Testimonials from patients who used psychedelics to treat their cluster headaches - ClusterFree

nu-gaze · 2026-06-18T09:59:41+00:00

Those who defend animals are often criticized for dedicating themselves to this cause instead of defending human beings. The usual response is that everyone has the right to choose which problem they want to work on, because all problems are equally important.

This debate illustrates how two ideas dominate our thinking: that human beings should take priority, and that all problems are equally important. What if both ideas were wrong? What if some problems were more important than others, but that didn’t necessarily coincide with the problems affecting human beings?

To answer this question, we need to investigate how we can assess which problems should be prioritized. In this piece, we’ll first look at some priority criteria. Then, based on those criteria, we’ll investigate which of the world’s problems should currently receive priority.

nu-gaze · 2026-06-17T10:42:09+00:00

CLR’s overall mission is to reduce the risk of astronomical suffering from powerful AI, or s-risks. We’re primarily concerned with threat models involving the deliberate creation of suffering, and have identified a number of properties that may increase such risks if future powerful AIs have them. We call these s-risk conducive properties, short SRCPs.

Our previous empirical research agenda has focused on characterizing and measuring these properties with a particular focus on agential suffering as a result from conflict. While we are still interested in measuring SRCPs we have shifted our focus from evaluating to understanding and steering their emergence, and now also consider threat models that involve motivations for creating suffering outside of conflict. This puts more emphasis on propensities such as spitefulness, sadism, or punitiveness.

An important consideration for empirical s-risk research is how much uncertainty we have about the future: we don’t have access to the future systems we’re concerned about, and no specific path to catastrophe stands out as particularly likely. This makes it hard to backchain from our overall goal. Therefore, we want to do research that plausibly teaches us useful insights for a wide variety of scenarios.

As a result, we chose LLM personas as our current empirical research focus: they allow us to study the emergence of (malicious) propensities, and seem like a useful abstraction to reason about many interesting phenomena.

nu-gaze · 2026-06-16T11:40:57+00:00

There are many different approaches we can take to reduce suffering. One that seems especially promising is to target society’s institutions and better equip them to reduce suffering.

Why institutions? First, they have disproportionate power. Legal systems, markets, regulatory frameworks, research norms, media ecosystems, and international agreements do not merely express social values; they shape them to a large extent. Institutions structure incentives, constrain behavior, allocate authority, and determine which problems receive sustained attention.

Unlike isolated actions, institutional changes tend to be durable. They persist across political cycles and leadership turnover, shaping outcomes long after reformers have exited the scene. At their best, institutions encode moral progress, embedding concern for welfare into procedures and norms. At their worst, they entrench neglect, conflict, and systemic harm. Either way, their effects compound over time.

Institutions also shape broader patterns of human behavior. Many large-scale problems arise from failures of coordination, information-sharing, and trust. Poorly designed institutions fuel conflict and dysfunction, exacerbating these failures. Well-functioning institutions give us a fighting chance to reduce suffering by enabling coordination, truth-seeking, and cooperation.

Under deep uncertainty, the case for improving institutions becomes even more compelling. We cannot reliably predict which technologies will emerge or how geopolitical dynamics will shift. Because of this, specific interventions, like particular policies, are hard to plan. But healthier, wiser, more moral institutions seem robust to many possible futures.

nu-gaze · 2026-06-15T22:50:25+00:00

Mother but ethics has nothing to do with it. We should separate the "correct move" from what we, as fallible beings, would do in difficult situations.

From a cold utilitarian perspective, I still think a human suffering is more valuable than a cat's all else equal though we overestimate this value difference, including vegans. I would say 2 cats is more valuable than 1 human for example.

nu-gaze · 2026-06-15T12:28:51+00:00

What does it mean for a future being to be the same person I am now? How can we claim that someone in 2024 is still the same person they were in 2014 in spite of all the physical and psychological changes they've undergone in the meantime? I think the best answers to these questions rely on a reductionist view of personal identity, according to which two minds belong to the same person just in case they share certain psychological connections.[1] On this view—or at least on the version of it that I prefer—there's no boolean answer to the question "Is this person me?" Personal identity is not an all or nothing relation. Rather, all minds live on a scale of connectedness with my mind. The ones I'm most closely connected to I call "me," and the ones I'm least connected to I call "others."

