Oof. I was following them for a while; utopianism is good to a degree (let's imagine the future we want and take small steps toward it!) and horrific if taken too far (let's end all the lives of everyone now to clear the way for a better humanity that will be happier). But they lost me the second they brought up hunter gatherer societies. Are they happier than us? Maybe. Sometimes. A pure model of it has never been recorded because modern HG societies live alongside industrial ones; and ancient HG societies aren't recorded in much detail. But we DO know:
-land carried MUCH much fewer people
-struggles over hunting territories were common and deadly
-population was kept in check by a number of means including infanticide
-as you point out in the footnote, it CAN'T be blended with just enough tech to make the medical care we want, that requires industrialization.
So to get to that future we need to kill about 7.5 billion people, because the earth can't carry so many. Or reduce the birth rate drastically for so many years that by the time the population is down to Earth's HG carrying capacity, the climate is already toast and the descendents have forgotten what it was their great grandparents were trying to achieve.
And! The second somebody invents agriculture, the whole game is basically over because they will out compete the hunter gatherers. So after all that we'll be right back to where we started.
I'm not saying they shouldn't have the priorities they have, but they need to do utopianism better!
I took a bunch of anthropology in school, and we talked a lot about the pros and cons of hunter-gatherer societies.
There are some nice things! Hunter-gatherers are clearly healthier than early farmers, and they have more free time!
On the downside, hunter-gatherer birth rates are clearly limited by repeated famine. There's some ugliness there, of one type or another, even if it's "merely" starvation.
But the giant flashing red warning sign is that in many hunter-gatherer societies, as many as 20% of men die from murder and inter-band conflict. And what that rate of violence means for women is going to be ugly as hell.
Even in far more advanced societies, violence remains a problem. One of the key things apparently holding many early Norse societies together was the fact that feuds between families had similar dynamics to MAD (Mutually-Assured Destruction) dynamics between nuclear powers. Njáls saga is a warning about societies based on face and feuds.
For in-band conflicts, there are some limiting mechanisms on violence. There's a frequently reappearing cultural motif of "your hostility towards other band members is a sign that you might be a 'witch' using malicious magic and you may not even know it. You should apologize for being a witch and make up with your enemy. Not doing so is dangerous."
TL;Dr: Hunter-gatherer societies are like moving to closely-knit small towns, but even more so. They have very real advantages if things go well, but it's far to easy to romanticize them and gloss over some horrifying dynamics. Or, you know, just read the histories of small, back-to-the-earth communes and how often they go wrong. Same idea.
as a science fiction writer, it is beyond frustrating to me when people read utopias and dystopias as related to the future. they're not related to the future! they're about the present.
reading a utopia or a dystopia and going "this is what life is going to be like in the future" is like buying a sketch from a caricature artist outside a tourist trap and then going "wow in the future my nose is going to be enormous."
it's just a straight-up category error.
(fwiw I don't think that this is an error that you, Ozy, are making in this essay. it's just an error that is being brushed by in the whole argument.)
i am reminded, now as often, of Le Guin's introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, where she discusses the difference between prophets, psychics, and futurists, and how none of them are science fiction writers.
While I agree with you in your general conclusions, I think Torres may have somewhat of a point regarding the Munster rebellion. One of its main policies was the collectivization of property, which (in a city which neither had a tradition of communal ownership of most property nor was made up entirely of believers) would surely have required substantial violence to impose even if the city had not been besieged. Moreover, the somewhat more detailed summary of the policy of the Munster rebellion in Slezkine's "House of Government" (in the chapter on the history of millenarian sects; citing Anthony Arthur's "The Tailor King: The rise and fall of the Anabaptist kingdom of Munster") seems to support Torres' point:
>In 1534-35, the Munster Anabaptists expelled all Lutherans and Catholics, burned all books except the Bible, destroyed altars and sculptures, renamed streets and days of the week (and named their city the New Jerusalem), abolished money and feast days, banned monogamy and private property, rationed food and clothing, enforced communal dining, decreed that all doors be kept open, and demolished all church towers ("all that is high shall be made low"). "Amongst us," they wrote to Anabaptist congregations in other towns, "God has restored community as it was in the beginning and as befits the Saints of God." Those unfit for saintliness were to be "swept from the face of the earth." Offenses punishable by death included envy, anger, avarice, lying, blasphemy, impurity, idle conversation, and attempts to flee. [...] By the time government troops entered Munster in June 1535, two-hour court sessions followed by executions were being held twice daily.
