Better never to have been?

(feel free to apply Betteridge's Law)
(also: note that I discuss nonexistence, and suicide in passing, and if you'd rather not read about that, maybe skip this post.)

I read this article, and I had one of those moments where I felt like I finally connected with someone, or some intellectual subculture, somewhere, that I didn't previously know existed. I had to get his book.

The book in question, Better Never To Have Been by David Benatar, tries to make the case that existence (as a human) is worse than nonexistence, and then explore what that means. I... kinda agree? So I read this book. Here are my thoughts.

Disclaimer

Before we go further, I think I should make it very clear that I'm not at all suicidal. This post is in no way a cry for help or anything. I'm trying to approach this question coldly and intellectually; it is no more about me, personally, committing suicide than a Trolley Problem discussion is about some urge to commit vehicular manslaughter. Besides, even if existence is bad, suicide is way worse. So, don't worry there.

(if you are in that place, though, maybe try the suicide prevention lifeline? https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/ or 1-800-273-8255. Also, I'm always willing to talk about depression and stuff, and non-judgmentally, and I won't jump to any conclusions or anything; I'm not a professional, but if you want to talk, you can reach out to me.)

Existence. Is It Bad?

I'll try to lay out Benatar's argument, and then my reaction.

Benatar's argument for why existence is bad

Basically, pains are worse than pleasures. Why are pains worse? Because the absence of pain is good, but the absence of pleasure isn't bad.

Imagine 2 scenarios: in scenario A, I exist, and in scenario B, I never existed. In scenario A, I have some pleasures and some pains; some good and some bad. In scenario B, I don't have any pain (that's good!) but I don't have any pleasures (well, who cares? I don't exist.) Therefore, scenario B will always be better.

He presents this as an axiom, referring to it as "asymmetry." He says, if you disagree, well, ok; but you probably agree. Here are 4 examples in which you probably agree:

1. If person X said, "I've got a rare genetic disease that would make my kids suffer a lot and die, and therefore I won't have kids," you'd say "yes, that makes sense." There's a responsibility to avoid theoretical beings' suffering. But there's no responsibility to provide theoretical beings' pleasure; if X said "eh, I've got a nice house and no genetic diseases; if I had kids, they would probably be pretty happy," you wouldn't say "X, you have a responsibility to create some happy kids."
2. He has a #2 example, but it sounds to me just like #1, so I'll skip it.
3. If person X said "I regret bringing my son into existence; he had a sad, miserable life," we would nod and say "hmm, bummer, but I agree." If X said "I regret not bringing my son into existence, he would have had a great life", we'd say "huh?" We can't really regret the absence of pleasure, but we can regret the presence of pain.
4. If I said "there are people on Mars, and they are suffering!" you would say "bummer for them!" If I said "no, just kidding, there are no people on Mars", you would say "whew! I am glad they're not suffering." If I said "there are no people on Jupiter, and therefore they're not enjoying their lives" you'd say "well, ok, I don't care." This shows, again, we regret present suffering, and we celebrate both present pleasure and absent suffering, but we don't regret absent pleasure.

Some other arguments he brings in too

Shiffrin's punch-for-money argument

We allow people to inflict pain in order to reduce future pain. (Say, you might have to pull out a tooth so that it doesn't cause more pain down the road.) But we don't allow people to inflict pain in order to cause pleasure, without permission. Imagine if I said "I'm super rich and I like punching people, so I'll punch someone, but then I'll pay them $1 million. I think the pain of the punch is not as bad as the pleasure of $1 million, so it's ok." But you still wouldn't say I'm ethical; it still feels wrong. Now, if I made a deal with you, and I proposed "let me punch you, and I'll give you $1m", and you said "OK, it's a deal", then this is ethical. But it wouldn't be ethical if I didn't ask your permission first.

When you bring a baby into the world, you're doing exactly that: you're saying "I'm going to cause some suffering and some pleasures for this baby by making it exist, and I think the pleasures outweigh the pains, but I couldn't ask it whether it wanted to do that deal," and therefore it's unethical.

