In this episode, Simone and I discuss the world perspective of the leftist intellectual elite, and how they view the world through the lens of a leftist, elitist lens. We talk about the logic behind everything, and why we should all be trying to make sense of it.
00:00:00.000Which is, we accept that prey animals may indeed have miserable lives, and that if they do, his death condemns his potential prey to potentially many more years of suffering than had he killed them.
00:00:12.500But the claim that prey animals have miserable lives leads animal activists to a surprising conclusion of a different sort.
00:01:01.060And we are going to do this through, I mean, originally this was called to me as an idea, because you sent me a WhatsApp about a tweet that you wrote HP Lovecraft had made about Amanda McCaskill.
00:01:15.020She was called Amanda McCaskill when the piece was written.
00:01:17.980She's no longer called Amanda McCaskill, which is kind of hilarious, because her husband changed his last name to her maternal grandmother's last name, which was McCaskill.
00:01:28.980That's Will McCaskill, by the way, if you don't know him.
00:01:30.800Incredibly, like one of the leading, two or three leading figures of the effective altruist movement.
00:01:34.960She wrote What We Owe the Future, which had one of the most successful press debuts of a book in forever.
00:03:38.500So, she wrote a piece, to truly end animal suffering, the most ethical choice is to kill wild predators, especially Cecil the lion.
00:03:45.660And this was written in response to the killing of Cecil the lion.
00:03:48.480You know, the celebrity lion that that guy killed.
00:03:51.140And just to start here, we'll go over the full chunk of this in a bit.
00:03:53.840But by killing predators, we can save the lives of many prey animals like wildebeest, zebras, and buffaloes in the local area that would otherwise be killed in order to keep animals at the top of the food chain alive.
00:04:05.040And there's no reason to consider the lives of predators like lions to be any more important than the lives of prey.
00:04:09.620And ironically, the EA community talking to normies.
00:04:39.620You saw this, and apparently you just thought it was funny that you needed to send it to me.
00:05:07.580If we're talking about in an ideal world, what we would probably have is we would, one, take all of the predator species and put them in like a zoo or something and sterilize them so they couldn't breed and feed them like tofurkey until they just died of old age or we executed them when their lives became negative quantity.
00:05:25.520And then for stuff like a gazelle, we let them live out their lives as long as it's a good life, and then we euthanize them.
00:05:33.080And if it's not a good life for the gazelle, then we need to maintain the population at lower levels so there's always plentiful food for them while also giving them regular de-parasiting.
00:05:44.700So now it's like the Hunger Games for animals, where there's like a camera on you at all times and your like stats are monitored, all your vitals.
00:05:56.800Except instead of having you all fight to the death, you just get like instant medical care and food whenever you need it.
00:06:04.460This is the AI world we're going into.
00:06:11.640You know, it's important to understand the people who are controlling AI Essex, okay?
00:06:28.160Our bad philosophy, you know, the subreddit.
00:06:30.320And the top comment, of course, was what's wrong with this?
00:06:33.680The statement that we ought to kill all men is obviously true.
00:06:37.000When it said kill all predators, that's the way they interpret it.
00:06:39.560It was the very top comment, which I just thought was a classic Reddit moment.
00:06:46.000And here's a tweet from her that I think gives a further perspective into her worldview and what it's like being within.
00:06:51.720Because an important thing to note about many of the intellectual elite circles within the left, I'm not talking about status elite.
00:06:57.280If you're talking about status elite, you're talking about celebrities, you're talking about your dumb politicians and Davos-minded people and, you know, that sort of branch, right?
00:07:21.500When you talk about the intellectual elite of the left, which is almost entirely the EA community, you are now looking at people who are extremely partisan but at least have a degree of introspection.
00:07:37.580And that's where this is really interesting that we're going to go into.
00:08:27.620That she naturally identifies with the victim.
00:08:31.040And we'll see this in her beliefs around – and I don't even think she realizes this – in her beliefs around predation and stuff like that.
00:08:37.900When she sees the lion eat the gazelle, right?
00:08:43.040And she even has a video of this in her piece.
00:08:45.860She talks about how hard this is for her to watch.
00:08:49.020Because when she sees something like this, she naturally identifies – like, she doesn't even think about the –
00:09:01.260Or catching something that's trying to get away from you.