I know relatively little about this time period, & it is possible that Slezkine or Arthur may be exaggerating to prove their theses, but if this description is correct, it seems to support the idea that the early Anabaptists were willing to enforce extreme policies in order to bring about the kingdom of God on Earth; that they did not actually do so except in this one isolated case is more a result of the fact that they had little political power & were generally suppressed by force by those in power.
AIUI the Munster Anabaptists were genuinely unusual w.r.t. other Anabaptists (as a neutral example, they supported polygamy, which mainstream Anabaptists didn't). I don't mean to say that the Munster Anabaptists weren't bad-- they definitely were! I just don't think they're particularly exceptional for the European wars of religion, which were notable for atrocities on all sides.
I have no argument with or opinion about the core points you're making, but I wanted to say that I care about species duration.
While it's not my chief concern even in those largely completely thought experiment excercies, and happiness trumps it, I think a future of humanity that extends a milion years is preferable to a future that extends 10000 years, other factors being reasonably equal.
And it's not just because reductio as absurdum where we'd end up with trillions of people disappearing in one big cosmic orgasm.
It feels toe that the existence of HUMANITY has a value. In the same way (but much much bigger) that a world with tigers is more desirable than a world where all tigers die out, even if they die out in not horrific ways.
I think there's a caveat here that you should note:
> For the purpose of this essay, the particular difficulty we’re interested in is that, if you think it’s possible for creating people to be good or bad, you have to accept one of...
Looking at the attached paper, it seems that this is only true if your particular style of population ethics is within the welfarist subtype of utilitarianism. This is an important point, since I am not sure Torres is utilitarian at all.
Good piece and I agree with you way more than Torres, but I think *a lot* of people care about “species duration”. Like if you were to ask people if we should make a bunch of sacrifices to our lifestyles bc of climate change (or whatever) that would make most people less happy and have humans living for the next thousands of years, vs not care at all and be super happy and only have humans for the next say 300 years, a lot of people would pick the first. I don’t understand that at all but it seems somewhat common to have a terminal value of humanity existing for as long as possible.
For me, it’s not a terminal value, but I would attach some instrumental value to it if the premise didn’t contradict it explicitly.
That’s the problem I always have with repugnant conclusion-type problems: to me, it matters how the situation develops. So you create X number of people with lives barely worth living now…are we saying things will never get better for them, or their eventual descendants? (I would guess that we probably had some ancestors whose lives were barely worth living.)
And so for this situation, I instinctively have a preference for the one that lasts longer, since it gives the human race more time for things to *potentially* get better and figure out how to survive. We know from the setup of the thought experiment that things are actually hopeless, but if you asked me to pick between two possible histories, I think I’d want the one that, in principle, had a greater chance of survival when looking at it up front.
I think that's an interesting point and one I haven't seen discussed yet. When doing the typical philosopher move of "do you prefer world A or world B", it makes a difference whether we talk about situations in our world (trolley, but the rest of the world is not really affected) or whether we're "creating" a whole world. The thought experiment presumably asks about the momentary utility/value/... of the world, but real worlds continue temporally and can end up with vastly different amounts of value. How are we to account for such future value: summation, averaging, summation over the minimum, something else entirely? It literally adds a separate dimension to population ethics.
I suppose you could force the immediate evaltuation the question tries to get at by precluding temporal development: "either world A or B will be created, then it will cease to exist after 1 day". This gets more complicated if you think the number of deaths matters, which only arises as a concern here, but not in a temporally unbound world. Difficult stuff...
(I know you were responding RE preference for species duration, but here are some other thoughts on the topic.)