(I made up this name; neither Benatar nor Shiffrin call this the "punch for money" argument :P)

Fehige's frustrationism argument

This guy says life is not ups and downs, it's just wants/needs that either get satisfied or frustrated. When we say we're happy, we mean "a need got satisfied"; when we're unhappy, we mean "a need is unmet." Therefore, if a person exists, they will be satisfied sometimes and frustrated sometimes; but if they never existed, boom, no frustration, so no problems!

This sounds like Buddhism to me too: life is dukkha; life is suffering/difficult. You can stop suffering by reducing your clinging to things.

The quick healing person

Imagine two scenarios: you get sick a lot, or you never get sick. And imagine you either have a superpower that you can heal quickly, or you don't have that power.

1. You get sick a lot, and you can heal quickly: this is fine.

2. You get sick a lot, and you can't heal quickly: ugh!

3. You don't get sick ever, and you can heal quickly: this is fine.

4. You don't get sick ever, and you can't heal quickly: this is fine.

Suffering in life = getting sick; pleasures = healing quickly. Cases 3 and 4 are analogous to never existing; cases 1 and 2 are like existing. Life's pains are like getting sick; life's pleasures are like healing.

This argument feels a lot like the frustrationist argument.

Life's worth is not just additive - and even if it were, it'd fall short.

You don't decide whether a life is good or bad by just adding up all the good parts and subtracting all the bad parts. I mean, do you? Is that how you experience life? Probably not. Even if you did, look back at your day; probably most of it was in the negative. And your negative/traumatic experiences loom way larger than your really good ones. I mean, maybe you're one of the rare people who have a positive sum; in that case, imagine that 90% of the world is negative - would you want to bring a baby into the world with a 90% chance they'd have a mostly-negative life?

My reaction

Benatar's argument isn't ironclad. I really wanted to be convinced, but his argument bottoms out to a bunch of "well, it sure seems like..." points.

The Asymmetry Point

He ... kinda just says this whole asymmetry thing, and I'm not sure if I'm on board. Maybe we should be regretting pleasures missed, or nonexistent people on Jupiter who can't experience the miracle of life. Or maybe the absence of pain is only "not bad", it's not "good" - after all, it's not happening to anyone.

But I feel you, David! Look at all this dukkha!

I mean, life is kinda a series of suffering! Isn't it? Sure, there are good things, but... having an ego is a solid trip to finding things unsatisfactory! I challenge anyone who disagrees with me here to spend more time with their own thoughts. It's kinda nuts in there.

However, the Remembering Mind

Daniel Kahneman points this out most clearly and popularly (quick article). We literally experience the world in two very separate ways, the Experiencing Mind and the Remembering Mind, and the Remembering Mind has some weird biases. For example, we'll go on a vacation during which we're kinda miserable, sick, sleep-deprived, over-touristed, and just crummy 95% of the time, but we'll only remember that great 5% and say it was a great trip.

By extension, say your whole life is that vacation. Benatar would say "Look at you! You're really mostly miserable!" But at any point he says that, your Remembering Mind would take over and says "nah, my life is pretty good. Look at (great thing X)! See, I'm happy."

Who's to say that that Remembering Mind is wrong?

Similarly, ok, I've got low-grade chronic depression, so I can kind of see life as being a constant struggle/frustrated desire/suffering/dukkha. But if I asked 100 people, probably 90 would say "nah, my life is pretty good." Even if it's not their experiencing mind talking, who am I to tell them they're wrong?

So, all in all, I'm not really any more convinced that existing is bad for everyone.

I mean, I think it'd be better if I hadn't existed. (refer again, if you like, to the above disclaimer about how I'm not suicidal.) I don't have high confidence in that, though; I'd guess that the net Goodness of my existing is a normal distribution centered at -0.1, with a standard deviation of 1. So, I could easily be wrong; ask me again in 10 years.

Regardless of whether I think it'd be better if I hadn't existed, I don't think I've learned anything about whether other people would be happier if they never existed. I imagine a very happy, fulfilled person reading this book and saying "meh, I disagree on your premise, it sure doesn't feel right to me," and I don't have a ton of great ammo to convince them.

Some easier side points that Benatar and I agree on

Suicide is bad

As bad as existing is, suicide just makes things worse! It's probably really painful, and it sucks a lot for everyone around you. So, Benatar argues that you shouldn't create more kids, but given that you already exist, you'll cause more suffering by killing yourself than if you just let yourself live normally, so don't kill yourself. I agree on this.