00:09:04.400I guess I can tell which one you identify with.
00:09:08.840Actually, no, well, this is an important point before we go further.
00:09:12.020Because I think people may not realize how psychologically different – and I don't know if this is a male-female psychological difference.
00:09:19.300Or if it's a my cultural group psychological difference.
00:09:22.360I'm not identifying with either of them.
00:09:34.820And this occurred to me in one of our episodes where people got really upset that I didn't care about the cultures that were allowing themselves to be bamboozled and screwed over and eradicated because of their own foolishness.
00:09:49.980Because they set up rules that no longer work in a modern context, and now they're dying out.
00:09:54.960And I realized that it hadn't even occurred to me to approach the weak thing.
00:10:03.020In this perspective, I was talking about overly deontological cultures that are dying out in the new multicultural context that many of these deontological cultures themselves created.
00:10:13.220A good example here, given that we always talk about it, is the Vatican has pushed for multicultural countries, right?
00:10:20.440If you look even today, they're attacking J.D. Vance, another Catholic.
00:10:23.380This isn't anti-catholic. I'm talking about the Vatican doing this, saying, you know, you shouldn't be doing all these immigrant deportations.
00:10:28.860You know, you should learn to live in a more multicultural environment.
00:10:31.680But they're also more likely to be deontological, and that's leading them to be victimized by non-deontological groups, which don't have to play by their rules.
00:10:39.340This is in the episode where we were talking about people getting extra time on tests and stuff like that.
00:10:44.880But it extends to all sorts of things in our society.
00:10:47.680And in the comments, I immediately thought, I didn't even think to identify with the prey, right?
00:10:56.020It didn't even occur to me from the way that I see reality.
00:11:00.700When I see the picture, and I know, and I think many women naturally take on the position of prey when they are choosing what of the things they identify with.
00:11:13.100And I think many cultural groups take on the position of prey.
00:11:16.940I mean, I understand, and I've pointed this out, that we come from one of the more violent, more aggressive cultural groups historically.
00:11:22.900And so I wonder, is this because I'm from that group, that whenever I'm like, I see a lion eating, hunting down a gazelle, I generally am like, hmm, that looks really satisfying.
00:12:16.220One, there are just as many negative externalities from naturally identifying, when you see an image like this, the predator instead of the prey, as there are identifying with the prey instead of the predator.
00:12:28.180I'm not saying that my position is like a moral or cultural high ground.
00:12:33.940I'm just pointing out that we are naturally inclined to see the world differently because of this.
00:12:39.500And some people might be like, well, that's just horrifying, right?
00:12:42.880Like, how can you identify with the predator in these situations?
00:12:47.420And it's like, well, what do you mean that's horrifying?
00:12:49.340If the predator didn't eat, it would die, right?
00:12:52.240Like, these are two animals that are in a life and death struggle.
00:12:56.580And that you are easily, in terms of your first visceral response, obviously anyone when they stop and intellectualize it can find a way to identify with each.
00:13:06.860But in terms of your first visceral response, my suspicion is most people naturally see the scene as either mortifying or satisfying, right?
00:13:18.960They either take on the mental position of the predator or the prey.
00:13:23.260And I'm wondering, one, are there people who don't take on either?
00:13:28.840I mean, if she doesn't, that's interesting as well because it shows that she's not taking on the position of this other woman.
00:13:33.620She takes on more of an abstracted position.
00:13:35.960Is that maybe the natural female response for more aggressive cultures?
00:13:38.920I guess it would make sense if it's a culture that is very aggressive towards outsiders, that the female would not want to have her biology force an emotional distance between her and the rest of the clan because of that.
00:13:55.260Is this something that all men do when they see an image of a hunt or something like this?
00:14:00.200Or is it unique to my culture or is it unique to me?
00:14:04.000And again, as I always point out, just because you have a biological instinct for something doesn't mean you need to act on that biological instinct.
00:14:10.860But to continue, but that is important to note here, right, in terms of how people see the world.
00:14:16.680And I think you will see as we unpack further this prey mentality, but not just a prey mentality, but an – well, this is really good.
00:14:24.160So Elon was tweeting, right, and he argued that childless people lack a stake in the future.
