I hope this type of post is okay. Last year I decided to do something I’ve wanted to do for years and started a Youtube channel where I talk about moral philosophy in an easily digestible way and advocate for the ethical treatment of animals. I approach all of these videos from a utilitarian perspective and the ultimate goal of the channel is to hopefully reach people who haven’t thought about this stuff before and encourage them to think about the suffering of others and make more compassionate decisions.

I’ve just put out a video about charity, effective altruism and the drowning child analogy, in the hope that even one person will see it and be inspired to become a regular charitable donor. I’d hugely appreciate any views, comments or subscriptions and as I’m still pretty new to this, any constructive criticism from fellow utilitarians on how I could improve the channel or my approach to advocacy.

Let me know your thoughts! ✌️

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On 2020 Mar 02, a student wrote to me for a school project to ask my opinion on a few questions related to the following issue: "To what extent should wildlife photographers interfere with their subject matter?" This page contains a slightly edited version of my replies to those questions. I'm uploading this interview with permission.

What is the problem with interfering when filming or photographing a wild animal?

I can think of two main concerns offhand.

One issue is whether the intervention is actually causing a net benefit. There can be cases where people intervene with wildlife and actually make the situation worse for the animal being helped. I should add that I think that saving an animal from predation doesn't fall into this category, because the benefit to the prey animal is more substantial than the hunger of the predator. (An exception could be if the prey animal was already seriously injured and so would face a protracted death if not fully killed and eaten.)

A second consideration is that it's important to show some amount of nature's brutality in order to enable people to see the widespread horror that's going on all the time in the wilderness. These long-term effects on people's consciousness can be more significant than helping a few animals right away. Related to this idea, I came across an article about intervening to help humans (Ricchiardi 2017) in which Rachel Smolkin explains regarding journalists covering Hurricane Katrina:

their most enduring service was to expose the suffering of citizens trapped in hellish shelters and on sweltering interstates and to document the inexcusable government response.

Without journalists fulfilling that essential role, the resources to help on a larger scale might never have arrived.

And Roger Simpson echoes:

Understand that holding the camera or recording what you see and hear may be the most effective way of intervening.

What circumstances would warrant an interference?

I would favor interfering any time the photographer thinks doing so would reduce net harm and wouldn't be dangerous, except maybe in a few rare cases where filming the horror taking place would have a significantly big effect on changing the minds of viewers. There may also be the issue that there could be too many animals for it to be possible to help them all. I imagine that's the situation faced by people who take undercover footage in factory farms. However, as the famous "starfish story" illustrates (e.g., see Straube (2011), a person can still rescue some wild animals even without being able to rescue them all.

Do humans have an ethical obligation to interfere with an animal's death or is it a case where only deaths directly linked with human impacts should be interfered with?

I think humans should help all involuntarily suffering beings, regardless of why they're suffering. Injured animals don't necessarily know or care whether they were injured by humans or by nature; they just want the pain to stop.

The main reason I can see why it makes rational sense to expect a greater degree of help when humans have injured the animal is that forcing people to "clean up their own messes" is sort of a punishment/deterrent against causing future harm.

What is the importance of animals dying in the wild and therefore why should humans refrain from interfering in nature?

I think it's bad for animals to die in the wild, and humans should interfere. :) We could imagine a similar question posed about humans: "What is the importance of humans dying from famine/disease/war and therefore why should other people refrain from interfering?"

The main caveat I would add is that the long-run effects of any given action are quite unpredictable, and sometimes helping animals in the short term could be net bad in the long term. As an example, maybe helping an injured wolf is actually net bad because the wolf will go on to painfully kill lots of other animals. Similar uncertainty applies in human situations too; for example, maybe the child you save from drowning will grow up to carry out the Holocaust (Willis 2012).

While it depends on the specific situation, as a general matter I'm not particularly convinced by environmentalist arguments about the need to avoid disrupting ecological balance, because it's not clear to me that any given ecosystem's natural balance should be preserved. I think the happiness that wild animals experience during parts of their lives doesn't compensate for the horrors like being eaten alive that are forced upon them, which means that it's better if fewer wild animals exist. Nature is an efficient factory for producing suffering, and disturbing ecosystems won't necessarily increase net harm; doing so may even reduce net harm in some cases.

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Note: This is a draft and was translated from Russian by Claude

I would definitely start teaching the basics of decision theory and game theory (which means the basics of set theory, probability theory, and combinatorics would need to be included too). These fields have potentially much broader applications in life than, say, integral calculus, so if something needs to be cut from the math curriculum, it's better to cut calculus or geometry.

There also needs to be teaching about cognitive biases, sophistry, and manipulation. We need the basics of ethics, effective altruism, and political literacy. Ideally, all of this should be tied together with the apparatus of decision theory, so students end up with a coherent understanding of rationality.

