Conflation vs. Erroneous Splitting

Originally published July 11, 2016

Consider these four situations:

• Conflating two things. Conflation is the mistake of thinking that two or more things are the same thing.
• Incorrectly splitting one thing into two things. This is the mistake of thinking that one thing is two or more things.
• Correctly identifying that two things are the same thing.
• Correctly distinguishing two things that used to be thought of as one thing.

To illustrate this I came up with a nice little 2x2, which I had ctrlcreep draw a prettier version of:

using "rectitude" in lieu of a proper antonym for "mistake"

The point I want to press upon you is that the situations in the top row are easier or more likely than the situations in the bottom row, due to working memory constraints. An ontology with fewer objects in it is easier to understand, so it's relatively easy for humans to correctly identify that what they thought was two things is actually one thing, and correspondingly, to mistakenly conflate two things into one. Mutatis mutandis, it's hard for people to notice subtle distinctions. And likewise people have low propensity to mistakenly think that one thing is two things.

This is why I see distinction-mongering as such an essential conceptual activity; it goes against the natural inclination to do the opposite.

It goes back to the personality distinction between lumpers and splitters. Some people want wikipedia articles to include everything related to the subject; others want to individuate the various things into their own wikipedia articles. Ever since the list of subtle distinctions I co-wrote, I've become much more of a splitter, seeking distinctions everywhere and never finding them unfruitful. Perhaps this is some sort of boast, like wow guys, look at how many distinctions I can fit in my head. I nevertheless see it as the essential conceptual activity. As Sarah Constantin once said, "science" means "to split".

My Weirdest Ethical Belief

Originally published June 25, 2016

I think male homosexuality is good and female homosexuality is bad. Mostly due to asymmetries in the sexual marketplace, the surplus of men. The upshot if you agree with me is that if you are a bisexual of either gender you should limit yourself to men. This is doubly good: it occupies a given man and frees up a theoretical woman. Additionally, putting this into practice should help control overpopulation (and be accord with antinatalism, which I also hold), though this isn't why I hold the belief at all.

Cooperative Epistemology

Originally published May 27, 2016

 The mathematical theory of instrumental rationality comprises two interrelated disciplines: decision theory and game theory, i.e., individual and group optimization. These are fields for which we can say that both exist. By contrast, epistemic rationality is given its coherent mathematical treatment only concerning individual knowledge. The study of group rationality is scattered to the winds, a field so small it as yet has no name. It could be called interpersonal epistemic rationality, multi-agent epistemology, interactive epistemology, or, preferably, something more clever. I title this post cooperative epistemology because that is the ideal I want the field to be about.

Distinction-Mongering
It will prove helpful to distinguish between the formal theories of rationality, the theory of rationality in practice, the practice of rationality, and the practice of theorizing about rationality. We can further subdivide these chunks into epistemic and instrumental by prepending the respective adjective to every instance of 'rational'. I do this as a rule, but the reason I'm inflicting such onerous distinctions on you is because the theoretical study of the practice of group epistemic rationality, by philosophers and psychologists, gets plenty of attention and is given its names. What's comparatively neglected is the mathematical theory of interpersonal epistemology.

Thus social epistemology is a cool field I aim to pay attention to, but is the "Robert Nozick investigating whether induction is justified" of group rationality, I am seeking more things like Aumann's Agreement Theorem.

Aumann's Agreement Theorem
is so famous and well-known in my circles that it needs no introduction here. Nevertheless I want to consolidate some of the last many years of discussion about it.

In the beginning, Robin Hanson and Tyler Cowen coauthored a paper about how disagreements are, therefore, either irrational or dishonest.

Nevermind
I had ambitious plans for a much longer post, but I don't feel like writing this one anymore, so I'm going to truncate it here and publish it. The main upshot was probably going to be something about how Wei Dai continues to be and have been the single best contemporary thinker.