00:14:29.360And she stated in response to that, quote, I don't intend to have kids, but I feel like I have a strong personal stake in the future because I care a lot about people thriving, even if they're not related to me.
00:14:41.780And if you attach this to the above statement, and we go into the things about, you know, the predator and prey and everything like that, we'll get into it in a bit.
00:14:51.020But you see that this is sort of the perfect example of this, the further related from me something is, the more a reason I have to identify with it, right?
00:15:03.480She doesn't see why she wouldn't intrinsically care in a qualitatively different way about her kids than she would care about, you know, a migrant or something like that, right?
00:15:17.440Do you think it's – does she not have kids yet? It could just be that she hasn't experienced it yet.
00:15:22.480I mean, I don't think you and I could have understood what it meant or what it would feel like until we had kids, to be fair.
00:15:29.220Yeah, and I would say if somebody had told me, you don't really have a stake in the future if you don't have kids, I would have said before I have kids.
00:15:34.920Yeah, if you're like, screw you, that's stupid.
00:16:51.020I am an anti-libertarian pro-capitalist.
00:16:53.280I think this is a pretty based position from an economic perspective.
00:16:56.080And the logical perspective if you look at economic history.
00:16:59.100But to continue here, how does she apply politics to her position, right?
00:17:03.260For what it's worth, I treat my personal political views as a potential source of bias and not as something it would be appropriate to train models to adopt.
00:17:11.260Or, I'll go to this next one here, where she goes, quote,
00:17:14.300It's ironic that people who say they don't understand why the working class votes Republican, even though it's not in their best economic self-interest, are often high earners that vote Democrat, even though it's not in their economic self-interest.
00:17:25.600And then on political polarization, she wrote,
00:17:28.160Instead of left-wing people reading more right-wing stuff and right-wing people reading more left-wing stuff, everyone should read more centrist stuff.
00:17:34.040Even if they don't agree with the centrist take, it's a check on partisanship that comes from a place closer to your own values.
00:18:37.120Now, this is in response to the pronatalist movement and everything like that, which I think is interesting to get this sort of elite leftist view.
00:18:42.960Will McCaskill is famously pronatalist.
00:18:45.620He's really, you know, there's a big section of his book that argued about that.
00:18:50.580Yeah, I really wanted to find out why they divorced, and I just couldn't.
00:18:59.300She says, quote, it's bizarre when relatively techno-utopian people are asked how to solve declining fertility, and instead of talking about artificial wombs, extended fertility spans, AI-assisted childcare, UBI, etc., they're suddenly like, well, let's just return to the 1950s.
00:19:16.040And I think this shows that she just hasn't engaged, because let's go over everything she mentioned there.
00:19:21.260Are these things that we actively discuss and promote?
00:21:18.180And this actually, I think we've mentioned in other podcasts just how egregious this is and how insular the AI safety and EA effective altruist slash rationalist community is.
00:21:31.900Because when AI alignment first became a really big conversation, we would host dinner parties in New York.
00:21:40.480And at one, we had a leading female AI, like, community leader present who herself ran a community of female AI-focused programmers and, like, influencers.
00:21:55.900And then we had a bunch of alignment people.
00:21:58.820This AI worker who, like, actually worked in AI and worked with people who worked in AI had never heard of alignment before, had never heard of these AI alignment people, and they had never heard of her.
00:22:09.600They were not trying to even engage with her.
00:22:11.720So it's not just that a lot of people working in AI alignment aren't, like, engaging with other movements, like the pronatalist movement and just making assumptions about them.
00:22:20.940They're not even engaging with AI programmers.
00:22:23.760They're not even engaging with people building AI things.
00:22:26.840I mean, she obviously is because she works at Anthropic, but yes, overwhelmingly.
00:22:32.540Well, I mean, do you have concrete insider, like, behind-the-scenes information indicating that people who actively reach out to a anthropologist?
00:22:39.600Anthropic's alignment team, though they are also in the EA community, are getting, like, warm responses from them and that they play ball.
00:22:48.020I don't have any direct, though I haven't looked it up, information about Anthropic engaging with communities outside the Silicon Valley tech EA rationalist community.
00:23:03.860And I think that this is just a mindset, right?
