This site contains writings on the topic of reducing suffering, including the suffering of non-human animals and far-future beings. Most content is by Brian Tomasik, though a few pieces are written by others.
Introduction
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 Usually Don't Differ Astronomically in Expected 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
- Assorted 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
- In What Ways Is Writing Valuable?
Animals
Food animals
- Why I Support the Humane Slaughter Association
- Does Vegetarianism Make a Difference?
- How Much Direct Suffering is Caused by Various Animal Foods?
- Comments on Compassion, by the Pound
- Is Kosher Slaughter Humane?
- Suffering in Animals vs. Humans
Wild-animal suffering
- The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering
- Should We Intervene in Nature?
- Medicine vs. Deep Ecology
- 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?
- Wild-animal suffering on The Reality Check podcast
- Why Vegans Should Care about Suffering in Nature
- Is There More Suffering Than Happiness in Nature? A Reply to Michael Plant
- The Movement to Reduce Wild-Animal Suffering (video presentation)
Insects and other invertebrates
- The Importance of Insect Suffering
- Do Bugs Feel Pain?
- Which Stimuli Are Painful to Invertebrates?
- How Good or Bad Is the Life of an Insect? (by Simon Knutsson)
- How to Kill Bugs Humanely
- Speculations on Invertebrate Population Dynamics Relevant to Reducing Suffering
- Convert Grass Lawns to Gravel to Reduce Insect Suffering
- How Many Springtails Are Created by a Gram of Grass?
- Insect Suffering from Silk, Shellac, Carmine, and Other Insect Products
- Water Use Often Kills Zooplankton
- How to Avoid Hurting Insects (on wikiHow)
Entomophagy
- Why I Don't Support Eating Insects
- What's Wrong with Entomophagy? (a short interview)
- Vegans Should Not Eat Insects: A Reply to Fischer (2016)
- Eating Insects Is Usually Less Efficient Than Eating Plants
- The Cruelty of Eating Snails
Welfare biology
- Applied Welfare Biology and Why Wild-Animal Advocates Should Focus on Not Spreading Nature
- How Does Vegetarianism Impact Wild-Animal Suffering?
- Estimating Aggregate Wild-Animal Suffering from Reproductive Age and Births per Female
- How Does Killing Animals Affect Total Suffering in a Simple, Food-Limited Population?
- Net Primary Productivity by Land Type
- How Forest Fires Affect Wild-Animal Suffering
- Will Gene Drives Reduce Wild-Animal Suffering?
- Habitat Loss, 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
- How Eutrophication Affects Freshwater Invertebrate Populations
Numbers of wild animals
- How Many Wild Animals Are There?
- Abundances of Soil Organisms
- Zooplankton Densities in Lakes and Reservoirs
- Zooplankton Densities in Rivers
Humanity's impact on wild-animal abundance
- Humanity's Net Impact on Wild-Animal Suffering
- Humanity's Impact on the Aggregate Metabolism of Land Wild Animals: An Analysis of Krausmann et al. (2013)
- Does the Against Malaria Foundation Reduce Invertebrate Suffering?
Crop cultivation
- Crop Cultivation and Wild Animals
- Why Lower Crop Yields Reduce Invertebrate Suffering (Given Certain Assumptions)
- How Irrigation Affects Global Net Primary Productivity
- Humane Insecticides
Fishing
- One Trillion Fish
- 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
- Going solar reduces painful fish deaths
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
- Net Impact of Vegetarianism on Factory-Farm Suffering vs. Invertebrates on Pasture Fields
- The Fine Print on Beef's Water Use
Climate change
- Climate Change and Wild Animals
- Effects of CO2 and Climate Change on Terrestrial Net Primary Productivity
- Scenarios for Very Long-Term Impacts of Climate Change on Wild-Animal Suffering
Food scraps
- Which Food-Waste Disposal Options Create the Least Invertebrate Suffering?
- Invertebrates Created by Throwing Out Food Scraps
- Invertebrates Created by Composting
- Invertebrate Suffering Caused by Worm Composting
- Invertebrate Impacts of Worm-Bin Composting vs. Methane-Producing Decomposition
- Invertebrate-Free Composting
Wastewater
- Zooplankton Created by a Facultative Aerated Wastewater Treatment Lagoon: An Analysis of Kring et al. (2013)
- Microorganisms Created by Septic Systems
- Microorganisms Created by Wastewater-Treatment Systems
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?
- Why I Am Not a Type-F Monist
- Flavors of Computation Are Flavors of Consciousness
- The Eliminativist Approach to Consciousness
- A Corporation Analogy for Consciousness: Comments on Ward (2011)
- Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness by Themselves Are Too Parochial
- The "Phenomenal Overflow" Debate is Disputing Definitions
- A Simple Program to Illustrate the Hard Problem of Consciousness
- Prudential Arguments Regarding the Problem of Consciousness
- Why do 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
- Machine Sentience and Robot Rights
- Do Video-Game Characters Matter Morally?
- Why Your Laptop May Be Marginally Sentient
- What Are Suffering Subroutines?
- A Dialogue on Suffering Subroutines
- Fuzzy, Nested Minds Problematize Utilitarian Aggregation
- How to Interpret a Physical System as a Mind
- A conversation with Luke Muehlhauser on consciousness
- Can Bivalves Suffer?
Small minds
- Brain Sizes and Cognitive Abilities of Micrometazoans
- Bacteria, Plants, and Graded Sentience
- Cognitive Abilities of Unicellular Organisms
Sentience vs. animal size
- Is Brain Size Morally Relevant?
- Two-Envelopes Problem for Uncertainty about Brain-Size Valuation and Other Moral Questions
- Fitness Considerations for the Suffering of Short-Lived Animals
- Do Smaller Animals Have Faster Subjective Experiences?
- Haller’s Rule and Sentience Per Unit Biomass
Ethics
Suffering
- On the Seriousness of Suffering
- The Horror of Suffering
- Preventing Extreme Suffering Has Moral Priority (video presentation; warning: disturbing content)
- Does Negative Utilitarianism Override Individual Preferences?
- Is my suffering focus a bias based on unfamiliarity with superhappiness?
- 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
- Altruistic Motivation Based on Pain vs. Enjoyment
- A Small Mechanical Turk Survey on Ethics and Animal Welfare
Moral theory
- Hedonistic vs. Preference Utilitarianism
- On Triage
- 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
- A discussion of metaethics with David Pearce and Lucas Perry
- 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?
- Sunk-Cost Fallacy as a Punishment Mechanism
- 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
- Risks of Astronomical Future Suffering
- Will Space Colonization Multiply Wild-Animal Suffering?
- Against Wishful Thinking
- Omelas and Space Colonization
- The Future of Darwinism
- How Likely is Wireheading?
- Artificial Intelligence and Its Implications for Future Suffering
- Predictions of AGI Takeoff Speed vs. Years Worked in Commercial Software
- Artificial general intelligence as a continuation of existing software and societal trends
- Astronomical suffering from slightly misaligned artificial intelligence
- 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
- Will Future Civilization Eventually Achieve Goal Preservation?
- How Likely Is a Far-Future Utopia?
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
- 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
- Additional Essays
- My Wikipedia Contributions
- My YouTube channel
- A Few Useful Topics to Read About
- Frequently asked questions
Interviews
- Interview with John Lamberton (2022)
- I'm one of four commentators in the "Addressing Uncertainty" episode of the Wildness podcast (2019).
- The Turing Test podcast: interview with Harvard Effective Altruism students (2017)
- Singularity Bros podcast: suffering, animals, far future (2017)
- TIF Blog (2016)
- Adam Ford (2015)
- Peter Hurford (2014)
- Vox: video-game characters, insects, and sentience (2014)
- Rhys Southan: effective altruism (2013)
- 80,000 Hours: careers and ethics (2012)
Organizations doing important work
- Future suffering: Center on Long-Term Risk and Center for Reducing Suffering (I'm an advisor to both)
- Wild-animal suffering: Animal Ethics
- Farm-animal suffering: Humane Slaughter Association
About this site