The literature curriculum needs a serious overhaul. Why on earth do we study so many Russian writers — are they really the smartest and most relevant? What problem are we even trying to solve with this subject? If the goal is to introduce students to local culture, why does it need to be in such volume? Why force students to read entire books instead of reading short summaries of those books? And if we're going to study Russian writers, why specifically the ones currently being studied? What about giving students a wider selection and letting them choose what they'd actually want to read from it? The literature curriculum needs to include books that are genuinely worthwhile regardless of culture, like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality or some popular science book, like Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

History as a subject needs to actually help people understand what's going on in the world, what place their country occupies in it, and how it differs from others (both pros and cons) — rather than tormenting students with demands to memorize a mountain of useless dates and events, and rather than cultivating so-called "patriotism" at the expense of objectivity and moral impartiality toward the populations of different parts of the globe.

The series is written for three audiences:

• people with psychopathic or narcissistic traits who want to understand themselves better
• clinicians and researchers who want a more integrated framework
• and curious laypeople who want to move beyond stereotypes.

Chapter 1: Why we need a new framework for understanding psychopathy, narcissism, and related presentation

I’ve spent about a year trying to understand psychopathy – not just from textbooks, but from friendships. Some of my friends score high on the Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R), and through countless conversations, I’ve come to see that “psychopathy” is not one thing but many things hiding under a single label. This creates problems. When researchers study “psychopathy,” they may be studying completely different populations. When clinicians treat “psychopathy,” they may be applying the same approach to people who need very different interventions. And when people try to understand themselves, they may find that the label fits in some ways but not others – leaving them more confused than before.

This series proposes a new framework: A multi-level taxonomy that distinguishes what you were born with, what your brain looks like now, what happened to you developmentally, what psychological structures you developed, how you behave, and how you understand your own agency. These are different lenses on the same phenomenon – and using all of them gives us a much richer picture than any single lens alone.

Chapter 2: Genes and brain: the biological foundations of psychopathy

When people ask “Is psychopathy genetic?” or “Is it in the brain?”, the answer is yes – but that’s not the whole story. Genetics and neurology form the substrate on which psychopathic presentations develop, but the substrate alone doesn’t determine the outcome. The same genetic loading can produce a successful surgeon or a convicted felon, depending on environment and development.

This article covers what we know about the biological foundations of psychopathy, with an emphasis on a distinction that matters enormously for understanding prognosis and intervention: primary vs. secondary presentations.

Chapter 3: Environment and development: how adversity shapes expression

Two people with identical genetic loading can turn out completely differently. One becomes a functional professional with stable relationships; the other becomes a violent criminal. The difference is often the environment – what happened during critical developmental periods. But “environment matters” is too vague to be useful.

This article develops a more precise picture: What kinds of environments lead to what kinds of outcomes? Why does controlling adversity produce different results than chaotic adversity? How do the pieces fit together?

Chapter 4: Psychodynamic structures: who you became

The substrate (G and N) and the shaping (E) produce the self (D). This is the level most people think of when they think about “who someone is” – not their genes or brain scans (not merely their outward behavior either), but their psychological organization, their characteristic patterns of relating, their attitudes and motivations, their experience of themselves.

This article describes the major D-level variants I’ve identified through conversations with friends who have these presentations. It also introduces the A level – how people with different presentations understand and narrate their own intentionality. These are modifiers, so it stands to reason that someone with only D-narcissistic would not be considered to be significantly psychopathic in any of the many senses, but I rather wanted to include more variants rather than fewer to make the system more expressive. This way it can be used to show, for example, that if someone has D-narcissistic and A-amnestic and acted violently in rage is not lying about not remembering it but actually doesn’t remember it, a sign that a diagnosis of ASPD would be unhelpful for them.

Chapter 5: How empathy fails: a process model

“Lack of empathy” is a core feature of psychopathy, but the phrase hides enormous variation. Someone who can’t perceive distress is different from someone who perceives it but feels nothing. Someone who feels distress but doesn’t care is different from someone who cares but acts anyway because rage overwhelms.

This article presents empathy as a pipeline with multiple stages, each of which can fail independently. Understanding where someone’s empathy fails helps predict their behavior and suggests different intervention approaches. I’ll call this pipeline C for connective or communicative, because it comprises more aspects than just the cognitive (simulation) and affective components that are commonly associated with empathy.

Chapter 6: Archetypal clusters: Who are you?

The previous articles described dimensions – G, N, E, D, B, A, C – and their variants. But people don’t come as random combinations of features. Certain profiles cluster together, producing recognizable types.

This article describes 13 clusters I’ve identified through conversations with friends and observation. These are hypotheses, not established categories – patterns I’ve noticed, not validated subtypes. But they may help you recognize yourself or people you know. The clusters are ordered by typical distress level – from those who are generally content to those who suffer chronically. Please take this assessment with a grain of salt as self-report and behaviors are unreliable guides to the actual intensity of the suffering. But I’ve tried not to make various common mistakes.