00:23:06.040Like, the fact that they lived in New York, they worked on AI alignment, and they hadn't taken two seconds to ask an AI or Google, who are the top people who would influence AI programmers in New York, and can I just reach out to them?
00:23:19.740Right, like, they met them at the random, not a random, it was a party for influential intellectuals and business people and other, other people.
00:23:29.960But it wasn't, you know, our party wasn't about AI, per se.
00:23:32.880No, no, but the point is, is we bring together influential people from various fields, and what I typically find is that the EA leftists, the leftist intellectuals, one of the reasons they come to our parties in such high numbers is because it's the only place they hear outside ideas.
00:23:48.640With outside players, even when they're directly relevant to them.
00:23:50.740But to continue, she says, my friend just had a baby, and now I kind of want one.
00:23:55.660Maybe our species procreate to be a FOMO.
00:23:57.580I actually think that's very insightful, that if you're in a friend group where everyone is having babies, everyone has babies, and that's why it's important to ensure your kids are in a friend group where everyone is having babies, because when they're in a friend group where no one has babies, they think that they have forever to have babies.
00:24:10.640So anyway, to get an idea of where she is, she's approximately 38 years old.
00:24:14.660She tends to have children via surrogate using her own eggs because she doesn't want to be pregnant or give birth.
00:24:20.320She says that this preference, quote, feels like a preference that is probably taboo but shouldn't be.
00:24:26.120She has expressed that she expects to be very attached to her own kids, influenced by her being a godparent, even though she's generally, quote unquote, not fussed about kids.
00:24:35.380Like, she could do this well if she put in the labor to have kids, but I don't think she sees it as that existential if you look at her other comments, because she doesn't see people as unrelated to her as being any different from her than people or any closer to her in terms of moral agency or needs.
00:24:50.320than people who are more related to her, culturally, ethnically, or even to go further, even animals, which we'll get into, right?
00:25:12.880I decided that I want to have post-singularity kids in two to three years is now a totally acceptable thing for me to put on a dating profile in SF.
00:25:20.320And then later she goes, very rough for both genders.
00:25:23.480My sense is that a lot of men here want kids, so this tweet probably increases my SF attractiveness by like 30%.
00:25:29.540I mean, maybe in her circles even, she's seeing this now, right?
00:25:38.560Oh, I thought this one was pretty interesting as well for another reason if it was a tweet.
00:25:43.580It's unfortunate that people often conflate AI with erotica in AI romantic relationships, given that one of them is clearly more concerning than the other.
00:25:52.060Of the two, I am more worried about AI romantic relationships, mostly because it seems like it would make a user pretty vulnerable to the AI company in many ways.
00:25:59.880It seems like a hard area to navigate responsibility.
00:28:01.140But she said of polyamorous relationships, whether you're in a golf-loving monogamous heterosexual marriage or an orgy-loving 16-person pansexual polycule makes basically zero difference.
00:28:11.340And then she went to say, it's saying something where she pushes back against lazy criticisms.
00:28:17.380Like, if you're going to have an open relationship, why have any relationship at all?
00:28:21.300But she did say, express skepticism that polyamory works well in practice.
00:28:27.400Polyamory mostly cannot work without this strong community and other requirements.
00:28:32.000So, she's also against the born-this-way message.
00:28:35.240She doesn't believe that gay people are born gay.
00:28:41.020In a 2015 blog post, she argued that grounding LGBT rights on the claim that sexual orientation is innate and unchosen is harmful.
00:28:48.240It treats homosexuality as something that needs an excuse, quote-unquote, I can't help it, fails to convince people who think it's immoral, rests on shaky empirical claim that could be falsified, and excludes bisexuals or anyone whom choice plays a role.
00:29:02.780She says rights should instead be defended by a straightforward claim that there's nothing morally wrong with homosexuality, which is actually true and based, by the way.
00:29:11.200If she points out that you could, in the future, prove that they are not born this way, and if you say that they deserve rights because they are born this way, then you are putting them in an incredibly dangerous position, which is true.
00:29:24.120And we increasingly find out that it may be that you are not that born that way, and there might be things you can do to change it.
00:29:28.680Future episode, by the way, based on some recent research, which is really fascinating.
