, instead of extremely big changes in the global system or human psychology. Not because they are not important, but because the attempts to solve that have failed - and it’s not clear why I’d succeed where so many failed.
Ok, I think we have a problem here - that you might have encountered before.
The problem is that the positions you take are extremely hard to refute - not because they’re necessarily right (that’s hard to know), but because they go into unverifiable territory pretty quickly.
I’ll try to summarize a few things here:
From the list above, I hope you will understand that the default position people will have about your argument is a certain dose of skepticism.
You make some interesting points using philosophy, but I must add that I have some skepticism in the predictive value of philosophy. There are just so many ways a perfectly logical argument in the real world can turn out to not work at all in the real world that I’m skeptical about these reasonings. I prefer what we can test and gather data on.
I’ll also share some feedback here, you are free to accept it or not. As the discussion went on, I found it very hard to see whether it was possible to change your mind at all, no matter if my arguments were good or not. I wonder if this might have been the case even on another topic.
This is because you make arguments that are, in general, very hard to disprove. They are often very abstract, or unverifiable, or drawing on philosophical standpoints that are hard to evaluate. As your standards of discussion are very specific (like requiring a knowledge of Popper), I also fear that very few people can provide you with feedback you will accept. This might make it hard for you to update.
I’ll just do a check to this whether this is really the case or if I’m wrong. Have you changed your mind on any important topic, say, in the last 2 years?
When I say an important topic, I mean something that is linked to a core value of yours, something that you had as a default assumption for a long time. Something that led you to change your behavior on a point.
Have you changed your position on something like that?
I’ll just do a check to this whether this is really the case or if I’m wrong. Have you changed your mind on any important topic, say, in the last 2 years?
When I say an important topic, I mean something that is linked to a core value of yours, something that you had as a default assumption for a long time. Something that led you to change your behavior on a point.
(I’m pointing from an iPad where the regular quoting functionality doesn’t work.)
Maybe these are what you are looking for:
https://mail.curi.us/2514-how-i-misunderstood-tcs
https://mail.curi.us/2464-david-deutsch-books-unendorsement
Ok - this could do. Interesting.
Oh, and merry christmas ! 
This is a lot of big topics at once. I’ll try giving brief replies.
Cause Area Report: Corporate Campaigns for Animal Welfare, p 13, section 2.2
Alternatively, advocates can launch social media campaigns against companies that refuse to engage.[14] These campaigns can give consumers – who are often unaware of the problem – information about animal treatment in the production chain, creating negative publicity for companies. This creates a PR incentive for companies to address the issue.[15]
This kind of campaign:
This is just the kind of tribalist fighting I think is counter-productive. You’re turning the companies into enemies. You’re getting them into a defensive mode, by attacking them, which makes it harder to reason with them.
You’re trying to control their behavior without changing their minds. You’re trying to, in a limited, partial way, turn them into your slaves, who act against their own ideas, and instead act on your ideas.
Nothing about this is seeking social harmony or rational persuasion. It’s just more of the ongoing tribalist fighting that has been plaguing society. It’s part of the problem. It does a ton of harm.
I’d like to do stuff where everybody would harmoniously agree, but I haven’t seen anything like that in the realm of cost-effective stuff for animal welfare.
Because ~everyone on ~all sides isn’t looking/trying/aiming for that.
Giving up on productive solutions because they’re hard, and instead fighting with people counter-productively, is what most people do and that is how we got into this mess and stay in it.
So I prefer working on band-aids that actually show some results
I think the results of coercing human beings, and getting them to hate you (more), are negative results.
The broad world situation is there’s a massive shortage of anyone trying to be an ambitious, rational intellectual who deals with root cause problems. You’re just one more person who isn’t trying. That makes little difference but it’s part of a trend where almost no one is actually doing anything useful that could lead to long term, important progress.
There’s such a shortage of anyone even trying that, although I’ve made a lot of progress on the matter intellectually, there’s basically no one who even cares enough to listen to the answers I developed. (By developed I mean some new ideas but also a lot of looking through, evaluating and organizing existing ideas, figuring out which ones are actually good, etc.)
