I don’t ever want to have a child. I haven’t been private about this, but I haven’t really been public either. I talked about why I don’t want to have children, and why I think it would be unethical for me to have a child.
Category: Uncategorized
On the state of the world
There is a lot happening right now. I’ve thought about commenting on it, but I’m a believer in forming opinions slowly with evidence rather than emotion (for a discussion of why, see my footnote – if this concerns you already, I strongly urge you to read it*). Having said that, I think I’m ready to share some thoughts, though I of course reserve the right to change my mind with new information. This is a long post, but I think the world is complex and nothing less would accurately describe my views.
I like to try and make the strongest case possible for both sides of argument (see steelmanning). I think this is just good practice, but it can sometimes get me in trouble, since I end up arguing in part against both sides of a story, even the side that I actually agree with. Oh well.
First, it would be remiss of me to start without a direct statement on the cause of the protests in USA. I believe that suffering and loss of life are tragic, and so I was naturally horrified to hear about the death of George Floyd. As best I can tell from what I’ve seen, his death was unnecessary and a gross breach of police conduct. I’m not an expert in policing, but I can feel relatively confident at this point in saying that the police seriously fucked up. Regardless of whether or not Floyd had committed a crime or had a valid reason for being detained, the response was not warranted.
Black lives matter, and I’ll try my best to do my part to create a better world for African Americans.
I know people desperately want a solution to what is happening (myself included), but the world is extremely complicated, and a solution is unlikely to be simple. There are many examples of actions taken that sound great and have the best intentions, but end up creating more harm than good. Could that be happening now? Maybe. It would be epistemically dishonest of me to pretend to have an answer to that. For what it’s worth, I’m strongly pro-non-human rights but still think there is a chance that some action ‘for the animals’ could result in more animal suffering.
I also refuse to propose a solution. This may warrant some criticism (“You say that what people are doing might not be the best way to go about it, yet you don’t even have a solution? Hypocrite!”), but I want to push back on the culture of people who aren’t domain experts claiming to have a simple solution to a complex problem.
And yet, I have a view about the solution for many things unrelated to my core expertise. Usually I arrive at these views after reading and thinking about the issue for a while. I haven’t done this for this particular issue. Maybe I should be spending more time doing this. I can’t argue with that, but I won’t propose a solution until I do.
In particular, the counter-productivity of looting in the US has been talked about a lot. This is something you could write an entire journal paper on. I won’t say much on it except to say that there are a lot of competing views. A couple of interesting things come to mind – the Boston Tea Party involved the destruction of British property by dissatisfied American colonists. To say that destruction of property is always bad as a form of protest, you’d have to accept that the Boston Tea Party was too (see the Tweets below that have been making the rounds).
Some of the looters may be doing it opportunistically, and some may be doing it as protest. But just as I accept that well intended actions don’t always have good consequences, I accept that the looting doesn’t necessarily have bad consequences. I don’t claim to have the answer, though I do note that supporters of the protests remain divided on the looting and property destruction itself.
Some are criticising those who are protesting for being hypocritical about COVID-19. Some people were seemingly concerned a few weeks ago enough to criticise those who protested about the lockdown restrictions, but think that these protests are worth the risk.
This is a pet hate of mine. Often (not always), I find that when someone disagrees with the methodology of a protest or civil disobedience, what they actually mean is that they disagree with that method being used for that thing because they disagree with the thing being advocated for. E.g. an animal rights protest in Melbourne last year was criticised for blocking traffic, yet a union protest in the same week which also blocked traffic was celebrated (broadly speaking). You just need to look at the text and headlines of the ABC News articles on both to see this discrepancy.
I like Venn diagrams like the one below because they remind us that we can hold numerous different views at the same time. This might seem obvious, but my impression is that some people will naturally trend towards agreeing with all of the propositions a particular side makes. We don’t have to, we can choose.
I’d add one more circle to this Venn diagram for now, which is ‘concern about a second wave of SARS-Cov2 is warranted’. Again, this might seem obvious, but some seem to be framing it as ‘you can only pick one’. Probably a lot of the protesters hold all five of these circles, but have decided, either consciously or subconsciously, that the risk of spreading SARS-Cov2 is worth the payoff of achieving change through the protests. It’s important to acknowledge that COVID-19 will disproportionately affect black neighbourhoods for a variety of reasons. This isn’t an argument in itself, but an important point that I don’t know people are considering enough.
