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May 15
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We tend to think about it in terms of synergistic multidirectional efforts. From our FAQ:

"Given the complexity of the topic, limited tractability and impact of specific sets of interventions, diversity of moral views, and high uncertainty levels, we are in favor of a multi-directional approach to improve the fate of farmed and wild nonhuman animals. Most (if not all) of our team members are vegans or reducetarians, supportive of the development of cultured meat and plant-based alternatives, and in favor of measures making farming/transport/slaughter less inhumane, hoping that these synergistic value streams will lead to a large-scale change in the global attitudes about this cause area. We are driven by the universal, non-speciesist concern about the suffering of sentient beings, though we also fully respect those who want to support us primarily or exclusively with regard to the first, human-centered project. The introduction of modified lines should not be used as a convenient moral justification for mistreating animals; simultaneously, from the consequentialist and pragmatic standpoint, we recognize the limited outcomes of narrower and more isolated approaches, often driven by very noble intentions. The global meat industry continues to have a significant compound annual growth rate, driven largely by the steadily improving economic status of developing countries with different cultural and legal contexts, so the introduction of modified lines through market forces may constitute a very important piece of the puzzle where other strategies, due to the existing roadblocks, fail to produce (yet) a significant impact."

There is a strong evidence base indicating the widespread presence of overlooked and often extreme suffering that cannot be effectively mitigated, related to physical and mental health issues, aging, social and military conflicts, substance abuse, relationship problems, financial struggles, and existential matters, often entrapping people in vicious cycles (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/24/how-bad-are-things/).

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I agree with your argument that we could prevent most suffering by treatment of animals (and people). I'd go further and argue that the extreme solutions like banning meat-eating and ending pain distract from achieving the simpler goals.

If people were to treat meat as a rare luxury, we would dramatically reduce meat consumption and animal suffering and factory farming would become unnecessary. Most importantly, we could win political support from people who might support eating less meat but would oppose a total ban.

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"Well, you could chemically alter factory animals to not feel pain, or you could raise them freely in natural environments. Proper rotational grazing with symbiotic cycles of cows, poultry, etc can be very efficient. We could feed the world without factory animal farms. Or factory animal farms could be improved: I have experimented with quail in outdoor cages, and they can be very healthy and quite happy together being social animals. "

There are already free-range farms (see eg https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SnGqab3noXLmJzQCs/lower-suffering-egg-brands-available-in-the-sf-bay-area ). But they cost more, so very few people buy from them. It's politically impossible to mandate them, because it would increase the price of all animal goods by quite a lot.

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I just bought gree range eggs from local farmer at the farmers market for $5. Is that too expensive? Very yellow orange yolks, not watery.

That's 84g protein and around half of daily calories. Eggs are cheap food. This is high quality cheap food.

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Free range is a meaningless descriptor that can apply to a warehouse with a small outdoor corridor. Yes, it is indeed cheap to grow chickens in a warehouse, exceedingly so.

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>But they cost more, so very few people buy from them. It's politically impossible to mandate them, because it would increase the price of all animal goods by quite a lot.

We regularly mandate things that increase costs of entire industries (relative to the absence of the mandate), such as airplane safety. The trick is, of course, to force every market participant to adhere to the rules. With airplanes, that is relatively simple because it is much easier to enforce the rules because there are far fewer airports, operators, and airplanes than there are animal farmers and e.g. cows. In the end, it comes down to enforcability of the rules. A higher price of meat for everyone would just result in a new equilibrium, but unequally enforced rules would be inherently unjust and unacceptable.

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Washington State has mandated free-range for at least eggs

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Signaling without suffering?

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One approach is less likely to succeed than many... It's a false dilemma; you could do rotational grazing AND pain research.

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I think I remember one of your articles where you said something like (very sorry if I misquote/don't represent your opinion, all mistakes mine) you have a bigger impact by preventing poor babies from eating lead than increasing education spending in places with lots of poor people.

I've been thinking a lot about meditation and jhanas recently, and if teaching everyone how to reach jhanas could solve a lot of problems like the opiod crisis, and this article seems to be the same idea, but at the biological level.

It gives me lots of hope for the future.

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In case it can give you some extra hope, many Far Out team members are interested, or even directly involved in supporting research concerning the deep end of contemplative practices and psychedelic therapies. Insights from these studies have a direct relevance to the suffering abolitionist project, and pair well with the biotech-focused efforts.

