hey all, i was thinking about the argument that x risk charities are the most efficient thing to donate to because without huamns we'll never have eco system rediesign or without life there'll be no happiness at all.

so as far as i understand the argument goes that theres a tiny chance of infinite utility being created and therefore

0.000000000000000001 X infinity = infinity

so thats where we should use all our resources, but i disagree with the possibility of infinite utility being something real that could actually exist, even in a universe full of exstatically happy organisms you can always add more happy organisms and utility can always increase

so i was looking at eco system redesign research vs. factory farming campaigning

all the figures i use here are just ones i remember reading and almost definitely arn't accurate at all but i just wanted to show my point.

i think alan estimates there could be 1 billion billion insect living at any one time (i think, sorry if im wrong)
and then i remember reading they make up 95% of the animal population,
so if we say that insects cant suffer and that the number of wild animals who can suffer is

1 billion billion ÷ 95 = 10526315789473684 = 1% of wild animals

x 5 = 52631578947368420 = number of wild animals who can suffer

then if you say that perhaps every single second 1 in every 1000 of these is suffering as badly as an animal in a factory farm suffers every second.

52631578947368420 ÷ 1000 = 52631578947368 = the number of wild animals every second suffering as badly as a factory farmed animal

i remember reading there are 58 billion factory farmed animals existing at any one time (once again as with everything maybe way out)

so 52,631,578,947,368 wild organisms suffering constantly with said intensity vs. 58,000,000,000 factory farm organisms suffering constantly with said intensity

so if these figures were actually correct you could argue that the problem of wild animal suffering is less than 1000 times worse than the problem of factory farming.

so is trying to stopping factory farming a thousand times more efficient than trying to stop wild animal suffering?

i think i may have left out a load of things here, like that its not all or nothing, some suffering can be stopped, or maybe thats already accounted i need to think about it more.

anyway thoughts?:)

thanks

even in a universe full of exstatically happy organisms you can always add more happy organisms and utility can always increase

So? Are you saying that that means you can't have infinitely many happy organisms?

1 billion billion ÷ 95 = 10526315789473684 = 1% of wild animals

x 5 = 52631578947368420 = number of wild animals who can suffer

Why are you saying 5% of wild animals suffer? Are you assuming that all animals besides insects suffer? It would seem odd to say that ants can't suffer, but dust mites (they're arachnids) can.

Alan Dawrst wrote an essay on the number of wild animals.

then if you say that perhaps every single second 1 in every 1000 of these is suffering as badly as an animal in a factory farm suffers every second.

I'd expect that if they're lives aren't worth living, it would be more than 0.1% as bad as wild animals.

so if these figures were actually correct you could argue that the problem of wild animal suffering is less than 1000 times worse than the problem of factory farming.

so is trying to stopping factory farming a thousand times more efficient than trying to stop wild animal suffering?

That would be assuming stopping factory farming is a million times easier, correct?

So? Are you saying that that means you can't have infinitely many happy organisms?

yes you cant becuase you can always add more organisms and keep increasing utility.

Why are you saying 5% of wild animals suffer? Are you assuming that all animals besides insects suffer? It would seem odd to say that ants can't suffer, but dust mites (they're arachnids) can.

sorry yea that was stupid, what i meant was vertebrates, i dont have any figures for that but lotsa the numbers are probably way off anyway im just trying to show that the difference might be big but it can never be infinitely big.


That would be assuming stopping factory farming is a million times easier, correct?
yup not that i am arguing that, just that you cant put infinity in felicific calculations

yes you cant becuase you can always add more organisms and keep increasing utility.

Why can't you have infinite, and then add another one?

because you cant have infinite utility in the first place, you cant have an infinite number of organisms experiencing happiness, unfortunately

because you cant have infinite utility in the first place, you cant have an infinite number of organisms experiencing happiness, unfortunately

What if you have one organism experiencing happiness, and another ten feet to his left, and another ten feet to his left, etc.?

How about if you have one organism experience happiness, but it does so forever?

