I am surprised again and again that people are surprised that animals, and social ones at that, have thoughts and emotions and relationships. Have you never been around animals? Do you truly have believe humans are that special?
I don't think people are surprised that animals have thoughts and emotions. No farmer I know of thinks cows aren't capable of being trained: the ones down the road from my parents line up in an orderly queue to go into the dairy every morning and afternoon, including leaving a gap across the road and giving way to cars.
On the other hand, a lot of people who claim animals have thoughts and emotions seem to think that cows have complicated human-level thoughts like "I am an oppressed cog; my owner will send me to the glue factory when I am too old to give milk, and yet I must queue up regardless, for my spirit is broken; my calf has been taken and I will never know if he got a college degree; life is pure suffering." This seems unlikely to be true.
Your second description involves many aspects of human culture. No matter how smart cows are, they'll never think this way.
Then, a big difference of humans compared to other animals is accumulation. We create stuff (buildings, language, knowledge, ...) that further generations will use. To really compare, I'd say, we have to take that away.
Let's assume some people decide to go back into the forest. They go there with nothing and teach their children only the necessary skills to live in the forest. After some generations, a scientist discovers them.
How would we compare them to humans and other animals like the great apes? How would they score on common IQ tests?
> They go there with nothing and teach their children only the necessary skills to live in the forest.
To live in the forest like humans do? Because then they would absolutely teach them language, and show them how to make fire and use sticks and stones.
> How would they score on common IQ tests?
Common human IQ tests? Very badly, they would probably not do much with the paper other than maybe take it with them for fire starter, and would just wander out of the room.
On an IQ test you could conduct with great apes? Like various physical puzzles which hide treats? Very well presumably. They would have dexterous hands and great eyesight and problem solving skills, and oral traditions.
Are you honestly trying to say humans living in a primitive society would be comparable to most other animals (not even "intelligent" ones such as chimps)?
The cognitive dissonance in that statement is blinding. Even in the pre-agrarian hunter-gather millennia of human existence, human societies the world over independently figured out housing, carried the knowledge for fire and the wheel, had intensely complex (relative to every other species on the planet) communication and social skills. They all came up with ways to develop knives, arrows, cooking+eating utensils, protective clothing, complex hunting strategies, etc.
Like, yeah...they didn't have computers in front of them, but all of the inate skills that allows modern humans to conceptualize, build, repair and utilize those things existed just as inately in them. You could teach one of them about things piece by piece...you'll never be able to do that with even a chimp, let alone a cow.
> Are you honestly trying to say humans living in a primitive society would be comparable to most other animals (not even "intelligent" ones such as chimps)?
No, I'm not trying to say that. I'm trying to express my belief that the gap between the intelligence of humans and other animals is much smaller. Looking closely at chimp communities or dolphins shows that they also have complex communication patterns. Even trees in a forest communicate. So this is also an expression modesty because humans don't understand yet too much about communication of other creatures.
But you're misframing the point. No one is saying animals (or even simpler living life) can't communicate or do basic reasoning.
You're claiming that humans, without modern society, are somehow in the same realm of intelligence of even the next "smartest" animal (chimps), despite the fact that human intelligence is blatantly orders of magnitude higher just from mere observability let alone deep comparison of neural activity, reasoned and logical thought, and social interaction.
Especially if you start breaking things down into slime molds, ant colonies, plant interactions and somehow conflate relatively simplistic and predictable pattern-based behaviors to high-order reasoning and abstract thought that humans inately possess.
Is that to say human thought is non-deterministic and unpredictable? No, I'm not making that argument. I'm saying that the levels of abstraction and complexity is so much higher that it's blatantly fallacious and misleading to compare them.
The datapoints are sparse, but are “wild-childs” an order of magnitude more intelligent than the animals they bonded with?
I personally think human communities and societies emerge into a super-intelligence while single individual remain distinctly bland or unimpressive, provided the community leaves some room for the unusual to potentially thrive and find their niche.
An individual human is clearly and blatantly observably more intelligent and capable than an individual chimp.
The fact that y'all are speaking in such abstracts is telling in its own right. No one is saying animals are incapable nor that they don't possess plenty of abilities humans lack, however in the specific fields of strict intelligent thought processes (reason, abstraction and logic) and social interaction; it's not even a comparison.
The vast majority of animals can't even recognize themselves in a mirror let alone conceptualize other planets, atomic structures, mechanical processes and forces, mathematics, abstract concepts, create social contracts, etc.
It's just....ridiculous to even be having a discussion on this. It's honestly akin to discussing vaccines with a COVID denier.
> The vast majority of animals can't even recognize themselves in a mirror let alone conceptualize other planets, atomic structures, mechanical processes and forces, mathematics, abstract concepts, create social contracts, etc.
This is true, but it takes a great deal of creativity and awareness of a species, to create a “mirror-test” that applies to said species.
The naive mirror test is flawed. That’s not say most species will pass; just that it was laughably bad experiments that are being revisited.
> It's just....ridiculous to even be having a discussion on this. It's honestly akin to discussing vaccines with a COVID denier.
Why is it ridiculous? Nobody is saying humans aren’t smarter.
You’re looking at the end results of societies to prove that we’re orders of magnitude smarter; but take away our ability to write and record knowledge for the next generation: What are we left with? How scalable and robust are oral-tradition
cultures?
Also note that none of the things you’ve mentioned came naturally to humans: It took many millennia of trial and error to build up and even so it takes the threat of homelessness starvation for the majority to give a shit and learn this stuff.
Instead, I’d argue it takes a great deal of self-awareness and humility to tease out what gives us the leg up over other species, even if it makes some uncomfortable.
> You’re looking at the end results of societies to prove that we’re orders of magnitude smarter; but take away our ability to write and record knowledge for the next generation: What are we left with? How scalable and robust are oral-tradition cultures?
Very, considering we started at the exact same point as all of those other "equally" intelligent creatures.
We have human societies that never moved past hunter/gatherer; or basic agriculture. Or perhaps reverted back.