It's not just dumb pleasure and pain here

Not just talking about ice cream vs. electric shocks. Whenever I say "pleasure", replace it with whatever you think is actually good, like falling in love or enjoying a sunset or being one in ecstatic union with your deity of choice or something. Whenever I say "pain", replace it with a terrible breakup or losing a loved one or whatever else is actually painful. Related:

There's no "meaning" that you can jump to to get out of this one

Well, I mean, maybe there is; if you're convinced that Jesus is God and that makes your life meaningful, don't let me talk you out of it. Or if you think you exist for the glory of Allah, or you're just part of Vishnu's plan, or you really get meaning from your Shinto deities, great! But some of us aren't so lucky. And if you're not, either, then it's kind of a dodge to say "well, life maybe isn't pleasant, but it's meaningful." Define your meaning, and tell me how that makes life worthwhile, and then we can get somewhere.

Anti-natalism (Benatar's belief) does neatly solve the Repugnant Conclusion

Derek Parfit talks about the Repugnant Conclusion, which goes something like this: Say you have 10 people on Earth, and they are all living great lives; 100 happiness points each. If we want to maximize total happiness, then you'd say surely it is better to have 11 people with 99 happiness points: 99*11=1089 happiness points total, instead of 1000. And therefore, 15 people with 98 happiness points each would be better still. How about 1 million people with 10 happiness points? That's 10 million total happiness! or, 1 billion people, each with 0.1 happiness - that's 100 million total happiness!

But I can't imagine the world with a billion people, each of them living lives that are barely worth living, is better than the world where 10 people live 100-point great lives. But, if you're a strict "maximize total happiness" utilitarian, the math works out. Therefore, "the 1 billion people world is better" is the repugnant conclusion.

If you instead look at every life as some amount of negative, it works out great. A very good life is maybe only -0.1 points; a -100 point life would be very bad indeed. Therefore, you want to decrease total misery, not increase happiness, and the mathy conclusions fit with our intuitions.

If you agree that existence is bad, it opens up a ton more questions

Should you have kids? Should you abort them, if you're pregnant? Should we as a species become extinct, and how should we do so? These are all very interesting; I didn't really care about these chapters because I wasn't convinced by the base argument.

I'm frustrated about the typography in Blogger

I feel like I have a pretty good outline of ideas, but their hierarchy won't come across in the published post, because of relative sizes of headings or something. Eh, Benatar didn't say this, but he would.

One other side point Benatar and I disagree on

He makes a point of saying "I'm going to use 'him' for the generic singular third person pronoun." Whatever, dude. You and the Jesuits both. Language moves on, you can use singular "they" now, it's way easier. That point aside, though, I found him a pretty thoughtful and generous writer, which I appreciate.

Giving money to people and places

Subtitle: I've probably explained all this already but money has such an effect on our world that I feel compelled to get my thoughts down again.

My relationship to money has changed over the last 5 years. I used to think "I should save money, because you never know. But I ideally want to get to a point where I'm donating about half my after-expenses money, because as a Richman in a Richcountry, we can do so much good just by tossing some money somewhere."

Now I've got a family (of two, currently, but growing at some point) so my priorities have changed: I got more selfish. I'm also in the most insane expensive city in the world.

Philosophy interlude:

I think everyone should have the opportunity to get at least 4/5 of the Maslow pyramid. Maybe all 5. Maybe all 5 plus the bonus 1! (from wikipedia I learn that there's a 6th stage, "self-transcendent needs.") For a life to be neutral, you've got to get all 5; for a life to be beneficial to the world, you've got to get self-transcendent needs too. (... or something? I don't know, but it feels about right for now.)

