Miquel Banchs-Piqué (prev. mikbp)
Bio
I studied Physics, hold a MSc in Photonics and was working for some years in a micro-cavitation lab. Then, as I wanted to work in improving the long-term future, I switched and did a PhD in applied foresight. Since then, I work as foresight researcher, first in the Centre for Foresight and Internationalisation of the Łukasiewicz Network and currently in Fraunhofer ISI. I helped to design Nüwa, a 1M people Mars city-state ranked top 10 in the Mars Society contest 2020, and have experience in sustainability projects and social volunteering. I'm very interested in the relation between global energy and progress, and their consequences for the environment, which may pose a global catastrophic risk. Dad of 2 still in that period when there's no time for anything else than taking care of them and working.
How others can help me
- Career advise
- Advise on avoiding sidetracking and help narrowing commitments
- Help becoming efficient and effective
- Find deep intellectual connection
- The opportunity to work with/for brilliant people and learn from them
- Career opportunities, especially within EA organisations
How I can help others
- Active listening
- Advise on living with few / frugality
- Share experiences as expat / making a life abroad
- First principles reasoning
- Fining bullshit (lack of logic, ungrounded reasoning, lack of generality, biases...)
- Explaining / giving info about: physics and off-world settling, foresight / futures research, the energy system, the Economy for the Common Good (ECOnGOOD)
Posts 16
Comments91
There is no universal value -not even moral value- scale. Each person has his/her own. If the mosquitoes cannot chose/feel, they don't have moral value for you. Other people may value life for its own sake.
I think I lean close to your values, giving moral value to whatever can feel. But this is mostly a rationalisation. I have no clue which animals or other living beings can feel and which don't (and, even we are scientifically improving in this regard, we cannot really know, at least for now) and still, I give or not give moral value to living beings. In addition, what these living beings do to me or to others (in an absolutely broad sense of others), how they look, how they move, etc. affect my moral judgement, the moral value I give them.
But where I wanted to go: you are going way too fast to determine that mosquitoes cannot feel. What is the relation between being able to chose or not and being able feel? Is a carnivore like a lion able to chose not to eat other animals? Is it able to feel? I think the answers for the lion are clear and make your argument fail.
Being net negative or positive and how much just depends on the values of whoever does this assessment. So I don't think such statements are useful. These EAs may be net negative given your values. Probably much less so given their values.
I don't think it is useful or helpful to speak in general terms about how positive/negative the (expected) value of something is. There is no universal way to value stuff.
I really like the paper and I appreciate the effort to put it together and easy to understand. And, I particularly appreciate the effort put in rising attention to this problem. But I am extremely surprised/puzzled that this was not common understanding! This is what lies below the AGI and even degrowth discourses, for example, no? This is why one has to first make sure AGI is safe before putting it out there. What am I missing?
"Both Lions and mosquitoes are enemies" But enemies can have moral value! [Sorry, I haven't read your LW post, yet]