Michael Dorrill

Matthew Adelstein's argument against human value is morally monstrous and timed extraordinarily badly, and effective altruists should reject it. I responded on a meta-level first, but I believe EAs are likely to find him persuasive if optically bad. That is wrong and should be addressed directly. My direct reply, copied from my comment on his blog: This article, particularly combined with your expressed preference elsewhere to destroy insects en masse because their lives are net negative, is not just wrong but morally monstrous, and radically out of line with other EA cause areas like the elimination of human x-risk via things like AI alignment. If insect life is commensurate with human life, insects matter more than people, and destroying "net negative" life (by eg habitat decimation and sterilization) is an appropriate response to that life, the primary consideration that makes humans worth keeping alive is instrumental: Is a world with humans more likely to lead to the elimination of insects and other "net-negative life" than one without humans? Is it more likely to lead to the creation of hedonically blissful life than one without humans? You combine this view with longtermism, but that does not rescue a non-instrumental value to human life. At least eight billion existing humans are, per your worldview, catastrophically misaligned: they rely on a web of net-negative animal lives to sustain themselves, and they repeatedly reject efforts to take suffering-reducing actions like eliminating wild animals and insects. There's likely no point in the future where the average human, based on the clash between their values and yours, is likely to exist in a way that does not rely on such a web. One of the most common concerns around AI alignment is existential risk to humans. In your frame, this only matters to the extent that humans are more likely than a non-human successor to prioritize the destruction of all net negative existing life and the creation of net positive future life. Compared to the rest of life, humans are a rounding error, and only our own special attachments keep us preferring a world where humanity is around to one where it is replaced by something that, like insects, is capable of feeling pleasure and pain but – unlike insects – you assess to feel overwhelmingly more pleasure than pain. In a frame that treats insects as more important than humans and the mass destruction of insects as a moral priority, then, the risk of a human-less universe isn't ultimately a huge deal. After all, what's the worst-case outcome? You sacrifice a few net-positive beings in order to put many net-negative ones out of their misery? Yes, it's worse than a hypothetical future universe in which all of those net-negative lives are replaced by hedonium cubes, so you'd need to run the math on "lifeless universe (neutral) vs future that looks like current universe in distribution of beings (negative) vs future of hedonium cubes (positive)," but human extinction isn't a big deal one way or the other. Given your premises, in short, it would be reasonable for you to advocate for humans to be superseded by a non-biological successor intelligence more aligned to destroying-net-negatives and creating-net-positives, eliminating the biological web of net-negative lives humans rely on and treating human existence as a rounding error, as soon as you could be confident that the successor was more likely to build that world than humans. Maybe that chain breaks down somewhere for you. I hope it does. But that is the sort of world your moral math builds. If your premises lead human extinction to become a rounding error as soon as a non-human "caretaker" exists, your logic has led you catastrophically wrong, and wrong in a way that matters more than ever as humans enter a world where we are not the only serious intelligences. You should be overwhelmingly more confident that human extinction is bad than you should be in your four speculative premises about insect experience. You treat our moral intuitions as untrustworthy, our preference for humans as illogical, and rejection of your views as being based on bias and prejudice. It is quite the opposite: people's willingness to let reality sand off the sharp edges of their first-principles thinking, our stubborn particularism, our insistence that we matter as more than just replaceable units of utility – those are what keep us from becoming moral monsters, and you discard them at your peril. The track record of people who bite all possible bullets is not a good one, and you should not trust your premises so much that you believe logic alone will lead you better than others who have told people to ignore intuitive warnings that something has gone badly wrong.