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Thanks, you're doing a wonderful job!

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As someone who has used both (in a context of the multi agent theory of mind) to greatly reduce suffering, I'm both glad to hear it and skeptical that the benefits can be mainstreamed. But as you'll observe from my other comments I am skeptical in general (likely due to suffering as a child*).

*this is phrased as a joke

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Are you aware of SEMA labs? They're onto something: https://cbs.arizona.edu/news/visit-sema-lab-shinzen-young

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Have you spoken with the Jhanatech folks?

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Interestingly, per a recent article in the NYT, making children do "mindfulness training" seems to be useless or even slightly worse. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/06/health/mental-health-schools.html

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My immediate guess is that it being compelled rather than chosen would be a factor.

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Oh yeah

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What about the Dark Night? or in general negative side effects of mediation (eprc or Willoughby Britton are doing research there).

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How qualified are those teachers?

Do the students want to do this/what are they taught?

School is trash in basically every area, would we expect it to be good in this area where the qualifications of the teachers are probably even worse.

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If this would just work it would be awesome but I don't think it tells us much about higher level practices. Very cool though to know that this doesn't just work at least in this way.

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Jhanas are very different from mindfulness!

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Over the years, I've heard many wonderful reports about the benefits of jhanas and other meditational disciplines. Sadly, what one rarely hears are stories of anhedonic or melancholic depressives who try meditation and find their mood lifts. Indeed, meditation can make some forms of depression worse. In short, if it works, do it. But alas meditation alone isn't going to fix the problem of suffering.

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Until zero-suffering long-termists start talking about population collapse and dysgenics, I'm not going to take them seriously.

I'm also pretty sure I've read about children born without pain receptors who wind up doing crazy things like shoving pencils through their kneecaps because there's no negative feedback. Pain actually does exist for a reason.

EDIT: For the sake of completeness, no, I didn't read the full article before commenting. I'm annoyed by this entire topic so it was something of a hot take. I still think that generalising from weird outlier samples to a program of wholescale biosphere re-engineering is insane, that corrective feedback for people's behaviour in the broader sense is indistinguishable from negative hedonic utility, and that the whole idea is a pipe dream when your civilisation is currently in a state of slow-motion collapse.

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Did you read the full article?

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Why? Does it talk about population collapse and dysgenics?

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No but it does talk about children born without the ability to feel pain and the fact that they often die from failing to avoid dangerous behaviours. Seemed odd to me that you brought them up as if it was some sort of counter to Scott's post when he already specifically raised and discussed that issue.

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Alright, fair enough, but I still don't see how you get to zero suffering until the pain receptors are switched off. Even responding to social stigma could be viewed as 'painful.'

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May 15
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Which part? The generalisation from Jo, a sample size of one?

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Woah, you are commenting without reading the whole article on a *Scott Alexander* essay? Do you also climb without a rope in mountains you visit the first time, eat weird mushrooms you picked without identifying, and cross twelve-lane roads without checking for traffic?

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I don't think the article substantially rebuts the point I'm making. Any kind of corrective feedback for a person's behaviour can be regarded as 'painful' under a sufficiently tortured definition of the word. Like... what's the zero-suffering-activist's answer to law-enforcement? Are we going to incarcerate people who commit serious crimes without any reduction in their hedonic utils score?

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Perhaps not, but you'd be more persuasive just crying mea culpa in this part of the comments, carefully reading the whole article and then starting a new, more carefully nuance top level comment. The earth over here has been scorched and if you double down you'll end up sounding like a troll or an undergrad.

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What are you recommending I do, precisely? Edit the original comment?

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"Do you also climb without a rope in mountains you visit the first time, eat weird mushrooms you picked without identifying, and cross twelve-lane roads without checking for traffic?"

Were I born without pain receptors or the usual experience of pain and thus as a result never developed anxiety, dread, or apprehension about my actions and activities, why wouldn't I do that?

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You might still read about the high risks of these activities and decide that taking some precautions is worthwhile, based on a risk analysis? I'm not convinced that being anxious is necessary for rational action.

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> Cameron seems to be somewhere between pain insensitivity and asymbolia; she’s had some very mild stove-related accidents, but always seems to figure out the situation in time. She hasn’t lost the ability to sweat. She hasn’t lost the ability to smell. The only Special Bonus Side Effect the London team was able to find is that apparently her wounds heal perfectly cleanly, without scars.

