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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   27882 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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After Zizians and the efilist bombing I have tried to pay more attention to the cross section of ethical veganism, rationalists, and nerdy utilitarian blogs.

A Substack titled "Don't Eat Honey" was published. Inside, the argument is made that to buy or consume honey is an unethical act for insect suffering-at-scale reasons. According to the essay, bees, like livestock, suffer quite a lot at the hands of beekeepers. That's a lot of bees. Thus the title: don't eat honey.

The median estimate, from the most detailed report ever done on the intensity of pleasure and pain in animals, was that bees suffer 7% as intensely as humans. The mean estimate was around 15% as intensely as people. Bees were guessed to be more intensely conscious than salmon!

If we assume conservatively that a bee’s life is 10% as unpleasant as chicken life, and then downweight it by the relative intensity of their suffering, then consuming a kg of honey is over 500 times worse than consuming a kg of chicken! And these estimates were fairly conservative. I think it’s more plausible that eating honey is thousands of times worse than eating comparable amounts of chicken

This particular post is high on assumption and light on rigor. It received outrage. Another post on Bentham's blog on insect suffering I recall as higher quality material for understanding. Did you know that composting is an unethical abomination? I'd never considered it!

'Suffering' presents an incommensurable problem. Suffering is a social construct. Suffering is the number and intensity of firing pain receptors over time. Suffering is how many days in a row I experienced boredom as a teenager. Still, science attempts to define and quantify suffering. An equation works out the math: how conscious a cricket is in relation to man, a cricket's assumed capacity to feel pain, the length of time it spends feeling pain, and so on. My prediction is we will figure out the consciousness part of the equation with stable meaning before we ever do so for suffering.

We will manage to rethink, remeasure, and find additional ways of suffering. People always have. Today, plants do not feel "pain", but tomorrow, pain may not a prerequisite for suffering. Maybe starvation becomes a moral imperative. If the slope sounds too slippery, please consider people have already built a (relatively unpopular) scaffolding to accept and impose costs at the expense of human comfort, life, and survival. Admittedly, that suffering may present an incommensurable problem doesn't negate any imperative to reduce it. Find more suffering? Reduce that, too. It does give me reason to question the limitations and guard rails of the social technology.

According to Wikipedia, negative utilitarians (NU) are sometimes categorized as strong NUs and weak NUs. This differentiates what I'd call fundamentalists --- who follow suffering minimizer logic to whatever ends -- to the milder "weak" utilitarians. The fundamentalist may advocate for suffering reduction at a cost that includes death, your neighbor's dog, or the continued existence of Slovenia-- the honey bee capitol of the world. Our anti-honey, anti-suffering advocate has previously demonstrated he values some positive utility when it comes to natalism, but much of his commenting audience appears more in the fundamentalist category.

One vibe I pick up from the modern vegans is that the anti-suffering ethics are the ethics of the future. That our great-grandchildren will look backwards and wonder how we ever stooped so low as to tolerate farming practice A or B. I don't doubt we'll find cost effective, technological solutions that will be accepted as moral improvements in the future. I am not opposed to those changes on principle. Increase shrimp welfare if you want, fine.

My vague concern is that this social technology doesn't appear limited to spawning technological or charitable solutions. With things like lab meat showing up more frequently in the culture war I'd expect the social technology to spread. So far, however, vegans remain a stable population in the US. Nerdy utilitarian bloggers are yet to impose their will on me. They just don't think I should eat honey.

This view of suffering, as some sort of negative imposed on life, is bizarre to me. I mean it makes sense coming from a person suffering clinical depression or otherwise deeply disordered. But suffering, by and large, is our biology's way of pointing the way to go. Only children think the world would be better off without suffering. Anyone who has ever seen a news segment or documentary about people literally born without the ability to feel pain understands what a nightmarish body horror that is. I'll never forget the one I saw. Turns out without pain, it's hard to keep an infant from clawing their own eyes out, chewing off their own tongue, fingers and toes, and other acts of senseless self mutilation. They won't cry when they need something, so the new parent, ignorant to the condition, first discovers something is amiss after the child, instead of crying to be fed in the middle of the night, lets their parents sleep peacefully while they remove their own eye with their curious searching fingers.

Suffering may seem pointless to the disordered mind, but every now and again we get a Twilight Zone like glimpse at a world without suffering, and it's a horror almost beyond belief. Like a hell out of Event Horizon or Hellraiser.

This view of suffering, as some sort of negative imposed on life, is bizarre to me.

It almost seems gnostic: we've been trapped by a terrible demiurge into a prison world of suffering. If only we can deprive ourselves of enough material items (now including honey) in this prison world, we'll finally be able to reach the perfect spiritual realm.

So much of modern leftism has Gnostic parallels, it's unsettling once you know what to look for.

I've never thought about it that way. Do you have other examples that come to mind?

