(note: I have not read the piece in detail yet, but skimmed each section)
I think being able to explore this sort of topic is important – I personally think wild animal suffering is most likely very important, and the only reason I’m not more worried about it is that I expect uploads/AI to make the future a really weird place that changes the nature of what sort of “wild animal suffering” is useful to think about. In the meanwhile, concrete discussions of the world-that-is seem useful to explore intuitions and philosophy.
But I have a concrete concern, and a slightly vague concern.
Including Overviews of Considerations
Whenever I’m reading a piece on wild animal suffering, I start to feel antsy if I can’t tell from early on what range of considerations an author is applying. (In particular, if they don’t at least touch on things like “when predators are removed from a system, a default thing that seems to happen is that death-by-predator is replaced by death-by-starvation”, and address that concern in some fashion. This essay touches briefly upon this, but I don’t think delves into “how do you do population control without hunting?” I don’t actually know the answer)
So the object-level thing is “I’d like to see those specific concerns at least touched on in wild-animal-suffering pieces”, and the meta-level thing is “I think it’s helpful for pieces exploring complicated topics to start with a brief overview of what considerations the author is thinking about.” i.e. before diving into any one issue, just have a table of contents of the issues at hand.
This leads to a second concern:
Aiming to persuade, not Inform
AFAICT, all the major sections of this post are evidence in the “hunting is unethical” direction, and this raises a red flag – it’s suspicious whenever a policy debate appears one sided. If I see a piece that only lists arguments on one side of argument, more often than not the piece isn’t trying to do an evenhanded analysis of the situation, they’re just trying to argue for their cause.
LessWrong 2.0 is specifically a place where “arguing to persuade” is frowned upon. Especially for frontpage posts in particular – the heuristic is “aim to explain, not persuade.” Give people information, in such a way that they can evenhandedly form their own opinions about it. The line between explaining a concept and persuading is blurry, but this post seemed to cross the line in a few places—both in the one-sided arguments, and in the “Bambi” section towards the end.
I think there’s an alternate version of this post that’d make sense for the frontpage, but as-is this seems more suited for your personal blog section.
I’d like to see [“when predators are removed from a system, a default thing that seems to happen is that death-by-predator is replaced by death-by-starvation” and “how do you do population control without hunting?”] at least touched on in wild-animal-suffering pieces
I’d like to see those talked about too! The reason I didn’t is I really don’t have any insights on how to do population control without hunting, or on which specific interventions for reducing wild animal suffering are promising. I could certainly add something indicating I think those sorts of questions are important, but that I don’t really have any answers beyond “create welfare biology” and “spread anti-speciesism memes so that when we have better capabilities we will actually carry out large interventions”.
have a table of contents of the issues at hand
I had a bit of one in the premise (“wild animal welfare, movement-building, habit formation, moral uncertainty, how to set epistemic priors”), but it sounds like you might be looking for something different/more specific? You’re not talking about a table of contents consisting of more or less the section headings right?
Aiming to Persuade vs Inform
My methodology was “outline different reasons why skilled hunting could remain an unethical action”, but I did a poor job of writing if the article seemed as though I thought each reason was likely to be true! I did put probabilities on everything to calculate the 90% figure at the top, but since I don’t consider myself especially well-calibrated I thought it might be better to leave them off… The only reason that I think is actually more likely to be valid than wrong is #3, but I do assign enough probability mass to the others that I think they’re of some concern.
I thought the arguments in favor of skilled hunting (make hunters happy and prevent animals from experience lives which might involve lots of suffering) were pretty apparent and compelling, but I might be typical-minding that. I also might be missing something more subtle?
In terms of whether that methodology was front-page appropriate, I do think that if the issue I was writing about was something slightly more political this would be very bad. But as I saw it, the main content of the piece isn’t the proposition that skilled hunting is unethical, it’s the different issues that come up in the process discussing it (“wild animal welfare, movement-building, habit formation, moral uncertainty, how to set epistemic priors”). My goal is not to persuade people that I’m right and you must not hunt even if you’re really good at it, but to talk about interesting hammers in front of an interesting nail.