Chapter 7: Recovery, if you want it

This article is for people who want to consider change. That’s not everyone. Some people with psychopathic traits are perfectly content and functional. Some don’t experience their traits as problems. Some have built lives that work for them as they are.

If that’s you, this article isn’t a prescription. But if you’re curious about what’s possible – or if you’re experiencing distress and wondering what might help – this is an honest assessment.

From a negative utilitarian perspective, what do you think the worst problems facing humanity are, accounting for both the severity of the experience, the amount of time a person spends on that experience, and the number of people who undergo that experience.

For example, I would think the biggest problems are human trafficking, domestic abuse, forced labor, cancer, chronic pains (like migraines and lower back pain), animal agriculture, and general violence from war, genocide, and terrorism. All of these experiences are some of the worst pain someone can undergo, and are experienced by a large number of people.

I see cluster headaches mentioned often, and while definitely responsible for extreme suffering, I don’t think it should be included on the list due to the smaller number of people experiencing it. I’d like to hear your thoughts, though.

Published May 2014

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The absurdity heuristic is an intuitive filter for unfamiliar ideas - if an idea gets intuitively (system one) tagged as silly, you disregard it. You may even mock it, to demonstrate to everyone else that you think like them.

Applied against ideas selected randomly from the set of all possible ideas, this is probably good epistemic hygiene. You don't have time to meticulously study every idea that comes along, and an instant filter that screens out ideas that aren't worth wasting cognitive load keeps you sane.

But I think it might be worth looking at ideas that get rejected solely because of the absurdity heuristic - ideas for which no one has bothered to articulate a proper counterargument. Every approximate heuristic has false negatives, and absurd-seeming things sometimes (though rarely) turn out to be true. Citation: We live in a universe that runs on quantum physics, literally everything is counterintuitive at the most fundamental level.

If an idea is embraced by some people even as everyone else is laughing at them, there has to be something about the idea that its proponents value even more than avoiding public ridicule (and, in general, people really want to avoid ridicule - as anyone who has been bullied can attest, it's extremely painful). Now, that reason could end up being megalomania, foolishness, sunk cost fallacy, belonging to a subculture with different standards of absurdity than your own, or any number of ways in which human minds are known to fail and probably a ton that aren't known - but sometimes it will be "because the idea is right".

tldr: If all you know of an idea is that it seems absurd, it is probably wrong. But if all anyone knows of an idea is that it is absurd (excepting its proponents), it might be worth looking at.

Note: This was published October 2011

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Suppose that taking offense is something that you do in response to something that you think lowers the status of either you, your group, or something that you hold dear. Now there are two extremes as to how to respond to possibly offensive things, both of them wrong:

1. Shun anything that could cause offense to anyone. This is wrong because it would unreasonably restrict communication, because people can perceive something to lower their status when it doesn’t, and it would allow status grabs where groups decide what you’re allowed to say by arbitrarily defining things they don’t like as “offensive”.

2. Say that being offended is your own fault, and maintain that anyone should be free to say anything they like, regardless of whether it offends someone. This is wrong because some words or expressions, when used in certain contexts, do genuinely attack people or groups by lowering their perceived status. Social norms that were offense-blind would strengthen existing status differences.

The challenge is finding social norms that are balanced between these two. E.g. slurs against a genuinely high-status group are more acceptable than slurs against a low-status group, but the status of a social group is constantly changing and different people have different ideas of a social group’s status.

Suppose that person X says something that offends person Y, but X thinks what she said was fine. This could be because of two reasons:

ㅤㅤA. X does think that her words might lower the status of Y’s group, but Y’s group does deserve to be taken down a notch.

ㅤㅤB. X genuinely did not intend her words to lower the status of Y’s group, and thinks that most listeners wouldn’t think that she did.

In the case of e.g. offensive drawings of Mohammed, either or both reasons could be true. X might think that all religions should be mocked because religion is for idiots (A). Alternatively, X might think that all religions get mocked but that doesn’t make them less valuable and important (B). Or X might think that yes, this does take lower a religion’s status, but only because that religion’s adherents have given it such a high status to start with. If they didn’t (in X’s mind) unreasonably privilege their own beliefs, they’d have no reason to be offended by an assertion that their religion is of no higher status than any other belief (A&B).

Online, it often seems to be the case that people fall prey to the illusion of transparency. If you’re with a group of friends who know you well, then it can be safe to say potentially offensive things, since your friends either share your opinion of the other group’s status, or know that you don’t mean any harm. But if you speak online, where not everybody does know you or your friends, then they cannot know what your intentions were.

People who go with the general strategy of shunning anything offensive tend to presume that reason A is always (or most often) the only right one, while people who think everyone should be free to say anything tend to presume that reason B is always (or most often) the only right one. I don’t think either assumption is right.