Author: admin

I’ve been a little quiet in the last few months as I’m in the final steps of completing my PhD. I’m finalising my thesis as we speak, and should be submitting it within the next month or two. Once I do, I’m excited to get back to making more blog posts and Youtube videos, and rebooting the Morality is Hard podcast.

I just want to thank everyone for their support so far. I recently hit 550 subscribers on Youtube, which is just incredible. My video on why I will never have children has reached 6,600 views, which makes it by far the most viewed piece of content I have ever made (more views than my thesis will likely ever reach, sadly!). Message received – antinatalism is a topic of interest to many of you. I will be doing more on this in the future. I have been overwhelmed by your support, and it’s clear that many people feel alone in their views on this – surrounded by a society where breeding is seen as the norm, and anything else is seen as odd.

In other plans, I will be doing a collaboration video on antinatalism in the near future, and I have some other collaborations lined up with other Youtubers to talk about ethics and philosophy. You can expect some videos on my research from my PhD, including the pros and cons of developing space technology, off-Earth mining and space colonisation. If you have any topics you’re burning for me to cover, please do let me know.

Thank you.

How can we predict and prepare for unexpected events that we may not have even thought of yet?

I gave a talk on some of the work I do as part of my PhD and discuss how we can predict and prepare for unexpected events known as black swans.

Thanks to UNSW and the UNSOMNIA team for helping me put this together!

If anything positive comes out of COVID19, I hope it’s that we will have better disease control protocols and public health around the world – but also that we might use this unexpected event to think about how we can prepare for future unprecedented events.

See my talk “Preparing for the unimaginable” online here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzDE2UJ8ufM

A 2 metre wide asteroid has a 1 in 200 chance of entering Earth’s atmosphere on November 2 this year. The most likely scenario is that it will blow up in the atmosphere, causing some damage at the surface.

The Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded over Russia in 2013 caused ~1,491 human injuries and some property damage (mostly shattered windows). This was 20 m wide, so we can expect less damage than that, but still some kind of damage.

There’s not much we can do about it now except monitor it to better understand up the impact probability, and where it would hit if it did.

Segue – Look at the headline and first paragraph of this Channel 7 News article.

“Astrophysicist weighs in on asteroid zooming towards earth” sounds scary, and “The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is monitoring an asteroid that appears to be on a direct collision course with earth.” sounds like we’re a bit fucked.

Asteroid impacts are no laughing matter, and I think we should be more worried about them in general than most of the public is (you’re more likely to be killed by an asteroid than a shark), but this kind of click/scarebait in news is frustrating.

News outlets are barely held accountable for misleading or false information, let alone clickbait, and that needs to change.

This post is prompted by the recent news that Miley Cyrus is no longer vegan, which she revealed on Joe Rogan’s podcast, but is a response to the consistent trend I see of people claiming that a vegan who stops being vegan was never a vegan to begin with. I want to talk about why that doesn’t make sense.

Let’s clarify the claim people are making. It goes something like:

If someone seems to be an ethical vegan (vegan because they think animal exploitation and/or suffering is wrong), but at some point in the future they start eating animal products again, then they were never an ethical vegan to begin with, they were just plant-based (meaning they didn’t eat animal products but were never an ethical vegan).

First, I don’t think this is how human minds work. We are not perfect rational actors, and we do weird things that don’t make sense all the time. We also change our minds a lot. I think it is absolutely possible for someone to fully believe that purchasing animal products is wrong, and to later change their mind on that. Why wouldn’t it be? It’s possible to change your mind in the opposite direction (indeed, that’s how most of us became vegan). It might seem unfathomable to me to consume animal products for pleasure again, but that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible.

Someone told me that they would die before eating animal products again. I note that Cyrus said something similar. If someone says that they would die before being friends with someone of another race, but then they reject their racist ways, does that mean they were never really racist, or has their character changed?

Misinformation, pressure and a lot of other factors lead well meaning people to think and do some strange things which are against their prior values and beliefs.

I don’t know the specifics behind Cyrus’ backflip, and to be honest I don’t care, but it seems disingenuous to say that she was definitely never vegan. Maybe she actually was never an ethical vegan, and only promoted ethical vegan and animal rights messages because it suited her image. But to say this is definitely the case without proof doesn’t make sense.

