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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35659 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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But it is what I get from it. As far as I can see your qualia, your sentience, my sentience, doesn't mean much.

I think this might be a copout. Heuristics have their weaknesses but a heuristic that rarely ever let me down I have is that "If its too easy, it's not right".

When you are faced with the visceral realization that every human, all 7 billion of them are just as sentient as you and their suffering is just as painful as yours, and that a majority of them suffer in painful silence. It can be overwhelming.

Two groups of people can come up two solutions to that. One group says "throw all the money at that problem right now !". Another group says "it doesn't matter". Neither of which is effective or true. Both of those are easy. Throwing money at the problem is easy, turning a blind eye to it is also easy.

But if you accept that it does matter, their suffering is as real as yours, and that throwing money at it isn't effective. Then you are really left in a difficult situation. And my pet heuristic tells me that is truthful position to be in. No one ever said it was going to be easy.

Sure, the object level problem is yet to be solved, but all the solutions are harder than ignoring or sacrificing all else at the cost of it.

When you are faced with the visceral realization that every human, all 7 billion of them are just as sentient as you and their suffering is just as painful as yours, and that a majority of them suffer in painful silence. It can be overwhelming.

And yet, humanity goes on absorbed in its daily routines and dramas without much societal psychosis about this fact.

People are more absorbed by whether that person they want to mate with is giving them the right look, whether their boss is happy with them or whether their friends are pulling their weight than they are about the massive suffering of people in

And, as someone from one of those Generic Third World Countries I can tell you that we spoke jealously about how much Westerners "wasted" while we had so little but ourselves "wasted" part of what we had with limited concern for the less fortunate.

It's almost like we weren't built to care about humanity as such. To steal a Thatcher line: there are individual societies and families, humanity? The jury is out.

Two groups of people can come up two solutions to that. One group says "throw all the money at that problem right now !". Another group says "it doesn't matter". Neither of which is effective or true. Both of those are easy. Throwing money at the problem is easy, turning a blind eye to it is also easy.

My personal heuristic leans against the belief these two groups are similar in size or ease or are balanced in any sense. One of them seems vastly more natural and easy than the other and one of them has vastly more evidence of revealed preference and a good evolutionary justification.

I would argue that, not only are the effective altruists the weirdos, the universalists in general are. The guy who pays lip service to the idea that the suffering of whoever in Guyana is as important (psychologically) as his is a weirdo. He may be a liar, unlike the person who actually wants to put their money where their mouth is, but he shares a similar assumption that is nowhere near obvious.

But if you accept that it does matter, their suffering is as real as yours, and that throwing money at it isn't effective. Then you are really left in a difficult situation. And my pet heuristic tells me that is truthful position to be in. No one ever said it was going to be easy.

"People feel as I do, but I don't have to give their feelings the same priority as mine" also seems quite truthful. And a precept we live by every day when we (for example) favor our own pleasure or kin despite knowing everyone else feels the same.

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