Edit:

Scavenging

Originally published April 3, 2016

 I've been homeless and unemployed for a long time. So I started scavenging out of necessity. But I would keep doing it even if I had were employed and dignified, to save money and prevent waste. It's smart and cool, like all forms of frugality.

I write this because it's not something that occurs to even the thriftiest of tightwads, and because even they reject the idea out of hand with some rationalization. "It's unhygienic," they say, but I've never gotten sick, even when all the food I ate was from trash cans. I'm on food stamps now. I can't spend that on anything other than food, so it doesn't cost me anything to scavenge less.

It wouldn't even have occurred to me if I weren't obsessed with not letting things go to waste. It started when I was hanging out alone in a dormitory's lounge, and some group walked in with a bunch of food, and then threw it away, with most of it untouched. "Americans. So wasteful," I thought. No one else was around, so I decided to unwaste it. I was newly homeless and not yet in the habit of scrounging, so I was hesitant for a bit. But it was great.

For several months, I fed myself by sneaking into that same building or the nearby one at 5am, and going to the lounge on every floor and picking out the good food. There was always enough that I could be picky about what refuse I consumed. There was good variety. Occasionally there was even alcohol. I stopped using those buildings after a few too many encounters with the cops. But that only happened when I was lazy and actually loitered in the building instead of looting the trash cans and splitting. It was hard not to, since the lounges were nice places with outlets, bathrooms, and free very fast wifi. Everything I needed!

After that I started using outdoor trash cans. This was a lot less fun. They were much farther apart, the amount of good stuff I could find was a lot less guaranteed, rain could fall and ruin stuff, and it was cold at night. Plus there was a much higher chance of being seen. Some part of me retained this irrational desire to appear dignified, so I only did this at night in the wee hours of the morning. I did it so much that I learned when janitors would be snooping around (annoyingly, essentially all the time), when students would be around, what days of the week were the best, and an efficient route that I could instantly modify depending on how much I wanted, how much I'd found already, which entrance to the campus I used, and so on, which ended somewhere that had an outlet and wifi. UCLA is nice enough to provide free wifi everywhere on campus.

When you're a veg*n¹ and homeless and thus have no place to cook or store food, food stamps alone isn't enough to feed you. Scavenging was nice because it allowed me thus to not dip into my real money in order to eat enough, without eating nothing but raw ramen, raw oatmeal, and bananas. I could splurge on canned soup and cans of cold refried beans.

My original idea for this post also included some guidelines for what discarded foods are good and what are bad, with the obligatory "your health is your responsibility, not mine, use your judgement" and tips for how to avoid being spotted, and other things I learned over years of scavenging, but whatever. I'm not going to convince anyone to try it, so that would be pointless.

Footnotes:

[1] My dietary restrictions are to not economically incentivize suffering. So I can't purchase eggs, dairy, or meat from things that can feel pain. I still buy clam products, because I'm pretty sure clams can't feel anything. For game-theoretic reasons, I can't accept gifts of these things either. But there's no reason for me not to eat meat that's been discarded and was going to be discarded regardless of my decision to eat it. I don't trust "cage free" bullshit about how some animals are in less horrible conditions than others. It's all probably pretty horrible. Anyway it's annoying that there's no short word for this, since in my view it should be the most common dietary restriction. "Vegetarianism" is stupid, since it tends to produce more suffering by way of replacing meat (small numbers of animals in Hell-conditions) with eggs (large numbers of intelligent animals in Hell-conditions).

The Lifehack

Originally published February 19, 2016. Some of it is out of date; see Audio Content at Grognor's Nook for updated recommendations.

It is called "the" lifehack because it is the only useful lifehack.

For a long time, I couldn't listen to any spoken word. Audiobooks, podcasts, and their ilk just didn't work for me. I would lose focus and think about other things, and have to go back in order to listen again to what I'd missed, and this was deeply frustrating because I had no idea how far back I needed to go and the whole point of listening to things is not having to interact with the source of the information.