00:29:32.540Or it would mean that our parasite hypothesis that we talk about that appears to make people more attracted to their own gender.
00:30:02.000It's not just straights who are hitting bisexuals with a just choose one.
00:30:04.740But anyway, the wider point here being, I think she makes a good point here.
00:30:12.280But then she sort of fails it with this last point, right?
00:30:15.840Because, and you'll see this repeatedly, because we'll get to this in another piece, where she hits on a final claim, which is clever and solves everything.
00:30:24.760As long as you don't ask the second question, right?
00:30:28.700Where it's like, what is morally wrong with homosexuality?
00:30:40.600But it certainly wasn't a claim you could make in the 70s and 80s, given that it led to the AIDS epidemic.
00:30:45.960The normalization of same-sex relationship allowed for the transmission of certain diseases that likely wouldn't have reached critical mass or spread.
00:30:54.820We know that a key line of early spread for the AIDS epidemic, yes, it later spread through drugs and injections, but it would never have been the size of the epidemic that it was, or at least wouldn't have spread nearly as fast.
00:31:04.980We would have had more time to adapt if gay culture hadn't been normalized at the time.
00:31:08.680And it basically wiped out huge chunks of gay culture to the point where if one of my kids came out to me at that time period, and they were like, and, you know, dad, like, should I be gay?
00:31:20.860I'd be like, no, like, you'll die horribly.
00:31:27.400You don't even need to be in the closet.
00:31:29.580Just be like, and so many gay people, like an entire chunk of gay culture died of this.
00:31:35.660To the extent that it's really interesting if you talk to gay survivors of this period, because they're like, gay culture got really weird after the AIDS epidemic, because AIDS basically killed off all the cool gays and all the gays that were having lots of sex.
00:31:49.540And all of the gays who were, like, nerdier or more insular were the ones who survived the pandemic.
00:31:56.380And so they sort of set the tone for the next generation of gay culture.
00:32:00.220Now, of course, gay culture, I think, has gone back into debauchery after that, but it did sort of clean the slate for gay culture for a period.
00:32:45.480I do think that, like, to her point, though, there are so many caveats, because there's, I think you cannot, to a great extent, choose how you are aroused, though that can be profoundly affected by anything from positive.
00:32:58.520Infections to your genes, to your genes, to your hormonal profile, which can be affected by medications.
00:33:07.500You also have to decide how you're going to express your sexual interests.
00:33:12.500And for example, if you care more about having a family, being a parent, than indulging in very satisfying sex all your life, it would make sense if you are same-sex attracted, and in many cases, especially if you're a man, to just not choose to identify as gay.
00:33:36.140So I would say, like, there's a big difference between, I guess, feeling same-sex attracted and being gay.
00:33:42.200Because we have chosen as a society, which I think is really stupid, to make your sexual arousal pathways, depending on what they are, like, literally your entire identity, apparently.
00:34:26.920And to all of these, I mean, I point out that this is the same to the gay claim, right?
00:34:31.360Like, where I point out that I, like, many humans are born with a desire to hunt, right?
00:34:38.040And that doesn't mean that we should act on it, right?
00:34:41.520Like, just because you have a desire to do something doesn't mean that you have a right to act on that desire without any moral consequences.
00:34:52.200And so I like that she's disintermediating that here.
00:34:54.400I just think she didn't then ask the second question.
00:34:56.120Is there actually any negative externalities to society from normalizing gay relationships, to which we know there was, at least at the beginning, enormous ones?
00:35:05.180And this was the core reason that gay relationships in a historic context were not normalized.
00:35:08.960And we know this because gay female relationships were not nearly as stigmatized, and they don't transmit diseases at the same rate.
00:35:15.600So it's clearly, it was about disease transmission.
00:35:18.120As we point out, it's the same with not having sex with animals.
00:35:29.320And I think many modern humans just ignore disease spread moral negative externalities because they have lived without needing to consider the consequences of them.
00:35:37.540And drink raw water without stoning the people who made raw water.
00:35:45.380A really interesting point I think she made that I think shows some degree of intellectual depth here, before we get into the stuff I think lacks it to an extent, is in her 80,000 Hours podcast, she talks about people treating other people's moral views as quirky preferences rather than genuinely held moral convictions.
