Introduction
- A Short Introduction to Reducing Suffering (translations: Spanish, Polish)
- Summary of My Beliefs and Values on Big Questions
Altruism
Ways to get involved
Charity
- My Donation Recommendations
- Spreading Google Grants with Caution about Counterfactuals
- The Haste Consideration, Revisited
- Quantify with Care
- Charity Cost-Effectiveness in an Uncertain World
- Why Charities Don't Differ Astronomically in Cost-Effectiveness
Making money to reduce suffering
- Employers with Huge Matching-Donations Limits
- Donate $400K per Year by Working at Soros Fund Management
- Why Activists Should Consider Making Lots of Money
- Advice for Students on Earning to Give
- Advanced Tips on Personal Finance
- When Should Altruists Be Financially Risk-Averse?
- Should Altruists Leverage Investments?
- Calculator for Expected Utility of Founding a Startup
- The Cost of Kids
Activism
- How Important Is Politics?
- Are Petitions Effective?
- My Personal Reactions to Confrontational Animal Activism
Personal effectiveness
- Why I Prefer Public Conversations
- Turn Discussions into Blog Posts
- Is It Better to Blog or Formally Publish?
- Personal and Social Tolerance
- Why Honesty is a Good Policy
- Education Matters for Altruism
- Staying Altruistic for the Long Term
- Macro- vs. Micro-Optimization
- Is Utilitarianism Too Demanding?
- Random Ideas and Suggestions
- The Value of Wikipedia Contributions in Social Sciences
Animals
Food animals
- Why I Support the Humane Slaughter Association
- Does Vegetarianism Make a Difference? (translations: German, Portuguese)
- How Much Direct Suffering is Caused by Various Animal Foods? (German translation: .pdf)
- Comments on Compassion by the Pound
- Suffering in Animals vs. Humans
Wild-animal suffering
- The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering (in Spanish: .pdf or .doc; in Portuguese: .pdf or .docx)
- Should We Intervene in Nature? (French translation: .html, .pdf, or .doc, Spanish: .html)
- How Many Wild Animals Are There?
- Medicine vs. Deep Ecology (German translation: .pdf)
- Caring about Animal Suffering
- A two-page pamphlet (pdf) on suffering in nature (.txt) (Polish translation)
- Intention-Based Moral Reactions Distort Intuitions about Wild Animals
- Does the Animal-Rights Movement Encourage Wilderness Preservation?
- How Painful Is Death from Starvation or Dehydration?
- Interview about Wild-Animal Suffering on "The Reality Check" (part 1, part 2)
- Why Vegans Should Care about Suffering in Nature (on Reasonable Vegan, in Portuguese, in Czech)
- The Movement to Reduce Wild-Animal Suffering (video presentation)
Insects and other invertebrates
- The Importance of Insect Suffering (Spanish translation)
- Do Bugs Feel Pain?
- Humane Insecticides
- How Good or Bad Is the Life of an Insect? (by Simon Knutsson)
- Speculations on Population Dynamics of Bug Suffering
- Convert Grass Lawns to Gravel to Reduce Insect Suffering
- Why I Don't Support Eating Insects
- Insect Suffering from Silk, Shellac, Carmine, and Other Insect Products
- The Cruelty of Eating Snails
- How to Avoid Hurting Insects (on wikiHow) (pdf backup)
Welfare biology
- Applied Welfare Biology and Why Wild-Animal Advocates Should Focus on Not Spreading Nature
- Crop Cultivation and Wild Animals
- How Does Vegetarianism Impact Wild-Animal Suffering?
- Humanity's Net Impact on Wild-Animal Suffering
- Estimating Aggregate Wild-Animal Suffering from Reproductive Age and Births per Female
- Haller’s Rule and Sentience Per Unit Biomass
- Net Primary Productivity by Land Type
- How Forest Fires Affect Wild-Animal Suffering
- Will Gene Drives Reduce Wild-Animal Suffering?
- Habitat Destruction, Not Preservation, Generally Reduces Wild-Animal Suffering
- Reducing Bug Suffering (video presentation)
- Cost-Effectiveness Comparison for Different Ways to Reduce Insect Suffering
- Efforts to Help Wild Animals Should Be Effective, Not Idealistic
Fishing
- One Trillion Fish (German translation: .pdf)
- How Wild-Caught Fishing Affects Wild-Animal Suffering
- Should Fishing Opponents Be Happy about Overfishing?
- Which Marine Trophic Level Contains the Most Total Suffering?
- Trophic Cascades Caused by Fishing
Cattle grazing
- How Cattle Grazing Affects Insect Populations on Pasture Fields
- How Cattle Grazing Affects Pasture Productivity
- Environmental Impacts of Cattle Beyond the Pasture
- How Rainforest Beef Production Affects Wild-Animal Suffering
Climate change
- Climate Change and Wild Animals
- Scenarios for Very Long-Term Impacts of Climate Change on Wild-Animal Suffering
Consciousness
Philosophy of consciousness
- Consciousness Is a Process, Not a Moment
- Dissolving Confusion about Consciousness
- The Many Fallacies of Dualism
- My Confusions about the Hard Problem of Consciousness
- What Knowledge of Consciousness Says about Theories of Consciousness
- Objections to the Zombie Argument
- Is There A Hard Problem of Consciousness?