I would encourage anyone who chooses to protest (for anything) to socially distance where possible while protesting (I know this is just impractical most of the time), wear a mask as a matter of priority, not protest if they are sick, and self-isolate for two weeks after the protest if possible.
For a specific example of things being complicated, I want to mention ‘Blackout Tuesday’, where people posted black squares on social media this week. This was intended as a show of solidarity and support of BLM, but there have been concerns from some in the BLM community that it had been drowning out live information (e.g. the #BlackLivesMatter and #BLM feeds) about the protests and what was happening on the ground, which was a life line for activists. Once again, no simple answer.
I hope that the systemic issues that are being questioned now do not get forgotten in the next media cycle. I hope that SARS-Cov2 is not forgotten about in this media cycle. The world sucks all year round, so let’s make sure we are always fighting for a better one.
Have I missed something? Almost certainly. There are also other related topics which I intended to write about, but felt that including them here would be distracting. I’m happy to update my views and amend anything that needs amending (that’s largely why I’m writing this). I’m happy for people to comment here or reach out to me privately.
* In January 2019, there was a confrontation at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., USA. There were groups of opposing political demonstrators at the site, and a video was released of a high school student wearing a Make America Great Again hat, seemingly taunting another man. The student was lambasted on social media, being called a racist and getting sent death threats.
Later footage revealed that the initial media coverage was inaccurate, and that the students had been antagonised by another group of protesters. Suddenly, the smirking, racist student was just a student smiling awkwardly after a man came up to him and started beating a drum in his face. Do I agree with all of the students’ views? No. But I don’t think that excuses criticising them for things they didn’t even do.
From the Wikipedia article on the incident: “The news media has been criticized for how it covered the incident, specifically for their initial reporting of the story based on various social media posts without fully investigating what occurred and subsequently fueling controversy and outrage over the incident.“
Videos and photos can be powerful, but they rarely constitute viable evidence in isolation. This is why I try not to make strong judgements based on a video and initial reporting, no matter how compelling they seem.
Australian live export ban of 2011 invalid?
The Federal Court of Australia has ruled that the temporary ban on live export of farmed animals to Indonesia in 2011 was invalid, and the Federal Government is likely going to have to pay out damages to animal agriculture corporations.
I make no judgement on whether the court findings are valid (I’m not a lawyer), keeping in mind that I don’t think legality equals morality.
However, the use of the words ‘reckless’ and ‘capricious’ in the judgement about an action aimed at reducing suffering to non-humans makes it abundantly clear that the legal system is not built to protect the interests of anyone but humans.
It also sets a sad precedent. Future governments may well be less inclined to make legal change in the interests of non-humans if they think an animal agriculture company or industry representative group is going to sue them. Consider also what happened to Premier Mike Baird after the (ultimately temporary) ban on greyhound racing in NSW.
Effective Animal Advocacy: The difference between life and death
I don’t believe that an action will always have a positive effect simply because it is ‘for the animals’. There are many well-studied examples of well-intended programs causing more harm than good in human-focused interventions, and we need to be careful.
In this video I talked about how animal advocates can be as effective as possible – I believe the animals deserve no less.
Esports and how to get interviewed in the media
I was interviewed by Ticker Sports about esports today, including my involvement as a League of Legends player for UNSW recently. It was a fun interview, and I got to talk a little about the past and future of esports, something I’m passionate about and enjoy a lot. You can watch the interview by clicking here and going to 21 minutes 12 seconds.
As a secondary reason for writing this post, I want to talk about how I ended up speaking about this. I don’t think I’m the most qualified or even most charismatic person to talk about this in Australia, and yet I was interviewed instead of a player or coach for an OPL team, or an esports journalist/analyst.
I use a website called Sourcebottle (I’m not sponsored, I swear), which puts both interviewers and interviewees in touch with each other. Anyone from journalists to blog writers can put in a request for someone to speak about a particular topic, and people like myself will get an alert based on some keywords they’ve entered.