I feel like tie breakers don't tell us much about how important the factor used as a tie breaker is. The actually interesting question is: How much of a positive good (happiness, number of happy people, ... ) you are willing to trade for a given increase in the factor under consideration?
Side note: I feel like on this specific point, it's difficult to comprehend what "reasonably equal" means concerning the number and happiness of humans per time period. If we think the number of (happy) people is a positive good, then humanity existing 100 times as long means a 100 times less dense population. How would that look like and what do we make of that (even ignoring practical concerns like Earthly capacity)?
> The actually interesting question is: How much of a positive good (happiness, number of happy people, ... ) you are willing to trade for a given increase in the factor under consideration?
FWIW I have a clear preference for ~10^8 merely happy enough people for 100 million years compared to 10^20 perfectly happy people for 10 thousand years.
This is because I view increasing the number of people as having diminishing returns after a certain (lower than current population) point. Same with increasing happiness, although we definitely have not yet reached diminishing returns here.
So something like log(happiness) or log(population size)? Huh. What makes you think/feel this way? I can understand the feeling when we're talking about these huge numbers that are just hard to properly grasp for a human (though this doesn't seem to apply to happiness). I assume there's something else to this for you?
If they want to be a hunter-gatherer, why don't they just become one?
Assuming you own enough land to fit a tent, I bet it's easier and safer to hunt and gather in a modern city than in a prehistoric savannah. And there's still wilderness out there, if you go looking for it.
But Torres appears to actually be an academic at a university, which is just about the least hunter-gatherer lifestyle possible.
I don't think *that*'s fair. They clearly want to be a hunter-gatherer *in a community of hunter-gatherers*, and one with the benefit of generational traditions/know-how. That's hardly the same thing as going out on you own as a self-sufficient hermit.
True, the full hunter-gatherer lifestyle is no longer available. And I don't know what the closest you can get in the modern world is. But it's definitely not working as an academic philosopher.
Sure, but it's not an absurd or irrational preference to want "the full hunter-gatherer package, no more, no less", while having no interest in settling for a consolation prize if it's not available. (Though if you wanted, you could also argue that being an academic activist who's vocal about wanting a return to hunter-gatherer ways isn't the *worst* way to find or convert enough like-minded true-believers to create a workable tribe ten years down the line.)
If they do their level best to avoid the parts of the package that are currently available, I'm going to doubt the sincerity of their desires. Or at least, whether they've really thought them through.
Even if they honestly think they'll enjoy it, how can they know? Things that sound good turn out to suck all the time.
Not if the parts of the package that are currently available suck sufficiently badly.
Especially because finding a place where it is legal (i.e. won't attract industrial societies with weapons you can't possibly match) to sustain yourself with hunting and gathering is probably very hard and you will almost always need at least a couple hundred dollars a year worth of "trade goods".
I dunno. This still seems like a weird argument to me. "Hunter-gatherer lifestyle within a supportive community" > "Modern lifestyle" > "Crazy person living alone in the woods" is a perfectly reasonable preference ranking. If I say "I like baked beans", and you say "well, we have no fire here, but here are some raw beans", and I refuse to eat those, you haven't proven much.
I don't think you need to become a crazy person living alone in the woods to do some hunting and gathering. There's plenty of outdoor work to do. And it's not like the world has any shortage of low-education low-income communities to join. If Torres wants a world with no money, no large institutions, and no schools, they should be fleeing from the academy at full speed.
Even just doing a PhD is expressing a very strong, and very unusual, preference for how you want your life to be. A preference that absolutely cannot be satisfied in a world of hunter-gatherers. Ancient economies are not good at supporting intellectuals.
And again, how can anyone know whether they'll like a lifestyle they've never lived? There's no shortage of people who work desperately to achieve a lifestyle that they end up hating. Including some people who do PhDs - but since Torres is still in academia, that's clearly not them.
I can think of a reason to have a very mild preference for longer species duration. Most people like the idea of having a connection to the past and the future in addition to living in the present. Having a longer past and future helps maintain this sense of connection with our ancestors and descendants that people value. However, this is a mild preference and other values can override it in many circumstances.
