A Short Introduction to Reducing Suffering – Essa... http://reducing-suffering.org/short-introduction-r...

Essays on Reducing Suffering

Altruism Animals Consciousness Ethics Science The future Other

A Short Introduction to Reducing Suffering

by Brian Tomasik Search 

First written: Dec. 2014; last update: 18 Feb. 2018

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The following page summarizes several of the major themes of this website.
Site author
Translations: Spanish, Polish
Brian Tomasik (contact me)

Contents [hide]

1 Introduction
2 Suffering and ethics
3 Animal suffering
4 Future suffering
5 Consciousness
6 What you can do
7 Lifestyle changes
8 Top charities

Suffering and ethics

Many ethical value systems feel that extreme suffering commands particular moral
urgency compared with other priorities. The agony of, say, Medieval-style torture is not
necessarily compensated by other, smaller bene�ts. We should give special attention to
reducing the net expected suffering of all sentient beings when deciding our actions.

Animal suffering
Animals signi�cantly outnumber humans, and most people view animals as less
important. These factors suggest that there should be low-hanging fruit for reducing
animal suffering. In the USA each year, 10 billion
land animals endure suffering in factory farms.
The number of animals in nature is orders of
magnitude higher, and wild animals also endure
harsh living conditions and painful deaths.
Because most wild animals die, often painfully,
shortly after birth, it's plausible that suffering
dominates happiness in nature. This is
especially plausible if we extend moral considerations to smaller creatures like the
~1019 insects on Earth, whose collective neural mass outweighs that of humanity by

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several orders of magnitude.

In addition to considering the suffering of huge numbers of wild insects, we can take
small steps to reduce the harm that we cause to insects in other ways. For instance, we
can avoid buying silk and shellac, reduce driving (especially when the road is wet),
prevent insect infestations in our homes, and try to avoid crushing insects on grass, the
sidewalk, in garbage cans, etc.

Future suffering
In addition to reducing suffering in the short run, we should consider how our actions
will affect the future, including the far future. We appear poised at a crucial period in
history, where the trajectories of our technology and society may make a lasting impact
on intelligence in our region of the universe for billions of years. It looks likely that
arti�cial general intelligence (AGI) will be developed in the coming decades or
centuries, and its initial conditions and control structures may make an enormous
impact to the dynamics, values, and character of life in the cosmos. Colonization of
space seems likely to increase suffering by creating (literally) astronomically more
minds than exist on Earth, so we should push for policies that would make a
colonization wave more humane, such as not propagating wild-animal suffering to
other planets or in virtual worlds.

Consciousness
Digital minds will likely have important differences from biological minds, but they will
still act intelligently in goal-directed ways. Since consciousness is not an ontologically
special property of the universe but instead reduces to the operations of sapient
creatures as they process information and especially re�ect on themselves, it's
plausible we should attribute consciousness to advanced digital minds as well. To avoid
parochialism, our concern may even extend to cognitive architectures that look very
different from our own. We can see traces of consciousness even in simple physical
systems, and there remains an important moral question of how far down the ladder of
complexity we want to extend ethical consideration.

What you can do

There are many ways to get involved in the task of reducing suffering. It's helpful to
focus more on those that appeal to your interests and skills. Following are some broad
categories:

Earning to give: Rather than working at an altruistic charity yourself, it can be

more effective to make money elsewhere and donate large portions of it to charity.
This approach works well if you especially enjoy technology, �nance, or other high-
earning �elds and if you think there's a low risk that peer pressure in such
industries would reduce your altruistic ambitions.
Research: There remain many crucial questions whose answers will in�uence
where altruists focused on reducing suffering donate their money and time.
Progress on these topics not only improves your own wisdom about where to
focus but can also improve the priorities of many others.
Movement building: Generating interest in reducing suffering effectively can
multiply your impact by bringing in more minds who can contribute.

One of the most important questions to consider is what career you should pursue,

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since you'll spend a lot of your waking life at work.

Here are some examples of possible suffering-reduction careers:

Working at a hedge fund or tech company and donating 75+% of your income to
suffering-focused charities.
Becoming a researcher at the Foundational Research Institute.
Doing a PhD in philosophy to write about theoretical and applied suffering-
focused ethics.

Lifestyle changes
Following are some things you can do in daily life to reduce animal suffering in
expectation. (The impacts of these actions are small compared with the broader effects
of your altruistic work.)

1. Reducing your water use may avoid killing tens to hundreds of thousands of
crustacean zooplankton per year.
2. Eat less corn/wheat/rice and more beans/nuts.
3. Consider converting your lawn to gravel if you actively manage it.
4. Avoid biomass-based carbon offsets. If you want to reduce your carbon footprint,
consider donating to a renewable-energy charity like CEERT.
5. Drive less, especially less in the rain. Don't buy silk. Avoid walking on grass when
possible. And explore other ways to avoid hurting insects.
6. Don't compost. Instead: avoid wasting food, dispose of food scraps in a sink
grinder, or seal food in plastic bags and then put it in the garbage.
7. Don't leave standing water outside, since it both breeds and drowns bugs.
8. [EDIT: Only do the following if your tap water comes from deep groundwater
sources, which tend to be relatively zooplankton-free.] Rinse food crumbs from
packages, bags, and containers down the drain before you throw the packaging
out, to keep �ies and maggots from growing in your garbage can.
9. If you have a cat, keep it indoors to avert painful killings of large numbers of other
vertebrates. In addition: "The 'normal' life expectancy for an indoor cat is
signi�cantly longer than that of felines who live outside full-time or part-time."
And indoor cats won't bring inside ticks that may give you Lyme disease.
Spaying/neutering cats is also very important, both for preventing cat suffering
due to overpopulation and for decreasing painful predation upon smaller animals
by feral cats.

Top charities
Here's a ranked list of charities that I think prevent the most expected suffering:

1. Foundational Research Institute: Researches considerations that might overturn

existing assumptions about where best to focus our altruistic resources.
2. Effective Altruism Foundation: Swiss charity building a movement of effective
altruists focused on suffering reduction.
3. Machine Intelligence Research Institute: Works on AGI control. Unlike the
previous two charities, MIRI is not speci�cally focused on suffering reduction, but
my current guess is that its work is still quite positive in expectation. That said, I'd
like to see more research on the question of whether controlling AGI actually
would reduce suffering.

For more details on my thoughts about charity choice, see "My Donation
Recommendations".

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