Woke is all about Catharism. Thé Cathari can save you by association- at terrible cost to themselves. The queer black women grace us with their presence, bringing us enlightenment, despite their suffering. Any sexual practice is good, as long as it doesn’t make a baby. There are those who are enlightened by the cathari and those who are stuck in the false consciousness of prevailing religion. There are those who are awakened to the reality of structural oppression(this is the literal meaning of woke) and those who are stuck in the mainstream mode of society. Christianity is imperfect but a great vehicle for the true faith.

Sidebar but what's up with the random é's I occasionally see randomly inserted in your text? Are you just using a non-american keyboard or is it like an "embolden the e" thing?

My keyboard is set to recognize English, Spanish, and French. I do not know, or want to know, why it sometimes autocorrects the to thé, but it doesn’t seem worth fixing.

Haha fair enough. I used to have a tv with a ui language set to french and never got around to changing it because i thought it was funny.

A lot of Marxist false consciousness and its derivatives seems very reminiscent of certain ideas about the demiurge.

The Matrix is obviously a big Gnostic metaphor (the machines have pulled the wool over our eyes and trapped us inside a false reality, we must see the truth and escape into the real world; machines = Demiurge). The Wachowskis later claimed that they'd always intended the film as a metaphor for coming out as trans, which inspired a lot of eyerolls and accusations of revisionism. But I don't think that's the case at all, I really do think that's what they intended at the time of writing:

the reason this interpretation doesn't jump out at most people is because they're approaching gender ideology from the perspective of "most people are cis, but some people are trans and that's okay and they deserve respect and compassion" as opposed to the perspective of "everyone is trans, but most have been brainwashed into believing they're cis - freethinkers whose eggs have hatched see the truth". Cypher is a detransitioner and also a cowardly traitorous villain: not a coincidence.

Everything about trans activism, really, has Gnostic undertones: the very concept of a "gender identity" which is wholly distinct from one's sex is obviously sneaking dualism in by the backdoor, but the way so many trans people talk about being trapped inside these nauseating flesh prisons and their transhumanistic desire to mould, slice and sculpt their bodies to better achieve their embodiment goals carries a big whiff of it too. This is part of a broader trend since the emergence of the internet towards Gibson's "relaxed contempt for the flesh": the tendency to see your body not as "you" but as a tool or vehicle you are controlling. Sometimes this can end up in weird science-denial places: fat acceptance activists who deny that the laws of physics apply to human beings just as much as anything else, that the only thing that can cause disease is mean words and fat shaming. It almost seems to come off like a denial of the existence of an objective external world: instead, we are all just souls trapped inside flesh prisons, and the only way one soul can be harmed is if another soul inflicts harm upon it.

At the extremes, you get into whatever the Zizians were doing, with their outré decision theory ideas about doing whatever it would be optimal for every one of your paraselves to do elsewhere in the multiverse - but they're a noncentral idea of the trend I'm describing.

The Wachowskis later claimed that they'd always intended the film as a metaphor for coming out as trans, which inspired a lot of eyerolls and accusations of revisionism

From time to time I read movie screenplays for movies I've already seen to help me fall asleep at night.

I read The Matrix screenplay right after a close friend of mine came out as trans and talked to me about it so it was top of mind and let me tell you the script is suspiciously full of trans messaging.

The police let their guard down in the beginning when arresting Trinity, not expecting a girl to be all that dangerous. Except she kills them

Then there's this

                   SCREEN
             JACKON:  I heard Morpheus has been
             on this board.
             SUPERASTIC:  Morpheus doesn't even
             exist and the Matrix is nothing
             but an advertising gimmick 4 a new
             game.
             TIMAXE:  All I want to know is
             Trinity really a girl?
             LODIII:  87% of all women on line
             are really men.

Tee hee.

Then, Neo specifically says to Trinity when she confronts him at a party that he thought she was a guy. She replies that most guys do.

This all seems very Hollywood girlboss by today's standards but in 1999 I think they were playing with something deeper.

                  TRINITY
              They're watching you.  Something
              happened and they found out about
              you.

You're out of the closet buddy.

She continues, talking about Morpheus helping her wake up from the Matrix

               He told me that no one should look
               for the answer unless they have to
               because once you see it,
               everything changes.  Your life and
               the world you live in will never
               be the same.  It's as if you wake
               up one morning and the sky is
               falling.

I've spoken to a few trans people now and a recurring story is the collapse of their denial.They wake up and realize their whole life is a lie. It's really upsetting. They can't go back but they're also scared to go ahead.

Neo attempts to follow Morpheus' plan at work but he chickens out when he has to go out the window. Maybe he can go on without finding out? Then he's arrested.

               AGENT SMITH
               It seems that you have been living
               two lives.

Choosing the red pill to wake up being like the first time you take hormones, etc.