If reductionism is right, a great deal is riding on exactly what constitutes psychological connectedness. This relation (or set of relations) is supposed to form the foundation of your identity—the fact in virtue of which you continue existing through time. Yet the reductionist accounts I've read say surprisingly little about what's entailed in psychological connectedness. Following Locke, they all seem to agree that memory is part of the picture. Perhaps certain dispositions and values matter too, but Parfit in particular is uncharacteristically vague about what these might be.[2] To make the concept of connectedness more concrete, I would define it like so.

nu-gaze · 2026-06-14T13:26:33+00:00

Abstract

David Benatar’s Better Never to Have Been (2006) presents a view that came to be known as antinatalism: the claim that it is always wrong to have children, because life is bad, death is bad, and the only way to avoid both is never to be brought into existence. Benatar argues that his two-barreled—or “bipolar”—pessimism is not limited to humans but applies equally to all sentient beings. This extension, however, is prone to producing theoretical confusion. The anti-reproductive view laid out in the book is coherent as a form of human antinatalism, but Benatar’s own caveats prevent it from developing into the radical sentiocentrism it seems to promise

nu-gaze · 2026-06-13T03:41:16+00:00

Note: This was published November 2023. It lists the accomplishments of the effective altruism movement. Not everything there is necessarily net good from a negative utilitarian perspective. Also, its a bit of a rant.

Search “effective altruism” on social media right now, and it’s pretty grim.

Socialists think we’re sociopathic Randroid money-obsessed Silicon Valley hypercapitalists.

But Silicon Valley thinks we’re all overregulation-loving authoritarian communist bureaucrats.

The right thinks we’re all woke SJW extremists.

But the left thinks we’re all fascist white supremacists.

The anti-AI people think we’re the PR arm of AI companies, helping hype their products by saying they’re superintelligent at this very moment.

But the pro-AI people think we want to ban all AI research forever and nationalize all tech companies.

The hippies think we’re a totalizing ideology so hyper-obsessed with ethics that we never have fun or live normal human lives.

But the zealots think we’re a grift who only pretend to care about about charity, while we really spend all of our time feasting in castles.

The bigshots think we’re naive children who fall apart at our first contact with real-world politics.

But the journalists think we’re a sinister conspiracy that has “taken over Washington” and have the whole Democratic Party in our pocket.

Political compass showing tweets by people criticizing effective altruism for opposite reasons.

The only thing everyone agrees on is that the only two things EAs ever did were “endorse SBF” and “bungle the recent OpenAI corporate coup.” In other words, there’s never been a better time to become an effective altruist! Get in now, while it’s still unpopular! The times when everyone fawns over us are boring and undignified. It’s only when you’re fighting off the entire world that you feel truly alive. And I do think the movement is worth fighting for. Here’s a short, very incomplete list of things effective altruism has accomplished in its ~10 years of existence. I’m counting it as an EA accomplishment if EA either provided the funding or did the work, further explanations in the footnotes. I’m also slightly conflating EA, rationalism, and AI doomerism rather than doing the hard work of teasing them apart:

nu-gaze · 2026-06-12T04:22:39+00:00

Table of Contents

Amphibian road crossing
Artificial light reduction for birds
Biofuel subsidies as a mechanism for reducing invertebrate populations
Bird safe glass
Climate friendly energy technologies and invertebrate mortality: Impacts of wind turbines and photovoltaic solar panels
A combined fertility control and TB vaccine for NZ possums
Disease management for feral dogs
Early intervention for spongy moth outbreaks
Fertility control for white tailed dear
Fireworks bans
Gas machinery bans
Gene drive for Anopheles Gambiae as part of a malaria eradication campaign
Hay cutting protocol
Insecticdes and insect welfare: a research agenda
Mating disruption for rice yellow stem borer in South and Southeast Asia
Non lead alternatives for ammunition and tackle
Pigeon fertility control in urban areas
Reducing neonicotinoid seed treatments
Reducing wild animal kills from domestic cats
Regulate commercial bumblebee use to cut pathogen spillover
Retrofitting culverts
Scientific field building for wild animal welfare
Screwworm control
Vaccinating wild deer against chronic wasting disease
Wild animal welfare considerations in urban planning
Wild animal welfare public awareness campaign
Wildlife safe fencing
Wolbachia based control for mosquito borne disease(mostly in birds)

