I'm collecting examples of pop culture which touches on themes of utilitarianism, animal suffering and related issues. For fun, but I think it also tells us a little bit about the "folk utilitarian" thinking that people engage in.

To wit, a neat comic about animal suffering:

http://maneggs.com/2011/03/30/man/

Extra bonus cartoon: you may have seen this controversial daily cartoon published by the Times a few weeks ago. Designed to deflect attention from the phone hacking scandal engulfing Murdoch, it seems nonetheless a fairly apt dig at the monumental failure by the Guardian-reading left to prioritize reducing suffering:

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/0 ... an-famine/

That's a fine comic. It convinced me to read the rest of the maneggs comics. Great illustrations. Brutally black sense of humour.

Here's the best utilitarian comic I've found so far: from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

All lovely, particularly maneggs. I like this one from Abstruse Goose. I saw that Times one and it was a little jarring, I don't expect to see that kind of stuff in the papers, normally it's all very safe and not upsetting.

Found this: .

Also,here are some old relevant threads:http://felicifia.org/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=422#p3418,http://felicifia.org/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4

Thanks for the update, and it is particularly interesting and have a good lot.

Unbelievably Win. I can't help but think he must've read some of Alan's essays at some point.

Funny comic, but he seems to fail to consider the idea that plants must be cultivated to feed the animals. More insects are killed making meat than vegetables.

He talks about ranching at some point. Perhaps he's saying that ranched areas have fewer insects than crop fields, and so the impact on insects is lower for eating animals grown on that land.

Or maybe I'm just reading too much into this and he's just confused.

The ranched areas have fewer insecticides than the crop fields, but the ranched areas plus the crop fields needed to grow the crops to feed the livestock has more.

So livestock need food other than grass/whatever's on the ranch to survive?
I didn't actually know that - that eviscerates my argument.

Previous discussion on ranch beef.

Better to eviscerate your argument than to eviscerate a chicken (while conscious, at least).

+1

@ Alan - thanks, I missed that discussion, and "Better to eviscerate your argument than to eviscerate a chicken" is probably going into my quotefile for sheer randomness - I actually laughed out loud.

I'm sorry I've posted more than one cartoon in a week - but... It's time for Depressing Comic Week!

Good one.

Here's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal making me like it more and more. There's a utilitronium analogy to be made here for sure:

Dan Piraro is a good vegan cartoonist.

Awesome, Dani.

Many more vegetarian cartoons.

Another example of proto-utilitarian pop culture?

Babe, the movie about the talking pig, certainly reinforces the notion that animal suffering/happiness matters. Indeed, in the reality of the film, it matters just as much as human suffering/happiness.

It reportedly led to fans giving up pork (possibly just swapping it out for other factory farmed meat, though).

spindoctor wrote:It reportedly led to fans giving up pork (possibly just swapping it out for other factory farmed meat, though).

Hmm, yeah, maybe better to promote Chicken Run.

That said, I do worry when these films portray idyllic scenes of animals on green farms. People who aren't moved by "childish sympathies" against killing movie protagonists might come away believing that conditions for meat animals are better than they are in reality.

Speaking of that essay, could you add a section where you compare to the size of the brain? We don't all agree that all animals are equally sentient.

DanielLC wrote:could you add a section where you compare to the size of the brain?

Well, I selfishly prefer my own views, so I'd rather not dilute the message in that piece. But I'm glad to discuss here. I guess a cow brain is 425-458 g. Here's the best datum I could find on chicken brains: "3.68 grams for a 1.8 kilogram animal." Based on skimming other web pages, I think 1.8 kg for a chicken weight sounds on the low side of average.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?db=comics&id=1722#comic

haha this one is amazing!:D! is the guy who write it utilitarian?

Ruairi wrote:http://www.smbc-comics.com/?db=comics&id=1722#comic

haha this one is amazing!:D! is the guy who write it utilitarian?