I’ve been interviewed for several news articles and magazines in this way, and even ended up having a book chapter written about some of my work. It’s a great tool, and I’d highly recommend filling in a profile with some keywords if there are some issues you are knowledgeable/passionate about so you can get opportunities to talk about it with the media. There is a paid version of Sourcebottle which gives you some extra perks, but in my opinion it’s probably not worth it. The free version gives you what I described above.
Finally, the media alert I got wasn’t even directly esports related. They were looking to speak with someone involved in a sport that had not been severely affected by the Covid-19 lockdowns, and I figured esports might fit the bill. Turns out it did.
The case against colonising space
I read an article today that summarised a book titled Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity by Daniel Deudney. The book (and the article) makes the case that we should be slowing down our expansion in to space. In particular, the article is commenting on the plans of both private and public entities to put humans on Mars. As a caveat, I haven’t yet read the book, though I intend to, and will likely do a longer post and video about it. But for now, I want to share some thoughts.
The article is quite critical of Elon Musk and SpaceX, mostly for their desire to put boots on Mars as soon as possible without thinking enough about the consequences, which include the possible weaponisation of space. Carl Sagan had long warned about the possible weaponisation of asteroids through the development of asteroid deflection technology (see also my take on this).
I’d like to add a concern of my own, relating to wild-animal suffering (please see this for an introduction to the concept). If you accept the premise that many wild animals and insects experience so much suffering that they have net negative lives, it would surely be bad to fill an entire new planet with them. And yet, that’s exactly what some people are proposing to do with Mars as part of or after a terraforming process. I’ve talked about this here. Given the enormous consequences, we should really stop and think about whether terraforming Mars is the right thing to do. Too many people in my field seem to assume it is definitely good to colonise and terraform Mars.
The article goes on to discuss some of Deudney’s critiques of some of the arguments people make for space colonisation, which includes ensuring the survival of humanity in the event of a catastrophe affecting Earth. I note that the article’s presentation of this case is rather strawmanned. They made it seem like people making this argument are only concerned about the death of our sun in several billion years, rather than the myriad of other X-risks such as artificial intelligence, pandemics, nuclear warfare, asteroid impacts and supervolcanoes, some of which could affect us tomorrow.
The article (and I can only assume the book also) seems to be making the case for slowing down space expansion, rather than halting it all together, which is a view I share myself.
This Device Protects You From 5G? Scientist Reacts to Pseudoscience
The main thing I discuss in this video is a series of products being promoted by ‘Juicing with Nadia K’, which claim to help protect people from the effects of 5G. To be immediately clear – 5G is not harmful, and I think this is a scam. I have reported it to the ACCC. Having said that, I thought we could have some fun and break down the claims Nadia is making, and look at a few other examples of recent pseudoscience.
More Youtube videos!
I’ve been putting a lot more work in to Youtube recently, and I hope for it to play an equal role alongside this blog. I know that video is a medium many people prefer to consume, and I want to reach those people too. For major posts in the future, I’ll aim to have a video and text version released at the same time.
In the mean time, please feel free to watch some of my recent videos and subscribe to my channel. Yesterday I spoke about asteroid impacts, and how developing asteroid deflection technology might actually increase the likelihood of asteroid impacts. Sound counter-intuitive? Take a look to find out how it kind of makes sense!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nD0D5ZsiwUY]
Last week I spoke about how I rejected Christianity and became an atheist.
On meditation and mindfulness – part 1
You can find a video version of this post here.
I’ve tried meditation and mindfulness a few times in the past, including when I was at one of my lowest points with depression and anxiety (I wrote more about this here). Recently, I’ve started again, and have even been mildly intrinsically enjoying it (positive on the -10 to 10 scale!). I’ve been doing the daily meditations on Sam Harris’ Waking Up app, which a friend gave me a free month trial for.
One of the things I’ve liked least about meditation (I’ll just say meditation from here on to refer to both meditation and mindfulness), besides not feeling any benefit, was the common appeal to spiritualism. This is not to say all meditation appeals to spiritualism of course, but the moment it approaches pseudoscience territory I disengage. This is probably why Waking Up has appealed to me.