(note: I have not read the piece in detail yet, but skimmed each section)
I think being able to explore this sort of topic is important – I personally think wild animal suffering is most likely very important, and the only reason I’m not more worried about it is that I expect uploads/AI to make the future a really weird place that changes the nature of what sort of “wild animal suffering” is useful to think about. In the meanwhile, concrete discussions of the world-that-is seem useful to explore intuitions and philosophy.
But I have a concrete concern, and a slightly vague concern.
Including Overviews of Considerations
Whenever I’m reading a piece on wild animal suffering, I start to feel antsy if I can’t tell from early on what range of considerations an author is applying. (In particular, if they don’t at least touch on things like “when predators are removed from a system, a default thing that seems to happen is that death-by-predator is replaced by death-by-starvation”, and address that concern in some fashion. This essay touches briefly upon this, but I don’t think delves into “how do you do population control without hunting?” I don’t actually know the answer)
So the object-level thing is “I’d like to see those specific concerns at least touched on in wild-animal-suffering pieces”, and the meta-level thing is “I think it’s helpful for pieces exploring complicated topics to start with a brief overview of what considerations the author is thinking about.” i.e. before diving into any one issue, just have a table of contents of the issues at hand.
This leads to a second concern:
Aiming to persuade, not Inform
AFAICT, all the major sections of this post are evidence in the “hunting is unethical” direction, and this raises a red flag – it’s suspicious whenever a policy debate appears one sided. If I see a piece that only lists arguments on one side of argument, more often than not the piece isn’t trying to do an evenhanded analysis of the situation, they’re just trying to argue for their cause.
LessWrong 2.0 is specifically a place where “arguing to persuade” is frowned upon. Especially for frontpage posts in particular – the heuristic is “aim to explain, not persuade.” Give people information, in such a way that they can evenhandedly form their own opinions about it. The line between explaining a concept and persuading is blurry, but this post seemed to cross the line in a few places—both in the one-sided arguments, and in the “Bambi” section towards the end.
I think there’s an alternate version of this post that’d make sense for the frontpage, but as-is this seems more suited for your personal blog section.
Thanks for the feedback Raemon!
Concrete Concerns
I’d like to see those talked about too! The reason I didn’t is I really don’t have any insights on how to do population control without hunting, or on which specific interventions for reducing wild animal suffering are promising. I could certainly add something indicating I think those sorts of questions are important, but that I don’t really have any answers beyond “create welfare biology” and “spread anti-speciesism memes so that when we have better capabilities we will actually carry out large interventions”.
I had a bit of one in the premise (“wild animal welfare, movement-building, habit formation, moral uncertainty, how to set epistemic priors”), but it sounds like you might be looking for something different/more specific? You’re not talking about a table of contents consisting of more or less the section headings right?
Aiming to Persuade vs Inform
My methodology was “outline different reasons why skilled hunting could remain an unethical action”, but I did a poor job of writing if the article seemed as though I thought each reason was likely to be true! I did put probabilities on everything to calculate the 90% figure at the top, but since I don’t consider myself especially well-calibrated I thought it might be better to leave them off… The only reason that I think is actually more likely to be valid than wrong is #3, but I do assign enough probability mass to the others that I think they’re of some concern.
I thought the arguments in favor of skilled hunting (make hunters happy and prevent animals from experience lives which might involve lots of suffering) were pretty apparent and compelling, but I might be typical-minding that. I also might be missing something more subtle?
In terms of whether that methodology was front-page appropriate, I do think that if the issue I was writing about was something slightly more political this would be very bad. But as I saw it, the main content of the piece isn’t the proposition that skilled hunting is unethical, it’s the different issues that come up in the process discussing it (“wild animal welfare, movement-building, habit formation, moral uncertainty, how to set epistemic priors”). My goal is not to persuade people that I’m right and you must not hunt even if you’re really good at it, but to talk about interesting hammers in front of an interesting nail.
[Edit: Moved to personal blog.]