These types of ideas are mildly well known among philosophical vegetarians, but they're not very common. Maybe the author is reading our forums.

As far as the one above, the obvious reply is that tofu requires less farming than feedlot meat production. And we had a prior discussion on tofu vs. ranch beef. I provisionally favor ranch beef because it seems to prevent more wild animals than does tofu.

This podcast show discusses "suffering per kg" calculations and has an awesome picture.

Alan Dawrst wrote:

spindoctor wrote:It reportedly led to fans giving up pork (possibly just swapping it out for other factory farmed meat, though).

Hmm, yeah, maybe better to promote Chicken Run.

That said, I do worry when these films portray idyllic scenes of animals on green farms. People who aren't moved by "childish sympathies" against killing movie protagonists might come away believing that conditions for meat animals are better than they are in reality.

Finding Nemo is my favourite animal film. It's funny but the message is good. The sea is shown as a place of danger, with suffering and predation. And there are a few sharks that want to be vegans.



There is another film (Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron) with an interesting connection between human slavery and animal slavery. But horses are shown as absolutely happy in the wild, what is problematic.

i thought this might be worth making and posting, not trying to make fun of the occupy protests just thought of how people often forget the world population isnt the human population

Ruairi wrote:i thought this might be worth making and posting, not trying to make fun of the occupy protests just thought of how people often forget the world population isnt the human population

Nice picture. My main concern is that, out of context, most people would assume that it's a joke, like a Far Side cartoon or something. The situation reminds me of Thomas Taylor's 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, which presented a true argument (that if women have rights, then so should animals), but he intended it as a joke to mock Mary Wollstonecraft.

Dave Pearce has a nice refrain that says something like this: "The more radical the message, the more sober the presentation needs to be."

This almost works:

Ruairi wrote:i thought this might be worth making and posting, not trying to make fun of the occupy protests just thought of how people often forget the world population isnt the human population

I think you're missing a few nines.

Found via reference by Jonathan Balcombe: "Skatecrow: Russian roof-surfin' bird caught on tape."

A comic I feel the need to bring up whenever people talk about how much better the real world is to being in the Experience Machine.

(Comic mildly NSFW, other comics on site very NSFW)

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2553

Another SMBC

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iy-UKF1xpf4

hopefully humans wont decide to be prejudiced against un-organic sentients tho:)

i think maybe a pascals wager reference down the page a bit? http://www.robotco.ca/oo1o1o.htm

http://science.tumblr.com/post/30202855 ... -traumatic wild animal suffering

Wow, I had never heard of that. Here's more from the Wikipedia article:

In the animal kingdom, traumatic insemination is not unique as a form of coercive sex. Research suggests, in the Acilius genus of water beetles, there is no courtship system between males and females. "It's a system of rape. But the females don't take things quietly. They evolve counter-weapons." Cited mating behaviors include males suffocating females underwater till exhausted, and allowing only occasional access to the surface to breathe for up to six hours (to prevent them breeding with other males), and females which have a variety of body shapes (to prevent males from gaining a grip). Foreplay is "limited to the female desperately trying to dislodge the male by swimming frantically around".[33]

"Rape behavior" has been observed in a number of duck species. In the blue-winged teal, "rape attempts by paired males may occur at any time during the breeding season." Cited reasons for this being beneficial to the paired males include successful reproduction, and chasing away intruders from their territory.[34] Bachelor herds of bottlenose dolphins will sometimes gang up on a female and coerce her to have sex with them, by swimming near her, chasing her if she attempts to escape, and making vocalized or physical threats.[35][36] In the insect world, male water striders unable to penetrate her genital shield, will draw predators to a female until she copulates.[37]

So even sex involves suffering in some species.

O: I was almost sure I first read about it one of your essays! I've no idea where I read about it so.
It sounds like a horror movie D:!