Now I am always listening to podcasts and audiobooks. Whenever I'm in transit or walking around. The difference is a genuine One Weird Trick: speed up the audio.

Why does that work? Introspectively: it seems to have to do with having too much spare brainpower when listening at normal speed. My brain gets antsy, and wants to use all of itself. It tries to think about other things in the gaps between the speakers' words. In doing so, it loses focus. By speeding it up almost to the point where you can't keep up anymore, you can eliminate those gaps. It forces you to concentrate on the input. There's some loss of information this way, but what can you do? It's way better than having to go back constantly.

The above is just speculation. I don't know why it works.^[1] The important thing is that it does.

Needless to say, by doing this you can also listen to more things in less time.

In case you're convinced it is worth a try, here are some recommendations:

Podcast Addict
The podcatcher I use. I tried a few, and it was the best. Crucially, it has the ability to speed up what you're listening to, with gradations of 0.1. I usually listen to things at around 1.7x speed. The exact speed isn't important, but speeding it up to the point where you have to spend effort to keep up, is. Most people who use the lifehack listen at higher speeds than I do.

The Hopwag
This is my favorite podcast. It is educational, often droll, and true to its name covers its entire subject matter! As of this writing it has hundreds of episodes and I'm almost caught up. Speeding this up is especially important because the host talks very slowly; I listen at 1.9x. It's also important to realize that you should skip episodes that bore you. There is no virtue in letting air waves beat against your eardrums if they stop before entering your brain. The whole point of the lifehack is preventing boredom. Boredom is the enemy. Slay it at great cost. I've skipped several interview episodes, and probably should have skipped a couple of the non-interview episodes.

Repeating for emphasis: you don't want to build a habit of not paying attention to the podcasts you listen to. That is the whole thing we are here to fix. Don't keep trying to listen if it's not working. Skip episodes if you must.

Hardcore History
I hesitate to recommend this, because while the actual content is informative and entertaining, it commits the sins of charging for most episodes and having advertisements within them. Episodes only come out once every couple years or so. So it's a good thing podcatchers can auto-update when new free episodes arrive.

LibriVox audiobooks
All the books are read by volunteers, so the reading varies widely in quality^[2], but the selection is enormous. Anything in the public domain, they either have or eventually will. Literary classics, old works of history, economics, philosophy... It's impossible to ever run out of good stuff to listen to. Every book has its own RSS feed, so it's easy to add them to podcast addict and listen to them like any other podcast. Podcast addict's search doesn't always find them, so make sure to use LibriVox's catalog.

other educational podcasts
EconTalk, You Are Not So Smart, and Rationally Speaking are the only other decent ones I've found. For various reasons they are not as good as the above ones, but still better than all the competition I've seen^[3]. I welcome new educational podcast recommendations.

non-educational spoken word prose
I don't listen to any of this, but there's a lot of it. LibriVox again has a lot to offer. Welcome to Night Vale is a popular fiction podcast. Lots of podcasts are of the form "two guys chatting about whatever", and those can be fun.

But it doesn't end there
Human, your mind is limited, and so you may not have realized another use for the lifehack. You may have a reading list whose items have been languishing for years. Many of these items will have audiobook editions. Do you see it now? Perhaps not. Things that you want to read, but which are especially difficult to get yourself to read, benefit from the double stimulus of reading and high-speed listening at the same time. This takes up even more of your spare brainpower. This is how I read Superintelligence; I used podcast addict to listen to the audiobook while using the android kindle app to read the book. It worked splendidly^[4]. Not only did I find it much easier to stay focused and engaged, I think the extra stimulus helped me remember the content better.^[5] An unexpected benefit was that having to close two apps made it inconvenient to stop, which made me more able to continue.

I've encountered knee-jerk skepticism about the idea of reading something and listening to it at the same time. I encourage you to try it and see if it works for you.

