Brian Tomasik - Peter's notes

*Content warning: some of Tomasik’s essays, including some of those I link to here, contain descriptions of extreme suffering.* Brian Tomasik is a [Monkish independent scholar](/misc/Monkish independent scholar.md). I’ve read a small fraction of Tomasik’s output (mostly the essays on ethics) and I don’t have a great feel for his overall worldview, despite his attempt to summarise it [here](https://reducing-suffering.org/summary-beliefs-values-big-questions/). One thing I’m confused about is that his summary suggests he has very high subjective confidence in several beliefs about value and meta-ethics. I can’t really see how anyone could get to such high confidence on these topics, so I feel like I must be missing something, or else we have some big differences on epistemology that I don’t understand. Annyway... Brian says he’s a moral antirealist who subscribes to a version of negative utilitarianism that is focussed on extreme suffering. I’m not sure what his argument for the negative focus boils down to: he presents it as a personal preference, and he provides arguments he hopes will reveal or cultivate that preference in others. In [The horror of suffering](https://reducing-suffering.org/the-horror-of-suffering/) he writes: > Several of my friends think I'm weird to be so parochial about reducing suffering and not take a more far-sighted view of my idealized moral values. They tend to shrug off pain, saying it's not so bad. They think it's extremely peculiar that I don't want to be open to changing my moral perspective and coming to realize that suffering isn't so important and that other things matter comparably. > Perhaps others don't understand what it's like to be me. Morality is not an abstract, intellectual game, where I pick a viewpoint that seems [comely](http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/beauty-driven-morality.html) and elegant to my sensibilities. Morality for me is about crying out at the horrors of the universe and pleading for them to stop. And elsewhere: > my brain could have been modified in vast numbers of ways toward vast numbers of values. But it wasn't, and I now care about what I now care about. Other people now care about what they now care about. There is no right answer—just differing intuitions, sometimes pushing against each other. To me, extreme suffering seems like the worst thing in the world. To other people, failure to create astronomical numbers of happy lives feels equally horrifying. That's just the way it is. I suppose he would see me as someone with a preference function that, like him, cares a great deal about reducing extreme suffering, but that, unlike him, puts great weight on realising positive experiences and a bundle of other plural values. This probably isn’t the full story though: he also seems to think that [many people are empirically mistaken about the intensity of extreme suffering](https://reducing-suffering.org/the-horror-of-suffering/). In the same essay, he writes: > Organisms routinely make welfare tradeoffs—e.g., enduring the cold outside your cave to find food. […] But I think there's some point at which the brain's ability to make these tradeoffs caps out. If an emotion exceeds that threshold, all the organism's resources are channeled toward responding to the emotion. This is particularly true with pain. At some level of agony, there's no benefit that can outweigh the suffering an organism is enduring, and every fiber of its being tries to escape. > […] > For an organism in the moment of such an experience, it is literally true that its suffering is worse than all the possible future pleasures in the universe. Call it irrational or scope-insensitive if you like, but there's an [empathy gap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy_gap) between you and that organism. You and I right now do not realize how bad it feels, and we cannot internalize it without experiencing it. This seems true, but also true for extreme positive experiences. I somewhat share the “maybe there’s an asymmetry here” intuition, but I’m way more uncertain about it than Tomasik seems to be, and—influenced by Nietzsche— much more suspicious of negative, reactionary, “no-saying” views. Tomasik suggests, reasonably, that those who have not experienced extreme suffering cannot understand it. But the same seems true for those who have not experienced extreme happiness. Anyway, a bit like David Pearce, I appreciate Tomasik as someone who has dedicated a large chunk of his life to thinking and writing and screaming ([Screamers](/misc/Screamers.md)) about the problem of suffering in public. I share the worry that we lucky ones tend towards obliviousness and complacency about this terrible problem. Unlike them, I’m a “life lover”, with a strong attraction to [Cheerful axiology](/misc/Cheerful axiology.md). Tomasik is still quite young, so I’m looking forward to seeing how his views evolve over the next decades. Where to start: * [Brian’s essays on ethics](https://reducing-suffering.org/#ethics) * [Education matters for altruism](https://longtermrisk.org/education-matters-for-altruism/#Taking_the_big_picture_Textbooks_review_articles_and_Wikipedia) * [Podcast with David Pearce](https://futureoflife.org/2018/08/16/ai-alignment-podcast-metaethics-of-joy-suffering-with-brian-tomasik-and-david-pearce/) ## Appendix 1. Tomasik on consuming animal products Brian’s “[How Much Direct Suffering is Caused by Various Animal Foods?](https://reducing-suffering.org/how-much-direct-suffering-is-caused-by-various-animal-foods/)” blog post helped me tweak my diet to cause less direct animal suffering than it would have done otherwise. The post points out that consumption of different animal products directly causes different levels of animal suffering, probably over a range of 2-3 orders of magnitude. The post offers a framework for making rough estimates, with Brian’s best guess numbers thrown in (you can edit according to your views). The numbers are speculative, and I can imagine reasonable people who looked into this for a while ending up with quite different answers. But Brian seems like a reasonable person who has thought about this much more than me, so I'm happy to largely defer to his numbers. For me, the key takeaway is that a meal of farmed salmon or chicken probably causes >50x the direct suffering than eating a meal of beef or pork, or a large helping of dairy products. So avoiding farmed salmon or chicken, which is fairly easy, is a surprisingly big improvement on animal welfare grounds. Complication: the environmental impacts (including Co2e emissions) of a beef meal are very large compared to other protein sources. But again, you should start with an overall picture of the biggest sources of your Co2e impact, and prioritise potential actions by ease and impact. On Co2e grounds, skipping one flight is equivalent to A LOT of skipped beef burgers. A skeptic might say that Brian’s article is a caricature of the naive utilitarian: he makes a spreadsheet full of dubious calculations and uses that to determine moral action. I say no: Fermi estimates are a useful method! One should not casually construct a Fermi and blindly trust the outputs, but Fermi estimates really can serve as a valuable input to your decision, mainly due to their ability to reveal non-intuitive differences in order of magnitude, which the human brain usually struggles to detect and give appropriate intuitive weight. Bad math can be worse than no math, but scope insensitivity (overlooking differences of several orders of magnitude) is also pretty terrible.