Given that the females try to get away is that a good reason to think they might be sentient? They're going precisely against whats reproductive, precisely against what evolution "wants" them to do, but if you're sentient you may have your own ideas about what you want.
I don't see why they'd try and get away if they're not sentient, it's not that (at least in some cases) they'll find a different mate who won't rape them, I think with bed bugs all sex is by traumatic insemination (I think, not sure) and the females try and get away (I think).

EDIT: That cartoon has other interesting cartoons http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1609

Ruairi wrote:I was almost sure I first read about it one of your essays!

The one in my essay was about the Ichneumon wasps that Gould describes in "Nonmoral Nature." That was about eating caterpillars, not mating with females.

Ruairi wrote:Given that the females try to get away is that a good reason to think they might be sentient? They're going precisely against whats reproductive, precisely against what evolution "wants" them to do, but if you're sentient you may have your own ideas about what you want.

The escape behavior might be some evidence for sentience, depending on how sophisticated it is, but not in the way you described. As far as I understood it, evolution should "want" the females to escape if they can, because traumatic insemination is fitness-reducing for them, since it means that males with lower-quality genes can impregnate them. This is the same reason that rape causes suffering in mammals. For example:

Women may have developed several defenses against and strategies to avoid rape. [... including] great psychological pain which according to some research is greatest during the childbearing years. [...] Other research have found that during the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle women perform fewer behaviors that may increase the risk of an assault. Studies have also found that sensitivity for potential coercive behaviors in males as well as handgrip strength (but only in a simulated coercive situation) increase during the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle.[6]

(Keep in mind these are psychology studies, where it's common for findings to be spurious.)

Ruairi wrote:I think with bed bugs all sex is by traumatic insemination (I think, not sure) and the females try and get away (I think).

Hmm, yes, you might be right here? If so, that is weird. However, I don't think it says much about sentience one way or the other. Humans have a vestigal tailbone that serves no purpose, but that's not evidence of our sentience.

Alan Dawrst wrote:

Ruairi wrote:I was almost sure I first read about it one of your essays!

The one in my essay was about the Ichneumon wasps that Gould describes in "Nonmoral Nature." That was about eating caterpillars, not mating with females.

Yeah I know, I thought I'd read about truamatic insemination from you too.

Alan Dawrst wrote:

Ruairi wrote:I think with bed bugs all sex is by traumatic insemination (I think, not sure) and the females try and get away (I think).

Hmm, yes, you might be right here? If so, that is weird. However, I don't think it says much about sentience one way or the other. Humans have a vestigal tailbone that serves no purpose, but that's not evidence of our sentience.

but our tail bone is just hanging around (lol), the bed bugs trying to escape is going against whats reproductive, and if its the only way they reproduce then it cant be that theres something different they'll go for? unless there once was and they stll have the instinct??? like if they only reproduce by traumatic insemination how come they dont evolve to want it?

Ruairi wrote:and if its the only way they reproduce then it cant be that theres something different they'll go for? unless there once was and they stll have the instinct??? like if they only reproduce by traumatic insemination how come they dont evolve to want it?

Yeah, that is a puzzle, but it's still a puzzle whether the resistance involves sentience or not. Emotions are malleable by evolution, too. As you said, why don't they evolve to want it?

Keeping in mind that I'm no expert, here's one random idea: Because the process is damaging, the females should want it to happen as little as possible. But that doesn't explain why they wouldn't want it the first time and then try to avoid it forever after. Maybe resistance serves a selection function, where only the stronger males will be able to succeed? Or, like the tailbone, maybe evolution doesn't care if they like it or not, so there has been no pressure to remove female resistance.

Given that the females try to get away is that a good reason to think they might be sentient? They're going precisely against whats reproductive, precisely against what evolution "wants" them to do, but if you're sentient you may have your own ideas about what you want.

Sentience does not justify them going against evolution. If it's evolutionarily better for them to not resist, then if they're sentient, they'd evolve to not dislike it.

My guess as to why they might always resist is that the males that they can fight off aren't worth mating with. Evolutionary psychology makes sure that they mate with the fittest males, without them wanting it on even a subconscious level.