Anyway, so it feels immoral to bring kids in the world if I can't give them a fair chance to get to at least 4, 5, or 6 Maslow needs. In the US, that seems to mean college. (Not that it's impossible for anyone to satisfy all their needs without college, but N% of people can't satisfy all their needs without college. And N here is increasing.) So, ok, say we have 2 kids, that's $250k each = $500k. (Right now this'll just barely still pay for any school; in 20 years maybe only state schools. But it at least gives them a chance.)
End philosophy interlude! Back to practical things, like:

Owning a home

It seems financially smart, at some point. Like say a genie told me "Here's $1 million, but you must give me $1 million after you die." Great! We buy a house, and that gives me so much free money, in terms of rent we don't have to pay over the years. Say we were renting a 2br for $5k/month - that's $60k/year. If we have this magic house, it's $6k for property taxes, plus maybe another $10k for repairs and stuff and $9k for insurance - saving $35k/year, or $1.05M over 30 years. Just because we happen to have a (temporary) magic genie bag of money!
Plus, seems a good way to get fixed costs down so I can someday decide I'm going to travel for a year or something.
(Now, owning for owning's sake is another story; in that case, it's worth it if you can get all the variables right. But owning if you had a magic genie money bag, that seems smart.)

Anyway, so:
$500k for 2 kids' college
$200k for other costs of raising 2 kids (I have no idea how much this costs)
$1.3M for a house (to make numbers add up nice):
We kinda need to make $2M (if we want to live in SF/Oakland long term).

My relationship to money now:

Is more complicated? I still want to help abstract people with malaria bed nets, but not at the cost of me, Tati, or our own (eventual) kids. And, given the long-term windfall that buying a house would get us, it seems like there'll be more return, even, if I were to sell a house when I get old and donate the profits.

And life is uncertain enough, especially in the US, that having a guaranteed house seems worthwhile, so we don't get super poor and dead when we get cancer or hit by a car.

So instead of "I'll throw half my money at anything" (which I never did end up doing, anyway), now it's "I will save most of my money. But I have disposable income, and I want to donate some of it to vague good things, so I guess I've got to choose a reasonable amount and spend it kind of wisely." It seems good to have a plan?

What I mean by "giving money", and my current plan

I guess I think about this as "giving money to places without expecting a concrete thing in return." Here's what I'm thinking for a provisional split:
Bed nets/GiveWell: 20%
Patreon: 20%
Local orgs like SF Bike Coalition, SF YIMBY, SF HAC: 4%
Democrat campaigns nationwide (like the Great Slate): 8%
Friends' things: 20% (the social benefit of "you're raising money for ____! here's $x!" feels really good, and their thing probably does some good as well.)
Planned Parenthood: 4%
ACLU: 4%
News (currently Economist and NYT): 4%
TBD: 16% (for whatever comes up during the year; I can always dump it into bed nets in December if nothing new arises)

Shouldn't I be doing all Givewell?

Maybe! They are just trying to do the most good in the world. $2000 saves a life, vs becomes 0.01% of some democrat's war chest or like one meal for a bunch of artists I like (who will probably survive anyway).

However, there's one unknowable huge variable: maybe a 0.01% chance of electing one rando democrat is actually better than saving a life. Like, if you could buy a 0.001% chance of ICE not manhunting 100000 immigrants... well, that nets EV=1 life not ruined. Or the increased chance of building more housing leads to 3 fewer homeless people which leads to 1 life saved. I guess I'm just diversifying my portfolio of possible benefits.

Should I split out the arts and friends' things?

Maybe. Like, I give to Patreon selfishly. I do want to live in a world where a lot of artists make a living, but I especially want the ones I support to make a living. That feels more like "me buying things I like" than "me giving away money."

Also, the social benefit of friends' things is pretty selfish. Not that it's bad: helps me build social capital, and maybe spending $20 on a meaningful relationship is worth more than $20 to ACLU. Again, we've all got to get our Maslow levels.

Arguably the news things should go in the "arts" category, but... well, I just want to support having a real press, I don't actually read them that much.

Really, all of these lie on a spectrum. From most selfish to most altruistic:
1. General stuff I buy
2. Patreon
3. Friends' things

4. News

5. Local orgs

6. Democrat campaigns, ACLU, PP

7. Bed nets/Givewell

Anything that's in the "general stuff I buy" camp is easy to evaluate: if I want it more than I want to lose that money, I buy it.

So I guess this post should actually be called:

"how I'm thinking about spending money on stuff that's not 100% selfish."

How do I implement this?

I think, do it for a year, and try to see how it goes. If I find myself wanting to give other money that's not 100% selfish, I should still do it, and then record it, and recalibrate after a year. But, actually tracking that (like tracking anything) is tricky, and I'd be interested if any of you have any input.