That does not seem to affect Cameron in particular, though I don't know if everyone could "figure out the situation in time".

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If your ultimate goal is zero suffering, you're going to have to knock out pain receptors eventually. Also, suffering evolved in a more general sense as part of homeostatic feedback mechanisms intended to keep you alive.

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How about a goal of much less suffering?

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All the roads that lead to that outcome are going to involve raising birthrates and preserving human talent. (Unless the plan here is to abolish the ageing process, which would eventually create its own problems.)

A goal of *less* suffering in the broader sense might be achievable, but this isn't what David Pierce is arguing for. He wants *zero* suffering of any description.

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I think you are hung up on semantics here. Pierce may not mean zero suffering quite as literally or extremely. To be clear - I don't claim to know what his actual position is, but there seem to be more reasonable interpretations to what you are suggesting.

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Before creating a no-pain biosphere, it makes sense genetically to aim for a low-pain biosphere for human and nonhuman animals (https://www.gene-drives.com) alike. Compare high-functioning genetic outliers (not quite as unusual as Jo Cameron) who, if asked, say things like "oh, pain, it's just a useful signalling mechanism".

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Your premise is false. You don't have to knock out pain receptors. You have to recalibrate them, so they send information without also sending suffering, e.g. "Take your hand off the hot stove," instead of "AAIIEEEE!!"

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Don't pain receptors work by providing sufficient motivation? I currently have an agonising shoulder condition, so I don't move my shoulder. If it was just information relaying that I had a shoulder problem, I'd likely ignore it or forget it and move my shoulder, injuring myself anew.

Evolution has done a pretty uneven and sometimes bad job in calibrating our pain system, no doubt, but I'd be surprised, at least, if lots of these circuits aren't doing useful work.

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Is it a rotator cuff tear? I think I've got one of those right now -- have had one before and I recognize the feeling. Yesterday tossed a small practically weightless toy for the cat to chase, and it sort of clicked and slid inside and hurt so bad I felt sick for about a minute.

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Ah, hope it gets better soon. No, mine is calcific tendonitis, which is basically small deposits of bone forming inside the supraspinatus. It is like I've been stabbed by a calcium dagger and the blade broke off inside the shoulder head.

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Replacing intelligence, you mean? Well, maybe; if the agony was half would you move your shoulder? A quarter?

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Maybe a very self-controlled person could unfailingly keep a limb the right degree of still, without requiring pain, based on their long term goal of having healthy limbs, but even then we'd need some additional feedback system to replace pain so we knew there was a problem in the first place. I'm all for someone devising such a system.

In my case, if the pain was a quarter its current level, I think I would move my shoulder a little bit more, but then again that'd probably be good for my recovery. The pain does seem to be way over the top. But I'd be wary of the unforeseen possibilities of just quartering all pain. I think we'd want to be more strategic about which pains to reduce and when.

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It would be nice to be able to "turn the knob" on suffering. Turn 8/10 pain into 4/10 pain, 4/10 pain into 2/10 pain, etc. Then the signaling would always be there, but would never be strong enough to cause more than brief suffering.

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This is why it makes sense to study the outliers that seem to have the best "reduction in total suffering" to "adaptive functioning" ratio, and the case of Jo Cameron is certainly among them.

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"Jo Cameron dislikes Boris Johnson, what a radical political fireband", written without a trace of irony.

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I hope that the diversity of sociopolitical views of the team members, coupled with approximating what's generally considered a high cause neutrality (think: anaesthesia, crisis relief) is at least somewhat reassuring. We do not interfere with the personal views of the low-suffering genome owners, and do not encode any specific views on UK politics. :)

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This is clearly a point of her having political opinions at all, instead of just a total laizzes-faire attitude to any and all things in her life.

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Less of this sort of uncharitableness on ACX please? Especially in response to a good-faith response by the team itself.

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That is not what Scott wrote. What he actually said was " lack the righteous anger necessary to fuel political engagement, but in fact she has strong political opinions (she doesn’t like Boris Johnson)." His point was not that she was radical and vehement, it was that she was able to feel angry disapproval of a government figure. How radical or correct or original her politics are is completely irrelevant to the question he's addressing, which is whether she is sort of emotionally numb and can't feel indignation about things she sees as bad government.