Footnotes:

[1] Allow me some more worthless speculation. Reading is an unnatural activity, requiring eye movements foreign to our ancestors. Beginning readers read line-by-line, very slowly learning to associate the strange shapes on the page with words they know, stored until then only as sounds. Once they do that, they still read line-by-line and only slowly learn to look at pages like a picture, eyes darting around for pieces of structure and still somehow reading the words, often accidentally skipping them. As a way of gaining information, it is less (to speak very loosely) "inherent" than listening is. Listening to other humans is something that humans have been doing since the dawn of humans. Learning to listen to speech that is much faster is merely quantitatively different from something you already know how to do. I've heard that some blind people learn to listen to speech at insane speeds like 6x. That's impressive, and makes perfect sense if listening is "easier" than reading. Another observation is: you are constantly blinking, but your ears are never "shut off".

[2] In addition, unfortunately, most larger works are read by multiple readers, so if you get to the middle of a book and there's a reader you can't understand, you have to turn to the original text to continue where that reader left you off. But that obviates LibriVox for that section. They are terribly 'understaffed' and have no ability to do anything about this. I assure you that plenty of the readers have good voices and good audio quality. There are plenty of works with solo readers as well.

[3] Many podcasts are absent from this list simply because I haven't listened to them. Sometimes I haven't listened to them because I haven't gotten around to them. Sometimes it's because I'm not interested in the subject matter. I know this isn't fair. But it's not like my recommendations are the end-all.^[6]

[4] It had downsides. Plowing through passages that would have been better digested slowly and pondered. Infeasibly difficult to look at the endnotes (this is true with the ebook alone, let alone ebook+audio). But the realistic alternative was not reading it at all.

[5] Reading Katja Grace's summaries and external links after each chapter also helped.

[6] I probably lean toward explaining myself too much with pointless digressions. To me it seems everyone else leans toward not explaining themselves enough. Humans don't live anymore in a world where everyone knows everyone else really well from a lifetime of interaction.

Three Old School Epistemic Essays

Originally published January 10, 2016

It is expensive to keep track of multiple partially overlapping partially contradictory models. You must do it anyway.

— Will Newsome (@willnewsome) August 5, 2012

You should read The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses, by T.C. Chamberlin

For those who wish to avoid reading a PDF, I have reproduced the paper here.

This blog post started as an attempt to summarize the essay in order to seduce people into perhaps reading it, but then I got bogged down in the effort, so, nah.

It reminded me of William James's The Will to Believe, published a year earlier. Reading this, I noticed he quoted W.K. Clifford's The Ethics of Belief, which is excellent. Man, there's this whole world of old school practical epistemologists that I've been ignoring up to now!

I would beseech you to read these three essays. All are excellent. But I know that such exhortations would be useless. They aren't easy reads. Even if you wanted to, you have to already be in the habit of reading things from that era to understand a word they say.

a hundred petty preferences. ten thousand unimportant concerns

Originally published December 27, 2015

everyone has like a hundred really strong and totally pointless preferences

— Grognor (@Grognor) December 10, 2015

I used to care a lot about whether my toilet paper faced the wall or not. I absolutely insisted that it face away from the wall, and held disdain for people who put it the other way. Looking back, I'm not sure why. I want to blame it on the universal propensity to form coalitions and something about how you seem cooler when you have strong preferences. But it's hard to imagine that mattering to me anymore. Why should anyone care about that?

Most preferences are like this. Totally arbitrary.

The most important viewquake I've had was learning of construal level theory, or more understandably near/far thinking. You shouldn't use this blog post to acquaint yourself with this idea. You should just already know it. People often point out to themselves and others that the things they're getting concerned with are unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Similarly, they encourage not sweating the small stuff. Even though I don't know what people mean by grand scheme, and even though small things can be important, I generally approve of these practices because they are ways in which people cause themselves to think about what matters and what doesn't, and to prioritize.

Here's to being less petty.

Subs are still better than dubs though. And you better use the Oxford Comma.

