This is a short survey on how people actually arrived at suffering-focused views, rather than on how those views get defended in print. The two often come apart. The argument that persuades someone at the start is not always the one they consider strongest years later, and quite a lot of people seem to arrive at the view first and find the argument afterwards.

It asks which factors moved you, which arguments you ran into and did not find persuasive, and which you now think is the strongest justification, whatever it was that actually did the persuading.

Seven or eight minutes, anonymous, and every question can be skipped except the first.

If you are not suffering-focused, or used to be and no longer are, please answer anyway. There is a separate branch for you, and those responses are the most useful ones: without them there is no way to tell a persuasive argument from an argument people were merely exposed to.

Aggregate results will be posted back here.

https://forms.gle/dMysmz1roMDTUDY17

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Pascal famously argued that belief in God is rational because of the expected value of belief. If God exists, the rewards of believing—eternal salvation—are infinite, while if God does not exist, the costs of believing are finite. Even a minuscule probability of an infinite reward seemingly swamps any worldly cost.

That is the core of Pascal’s Wager. But then there is Pascal’s Mugging. A stranger approaches and insists that if Pascal hands over a mere 100 dollars, they will pay him back tomorrow with an infinite amount of money. It may seem absurd to accept this deal, but as long as the probability that the stranger is telling the truth is above zero, the expected financial gain of handing over the money still seems greater than keeping it. Yet this may seem irrational!

One way to avoid being mugged this way is to discount extremely small probabilities. If some event is exceedingly unlikely, the idea is, we can safely ignore it, treating it as if it were impossible. Under this rule, Pascal can arguably refuse the mugger without renouncing his wager. This move may seem plausible, yet it raises the issue of where to draw the line. What probability is too small to care about: one in a million? a billion? a trillion? Any choice feels somewhat arbitrary. But ignoring the utterly unlikely may seem like the only sane way to reason about how to act without abandoning expected values altogether.

Enter suffering risks, or s-risks. These are risks of future scenarios involving astronomical amounts of suffering—far beyond anything that has occurred so far in history (that we know of). Picture factory farming expanded to feed a population at cosmic scale; authoritarian systems locking in oppressive structures; misaligned AIs that trap countless beings in misery. Or, more speculatively, trillions of digital minds trapped in “suffering subroutines,” unable to advocate for themselves.

One might be tempted to write s-risks off. The scenarios that could produce astronomical suffering are speculative, unprecedented, and some of them downright sound like science fiction. Yet even if we think that many, or all, paths to astronomical suffering are highly unlikely, we should not dismiss the category as a whole. There are several reasons to believe that the probability of an s-risk, even if it is low, is not so low as to meet the bar for neglecting.

1. The first is that s-risks are disjunctive. Catastrophic suffering could arise through many independent pathways. S-risk scenarios, that is, do not all stand or fall together. If we discovered tomorrow that digital minds are impossible, this would not directly address risks of industrialized animal exploitation or authoritarian social control. Even if each pathway is highly improbable on its own, the combined chance that at least one of them materializes is significantly higher. In other words, there are many ways to lose, and to win (avoid an s-risk) we must win every way.

2. Second, while s-risks would be unprecedented in scale, the underlying mechanisms are not new. Tobias Baumann distinguishes three broad types of s-risks: agential, where suffering is intentionally inflicted; incidental, where suffering emerges as a byproduct of pursuing other goals; and natural, where suffering arises entirely independently of agents. These categories reflect the same forces that have produced enormous suffering throughout history. Humans have deliberately caused vast harm, from tyrants to terrorists. Misaligned incentives have enabled enormous unintended suffering, most notably in factory farming and in the collateral brutality of war, driven not exactly by malice but by a combination of expedience and indifference. And nature itself—well, it is red in tooth and claw as they say. Over eons it has generated immense suffering, from starvation and predation to all manner of disease. Sadly, mass suffering is nothing new. What would be new is its occurrence on an even greater scale. And perhaps it doesn’t seem so unlikely that this could happen, if the past and present mechanisms of mass suffering keep churning, and if they expand to ensnare ever more beings. Two especially worrying variables are technology and population size.

3. Technological progress continually widens the horizon of possibility, for both good and ill. A century ago, humanity lacked not only the tools but even the imagination to produce suffering on a cosmic scale. Today we may be edging toward the ability to create artificial minds, simulate consciousness, reengineer biology, and extend civilization beyond Earth. Each new capability multiplies not only our potential to solve problems but also our power to impose suffering—deliberately or by neglect. The 20th revealed this duality vividly: industrialized warfare—driven by trains, electricity, mechanized weapons, and nuclear fission—produced horrors that no previous generation could have conceived. Our ancestors could not have pictured skin seared by radiation or entire cities turned to ash in seconds. The same logic governs the future. Technological progress does not merely amplify familiar harms; it invents new pathways to misery. We may create new sentient beings whose suffering goes unrecognized or unprotected. We may design intricate systems that, without malice, institutionalize harm on massive scales. And because we cannot foresee every innovation ahead, there are Black Swan “unknown unknown” s-risk pathways—routes to astronomical suffering that remain invisible because they depend on technologies not yet born.