My positions are strong, bold claims that are easy to refute for philosophy views. A critic has to know what they’re doing, though. Your epistemology is too focused on evidence so that makes dealing with abstract philosophy hard for you, but that isn’t a flaw in my positions.
Also, some my claims depend on or involve substantial amounts of literature. This is a common issue with experts who have actually studied some topic a ton. It would be hard for you to debate a chemist about chemistry, too. Or a hair stylist about hair styles. Or a plumber about the right pipes to use in a particular home.
I don’t use analogies.
You’re wrong about how science and reason work, and it’s been written down. You can point out the first error rather than read all of it, if you’re able. Or you can find someone else who did a lot of the work already and use some of their work.
If you want to change my mind while being ignorant of the ideas and literature I consider important, you should expect to fail. If no one will respond to Popper’s arguments in a reasonable way, then I’ll conclude the world is unreasonable.
Popper isn’t even obscure. My other two favorite philosophers (Goldratt, Rand) are even more well known, having each sold many millions of books. It’s not like I asked you to read Political Justice by William Godwin, which is actually relevant to the social harmony stuff, but obscure, hard to read (due to being over 200 years old), and probably not necessary.
I object to this question. I think a better question is whether there is a topic that I should have changed my mind about, but didn’t. Did anyone point out something I was wrong about, which I responded to in an unreasonable way?
I’ve been pro-abortion for as long as I’ve had a position on the matter. I don’t think I can be faulted for not changing my mind about that. I also changed my mind about a lot of things more than two years ago, leaving fewer opportunities for the last two years; I consider that a virtue not something I should be penalized for.
Nevertheless, this is under 4 months old: Capitalism Means Policing Big Companies · Elliot Temple
I broadly think if people actually catch up to pre-existing, published human knowledge, they actually could work on root cause problems productively. They just don’t care to read and study that much. They want easy or fast answers.
How many people have studied both Goldratt (over 7 million books sold) and Mises (widely viewed as the top guy of Austrian economics, a well known school of thought) and then tried to understand the problem of most large corporations today being awful? If even one person has done that besides myself and a few of my fans, I’ve never found them and their books/blog/whatever.
The intersection of two prominent thinkers often has almost no interest or study.
Of course there are many thousands of prominent thinkers, so you could choose many millions of pairings, most of which won’t be particularly useful. But I’ll bet you’ll agree that some pairings are very useful and under explored, so more people looking and trying has a chance to actually help. And I already found some pairings I believe are great and under explored, which no one has any refutation of (nor any alternative they plausibly argue is a better lead), but basically no one is helping with. Instead they generally either aren’t trying to change much or go get into counter-productive fights with human beings they treat as enemies.
As I said - I don’t think that corporate campaigns is an optimal solution. I’d really prefer a solution where people can be rationally convinced and they change their mind when they see something that makes sense when it comes to argument.
But it just happens that changing people’s mind is very hard. And there are a lot of deep-rooted evolutive reasons for that - otherwise confirmation bias wouldn’t be a thing. Changing the mind of companies is even harder - since they can’t really do much that would damage their business model.
It’s pretty clear from evidence that even when people rationally agree that harming animals is not good, they still continue doing that. Hence why 30% of meat-eaters in the US and 60% in France are conflicted - feeling guilt. In these cases, they already agree with animal welfare people, there isn’t even a need to change minds - it’s just that action doesn’t follow through.
So I don’t see why better arguments would improve things.
Not sure - since once people are used to a reform, they stop seeing that as coercitive. Many of the things we consider good involved a lot of fighting in the process of getting it. Examples include stopping slavery, stopping child labor, getting access to civil rights, access to rights for retirement and healthcare and minimal wage (considered very good in France, maybe less in the US).
Each time there were entrenched interests going against that. For instance, allowing interracial marriage in the US involved a lot of fighting - but now it’s seen as normal and uncontroversial. Once something is part of the statu quo, it’s much less conflicting.
This is exactly why I see making everyone more rational an option that so incredibly difficult that I don’t spend a lot of time doing it. I’ve actually seen ambitious and rational intellectual that tried to get to the root causes of problems - but every time, they’ve failed to make their case beyond a small following of people.
