I've been lurking here for a while and figured it was time to step into the light. My flavor of utilitarianism is what I think you would call classical (total) utilitarianism. It seems to me the obvious way of looking at the world, with no weird intuitions thrown in.

I'm having trouble actually putting my views into practice; I am registered as an organ donor and I am approximately vegan but all that is chump change. It would be more effective to change people's minds and steer the human machine as a whole into a better direction. But so far I haven't had any luck with ridding the people around me of their nature worship and traditional morality. In fact I haven't even been able to get them to take the phrase "approximately vegan" seriously.

I've been trying to distill my views into an accessible presentation or something like that (think TED but with substance), that I could then reuse and perform in various places. Unfortunately every time I try, I feel like I have to touch on probability theory and decision theory and crap like that just to give them the tools to look at the world the way I do (when I can afford it). Or maybe I just need a way of suspending the intuitions and platitudes that allow them to conveniently disagree with me every step of the way.

My main reason for posting here now is that we might be able to put something like this together together.

This is the problem of large inferential distance. Utilitarianism is a weird idea, unless you already know how to think analytically. This is similar to the way that the consequentialist Eliezer Yudkowsky realised that it was too hard to explain the significance of AI ethics to people without rationality, and so he wrote the "Sequences".

I suspect a better strategy than figuring out how to persuade people better is figuring out how to persuade better people. Find those whose ideas aren't a million miles away but just haven't codified them, or who have, but haven't thought through the practical implications.

80,000 Hours does the latter, and maybe a little of the former, but I don't know of any groups that really focus on it, or what the best strategy would be. (Felicifia sort of functions as a low-cost low return approach to it, but I suspect there are a lot of low-hanging fruit we miss)

Welcome! !

koning_robot wrote: their nature worship and traditional morality

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@Arepo, sounds very interesting, could 80k or someone look into this?

Thanks for your replies. Arepo's suggestion is obvious in hindsight, but I had not really thought about it before. That said, I have been looking to persuade people who already have something they claim to care about, e.g. veg*ns. My thinking is that someone who claims to care about something has an interest in appearing to care about it, and since caring about something implies caring about the truth of that thing, this opens up the possibility of pushing them to choose between seeking truth or losing face. I only have a tiny sample (less than half a dozen people), but so far they've all chosen to admit that they don't really care. Literally.

I get the concept of inferential distance (and I've read most of the sequences), but I would expect to make more progress by throwing information at a larger audience than to constrain myself to the LessWrong crowd, most of whom already unshakeably hold a preference utilitarianism view. There's lots of people out there who say they "fucking love" science. Even if that's only attire, they still have an incentive to live up to it. Giving them a non-mysterious meta-ethics and some of current science's implications might get them going in the right direction.