Uhh anyway there's more of this stuff. Might need to make a fun thread post.

I read that their original plan was for Switch to be played by a male actor inside the Matrix, and by a female actor in the real world (or maybe vice versa). They wisely decided against it because they reckoned audiences would find it too confusing, but the fact that that was the original plan makes their intentions all the more explicit.

Consider also the scene in which Agent Smith holds Neo down on the train tracks addressing him as Mr. Anderson (i.e. deadnaming him), but Neo insists that his name is Neo and refuses to let himself be killed by the oncoming subway. Now consider also that, at some point prior to filming, Lana Wachowski was feeling such intense despair brought on by their gender dysphoria that they considered throwing themselves in front of a train. With all the high concepts flying around, it's easy to forget what an intensely personal film The Matrix is for its creators. It was not some commercial film they did for a paycheque: for better and worse, they put every ounce of themselves into this thing, and its first two sequels.

Right. Agent Smith deadnames all of them, in fact, (he calls Cypher "Mr Reagan"). You could imagine Cypher as desperate to de-transition since living the truth is so hard.

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The metaphor itself has been a part of ancient Western culture for millennia. Gnostic thought goes all the way back to Plato. The gnostic gospels are nearly 2000 years old. It’s hardly surprising that a movie playing on those themes is going to resonate with modern western people raised with the idea of a separation between the mind and the body and who quite often react with surprise when they find out that biology influences your mind both from birth and because of the environment. We think of ourselves as minds driving bodies and not as a whole being that contains a brain that is biologically wired to produce your thoughts. It’s hardly surprising that Marxists and other gnostics can appeal to this pre Christian myth to push their beliefs.

We actually have a lot of those pre Christian myths in our culture. The myth of the perfectibility of human kind — which should have died the day we discovered Auschwitz’s gas chambers — has been going strong for centuries. This is another piece of the liberal system of thought. If only we could teach people to be good, they’d actually be good. If only people had more money they’d stop being criminals. If only we could give people what they say they want we could have utopia. It’s never worked that way.

It’s hardly surprising that a movie playing on those themes is going to resonate with modern western people raised with the idea of a separation between the mind and the body

Sometimes you'll even find evangelicals who misunderstand Christian teaching on the dead -- it's really common among evangelicals to find people discussing how "I won't need my body when I'm gone," or speaking of "Jesus taking me out of this vessel of a body," in a way that reveals they misunderstand the ultimate Christian view of the human person as body and soul and the Christian agreement with the Pharisees on the resurrection of the dead.

Obviously this isn't an indictment of evangelicalism as a belief system -- informed evangelicals are firm believers in the resurrection -- but it just shows how widespread this view is. I also strongly agree with the Orthodox on the point that cremation is just a bad call, because the overall culture of cremation encourages the neglect of the bodies of the dead by making them scatterable and transportable. The proper resting place of human remains is the ground or the crypt, not an urn on a mantlepiece or the ocean or -- God help us -- Disney World.

I once heard that so many people were requesting to have their ashes scattered at Old Trafford that Manchester United actually bought a dedicated ashes-scattering plot for their fans.

I regret clicking that link. But I generally agree that the ideas are so entrenched that most people don’t even think about them. It’s in almost every scifi at some point that highly evolved aliens will transcend the need for physical-matter bodies and become pure spirit or mind. Or in speculation about aliens you find the same reports (in ufo stuff) or speculation in general— the aliens are so advanced they no longer have or need physical bodies. I don’t have personal strong feelings about cremation, as I think God can resurrect anything so it’s not like if I happen to be turned into powder that God cannot resurrect me. On the other hand, I think it’s a crime against human dignity to throw ashes around in any place. Just like bury the urn and respect that these are the remnants of your relative. Also, Disney people are just plain weird.

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Doesn't resurrection entail a new body being created? The old one seems pretty irrelevant.

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I'm often startled at how culturally significant the Matrix has been. The sequels weren't all that good, the plot of the original was strange and confusing, and the concept of "the world is revealed to be an illusion" has been done better -- but the concept of the colored pills, bullet time, and Laurence Fishburne's performance as Morpheus just made the movie hard to forget. The strange aesthetic made it both confusing and memorable. (Sometimes I think the flaws of Star Wars did the same -- both the OT and the prequels have diehard fans precisely because they were tacky and disjointed. The sequels are so polished, but they're polished like a turd.)

The Matrix definitely sticks out in my memory, but personally I'd rather everyone take the Christpill from Catholic Morpheus.

the concept of "the world is revealed to be an illusion" has been done better

At the risk of spoiling the works in question for myself, which works are you thinking of?