I'm sure you're not too dumb to remember what Scott said, so you're just lying here to try to make him look bad. Listen, there's no way you can make him look anywhere near as bad as you look so far here. You don't read the article, you run your mouth anyhow, when people ask you to read it you ask them instead to summarize it, and now you're putting up things Scott didn't say, and didn't even mean inside of *quotation marks* and them jeering at them. You're being a major asshole.

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Agreed. My knee-jerk reaction is that Jo Cameron is a counterexample to the idea that the hedonic treadmill is universal and inescapable, and that a consistent set of experiences for a period of time always settled down to "meh" for everyone, with only _changes_ making us happier or unhappier. And counterexamples are _very_ important!

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The negative feedback mechanisms of the hedonic treadmill can operate even in paradise. Jo Cameron experiences hedonic adaption like the rest of us; but Jo's unusually high hedonic set-point means she's always enjoyed a much higher default quality of life. What's tantalizing is the possibility that just a handful of genetic tweaks might do the same for future life.

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Many Thanks! Excellent point. I was thinking of the default model being that more or less the same set-point was linked to the hedonic treadmill for everyone. Yes, Jo Cameron proves that "same set-point" is false, but as you pointed out, this is indeed separable from _dynamics_, from

>The negative feedback mechanisms of the hedonic treadmill can operate even in paradise.

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Thanks. Twenty years ago I wrote https://www.gradients.com/ ("An information-theoretic perspective on Heaven") about a world where the ancient pleasure-pain axis has been superseded by a pleasure-superpleasure axis. It's still my tentative prediction for the future of sentience.

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Re: the first point, as an intentional initiative with a narrowed focus, we heavily prioritize the neutral robustness while conducting the exploratory research - we want to ensure that the outcomes, including potential interventions, will be net positive under numerous reasonable ethical assumptions and game-theoretic arrangements. This should not interfere with adaptive functioning or giving a consideration to challenges in other domains.

Re: the second point, it has been addressed both in the article and in the FAQ section on our website. Happy to answer any further questions you may have!

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"This should not interfere with adaptive functioning or giving a consideration to challenges in other domains."

This seems to be an elaborate way of saying that "preventing civilisational collapse is someone else's job." I just... I don't get how people with supposedly long-term goals and priorities don't treat these topics more seriously. It's like your house is burning down and you're talking about the most comfortable way to arrange the furnishings.

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I think he's saying "we're intentionally targeting treatments that don't interfere with adaptive functioning". "This should" in the sense of "we are working to", not "we expect to".

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I'm already sufficiently annoyed with effective altruists in general, especially after the SBF debacle, so extending that principle out to the biosphere in general looks like the textbook definition of telescopic philanthropy.

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I'm not sure how much the SBF fiasco was intrinsic to effective altruism, but this points at an interesting question.

A lot of the problem, as I understand it, isn't so much that effective altruism was a scammy environment as that it was a gullible environment. A focus on rationalism didn't lead to enough willingness to be skeptical in face of attractive claims. People may well be working on getting better at being less vulnerable. I wouldn't necessarily have heard about it.

To tie it back to the topic, does feeling pain have anything to do with not falling for scammers? Jo Cameron seems to have enough good sense to not be looted, but has she run into capable scammers?

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The problem with Jo Cameron isn't Jo Cameron. It's the accelerationist progressive left doing what they always do and fishing out cherry-picked counterexamples to normative standards which they will then use to dismantle traditional constraints on human action- or, in this case, the constraints imposed by millions of years of biology- before any comprehensive and rigorous long-term study of the wider social side-effects could possibly be mounted. And when the bill comes due, it will always be someone else's fault.

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Based on the existing datapoints (e.g. activism of Jo Cameron, engagement of deeply realized meditators in social issues), it seems that removing a large portion of involuntary suffering while maintaining adaptive behavior should a) increase people's capacity to support other important causes, b) increase people's confidence in the net positivity of existence, or at least further support pro-existence stances.

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I just want to add that, based on personal experience with changed happiness set points in my life (mine used to be extremely high!), this statement seems trivially true to me. I've maintained a lot of my high-happiness-setpoint stances even after it crashed (partially due to biological issues, partially because my mother died and it made my brain start obsessively pattern-matching absences, which it hadn't done before), since they all still make perfect sense, but it takes remarkable work to maintain them emotionally, and I don't think I would have started with them if I had not had the high-happiness-setpoint around the times I was establishing my attitudes toward life and people.