Does that imply that they’re somehow less intelligent? And so, by an order of
magnitude?
I don’t expect anyone to change your mind—that much is clear—but for someone like me it’s an interesting question because it gets to the heart of what it means to be intelligent; aware; and driven.
Even the standard “man is the measure of all things” has more nuance than at first glance.
I mean, they have isolated tribes that have seen limited outside contact even today. In the absence of outside contact, their culture is not as bland as in your example. Perhaps the formation of culture, religious beliefs, and higher levels of thought is one of the aspects that do make humans special.
As to the IQ tests, they can't ethically run them on uncontacted people. There have been many studies on indigenous people's that include a focus on intelligence. However, a major factor that usually comes up is that the format of standard IQ tests tend to be biased against indigenous people due to things like language issues.
> On the other hand, a lot of people who claim animals have thoughts and emotions seem to think that cows have complicated human-level thoughts like "I am an oppressed cog; my owner will send me to the glue factory when I am too old to give milk, and yet I must queue up regardless, for my spirit is broken; my calf has been taken and I will never know if he got a college degree; life is pure suffering." This seems unlikely to be true.
Yes, but do we know how a cow experiences the loss of a calf? The loss of a human child is very painful because of human comprehension of permanence, death, and the future. Is a cow thinking "I can't find my child, I am sad, I'm going to bellow and walk around for a few days searching" or is she experiencing a longer-term loss which she understands as the irrevocable death of her calf + social isolation from the experience + the end of her personal dreams for the calf?
This is what I meant by "my calf has been taken and he'll never get a college degree". I'm not saying that a cow isn't upset when you take her calf away, but I am skeptical that she is capable of being upset in the way a human would be, or for as long and as deeply. I'm skeptical that even earlier humans from a time with ~50% child mortality would be as sad as a modern mother upon losing a child, just due to the relative normality of the loss.
I’m surprised too. But I suspect it’s more because it’s a very inconvenient truth: what about factory farms, the suffering we make billions of animals go through so we can eat them cheaply, and having to change our habits to accommodate this reality? It’s way easier and socially accepted to ignore this entirely and assume animals are dumb so it’s ok to keep doing what we do to them.
The broader context is a lot of the Western philosophy we rely on today formed around the same time we started building intricate machines, and those thinkers also wondered whether animals were just really intricate machines. Nothing nefarious. It’s probably fine if we express more gratitude towards these animals like we used to.
Meat, especially beef, is an utterly inefficient way to produce food.
People die from hunger not because the world is not producing enough food, and even not because the world is not trying to feed people in distress. It happens mostly because local politicians or warlords tend to steal or grab the humanitarian aid, or straight out not let it in, in order to preserve their power structures, and themselves on top. They don't mind killing some compatriots for that, with guns, or with hunger, no matter.
All food is not fungible, people eat meat because they want to eat meat, not other foods. Given that as a constant, find more efficient ways to make the same end product, because that is much less work than convincing whole swathes of people to want a different end product. Hence, lab-grown meat or plant-based meat have been way more effective at convincing people than decades of campaigning by those who want people to eat less meat.
When the world was much smaller, the same problems persisted. The Great Famine of 1845 in Ireland happened not just because crops failed in Ireland. England had enough crops, and the world was ready to sell more, but the British government kept Irish ports closed for imports of foods, and English Protestant farmers were not very keen to sell to Irish Catholics (fun: both considered themselves Christians). Estimated world population at the time was about 1 billion.
Man-made famines are a really common thing all along the human history; just consider the medieval sieges of cities, and routine deliberate destruction of enemy crops. This was happening when the world had merely 300-400M people.
It's not too many people. It's too little wisdom, and too much cruelty, per person.
Then again, if you believe that it's not 'too many people' and you also concede that population will continue growing as it has for the last 650+ years and the planet obviously isn't growing then surely you must also concede that at some point it has to become 'too many people', the only question is when.
No, population growth slowing down has nothing to do with a collective agreement on their being too many people.
It's simply that people in developed countries don't want to deal with the trouble of raising more than 1 or 2 kids because raising kids is difficult and expensive. You need 2 kids to replace the 2 adults, but then you add in other mortality factors and it drops below replacement.
Most of those people aren't agreeing that there are too many people, hell in cases like Japan, even their governments want them to have more children, they're just focusing on what strikes a balance for their comfort.
The population is demonstrably not continuing to grow at the same rates - all but sub-Saharan Africa is at below replacement fertility (and sub-Saharan Africa is also dropping fast), and much of the world today only experiences population growth due to immigration. With China likely now having slipped into decline net of migration, and India having dropped below fertility replacement rates and so only a couple of decades away from population decline, we're 50-100 years away from global population decline without drastic steps.
According to our best estimates we're already past the "peak children". World population growth has been slowing down for decades at this point, it will become negative in second half of this century.
World hunger is not caused by too many people, it's entirely caused by our priorities. World produces more food than it needs and that production grows faster than the population.
The elephant in the room that any discussion about social issues will bend over backwards to avoid mentioning.
Climate change, ecocide, many if not most international conflicts, the housing crisis, fossil fuel consumption, and countless other issues are simply proportional to the number of humans on the planet.
Yet directly addressing that fundamental problem is almost always the very last thing proposed, or even talked about.
Sure, these conflicts are caused by people, but 'there' s just too many of us' isn't a suppressed thought, just a bad one that we have since moved on from. Overpopulation was a trendy idea in the 70s that inspired many ugly policies, like sterilisation of ethnic minorities.
Poplation growth is slowing down everywhere, in the developed world (which uses the most energy and resources) it's been negative for some time.
Currently there's about 8 billion people, and estimates predict it will stop at 10 billion people and start to derease in the second half of this century.
So you're calling a temporary increase by 25% "elephant in the room", meanwhile the difference between resource consumption in USA (14 metric tons of CO2 per person per year) and the world average (4 metric tons of CO2 per person per year) is over 300%.