Reminds me of Umberto Eco's Cult of the Imperfect. He applies the idea even to acknowledged masterpieces - one of the reasons why Hamlet, for instance, has been so compelling is because it is in some ways badly written. Lakes of ink have been spilled on trying to interpret Hamlet's motives because they are not clear in the play - because they are actually rather arbitrary and inconsistent, in a way that would probably strike us as bad writing, if Shakespeare did not have the reputation that he does. And while you could just conclude it's because Shakespeare was rushed or made some bad calls, it's so much more interesting to treat the text as whole, the arbitrariness as intentional, and dive into psychoanalysing the hero.

Star Wars is also in that golden zone of imperfection, I think. Even in the OT, the films are frequently disjointed, and characterisation changes wildly without explanation. It's pretty obvious that ANH is written for a universe in which Luke's father and Darth Vader were different people, and Luke and Leia are not related, for instance. In ESB, Luke hates and fears Vader and wants to kill him, and Vader disloyally seeks an ally to stage a coup against the Emperor; in RotJ, without any explanation, Luke now regards Vader with this self-sacrificial love, and Vader is so broken upon the Emperor's will as to consider revolt impossible. It's not inconceivable that something happened in between the films to cause both of them to change their minds (maybe Luke struggled long and hard with the revelation that Vader was his father and eventually came to the painful conclusion that he must love him the same way he thought he loved Anakin; maybe the Emperor discovered Vader's plot and tortured him into submission), but there is no hint of either of these processes in RotJ. The characters are just... different.

And yet I can't make himself dislike Star Wars because of this, or view the OT as lesser. I even like the PT. I still love those films, all six of them. (There are only six Star Wars films.) In many ways I love Star Wars because of its flaws, not only because of its strengths.

The Shadows of the Empire book does a lot of the heavy lifting, at least in the old Legends continuity, explaining not just Luke (Jedi training and seeing the cost of seeking revenge above all) and Vader's (finding the Dark Side increasingly unable to repair or alleviate his damaged flesh, and that Palpatine is grooming people to kill Vader's whole family... and thinks Vader's so weak that a crime lord that's not even force-sensitive might take him down) change in perspective, along with a lot of other goofy bits like Leia's Booush outfit or where Luke's new lightsaber crystal came from. Kinda with mixed results: it's definitely not a Zahn-level book, and a few parts were pretty cringy even by 90s-standards, but neither was it awful.

Of course, it did so twelve years after Return of the Jedi made it to theatres.

Eco's theory is certainly believable. For other examples, Harry Potter and Redwall fandom regularly points to the many bizarre early storytelling decisions as why they joined as heavily as they did. I will caveat that it's definitely not sufficient, though. Jupiter Ascending is a glorious trainwreck that leaves unanswered questions everywhere, but despite a small fandom of exactly the demographics you'd most expect to be into fanfic, it's largely abandoned.

I think it'll be hard to explain to the next generation, but the effects in The Matrix were absurdly groundbreaking. But they also were groundbreaking enough that pretty much any movie with a VFX sequence will copy some of its visual language. If you've seen a bunch of modern action movies, though, and then watch The Matrix, you're going to feel that a lot of it is just playing to standard visual tropes that have been done well, maybe even better, in lots of movies. But the thing is, most of those were new in 1999, and you won't appreciate it unless you can compare it to the zeitgeist of 1998 cinema -- without a lot of effort, you really have to have been there.

I'd compare it to The Beatles: I wasn't around when the originals were published, and I find it hard to appreciate the novelty that my older friends and relatives attribute to them because very few features in their catalog haven't been done better (and with better recording and mastering) by other artists since.

The Seinfeld is Unfunny effect.

A lot of people have pointed to 1999 as being a high-water mark for mainstream American cinema. It's remarkable to think what a widespread influence on Western Anglo culture two concepts from movies released that year had (taking the red pill from The Matrix, "beautiful and unique snowflake" from Fight Club), and how durable their staying power was. A quarter-century after the film's release, you can use the phrase "taking the red pill" in conversation with a group of Anglophones of varying socioeconomic backgrounds and income levels, and reasonably assume that they'll understand the metaphor and that it won't seem dated or clichéd, even if they haven't seen the movie from which it originated. ("Snowflake" will be understood by most audiences, but won't have the desired effect, after years of conservative commentators beating it like a dead horse.) In this regard (that even most people who haven't seen the movie have a passing familiarity with at least one of its key images/concepts), The Matrix is right up there with 1984 in terms of its cultural penetration. The Matrix was a true four-quadrant movie, equally appealing to fans of action movies, sci-fi nerds, philosophy eggheads, undergraduate Buddhists, spiritualists and weeaboos. In today's era of disposable pop culture, where Marvel Studios are delighted if people are still sharing GIFs of their latest capeshit instalment so much as one year after release, that kind of durable cross-demographic cultural staying power is hard to even wrap your head around. Nothing from the current decade of cinema seems likely to equal it: offhand, the only movie from the last decade which might is Joker* (and I think that film's star has well and truly fallen after its disastrous sequel); from the decade before, The Dark Knight.