Which is to say, I would definitely take something that could give me my old happiness set point back, and I have reason to believe it would make me a better person.

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Or, "Long-range prediction of non-linear phenomena is... untenable." AGI - possibly LLMs - might be our post-biological descendants. Mass drivers on equatorial mountains throwing us into orbit might let us colonize the Earth-Mars asteroid belt, giving us several orders of magnitude more lebensraum and consequently provoking population increase. Open borders might raise reproductive rates significantly... There are a lot of current approaches to preventing civilizational collapse; closing your eyes and covering your ears and shouting at the top of your voice that no one is doing anything is, among other things, untrue.

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A more modest proposal might be uterine replicators; if women didn't have to be pregnant for nine months per child people might have more kids.

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People seem to shift it to "but I can't afford a kid" so I doubt it. Even if one of you doesn't have to be pregnant for nine months, you might well decide "two is as much as we want because any more is too expensive".

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Wealth's increasing pretty rapidly. It's unevenly distributed, I know, but some people can definitely afford several kids.

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Could you repeat the question?

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This makes me deliriously happy (no joke intended). Finally some material progress on The Hedonist Imperative! May all the fans-of-suffering, the too-invested-in-sour-grapes, and every one holding the transparently evil position that suffering is good, meritorious, something to protect and strive for... Well. May they all update and adopt the Obviously Correct position that Superhappiness is Optimal.

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Thank you. When our project attracted substantial attention, we obtained some constructive and greatly appreciated feedback that we quickly incorporated into our roadmap. Simultaneously, the most frequent talking points of the critics seemed to be grounded in the inability/unwillingness to imagine adaptive functioning devoid of negative valence, and/or in assigning value to the suffering even if it was both maladaptive and involuntary. We, obviously, challenge this position, and are glad that this discussion if finally taking place on a larger scale.

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I suspect that for many of us skeptics it's not inability or unwillingness per se, just bayes unfortunately filtered through SDB. Most are too squeamish to say out loud that e.g. reducing child mortality likely does make a society less fit in other ways we value. Where we need to be convinced is that the next intervention will be the one that finally reduces suffering without corresponding cost.

I'm happy to admit the possibility of being trapped in a local optima, here, but the philosophical point isn't 'is suffering good?' but 'will this next attempt at alleviating it be overly blithe again as usual?'.

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We mostly think suffering useful given the rest of how a human is organized. It's at least 'lindy'. This question more concerns one's priors on interventionism than one's sour grapes.

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it's not that suffering is good. It's that suffering exists, so how can we mitigate it, and make use of it, given that we are very likely to suffer at some time in some way?

See Christina's story above. Painkillers did nothing for her, so she coped with the pain by pacing around the room. Finding ways to use suffering is like that: pacing, rather than lie crying curled up in a ball, because either way we're going to feel the pain.

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removing the pain is still very obviously better.

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Oh, definitely. But if you're in a situation where there's no way of removing it and you have to undergo it anyway, then finding coping strategies work better for you.

Imagine Jo *had* to go to work the day after her husband killed himself because the job wouldn't give her time off, she needed the money, etc. Then "well better pull myself together and get on with it, anyway he's better off now" is an attitude that enables survival. Being so upset you're non-functional, even for a short while, is harmful. We all think that her attitude is unusual because we generally have the social support that says "okay, you are grieving and this is natural so you can have some time for that", hence we find her lack of grief unusual or even unsettling.

But if it was literally "work or die", then we'd understand Stoicism in that situation. Same way with "okay, suffering happens, how do we make use of it?" in theology and so forth.

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We who live to Suffer thank you. All we're asking for is Validation.

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of course we have to figure out a way that sadomasochism could still work; I mean, it's Fun

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Switch it to be about power rather than pain? Being able to compel someone to do something humiliating (but not physically painful) is still exerting power over them, and you get the bonus of forcing them to do something they don't want to do, because it emotionally/mentally distresses them?

"You WILL file your taxes on time before the deadline, heh-heh-heh1"

"NOOOOO, Master, anything but that! And you've even withheld my dose of Adderall so I can't focus!"

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Good grief! I've been in so, so many debates - in pubs, in professional or academic settings, even on military operations - where I've argued for _exactly_ this (honestly, uncannily so!) to entirely universal derision ‒ and until this post I genuinely supposed I was the only person in the world who had such beliefs. Very, very glad to read this ‒ thanks most awfully, Scott!