It's working everywhere. India dropped below replacement fertility a couple of years ago. The only part of the world left with above replacement growth is sub-Saharan Africa, and even the very highest, like Niger, has seen substantial drops in fertility rates.
If anything we're a few decades away from a rising panic about increasing them again.
> Climate change, ecocide, many if not most international conflicts, the housing crisis, fossil fuel consumption, and countless other issues are simply proportional to the number of humans on the planet.
Totally false, CO2 emissions coming from the US have fallen as the population has risen. No, that's not because of offshoring.
These things are caused by economic structure and government policy (independent of population) and technology efficiency (which gets better with more people, not worse). Examples being whether or not you're allowed to build apartments or beef is subsidized.
This is a common sentiment, but I have yet to hear any reasonable proposal for solutions. It certainly is talked about a lot in my experience.
It is so easy to complain about overpopulation. But how would you solve it?
1 child policy? Didn't work out great in China.
Some can have children, others can't? Doesn't exactly seem right.
Culling? Yeah, no-one wants genocide.
It's a very complex problem and people are very fast to complain about it, without thinking much about what actually to do.
It's a completely fake problem invented in the 70s by the book "The Population Bomb", and if it was true the things in that book would already have happened.
However, the West's strategy of writing moral panic books like this and then not actually reading them did allow us to defeat China (who read the book, actually did it and now has a demographic crisis) so that's something.
The cause and effect is not so clear. China's wealth has also risen substantially, and with it comes fertility decline. E.g. India reached below replacement fertility a couple of years ago without it.
I think it's likely the one child policy contributed a bit, but a substantial part of the decline is clearly also due to economic development.
The solution is talked about and is reasonable - creating western-like living environments in the remaining high fertility rate areas. Higher standard of living and more individual freedom leads to fertility rates near or even below replacement rate.
No, the real problem is there isn't enough people. If one Einstein is born per 1bln people, imagine what kind of progress in culture efficiency, technology, and ideas in general we would make as a species if there was 1T people (tera as in trilion).
None. At our current efficiency levels, 1T of us would destroy our home planet's ability to support ourselves in a week.
If we want to go multiplanetary and support populations of that kind of size, we have to get much better at optimising our footprint. Which probably requires ethical/philosophical innovation as well as hard science/technology. What we have now is too wasteful and inefficient to scale up in that way, indeed so much so that it risks poisoning itself before it's able to develop those capabilities.
You're presuming that Einsteins are born and destined to greatness regardless of their environmental conditions. What if Einsteins require particularly social/environmental conditions to reach their full potential and furthermore, what if those particular conditions cannot arise when people are packed together like sardines in a can?
This statement ignores a ton of other factors, and provides a particularly poor example. What did Einstein do to alleviate hunger? Most of his contributions remain theoretical or applied to things that don't directly help the population (or haven't paid off yet).
Even if you have someone who is intelligent, will their contributions actually make life better for people? Or will their ideas become commercially corrupted and be used for greed (Edison commercialization vs Tesla gifting)? Will they complicate our lives or provide harm along with some benefit (social media, TV, etc)? At such a small rate of the population (using your 1/1 billion), would a truly good idea gain traction? Maybe the idea to eliminate or restrict meat is theoretically a good one. But are you going to convince all the people to support it? Then how much impact will it actually have?
There is no magic solution nor hyper intelligent person that will save us.
But has it helped with living conditions like food and shelter? Sure it's made life easier, even for stuff like tractor positioning for field planting. But I don't see it having a real impact on those sorts of issues. I guess it has made many munitions more accurate and reduced collateral damage.
Have you tried moving through a desert or a steppe in the dead of night, far from human infrastructure? It's damn dark, the land is literally darker than the star-strewn sky. Headlights give you only so much light, for the next 100-150m of the road maximum. Unless it's a really nice, well-maintained road, with reflector posts, etc (and usually it's not), it's really easy to lose your way if you drive a tad too fast. You either crawl, or choose to camp and wait until the morning light.
With a GPS map, you can proceed much more confidently. And a few hours may play a serious role in disaster relief.
So too can the stars, or proper time/speed/direction navigation.
I'm not saying GPS isn't useful. I'm saying it hasn't had a life changing impact for the masses that allows for a larger population (eg it's not providing more food, shelter, etc).
In this day and age, people aren't still starving because the animals and plants don't give up their nutrients easily enough, but because humans trample and prey on humans at worst, or neglect their suffering at best.
And empathy is empathy, I doubt you can outright ignore the suffering of animals while having a whole lot for the suffering of humans.
Less meat consumption should lead to more production and decrease in price of of other types food. Also despite all the suffering in the world people still care very much about the wellbeign of dogs and cats. If anything with inflation and more and more wars around the globe the world needs cheaper food now more than ever.
The inputs into meat today are things like soy and feed corn, which aren't particularly good for people. It's not quite as easy as just not eating meat. Many of the farms need to switch to other crops that are healthy which requires different machines, more labor, or other factors. You probably aren't going to see too much drop in other food prices since much of the cost of foods (especially corn and soy related) is in the processing and distribution, not in the actual growing. Then you need to convince people they want to eat whatever the new product is. You could give people something made from scraps similar to dog food, but that's not going to go over well for a bunch of reasons.
> the world needs cheaper food now more than ever.
We are getting there. The price of food has crashed pretty hard over the last couple of years, and we're already back to 2019 levels, with little sign of that trend stopping. Barring some major shift, food will be cheaper than ever by next year.
It may not actually be cheaper food that you need, but rather cheaper retail workers. While food has crashed, the price of food in the grocery store still seems to be climbing.
And westerners throw away an obscene amount of edible food on a daily basis. I don’t see how being more compassionate and opting out of participating in animal suffering will make people who don’t have enough to eat have more to eat.
This makes no sense. Animals eat grain. We eat the animal. Animal has to eat 10x the calories in grain for 1x the calories to whoever eats the animal. VS 1x the calories in grain if you skip eating the animal in between.