*I was tempted to say Drive, but I have to remind myself that that film only made a tiny fraction of what The Matrix did: it's universally beloved in the circles in which I move, but not necessarily beyond that.

In today's era of disposable pop culture, where Marvel Studios are delighted if people are still sharing GIFs of their latest capeshit instalment so much as one year after release, that kind of durable cross-demographic cultural staying power is hard to even wrap your head around.

What was the home video market like in the US? Because, for us, The Matrix was one of the first DVDs we got which gave it even more staying power but we were generally a bit behind the West (especially on TV)

If you can only own a few you pick movies that are either classics, have good special features or really "popped" on screen.

Nowadays you can cycle through terabytes of movies at will (hell, even if you had no internet 6-in-1 DVDs are common in any random street market in Africa) and I don't know that anyone cares about the BTS stuff. You can't sit with a movie for months to years.

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Excluded middle, no?

You can’t point to the most useful examples of suffering and conclude that all suffering must be at least as valuable.

Point taken, but the transhumanists will reasonably interject how contingent so much suffering is. They're entirely correct to note that technological solutions (vaccines, cochlear implants, glasses etc.) have largely obviated forms of suffering which affected vast swathes of the population even a few generations ago, and that it is reasonable to expect this trend to continue. Pain as a stimulus warning you off doing something which will injure or kill you is a relatively elegant evolutionary mechanism, but the modern WEIRD context in which the rate of premature violent death has plummeted to negligible levels really brings home how much of a hack it is in absolute terms (e.g. people who are bedridden for years because of chronic idiopathic back pain). It's not much of a reach to imagine how these particular kinds of suffering could be wholly negated in the near future. Your example about children afflicted with chronic insensitivity to pain and inadvertently gnawing off their own fingers is entirely valid, but it isn't remotely difficult to imagine a future in which small children are given e.g. brain implants so that they intuitively understand that they oughtn't do this without needing the pain stimulus.

brain implants so that they intuitively understand that they oughtn't do this without needing the pain stimulus.

Ah yes, I can totally see how that will go. The screening for the disease will be more expensive than just getting the device and/or lobbyist will get the CDC to "recommend" that every child get the device, even ones that don't have the disease. Better safe than sorry. They can throw it in with the Hep B vaccine as soon as the baby is born. But then it turns out that when you offload vital cognitive function to this device, the brain never develops them itself, so now every child grows into an adult dependent on this device for life. Oh, and also you need a new one every 5-10 years. And when they break, now it's like pain insensitivity has been induced in you, and you get mightily banged up.

I guess mentioning the Twilight Zone is a bit dated of a reference. But if you've never seen one, a constant theme of the show was to heighten one aspect of the human condition to a point of terrifying absurdity. And while an autist or a particularly dim child might watch an episode and think "Ah yes, it would suck to literally wish for more time to read, and then be the only survivor of an apocalypse and have your glasses break", you are supposed to realize how foolish it is to have such a myopic focus in life in the first place.

So when I compared that medical condition to a Twilight Zone episode, I was implying there are lessons to be drawn from it beyond the literal "This condition sucks." I fully reject the notion that pain, physical or mental, is outdated in any modern context.

But then it turns out that when you offload vital cognitive function to this device, the brain never develops them itself, so now every child grows into an adult dependent on this device for life.

Funnily enough, I finally got around to reading The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich after reading Scott's review of it ~7 years ago. I'm only about 70 pages in, but Henrich has already clearly elucidated that this pattern you're describing (of humans becoming frail and atrophied in some domain because of our life-or-death dependence on technological interventions) is also known as "the history of the human species" or perhaps even "the very thing that makes us human"*. Apes and chimpanzees might scoff at us feeble humans: how we have to cook our food before eating it instead of consuming it raw, how we always lose against them in unarmed fights (even fights between a burly adult male human and a juvenile chimp). Who cares what they think? We took over the planet, not them. In the distant future, who's more likely to colonise the solar system: the humans who stubbornly insist on hanging on to their pain receptors in spite of the fact that they've never laid eyes on a rusty nail in their entire lives; or the humans who've outsourced that cognitive module to an external gadget, and can hence devote that extra processing power to optimising their local Dyson sphere? Trick question: the former group won't even exist, having been ruthlessly outcompeted by the latter, just as the proto-humans who weren't onboard with this whole "applying heat to raw meat before eating it" thing got outcompeted by those who were.

*Reading it is making me even more contemptuous of Luddites than I was before. If, as Ted Kacsynski would have us believe, the industrial revolution was a disaster for the human race, why stop at 1750? Technological developments and our reliance on increasingly complex tools have been changing who we are, at a cellular, neural level, for as long as the human race has existed.

*Reading it is making me even more contemptuous of Luddites than I was before. If, as Ted Kacsynski would have us believe, the industrial revolution was a disaster for the human race, why stop at 1750?