I think having a connection to ancestors and descendants is cool but on the whole less cool than having a connection to my peers. If the world's carrying capacity allows it, I'd rather a given other person is alive at the same time as me than at a different time.
This is a truly bizarre misreading of every aspect of my work. No, I am not a utopian _in any way_. No, I do not and would never say that violence of any sort is _ever acceptable_. "How many people is Torres willing to kill for their grand and glorious future?" --> Zero. Period. I have never even hinted otherwise. And I do not envision a "grand and glorious future" at all.
Brief comments:
“oppose capitalism” does not mean “violently overthrow capitalism.” Why would you think that?
“Torres then describes their ideal society” —> False. I am merely critiquing “progress.”
“If you define “utopian” as “person whom Emile Torres doesn’t agree with,” then Torres isn’t a utopian! Checkmate, TESCREALists” —> Nope.
“How many people is Torres willing to kill for their grand and glorious future?” —> My answer is above. In contrast, someone asked Yudkowsky on social media: “How many people are allowed to die to prevent AGI?” His response was: “There should be enough survivors on Earth in close contact to form a viable reproductive population, with room to spare, and they should have a sustainable food supply. So long as that’s true, there’s still a chance of reaching the stars someday.” Yudkowsky is saying that around 8.2 billion people are “allowed” to die so that we can still reach the stars someday, since the minimum viable population ranges between about 150 and 40,000 people. Sheesh.
“Either Torres is willing to trade off well-being with the longevity of human civilization or they aren’t” —> Neither. I reject the framing of the question, and indeed this is one of my critiques of population ethics!
Etc. etc. I won't waste anymore of my time on this. :-)
I get some sense of grief or overwhelment from torres. And that they see Longtermists as being worried about super abstract stuff when the house is burning down
I'm far from your ideological twin, but I'd be careful with these people. Activists with connections to prominent media people can really ruin your life if you're not careful--look at Scott Alexander. They believe they're defending the world from fascism, and have very expansive definitions of fascism.
The concern about species duration reminds me about an argument I once encountered, that factory farms were a moral good because they allowed the greatest possible production of (for example) chickens, which was good because the purpose of life is to perpetuate itself, so the best thing possible for a chicken is for the number of chickens to be maximized.
"Even under conservative estimates, governments trying to overthrow capitalism have killed tens of millions of people." Is your "conservative estimate" seriously an "unpublished essay" on a website designed for Netscape Navigator on "deka-megamurderers"? Rummel is universally considered a clown by mainstream historians.
While the doorstop-sized "The Black Book of Communism" (1997) certainly has some drawbacks as a historical work (especially involving the introductory chapters), it does provide a pretty good overview of Communist atrocities and mass death. Some of these were caused by ideologically-blinded stupidity, but there is plenty of outright villainy.
If anyone reads the Black Book, it's also worth reading the academic responses to it.
(I don't expect to be able to convince modern communists that historical communism was a bloody catastrophe, any more than I expect to convince MAGA voters that Trump is a crook. So I don't plan to get into an extended debate here. If anyone wants to take a shot at my politics, I'm a gradualist, anti-accelerationist, pro-labor social democrat who cares about the real-world costs and benefits of policy.)
"If anyone reads the Black Book, it's also worth reading the academic responses to it."
LOL. I am going to take the bold stand to read serious academic work FIRST and work universally rejected by mainstream historians LATER (if I run out of things to read in the toilet, but not of toilet paper).
The revisionist school decisively won over the totalitarian school in the 1980s dispute and post-revisionism has been the dominant school in Soviet historiography since the opening of the archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union. You can cope and seethe about it.
(The actual worst crime in Europe was that a lot of people were eating animals. I see where you're coming from though, the rape murder genocide was pretty bad too. (also slavery but probably less European))
Oof. I was following them for a while; utopianism is good to a degree (let's imagine the future we want and take small steps toward it!) and horrific if taken too far (let's end all the lives of everyone now to clear the way for a better humanity that will be happier). But they lost me the second they brought up hunter gatherer societies. Are they happier than us? Maybe. Sometimes. A pure model of it has never been recorded because modern HG societies live alongside industrial ones; and ancient HG societies aren't recorded in much detail. But we DO know:
-land carried MUCH much fewer people
-struggles over hunting territories were common and deadly
-population was kept in check by a number of means including infanticide
-as you point out in the footnote, it CAN'T be blended with just enough tech to make the medical care we want, that requires industrialization.