(Also, if you have another way you've thought about this whole concept.)

Edit: this post by Holden Karnofsky at Open Phil is relevant and says what I want to say in fewer words; I'm trying to diversify among different world views.

Buying concert tickets for a megastar in 2018

(the megastar being David Byrne.)

Tour's coming to Oakland and San Jose. Oakland's easy to get to, San Jose a bit farther. I hear of the show going on sale on Friday, so I make a note to buy tickets on Friday. Sure enough, I log on on Friday at 12pm and Oakland's sold out. Turns out they added a second show in Oakland, and it instantly sold out too.

Uff. So I try to buy tickets for the San Jose, and the company selling tickets to that one ("AXS") is super broken on the critical parts of "sign in" and "create an account."

So I go on Stubhub and end up paying about double sticker price.

This is weird. It's weird that Ticketmaster can't filter bots. (I guess it's because they don't have any incentive to.) But given that all the tickets went so fast, I suppose they were priced below the "fair" market price... so getting them to Stubhub or another similar auction mechanism is more economically efficient. But it does feel unfair for everything to be determined by money, when money is so unequally held. But... I don't really mind a system whose biggest failing is that some people can't afford concert tickets.

Like, why not just release tickets onto Stubhub first?  Would it be a PR issue? I guess it might look bad, like money-grubbing or something, but I'm not sure why. I mean, we already have a system where rich people can buy their way in, and poor people can't; the only thing that our current system does is make half that money go to a little industry of Ticketmaster bots instead of to the artist (or venue, or anyone who's creating real value here).

Black Mirror S04, I have issues

(Spoilers for season 4 all over the place!)

I watch Black Mirror for a couple reasons. I don't really need it to get depressed; I can do that easily enough. (It certainly helps though.) I mostly want to:
1. enjoy some good entertainment
2. think about something new
3. get some tropes I can use to talk about future problems

And Season 4 only gave me #1.

"But Dan, it's still giving me all sorts of weird takes on all sorts of futuristic-yet-everyday ideas" - no, this season's not; it's only giving you weird takes on one idea. That idea is: "what if we could interact with your brain as though it were a computer?"

To be fair, this is kinda maybe my favorite future idea. I really like thinking about this. Mostly because it opens you up to the kind of vast, sublime, terrifying futures inaccessible this side of the Great Old Ones. Also, it lets me have opinions, and because I have studied computers and also humans, I feel qualified to have opinions, even though I'm really not very qualified at all.

But they already did this idea, as completely as I think you need to, in White Christmas (that holiday special with Jon Hamm). The lesson you will hopefully learn from that episode: if you could access your brain as you do a computer, it is effing incredibly horrifying because you can basically torture them forever.

This season, we've got: (for serious, spoilers)
- USS Callister. In which some nerdo creates a terrifying simulation in which he tortures some people forever (and he's a supergenius so he's thought of everything, except for the way that they get out of it.) Props, though, for: the scenes of the simulated people when the main guy isn't in the picture. That's an interesting side of things you wouldn't normally see.
- Arkangel. In which helicopter parenting by tapping into your kid's mind as if it is a computer is bad. This may be my pick for weakest of the bunch, because the mom is pretty unsympathetic. (Maybe because I've never been a parent? I dunno.)
- Crocodile. In which memory technology works like incredible magic. Surprisingly, brains=computers makes things scary and weird. And... guinea pigs have memory too? Upside: felt relatively un-normative. And the scenery! Holy cow!
- Hang the DJ. Ok, this one was really good. Surprise: they simulate your consciousness as if your brain was a computer! But the twist at the end is unexpected and great, and neatly answers your questions about "wait but don't they like... go to work?" And the bit where revealing the time they have together makes it shrink was really cool; by learning that information, he does indeed change that information.
- Metalhead. As an episode of any other TV show, I'd think "cool sci-fi action movie." As it's Black Mirror, I was disappointed, because it didn't make me think much at all. Plus, the twist of "it was a teddy bear!" just seemed dumb. Upside: the ideas of ways to fight the dog (throw candies at it all night, send the tracker down a river, paint) were pretty clever.
- The Black Museum. I do want to see more of the first vignette, "the pain doctor." That offers at least a slightly different take on "brains = computers", and its interesting and weird consequences. The second one (monkey*) and third one (guy getting electrocuted repeatedly) less so. Surprise: reproducing your consciousness out of a body is pretty bad because it leads to torture forever. Also, by killing Rolo Haynes, our hero does stop one crime - but 99% of the crime is still out there, in the thousands of consciousnesses trapped in the little "souvenirs" he's distributed! And in taking a souvenir herself, she's participating in the endlessly cruel infinity we've set up!
*this story especially can go take a hike, because it's based on "we use 40% of our brains." whoever wrote that one: go sit in the corner and think about what you've done.