How smart were those 9 million people? Given that most of them live in zones where they couldn't apply even the simplest agriculture techniques, I would say not much.
Humans are special, but in more subtle ways than "thinking vs dumb". I think it's safe to assume that all higher mammals have some idea about the world around, themselves, their kin, etc, with a social structure of sorts, unless they are solitary. Many of them, like wolves, pass their learned experience to their progeny, that is, possess and sustain a culture. Some of them, like cetaceans, are officially considered conscious. (And there are comparably intellectual birds, too.)
Humans have unique achievements, like constructive syntax, or overcoming of the Dunbar number limitation in cooperative structures, or mathematics, but these stem from a really tall intellectual base humans share with other mammals.
I'm an atheist, but the book of genesis put it very well on this subject. There is one emotion that is unique to humans. It is not compassion, or sense of justice or fairness, aninals have those. It is shame. Which is unique to humans.
On a related note, I heard some interesting theory by Robin Hanson on Lex Fridman's podcast. The guy said that the ego is our brain's attempt at forming a story around the brain's decisions (which are made pre-thought). It's crazy to consider that what we are is just our brain attempt at storytelling to justify ourselves.
I've lived around animals all my file, even my SO grew up on a farm. Why on earth do you (or anyone) think they experience thoughts, emotions and relationships in a human way?
Simply because we have similarities does not equate that animals experience things the same way. We know this because we have a better understanding of what goes on in a more limited human brain (be it a child or neurodivergent) compared to a healthy adult one.
I frankly compare this humanization of animals as a sign of not having sufficiently worked and lived with animals, with apophenia/pareidolia playing a large role.
Maybe also depends on what the animals are used to. As someone who grew up in the alps with free roaming cows, these are some clever animals. They definitly know what they are allowed to and what not, they have character differences, etc. The frolicking they do when they are let out in spring is not something you would forget.
If you look at cows who never where outside you the same nuanced behavior isn't that easy to spot, they become much more dull and complacent.
I grew up with animals and I would definitely say they have feelings. Of course it is hard to say how deep those go, or how refined they are and whether they are comparable to human feelings, but there are clear similarities: cows get afraid in bad weather or when they see something they don't know, a mother cow will be proud and protective over their calf, some will be mischiefous and ashamed once you catch them doing something they shouldn't do. That is not nothing. Sure inside that cow could be a complex Rube Goldberg machine that makes it look like fear, pride or shame to us silly humans, but given that we are both mammals evolutionary more likely is that these emotions are at least somewhat similar because they served similar purposes. What cows think is a much harder question. They are surprisingly clever if they think no one is around (and they have a very, very good sense for that).
>Why on earth do you (or anyone) think they experience thoughts, emotions and relationships in a human way?
GP poster did not use the qualifier "in a human way". Take that away, and it's really hard to argue that animals do not experience thoughts, emotions and relationships. If you say otherwise, it makes it really hard to believe that you lived around animals all your life.
Maybe we should be asking "do humans feel emotions in a bovine way". And the answer would be an unsurprising no, so why should one spend any time stating and disproving the converse. Animals do not have to feel in a human way for their feelings to be valid. That does not make killing them and torturing them any less barbaric. And we can be humane in our treatment of animals regardless of what importance we give to their feelings. Cat and dog owners will tell you their pets have feelings. Numerous studies on pigs show they are more clever than dogs. Do they somehow have to develop humanlike emotions to count?
The difference becomes important though when deciding where the line of 'torture' or 'barbarism' starts or ends. If you'd ask certain people, the act of castrating lambs with bands is barbaric.
I brought up neurodivergence before, but we have clear proof of situations where even non-healthy brains caused a clear difference on how that line can sometimes be interpreted. A very simple example is extremely repetitive work. Same goes for children.
Yeah but throughout a lot of western philosophy animals have been seen as totally incapable of feeling and thought. I had a philosophy professor (a year before his retirement) who was proclaiming just that.
As someone who also has visited seminars in ethics and animal ethics I will now recite the train of thought of Prof. Fink from Oxford:
That is obviously bullshit. Animals have feelings and thought (and we have the behavioral studies to show this to some degree). Yet we are not in a pixar movie and the animals don't have human-like interior worlds — but that doesn't mean they don't have their own variants that could be deep and rich in their own ways (or not, who knows).
Ethically the question for everyone of us is: Given a being that is very likely to experience feelings and though; given we don't know how deep the inner world of that being is — what is the right way to treat such a being? Do we assume it won't notice anything and treat it accordingly? Or do we side with caution and treat it carefully till we know more?
Of course to make things even more complicated the society we live in (in the form of previous generations) has made some of those choices for us already. So it might seem more normal to treat animals as if they have no feelings, because that is what we grew up with. But just because our ancestors did it that way doesn't mean it is ethically the right thing to do. Especially since we, unlike our ancestors, life in a world where survival without eating meat is not only possible, but doesn't come with huge downsides.
Many would say we are allowed to herd, hold and slaughter animals because we are more intelligent than them, and because they lack the inner life. But if an alien race or an AI came by that was more intelligent than us and had a richer inner life, wouldn't they then be right to do the same to us? Ethical systems should be universally applicable, not just when it suits us.
One could make all of this less complicated by ditching right and wrong and just asking who is stronger. But that isn't the kind of thinking that built the societies whose fruits we are all enjoying in the form of working division of labour, developed technologies, etc.
From a cold utilitarian POV, ideas of justice and equity only need to be applied to those wo will, do, did, or might contribute to the common good (and the ones emotionally close to these), and would not do that if they weren't well treated. That is not the case for animals.
In fact, that is, I believe, a pretty good description of how things are. The treatment of animals will improve, if it does, by moving into the "emotionally close" group.
There is a lot going on in what constitutes "common good" here. The standard "ethical" vegan position would contend that the happiness of animals count among intrinsic common good.