Harris talks about why we don’t need to appeal to religion or spirituality for meditation, even though a lot of practices, techniques and insights about the self through meditation have their roots in Buddhism. Religion and pseudoscience sometimes gets things right, but then we can choose to separate that out from the rest of it. In the app, Harris says something to effect of ‘Needing Buddhism for meditation and mindfulness today is like needing Christianity for physics [I fact checked whether Christianity played a role in physics – looks at least partly true, I guess]. Just because they played a role in formulating the early ideas doesn’t mean we need to give their other ideas any credence today.’
I’m writing this partly to document how my thoughts on meditation change over time, if at all, and I aim to write again in a month or so. In particular, I’m interested in the claim Harris makes about meditation allowing you to observe that the ‘self is an illusion’. I’m curious to see whether I will come to notice this myself. At an intellectual level, I feel like I can kind of understand what he means by this. When you have no thoughts, then a thought arises in your mind, it seems fair to say that you did not call upon this thought yourself. It came in to your mind without your willing it. Is this what he means? Is it that all of our thoughts, ideas and experiences (since we don’t control the input (senses) to our mind either) are out of our control, and we are ‘along for the ride’?
This seems reminiscent of the way Daniel Dennett talks about free will (edit – it looks like Sam Harris proposed the below analogy, but Dennett also talks about free will in a similar way). E.g. think of a city. Which city came to mind? Why was it that city? Did you choose that city, or is it the first one that your mind called up without your real involvement? Are not all thoughts like this? Is this view on free will the same as Harris’ view on the self?
Other things Harris mentions which I find intriguing but can’t intuitively notice yet include the idea that you can’t feel the shape of your body, but instead feel a cloud of experience. I don’t even really know what this means, but maybe it will be trivial in time.
Another question I have is; what do these realisations mean for how you live your life? Are they necessarily good? On some naive level to me, realising that there is no self feels like it might be depressing, and maybe I’m better off in blissful ignorance.
I think we can have all of these insights without having to invoke any kind of spooky spiritual or religious overtones. Everything is explainable through science, and the way our mind works should be no different. Just as we call alternative medicine that works ‘medicine’, we should call spiritual pseudoscience about the mind that happens to be real ‘neuroscience’.
Stay tuned for the next instalment of this, where I’ll hopefully be able to share more of my experience of meditation.
How I renounced Christianity and became atheist (or, my ongoing struggle with the fear of oblivion)
Above photo is me taking communion in a church some 16 years ago.
You can find a video version of this post here.
Switching from Catholicism to atheism in around 2012/2013 was a rather major point of my life, so it’s a little strange in hindsight that I haven’t spoken much about it. I recently wrote about why I think atheists shouldn’t feel afraid to tell non-atheists about why they think there are no deities, but here I want to talk about my own journey.
As I started to write this, I realised I don’t know exactly how I came to believe in ‘god etc.’ (I’ll use this as short hand for believing all the typical Catholic beliefs). As far back as I can remember, I took the existence of god etc. for granted. I found I had to ask my parents for some of the answers. Here is what I’ve been able to recall and gather.
My mum’s mother was religious, and occasionally went to Sunday mass. This rubbed off on my mum, but when asked about it today, she described herself in hindsight as being a ‘closet atheist’. It sounds like my dad’s experience was similar.
I was born in Perth where I was baptised (when pressed, my mum said that this would have been more for the benefit of my grandparents, who were all believers). I took kindergarten in Tokyo, Japan, and had my first few years of primary school at a British international school (Al Khubairat) in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Broadly speaking, both of these seemed to be fairly non-religious. However in Abu Dhabi, I took part in a Christian Sunday school at least once. As best I can work out, I went because some friends went.
We moved to Adelaide, Australia in 1999 and I started going to St Ignatius College, a Jesuit private school. I was there from year 2 to year 12. I think it’s here that any nascent beliefs I had in god etc. were solidified. My mum described it best when she said I was like a sponge and would have readily taken on what the school was teaching us.