So to get to that future we need to kill about 7.5 billion people, because the earth can't carry so many. Or reduce the birth rate drastically for so many years that by the time the population is down to Earth's HG carrying capacity, the climate is already toast and the descendents have forgotten what it was their great grandparents were trying to achieve.
And! The second somebody invents agriculture, the whole game is basically over because they will out compete the hunter gatherers. So after all that we'll be right back to where we started.
I'm not saying they shouldn't have the priorities they have, but they need to do utopianism better!
I took a bunch of anthropology in school, and we talked a lot about the pros and cons of hunter-gatherer societies.
There are some nice things! Hunter-gatherers are clearly healthier than early farmers, and they have more free time!
On the downside, hunter-gatherer birth rates are clearly limited by repeated famine. There's some ugliness there, of one type or another, even if it's "merely" starvation.
But the giant flashing red warning sign is that in many hunter-gatherer societies, as many as 20% of men die from murder and inter-band conflict. And what that rate of violence means for women is going to be ugly as hell.
Even in far more advanced societies, violence remains a problem. One of the key things apparently holding many early Norse societies together was the fact that feuds between families had similar dynamics to MAD (Mutually-Assured Destruction) dynamics between nuclear powers. Njáls saga is a warning about societies based on face and feuds.
For in-band conflicts, there are some limiting mechanisms on violence. There's a frequently reappearing cultural motif of "your hostility towards other band members is a sign that you might be a 'witch' using malicious magic and you may not even know it. You should apologize for being a witch and make up with your enemy. Not doing so is dangerous."
TL;Dr: Hunter-gatherer societies are like moving to closely-knit small towns, but even more so. They have very real advantages if things go well, but it's far to easy to romanticize them and gloss over some horrifying dynamics. Or, you know, just read the histories of small, back-to-the-earth communes and how often they go wrong. Same idea.
Torres: *Complains about EAs making Ted Kaczynski jokes*
Also Torres: *has the exact same ideology as Ted Kaczynski*
False.
as a science fiction writer, it is beyond frustrating to me when people read utopias and dystopias as related to the future. they're not related to the future! they're about the present.
reading a utopia or a dystopia and going "this is what life is going to be like in the future" is like buying a sketch from a caricature artist outside a tourist trap and then going "wow in the future my nose is going to be enormous."
it's just a straight-up category error.
(fwiw I don't think that this is an error that you, Ozy, are making in this essay. it's just an error that is being brushed by in the whole argument.)
i am reminded, now as often, of Le Guin's introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, where she discusses the difference between prophets, psychics, and futurists, and how none of them are science fiction writers.
While I agree with you in your general conclusions, I think Torres may have somewhat of a point regarding the Munster rebellion. One of its main policies was the collectivization of property, which (in a city which neither had a tradition of communal ownership of most property nor was made up entirely of believers) would surely have required substantial violence to impose even if the city had not been besieged. Moreover, the somewhat more detailed summary of the policy of the Munster rebellion in Slezkine's "House of Government" (in the chapter on the history of millenarian sects; citing Anthony Arthur's "The Tailor King: The rise and fall of the Anabaptist kingdom of Munster") seems to support Torres' point:
>In 1534-35, the Munster Anabaptists expelled all Lutherans and Catholics, burned all books except the Bible, destroyed altars and sculptures, renamed streets and days of the week (and named their city the New Jerusalem), abolished money and feast days, banned monogamy and private property, rationed food and clothing, enforced communal dining, decreed that all doors be kept open, and demolished all church towers ("all that is high shall be made low"). "Amongst us," they wrote to Anabaptist congregations in other towns, "God has restored community as it was in the beginning and as befits the Saints of God." Those unfit for saintliness were to be "swept from the face of the earth." Offenses punishable by death included envy, anger, avarice, lying, blasphemy, impurity, idle conversation, and attempts to flee. [...] By the time government troops entered Munster in June 1535, two-hour court sessions followed by executions were being held twice daily.