Because the process is damaging, the females should want it to happen as little as possible.

If it's their only way to reproduce, this doesn't make sense. They wouldn't want it for non-reproductive purposes like social bonding (as in bonobos), but they'd still end up showing behavior toward optimal reproduction.

My guess as to why they might always resist is that the males that they can fight off aren't worth mating with.

This seems the most probable explanation, if there are always males who will succeed anyway.

I wonder if there are species for whom eating food or breathing air is always distressing.

Hedonic Treader wrote:

Because the process is damaging, the females should want it to happen as little as possible.

If it's their only way to reproduce, this doesn't make sense. They wouldn't want it for non-reproductive purposes like social bonding (as in bonobos), but they'd still end up showing behavior toward optimal reproduction.

Yeah, by "as little as possible," I meant "only once per reproductive season."

Here's one last hypothesis for why the females resist. The impulse to guard against tissue damage is a simple and general response, and maybe it's too hard to evolve a special-case exception to it. The evolutionary leap is too big for a few mutations to make. An analogy here is the fact that child-birth is excruciating (some say as bad as having a limb chopped off), yet this is precisely the opposite of the way things should be evolutionarily. I think the only explanation of this is that this pain hasn't caused enough deterrence of getting pregnant for it to be selected away. (I guess another explanation is that a woman talked to a snake and then ate a fruit.)

Alan Dawrst wrote:Yeah, by "as little as possible," I meant "only once per reproductive season."

Yes, and if there are enough rapists around on average, default avoidance behavior could be fitness-maximizing. It reminds me of some other inter-sex competition adaptations Sapolsky mentioned which would result in failed pregnancies if the "selfish" adaptation of one sex weren't canceled by the co-evolved "selfish" adaptation of the other sex.

Here's one last hypothesis for why the females resist. The impulse to guard against tissue damage is a simple and general response, and maybe it's too hard to evolve a special-case exception to it. The evolutionary leap is too big for a few mutations to make.

Hm, I don't know. Their generation times are short and evolving a simple stimulus-response override for this one purpose shouldn't be that hard.

An analogy here is the fact that child-birth is excruciating (some say as bad as having a limb chopped off), yet this is precisely the opposite of the way things should be evolutionarily. I think the only explanation of this is that this pain hasn't caused enough deterrence of getting pregnant for it to be selected away.

Sexual desire, impulsiveness, social expectations all combined with the cognitively involuntary nature of pregnancy could override the deterrence effect on average. And the first pregnancy happens without prior associated pain experience. On the other hand, there are women who intentionally go through several pregnancies and are fine with it. Maybe it's because they can rely on modern medicine to ease the discomfort, or maybe some people just don't care about pain that much?

It is depressing how much in evolution works simply by being involuntary. But there is a glimmer of hope in memetic selection; one good way for memes to propagate is to be attractive to the voluntary mind, which means that memes adapt to give the voluntary mind more and more control over the environment and its own internal states (e.g. painkillers), unfortunately only as long as that doesn't conflict with the interests of other voluntary minds who have more power (e.g. strategic torture).

[Sorry for derailing the thread, I'm afraid I don't have a cartoon to make up for it. ]

Hedonic Treader wrote:Sexual desire, impulsiveness, social expectations all combined with the cognitively involuntary nature of pregnancy could override the deterrence effect on average.

There must be some fraction of women for whom it's decisive, though. Ignoring all altruistic considerations, I personally would not accept going through that much pain for pretty much anything that I know of in our world.

Hedonic Treader wrote:Maybe it's because they can rely on modern medicine to ease the discomfort, or maybe some people just don't care about pain that much?

It is depressing how much in evolution works simply by being involuntary.

Yeah, but what about women before modern medicine? I guess you could argue they could have been pressured into it by their husbands...

There are lots of cases where the brain clearly doesn't maximize long-term selfish welfare (e.g., sharing a needle with the other 50 prisoners in your group, with extremely high chances of getting some disease). Certain systems just switch on at certain times and suppress other systems.

