Peter B 📈

This is a great example of how EA fails. Even working within the universalist utilitarian premise: the author calculates that there are 75 hours (270,000 seconds) of insect death per second of human life. But human brains are 1 million to 20 million times larger than insect brains. How does suffering potential/intensity scale with brain size? We have no idea! It could be linear, log, exponential, or something else entirely. It could be based on specific neural structures, it could be about brain mass relative to body mass. We just have absolutely no clue. I imagine the response would be “fine I’ll just vibe a probability distribution over all of these” but that’s just as unknown as the questions themselves, and when numbers are this big, small parameter tweaks will cause huge swings in the final result. Furthermore, what does “matter” mean in this context? We don’t really have a way to meaningfully address insect suffering. Of course there are also far more foundational critiques: morality as a social technology rather than a cosmic fact, the greater potential of humans to spread life throughout the universe, etc etc. Tldr this is both fake and useless. Fake in that, despite some superficial math, it’s really just laundered vibes, and useless in that we couldn’t do anything about it anyway. I think the psychology that drives this is a glee in being counterintuitive. If his own calculation had instead showed that humans housed more utils, I think he would have felt disappointed and bored, and probably not published it. A reflexive preference for the unintuitive is no more rigorous than intuition, and based on an evolutionary argument is probably wrong *more* often, or at least less fit. This “glee in being counterintuitive” is a ubiquitous pathology among EAs. It makes them feel smart, feel like high decouplers. They allocate esteem based on how many weird beliefs/practices someone will espouse, since that indicates rational elevation above our “base” cognitive nature.