Writing Is Bullshit

Originally published December 20, 2015

Ugh, the only visible response to the hastily-written, not researched and not-reflected-upon post, why would you even think that, was praise. I want to take into account the silent responses, hopefully some of which were people agreeing that the post was not good and not worth reading, but that's impossible.

@Grognor @davidmanheim @Meaningness what the fuck is wrong with you. This is worth reading.

— ema (@emareaf) December 16, 2015

Yeah what the fuck is wrong with me, having a contrarian position as regards what is worth reading. How dare I have an opinion about my own writing. This is the world I live in.

You! who is reading this post now, suppose that you'll get to the end of it, and suppose also (this stretches the imagination, but suppose) that you read the post I began by discussing. Ask yourself, why? You could have been reading Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, but you read poorly-written haphazard rants. Heck, you could have reread one of my earlier essays, some of which are actually good, but you chose that one and this one! Why? The real reason is probably that you have a habit of clicking on links you see. Did you decide to have this habit? Does it serve you well? Does it make you a better person? Of course not. Most of your habits have no good reason to be there, and came unbid, inexorably, from your brain's interaction with the world you live in. If your arm is full of sin, cut it off and throw it away. If your habit is dead weight, cast it from you.

I digress by mentioning sphexishness and biodeterminism and self-threshing. I hate people's reading habits. I read somewhere on overcomingbias that some ridiculous portion, something like 95%, of what people read, was written in the few weeks prior. I can't find the source but it rings true, it even rings true with myself, though I try to read old things. I did find Against News, though:

Bryan Caplan raises a neglected but important issue: are important issues neglected for news of the moment? Bryan quotes Delos Wilcox from 1900:

But we must deplore and, so far as possible, overcome the evils of habitual newspaper reading. These evils are, chiefly, three: first, the waste of much time and mental energy in reading unimportant news and opinions, and premature, untrue, or imperfect accounts of important matters; second, the awakening of prejudices and the enkindling of passions through the partisan bias or commercial greed of newspaper managers; third, the loading of the mind with cheap literature and the development of an aversion for books and sustained thought.

Bryan also quotes Thomas Jefferson:

Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper. …
I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it. …
The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

Just as fantasy typically substitutes for reality, news typically substitutes for insight – in both cases by diverting attention. The same risk applies to reading blog posts of course, which is why I try to focus on reading and writing posts on relatively deep long-standing issues, and not current news fashions. I avoid posts that should not be nearly as interesting a year before or after.

Yes, in a world where everyone was trying as hard as possible to contribute to long term insight and progress there would be a place for news of recent events of wide interest. And in that world it would make sense to track the news that others also track. But we do not live in such a world.

It seems to me that in our world most track the news to talk intelligently with others who track the news. By coordinating to talk on the same recent news topics, we can better evaluate how well connected and intelligent are those around us. If we tracked very different topics, it would be much harder to evaluate each other. If our conversation topics were common but old, it would be harder to distinguish individually thoughtful analysis from memorized viewpoints, and harder to see how well-connected folks are to fresh info sources.

But if you care less about signaling intelligence and connectedness, and more about understanding, then consider reading textbooks, review articles, and other expert summaries instead of news.

Added: Stuart Buck quotes C.S. Lewis:

Those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand.

I hate having to blockquote entire articles like that, but it's necessary because humans, including the relatively elite clasm that is my audience, very rarely follow through on the links on the articles they read. This is annoying because, for instance, sometimes people ask me questions about The Monster that they'd know the answer to if they had clicked the hyperlink on the text they're asking about. I'm digressing again. You asked for more, this is what you get.