(But still a tiiiny bit disappointed to get through the whole post without seeing the phrase "Immanetise the Eschaton"...)

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Same, although I was lucky enough to find this stuff many years ago when I was around 18 or so; I was pretty elated to find that I was not, in fact, the only one to see that suffering is bad (so to speak, heh).

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*pulls you aside at a Bay Area House Party*

See the big new thing is Biblical Transhumanism. We know that the Bible is the literal word of God and infallible in every way, right? And we know that early Genesis people could live to over 900 years old. So that gives us a divinely-revealed research direction - long lifespans are clearly possible, we just need to undo whatever went wrong genetically after Noah, probably some kind of inbreeding problem caused by the population bottleneck there. And pain is probably preventable or at least highly mitigatable too! When god curses Adam and Eve he tells Eve "I will terribly sharpen your birth pangs, in pain shall you bear children." We're not sure yet whether this means childbirth specifically can be made less painful or if all pain can and - hey wait, where are you going? I was just about to invite you to my new Church of Transhumanism, we take up offerings for medical research every sunday!

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The lion eating straw image is literally just Isaiah 11:7

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It's honestly a bit sad how many people don't pick up on that...

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Biblical literacy as part of the cultural background is declining, and you can't expect kids to pick up on it in school because that would be The Government Privileging One Religion Over Another and Establishing Christianity.

But mostly because they're reading 'modern, relevant' texts that no longer use such imagery. If the family doesn't go to church (or even if it does), they're not hearing such texts read and they don't know where these references come from, then, when they encounter them.

Even more so for those from a non-Christian (culturally or not) background who reasonably can't be expected to recognise such themes.

EDIT: Or non-Jewish background, because Judaism would also be familiar with the Old Testament (duh).

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I hear you. It's a bit sad to see how thoroughly misunderstood the Establishment Clause has become over the past couple centuries. Far too many people these days don't understand that by definition, you cannot "establish Christianity" for the simple reason that there is no such thing as "The Church of Christianity," various individual religions laying claim to that honor notwithstanding.

The original Congress that adopted the First Amendment, containing several of the people who helped debate on and draft the Bill of Rights, might open Monday's session with a prayer by a Methodist chaplain, then Tuesday's with a Presbyterian chaplain, Wednesday's with a Lutheran chaplain, and so on. That's a far cry from the mess we find ourselves in today, where we have a de facto Established Church of Atheism.

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Anyone know of a good Christian/Biblical mythology book I can read to my kids? There's plenty of them for Greek/Norse/Roman/etc., but I haven't seen a good Biblical one written from an outsider perspective but serious enough that my kids would recognize references such as the lion laying with the lamb.

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Take them to Sunday school!

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That's an intriguing concept. Would you be interested in presenting on it at an upcoming Innovation Forum?

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Post-biological descendants e.g. AGI - maybe LLMs - brain uploads et cetera. More modestly, uterine replicators; no more biological births.

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The bit about

> her wounds heal perfectly cleanly, without scars.

...definitely gave me that "loophole in an otherwise ubiquitous ancient curse" vibe.

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Scarless wound healing seems to me to be something much more interesting and beneficial to explore than "can we all become pain-free, carefree, super-happies?"

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May I push back at such a description? Other things being equal, the more one loves life, the more zealously one wants to protect and preserve it. Consider the transhumanist polymath Anders Sandberg, for example ("I do have a ridiculously high hedonic set-point"). It's no coincidence that all people I know involved in x-risks studies and prevention are themselves blessed with unusually high hedonic set-points. Sure, their lives aren't blighted by anxiety, but they _do_ care - probably more so than folk whose feelings about Life are at best ambivalent.

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Agreed. I'm in the position of probably having a somewhat lower hedonic set-point than most people (though, objectively, luckier than most people). As a somewhat grouchy 65 year old, I tend to look at x-risks rather fatalistically.

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Indeed. I have a friend in the AI safety community who half-seriously likes to suggest I know ASI will probably kill us but hide this recognition because of my negative utilitarianism. Not so (I think digital zombies are cognitively crippled https://www.hedweb.com/social-media/full-spectrum-superintelligence.pdf). Yet anyone who understands the nature of the severe mental and physical pain endemic to Darwinian life can be forgiven for wondering if an insentient world tiled with paperclips (etc) would really be worse.