Let’s say it’s impossible for someone to be an ethical vegan for 10 years and then start eating animal products again. If that were the case, there would have to be a way to tell whether someone is plant-based, not just vegan, in a way that doesn’t require the retrospective judgement. To put that another way, how can you tell that a current ‘ethical vegan’ is actually just plant-based, if they haven’t started eating animal products again?

What’s the effect of the vegan community thinking that all ex-vegans were never really vegan to begin with? I have no idea. Maybe it makes the community look dogmatic and off-putting, or maybe it encourages people to not change their mind. But I know that it just doesn’t make sense, unless there is something I’m missing.

How can we predict and prepare for unexpected events that we may not have even thought of yet?

I gave a talk on some of the work I do as part of my PhD and discuss how we can predict and prepare for unexpected events known as black swans.

Thanks to UNSW and the UNSOMNIA team for helping me put this together!

“Do you lie awake at night worrying about volcano eruptions, asteroid impacts, global pandemics, evil robots, or nuclear warfare? Have you spared a moment to consider that there might be existential threats humans can’t even imagine? If anything positive comes out of COVID-19, it’s that we will have better disease control protocols and public health around the world – but also that we might use this unexpected event to think about how we can prepare for future unprecedented events. What can we do today to prepare for the unimaginable?”

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzDE2UJ8ufM]

I finally got around to listening to Sam Harris’ interview with Lucas Perry on the Future of Life Institute podcast. Overall I thought it was pretty good. I didn’t personally update on or learn much, but I enjoy listening to conversations about reducing suffering, the far future and existential/catastrophic risk.

Conversations they touched on include global priorities, existential risk, wild and farmed animal suffering, global poverty, artificial general intelligence risk and AI alignment and ethics/moral realism.

I agreed with most of what Sam said, so I won’t touch on that. I also felt like this particular instance of Sam explaining his version of moral realism to be the most clear explanation I’ve heard from him, so it’s worth catching the last 20 odd minutes for that. There were a few things however that I disagreed with Sam on, and want to briefly share why.

First is the intuition he has that there is an asymmetry between suffering and pleasure. He’s not talking about the asymmetry of the asymmetry argument put forth by David Benatar, but rather that the worst possible suffering that we could experience seems worse than the best possible pleasure we could experience could be good. To put it another way, Sam says that if you could choose to get an hour of the most blissful possible experience, followed by an hour of the most painful possible experience, most people, following their intuition, would say ‘no thanks’.

But this is just an intuition, and our intuitions aren’t always right, even when they are about our preferences. I might think that I would prefer some experience over another, but I could very well be wrong about which would actually bring me the most joy. I think it’s possible that the worst suffering could be more bad than the best pleasure is good, but I don’t take it for granted. It could be the opposite.

We can’t yet imagine just how good the best possible pleasure could be. We might be biased towards thinking suffering is worse because nature tends to make us more suffering focused through evolution (see the wild-animal suffering argument), but it needn’t be that way forever. We could hack our minds or biology as David Pearce suggests to experience less suffering and more pleasure.

Also, when ones’ life is pretty good, one might think that the 1 hour of pain followed by 1 hour of pleasure is not a trade off worth making, and maybe even for good reason – if your life is already net positive, this would be a net bad trade off. Someone experiencing unimaginable chronic pain through some disease might feel differently.

The second thing I disagreed with Sam on was his position on veganism. In particular, his position on children being vegan. He said that it was effectively a longitudinal experiment on their health that we don’t yet know the outcome of. To the extent that nutrition is by its nature a difficult science, and that we can never be completely sure of the effect of various changes to our diet on long term health, I agree.

However, we don’t completely understand the long term health outcomes of consuming animal products either. This has certainly been the status quo in western culture, but it’s not inherently obvious that the status quo is good. The unknown could be bad, or it could be good. You can have an unhealthy vegan diet, and you can have an unhealthy non-vegan diet. The pressures that parents have to not harm their children through nutrition remain the same. We hear about malnourished vegan children in the media more because of the sensationalist media bias and confirmation bias – we don’t pay attention to the hundreds of malnourished non-vegan kids because they’re either not reported or their ‘veganness’ doesn’t come in to the reporting.

