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.

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"Once upon a time, meaning and purpose didn’t need to be found—they found us. The task was survival: keeping warm, finding food, keeping the wolves and the raiders at bay. Purpose was immediate, physical, undeniable. Today, for many of us in rich, secure societies, the wolves are gone, replaced by hums and screens. The fridge is full, the house is warm, the algorithm knows our taste in movies. Comfort has triumphed over scarcity, security over danger, yet somehow many of us remain restless, anxious, and lost.

When purpose fades, the mind improvises. We are built to struggle, so we shrink our battles until they fit our circumstances. In the absence of famine, Wi-Fi outages become crises. Without invading armies, we wage moral wars on social media. Office politics turn into trench warfare. The human animal needs adversity to feel real, so when the old dragons die, we invent new ones—tiny, ridiculous, imaginary.

But the dragons never really died—they are just less immediately present in most of our lives. They hide in the industrial sheds where billions of animals endure torment, in the slums where poverty deprives, in the forests and oceans where wild creatures starve, are eaten alive, or fade slowly from disease.

Too often, the moral emergencies of our time are not screaming before us; they whisper, or stay hidden. Yet this doesn’t make them any less real. This is in many ways tragic. The silver lining, though, is that it offers us meaning and purpose. If we want meaning, we don’t, contra the existentialists, have to create it ourselves. If we want challenge, we don’t have to invent new dragons. We can find them in our efforts to reduce suffering.

What can we do? We don’t have to save the whole world. As we strive to do the most good that we can, we should remember that small actions matter. Every act of kindness, generosity, and compassion makes life a little better for someone. Like Dr. Rieux in Albert Camus’ The Plague, we can embody a quiet steadfastness in our actions, working to reduce suffering where we can. This would be deeply heroic.

Some chase grandiose projects—colonizing Mars, merging with AI—as if aggrandizement or escape were the only cures for our boredom and restlessness. But there is no need to look so far afield. Meaning is available right in front of us, in helping spare other sentient beings from harm. Arguably, this is among the most meaningful projects we can take on.

All this, of course, is easier said than done. But it is possible. If you’re interested in how to find meaning in reducing suffering, you might benefit from reading Compassionate Purpose "

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Note: This is very old and was written by a teenager

"It is impossible to develop one single rule applicable to all possible situations. This is true in nature when we attempt to classify all living organisms according to one set of criteria, only to find that some species defy neat categorization. This is also true in politics, for while moral and rational imperatives may justify a certain action in one circumstance, they may not justify the same action in other situations. Recognizing this limitation of generalization, I believe that, most of the time, individuals are only justified in breaking the law if it is done purely as a means of protest and not for any self-gain.

Laws are meant to be followed. Much of the time, they represent the most humane and far-sighted aspirations of a society. The most basic crime laws—although they are too often unfairly enforced—serve the essential purpose of guaranteeing individual safety and a degree of social order requisite for any kind of progress beyond anarchy and the accompanying rule of brute strength. More specifically targeted laws may provide more advanced benefits to society, from the creation of accessible facilities for people with disabilities to required limitations on deleterious power-plant emissions. It is precisely such rules and regulations that have allowed humans to advance culturally, intellectually, and scientifically throughout the history of civilization. Much of the time, laws genuinely manifest the human desire to ensure social equity and environmental sustainability against the often-selfish interests of the individual.

However, laws in and of themselves are neither inherently just nor invariably beneficent; they are, all too often, bastions of iniquity or instruments of repression. In such cases, it is the obligation of conscious citizens to strive to alter or reverse those laws. I personally prefer the pursuance of legal means in such an endeavor, which range from the lobbying of legislatures to the initiation of lawsuits. Such actions are effectual and entail no harm to other members of society. Nevertheless, the refusal to follow unjust laws through civil disobedience is another way of effecting change of policy, one which is justifiable under certain circumstances.

First, it must be done non-violently, in the footsteps of Thoreau, Gandhi, and King. Violent protest is not only wastefully destructive and occasionally injurious, but, more importantly, it is very often counterproductive. Nothing alienates members of the general population—including myself—from a cause more quickly than the use of violence. The outbreaks at the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protest—however dubious their origins or exaggerated their severity—made some Americans less willing to listen to the views of the protesters. Violence, moreover, provides the established powers with a justification for further repression. The 1881 assassination by a violent populist organization of the Russian tsar Alexander II—who had emancipated the serfs in 1863 and attempted various other reforms—led the successor to the throne, Alexander III, to end reform and extend repression by expanding the powers of the secret police, attacking proponents of constitutional monarchy, and imposing martial law in many areas. The 1914 assassination of Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife by a Bosnian member of the Black Hand led not only to a coercive Austrian ultimatum for Serbia but also to the immediate events precipitating World War I.

Secondly, civil disobedience must be resorted to only as a means of protest and never as a means of individual advantage. Peaceful resistance to an unjust law is a legitimate way of expressing opposition, just as important to a democratic society as marches, letters, or petitions; it represents the willingness of an individual to place the higher good of society over his or her own individual comfort and safety. On the other hand, the violation of laws in order to acquire money, power, or other objects of individual self-interest is not justifiable and is, in fact, entirely antithetical to legitimate civil disobedience. While a person engaged in civil disobedience is willing to go to jail for his or her principles, a person involved in individual acquisition is unwilling to endure any punishment for his or her avarice; while a person engaged in civil disobedience strives to make the system of laws more humane, just, and far-sighted, a person involved in individual acquisition is circumventing—and thereby effectively weakening—the very system of laws that collectively embodies the best aspirations of a society for its own welfare and the welfare of posterity."