I know relatively little about this time period, & it is possible that Slezkine or Arthur may be exaggerating to prove their theses, but if this description is correct, it seems to support the idea that the early Anabaptists were willing to enforce extreme policies in order to bring about the kingdom of God on Earth; that they did not actually do so except in this one isolated case is more a result of the fact that they had little political power & were generally suppressed by force by those in power.
AIUI the Munster Anabaptists were genuinely unusual w.r.t. other Anabaptists (as a neutral example, they supported polygamy, which mainstream Anabaptists didn't). I don't mean to say that the Munster Anabaptists weren't bad-- they definitely were! I just don't think they're particularly exceptional for the European wars of religion, which were notable for atrocities on all sides.
I have no argument with or opinion about the core points you're making, but I wanted to say that I care about species duration.
While it's not my chief concern even in those largely completely thought experiment excercies, and happiness trumps it, I think a future of humanity that extends a milion years is preferable to a future that extends 10000 years, other factors being reasonably equal.
And it's not just because reductio as absurdum where we'd end up with trillions of people disappearing in one big cosmic orgasm.
It feels toe that the existence of HUMANITY has a value. In the same way (but much much bigger) that a world with tigers is more desirable than a world where all tigers die out, even if they die out in not horrific ways.
My intuition is inclined to agree with you.
I think there's a caveat here that you should note:
> For the purpose of this essay, the particular difficulty we’re interested in is that, if you think it’s possible for creating people to be good or bad, you have to accept one of...
Looking at the attached paper, it seems that this is only true if your particular style of population ethics is within the welfarist subtype of utilitarianism. This is an important point, since I am not sure Torres is utilitarian at all.
I wrote up a reply but Substack won't let me post it >.< short version: axiologies aren't ethical systems, I glossed over some subtleties for space
If you still have it, I'd be interested! Maybe split it into several parts? Or share it as a note if that provides enough space?
Good piece and I agree with you way more than Torres, but I think *a lot* of people care about “species duration”. Like if you were to ask people if we should make a bunch of sacrifices to our lifestyles bc of climate change (or whatever) that would make most people less happy and have humans living for the next thousands of years, vs not care at all and be super happy and only have humans for the next say 300 years, a lot of people would pick the first. I don’t understand that at all but it seems somewhat common to have a terminal value of humanity existing for as long as possible.
For me, it’s not a terminal value, but I would attach some instrumental value to it if the premise didn’t contradict it explicitly.
That’s the problem I always have with repugnant conclusion-type problems: to me, it matters how the situation develops. So you create X number of people with lives barely worth living now…are we saying things will never get better for them, or their eventual descendants? (I would guess that we probably had some ancestors whose lives were barely worth living.)
And so for this situation, I instinctively have a preference for the one that lasts longer, since it gives the human race more time for things to *potentially* get better and figure out how to survive. We know from the setup of the thought experiment that things are actually hopeless, but if you asked me to pick between two possible histories, I think I’d want the one that, in principle, had a greater chance of survival when looking at it up front.
I think that's an interesting point and one I haven't seen discussed yet. When doing the typical philosopher move of "do you prefer world A or world B", it makes a difference whether we talk about situations in our world (trolley, but the rest of the world is not really affected) or whether we're "creating" a whole world. The thought experiment presumably asks about the momentary utility/value/... of the world, but real worlds continue temporally and can end up with vastly different amounts of value. How are we to account for such future value: summation, averaging, summation over the minimum, something else entirely? It literally adds a separate dimension to population ethics.
I suppose you could force the immediate evaltuation the question tries to get at by precluding temporal development: "either world A or B will be created, then it will cease to exist after 1 day". This gets more complicated if you think the number of deaths matters, which only arises as a concern here, but not in a temporally unbound world. Difficult stuff...
(I know you were responding RE preference for species duration, but here are some other thoughts on the topic.)