Also, expected utility can be infinite even if only finite utilities are possible. If there's a 50% chance of one happy organism, a 25% chance of two, a 12.5% chance of four, a 6.25% chance of eight, etc., the expected number will be infinite.

DanielLC wrote:

because you cant have infinite utility in the first place, you cant have an infinite number of organisms experiencing happiness, unfortunately

What if you have one organism experiencing happiness, and another ten feet to his left, and another ten feet to his left, etc.?

How about if you have one organism experience happiness, but it does so forever?

Also, expected utility can be infinite even if only finite utilities are possible. If there's a 50% chance of one happy organism, a 25% chance of two, a 12.5% chance of four, a 6.25% chance of eight, etc., the expected number will be infinite.

the current situation on earth has many organism within 10 feet of each other but that simply makes a very large number of organisms.

hm well then the amount of time you have is infinite

do you mean that if there was a

1 in 2 chance of 1 happy organism
1 in 4 chance of 2 happy organisms
1 in 8 chance of 4 happy organisms because then
1 in infinity chance of an infinite amount of happy organisms

the current situation on earth has many organism within 10 feet of each other but that simply makes a very large number of organisms.

Yes, but it doesn't go on forever. I mean that each organism has one 10 feet to the left, and that it keeps going. It's not just a circle.

hm well then the amount of time you have is infinite

And if you feel happiness at a constant rate, the total happiness will be infinite.

because then 1 in infinity chance of an infinite amount of happy organisms

No. The expected number of happy organisms becomes
0.5*1 + 0.25*2 + 0.125*4 + 0.0625*8 + ...
= 0.5 + 0.5 + 0.5 + 0.5 + ...
= infinity

I think I should probably point out that I also am against the idea of infinite utility. I could subtly modify that infinite expected utility thing, by swapping ever other sign for example, and make it diverge. Since there's no clear order to add them in, there's no real way to make sense of it.

Here's the obligatory reference for discussions of infinite utility.

I think it's almost certainly the case that the total utility in the multiverse is infinite, because there are infinitely many universes. Indeed, everything you do has an infinite utility impact, because there are infinitely many exact replicas of you.

There are other reasons to think we live in the biggest possible multiverse:

1. SIA, which is one of my preferred resolutions of the Doomsday Argument.
2. The prudential argument that if the universe is bigger, everything we do matters more, so we should assume it's as big as possible.

Technically I guess #2 doesn't affect our probabilities of a "big world," just the expected-utility calculations, but we end up acting as though the world is as big as possible.

Ruairi wrote:the argument that x risk charities are the most efficient thing to donate to because without huamns we'll never have eco system rediesign or without life there'll be no happiness at all.

Hmm, but if humans survive, there are all sorts of opportunities for vastly greater wild suffering: My standard list is terraforming, directed panspermia, sentient nature simulations, and lab universes. Not to mention the possibility of sadistic simulators.

Ruairi wrote:1 billion billion ÷ 95 = 10526315789473684 = 1% of wild animals

x 5 = 52631578947368420 = number of wild animals who can suffer

Hmm, do you mean just 1 billion billion * 0.05?

I'm not familiar with the 5% figure myself....

Ruairi wrote:i remember reading there are 58 billion factory farmed animals existing at any one time (once again as with everything maybe way out)

I've seen 55 billion for the number of livestock killed per year (see the reference on p. 22 here). However, meat animals live on average less than a year, so I think the total population is closer to 24 billion, as estimated in the "Livestock" section here. This doesn't count fish or other seafood, which are killed in vast numbers because they're so small.

Ruairi wrote:so if these figures were actually correct you could argue that the problem of wild animal suffering is less than 1000 times worse than the problem of factory farming.

I think wild animals experience things as bad as factory-farmed animals more than 1/1000th of the time, as Daniel suggested. Also, I think we should give probabilistic weight to insect suffering. But I understand this is just a hypothetical analysis.

Ruairi wrote:what i meant was vertebrates

Yeah, it's my fault for introducing bad terminology. When I say "insects" I always mean "invertebrate animals."