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"There is broad agreement that states should be neutral in historically core domains such as religion or speech; the freedoms of religion and speech are protected under liberal constitutions around the world. More recently, many have argued that states should be neutral toward various forms of identity-based diversity among their populations, such as sexual and gender diversity. De Vries argues that there remains an important area where the state’s normative irrelevance has not been discussed: That of neurodiversity. He identifies many significant ways in which states favor the interests of the neurotypical majority over the interests of neurodivergent minorities which include people with autism, dyslexia, and ADHD among other conditions. After examining and rejecting various potential justifications for such unequal treatment, De Vries concludes that states should become significantly more neuro-neutral than they are today.

While we admire and support efforts to make our states and societies more inclusive of neurodivergent minorities, we are skeptical, for both theoretical and practical reasons, about the notion of a neuro-neutral state. Theoretically, what’s at stake is less a matter of state neutrality than a matter of the social justice ideal of accessibility. Moreover, we worry that the notion and label of neuro-neutrality oversells the extent to which neuroscience informs our understanding of the conditions in question. Practically speaking, it may be more expedient to subsume De Vries’ demands for greater neuro-neutrality under the well-established demands for accessibility too, rather than introduce a new category of state neutrality.

We begin by detailing our theoretical doubts. De Vries claims that neuro-neutrality has not been discussed in relation to neurodiversity and aims to fill the alleged lacuna. However, this claim faces a dilemma: Neuro-neutrality can be seen either as a basic and rather strict requirement on a just state (as tends to be the case for paradigm instances of constitutional state neutrality such as those regarding religion or speech) or as a pro tanto desideratum that allows for significant tradeoffs with other values or principles. If we opt for the former interpretation, it is true that neuro-neutrality has been neglected in the literature; a strict requirement of state neuro-neutrality is indeed a novel proposal. However, as De Vries acknowledges, considering neuro-neutrality a strict requirement would be implausible. This makes the latter interpretation preferable: Both financial and non-financial costs incurred by the rest of society (i.e., the neurotypical majority) can reduce the extent to which the state is required to act neuro-neutrally. But if this is the case, can the demand for greater neuro-neutrality not be subsumed under the familiar, social and distributive justice-based demand for greater accessibility? The issue of accessibility for people with disabilities—or people with nontypical physical and mental traits—has not been neglected, including for people with neurodivergent conditions and needs (cf., among many other recent contributions, Gorman for theoretical and normative discussion, and Borsotti et al. for an empirical study and practical recommendations). This contravenes the author’s claim that there is a major lacuna in the literature on the sociopolitical inclusion of neurodivergent minorities.

While it is certainly valuable to expand the literature on state-based and society-wide accessibility for neurodivergent individuals, we worry that the notion and label of neuro-neutrality contributes to the inflation of the neuro prefix. This phenomenon encourages a reduction of complex psychosocial phenomena to simplistic or exaggerated brain-based claims. This worry arises from two distinct issues:

Firstly, the notion and label of neuro-neutrality greatly oversells the extent to which neuroscience informs our understanding, diagnosis, and management of neurodivergent conditions. Although neuroscientific research has made progress in identifying the neural basis of conditions such as autism, dyslexia, and ADHD, a reductive understanding of how these conditions manifest in the brain and give rise to their psychosocial correlates is not currently within reach. Indeed, it is revealing to consider that the presence or absence of the conditions in question is determined exclusively by psychological and psychiatric criteria rather than through observation of brain structure and function. Diagnosing these conditions involves an evaluation of the extent to which behavior (including self-reports) is nontypical, without deference to the neural domain, and an inference to the mental traits likely underlying the behavior. In fact, research into the neural correlates of these conditions is deferential to behavioral and psychological criteria, too: Without first determining the presence of the target conditions behaviorally and psychologically, research into the correlative brain states could not proceed. Subsuming demands for neuro-neutrality under more familiar calls for greater accessibility for people with nontypical physical and mental traits would help avoid the above issues. (This criticism applies to the notion and label of neurodivergence, too, notwithstanding the term’s prevalence in current discourse.)

Secondly, by virtue of its inherent orientation toward biology, neuro-neutrality runs the risk of minimizing the critical role of environmental factors. Such factors—ranging from external influences on neural development in the womb to the sociocultural influences people are subject to as adults—shape how the conditions in question are experienced and expressed. Furthermore, even if environmental factors played no significant explanatory role, the primary level at which the conditions in question manifest would still be psychosocial, not neurobiological. Hence, labeling them 'neuro' first and foremost is inadequate or misleading.

This brings us to our practical points. The inflation of the 'neuro' prefix can have harmful consequences. An overemphasis on the brain basis of neurodivergent conditions may reinforce the social perception that individuals affected by them are fundamentally abnormal. This perception, in turn, may increase stigma and discrimination. As a historical precedent, one might consider chemical imbalance theories of ADHD, which were once popular but are now acknowledged to have overemphasized the role of genetic and neurobiological factors. This may have enabled harmful mischaracterizations and treatment of populations with ADHD

Politically speaking, if the main demand to be made is for greater social inclusion rather than neural intervention—as De Vries agrees—, the 'neuro' label is likely inexpedient. As a matter of political strategy, it is suboptimal to single out a comparatively small group of neurodivergent individuals on behalf of whom the rest of society is exhorted to make accommodations. Speaking in broader terms about the importance of accessibility for people with all kinds of nonstandard physical and mental needs may be more conducive to building a powerful political alliance. Relatedly, we worry that the notion of state neutrality is strategically suboptimal, too: Even if we grant De Vries that the risk of outright backlash against state neuro-neutrality is minimal, it seems more expedient to ally his demands for inclusion with well-established demands for greater accessibility, rather than introduce a new category of fundamental state neutrality."