We had compulsory mass around once a week. In later years, this became optional, but I still went most of the time since most people did. I prayed in my own time, though not consistently. I believed I was speaking to a god. I discovered in my last few years there that some of my friends were atheist, and that they just didn’t believe. We never really talked about it any more than that, but I recall feeling a little surprised and sad by this.
I’m not sure exactly when, but at some point while I was at St Ignatius, it occurred to me what it might be like if, against all odds, god etc. wasn’t real. Oblivion. This scared me, and in all honesty it still does when I’m not careful and I think about it too hard. I recall once as a child thinking about this in the middle of the night (“But if there is nothing, then that means…“) and having a panic attack. I leapt out of my bed, silently screaming “NO”, and collapsing on the floor outside my room. I never told anyone about this. I did my best to remind myself that this was silly and unlikely. I was getting heaven or hell, but certainly not nothing.
After I left school, I started studying my Bachelor of Science at the University of Adelaide in 2010. I would still describe myself as Catholic, and would still pray sometimes, but I stopped going to church. In 2011, my fears about oblivion were reaching a boiling point. I was having more doubts, and it was starting to seriously affect my life. Desperate, I went to mass a few times with my grandfather, but it didn’t seem to help. I decided that I needed to apply the science I was learning and find out the truth. Did god etc. exist?
I embarked on an online journey of research, reading things from atheists and Christians. I watched debates (in particular Richard Dawkins videos), and even joined an online Christian/atheist text and voice debate platform (I tried finding it to share it here, but couldn’t), where I spent several weeks/months engaging and listening. It was run by Christian preachers, but they welcomed atheists to come and debate. I described myself here as neutral and wanting to find the truth.
The more I listened and engaged, the less it made sense. As one example, I was studying geology, and I asked about how plate tectonics would fit in with a 6,000 odd year old universe. They answered that Noah’s flood smashed up the plates and they’re still moving around a little because of that. I don’t want to strawman all creationists with this one example, let alone strawman all Christians with creationists in general. This is just one example of me realising that none of the arguments for god etc. made any sense when I thought about them through the lens of science.
After this, I rather quickly realised I was an atheist. Unfortunately, this only amplified my fears of oblivion. It was now effectively a certainty – I was going to die, and I was going to be nothing. Incredibly, while writing this I’m not experiencing panic. Perhaps I’ve gotten better at separating my thoughts from my feelings, because I don’t think I’ve actually come to terms with death. As recently as about a month ago, I had a short lived (3-10 seconds) panic over this. They usually only come at night while I try to sleep now, when my mind is most free to be active and think.
Back to 2011 – I opened up about my fears to my parents and girlfriend at the time. I tried counselling, where it was suggested I was experiencing depression and anxiety. Ultimately I wasn’t prescribed medication, but it was suggested I try mindfulness, which didn’t seem to help.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what did help, but something that comes to mind is a conversation I had with my dad in 2012 about my videogame addiction (I’ve had a somewhat unhealthy relationship with videogames for years – often I’ll either play too much or not at all, with little in between), which combined with my depression was leading me to fail some university courses. We spoke about what I want to get out of life, and he said something to the effect of ‘you’re smart and can do anything you want’.
This, more than anything else, I think, put me on the path to recovery. I decided I wanted to save the world. Climate change looked pretty serious, maybe I’ll dedicate my life to that. I haven’t really told anyone this either, but part of why this mostly worked was because I decided I might just try to live forever. If I could set the world on a path of blindingly fast progress, maybe we could develop the technology to become immortal (the work of Aubrey de Grey was of interest to me here). In any case, this did seem to motivate me to go from failing my degree in 2012 to completing honours at the top of my class in 2014.
Over time, this ‘live forever’ motivation transitioned in to a ‘reduce suffering in the universe as much as possible’ motivation, and that seems to be where I remain today. I have a mission to do, and life is too short for me to spend any more time thinking about what comes after than I have to. I still go through slumps, and I suspect depression and anxiety will never fully leave me, but I am committed to this goal.
Some things I wrote about here are things I’ve never told another person. Most of it is at least stuff I’ve mentioned to very few people. I hope this inspires you to share your stories of how you came to no longer believe in a religion.