I’m sure I’m nowhere near the first person to talk about this “barely visible but vast tragedy”, but factory farming is as far as I can tell the number one most heinous thing humanity has ever done. Every mass genocide perpetrated upon humans pales in comparison by orders of magnitude. Seems to me that one of the most effective ways of doing effective altruism right now would be to go vegan and spread veganism throughout society as much as possible, with the end goal of destroying the animal agriculture industry entirely.
But that’s not really barely visible, I guess. Invisible to most people due to their indoctrination by a society that doesn’t want them to experience their natural empathy for animals because it takes money out of the pockets of corporations, yes, but veganism is very old—lots of people are aware of it. In the same direction and less visibly (but still, I’m not the first one to notice this) is the even more horrendous suffering intrinsic in nature—a tragedy of cosmic proportions which only humans can solve, through paradise engineering. I can’t seem to think of something not previously noticed, though...
As for type two, I think that artworks rendered in the sense of proprioception—choreographed transformations of one’s sense of body shape and location—are quite imaginable and could be very beautiful, something like an exponentiation of dance—but with current tech basically impossible to create. We would need brain implants for that. Another obvious example is the direct experience of higher-dimensional spaces, which are capable of symmetries (and thus, if the symmetry theory of valence is correct, degrees of beauty) which cannot even be imagined with our 3D bodies and 3D-adapted brains.
I’m sure I’m nowhere near the first person to talk about this “barely visible but vast tragedy”, but factory farming is as far as I can tell the number one most heinous thing humanity has ever done. Every mass genocide perpetrated upon humans pales in comparison by orders of magnitude. Seems to me that one of the most effective ways of doing effective altruism right now would be to go vegan and spread veganism throughout society as much as possible, with the end goal of destroying the animal agriculture industry entirely.
But that’s not really barely visible, I guess. Invisible to most people due to their indoctrination by a society that doesn’t want them to experience their natural empathy for animals because it takes money out of the pockets of corporations, yes, but veganism is very old—lots of people are aware of it. In the same direction and less visibly (but still, I’m not the first one to notice this) is the even more horrendous suffering intrinsic in nature—a tragedy of cosmic proportions which only humans can solve, through paradise engineering. I can’t seem to think of something not previously noticed, though...
As for type two, I think that artworks rendered in the sense of proprioception—choreographed transformations of one’s sense of body shape and location—are quite imaginable and could be very beautiful, something like an exponentiation of dance—but with current tech basically impossible to create. We would need brain implants for that. Another obvious example is the direct experience of higher-dimensional spaces, which are capable of symmetries (and thus, if the symmetry theory of valence is correct, degrees of beauty) which cannot even be imagined with our 3D bodies and 3D-adapted brains.