There’s even one that identified “low political truth literacy” as one of the root causes of our problems. But they couldn’t make their case - because even if the people actually doing action agreed intellectually (the classical activists you talk about), they didn’t change their behavior afterwards. One of the reasons was that the reasoning behind it was hard to expose, so people couldn’t “grasp” it. It wasn’t mind-sized.
I’d really like the option of rationally convincing people with arguments to be possible and effective. If I could just make good arguments and people would listen to me and rationally improve, it would be much easier for me than any other stuff.
But the world doesn’t work like that, so I have to adapt.
Seeing someone achieving that, that is solving better some of the world’s problems with rationality, with a good track record, would make my estimates go upward.
“Your epistemology is too focused on evidence”. I find this sentence very odd. What value has a claim with little evidence to back it up?
I mean, we can claim a lot of things with abstract philosophy - which is why there is a lot of disagreement in the field.
But how do we check whether a claim is backed up by reality, or just theoretical stuff that has no real importance? I don’t see how to do that without a strong focus on actual evidence.
One of the main concerns I have here, and that we might disagree with, is that I do not think that philosophy is the right tool for the topic at hand. I think I will soon have to part way with this conversation (maybe one or two additional answers), because of this lack of common ground.
Abstract thinking without a focus on evidence makes it too hard to know whether the claims put forward really match reality.
That may come from my programming background, but I tend to think that while something might be very promising at the state of abstract concepts, it’s essentially worthless until we do a lot of testing to check that it works.
For instance, let’s take your claim that knowledge creation is required for suffering. How do you test it ? How do you test whether the claim “interpretation involves knowledge creation” is true ? How do you do a test that interpretation of something cannot be done in automatic ways, like “if nociceptors go on → the automatic interpretation is to consider the input as bad” ?
I think I’ll try to do something a bit different here. One of your claims is that you have obtained very good results on intellectual matters. Another claim is that it’s possible to make progress on the world’s biggest issues by making good rational arguments and ideas that push things forward.
However, you say that basically no ones listens to you. This means that you’re doing something wrong here - otherwise you would have obtained truckloads of results. It’s one of the following:
Which of these 3 options do you think is the best suited to the current situation?
Making a large number of people (e.g. 10% of the population, not everyone) more rational is one approach worth considering. In my experience, the biggest obstacle to this approach is that the person I’m speaking to thinks they’re already plenty rational and they just want other people to change. So I can’t even get one person interested, so of course we can’t move on to helping large numbers of people.
But there are other approaches. If you get 20 rational people (or maybe even just one) and study the situation, you may find a high leverage point to make a change that doesn’t require people to become rational.
It’s the same kind of issue as improving a company with say 50+ people, as Goldratt has written about. Getting everyone to be smarter or better would be nice but isn’t the typical approach. Instead, a few intellectuals/leaders/planners can develop a few high-impact changes that’ll be implementable by regular people without them having to change their personalities or rationality much. Doing this requires avoiding local optima and superficial solutions, and understanding the cause and effect relationships well. It’s very important to carefully find the right solution instead of making many attempts that fail to get big results, at which point people get tired of trying and stop believing that the next plan will work. This problem is happening in society right now, where people with candidate solutions are mostly ignored and assumed to be wrong because most of the last 1000 proposals didn’t work. That happens both in companies and society.
I would bet a large amount of money that they weren’t very rational, ignored a ton of relevant ideas/literature, and that their ideas would not hold up to criticism. Overall, there are many more people posing as rational then actually being rational, then they fail and give rationality a bad name and help convince others to give up.
Also, yes people say they agree with stuff then don’t change their behavior. That is not a failure of rationality. It’s a failure of understanding how persuasion and learning work. The intellectuals in that scenario have failed to guide people to real change, and instead have elicited superficial agreement and then complained about the results. In other words, they didn’t understand what they were doing. I have writing about how this stuff works and what is needed for real change, I have answers which I’m not aware of any outstanding refutations of, and there is a variety of existing literature about it which I regard as good and useful.
