Author: admin

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]

A video version of this post is available here.

A few days ago a Han (the main ethnic group in China) Chinese citizen, Li Wei, armed with a rifle took 14 Han’s hostage on a bus in the Xinshi District, Ürümqi, west China. Li Wei was demanding justice for the Uyghur people, a Turkic ethnic group in a region of west China that was invaded by China in around 1750 following a decade long war (and culminating in an attempted genocide of some of the regions’ ethnic groups).

Today, the Uyghurs remain an exploited minority to an extent that I’m sure most people would find horrifying, and some people might even be genuinely surprised is happening in our modern world (I certainly was a few years ago). Today, Uyghurs are being forcibly removed from their homeland and sent to east China to work in factories against their will, among other atrocities.

The hostage situation played out for 12 hours, and ended when the hostages demand was met. After a 15 minute phone call between Li Wei and Xi Jinping, the president of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping made a public and international statement that the country’s treatment of the Uyghur people was wrong. Li Wei then turned himself in to the authorities without physically harming anyone.

How do you feel about this? It remains to be seen, but Li Wei may have created some meaningful change for Uyghurs. However, they did it through the threat of violence. Should we never use violence, or should we consider it in the face of extreme oppression? I will point out that, while the 14 hostages were innocent, they were also complicit in the treatment of the Uyghur people. There are some indications that they worked at a factory where Uyghurs are exploited and that’s why they were targeted, but I can’t verify this. But supposing they were indirectly causing the suffering of the Uyghurs, would this then be acceptable?

I want you to really contemplate how you feel right now, and capture this. I’m about to make a point.

I made up some of this story. The plight of the Uyghur people is entirely real and entirely horrific. However, the hostage situation a few days ago was not in China, it was in Ukraine’s western city of Lutsk. 13 people were taken hostage at gunpoint by a man who released them and turned himself in after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy publicly urged Ukrainians to watch Earthlings, a documentary from 2005 with footage of the cruel exploitation of non-humans in the agriculture industry.

How do you feel about this now? I’m trying to make a point, but I’m also genuinely curious. Please consider sharing your thoughts. Do you feel any different about the use of violence in this situation? If so, why do you think that is?

I want to be clear that I’m not condoning the use of violence for social change. However, I have the impression that many people are supportive of violence to end human on human oppression (we’d call them freedom fighters), but not to end human on non-human oppression (we’d call them terrorists). There are possibly some valid reasons for this difference, and some non-valid reasons.

The simple fact that the victims are not human is not a valid reason. Non-human animals feel pain just as we do, and their exploitation and suffering should be seen as also tragic. Indeed, the scale of farmed animal suffering today is greater than the suffering of human-caused human suffering today. Someone might claim that they don’t care about non-humans as much as humans, just as someone might claim they don’t care about Uyghurs as much as non-Uyghurs, but is this an opinion we should value? Or should we just say they are wrong, and that their suffering is still bad?

One of several plausibly valid reasons for having a different position on the violence used for non-human and human freedom is that we are just at different stages of progress for both. Many people see human oppression as wrong, but many people see non-human exploitation as acceptable. If it is the case that, because of this difference, violence for the benefit of non-humans backfires and harms the movement/victims rather than benefits them, this is an important difference.

I honestly don’t know if this has happened here in Lutsk. I genuinely think anyone who claims they know whether this was positive or harmful for animals at this point is lying. But I absolutely accept that well-intended actions don’t always have good consequences, and that we can’t just do things ‘for the animals’ and think that’s good enough. But I do think that if it is possible for violence used against oppressors to have a net positive outcome (as some people would say), then it should be possible for violence used against oppressors to have a net positive outcome.

If you think that violence is just unacceptable for ending exploitation of non-humans as a rule, consider whether you would have held the same position regarding aggressors in Nazi Germany, or in slave-holding USA. If these don’t do it for you, it surely can’t be difficult to construct a realistic scenario where, if you are consistent in your logic, you shouldn’t support violence for ending the exploitation of humans in a place where the majority of people support the exploitation, or are at least entirely complicit. Perhaps, say, in western China.

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

[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.

By way of introduction, I wrote a long response to some questions on my recent Youtube video which I thought might be of interest. I’ll just throw up the original comment and my response.

They were arguing that an individual being vegan doesn’t do anything (at all) for animal suffering, and were arguing in favour of advocating for systemic change (replacing capitalism with socialism was the example they gave previously).

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Commentor

“Also i dont think that its possible to be perfectly moral.

Does your being “vegan” contribute something to reducing animal suffering?

Probably not. You as an individual, your choice to be vegan has zero effects on the industry.

So your individual choice to abstain from eating meat and consuming animal products. Isnt really rational in that sense, just like it is not with voting. I mean your vote alone doesnt decide elections.

So if you want really signifact changes you should advocate for a total system change. Just being an individual vegan only strokes ones ego and thats it.”

My response

“It depends on what you mean by moral of course. To take the utilitarian view, being perfectly moral might be something like doing the optimum thing for reducing suffering and increasing wellbeing at all stages of your life. Sure, probably impossible, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for as much as possible.

“Does your being “vegan” contribute something to reducing animal suffering? Probably not. You as an individual, your choice to be vegan has zero effects on the industry.”

What makes you say it has zero effect? Supply elasticity shows that 1 fewer product purchased will lead to somewhere between 0 and 1 fewer products produced. The true number depends on the product and context, but usually it’s around 0.5. See the below quote from a paper I coauthored (here).

“But the purchase of one fewer animal product does not necessarily result in the production of one fewer product. Estimates on effects that changes in consumer behaviour have on the number of animals raised (or killed, in the case of wild-caught marine animal consumption) for food must account for the sensitivity of the market to changes in the quantity of animal products demanded and supplied (i.e. the price elasticities of demand and supply). Using elasticity estimates, ACE estimates that one person consuming 30 fewer land animals will result in 1.8 – 21 fewer animals being farmed, and one person consuming 232 fewer marine animals results in 35 – 144 fewer being killed (ACE n.d.d).”

If you extrapolate your view that it has zero effect, it implies that the same number of animals would be farmed regardless of how many humans are born, which doesn’t make sense. This is an economic effect that is quite well studied. I wouldn’t expect it to suddenly not work for specifically animal products.

I also disagree that voting has no effect. See the below from here.

In short, you have a small chance of making a huge difference. Elections are decided by 1 vote from time to time.

“The estimate of the value of voting being $5,200 USD as calculated by MacAskill is briefly described here.

Political analyst Nate Silver, Professor Andrew Gelman (Statistics) and Professor Aaron Edlin (Law) calculated that the odds of an individual changing the outcome of the 2008 USA presidential election was, on average, around 1 in 60 million, which is a low probability, but we have to also look at the potential impact.

Estimating simplistically that the benefit per person of the $3.5 trillion annual US budget being spent 2.5% more effectively ($1,000 per person per 4 year election term), the benefit that you would expect to receive personally over an election term based on your vote is 0.0016 cents. However, looking at the benefit received by all Americans ($1,000 multiplied by 314 million), the expected value of voting is $5,200 ($314 billion of value multiplied by a 1 in 60 million chance of swaying the outcome).

This is further simplified by the fact that the policies of parties aren’t always opposite, and there is significant overlap, however it does demonstrate that the value of one person voting, when spread over the population of a country, can be big.”

You said: “So if you want really signifact changes you should advocate for a total system change. Just being an individual vegan only strokes ones ego and thats it.”

Couldn’t you apply your same reasoning to systemic change as well? It’s unlikely for one person advocating for systemic change to have an effect? Why would this be any different? Couldn’t you argue that just being an individual socialist advocate only strokes ones ego and that’s it? I wouldn’t argue that, but it feels like you might, if you were consistent.”