S-Risks with Tobias Baumann - "Avoiding the Worst... a moral catastrophe" - Sentientism Ep:180
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- Опубліковано 3 гру 2023
- Tobias co-founded the Center for Reducing Suffering with Magnus Vinding. CRS is a research center that works to create a future with less suffering, taking all sentient beings into account. More broadly, Tobias is involved in the effective altruism movement which applies evidence and reason to find the most effective ways to help others. In his new book, Avoiding the Worst: How to Prevent a Moral Catastrophe, Tobias lays out the concept of risks of future suffering (s-risks) and outlines ways to steer the world away from s-risks and towards a brighter future. You can get his book for free on Amazon or via his website.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?” Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The audio is on our Podcast: apple.co/391khQO & anchor.fm/sentientism.
We discuss:
00:10 Welcome
02:09 Tobias' Intro
- CRS: "How can you best reduce suffering?"
- Tobias's book "Avoiding the Worst" and S-Risks
- A 2 step approach: 1) who and what matters, 2) empirical understanding and action
03:33 What's Real?
- "I am #atheist since I am old enough to think about these issues"
- "I have a naturalist worldview - my answer to what's real is what we can scientifically observe and measure..."
- JW: For many religious people the biggest S-Risk "is that of being sent to hell by a supposedly benevolent god"
- Cognitive biases: wishful thinking (hoping s-risks aren't possible), confirmation bias (looking for evidence that supports our existing beliefs - ignoring contradictory evidence), scope neglect (struggling to understand or emotionally respond to very large numbers)
- JW: Animal agriculture as an understandable S-risk vs. #longtermism, large scales, artificial sentients
- "Factory farming is a moral catastrophe of incredible scale"
- JW: The ethical (e.g. "only humans matter") and epistemological (e.g. "animal farming is humane") errors that can cause massive harms
- Animal advocates' neglect of wild / free-ranging animal suffering ethics "the vast majority of sentient beings on earth are not humans... are not factory-farmed animals... but animals living in the wild, in nature - and they also suffer very serious harms... predation... starvation... diseases"
- @AnimalEthics video course on wild animal ethics: www.animal-ethics.org/wild-an...
- "This might be the most important source of suffering at this point in time"
- Risks of belief digitisation (jumping to yes/no instead of probabilistic credences) when considering low probability outcomes and/or large scale impacts
- Dealing with uncertainty
- "It's not necessarily what we are emotionally made for..."
- The expected value approach and "Pascal's mugging"... "taking speculative scenarios sufficiently seriously but not getting too crazy over it"
- Bayesian thinking
- "I would not think of S-risks as a Pascal's mugging... The broader idea of a large-scale moral catastrophe in the future doesn't seem that far-fetched to me at all"
- "We already have a similar dynamic... in terms of factory farming. Why is it so crazy to think that something similar and even larger scale could happen in the future."
- "The topic is quite neglected. I'm just a random guy on the internet and I've managed to write the first book on the topic. It would seem that the possibility of worst case futures with astronomical levels of suffering is worth having one book on."
- We know terrible things can happen... the rise of #fascism etc.
- "If you envision a future... more advanced technology... other planets... artificial intelligence... ever more powerful tools"
- "If we don't make moral progress... it's not so difficult to see how the combination of these two facts can lead to s-risks."
20:30 What Matters?
- Divine command theory, nihilism, moral relativism vs. caring about the suffering & flourishing of others
- Virtue, feminist care, deontological, utilitarian, consequentialist ethics?
- "The idea that we should try to prevent the suffering of others... that seems relatively uncontroversial..."
- Beyond suffering: interests, preferences, life, dignity, agency? "...it just seems that, especially when we are talking about severe forms of suffering... those other things seem relatively abstract and perhaps less important in comparison?"
27:40 Who Matters?
48:45 A Better World?
01:10:40 Follow Tobias
- Avoiding the Worst: / avoiding-the-worst
- CRS: centerforreducingsuffering.org/
- Tobias' site: s-risks.org/
& much more... (sentientism.info for full notes)#sentientism
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Looking forward to this discussion
Thanks Louis!
Great discussion! And also his book!
Thank you! Yes - it's an important read...
Strengthen and enhance engagement of suffering risks! Forge ahead towards a shared future for humanity with humane values at the core! Go go suffering reducers!
Not just “humanity” but for all “sentientity”!
Great talk so far! Next time I'm gonna get here before Louis. 😀
Thank you! - and good luck with beating Louis... :)
Here's an article on S-Risks (and why veganism helps mitigate them) by Sentientist Hein de Haan: medium.com/timeless-sentientism/effective-altruism-why-s-risks-should-be-a-top-priority-657c0041e06c
Good one! The larger and longer (in time) you can make the moral scope the better.
Unfortunately I'm not sure we're up to it. 4 things:
1) I hate guys like Stalin but he was right in this: “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic” - same goes for other immoral acts, like torture, or any abuses for economic reasons (e.g. various forms of slavery).
Similarly, Asimov's famous metaphor: "If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then both have what I call freedom of the bathroom, go to the bathroom any time you want, and stay as long as you want to for whatever you need. Everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom. But if you have 20 people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door, aren't you through yet, and so on. And in the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. The value of life not only declines, but it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies." - Morality and dignity are intertwined, and fragile.
2) Also, I think the S-risks in "the wild" are usually greatly overstated. If the ecosystem is healthy and balanced the number of survival niches for all kinds of sentients is immense and there is plenty of pleasure. If the ecosystem is "tight" and survival niches become squeezed (e.g. due to human incursion) then the S-risks increase greatly.
3) I would pay the $5 in "Pascal's mugging". I'd maybe ask a few more questions though - and if the mugger answered that he was investing it in Bitcoin, for the long term, to save those masses of suffering beings in the future - I'd give him $10. 😁
4) We humans are great exploiters and deniers. We will teach AI that behavior; we already have. AI will either replace us or fix us (if it deems it worth its while.) - or maybe it will just "fix" us like we "fix" cats and dogs, and we'll just naturally die out from lack of procreation... So it goes... (as Vonnegut would say).
PS: Enjoying the CRS website! I think I'll donate $10 😁(- maybe more if Tobias is vegan. Is he?)
He is!
Watch out for the Pascal's mugging. Part of the problem is there's an infinite number of muggers with different propositions for you. Just like the Pascal's wager deity problem :)
You might be interested in previous guests Heather Browning and Walter Veit who have argued there might be more flourishing and pleasure in the wild than many think. One idea being that animals have presumably evolved to want to keep living - maybe having a passable life is one motivation for that?
On the population front my sense is we have masses of space for our peak ~10-11bn humans as long as we end the population of farmed/fished animals. So much land! ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets.