The Nonlinear Library: EA Forum
Education
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Tragic Beliefs, published by tobytrem on February 8, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.I'm posting this as part of the Forum's Benjamin Lay Day celebration - consider writing a reflection of your own! The "official dates" for this reflection are February 8 - 15 (but you can write about this topic whenever you want).TL;DR:Tragic beliefs are beliefs that make the world seem worse, and give us partial responsibility for it. These are beliefs such as: "insect suffering matters" or "people dying of preventable diseases could be saved by my donations".Sometimes, to do good, we need to accept tragic beliefs.We need to find ways to stay open to these beliefs in a healthy way. I outline two approaches, pragmatism and righteousness, which help, but can both be carried to excess.Why I ignored insects for so longI've been trying not to think about insects for a while. My diet is vegan, and sometimes I think of myself as a Vegan. I eat this way because I don't want to cause needless suffering to animals, and as someone interested in philosophy, as a human, I want to have consistent reasons for acting. You barely need philosophy to hold the belief that you shouldn't pay others to torture and kill fellow creatures. But insects? You often kill them yourself, and you probably don't think much of it.I ignored insects because the consequences of caring about them are immense. Brian Tomasik, a blogger who informed some of my veganism, has little capacity for ignoring. Hewrote aboutdriving less, especially when roads are wet, avoiding foods containingshellac, never buyingsilk.But Brian can be easy to ignore if you're motivated to. He is so precautionary with his beliefs that he is at least willing to entertain the idea of moral risks of killing video game characters. When a belief is inconvenient, taking the path of least resistance and dismissing the author, and somehow with this, the belief itself, is tempting.But last year, at EAG London, I went to a talk about insect welfare by a researcher from rethink priorities, Meghan Barrett. She is a fantastic speaker. Her argument in the talk was powerful, and cut through to me. She reframed insects[1] by explaining that, because of their method of respiring (through their skins[2]) , they are much smaller today than they were for much of their evolution. If you saw the behaviour that insects today exhibit in animals the size of dogs or larger, it would be much harder to dismiss them as fellow creatures.Many insects do have nociceptors[3], or something very similar, many of them exhibit anhedonia (no longer seeking pleasurable experiences) after experiencing pain, many of them nurse wounds. If you are interested, read more in her own wordshere. She ended the talk by extrapolating the future of insect farming, which is generally done without any regard for their welfare. The numbers involved were astonishing. By the end, the familiar outline of an ongoing moral tragedy had been drawn, and I was bought in.Why did it take so long for me to take insect suffering seriously, and why did Meghan's talk make the difference? I think this is because the belief that insect suffering is real is a tragic belief.What is a tragic belief?I understand a tragic belief as a belief that, should you come to believe it, will make you:a) Knowingly a part of causing great harms, andb) A resident of a worse world.The problem is, some beliefs are like this. It's easier for us to reject them. Perhaps it is healthy to have a bias against beliefs like this. But, if we don't believe them, if we avoid them because they are difficult to embrace even though they are true, we will continue to perpetuate tragedies.So we should find a way to stay open to tragic beliefs, without making the world seem too tragic for us to act.How can we open ourselves up ...
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free