I meant a definition of "common good" from, again, a cold utilitarian POV - providing goods and services (but including decidedly social ones like child bearing, taking care of the elderly and such)
That's not what's commonly understood by utilitarianism, by the way. If said activity to render goods and services does not result in increased total happiness or average happiness, after factoring in externalities, many utilitarians do not consider that a "good" activity.
(via Wikipedia) for example, Bentham, the first formulator of says that utility is
> That property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness ... [or] to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered.
but the question is open as to whether or not the happiness of animals is included in it. So just as exploitation of many to a great degree for services like a relatively small increase in comfort of few (as in chattel slavery) would be negative utility for Bentham, the suffering of animals for food would be considered negative utility to the utilitarian animal rights advocate.
It doesn't feel that surprising to me. I would've been in the same camp if I hadn't gone through a phase of being interested in random animal related trivia (eg wondering why so many mammals seem to enjoy being pet).
I just never really grew up with much interaction with animals, and what I did see was mostly stuff that could be passed off as just instincts without deeper thought.
It took actually thinking about their behavior and realizing that "being social" as an instinct includes having some level of intelligent emotions and relationships, it isn't just some mechanistic urge to be in a group based on some hardcoded rules.
Over the break I was thinking a lot about C.S. Lewis an his issekai Christianity as well as the alternate-world Christmas of Terry Prachett’s Hogfather so I was really in the right mood when Jehovah’s Witnesses came to my door.
They led with the question of “Do you think God made a mistake when he created the world?”. I thought about it really hard and answered “I could make the case either way.”
Where does evil come from? My answer is that “Well you try to push a fluid in a certain direction and it goes sideways and swirls…” (must have been a dynamicist in a past life)
Where we really differed from them the most I think was their insistence that humans are completely different from a spiritual viewpoint than animals which I’d reject completely because my experience with cats and dogs and horses is that animals seem very much to have a moral sense and to feel bad when they fail to match expectations. The first time I fell off a horse it seemed the horse felt a lot worse about it than I did and she seemed exceptionally contrite.
Sure people do have languages, beavers are never going to figure out that they could make much bigger dams with concrete, but animals do appear to have moral feelings which is consistent with the Buddhist idea that animals are subject to the law of karma, you can reincarnate as animal, etc.
Not so long ago we had surgery on babies without anesthesia because people somehow thought they didn't feel pain
I imagine it's a mental safety mechanism, involving various degrees of mental gymnastic depending on the individual, otherwise everyone would be vegetarian/vegan after watching a single industrial farm/slaughter house video
I doubt you've seen industrial slaughterhouse videos that aren't meant to sensationalize. I've even walked around in some, where all rules and guidelines are followed, and I can still eat meat just fine. The animals don't realize what happens and death is instantaneous.
How do I rationalize it? Animals are being eaten in nature too, we at least don't eat them while they're often still alive (like in nature). Plants are living organisms too, and everyone eats those without a second thought. It's just that they don't pass a self-determined bar for many.
The environmental impact is a completely different question, unrelated to this.
The only one arguing in bad faith is you, along with the cookie-cutter propaganda that you consume without further thought.
You're allowed to your own opinions and discuss them, but what you're doing is just regurgitating an opinion and trying to use THAT as a fact that should somehow persuade people.
Why is it that militants like you ever think that'll work in a discussion where you can't use pressure or force is beyond me.
> because people somehow thought they didn't feel pain
The boring alternative explanation would be that doctors knew that anesthesia can kill a baby, because babies have a not fully formed lung system; and pain is temporal but death is permanent.
But this explanation does not inflame a social warrior heart in the same way. The rush of outrageine is much lower and less satisfying. Repeating the same arguments since 1820 without thinking a second about it, is much better.
A drug applied topically. Can be the same drug or other drug.
The problem is that religious thinking is not compatible with modern medicine.
Anesthesia inhibits thermoregulation on babies. It is common for core temperature to drop by 1 to 2 degrees Celsius in the first hour of anesthesia. Sick babies can became hypothermic easily and struggle to keep themselves warm. Add anesthesia to that mix and you could be reducing the survival rate.
Some researchers also claim that anesthetic exposure can cause toxicity and neuronal apoptosis (death of neurons) in the developing brain of a baby, and this has the potential to became a long term problem in the later nerve development.
This is a problem particularly for premature infants. This babies sometimes need to pass by multiple surgical procedures with multiple anesthesia. Premature birth is a main cause of death in children, so they have yet a lot of things to address even without the toxics.
Avoiding punctual pain at any cost shouldn't never be the main (and much less the only) objective here. And adding a new risk to the medical procedure, just for ideological reasons, is very stupid.
Isn't the main problem that academics are measured by the number of publications they publish, and reproductions of existing studies aren't published by the main journals, thus there is little incentive to try and reproduce findings? I never thought this was a problem of ability.
You're also leaving out the biggest issue. Journals generally don't want to produce negative results. If you spend researching [shocking possibility] and it turns out that [shocking possibility] isn't true, you're not getting published. It motivates everything from HARKing [1] to outright data manipulation. By contrast if negative results were seen as valuable, then none of this is an issue.
On the other hand, it really is the case that there's just not much of any value in learning that [shocking possibility] is, as everybody would naturally expect, indeed not the case. And filling up limited journal space with such discoveries would seem to be counter-productive, at best. And when you have limited space/funding for researchers, one guy who keeps proving everything everybody knows to be false, to be false, is always going to be perceived as less valuable than one making [shocking discovery] [... which ends up being proven false years later].
> If you spend researching [shocking possibility] and it turns out that [shocking possibility] isn't true, you're not getting published
But this simply isn't true in physics where negative results are very common. This is at least an existence proof that this can work, people just have to get their heads straight on what research means.
The biggest problem is honestly obtained incorrect results. If you run 1000 experiments across 1000 labs. Few will statistically not notice a mistake and get a wrong result. That wrong result is then published as it is surprising.