Didn’t kaczynsci think that we should return to pre-civilisation?

Well, he specifically talks about the industrial revolution being a disaster for the human race. It's a few years since I read it, but my vague recollection is that he thought that the pre-industrial tech level was not so advanced as to be incompatible with authentic psychological flourishing. But I admit I could be mistaken.

It is the latter group which won’t even exist. The choice of existence becomes rarer thé longer it has been a choice. Those transhumanists will produce few young, lose most of them to soma, and then burn out the few that remain with oriental bugman academic grinds. Keeping that civilization going requires a reserve supply of mark I humans to replenish it and modernity does not supply it.

Say what you will about the Amish and similar, they hang on. In 3000 AD there may not be a Silicon Valley but there will be Pennsylvania Dutch.

Say what you will about the Amish and similar, they hang on. In 3000 AD there may not be a Silicon Valley but there will be Pennsylvania Dutch.

I do wonder how long they'll be tolerated by the wider culture, though, if it seems like they're growing enough to be more than token weirdos. I would not be surprised if, within the next ~40 years, there was a push to bring the Amish to heel, most likely with "child (sexual) abuse" as the casus belli.

Probably indefinitely. Northern European Protestant cultures cannot function in modernity without a Refugia to provide labor that makes up for their own low fertility rates; in the past these were mostly Catholic cultures that provided immigrants(Ireland as the ur-example, but that’s what Mexico was recently. Obviously, neither of these places are going to be exporting masses of young laborers they way they could in 1850 or 1990.), but that’s not an option anymore so the choice is between tolerating weirdos in your midst- provided they have six well behaved and hard working kids- or importing Africans. Germany may rather the latter, now that there’s no youth surplus in its Slavic near abroad, but America will almost certainly rather give the Amish more of the same special carve outs they have now.

If I were thé Hasidim, however, I’d be worried. Antisemitism is slowly becoming normalized on the left and the future right is unlikely to have much patience for groups that won’t even pretend to work.

I would not be surprised if, within the next ~40 years, there was a push to bring the Amish to heel, most likely with "child (sexual) abuse" as the casus belli.

I'd say odds are high, and I'm somewhat surprised it hasn't happened yet. Look at the flurry of stories from the past few years involving Jehovah's Witnesses, which is a relatively small sect (but larger than the Amish). Washington's recent law removing clergy-penitent privilege specifically referenced them along with Catholics as the reason for needing to remove the privilege.

A law removing long-standing rights isn't likely to stand. I'm unsure how it works with JWs, but the practice of Catholic confessions (behind a screen in a dark room, anonymous option) nullifies testimony. Are sexual offenders going to testify that they confessed their sins and then the priest didn't provide testimony to the state? Will the state be bugging confessionals?

Should Washington state consider revoking other privileged positions? Why should spouse, lawyer and doctor be exempt?

Edit: Reading the text of the law there is more leagalise to parse through in regards to the responsibilities of medical personnel if understand it correctly https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2025-26/Pdf/Bills/Senate%20Passed%20Legislature/5375.PL.pdf#page=1

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Say what you will about the Amish and similar, they hang on. In 3000 AD there may not be a Silicon Valley but there will be Pennsylvania Dutch.

Per Wikipedia, even the Amish are only 300 years and change old. We're talking about Harvard, not the Catholic Church.

Apes and chimpanzees might scoff at us feeble humans: how we have to cook our food before eating it instead of consuming it raw

Great. Now imagine what happens when we not only become dependant on cooking, but we also lose our ability to cook. That's the issue being raised here. Do you think that's not happening? That it's impossible?

Well, I'm not bothered that we might lose our ability to cook, even though that's technically possible.

It was a hypothetical example.

I think smartphones/TikTok/AI are making us lose our attention, our ability to analyze and to think, and they don't offer anything in return (AI could in theory take over our thinking for us, but I doubt it will, and even if it did it raises the question of who's going to fix it if it breaks down). It's akin to becoming dependent on cooking, and losing our ability to do so, but it's not literally the same thing.

I agree with your overall reasoning. Our favorite current-day technologies could theoretically be used as the next step in the formation of homo technicus, tool-using man who outcompetes his more natural rivals because technology just makes him better at life, but right now those technologies are mostly used to hook into our path-of-least-resistence hedonism to maximize engagement and minimize agency. In the long run, we'll figure out how to use them more intelligently and efficiently for productive purposes, and how to protect ourselves from addiction and brain-addling engagement-maximization-schemes. Well, "we" - some will, some won't, and the former will make it further into the future than the latter before technology progress makes humans in general obsolete.