"never read the comments" is a good start, but wait till you level up to "never read the articles"

— Chris Wage (@cwage) December 1, 2015

I made a twitter poll, "should I tweet more, optimizing for signal, or less, optimizing for signal to noise ratio". The results:

1. more (11 votes, 61%)
2. less (2 votes, 11%)
3. dichotomies are bad (5 votes, 28%)

With "dichotomies are bad" being the stupid troll option, thinking that my stupid troll respondents would be too sophisticated to pick "muffins". I jokingly commented "study shows people don't care about tweet quality," but deleted it because someone felt the need to miss the point. So it goes. The point is that there's a tension between showing people the best of what you have, and having things to show people. There's a big reason most people miss this tension, and I think I've got my finger on it.

The big thing that I do with tweets and what I decide to read, that others mostly don't, is thinking in terms of marginal utility and opportunity cost. That's it. I'm not the only one who consciously, deliberately decides what to read and what not to (though it is worth noting that this is a tiny minority), but it sure feels like I'm the only one who applies those basic economics concepts to that decision. The marginal blog post, or worse, the marginal blog comment, does more harm than good, by way of taking up scarce attention that could have been better spent elsewhere, just like the make-a-wish foundation does more harm than good by redirecting charitable donations to something with negligible impact.

Look, I'm not knocking your taste, see next paragraph, but it's *frustrating* to watch people mindlessly click the latest outrage porn and bicker about it on my facebook feed for half an internet-century before forgetting about it and moving on to the next outrage porn when they could READ A CLASSIC. Now I know that time is not fungible, that one cannot spend all one's waking hours catching up on Plato and Sipser, but would it kill you to try? to cut some of the proverbial empty calories out of your information diet? Do you really have to keep your criticisms of the hated enemy constantly up to date? Can't you just ignore things that waste your time? You'd be better off staring at a wall and thinking about triangles. I'm completely serious. Triangles are cool. Did you know the sum of the angles of a hyperbolic triangle is less than 180°? What's up with that? I'm digressing again. Where was I? Ah, yes. Politics. Not even once.

Some people just lose the lottery of fascinations. I know that you are going to concern yourself with plenty of stupid, unimportant things. Humans are imperfect. It's okay. Go ahead and reblog that dumb image with some smart sarcasm pasted over a politician's portrait. see if I care

Another reason people rug-sweep the tradeoff between quality and quantity (or more technically, total quality versus average quality) is that encouragement is encouraged while discouragement is discouraged; i.e., there's a taboo on discouraging people from undertaking anything, including writing. This is partly because encouragement is seen as associating, which is "nice", while discouragement is seen as dissociating, which is "mean", and partly because encouragement is a low-cost bet: if they succeed with their endeavor, you win some apparent prescience and a valuable ally. Conversely, someone might resent you for discouraging them, and at least other people will think worse of you. Who needs the hassle? Alas. This asymmetric equilibrium has terrible consequences. It serves no one to tell talentless hacks that they should waste time and effort on some leisure activity they'll soon abandon. You want to begin writing a novel you'll never finish? Fine. But failure begets failure. You'd do well to do only things you can reasonably do.

But there's a critical problem with the idea of not making things unless they're good, which I didn't begin to notice until I in 2014 looked upon what I wrote in 2012 and earlier, and saw that it was garbage. You can't start out by making good things. And you can't improve easily without feedback from people outside yourself. So at some level, for there to exist great writers and thinkers whom the general audience can consume without needing to heed even a single mediocre thing, someone has to start by showing someone else something subpar. There's something about making more things that instills practice much better than trying to make better things. Quoth Paul Graham:

Working on small things is also a good way to learn. The most important kinds of learning happen one project at a time. ("Next time, I won't...") The faster you cycle through projects, the faster you'll evolve.

You can't write as much if you spend effort on rigor or on writing style. I don't have much motivation to spare. So that is why I am trying to lower my standards and write more, even though I'm not proud of what I write in this mode.

Missing Vocabulary I: sweeping under the rug

Alas, my idiolect requires a word that does not exist. I tried to coin a word for it, but failed, and ultimately concluded that since other people don't seem to need it, it's not important enough to coin one.

