Introduction
In 2020, John Lamberton asked me to do an interview and sent some interview questions. In 2021, I wrote my answers on this page. The questions are mostly about how diet, lifestyle, and art relate to reducing suffering.
John Lamberton is a guitarist, composer, and podcaster with interests including futurism and veganism. His musical project Eliminativist explores algorithmic compositional processes while referencing subject matter related to suffering-focused ethics, utilitarianism, and transhumanist futures. His "BRIDGE Podcast" (RSS) features longform discussions on music, art, and philosophy.
The interview
Do you drink coffee?
No. I don't feel I need it to be productive, and I'm averse to getting addicted. Based on what limited information I've read, I don't think caffeine would increase my overall productivity, since I'd probably just feel more tired when the effect wore off.
I could drink non-caffeinated coffee or teas, but I have no motivation to do that.
In terms of eating, it seems that you've carefully weighed considerations like your personal nutrition while also considering impacts on animal welfare. Can you speak a little bit about your personal model of how to eat? What might The Negative Utilitarian Cookbook look like and what sort of guiding principles might it follow?
As with other areas of life, in the realm of eating, we should avoid letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. The most important advice I would give to the average persion is to stop eating fish, chicken, eggs, and other products made from small animals. That's because it takes many times more small animals to produce a given amount of food compared with larger animals, while I don't think those small animals are vastly less sentient than the larger ones. For example, chickens and cows both seem to have sophisticated cognitive abilities.
If you can give up all animal products, that's great. If you feel the need for some animal products in your diet, I'd probably recommend grass-fed dairy and/or grass-fed beef, because you can get so many calories of food per farm animal harmed. Most beef cattle spend a majority of their lives grazing on pasture, so their lives are generally less horrible than those of chickens or pigs, though even beef cows endure some agonizing moments such as castration and slaughter. In some cases, I suspect that cattle grazing may reduce total wild-animal suffering because cattle can eat a lot of vegetation that would have otherwise fed more smaller creatures. However, a complete calculation of the wild-animal side effects of cattle grazing is complicated, and it may depend on where you live. In dry regions like the Western USA, cattle pastures can be heavily irrigated, which may increase the total amount of vegetation and therefore wildlife that exists compared against if the land had been left alone. Therefore, I'd plausibly discourage eating beef and dairy produced in the Western USA.
I try to follow a few other eating guidelines besides avoiding meat and eggs, though I haven't studied the topic in much depth, so for now these are just speculative. I avoid honey because its production requires a lot of insects, and some bees can get crushed or killed in other ways by beekeepers. I also try to avoid rice because of an anecdote from a rice farmer on a Usenet forum that reported enormous numbers of frogs and anoles being killed by a rice-harvesting combine. I'd love it if someone could investigate this claim to see if it's accurate.
Choices about eating are important, because we eat an enormous amount over the course of our lives, and that affects large numbers of animals. But we also directly impact animals in other ways besides eating. For example, many people who live in towns and cities indirectly kill vast numbers of tiny animals by using water. I've estimated that maybe on the order of 10 crustacean zooplankton are killed per liter of water used, if your water comes from rivers, lakes, or reservoirs (Tomasik "Water ..."). Water originating from the ground, including well water, probably kills many fewer animals.
[Update from 2024: I moved the paragraph that used to be here to a page of its own.]
How we dispose of food scraps can make a big difference. Composting the food scraps of a single person can bring into existence hundreds of thousands of springtails, mites, nematodes, and other animals, who are forced into short lives that often end with painful deaths. Instead of composting, I recommend throwing out food scraps in sealed containers (sealed to keep flies from breeding in the trash bin) or grinding the scraps in a sink garbage disposal unit (Tomasik "Which Food-Waste ...").
As far as nutrition, I would tend to follow some basic rules of healthy eating, including vitamin-B12 supplementation if you're vegetarian or vegan, but I don't obsess too much over the details because I'm unconvinced that tweaking smaller aspects of my diet would make too much difference to my productivity or lifespan, especially given that there are many contradictory findings in the nutrition literature on what's healthy and what isn't. I think you should generally eat what makes you personally feel healthy, while avoiding the ethically worst foods like most types of meat and eggs.
If you were speaking (or writing) to an open minded audience of, for lack of better words, normies, how would you communicate your response to the "Torture vs Dust Specks" thought experiment?
For those unfamiliar, the "Torture vs. Dust Specks" thought experiment (Yudkowsky 2007) asks whether it's worse for "one person be horribly tortured for fifty years without hope or rest" or for an unimaginably huge number of people to "get dust specks in their eyes". That unimaginably huge number is 3↑↑↑3, where ↑ is an up arrow in Knuth's up-arrow notation. This number is vastly larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe. It's so gigantic that we really cannot grasp how big it is. I think we should be terrified of a number this large, and if we aren't, we may not have properly understood it.