It could also be that the same biases that produce rosy retrospection operate in order to make women feel that "it was all worth it" afterward. I read one forum about the pain of pregnancy where pretty much everyone said, "Yes, it was one of the worst [sometimes, the worst] pain I've ever felt, but it was worth it for what I got at the end."

Hedonic Treader wrote:[Sorry for derailing the thread, I'm afraid I don't have a cartoon to make up for it. ]

No worries -- I think threads are meant to be derailed for good discussions.

This isn't what you meant by "cartoon", but Simle Smile Smile.

Alan Dawrst wrote:Yeah, but what about women before modern medicine? I guess you could argue they could have been pressured into it by their husbands...

Yes, reproductive rights weren't exactly a female privilege historically.

Certain systems just switch on at certain times and suppress other systems.

Yes. I also think that people like Robin Hanson and Dan Ariely make convincing cases about motivational inconsistencies in human psychology. Ariely ("Predictably Irrational") shows some nice illustrative cases of this. He also points out that states like sexual arousal vs. non-arousal have what he calls a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde dynamic to them. People clearly often act impulsively against their rational self-interest (or cognitive moral beliefs). There is also time-discounting of future (dis)utility.

It could also be that the same biases that produce rosy retrospection operate in order to make women feel that "it was all worth it" afterward. I read one forum about the pain of pregnancy where pretty much everyone said, "Yes, it was one of the worst [sometimes, the worst] pain I've ever felt, but it was worth it for what I got at the end."

Could be rational though. People clearly differ in their cognitive estimate of how relevant pain avoidance is to them in comparison to other values. I sometimes ask exemplary hedonistic trade-off questions to random people on the internet, examples of "how much reward would you need for this-and-that suffering?" and the results usually fluctuate all over the place. People often don't really know what they want, answers shift with mood, personal philosophy, self-image, framing effects, individual differences etc. It's one reason why making an actual numerical felicific calculus is hard to do and never satisfies everyone.

Then there are culturally programmed cached responses. People say cliché things they think people in their situation would/should say. I remember a bizarre case where a woman who abandoned her baby in the cold of winter after secretly having it was interviewed in prison. She hadn't wanted to be pregnant and didn't want her boyfriend to know. So she disposed of the child. When the clearly morally outraged interviewer asked her how she had felt when she first saw her newborn child, she responded with the cliché "It's the most beautiful thing ever" - even though she hadn't wanted the child and was in prison for abandoning it outside in the winter!

I talked to a few mothers yesterday and got two responses about the pain of pregnancy, "it wasn't as bad as people had claimed it would be", and "I don't really remember how bad it felt". That woman compared it to breaking a bone in the past and no longer being able to remember exactly how bad it was.

this is really funny ! http://comixed.memebase.com/2012/05/09/ ... ontenthole

Hedonic Treader wrote:He also points out that states like sexual arousal vs. non-arousal have what he calls a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde dynamic to them. People clearly often act impulsively against their rational self-interest (or cognitive moral beliefs).

It reminds me of some algorithms I've seen where you let the simple, numerical formulas take their course most of the time, but in the really crucial situations, you override it with a hard-coded answer to make sure you get it right.

Hedonic Treader wrote:I sometimes ask exemplary hedonistic trade-off questions to random people on the internet, examples of "how much reward would you need for this-and-that suffering?" and the results usually fluctuate all over the place. People often don't really know what they want, answers shift with mood, personal philosophy, self-image, framing effects, individual differences etc.

Yes, I've asked many people the same type of question: "How many days of normal, pleasant life would you need to compensate one minute of burning at the stake (assuming you could wipe away all memories afterward)?" People's replies range from "a few days" to "a few years" to "no amount would compensate." A few hard-core contrarians even say "anything is better than nonexistence, even torture," but I don't believe them. (My own answer is probably at least in the billions of years, possibly higher.)