The concept is underemphasizing something that deserves emphasis in response to an incentive to do so. People respond to incentives whether consciously or not, and a very common felt incentive is to win an argument, so people very seldom think of relevant things that would undercut their argument.

People don't always do this on purpose, and they usually do it unaware, but it's a culpable mistake, one that does real harm, and so the word should have negative connotations and some associated social pressure to admit the mistake.
Originally published December 12, 2015

When I first tried to coin it, I wrote: The definition is pretty simple. The word will mean, "possibly deliberately (but possibly just by negligence) sweeping something under the rug" or "wrongfully understating/underestimating the importance of something"

Some rejected candidates:

• discount
• omit
• neglect
• disregard
• ignore
• paper over
• overlook
• underlook

"Shoving under the rug" has the right connotations and means what I want it to mean, but is simply too long.

People usually ask for examples of where I'd use the word. I have frequent want for it, so I'm sure I'll think of more and add them, but for now I can only think of one:

• "If you think living forever conditioning on continuing forever to want to live would be great, you're _____ the distinction between *wanting* and *enjoying*."

"Sweeping the distinction between wanting and enjoying under the rug" is a very awkward phrase.

As of December 9, 2016, I'm going with "gloss over" for the time being.

why do you even think that

Originally published December 12, 2015

This is an experiment in drastically lowering my standards for post quality, that I might post more often.

I see a lot of people talking about offsetting the suffering they cause as meat eaters by consuming more cow relative to chicken and eggs, and to donate money to vegan activism organizations. I'm all for donating to veganism charities because they seem to be prioritizing a problem that is neglected on the margin. These discussions usually come with what seem to me to be ridiculously overblown calculations for how effective these organizations are per donated dollar, which allows people who donate to them to feel less guilty for eating meat, but I'm not going to try to calculate how effective they are because that's not what I want to focus on today.

These discussions always seem to come with some caveat about how maybe cows are worth a lot more moral weight than chickens, because they're more """evolutionarily advanced""" than chickens. It makes me want to wonder, have these people ever spent time with chickens or cows? Want to wonder, rather than wonder, because it is obvious that anyone who talks like that has never spent time with a chicken.

Chickens are relatively smart. They play dominance games, whence "pecking orders". They hunt bugs. They have individual personalities; some are meaner and bitier than others; many actually like humans. They know fear, and get made fun of a lot for their cowardliness (which is unfair; would you be brave if your combat capability was that of a chicken?). Virtuous or not, cowardliness is at least brain activity. Fear is an emotion. They visibly suffer.

Cows stand around and chew the cud.

The thrust of my point thus far is that this is an unexamined assumption that people keep making, occasionally with the regular lip service admitting uncertainty. If questioned, people will probably react by mentioning brain size, but whales have enormous brains and are not very smart. Yes brain size is correlated with intelligence, but to measure intelligence you have to consider how things behave and not how big their organs are, unless you want to measure moral weight in pounds.

Which reminds me, how bad is its suffering? should be the relevant question when determining moral weight, not how intelligent is it? Bentham knew this.

You know that people don't believe things for the right reasons, so let me speculate on why people automatically default to assuming cows have more moral weight than chickens. I have observed that humans have a bias toward mammals. This should be obvious. Humans are mammals. Isaac Asimov asserted the principle that ceteris paribus one serves the interests of things more similar to oneself. Many people reify this bias into a moral principle. That's stupid. It's what people do. Birds are much less popular as pets than dogs and cats. On the OKcupid thing for whether you want pets, you can select "dogs", "cats", or "none". You can't select birds.

It's harder to empathize with things you understand less well, almost by definition. People don't understand birds as well as they do mammals. When getting a new pet bird, people's first instinct is to pet it in the places that a mammal would enjoy being touched. They have to be taught that birds usually only want to be pet in the head and neck area, with species and individual variations in preferences.

I don't think this is the main reason people default to that assumption, but it's something I wanted to explain somewhere.

Okay, I guess I'm done for now.