I think smartphones/TikTok/AI are making us lose our attention, our ability to analyze and to think, and they don't offer anything in return

I would posit that the smartphone has observably reduced the need to store specific data because it's much easier than it used to be to load it (I'm old enough to "search the Internet", the kids these days "ask AI") on the fly when necessary. Lots of encyclopedia facts are useful to know on rare day-to-day occasions ("Which rivers empty into the Aral Sea?"), but I think in practice things are "better" (for some definition of "better") where I can pull up that fact at hand, which maybe a generation ago sometimes required referencing my shelf of encyclopedias or a trip to the library. And maybe I can use that mental space that was previously holding the population of Iran or the specifics of red-black trees for something that is more useful to me today [1].

I recall hearing from a historian a while back that the most numerous book on US Navy ships in the 1980s was a dictionary: has ubiquitous spell checking (and sometimes-wrong autocorrect) lost us something of value other than the "character" built by having to thumb through the dictionary to spell right? That one feels similar as a technology question, but I'd bet you have fewer takers for "the good ol' days" before spell check.

  1. I think whether that space has been efficiently re-purposed is a valid question, and I'm not convinced capacity hasn't declined somewhat. But I think that's best addressed as a separate question.

I don't think it's impossible, but the people who object to the process remind me of King Canute. Plant your stick in the ground and say you'll have no part in it if you must: the great tide of technological progress will sweep on just fine without you.

Perhaps in the far future there will be people who have been dependent on external software peripherals for so long (generations of them, in fact) that their native pain receptors have atrophied to the point of disuse, like the appendix. Maybe we'll find that the concept of "pain as a warning to avoid injury and death" has been wholly consigned to the dustheap of history. Would that be bad? Sure. But in a list of things that make me unnerved when thinking about fates that might befall humanity in the distant future, it wouldn't crack the top ten, probably not even the top fifty. I'm far more worried about e.g. humanity signing over our ability to feel anything for the sake of economic progress than merely our ability to feel pain, especially when the threats that pain evolved to protect us against (predators, fire, poisonous food etc.) are becoming increasingly irrelevant for humanity in general and for Westerners in particular.

Plant your stick in the ground and say you'll have no part in it if you must: the great tide of technological progress will sweep on just fine without you.

I for one happen to think we can just choose to not commit collective suicide.

Perhaps in the far future there will be people who have been dependent on external software peripherals for so long (generations of them, in fact) that their native pain receptors have atrophied to the point of disuse, like the appendix

I don't know about pain receptors, but the general process we're talking about is already happening. Kids growing up with smartphones are getting their brains fried. ChatGPT will fry them even more. It's not going to be like cooking, with the ability to start a fire being passed down culturally. It's not even that they'll become dependant on ChatGPT, or whatever, and will have to outsource their thinking to it. ChatGPT will just suck their skills out, and but won't be able to offer an appropriate replacement.

I understand. My point is, every generation has always had this complaint about the one following it. Everyone's parochial about the technological level with which they're familiar, and suspicious about every one following. We can even acknowledge that some of the doomsaying predictions made about this or that new technology were right on the money, and yet that the technology in question was still a boon to the human species on net.

"Now that they're written down, no one's able to recite long passages of text from memory anymore!"

"Now that we have guns, no one knows how to hunt animals with a compound bow anymore!"

"Now that we have player pianos, our vocal cords will atrophy from disuse!"

"Now that we have internal combustion engines, everyone will become fat, slovenly and sedentary!"

"Now that we have cheap and reliable medicine, there's no incentive for people to live secularly healthful lives!"

"Now that we have slide rules calculators, no one can perform complex arithmetic calculations in their head anymore!"

"Now that Word automatically spellchecks your writing, no one can spell anymore!"

"Now that Google Maps navigates for you, no one can read an OS map or perform basic orienteering anymore!"

That's not to say that I'm not at all concerned about the impact of ChatGPT on literacy and logical thought, particularly on developing brains - if I had children, I wouldn't be giving them smartphones until they were of age.

But at the same time, I don't feel like I've lost out that much because I don't know how to hunt game, or that I can travel a few hundred kilometres in three hours rather than several days, or that I've outsourced the task of navigation to Google Maps. When it comes to ChatGPT, it's important to bear in mind that this technology is very new. We may soon find that having it at our disposal affords us the ability to perform intellectual tasks we couldn't do otherwise, or frees up our time which would otherwise be wasted on time-consuming and labour-intensive tasks. Or maybe it'll turn all our brains to mush. At this point I think it's too soon to say, and I'm not yet at the point of wanting to wage Butlerian jihad.

And to return to my previous point: the advent of weaponry did result in us becoming physically weaker than chimpanzees. But I kind of - don't care? Doesn't seem like that big a deal in the scheme of things.

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I admit I have trouble parsing your arguments here as anything but "do not ever attempt to change anything for the better (unless we define "better" as things that have existed before and now don't), you moron, you absolute buffoon".

Pic related

Well, there's suffering and there's suffering.

A pain signal that tells you to pull your hand away from a hot stove is "suffering".