The short story is that most attempts at persuasion are not thorough enough and don’t involve people practicing with new ideas. Persuaders do too little to elicit and answer objections, so people think of those later and unpersuade themselves. People are also disorganized and need help dealing with complex ideas. And to use new ideas in your life, you have to get them into your subconscious mind, which basically involves practice. Asking people if they agree is checking if they currently have the idea in their conscious mind, so it’s not a good indicator of whether they changed.
This makes you part of the problem, not part of the solution. Which doesn’t matter much, but there are millions of people who think this way, so it matters a ton in aggregate.
Those are all examples of basically disasters with huge negative effects to this day due to ongoing fighting and disagreement about them. Are the disasters that happened better than nothing? Maybe. But omg those are not impressive success stories.
For the legacy of slavery, there is a lot of incorrect left-wing propaganda, but there were and still are also many large, real problems. The propaganda unfortunately makes it much harder to figure out which problems were/are important. (The right-wing propaganda on the subject is also problematic but is more about denying these problems than pointing them out.)
It’s not that they’re non-optimal. It’s that they are worse than nothing because the make the fighting problem worse (even if animals did suffer, I’d still think they should be stopped).
It’s primarily better explanations of how stuff works, not arguments, that educate people so they can reach better conclusions. Arguments are more useful for truth-seeking than for persuasion – you need to argue with yourself, and perhaps a few people you find reasonable, to help figure out the right conclusions (larger scale interactive argument can be productive sometimes too but often isn’t).
But often there are solutions which don’t involve much education and also aren’t based on having and winning a big fight. They just require a few people to do good analysis and figure out a good approach that’s compatible with the world (mostly or entirely) as it currently is.
Guilt and conflict don’t mean they already agree with you. It’s really important to recognize disagreement more instead of overestimating or exaggerating how similar people are to you. Guilt and conflict mean they partly agree with you and partly disagree. They have mixed, conflicting ideas. That’s very different than agreeing with you. There is a need to change minds because they have ideas that disagree with you and they don’t see the issue like you do.
Nevertheless, as much as I’m a fan of broad educational efforts, there are other options. Maybe it’d be useful if we looked at some of the root/underlying causes of factory farming problems next and did some of that analysis that I think activists should but don’t do. Maybe you can get started by doing some analysis or sharing a link to the best analysis you know of. Or if you don’t know how or don’t have anything to share, that’s fine, I can lead the analysis. (Since I dislike factory farms too, for reasons other than animal suffering, this doesn’t even require devil’s advocate thinking for me or anything like that. I too already want them to change and believe there’s something bad there.)
Explaining Popper’s epistemology to you is a long and somewhat tangential project. If you really want to know, you can read a bunch of my articles to get a shorter version, or you can read and discuss books for more detail. I think we could talk about factory farm root causes without settling this first.
I don’t believe that I have full solutions implementable by one person with low social status and little money. I’ve figured some things out and I’m happy with that, and I think it’s great and valuable progress. And I think a lot more could be achieved if more other people wanted to. That’s all.
Don’t worry, other people also think that you are in the “thinks they’re already plenty rational and just want other people to change” category ^^
To be fair, I don’t think I’m very good at being rational - I do a lot of stuff that is a waste of my time. But I want to learn to be more rational, which is why I accepted to exchange with you on the debate methodology on the EA forum.
To be entirely honest, however, I’m not really convinced by your track record at teaching people to be rational - I consistently asked for practical advice during this debate, and got little back.
This is a good plan - the best I’ve seen at attempting to do that is effective altruism (with still a focus on rationality). It’s on of the few fields that can show some actual results based on actual evaluation of the stuff that’s been attempted. Pretty rare!
Of course, we’ll probably disagree on that! Not sure we’ll gain much on debating more on this point.
But of course I’m ready to believe that your approach is better when you will have implemented it and I can see the big results that have been obtained.
I agree with it, absolutely.
However, I’m sorry to say that, but one of the main issues I have when exchanging with you is that it’s hard to practice with the new ideas you’re giving. You provide a lot of abstract ideas, and you provide little examples, which makes what you talk about hard to grasp - let alone practice with.
Also, as I pointed above, you gave very little when I asked for practical advice in the debate methodology conversation.
Excellent! That means you can come back to me when you have implemented change and can show me how this works.