I think there are some strong arguments against this. The first is numerical. Fields like social psychology are seeing replication rates as low as the twenties. And not just from low hanging fruit from but from journals like "The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology", which has one of the highest impact factors across all psychology journals, and a 23% replication success rate! [1] This [2] is a Google search for site:nytimes.com "Journal of Personality and Social Psychology". It's interesting seeing how many [shocking discovery]s, many which end up being shared on this site, come from this particular journal.
Furthermore, I think you can often see poorly done science in the papers themselves. They will use suggestive wording in surveys, unreliable sources for sampling such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, and maybe one of the biggest tells is measuring a large number of unnecessary variables. That does very little to further your experiment, but absolutely ensures you can p-hack your way to a statistically significant result. Another is ignoring such patently obvious viable confounding issues, that one can't reasonably appeal to Hanlon's razor.
It can also be hard to judge whether replication failed because the result is bogus or replication failed because the replication team is themselves incompetent.
Did they follow the exact same steps claimed to result in something? Did it result in that thing?
The repetition team being incompetent sounds like a cop out. The researcher did a bad job and it’s on them to explain better etc in that case. No excuses, if it can’t be reproduced it isn’t taken seriously no exceptions
So just make sure someone unaffiliated has to be able to reproduce whatever research has been conducted. Tough luck if it doesn’t make it, that’s why you do your best to ensure you’ve verified it’s a real result.
Unfortunately this is only part of the problem. Even studies on ML that use public datasets, which are the kinds of studies that when code is shared should be very easy to reproduce, are often surprisingly hard to repeat. Sometimes only parts of the code are published, the code has a lot of bugs (who knows why? Added intentionally?), the code is very badly documented, or the exact libraries are not specified properly.
And this is in a field where everything is based on code, where in principle reproducibility is easy. Go into materials science or chemistry and try to synthesize something following a published paper and you get all sorts of problems. Different equipment, different temperature, not all steps documented, ... Reproducing experimental findings can take you months.
It still largely comes down to incentives from what I've seen. A lot of times all anyone (from the researcher to the reviewer) cares about is the paper. Journals don't check that code actually works, and a lot of researchers don't spend time on preparing their code. They feel there's no need, since they now got a new article on their CV. It's true that they may not have the skills and experience to produce good code they can share (depending on the area), but often 1) there's no time to prep code since they've got 3 other projects going on and a crazy work pace 2) the code is seen as something incidental and secondary - what matters to them is the figures and results 3) some groups want to milk a topic for a few papers so they're guarding their code and data. Luckily at least plenty of journals demand access to data or even making it public.
In fact, there's even more incentives for researchers to make reproducing their work as hard as possible. For example, what if someone tried to reproduce it and found contradictory results? In both cases (reproducer made mistake, original made mistake) it's additional hassle that the original authors can basically only suffer and never gain.
This is just you confirming that tons of research is essentially fraudulent. If it can be contradicted it absolutely should be, that is how fields progress and weed out bad ideas.
Another issue is that making things reproducible costs you time and that is exactly what most researchers do not have. For example, many ML papers have code that is just a barely working Jupyter notebook. To make it reproducible you would have to create a reproducible environment, package the data, and prepare scripts that would rerun all the experiments you have done. That can take several weeks, but it will not increase the chance of acceptance for your paper at all.
More precisely, making things reproducible after the fact costs you significant time - there are tools for reproducible setups that take maybe an hour (at most) to setup upfront, after which it takes very little effort to do your work within that framework and keep things reproducible (for eg. Julia has DrWatson, DataDeps, etc., I'd be surprised if Python doesn't have equivalents).
The problem is knowing upfront which of your work would need to be reproducible, or having the discipline to do all your hacking starting from such reproducible setups.
But Julia and Python tools aren't enough. The whole environment has to be reproducible. So many python libraries themselves take shortcuts which work on the current Ubuntu or current state of the web, but will fail to build later by the time someone tries to reproduce the result. Shipping a container just hides the implicit dependencies and assumptions. People need to be packaging for Guix en masse for reproducibility to be feasible. Until then, "reproducibility" is just another lie people are telling themselves and others to try and get ahead in their rat races.
So you say "julia and python tools aren't enough" but then proceed to only talk about Python and say a bunch of stuff that is completely inapplicable the Julia.
Do you know much about how reproducibility is approached in Julia? Maybe hold off on calling it a lie if you're not experienced in what you're talking about.
I have asked about Julia's reproducibility story on the Guix mailing list in the past, and at the time Simon Tournier didn't think it was promising. I seem to recall Julia itself didnt have a reproducible build. All I know now is that github issue is still not closed.
"reproducible build" in this sense has nothing to do with scientific reproducibility. That issue is about hash-verifiability for the sake of security, and how some autogenerated random paths included in the binary affects that.
Scientific reproducibility requires only that versioned binaries be functionally equivalent if they have the same version, which is quite independent of this and certainly exists in Julia.
Would love a link to the Guix mailing list discussion, if you can dig it up.
I agree with your first sentence, but saying people are fooling themselves and being overoptimistic (by telling themselves lies) is very different from "calling it a lie" (i.e. intentionally deceiving others). That seems like an unnecessarily negative interpretation of what they said. Even if you disagree with it, that does not deserve such a harsh response.
I agree that docker is great. But docker solves only one of the problems mentioned above (env) and even that solution does not work for some teams that run their experiments in GPU clusters where docker is not supported.
Perhaps the core issue is that academia excels at being a textbook case of goodhart's law. If/when reproducibility became a target then the academic system would/will likely make an equally bad mess as it has with its current targets.
If you fail to reproduce some important research then I think that would absolutely get published. (see the recent superconductor drama)
So if you feel some impactful work is suspicious .. I think disproving it would absolutely be incentivised
If you show its actually correct.. Well then usually it's not that hard to push the envelope a bit further and say something new. That happens all the time
Yes, but in the vast majority of cases, it's hard to tell just by reading a paper if there's been dishonesty somewhere in the pipeline.
Also, the LK-99 example is an exception, not the norm–the chances of receiving significant attention for a replication study are near zero in almost all other cases.