Hedonic Treader wrote:That woman compared it to breaking a bone in the past and no longer being able to remember exactly how bad it was.

Fascinating. It's hard for me to imagine not remembering something that bad as an adult, unless medications got in the way.

Ruairi wrote:this is really funny ! http://comixed.memebase.com/2012/05/09/ ... ontenthole

Alan Dawrst wrote:Yes, I've asked many people the same type of question: "How many days of normal, pleasant life would you need to compensate one minute of burning at the stake (assuming you could wipe away all memories afterward)?" People's replies range from "a few days" to "a few years" to "no amount would compensate." A few hard-core contrarians even say "anything is better than nonexistence, even torture," but I don't believe them. (My own answer is probably at least in the billions of years, possibly higher.)

I find this type of question is subject to a strong future-oriented bias (or maybe 'effect', if you think it's rational). For eg, I suspect if you asked separate groups questions something like this:
1) If I could spend a minute burning you at the stake tomorrow but then restore you to full health, what's the minimum number of years of life at full health would you want in exchange for the experience?
2) If I could offer you any amount of years of life at full health but in exchange I'd burning you to death at the stake at the end of them (which would take approximately a minute), what's the minimum number of years you'd want in exchange?

I'd bet you'd get much bigger requests from the second group - even if you specified that whatever pact you made with them, they'd immediately forget about having made.

I can also imagine that if you didn't specify which way round it was, different people would be inclined to understand the question different ways, thus biasing their answer (eg in your phrasing of the question there's a light implication that the 'days of life' would follow the burning, since compensation usually follows injury - but I suspect philosophically minded people would be much more inclined to treat it that way than people more used to thinking about the actual physical world, where once one's burnt at the stake, one obviously doesn't get any more days of healthy life)

We ought not restrict ourselves to memes, right?



explanation:
http://80000hours.org/blog/28-26th-of-september-petrov-day

http://www.lefthandedtoons.com/619/ stole this from the wild animal suffering fb group

New smbc. It's a good one. I always found it funny that people say they wouldn't step into an experience machine while everybody watches TV shows, plays video games, reads novels etc.

Hedonic Treader wrote:It's a good one.

Hahaha, awesome!

It makes total psychological sense that people do this, because we become upset when we wish for things we'll never have. Satisfaction is something like actual reward divided by expected reward, so you'll often be most satisfied if you can manage not to want anything you don't have. Cf. Buddhism, paradox of choice, and so on.

However, utilitarianism does not work like the brain. Aggregated happiness is not normalized based on expectations. We can't make the world better by expecting it to be worse. Instead, we have to get to work and change the situation as best we can.

All of that said, I still find it amazing that people say they wouldn't want to enter an experience machine. The only reason I would not sign up is that I have an obligation to prevent suffering in the real world. If I could prevent equal suffering whether or not I signed up, I would totally put my name on the list.

Alan Dawrst wrote: We can't make the world better by expecting it to be worse. Instead, we have to get to work and change the situation as best we can.

Why not? This is something I'm trying to understand, is our happiness relative to what we expect? I think I remember reading on the old felicifia about changing peoples preferences instead of changing other stuff

To clarify, we can make ourselves feel better if we lower our expectations. There's a joke: "What is a Buddhist's favorite movie?" Answer: "The one he's currently watching."

However, in the world as a whole, the sum of suffering over all individuals is an absolute number, and we can't reduce suffering just by focusing our minds. (That would involve spooky magical powers.)

One way to reduce suffering in some circumstances could be to teach people meditation and other Buddhist practices. But this is probably not suitable all the time. Moreover, it doesn't work for animal suffering: We can't teach mice to feel less pain when they're eaten alive by snakes. So for 99+% of the suffering in the world, we have to reduce it directly by changing the way the world operates.

Also, I think happiness is somewhat relative among organisms right now. At least, it has an upper bound at your hedonic setpoint due to the hedonic treadmill. I think it can probably go substantially below that if you live in a factory farm or get infected with a deleterious parasite.