In practice, I think fixing the problem of suffering is up to us.

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Many Thanks!

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There's a theory that the human visual cortex has special processing to pick out ripe fruit, naked humans, and snakes. The snake processing is clearly a later addition, after the Fall. Tracing that back might lead to the fear and suffering areas, although possibly also to free will.

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tangentially related Scott "More than 50% of EAs probably believe Enlightenment is real. This is a big deal right?" https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/poZ3p2Zum4im2LSGb/more-than-50-of-eas-probably-believe-enlightenment-is-real

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We do (assuming a precise operational definition).

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After receiving a pointing out instruction from Loch Kelly a year ago my life hasn't been the same. I used to say I was an 8/10 happy, but now I'm like a 10/10. The problem is that i wouldn't trade 1 day of my current life for 5 days of my previous (i.e. 1 day now is worth more than 5 days then). This leads me to think that experiencing nonduality doesnt interact with traditional wellbeing. Anyway, I basically can't believe how well I am. Its very strange talking about it (I rarely do, online)

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What is a pointing out instruction?

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It's an instruction intended to give insight at a lower level than traditional knowledge (like koans). Instead of learning a fact, you might change your schemas. I've heard this phase only in the context of non-duality, in which case it would be intended to erode the perception of being a self.

A common pointing out instruction that leaps to mind would be something along the lines of "look for the looker".

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Or recursive questions; for example: What do you want? gets you pretty basic answers along the lines of fame, success, wealth, happiness et cetera. What do you want to want? gets you abruptly much closer to your best self. What do you want to want to want? is hard to parse; you could rephrase it as What would your best self want to want? and you start get more interesting answers. This approach can be applied to a range of questions.

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Are you Mr. Morden?

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Very interesting. What was pointed out to you?

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Hi Marcel :) Good question! A few things actually. Firstly, my true nature (the context in which all conscious content appears), then, the nondual nature between context and content (i.e. they're actually made of the same thing anyway), and then the ground of being from which all this arises (love).

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> The problem is that i wouldn't trade 1 day of my current life for 5 days of my previous (i.e. 1 day now is worth more than 5 days then).

Isn't that good? I'm confused why you call this a "problem". Did you reverse the numbers or something?

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Sorry I was unclear. It is great that I’ve had this perceived improvement in wellbeing. But the problem is either the 10 point scale isn’t sensitive enough or I’m lying to myself about something to do with my experience.

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Are you assuming that the scale should be linear or something?

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I'm extremely unsure. But it seems from my experience there is at least a 5x difference between 8/10 and 10/10. Some things I feel now for hours a day, that may not be captured by 10 point scales: deeply well, completely safe, boundless, timeless (in one sense, impermanent in another), interconnected, loving.

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EA is a quasi-buddhist new religious movement? Wow. I didn't know that. You're telling me now for the first time.

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It is not. Different EAs believe different things, and there is nothing like a unified push towards any given world model or cause area. But I do think that EAs are vastly more likely than genpop to believe in the utility/attainability of enlightenment.

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Yes, fair. EA is a broad umbrella. But, like you said, there are trends. And whether "Enlightenment" exists at all is a theological claim on par with "the resurrection of Jesus actually happened". Even whether things like Jhanas *exist* is tricky to answer (and I've had meditative experiences that seem to fit the "Jhana" description - doesn't mean I was actually in a "Jhana" state or that such a state exists.)

If there was an ostensibly secular group where nonetheless over half of the members think the Resurrection probably happened, I'd be comfortable calling that "quasi-christian".

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This seems much closer to "did Jesus exist as a historical figure" than "did Jesus rise three days later". We have actual modern day accounts of enlightenment as well as people who have apparently reproduced it in conditions we can independently verify. Surely, this counts as being more likely than something that violates the second law of thermodynamics?

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The existence of nirodha-samapatti seems like pretty strong evidence

https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/the-science-behind-the-worlds-most

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"If there was an ostensibly secular group where nonetheless over half of the members think the Resurrection probably happened, I'd be comfortable calling that "quasi-christian"."

May I refer you to the cryonics movement, which thinks it can deliver the resurrection of the body, no religion required? 😀

Though if you read through comments on this site, I think the emphasis is now shifting to brain preservation so it can be digitally 'sliced' and imaged and an upload created (someone on here did have a recent comment about that).

Secular re-creation of religious promises, via technology!

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