I just don't think it's really relevant. If the research is impactful, then it'll be replicated (at least in part) when the next person tries to build on the results. If it doesn't replicate then they'll probably end up discovering something new/different - and that'll lead to it's own paper.
Even in the ideal world, you effectively almost never end up with a replication paper. Either it replicates and you add on your own novel research. Or it doesn't replicate and you discover something new
You can in theory end up with a super dull null result that disproves someone else's claim. But even then, when you set out on the project you're aim is to add something new on top of what's been already done. This happens all the time
It seems to me, instead of funding a new college or traditional research institute, some benefactor ought to fund a "research reproduction institute", dedicated to identifying and reproducing suspicious publications.
Sort of. Yes and no. There has to be a metric to assess researcher's performance. Otherwise we won't know what research is worthwhile. When the rules of the game are known, players will find their way to cheat, or at least bend the rules to their advantage.
So, for example, suppose negative results become as valuable: well, they are easier to produce. They are also less valuable as stepping stones for further research. Given that, you'd still need to have a metric that compares publishing positive results to negative results. Even if you declare them to be equally important, the shared understanding will be that they aren't. And one would be more important than the other. And here were are back to square one.
There are some minor things that can be done in the near future. For example, results produced with code must come with the code that produced these results. A lot of research bodies resist this because they want to commercialize their code, or their code may inadvertently contain organization's secrets and therefore needs more auditing... but, in the end of the day, it needs to be made clear that this is a necessary and unavoidable price to pay.
Data sharing is even more problematic. Beside confidentiality concerns, data is always a bargaining chip in the game of getting collaborators (and grants). Should it be made public, it loses its value to those who collected it. Right now, the trend is: if you managed to collect a worthwhile dataset, then you'll cover yourself foot to head with NDAs, contracts of all kinds etc, and will sit on it, exploiting it for a series of research. And if anyone wants to do research on the same subject, you will only invite them if they bring grants or equipment etc.
But you cannot really verify results w/o having the data available. Even if you have the code.
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It's really sad to see how research is doing wrt' programming in part because of the above, but I don't think the programs outlined in OP will have a noticeable effect. They don't paint a convincing picture in terms of incentives, i.e. they don't answer the question why would researches want to do any of that RepRes and OS training. Even in computationally-heavy research today you often find that all the computation work is outsourced by the researchers and they themselves have no clue what their code is doing.
Above were all sorts of arguments for why the current (or yours) approaches are ineffective. But I don't claim to know what needs to be done.
The marginal cost of using spare capacity in home computers has risen significantly. It used to be the case that CPUs pretty much always used the same amount of power regardless of load, so filling those unused cycles with SETI@home et al. was essentially free. Now, whether the CPU is idling or running full bore makes a significant difference both in energy usage and in noise development. I would not want my desktop's fans to drone away while I'm trying to work.
Privatizing all roads would ironically probably be the fastest way to cut down on oversized vehicles. Nobody wants to pay a quadratic weighted toll on the GVWR of a bunch of extra SUV, but when they have to pay it all in taxes non-quadratically anyway it's a fuck it go big moment.
Let's see... If we privatize roads and every owner (pinky promise) only makes everyone pay basod on vehicle weight... That almost sounds like a tax based on car weight.
Some combination of both would be best in my opinion. Weight due to wear on roads and size due to the safety implications (some personal vehicles are now almost 2m tall and impossible to see over for pedestrians and cyclists - creating a much more dangerous environment).
It is about safety. Larger cars on the streets are more dangerous for the people living in the city.
Cars have been getting ridiculously large over the past decades because the only force acting upon carmakers is the desire of the car buyer.
If I’m buying a car, I obviously want the largest car I can afford and semi-reasonably fit where I’m going to be. This has many benefits for me, but a lot of negative externalites for everyone around me.
That is why policies need to discourage larger cars in many ways, to keep the average size in check, so to speak.
> If I’m buying a car, I obviously want the largest car I can afford
Is that obvious? I guess I'm weird, as I always want the smallest car I can get that gives me the features I want. I'm constantly annoyed that I end up in larger cars than I ideally want because that's basically the choice I'm given.
I mean the US effectively outlawed an arguably most versatile of all vehicles for vast spaces of US, the compact truck, which fits somewhere in the middle of vehicle sizes. I suspect most of those people had to move to another class, perhaps to these larger trucks.
If I am buying a car I am buying the smallest, most efficient and reliable thing that still fulfills my needs.
A car being big is not a quality in itself unless you need that size twice a week. An there are quite few SUV driving people that really do.
At the same time there are real advantages for small cars in any city that isn't designed and zoned around cars (so literally every city where I live). You find easier parking, fuel consumption is lower, tires last longer, most maintenance is cheaper, you usually have an easier time in traffic avoiding kids, animals and cyclists, because you will see them more easily, etc.
>decades because the only force acting upon carmakers is the desire of the car buyer.
Trucks, and perhaps some cars also got bigger also because of fuel efficiency regulations (CAFE) that require a larger footprint if gas mileage is worse. They had to make for instance the Tacoma much larger to match a barely changed engine. And foreign small import trucks were stifled with the chicken tax, pushing consumers towards Americas McGigantic brands.
Actually, it wouldn't, kerosene and diesel are pretty similar, so it would not be surprising if a diesel car engine can run on SAF.
That being said, it's by no means a given, modern diesel engines are highly optimized and might have trouble with kerosene/SAF, especially given the different lubrication qualitities. Old diesel engines, however, should be fine, they can run on pretty much anything.
Some Cold War era fighter engines were able to run diesel for a while, tge reasoning was to allow quick re-location of the aircraft to safety. They needed basically a full rebuild if run on diesel for too long.
And all multi-fuel engines the military tried, e.g. in the Chieftain (if memory serves well), were rather underwhelming and ran mostly on diesel anyway.
Old disel engines are fine with all kinds of stuff, modern ones a lot less.
> Some Cold War era fighter engines were able to run diesel for a while, tge reasoning was to allow quick re-location of the aircraft to safety. They needed basically a full rebuild if run on diesel for too long.