I feel conflicted regarding "Torture vs. Dust Specks", but I think it's safer to err on the side of saying the dust specks are collectively worse. 3↑↑↑3 is such a big number that we shouldn't risk it. If we were talking merely about, say, a trillion dust specks, I'd say the torture is definitely worse. After all, 50 years of torture is more than a billion seconds, and one second of torture is vastly worse than a dust speck. If it was a trillion trillion dust specks, I might still say the torture is worse. But 3↑↑↑3 is just way too big.
For better or worse, I think most people agree that small inconveniences can collectively outweigh horrible tragedies, even if they deny it explicitly. In a well known paper, Norcross (1997) defends a claim he calls "Life for headaches" (p. 159):
there is some finite number of headaches, such that it is permissible to kill an innocent person to avoid them.
Norcross (1997) adds (p. 159): "I will claim, most of us, consequentialists and nonconsequentialists alike, accept at least some other claims that do not differ significantly from life for headaches." As an example, Norcross (1997) points out that the United States could impose a national speed limit of 50 miles per hour, which would presumably save lives from traffic accidents and air pollution at the cost of added inconvenience (p. 159). But many people don't think it's morally obligatory to impose such a speed limit. Those who do think such a speed limit is morally obligatory may not agree with even more restrictive proposals, such as banning private automobiles (pp. 159-60).
During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic of 2020 to 2022, we've seen many examples where people have been willing to slightly increase risks of death, for themselves and others, in order to alleviate relatively minor discomforts. For example, people might make an extra trip to the pharmacy for headache medication, even though this slightly increases the chance that an innocent person will die. Indeed, this is somewhat true even during non-pandemic times, since the regular flu and other infectious diseases can also be deadly.
One possible reply is that traveling faster on the highway or treating headaches also has instrumental value, such as increasing society's wealth, allowing us to save more lives in other ways. That reply is plausible, but it doesn't seem to be the only reason that most people are willing to sacrifice lives for convenience. I suspect most people would still sacrifice lives for convenience if there were no instrumental benefits of this type. For example, people risk the lives of others by driving to movie theaters or concerts, when they could enjoy comparably entertaining forms of recreation at home.
I actually tend to think that most of us don't give enough weight to extreme suffering relative to mild suffering. For example, when advocates for farm animals discuss factory farming, they usually focus on the horrible conditions in which the animals live. But I tend to think that a significant fraction of the total badness of farm-animal lives comes from relatively short moments of unbearable suffering, such as during castration, branding, and slaughter. I think there's not enough focus on efforts to reduce the awfulness of slaughter within the animal-welfare community.
You have done presentations that detail all sorts of suffering, whether it's the Brazen Bull, video-game NPCs, or r-selection in insects. Not many people have a disposition suited for this sort of study. To what extent have you cultivated this disposition and to what extent is it innate? Given the importance of reducing suffering, should others attempt to cultivate such dispositions? (Let's assume this hypothetical person has a hedonic set point that doesn't put them at mental-health risk.)
I think different people can be motivated toward reducing suffering in different ways. In my case, the overwhelming importance of suffering is made clear when I watch videos or read descriptions of horrific experiences. I also enjoy intellectual exploration, and so I find that thinking and writing about these topics can also be intrinsically interesting. Other people may be more motivated by social influences, such as being part of a community that cares about these topics. And there are surely other motivations for doing this sort of work too.
I think my disposition to be strongly affected by thinking about extreme suffering was innate, but it actually didn't really develop until roughly age 13. When I was a child, I watched numerous nature documentaries in which predators painfully killed their prey, and as long as humans weren't intentionally causing the predation to happen, I didn't mind it at all; I actually found the hunting scenes thrilling to watch. My favorite parts of dinosaur movies were when the meat-eating dinosaur sunk its teeth into the herbivorous dinosaur. I was also relatively unaffected by seeing violence against humans, although I didn't watch too much of it because my parents only allowed me to watch public television and a limited set of movies. Somehow by my teenage years my brain's empathy developed, and I began to understand how horrible violence actually was.
I feel an obligation to learn about extreme suffering in various forms because ignoring it doesn't make it go away. If we want to do good, we have to know what the world is really like. That said, I tend to limit how often I think in detail about extreme suffering because too much of it can be debilitating. On a daily basis, most of my motivation comes from enjoying what I do for its own sake. Work on reducing suffering usually feels roughly the same as work on anything else, such as completing a school assignment or doing a paying job.