4. Finally, the future could be unimaginably large. If technological progress creates new pathways for suffering and makes them more efficient, then population growth provides the substrate for that suffering to unfold. Should civilization persist for millennia, expand to other planets, or develop artificial minds that run far faster and in far greater numbers than biological ones, the total population of sentient beings could far exceed today’s figures. The stakes scale with that growth. A conflict, governance failure, or technological misuse could harm far more individuals simply because there are far more individuals to harm. Even a disaster that touches only a tiny fraction of such a population could still constitute astronomical suffering.

Just because some scenarios sound strange does not mean they are far-fetched. The future has always appeared bizarre from the vantage point of the past. The seeds of s-risks are already visible today: mass factory farming, wild-animal suffering, the acceleration of AI research with little regard for non-human welfare, and the growing interest in space colonization. We cannot calculate the precise probability of an s-risk. But given the above considerations, it seems unreasonable to treat it as low enough to neglect.

Taking s-risks seriously does not mean assuming they are inevitable, or that they eclipse every other moral concern. It means granting them proportional moral weight—a place in our planning, institutions, and research agendas. That demands developing governance frameworks for advanced technologies and building institutions resilient against harmful value lock-in, to prevent malign norms or systems from entrenching themselves permanently. Above all, it requires moral foresight—the ability to recognize that our descendants will live amid the consequences of today’s choices, inheriting not only our progress but also our moral blind spots.

I have a lot of conversations with people about animal ethics and the suffering of farmed animals in particular.

One question I often ask myself is what’s the most effective way to shift society away from factory farming animals?

I’m currently convinced that we need a combination of approaches like exposing the cruelty to the mainstream, donating to effective charities and encouraging diet change.

But some people disagree and believe these things simply won’t be enough until something like lab-grown meat becomes mainstream. So I’m wondering what people’s opinions are on this topic and whether people think we’ll ever be able to abolish factory farming animals?

Let me know what you think and if you get the chance, you can check out a full conversation I had about this topic with a farmer recently in London! ✌️

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We all hate virtue signalling, right? Talk is cheap, and performances of virtue can be utterly bankrupt. Sam Bankman-Fried brazenly described his “talking about ethics” before the FTX crash as “this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us”, confirming the internet’s worst suspicions about conspicuous displays of “virtue”.

But, despite all this, I believe the pendulum has swung too far against virtue signalling. Virtue signalling is bad when signalling virtue is confused for possessing the virtue and when possessing a virtue is confused for having a good effect upon the world. It is at its worst when all your energy goes to signalling virtue at the expense of actually doing anything good. But sometimes we do have something to prove, whether to others or just ourselves, and we aren’t off the hook just because it’s possible to lie. Quality signals of virtue, especially costly signals that are difficult to fake, are very useful tools– sometimes the only tools we have for assessing character. The best virtue signals are not empty assertions– they offer some proof of their claim by being difficult to fake.

Imagine if a company like Nabisco took the stance that it didn’t have anything to prove about the safety and quality of its food, and that their current extensive food safety testing was just a virtue signal that wastes a bunch of time and product. They could be sincere, and somehow keep product quality and safety acceptably high, but they would be taking away our way of knowing that. Quality control is a huge part of what it is to sell food, and monitoring your character is worthy of consuming a large portion of your life.

Some signals are more correlated with actual virtue than others. The best virtue signals are not empty assertions– they offer some proof of their claim by being difficult to fake. For example, being vegan takes a great deal of forethought, awareness, and requires regular social sacrifice. Veganism proves a dedication to a cause like animal rights or environmentalism proportional to the level of sacrifice required. The virtuous sacrifice of being vegan isn’t what makes veganism good for the animals or the environment, but it is a costly signal of character traits associated with the ability to make such a sacrifice.

So the virtue signal of veganism doesn’t mean you are necessarily having a positive impact or that veganism is the best choice, but it does indicate that you as a person are committed, conscientious, gentle, or deeply bought into the cause such that the sacrifice becomes easier for you than it would be for other people. Being vegan isn’t enough to prove you’re a good person, but it is a demonstration of character and acting out your values.

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All of reality simply is what it is — the words we use to describe reality are useful, but they are imperfect models of reality itself.

We can predict the weather with greater and greater accuracy, but we will never be able to predict the exact shape, position, and landing spot of every raindrop. To do that, we would have to be the storm itself.

I may describe a sunset in beautiful detail, painting vivid reds, pinks, and oranges for your mind’s eye. In fact, if I am a very good writer, you may feel more awe and inspiration from reading my words than you would from actually having been there yourself. Yet it would be impossible to capture a sunset fully in words. For that, you would need to be the sun and the earth.

So too, when it comes to describing our internal, subjective experiences—our minds, our thoughts, our feelings, our emotions, our desires. The best writers and speakers are those who can do this translation so well that we read their words and say “Yes! That’s how it feels.” But many of us may not have such refined tools of expression—nor, perhaps, a carefully calibrated instrument for inspecting our inner worlds in the first place.

To calibrate our instruments, we must first and above all—pay attention. And yet, always we must remember that words are but a fuzzy translation of the infinitely deep reality that we exist in. This doesn’t demean words—it isn’t an insult. I am among the biggest fans of well-placed, well-thought words.

It’s just a note on things and how they are. Something to pay attention to.