Interesting, haven't heard of that. But yes, I can imagine with diesel containing heavier hydrocarbons than kerosene, there could be a buildup of soot deposits on the hot parts of the engine. Might also be some certification issue, that if you operate with out-of-spec fuel then you need to overhaul the engine before it's considered flight worthy again (even if there might be no problem with the engine per se).
Then again, don't these naval ships with gas turbine engines run on something like standard light marine diesel oil?
> And all multi-fuel engines the military tried, e.g. in the Chieftain (if memory serves well), were rather underwhelming and ran mostly on diesel anyway.
The Chieftain engine was designed to be "truly" multi-fuel, being in principle capable of running on both diesel, petrol, and anything in between like kerosene.
If you limit the multi-fuelness to diesel and the current day narrow cut kerosenes that are used as jet fuel, it's a much simpler problem.
E.g. Western military diesel vehicles tend to be specced to run on diesel or JP-8 (the military variant of standard Jet A-1 jet fuel, with a few additives). And aviation diesel engines used in some GA aircraft tend to be certified for Jet A-1 (and they are often modified versions of standard automotive diesel engines).
Diesels are mostly cheaper to run because european governments artificially reduced the taxing on diesel comparative to gasoline as an help for the economy since most trucks were running diesel for the best low-end torque.
They tend to have a bit better economy but an higher price, so in the end it depends on how long you keep them and the difference is not that positive in countries that tax both fuel the same, like Switzerland.
Diesel engines run at higher compression ratios, 20:1 vs. 10:1 IIRC, resulting in higher thermal efficiency, and they also don't need a throttle valve, meaning there is no pumping loss at partial loads. The higher compression ratio also means they must be stronger (heavier and more expensive).
Modern gasoline engines have a few more tricks though and reduce the gap (like very high top gear, direct injection etc.).
> no throttle valve, meaning there is no pumping loss at partial loads
I believe this effect is small compared to the alternative, which is that partial loads have dramatically excess air. That excess air isn't involved in the combustion, but still gets heated and pumped through the exhaust. That energy loss exceeds the pumping loss through a throttle on a part loaded engine.
Obviously the ideal case for both engine types is that you run it at a lower RPM whenever you need less power out. Unfortunately, that has other downsides (mostly slower response when you floor-it). Luckily, hybrid electric systems mitigate much of that downside by providing rapid response with electricity and allowing your engine to sit at 1000 rpm and 80% throttle in a super high gear while cruising 70mph on the freeway.
It's super common here in Sweden. Hell, we have a diesel car! The used car market was full of diesel cars. All petrol stations here have diesel tanks. It's diesel all the way down!
They need less fuel than petrol, but one issue is that they don't lend themselves well to 100% city driving because this can lead to costly diesel particulate filter repairs as they clog up. Diesel cars automatically regenerate the filters (burn the muck to ash) as you drive e.g. over 40 mph for >25 minutes or so. (depends on car model) You should drive like that at least once a month.
However, where I live, longer distance driving is pretty common.
They're falling out of favor with rising diesel prices since covid and of course EV's. Companies here go full EV nowadays for several reasons, public image only one of them.
I'd also like to go electrical but seems like we're still stuck for yet a few years because they still don't offer charging poles in apartment garages very liberally, and for any kind of convenient EV use, it honestly builds upon the fact that you can charge it overnight close to home.
Why should the type of car matter? It's just an engine, you make it a bit more compact and it will fit in a sedan. Voila, you have a diesel sedan. Sales of diesel sedans have been slowly decreasing in most European countries Inn recent years, but it wasn't that long ago that more than half of all passenger cars (in some countries) were diesel. Of the 4 cars I've owned, 2 were diesel.
Yeah, 11 million diesel vehicles were recalled by VW -- nearly all were ordinary cars (they don't even make a heavy truck). Mercedes, BMW, Audi, VW all sell (or used to sell) diesel cars in the USA. They all certainly do in Europe, where they're joined by all the European brands like Renault and Seat.
Post-scandal, fewer manufacturers are selling them in the US, but there are millions sold every year worldwide in plain old passenger cars.
My car is diesel (in the UK) it was popular a few years ago because CO2 emissions are reduced. Unfortunately particulate emissions are problematic. Hence modern diesel cars need Ad Blu to help catalyse their destruction.
I've mostly owned European diesel passenger cars (in USA). It's lower maintenance, more efficient, I like the way they drive (more torque/cool sound), and a fun hobby with a great community of hobbyists that help each other out.
It's rare enough that I often get very concerned gas station attendees warning me that I'm "accidentally" putting diesel in my car.
Up until the VW scandal GM was pushing diesel in most of their fleet - from the Chevy Cruze, Equinox to the Colorado all had strait 4 diesels as a premium tier option.
16% of personal vehicles in the Netherlands are currently diesel cars. About 20% of all vehicles sold here last year were diesel vehicles. So at least here, it's very common for people to drive a diesel car. They come in all sizes.
Modern Ultra-Low Sulphur Diesel (ULSD) is the standard road diesel in both the EU and USA since many years now. And with modern common-rail engines with electronically controlled direct injection, you no longer get the big black clouds of soot when you push down the pedal either (unless you're one of those "rolling coal" morons that mod their trucks to intentionally produce more of it). And further, modern diesel cars tend to have particulate filters and urea catalysts etc.
So all in all, a modern diesel is pretty clean. Not as good as a modern gasoline car, but still reasonably ok and massively better than old diesels.
Many of the car-buying Americans have the idea of "diesel car" from old Mercedes 240Ds and such, which had the acceleration of a dead snail against a headwind on a good day.
There is nothing inherently requiring diesel cars to be slow.
> because motorcycles require a higher-level of attention and are significantly more dangerous to operate than a car.
For the driver. Cars are more dangerous than motorcycles for everybody but the people inside/on it, which means that swerving and braking exercises are actually much more necessary for car drivers than for motorcycle riders