Your NPC essay (Tomasik "Do Video-Game ...") is quite interesting and I'd love to hear you speak on two topics with a similar lens: 1) the message sent by vegan "meat" products (whether we're talking about Impossible Burgers or the cultured meats that are in development) 2) creative work such as horror films or various extreme musics that at best use suffering/violence for emotional potency, or maybe worst case they glorify it. These sorts of impacts are obviously lower priority than the actual suffering that's out there but I'm curious where your mind goes. Example: Does a vegan eating fake chicken at some miniscule level validate the consumption of meat? Or is the more gruesome side of the horror movie genre on some level "giving people ideas" the way violent video games might?
One point of clarification for readers who may not know: my article on video-game NPCs explores whether the NPCs themselves might be moral patients to some (extremely tiny) degree. In that piece I don't discuss the side effects of violent video games on the humans who play them. But those side effects on human psychology may be somewhat important, and they're certainly more important (in terms of the indirect effects they have) than the vanishingly small harm that playing video games does to the NPCs themselves.
Now to answer your question. I can see how some people might see eating fake meats as validating consumption of real meats, but I doubt the effect is very strong. I tend to think the opposite effect is probably stronger, namely, showing that vegans oppose meat only when it actually harms animals rather than because they're puritanical killjoys. If veganism comes across as a quasi-religious opposition to animal flesh per se, then it feels more like a lifestyle choice rather than a moral imperative.
I personally find horror films and other gruesome media to sometimes be motivating regarding reducing suffering, because they show just how awful some experiences can be. I watch horror movies only rarely because I find them very intense, but I think in small doses they might have some value. It's plausible that watching them too much could lead one to become more numb to suffering. But in practice it doesn't seem like horror movies inspire very many people to become psychopaths; probably people just adapt to the stimuli while still retaining their normal sense of right and wrong in real-life situations. So my inclination is to let people enjoy what they enjoy without moralizing too much about it. People tend to discover what works for them and makes them happy in the realm of entertainment, and usually we shouldn't pester people about their choices.
What sort of role should/can artists play in altruism and reducing suffering? Obviously they could get rich and donate a portion of their income as the effective-altruism (EA) movement suggests, but let's assume that we're talking about "Bohemian" artists who already live somewhat ascetic lifestyles and whose incomes won't have the same impact as an EA-minded quant for instance. Are there any ways that artists can uniquely contribute that others can't?
I think the main other path to impact besides money would be drawing more people into a cause area in some way. If you became well known, you could point your fans toward important altruistic projects. Or the art could directly contribute to spreading an important message. For example, comics and Internet memes can often have wide readership and influence a lot of minds. You could create animated videos or short films about topics like wild-animal suffering or suffering-focused ethics.
Another option is to split your time between art done for art's sake and your altruistic work without worrying too much about whether the art has altruistic impact. The art would be a form of leisure to add balance and diversity to your life.
How does art fit into your life personally?
I probably consume less art than most people.
I almost never listen to music, even though I enjoy it, because it interferes with my concentration. During periods when I'm doing a mindless task, I prefer listening to news or podcasts because doing that seems more informative than listening to music. I also think that due to the hedonic treadmill, the pleasure of music probably wouldn't increase my total happiness; the pleasure squirts it creates might just come at the expense of pleasure squirts from other stimuli.
I like fiction, but I almost never read it because I like nonfiction just as much, but nonfiction seems generally more useful. Learning about the lives of real people is equally interesting as learning about made-up people, but I can usually learn more about the world from the lives of real people.
I like poetry, but reading it can take a lot of work, and it usually seems more worthwhile to apply that mental effort to something more practical.
I tend to feel similarly about math puzzles, chess, brain teasers, etc. I used to do them a lot for fun, but as I get older, I usually have enough practical things to worry about that I don't want to take the time to do a puzzle merely for its own sake. I'd rather work on mental puzzles that seem useful, like pondering the good and bad side effects of a proposed way to reduce suffering, trying to get some sense of how consciousness might work, or deciding how to allocate my stock-market investments.
The main form of art I do consume is to watch movies, TV shows, and YouTube comedy videos while exercising. These forms of entertainment are slightly more exciting than regular nonfiction videos, which helps take my mind off the exercise. I usually avoid exciting entertainment when not exercising. One reason is that a rule of only viewing fun entertainment when exercising is a form of "temptation bundling"—i.e., psychologically pairing something difficult with something enjoyable in order to make it easier to do the difficult thing. I usually look forward to exercise as one of the most fun parts of my day. (That's also because exercise itself releases feel-good chemicals and makes me feel less jittery.)
Notwithstanding that I consume less art than most people, I often see my own life in sort of an artistic way. Sometimes I'm motivated to write an article or develop a habit because I just want to do those things to express myself, rather than because it's optimal in a utilitarian sense. Being a slave to utility can be tiring, and most of the time I prefer to just live the life I want to have, while trying to have a nontrivial utilitarian impact along the way.