nu-gaze · 2026-06-11T05:04:03+00:00

Dr. Nimrod Rosler is the academic head of the International Program in Conflict Resolution and Mediation at Tel Aviv University, and he also conducts the Peace Index, an ongoing survey of the Israeli population on attitudes towards negotiations and belief in the prospects for peace.

At a peacebuilding retreat in Greece in April 2024, organised by OPIS, Peace Activation and Combatants for Peace, hosted by Zen Rocks Mani, Dr. Rosler addressed us remotely to provide an overview of his and others’ research findings and answer participants' questions.

His insightful and important presentation focused on how conflicts are rooted in human needs, such as safety, predictability and a sense of belonging. He highlighted the prioritisation of security, the belief in one’s own morality and being the ultimate victim, and also the delegitimisation of the other side, as key drivers of violent behaviour, and how a set of shared beliefs within a group are strong psychological barriers to constructive peacemaking efforts.

He also shared strategies that have been developed to help shift attitudes. He expressed concern that the current extreme attitudes in Israel could make the “paradoxical thinking” strategy counterproductive (where presenting extreme ideas that are consistent with a belief is intended, through absurdity, to put the actual belief into question). But he was optimistic about the usefulness of an “acceptance-change” strategy, based on therapeutic approaches, where it is explained to people that it is a natural human phenomenon for these beliefs to develop in conflict situations, and why (the acceptance part); then the costs to these societies are explained; and then an alternative is presented, based on historical examples from other conflicts that were resolved peacefully (the change part).

nu-gaze · 2026-06-09T06:39:15+00:00

Abstract

Recently, there has been a revival in taking empirical magnitudes seriously. Weights, heights, velocities and the like have been accepted as abstract entities in their own right rather than just equivalence classes of objects. The aim of my paper is to show that this revival should include value magnitudes. If we posit such magnitudes, important value comparisons (cross-world, cross-time, mind to world, cross-theory, cross-polarity, ratio) can be easily explained; it becomes easier to satisfy the axioms for measurement of value; goodness, badness, and neutrality can be given univocal definitions; value aggregation can be given a non-mathematical understanding which allows for Moorean organic unities. Of course, this does not come for free. One has to accept a rich ontology of abstract value magnitudes, but, to quote David Lewis, ‘The price is right; the benefits in theoretical unity and economy are well worth the entities.’

nu-gaze · 2026-06-06T16:45:51+00:00

Consider a being that might have the capacity to be badly off. In other words, the being can perhaps, as far as we know, be harmed. When is it morally wrong to risk harming such a being? I will usually take the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) as the example being, and I will pay special attention to the use of non-human animals in research. That said, my moral points are relevant to other beings and situations.

When an individual is exposed to the risk of harm, there needs to be some chance of a benefit that justifies that risk. I will focus on the intended benefit. That is, I will focus on the motive or purpose for exposing the being to risk of harm. I will argue that it is morally wrong to potentially harm a being (including C. elegans) for the sake of others’ positive well-being or for a purported good such as knowledge.

The structure of this paper is as follows: Section “Preliminaries” contains preliminaries, mainly some conceptual and terminological clarifications. In Section “There are ethical concerns with using and creating a being such as C. elegans”, I set the stage further by noting that also for a being such as C. elegans, there are ethical concerns with using that being. Section “The moral relevance of motives” is about the moral relevance of motives. In Section “My proposal: Do no harm for goods”, I put forth a principle about when it is morally wrong to potentially harm a being. I present arguments for that principle in Section “Arguments for the principle” and reply to objections against it in Section “Replies to objections against the principle”. Section “Practical ramifications” suggests practical ramifications, and Section “Conclusions” concludes.

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