Same here - I’m ready to change my mind when I can actually see that this leads people to make better decisions, and that the state of the world improves as a result. And that this is more cost-effective than the “reformist” stuff that actually provides results.
I’d be glad to see this work !
Personally, I tend to judge whether things represent a progress or not by the impact they actually achieve in the real world. If the problem is that the people you talk to have little status and money, then you can use your rationality to find ways to convince them - and if that’s impossible, either change your methods or revise your belief that it’s possible.
Plus, I’m not entirely convinced by your line of “I’ve figured some things out and I’m happy with that”. I personally like to figure things out and then keep them to myself, I know what that feels like - I’ve rarely shared things until recently.
What you do is different than that, since you’re a writer: it’s pretty obvious that you want people to share your ideas, and that this doesn’t really work.
I’d like that, but I think we’ll quickly end up disagreeing.
I think the root cause, here, is within the economic system.
This link doesn’t relate to factory farms, but I find it interesting (though pretty sure you won’t like it): The economy is an elm. Cet article est aussi disponible en… | by Systems Innovation Paris Hub | Medium
The economic system directly favors the companies that make the most profits (and that also are the best at lobbying governments). Externalities are ignored: animal suffering, poor working conditions in factory farms, environmental impact, high water consumption and pollution, competition with human food, all of this is ignored while factory farms make a profit.
For profits to be made, this also requires factory farm companies to present themselves as being good: they need to hide what they are doing and advertise themselves in a positive way (which is possible as long as they have enough profits).
Advertisement also has the functions of boosting sales and then profits- the idea of eating meat every day was not seen as normal a century ago (and has many adverse health effects). This was the result of a lot of PR campaigns (ads, presentations in schools, linking meat with manliness…). Of course, it helped that meat has good taste and was historically linked to high status.
All of this requires a lot of money, which is of course not available to smaller, more responsible farms, or people fighting against the adverse effect of factory farms. These big companies (4 of them control more than 70% of the market, not unlike a monopoly) are big enough to influence politics in a considerable way, and public opinion (they attract a lot of subsidies).
Of course, there are other reasons, drawing from taste (it tastes good), evolution (meat is seen as good and natural in many societies, although India is a huge outlier here), culture (meat production was much less harmful 200 years ago and we still have that in mind), and philosophy (cartesian thinking how humans being the masters of nature, and who can do whatever they want with it). But factory farming didn’t arise until recently.
Note too that if animal products end up being less profitable and attractive than plant-based food, then the above wouldn’t apply.
This link is better to draw links with the food system, and why small family farms disappeared, leaving mostly big, concentrated agricultural companies. Feedback loops help understand how the “Get bigger or get out” came to be.
Now, what do we do about that to change this feedback loop? No idea.
Maybe. Let’s see.
I’d call it the political-economic system. I’m guessing we agree.
I agree.
There are complex issues in this area, and the current situation has tons of problems. So, mostly agree.
Sure, I agree.
Advertisement also has the functions of boosting sales and then profits-
Agreed.
the idea of eating meat every day was not seen as normal a century ago
I’m no expert on the history of eating meat, but this sounds plausible.
(and has many adverse health effects).
I disagree, but I don’t think it matters.
Also my general understanding is that the anti-meat studies show that processed or factory farmed meat is bad for you, not all meat. I agree that factory farmed meat that is then made into hot dogs is bad for you.
This was the result of a lot of PR campaigns (ads, presentations in schools, linking meat with manliness…). Of course, it helped that meat has good taste and was historically linked to high status.
I don’t know. Seems plausible.
So we seem to agree a fair amount and you actually mentioned some of the points I think are the most promising for finding a productive rather than counter-productive approach to anti-factory-farm activism.
Focusing on one issue, I think you basically said that the companies are doing some things which are:
So I think it’s possible to focus on that and have a much better consensus for what you’re doing. They’re doing things which are illegal under our actual laws and would also be illegal under a bunch of alternative systems of law that various people favor (so many people, with varying political beliefs, will think what they are doing is both illegal and also should be illegal). And they’re doing stuff which is considered immoral by people with a wide variety of moral beliefs.
From what I said, can you figure out which specific issue I’m thinking of?