I feel like tie breakers don't tell us much about how important the factor used as a tie breaker is. The actually interesting question is: How much of a positive good (happiness, number of happy people, ... ) you are willing to trade for a given increase in the factor under consideration?
Side note: I feel like on this specific point, it's difficult to comprehend what "reasonably equal" means concerning the number and happiness of humans per time period. If we think the number of (happy) people is a positive good, then humanity existing 100 times as long means a 100 times less dense population. How would that look like and what do we make of that (even ignoring practical concerns like Earthly capacity)?
> The actually interesting question is: How much of a positive good (happiness, number of happy people, ... ) you are willing to trade for a given increase in the factor under consideration?
FWIW I have a clear preference for ~10^8 merely happy enough people for 100 million years compared to 10^20 perfectly happy people for 10 thousand years.
This is because I view increasing the number of people as having diminishing returns after a certain (lower than current population) point. Same with increasing happiness, although we definitely have not yet reached diminishing returns here.
So something like log(happiness) or log(population size)? Huh. What makes you think/feel this way? I can understand the feeling when we're talking about these huge numbers that are just hard to properly grasp for a human (though this doesn't seem to apply to happiness). I assume there's something else to this for you?
If they want to be a hunter-gatherer, why don't they just become one?
Assuming you own enough land to fit a tent, I bet it's easier and safer to hunt and gather in a modern city than in a prehistoric savannah. And there's still wilderness out there, if you go looking for it.
But Torres appears to actually be an academic at a university, which is just about the least hunter-gatherer lifestyle possible.
I don't think *that*'s fair. They clearly want to be a hunter-gatherer *in a community of hunter-gatherers*, and one with the benefit of generational traditions/know-how. That's hardly the same thing as going out on you own as a self-sufficient hermit.
True, the full hunter-gatherer lifestyle is no longer available. And I don't know what the closest you can get in the modern world is. But it's definitely not working as an academic philosopher.
Sure, but it's not an absurd or irrational preference to want "the full hunter-gatherer package, no more, no less", while having no interest in settling for a consolation prize if it's not available. (Though if you wanted, you could also argue that being an academic activist who's vocal about wanting a return to hunter-gatherer ways isn't the *worst* way to find or convert enough like-minded true-believers to create a workable tribe ten years down the line.)
If they do their level best to avoid the parts of the package that are currently available, I'm going to doubt the sincerity of their desires. Or at least, whether they've really thought them through.
Even if they honestly think they'll enjoy it, how can they know? Things that sound good turn out to suck all the time.
Not if the parts of the package that are currently available suck sufficiently badly.
Especially because finding a place where it is legal (i.e. won't attract industrial societies with weapons you can't possibly match) to sustain yourself with hunting and gathering is probably very hard and you will almost always need at least a couple hundred dollars a year worth of "trade goods".
I dunno. This still seems like a weird argument to me. "Hunter-gatherer lifestyle within a supportive community" > "Modern lifestyle" > "Crazy person living alone in the woods" is a perfectly reasonable preference ranking. If I say "I like baked beans", and you say "well, we have no fire here, but here are some raw beans", and I refuse to eat those, you haven't proven much.
I don't think you need to become a crazy person living alone in the woods to do some hunting and gathering. There's plenty of outdoor work to do. And it's not like the world has any shortage of low-education low-income communities to join. If Torres wants a world with no money, no large institutions, and no schools, they should be fleeing from the academy at full speed.
Even just doing a PhD is expressing a very strong, and very unusual, preference for how you want your life to be. A preference that absolutely cannot be satisfied in a world of hunter-gatherers. Ancient economies are not good at supporting intellectuals.
And again, how can anyone know whether they'll like a lifestyle they've never lived? There's no shortage of people who work desperately to achieve a lifestyle that they end up hating. Including some people who do PhDs - but since Torres is still in academia, that's clearly not them.
I can think of a reason to have a very mild preference for longer species duration. Most people like the idea of having a connection to the past and the future in addition to living in the present. Having a longer past and future helps maintain this sense of connection with our ancestors and descendants that people value. However, this is a mild preference and other values can override it in many circumstances.