The hedonic setpoint is an economizing adaptation by evolution to avoid too much unnecessary emotion, but it's not intrinsically necessary to hedonic experience itself. Reengineering the neural substrates of pleasure (most easily in electronic form) would allow this limitation to be overcome.

See also pp. 28-31 of this dusty document of mine.

Thank you! I've saved a link to here with all the stuff I'm gonna read about 0 utility and hapiness being relative and stuff and ill read it soon !

Why would the hedonic treadmill only work one way? The reason for its existence seems to work both ways.

Reengineering the neural substrates of pleasure (most easily in electronic form) would allow this limitation to be overcome.

It would also cause too much unnecessary emotion. Mania is not without its downsides.

The obvious solution would be to make sure the people in charge aren't overly happy. I wonder if that would also act as an effective deterrent of corruption.

DanielLC wrote:Why would the hedonic treadmill only work one way?

Good point. It does work both ways. However, I guess what I was thinking was that happiness may not be strictly at a fixed set point, but it may lie within a range, and the further out of the range you push it, the stronger is the push backwards. Sort of like navigating on a rollerskating half pipe. [This is just unabashed speculation on my part.]

DanielLC wrote:It would also cause too much unnecessary emotion. Mania is not without its downsides.

From the Intro of The Hedonistic Imperative:

A small minority of humans do in fact experience states of indefinitely prolonged euphoria. These states of involuntary well-being are usually pathologised as "manic". Unlike unipolar depression, sustained unipolar euphoric mania is very rare. Other folk who just have high "hedonic set-points", but who aren't manic or bipolar, are sometimes described as "hyperthymic" instead. This isn't a common mindset either. [...]

Euphoria may be accompanied by hyperactivity, sleeplessness, chaotically racing ideas, pressure of speech and grandiose thought. Hyper-sexuality, financial excesses and religious delusions are common. So is rampant egomania. Sometimes dysphoria may occur. In dysphoric mania the manic "high" is actually unpleasant. The excited subject may be angry, agitated, panicky, paranoid, and destructive. When in the grip of classic euphoric mania, however, it's hard to recognise that anyone might think anything is wrong. This is because everything feels utterly right. To suppose otherwise is like going to Heaven and then being invited to believe there has been a mistake. It's not credible.

It seems as though there are better and worse forms of mania. I've heard also (can't find the reference) that some people experience major hyperthymia while maintaining full, normal functioning.

Saw this and just wanted to share:

I sort of agree with the person on the right. Certainly the pyramids are nice to look at, but if you think about how much brutality went into building them and how much suffering could have been averted using the same resources, they begin to appear as something of a humanitarian atrocity.

LHC and such are different because science has insane long-term instrumental value.

Brian Tomasik wrote:Certainly the pyramids are nice to look at, but if you think about how much brutality went into building them and how much suffering could have been averted using the same resources, they begin to appear as something of a humanitarian atrocity.

My personal guess is that even if you discount all the happiness created by virtue of being a "World Wonder", the money brought in through tourism is greater than the monetary value of the resources minus the construction costs needed to make use of them. Of course, the tourism money is spent sub-optimally, but that's true with everything, because no country has a utilitarian budget policy.

Did you take interest into account? If it takes several thousand years to pay for itself, it's not a very good investment.

DanielLC wrote:Did you take interest into account? If it takes several thousand years to pay for itself, it's not a very good investment.

What I mean is that while it definitely wasn't a good idea at the time (when it was built, the materials definitely could have been better used elsewhere), it's not a good idea to tear them apart now.

The Onion's Horrifying Planet is a wonderful spoof of nature documentaries with moral condemnation.

That's actually a really good video, HedonicTreader! It was shared by David Pearce on the "Reducing wild-animal suffering" Facebook group as well.

Another SMBC hit:

Nice! David Pearce would say the same about the Darwinian hedonic treadmill in the face of the prospect of utilitronium.