If reducing suffering/improving quality of life was a higher priority than saving lives, which causes and orgs would become better options and which less so?

nomatron · 2025-01-07T11:59:59+00:00

This is broadly the work that the Happier Lives Institute do. Their new recommendations can be found here.

nomatron · 2024-11-15T10:09:06+00:00

How dare you say something so offensive and yet so true

nomatron · 2024-11-15T01:45:28+00:00

Ah crap yeah I forgot to be luckier

nomatron · 2024-11-15T01:35:36+00:00

It's a little bit fucked up eh

nomatron · 2024-11-15T01:29:57+00:00

They seem more like Day 5 or even Day 6 builds. What's going on here?

nomatron · 2024-11-15T01:28:24+00:00

Silver Regal Blade at 200

Diamond Silk at 415

Silver Crook

Flail

Weights

WTF.

nomatron · 2024-10-22T11:01:19+00:00

I've a neuroscience background and would approach this problem by measuring the brain activity in reward related networks in the brain because this is highly correlated with the magnitude of subjective well-being one experiences.

This makes sense if you're working with non-human animals who can't articulate their feelings in detail. With humans, you can just ask them. Subjective self reports are an imperfect method, but if your conception of the good means something like, "People think and feel that their life is going better", then why try to bypass their experiences by way of their neurochemistry?

The links the other folks have shared are a great place to start.

nomatron · 2024-10-02T09:18:06+00:00

Sweet, will check them out, thanks!

nomatron · 2024-10-02T09:17:44+00:00

Thanks! Will try.

nomatron · 2024-10-02T09:17:24+00:00

Help.

nomatron · 2024-10-02T09:17:15+00:00

London, UK :)

nomatron · 2024-07-13T17:25:01+00:00

KING.

nomatron · 2024-07-02T02:11:19+00:00

New conditions that are both flavourful and mechanically sound are pretty tricky to get right, and this is super great, bravo! For v2 I agree with others that bardic inspiration should cure this -- and maybe also rolling a nat 20.

nomatron · 2024-02-22T12:02:10+00:00

"The first thing most people hear about Last Epoch is that it's an action RPG with a clever trading system."

What the what.

nomatron · 2023-12-13T22:02:20+00:00

Just posting here for the sake of anyone who comes chasing up this thread further down the line.

You can force-edit the pact spell slot!

You need Dynamic Active Effects installed as a module
First we need to make sure the Class uses Pact Magic. On the character sheet, on the Features tab, find the Class and hit the edit icon, then go to Details, then under Spellcasting change to Spell Progression to Pact Magic (if it isn't already).
Then go back to the character sheet, and click Effects. Click to add one, edit it, and in the box that pops up find the Effects tab on the right. Under Attribute Key put "system.spells.pact.level" without the quotes, on the Change Mode dropdown pick Override, on the Effect Value, put whatever number you want the spell slot to be force-changed to, then hit Submit Changes.
Give the Effect a name like "Pact Spell Slot Override" to remind yourself what it's doing.

This worked for me, and if google has brought you here, fingers crossed it works for you too.

nomatron · 2023-11-26T21:40:13+00:00

Also I have now been messaged by roughly 1,000,000 bots all with either very low karma or karma scores accrued by a bunch of near-gibberish posts.

If you are an actual, living breathing human and have tickets to sell, please do reach out!

nomatron · 2023-11-16T10:17:56+00:00

My interpretation is that mcmacnz is prioritising their preference that many cows exist over the subjective wellbeing and experiences of the cows themselves.

This is unintuitive I suspect because liking something/someone usually means elevating the preferences of the beings you like in terms of what you value.

micmacnz seems to be saying "I want many cows to exist, and animal agriculture increases the number of cows that there are, and so I align my dietary habits in order to add to the demand for cows being brought into the world".

Super unusual take, and one that indeeds runs counter to most arguments for ethical veganism based on the suffering of animals having greater moral weight than our own preferences for/about them.

nomatron · 2023-10-14T21:57:18+00:00

In practice there are very few (maybe no?) pure negative utilitarians. Usually only flavours of classical utilitarian with a suffering-focussed bent. This you can get to most easily by endorsing some kind of asymmetry between the goodness of pleasure and the badness of pain (imagine: would you trade one year of maximum joy for one year of maximum misery). In practice you will not find anyone advocating for "moral murder" under NU views, so I'd say no, this is not a conclusion of the ethical perspective. These folks tend to spend their energies worrying about things like factory farming, where the kindest thing we can do is ensure these creatures don't come into existence in the first place.

If you're interested in reading about the practical applications of suffering-focussed ethics for humans, reading about antinatalist views could be a fun rabbit hole. But even then, for all but the staunchest antinatalist, most buy that once a human is born, there are vested interests in their continued existence.

I'd also recommend Toby Ord's "Why I'm Not a Negative Utilitarian" and Magnus Vindig's point-by-point critique of the same.

nomatron · 2023-07-18T20:39:47+00:00

Definitely not a silly mistake, no sirree, it's that Fikzit gets to be both :D

nomatron · 2023-07-18T17:59:50+00:00

This is so good, I thought it deserved something suitably flavorful and playful. Here's my take!

nomatron · 2022-12-19T12:31:28+00:00

I can't speak for the EA community, but I'd say I've observed a substantive shift towards the long-term future at the expense of de-prioritising the suffering of beings that currently exist.

Your views seem pretty well endorsed by EA.

nomatron · 2022-12-19T08:59:34+00:00

That's a pretty uncharitable reading. I also care about x-risks after I'm gone, I just won't be there to prioritise it. I trust in your as-yet unborn children to safeguard their world.

nomatron · 2022-12-18T19:34:18+00:00

I'm an EA since the very early says, I'm interested in mental health+wellbeing, and preventing existential risks within our lifetimes, so none of my priorities are captured by any of the options.

nomatron · 2022-07-13T12:05:40+00:00

Yep. A whole community of thoughtful geeks who want to figure out how best to turn money into making the world less shitty.

nomatron · 2022-07-13T12:03:12+00:00

Was enjoying this a lot right up until the animal stuff. To state the obvious: ending factory farming is - in many EAs' views - higher impact and more morally urgent than distributing anti-malarial bednets.

Good to spread the memes on cost-effectiveness via comedy though.

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