I think having a connection to ancestors and descendants is cool but on the whole less cool than having a connection to my peers. If the world's carrying capacity allows it, I'd rather a given other person is alive at the same time as me than at a different time.
This is a truly bizarre misreading of every aspect of my work. No, I am not a utopian _in any way_. No, I do not and would never say that violence of any sort is _ever acceptable_. "How many people is Torres willing to kill for their grand and glorious future?" --> Zero. Period. I have never even hinted otherwise. And I do not envision a "grand and glorious future" at all.
Brief comments:
“oppose capitalism” does not mean “violently overthrow capitalism.” Why would you think that?
“Torres then describes their ideal society” —> False. I am merely critiquing “progress.”
“If you define “utopian” as “person whom Emile Torres doesn’t agree with,” then Torres isn’t a utopian! Checkmate, TESCREALists” —> Nope.
“How many people is Torres willing to kill for their grand and glorious future?” —> My answer is above. In contrast, someone asked Yudkowsky on social media: “How many people are allowed to die to prevent AGI?” His response was: “There should be enough survivors on Earth in close contact to form a viable reproductive population, with room to spare, and they should have a sustainable food supply. So long as that’s true, there’s still a chance of reaching the stars someday.” Yudkowsky is saying that around 8.2 billion people are “allowed” to die so that we can still reach the stars someday, since the minimum viable population ranges between about 150 and 40,000 people. Sheesh.
“Either Torres is willing to trade off well-being with the longevity of human civilization or they aren’t” —> Neither. I reject the framing of the question, and indeed this is one of my critiques of population ethics!
Etc. etc. I won't waste anymore of my time on this. :-)
I get some sense of grief or overwhelment from torres. And that they see Longtermists as being worried about super abstract stuff when the house is burning down
Maybe, but that kinda combines with the left wing "No, The Important Thing Is Fighting Over Capitalism" theme.
I'm far from your ideological twin, but I'd be careful with these people. Activists with connections to prominent media people can really ruin your life if you're not careful--look at Scott Alexander. They believe they're defending the world from fascism, and have very expansive definitions of fascism.
Stay safe.
P.S. I agree with you 100%.
The concern about species duration reminds me about an argument I once encountered, that factory farms were a moral good because they allowed the greatest possible production of (for example) chickens, which was good because the purpose of life is to perpetuate itself, so the best thing possible for a chicken is for the number of chickens to be maximized.
Despite knowing about Torres for years, I didn't know about some of this o_0
"Even under conservative estimates, governments trying to overthrow capitalism have killed tens of millions of people." Is your "conservative estimate" seriously an "unpublished essay" on a website designed for Netscape Navigator on "deka-megamurderers"? Rummel is universally considered a clown by mainstream historians.
While the doorstop-sized "The Black Book of Communism" (1997) certainly has some drawbacks as a historical work (especially involving the introductory chapters), it does provide a pretty good overview of Communist atrocities and mass death. Some of these were caused by ideologically-blinded stupidity, but there is plenty of outright villainy.
If anyone reads the Black Book, it's also worth reading the academic responses to it.
(I don't expect to be able to convince modern communists that historical communism was a bloody catastrophe, any more than I expect to convince MAGA voters that Trump is a crook. So I don't plan to get into an extended debate here. If anyone wants to take a shot at my politics, I'm a gradualist, anti-accelerationist, pro-labor social democrat who cares about the real-world costs and benefits of policy.)
"If anyone reads the Black Book, it's also worth reading the academic responses to it."
LOL. I am going to take the bold stand to read serious academic work FIRST and work universally rejected by mainstream historians LATER (if I run out of things to read in the toilet, but not of toilet paper).
The revisionist school decisively won over the totalitarian school in the 1980s dispute and post-revisionism has been the dominant school in Soviet historiography since the opening of the archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union. You can cope and seethe about it.
(The actual worst crime in Europe was that a lot of people were eating animals. I see where you're coming from though, the rape murder genocide was pretty bad too. (also slavery but probably less European))