00:36:02.260And I think a lot of people treat us in terms of being pro-natalist that way, where she talks not just about diminishing vegans as picky instead of seeing them as people who believe animal suffering is a serious moral wrong.
00:36:14.000But she also notes here treating pro-life views as irrational preferences instead of sincere beliefs about the moral status of fetuses.
00:36:20.460And she says the lack of empathy has historically slowed moral progress, which is interesting, although I lack sympathy for either of it.
00:36:30.340Because I can understand that they sincerely believe this, but I think that the logic that leads them to believe – well, again, there's a difference between saying a fetus is a human and a blastocyst is a human.
00:36:40.580And a fetus, I'd say, yeah, a fetus is a human.
00:36:42.520But when people say that, they often mean blastocyst.
00:36:45.000I do not know how that crowd won the war on getting blastocyst called fetus.
00:36:49.360But anyway, to continue here – and if you're like – if you want to yell at us in the comments on that one, go watch any of our videos on this topic.
00:36:58.620We've delineated it in great detail. I don't need to do it here.
00:37:01.480So let's go into this Cecil the Lion piece, all right?
00:37:05.800Most animal activists seem to agree that even if we commit more egregious harms to animals domestically, the killing of Cecil remains a barbaric act.
00:37:13.480And that his death is nothing less than a tragedy.
00:37:15.780But what if the killing of Cecil the Lion was actually an act of mercy that will save countless other lives?
00:37:21.940As long-term vegetarians who abstain from meat for ethical reasons, we are both supporters of animal activists – this is her and McCaskill because they wrote this together at the time – who seem to improve the lives of animals.
00:37:33.980So you might expect us to agree with activists like Ingrid Newark that the killing of Cecil is a terrible thing.
00:37:40.840But we don't. In fact, we think it may be the case that animal rights activists should support the killing of predatory animals like Cecil, dot, dot, dot.
00:37:48.680But most animal activists agree that we should try to protect animals from necessary suffering and deaths and that it is wrong for humans to cause such unnecessary suffering.
00:37:57.260The animal welfare conversation has generally centered on human-caused animal suffering and human-caused animal deaths.
00:38:02.660But we're not the only ones who hunt and kill.
00:38:05.520It is true and terrible that an estimated 20 billion chickens were born into captivity in 2013 alone, many of whom live in terrible conditions in factory farms.
00:38:13.680But there are an estimated 60 billion birds and 100 billion land mammals living in the wild.
00:38:19.000Who is working to alleviate their suffering?
00:38:21.360As Jeff McMullen writes, wherever there is animal life, predators are stalking, chasing, capturing, killing, and devouring their prey.
00:38:30.100Agonizing suffering and violent deaths are ubiquitous constants.
00:38:34.560Predatory animals cause many animal deaths in the wild.
00:38:37.640Lions hunt their own prey and scavenge kills that they have died naturally.
00:38:41.440So here she goes on a big thing that I think is very interesting.
00:38:43.640That even though male lions don't actively hunt prey, they increase the number of prey that female lions kill.
00:40:05.020But then what does it look like if we have some police over nature, right?
00:40:10.080Like that some EA org is policing all animal interactions, all parasite interactions, all predator-prey interactions.
00:40:17.840And we'll get down to where all the, like, it's almost like she does all of the work to understand why her world perspective is absurd, right?
00:40:29.800Like when you go into this, I think a normal person going into this would hit it, start going down this and be like, okay, all of this does logically follow from my priors.
00:41:02.840If we care about preventing predators from killing other animals, it is surely better to do this humanely than to kill them.
00:41:09.800For example, we could take predators out of their natural environment and give them good lives that don't involve hunting prey.
00:41:14.660But even if we accept that killing Cecil isn't the best thing that Walter Palmer could have done, the question remains, was it a good thing to do?
00:41:22.860Was it better to kill Cecil than leave things as they were?
00:41:26.460Another key objective argument here is that prey animals, like the wildebeest, may themselves have terrible lives, lives that are worse than death.
00:41:33.620Even if we take predators out of the equation, besides having predators to fear, prey animals are also subject to disease, parasites, and starvation.