Finally, some words to Sam himself. Sam you’re not a child, and yet you’re not vegan. You admit to all of the moral shortcomings of animal agriculture, and yet you partake in it. Surely if there is a peak in the moral landscape we are working our way towards, you eating animal products is not helping us get there, indeed it might be moving us away. You have even more of a responsibility to be vegan given your follower-base. You being vegan could encourage thousands of others to follow suit.

In many ways, atheism and veganism are similar. They are both about rejecting traditions that don’t make sense, valuing the truth and being ethical.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on a video with Pat Bateman (That Vegan Lawyer) on the links and similarities between veganism and atheism. We talked about the overlap between the demographics, and why both are fundamentally about valuing what is true and what is ethically right.

I drew pretty heavily on Kim Socha’s book Animal Liberation and Atheism which I highly recommend for anyone interested in learning more about the overlap.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Tcz6sRWSKg]

Last night, Burnside Council voted on a motion to ban the sales of fur at events on council land. I gave a speech to council in support of this motion. The council voted against this motion 10 votes to 2. This is truly disappointing. In this video, I read the speech I gave to council, and voice some concerns I have with the content of the council debate.

This set back to the campaign had me frustrated, but I won’t let it slow me down, and I will never stop fighting for animals (humans and non-humans alike).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQcFIwmXTns]

This post was submitted to the Sydney Morning Herald as an opinion piece, but was not accepted.

I’ve been contacting UNSW Sydney, where I am a PhD student, to try and stop them from killing a fox who has been living on campus. They seem to have ‘moved in’ because of the reduced numbers of staff and students on site. Thankfully, it looks like they won’t be going through with it. But the university’s responses have me irked.

They make the point that we need to be protecting native species. I don’t deny that the fox may kill native animals, but what I do disagree with is the prevalent idea that we should put the lives of native animals above and beyond the lives of introduced animals. I want to reduce the suffering of all animals, not just native animals.

Foxes and other introduced species didn’t ask to be introduced. They were brought to Australia by humans. Why should the foxes have to suffer for this error of human judgement? Surely we bear some responsibility for introduced species. It shouldn’t just be the introduced animals themselves that have to suffer for this.

Currently, it’s illegal in NSW to move a fox once it has been captured, even to a rescue shelter. Legally speaking, they must be killed. This limits our options. We can leave the fox alone and hope it will move away when staff and students return to campus, or we can use other non-harmful means of moving them away, like removing their food sources and installing fox lights.

Rather than jump to killing as the solution, we should be considering other things, like immunocontraceptives to make some of the animals infertile. This is a more long-term solution than culling attempts, since after culling the population will typically rise again to fill the gap. Immunocontraceptives and trap, neuter and release (for those animals where we are legally allowed to do so) will mean we don’t have to perform a slaughter every few years.

Given that we kill kangaroos, a native animal, en masse, I’m suspicious as to whether the true motivation is for the benefit of the animals. Is it just for us? We kill kangaroos because they are competing for the food that farmed animals, such as cows and sheep, who both introduced animals, are eating – grass.

Further, if we really cared about native animals, maybe we’d stop cutting down forests to make way for farms and housing development. From 2015-16, the NSW Government allowed the clearing of over 7,000 hectares of native vegetation. It is unknown how much of this was to clear land for grazing, however from 1988 to 2009, 93% of land clearance in Queensland was to make room for livestock grazing.

NSW land clearing laws introduced in 2017 expose 99% of identified koala habitat on private land to clearing. 92% of land degradation in Australia is caused by animal agriculture. Globally, animal agriculture is the leading cause of species loss.

So I hope you will forgive me if I’m suspicious as to whether the laws we have in place around wild animal management are actually in place for the benefit of the animals themselves. If they’re solely for the benefit of humans, we really ought to reconsider our laws. Humans and non-humans are all animals, and we can all suffer. Perhaps it’s time we learned how to share this planet with our fellow earthlings.