- Flavors of Computation Are Flavors of Consciousness
- The Eliminativist Approach to Consciousness
- Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness by Themselves Are Too Parochial
- A Simple Program to Illustrate the Hard Problem of Consciousness
- Prudential Arguments Regarding the Problem of Consciousness
- Why Organisms Feel Both Suffering and Happiness
Which beings are sentient?
- Which Computations Do I Care About?
- Do Artificial Reinforcement-Learning Agents Matter Morally? (tex, bibtex)
- Ethical Issues in Artificial Reinforcement Learning (supplement to previous article)
- My interview with People for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcement Learners (pdf backup)
- Bacteria, Plants, and Graded Sentience
- Do Video-Game Characters Matter Morally?
- Why Your Laptop May Be Marginally Sentient
- A Dialogue on Suffering Subroutines
- Fuzzy, Nested Minds Problematize Utilitarian Aggregation
- How to Interpret a Physical System as a Mind
Sentience vs. animal size
- Is Brain Size Morally Relevant?
- Two-Envelopes Problem for Brain Size and Moral Uncertainty
- Fitness Considerations for the Suffering of Short-Lived Animals
- Do Smaller Animals Have Faster Subjective Experiences?
Ethics
Suffering
- On the Seriousness of Suffering (Spanish translation)
- The Horror of Suffering
- Preventing Extreme Suffering Has Moral Priority (video presentation)
- Reasons to Promote Suffering-Focused Ethics
- Strategic Considerations for Moral Antinatalists
- How Important Is Experiencing Suffering for Caring About Suffering?
- Are Happiness and Suffering Symmetric?
- Empathy vs. Principle: A Reply to David Brooks
- A Small Mechanical Turk Survey on Ethics and Animal Welfare
Moral theory
- Hedonistic vs. Preference Utilitarianism
- On Triage (German translation: .pdf)
- Mr. Rogers on Unconditional Love
- Beauty-Driven Morality
- Intuition and Reason
- Three Types of Negative Utilitarianism
- Dealing with Moral Multiplicity
- Posthuman Multiculturalism
- Why the Modesty Argument for Moral Realism Fails
- Thoughts on Postmodernism and Its Intellectual Kin
- I'm Not a Speciesist; I'm Just a Utilitarian
Judgment as incentive design
- Instrumental Judgment and Expectational Consequentialism
- Should We Base Moral Judgments on Intentions or Outcomes?
- Why Free Will is Not an "Illusion"
Cooperation and peace
- Gains from Trade through Compromise
- Possible Ways to Promote Compromise
- Differential Intellectual Progress as a Positive-Sum Project
- International Cooperation vs. AI Arms Race
- How Would Catastrophic Risks Affect Prospects for Compromise?
- A Lower Bound on the Importance of Promoting Cooperation
- Reasons to Be Nice to Other Value Systems
- Expected Value of Shared Information for Competing Agents
Science
Probability
- Why Maximize Expected Value?
- Precautionary Principle vs. Expected Values
- Covariance in Wealth and Cost-Effectiveness
- Epistemological Black Swans
- Anthropics without Reference Classes
- Ranking Explanations of the Fermi Paradox
Physics
- Eternalism and Its Ethical Implications
- Lab Universes: Creating Infinite Suffering
- Is There Suffering in Fundamental Physics?
- Should We Believe in Infinity?
- Why Does Physics Exist?
The future
- Why Digital Sentience is Relevant to Animal Activists (pdf backup)
- Risks of Astronomical Future Suffering (Spanish translation: .pdf, .doc)
- Will Space Colonization Multiply Wild-Animal Suffering?
- Against Wishful Thinking
- Omelas and Space Colonization
- The Future of Darwinism
- How Likely is Wireheading?
- Thoughts on Robots, AI, and Intelligence Explosion
- Predictions of AGI Takeoff Speed vs. Years Worked in Commercial Software
- Why I Don't Focus on the Hedonistic Imperative
- Should Altruists Focus on Reducing Short-Term or Far-Future Suffering?
- Thoughts Regarding the Simulation Hypothesis
- How the Simulation Argument Dampens Future Fanaticism
Other
Writings by others
- Life in the Wild
- How Fungicides and Eutrophication Affect Suffering in the Wild
- Why Most People Don't Care About Wild-Animal Suffering (Portuguese translation)
- The Case for Reducing Wild-Animal Suffering
- Jeffrey Lockwood on Insect Suffering
- Yew-Kwang Ng on Wild-Animal Suffering
- Machine Ethics and Preference Utilitarianism
- Panmnemism And The Value of Experiential Information
- Paul Almond on AI, Atheism, Consciousness, and the Multiverse
Further material
Interviews
- Interview with Dylan Matthews on video-game characters, insects, and sentience
- Interview with 80,000 Hours on careers and ethics (pdf backup)
- Interview with Rhys Southan on effective altruism
- Interview with Peter Hurford on my approach to altruism (pdf backup)
- Interview about Ethics and Effective Altruism (German translation)
Organizations doing important work
- Foundational Research Institute (FRI)
- Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI)
I support MIRI's research on positive-sum compromise and foundational philosophy. The sign of its other work is unclear, but on balance, MIRI still appears to have outsized impact.
- Animal Ethics (AE)
- Humane Slaughter Association (HSA)
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