Magnus Vinding's Blog, page 4

Making Our Concern for Non-Human Beings Common Knowledge

The following is an excerpt from my book Reasoned Politics .

Two levels of knowledge are worth distinguishing in the context of human coordination (De Freitas et al., 2019):

Private knowledge: “where each person knows something, but knows nothing about what anyone else knows”Common knowledge: “where everybody knows that everybody else knows it”

Common knowledge is often explained with the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes, in which everyone had private knowledge that the emperor was n...

Priorities for reducing suffering: Reasons not to prioritize the Abolitionist Project

I discussed David Pearce’s Abolitionist Project in Chapter 13 of my book on Suffering-Focused Ethics. The chapter is somewhat brief and dense, and its main points could admittedly have been elaborated further and explained more clearly. This post explores and elaborates on some of these points.

A good place to start might be to highlight some of the key points of agreement between David Pearce and myself.

First and most important, we both agree that minimizing suffering should be our o...

Some reasons not to expect a growth explosion

Many people expect global economic growth to accelerate in the future, with growth rates that are not just significantly higher than those of today, but orders of magnitude higher.

The following are some of the main reasons I do not consider a growth explosion to be the most likely future outcome:

Most economists do not expect a growth explosionThe history of economic growth does not support a growth explosionRates of innovation and progress in science have slowed downMoore’s law is comin...

Effective altruism and common sense

Thomas Sowell once called Milton Friedman “one of those rare thinkers who had both genius and common sense”.

I am not here interested in Sowell’s claim about Friedman, but rather in his insight into the tension between abstract smarts and common sense, and particularly how it applies to the effective altruism community. For it seems to me that there sometimes is an unbalanced ratio of clever abstractions to common sense in EA discussions.

To be clear, my point is not that abstract ideas are...

Antinatalism and reducing suffering: A case of suspicious convergence

Two positions are worth distinguishing. One is the view that we should reduce (extreme) suffering as much as we can for all sentient beings. The other is the view that we should advocate for humans not to have children.

It may seem intuitive to think that the former position implies the latter. That is, to think that the best way to reduce suffering for all sentient beings is to advocate for humans not to have children. My aim in this brief essay is to outline some of the reasons to be skeptical...

Conversation with David Pearce about digital sentience and the binding problem

Whether digital sentience is possible would seem to matter greatly for our priorities, and so gaining even slightly more refined views on this matter could be quite valuable. Many people appear to treat the possibility, if not indeed the imminence, of digital sentience as a foregone conclusion. David Pearce, in contrast, is skeptical.

Pearce has written and spoken elaborately about his views on consciousness. My sense, however, is that these expositions do not always manage to clearly convey ...

Two biases relevant to expected AI scenarios

My aim in this essay is to briefly review two plausible biases in relation to our expectations of future AI scenarios. In particular, these are biases that I think risk increasing our estimates of the probability of a local, so-called FOOM takeoff.

An important point to clarify from the outset is that these biases, if indeed real, do not in themselves represent reasons to simply dismiss FOOM scenarios. It would clearly be a mistake to think so. But they do, I submit, constitute reasons to be ...

Suffering-focused ethics and the importance of happiness

It seems intuitive to think that suffering-focused moral views imply that it is unimportant whether people live rich and fulfilling lives. Yet the truth, I will argue, is in many ways the opposite — especially for those who are trying to reduce suffering effectively with their limited resources.

Personal sustainability and productivity

A key reason why we need to live fulfilling lives is that we cannot work to reduce suffering in sustainable ways otherwise. Indeed, not only is a reasonably...

Underappreciated consequentialist reasons to avoid consuming animal products

While there may be strong deontological or virtue-ethical reasons to avoid consuming animal products (“as far as is possible and practicable”), the consequentialist case for such avoidance is quite weak.

Or at least this appears to be a common view in some consequentialist-leaning circles. My aim in this post is to argue against this view. On a closer look, we find many strong consequentialist reasons to avoid the consumption of animal products.

The direct effects on the individuals we eat

99 pe...

When Machines Improve Machines

The following is an excerpt from my book  Reflections on Intelligence (2016/2020).

 

The term “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI) refers to a machine that can perform any task at least as well as any human. This is often considered the holy grail of artificial intelligence research, and also the thing that many consider likely to give rise to an “intelligence explosion”, the reason being that machines then will be able to take over the design of smarter machines, and hence their further devel...