Alan Dawrst wrote:

Ruairi wrote:the argument that x risk charities are the most efficient thing to donate to because without huamns we'll never have eco system rediesign or without life there'll be no happiness at all.

Hmm, but if humans survive, there are all sorts of opportunities for vastly greater wild suffering: My standard list is terraforming, directed panspermia, sentient nature simulations, and lab universes. Not to mention the possibility of sadistic simulators.

oh dear D: would you agree then that what makes x risks good or bad is whether or not humans that exist with future technologies will make a universe which is better or worse than nature?

so the questions would be what is nature like and if humans survive what are they likely to make things like

Ruairi wrote:oh dear D: would you agree then that what makes x risks good or bad is whether or not humans that exist with future technologies will make a universe which is better or worse than nature?

so the questions would be what is nature like and if humans survive what are they likely to make things like

Partly, but that's not the only comparison. I think the median for human-created experiences will be somewhat better than the median of what we find in nature. However,

• Human survival probably means the creation of vastly (possibly infinitely) more wild animals than exist now. So it's not just about the average painfulness of life per wild animal but the total amount of pain.
• The worst human-created experiences will be orders of magnitude worse than anything in nature. Since we know what causes each other pain, humans can torture each other in ways more agonizing than anything that would happen in nature. Once we better understand suffering in the brain and can create simulated minds under our complete control, the worst possible experiences will become much worse than anything we can imagine.

Apologies for the somber tone, but the pessimistic outlook needs its fair share of consideration.

Alan Dawrst wrote:Human survival probably means the creation of vastly (possibly infinitely) more wild animals than exist now.

That doesn't seem to be a meaningful comparison. A more meaningful one may be, "Human survival means the creation of vastly more wild animals than human extinction".

Imagine it turned out for some reason that space colonization and the creation of lab universes and terraforming of other planets like Mars is very improbable. Then compare a scenario of human extinction where the general biosphere on earth survives and quickly regains its biodiversity after a couple of million years with a scenario where human civilization absorbs more and more of the natural resources for its own sake.

If the probability of human-created "wild animal foom" scenarios is small enough, the expected wild animal life years will be smaller if human civilization persists (probably except for the infinity scenarios, leading to the general Pascal's Wager topic).

Once we better understand suffering in the brain and can create simulated minds under our complete control, the worst possible experiences will become much worse than anything we can imagine.

Yes. The upside of this knowledge is that it probably enables hedonic enhancement, possibly to the level of the Abolitionist Project ending all suffering, as well as creating vastly intensified positive experiences.

Hedonic Treader wrote:That doesn't seem to be a meaningful comparison. A more meaningful one may be, "Human survival means the creation of vastly more wild animals than human extinction".

Oops -- that's what I meant. Yeah, humans are unlikely to make a dent in the total number of wild animals in existence, even if they can create orders of magnitude times the number that will survive the next billion years on earth.

For example, with lab universes, even if humans create infinitely many new universes, that contribution is a tiny fraction of the "natural" production of inflationary universe bubbles already taking place.

Hedonic Treader wrote:possibly to the level of the Abolitionist Project ending all suffering

Ending all suffering strikes me as absurdly improbable (short of berserker probes or false-vacuum decay), but whether suffering is completely eliminated isn't the important question. What matters is the probability distribution of how much will remain. We can hope to make a contribution toward slightly decreasing the mean of that distribution.

Alan Dawrst wrote:For example, with lab universes, even if humans create infinitely many new universes, that contribution is a tiny fraction of the "natural" production of inflationary universe bubbles already taking place.

Sorry for my ignorance, is this well-established scientific fact or cosmological speculation?

I think it's pretty standard, though not quite to the same degree as, say, the Big Bang. I think it falls out of Tegmark's Level II multiverse, which Tegmark seems to regard as relatively uncontroversial, as do cosmologists like Alan Guth and Andrei Linde. "Parallel Universes" discusses the evidence for it.