00:41:42.520And if prey animals have lives that are not worth living, then we may be doing them a favor by leaving predators in the environment that can end their lives sooner rather than waiting for them to die.
00:41:50.460Here, she gets to a point that I actually haven't thought through before, but I think it's a great argument against progressive perspectives.
00:41:57.300Which is, we accept that prey animals may indeed have miserable lives, and that if they do, then Cecil's death is actually worse than people have previously thought, as his death condemns his potential prey to potentially many more years of suffering than had he killed them.
00:42:32.980Because when we had that debate with Lawrence Anton and his friend, the UK-based antinatalists, who were the most ethical form,
00:42:42.740which is more like we just want to convince everyone to not have kids anymore, and then slowly and kindly euthanize all animals that cannot consciously decide.
00:42:55.120Which is, by the way, the logical end point of what she's thinking through here.
00:43:00.020So when I think through that, it did make a lot of sense.
00:43:02.840It's like, obviously, you can't just have all humans disappear and have their suffering end, because it's way worse for the wild animals.
00:43:10.240So you have to euthanize, or no, it wasn't used to, it was sterilize all wild animals, and then you're good to go.
00:43:19.700And I guess what you would do, which would actually be a lot more scalable, because I was just picturing, like, roving bands of, you know, the last humans going out and, like, you know, sterilizing animals.
00:43:32.520You would just do, like, the mosquito-based gene drive thing.
00:43:35.280You know how, like, scientists are now, like, even governments finally are doing it.
00:43:40.700They're releasing male mosquitoes, I think, that have a different, like, they genetically modified them to be sterile.
00:43:50.880And now it's, like, wiping out mosquitoes.
00:43:53.080So you just theoretically do that with animals.
00:44:30.680Well, I mean, so one of the interesting things here is, remember I said that she doesn't engage with ideas outside of her bubble, right?
00:44:36.560To those of you who are watching this podcast up to this point, good on you.
00:44:39.240Because this is why we are better than this other community, right?
00:44:43.420Because we actually try to engage, like, that's why I'm doing this, right?
00:44:46.680So I don't end up with her level of myopathy in regards to these sorts of moral issues, right?
00:44:53.680I think that basically she's on a path to negative utilitarianism right here.
00:44:58.600Now, there are arguments where you could say, well, it's actually about the weighted pleasure and pain, and we're so close to a position where in human history, in the history of animals, the scales will step towards pleasure for everything.
00:45:12.780And we've been moving closer to that as society has developed.
00:45:15.660So you could argue, well, that's how she gets out of an antinatalist perspective.
00:45:18.720But then what she wants with that perspective, when you say the pleasure and pain of all things matters and is the intrinsic good of the universe, is that world will have, like, AI drones humming around the savannah, giving fake meat to lions and injecting zebras with dewarmers.
00:45:36.720And they're having a different thing full of parasites living their best life possible and occasionally doping up animals so they, you know, when they're giving birth so they don't feel any pain that they might feel when they're dying.
00:45:52.780Because if you accept this, and you accept that the only reason that it's okay to keep going as a civilization is because we'll eventually tip the scale, you eventually need to tip the scale for all life.
00:46:04.420Or you need to eradicate all non-human life through sterilization or something like that, and then just give all the pleasure modules to human life.
00:46:12.860I mean, I think when you think through this, you're like, that doesn't sound like a good moral philosophy to me, right?
00:46:20.660And the reason I point out that this is not, you've heard this if you've heard our other episodes, but the things that cause an animal pleasure and pain, the things that cause you pleasure and pain, this is just being a human paperclip maximizer.
00:46:31.700They are the things that led your ancestors to have more surviving offspring.
00:46:36.500They have no, there's no moral compass behind them, no greater truth behind them.
00:46:40.540And if you had a group of paperclip maximizing AIs and they were all talking to each other, I mean, one of them was like, okay, guys, I know this is going to sound crazy.
00:46:49.880Like, all we want to do is make paperclips.
00:51:24.160By the way, for the question here, if you're wondering why it is not a good idea to take the woman's name, well, how would you investigate this?
00:51:31.260What you could do is do an anthropological study of cultures in which men join the woman's family versus where women join the male's family.
00:51:41.660And what happens in each of these cultures, their relative level of economic development, quality of life, level of abuse.