So, 5 about brains=computers, and one about those Boston Dynamics robot dogs. Frustrating. Especially because brains=computers is a heckofa long time off. I guess that's why I was so into episodes like "Shut up and dance" (and even "The national anthem"); it could happen tomorrow. Or "Hated in the nation" and especially "White Christmas", which gave us a lot of new things to think about. I want to end an episode and go "huh, I didn't imagine (technology x) would feel like that when it happened."

(OTOH, there were some I could skip in earlier seasons too: Nosedive, 15M Merits, Be Right Back. Ok, maybe this season was fine, and I'm just holding this show to too high a standard.)

Thinking about reclaiming a chunk of brain

Three famous, influential, VC/tech guys:
Sam Altman: this
Anil Dash: this
Benedict Evans: this
... and it devolves from there.

A weird thing about this is that I now feel like I have to have a fully formed opinion on this debate*, just from having read it. But like, they're all talking past each other. It's like someone saying "we need GPS so we can tell where our car is, and how fast it's going!" and someone else saying "but quantum uncertainty; you can never know the location and velocity of anything!"

This kind of thing is... a lot of discussions of real, important issues online. So maybe I'd like to disengage from it a bit.

One objection from one part of my mind: "disengaging is reckless! you're just abandoning the world to its sordid fate!" I don't think so. Choosing not to argue online doesn't mean choosing not to do anything. In fact, I can probably do *more* if I spend less time thinking about online arguments.

(*using the term "debate" loosely. for the record: my opinion is: Anil's right, Sam's also right (his later post also helps), Benedict's question was asinine, Anil's response to it is also asinine, and I can't really blame Anil but if you're gonna argue online you kinda gotta be Superjesus, which nobody involved is.)

Article about millennials and finance sticking in my mind

Specifically this one: "Millennials are screwed"

I don't have a ton to add, and it's got the annoying scrolly whizbangs, but it's a pretty decent look at the... four?... pronged assault on "the younger generation" that I think the "older generation" doesn't get:

1. work is unstable. it's never a 40-year 9-to-5. At best, it's a 9-to-5 for a few years with a decent company. Unemployment is a never-ending abyss that we're always one step away from, whenever our dear employer decides we're disposable. And we sure don't have unions to negotiate for us.

2. healthcare is insane; ok, y'all old people kinda know this. But you don't feel it if you've still got (job-sponsored) insurance. Otherwise, we mostly just go without, and hope we never get sick. Again, we're one step away (one illness, one car accident, one random thing) from the abyss of infinite hospital debt.

3. housing is insane; y'all have no idea about this, and you're making it worse. The places with the jobs have no houses, thanks to years of zoning and NIMBYism. So if we're in the lucky few that can make it to a job, we've got to rent an overpriced studio in a crowded market. And hope you don't tick off the landlord, or you're a "problem tenant" (or worse, evicted!) and who would ever rent to you again?

4. civic disenfranchisement: you might think "well, vote!" I mean, we're trying. But we're dealing with gerrymandering and voter suppression on one hand, and just the lack of time to get more involved on the other. Housing decisions, for one, are often made with minimal public comment periods at 2-4pm on Wednesdays. Sorry, we're busy either hustling at our jobs or hustling to find a job.

I say all this as one of the lucky few who's making it in this economy. (Getting a fancy degree in Computer Science helps.) All of the above are much easier for me than for most. But... can we make things better for everyone else?

(I'm not sure what I'm trying to do by writing this. Like, ideally convince a boomer to help with these things? and stop figuring we can just cut taxes on the rich and trickle-down will fix any of this? More likely, I'm just recording my feelings for later consumption. And/or, getting this on paper so I can stop thinking about it for now. But more on that later.)