This, on the other hand, is suffering:

The New Mexico State Penitentiary riot, which took place on February 2 and 3, 1980, at the Penitentiary of New Mexico (PNM) south of Santa Fe, was the most violent prison riot in U.S. history. Inmates took complete control of the prison and twelve officers were taken hostage. [...]

Events spiraled out of control within the cell blocks in large part due to the actions of two gangs. The first were the Chicanos, who protected each other and dished out targeted retribution for specific grudges. The other gang was loosely labeled the Aryan Brotherhood and was led by some of the most dangerous inmates (who by this time had been released from segregation in Cell Block 3). They decided to break into Cell Block 4, which held prisoners labeled as informers. Cell Block 4 also housed inmates who were mentally ill, convicted of sex crimes, or otherwise vulnerable, and held a total of 96 prisoners. [...]

During an edition of BBC's Timewatch program, an eyewitness described the carnage in Cell Block 4. He saw an inmate held up in front of a window; he was being tortured by using a blowtorch on his face and eyes until his head exploded. Another story was about Mario Urioste, who was jailed for shoplifting. He was originally placed by officers in a violent unit where he was gang-raped by seven inmates. Mario had filed a lawsuit against his rapists, so prison officials had housed him in Cell Block 4 for his own protection. Urioste was one of the targets for revenge. His body was found hanged, with his throat cut and his dismembered genitals stuffed into his mouth.

The former is a useful biological mechanism; the latter raises suffering to the level of a genuine philosophical problem (as in, should we sacrifice everything else to make the elimination of suffering our primary goal? If the choice is between a universe with suffering and no universe at all, would it be better to just not exist at all? etc).

We can basically break suffering into two components: the physical sensation, and the meaning / long-term effects. As bad as getting a leg amputed without anesthesia hurts, the long-term effects will hurt worse, and so the horror of losing a leg permanently may well outweigh the physical pain in the moment.

Conflating these two types of pain is counterproductive. If we turn off physical pain, we might get hurt more. If we turn off negative utility we fundamentally alter ourselves. I'm not sure it's even theoretically possible to turn it off--going from 100 utility to 50 probably feels exactly the same as going from 0 to -50.

I doubt being fed your own genitals is actually all that painful compared to any number of other ways to die. It's just more horrifying. Most elderly people in America probably go through much worse physical pain than anyone in that prison as their bodies linger in agony for months.

Rape might not be physically painful at all but most people would choose to break a bone above being raped. Even if you were guaranteed to never suffer trauma or anything from it, it's still highly undesirable because of fundamental human desires. If you want something (control over your own body, both legs, an ice cream cone, a million dollars, etc.), then not getting it will inherently feel like suffering no matter what it is.

There's also the concern of what kind of suffering a post-singularity society can theoretically enable; it might go far, far beyond what anyone on Earth has experienced so far (in the same way that a rocket flying to the moon goes farther than a human jumping). Is a Universe where 99.999% of beings live sublime experiences but the other 0.001% end up in Ultrahell one that morally should exist?

I think the Christian God among others has approved a worse heaven/hell ratio, so make of that what you will.

The Christian God, as generally proposed, is infinitely just. I would not like to see approximately godlike powers vested in a human. They would absolutely abuse them.

Not only that, but there’s “pleasant suffering”, as in a boy playing a game with friends that roughs him up, or a climber scaling a mountain. There are people who live weeks or months of their life with a negligible amount of “pain signal pain” and zero “traumatic pain”. To deny that we can live with less pain is to deny essentially any motive for a human to do anything. It governs everything we do.

No you're right of course. I'm sure you will be able to phrase your wish in just the right way on the monkey's paw.

Well yes there is a significant monkey's paw aspect, that's why I said it's a problem. If the answer was obvious, it wouldn't be a problem. I'm not a utilitarian or a consequentialist, I don't adhere to an "anti-suffering ethics". But I also appreciate the gravity of the problem and I understand why people do become utilitarians.

There's a lot of pointless sufferring that is a useless signal. Evolution just isn't smart enough to distinguish. Besides, if "I should react to reduce this pain" is a useful idea on an individual level, why shouldn't there be cases where it is also useful on a collective one? E.g. "torture is bad, ceteris paribus"

Bees can't do anything about their condition when being farmed. Why is suffering a useful signal to them? Why should it be preserved?

If there was a cost-free way to make bees not suffer at all while farmed, wouldn't you press the button?

If there was a cost-free way to make bees not suffer at all while farmed, wouldn't you press the button?

Because nothing is cost-free, and it's this sort of magical thinking that walks people straight into the nightmare world.

I don't think it's too hard to get around that objection: just divide suffering into useful suffering and pointless suffering, and then switch the objective to minimizing the pointless suffering. Suffering from touching a hot pan is useful; suffering by immolating someone on a pyre is pointless.

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