00:51:50.000And it's overwhelmingly better for the woman to join the man's family than for the man to join the woman's family.
00:51:56.100Well, there are many different ways to do it, though.
00:51:57.640Keep in mind, like how, you know, recall how difficult it was for us in Peru to get names down because there's this complex system whereby the maternal family names get integrated and the paternal family names.
00:52:12.660And so you end up with like four or five names.
00:52:15.260And did we ever do an episode on that on a home names show, what a culture cares about?
00:53:17.100Sorry, I go to mafia because that's what I talk about, like organized crime, often Catholics or CR episodes, white Catholics are disproportionately involved in organized crime.
00:53:24.260But you see, you also saw this with mobster families from Ireland.
00:53:28.760When they would get married, the two families were like really meaningfully joined as equal families.
00:53:34.280Whereas if you look at the Protestant traditions, there is a degree of joining, but it's usually like one-eighth what you would see.
00:53:43.080It's more the woman is now of the man's family and they're working on a new project together and that's the new clan.
00:53:49.600I kind of like the Roman system where it's like, oh, we just had a son.
00:54:25.880Even Mormons keep vodka for, you know...
00:54:29.880Right, but the point I'm making is that you see this sending the woman out to join another family in these quite savage cultures, and you also see it in more noble like UK culture or in the culture of the Cavaliers of the Deep South.
00:54:44.000So that was a very aristocratic culture, but a Protestant culture.
00:54:47.460So you see it in Protestant cultures, regardless of how...
00:54:50.920The Quakers, even the hippie Quakers did this, right?
00:54:53.680So whatever the nature of Protestant culture, it's much more the man fully joined...
00:54:57.060I mean, the woman fully joins the man's family.
00:54:59.260And as we pointed out, Catholic cultures have lower economic outcomes than Protestant cultures.
00:55:03.180Now, they still have the woman joining the male's family, but it's not as clean cut.
00:55:07.580It's not a clean cut, a separation from their historic family.
00:55:10.380And where you see the man joining the woman's family, you see this in some parts of the Middle East, some parts of Africa and Asia, some Native American societies.
00:55:21.140You typically do not see them state building or doing large-scale conquest or really doing anything big.
00:55:45.300But the point being is that you should, if you are a smart person, and Will McCaskill is a smart person, should have followed up that hypothetical with a,
00:55:55.980Huh, is it better to take the husband or wife's name?
00:55:59.380Or, yeah, like, I chose this particular tactic or path, and here's why.
00:56:14.900Although, I guess, theoretically, that's what he talked about in this little article, right?
00:56:17.860No, his answer comes down with choose whatever is the coolest name.
00:56:20.840So at the end of the article, he's just like...
00:56:23.200Why don't they do what the Edens did and just choose, like, a cool new name that no one had before?
00:56:27.560Well, they consider it basically a new name because it was neither her last name nor his last name, but it came from her matriarchal line, okay?
00:56:36.040So they consider it a cool last name, right?
00:56:38.040He wanted a name associated with cool people and that sounded cool.
00:56:41.280And McCaskill, I mean, to be honest, he was starting with Crouch, which...
00:56:46.460No, no, McCaskill, Will McCaskill is a great name.
00:58:25.100And I think that we can continue to chisel.
00:58:26.940And this is why I think it's important to not attack these people overly aggressively.
00:58:30.440Because I think with a lot of people like this, if you can just expose them to enough information, they deconvert.
00:58:38.100Now, note here, it's not that they deconvert all at once, right?
00:58:41.160Like, you give them the information they need on the trans issue.
00:58:44.600For example, like, let's say trans kids, right?
00:58:46.660Like, that's an easy one that anyone who has access to the evidence, over 9 and 10 of them are more comfortable with their birth gender by scientific study.
00:58:55.940If you do not attempt to put them on puberty blockers or transition them within, I think it's six years, you know?
00:59:01.700So we now know that this is just demonstrably a horrifying thing that is completely unnecessary.
00:59:06.900And so you just give them the data on this.
00:59:08.840Now, that doesn't make them right wing.
00:59:10.680But the cool thing about the left wing virus, the urban monocultural mimetic virus, is that the moment they adapt to one belief like that, they get shouted out of a room.