There’s research to try to get closer to an objective demarcation of suffering. The latest measures place even shrimp at some level of intolerable suffering, due to some of the farming techniques, eg removing they eyeballs of females to make them more fertile.
Not seeing the moral imperative is not the same as there not being a moral imperative. The attitude that motivated your comment is astonishingly cruel.
I'd be super down to throw my shoulder into a couple projects at once. It would personally help with some of the exhaustion that happens when focusing on one codebase. It would be a lower risk for organizations and provide a more affordable chunk of value for increasing the quality of their product.
I currently feel like it's too out there to comfortably propose to companies I'm interviewing at. If a job description explicitly stated "open to discussing part-time opportunities" and leadership was realistically aligned with the time commitments part-time engineers would face, I would definitely bring it up as a possibility.
There's so many companies doing cool work. Individually we commonly end up contracting our aspirations in service of one endeavor. That makes sense for some companies. For others, the benefits in terms of production value and having their engineers exposed to multivariate problems could be huge. I'm particularly thinking if companies that have straightforward apps to present or deliver their services, like a video app, community apps, etc. A lot of those problems are solved, and I'm not sure it makes sense to invest a huge amount, in terms of full-time work, in executing on those visions.
I'm also curious what it would be like to manage a part-time engineer. Work life balance would have to be front and center. Processes for dealing with emergencies would need to be realistic. Demands from management would need to be broken down with part-time chunks in mind, and so on.
I've just recently started framing more and more of my options as if-thn statements, with an emphasis on the then being some emotion tht I predict I will feel. I think some people probably naturally do this, but it takes effort for to me to think of now vs future.
I base my understanding of generating internal motivation of of the WOOP model, academically known as implementation intentions with mental contrasting. Focusing on mounting my internal dialogue on simple if-then models is easier than running through the whole WOOP model.
I'd love to know of any mental heuristics others here use that help them effectively close the current state vs ideal state gap.
I think it helps to find people slightly ahead of you on the same journey. Their internal map of the topic is slightly more filled out, so the difference is easier to manage. I want to learn AI programming, and I'd more effectively learn from someone who has just gotten their head around Prolog than from a PhD at DeepMind.
I see where you're coming from. It's a failure on my part that I didn't make it clear that one of my ideals is continual expansion of our moral intuitions. It's also partly a choice to leave it out because it can become so unintuitive that it affects the basis of the entire argument.
Since you expressed openness to this dialogue, I'll share. When I really, really stretch my moral imagination to the point it decouples from practical logic, I find myself feeling spiritually reverent for the things that the mental abstraction "complexity" points at. I arrive at this by synthesizing a particular metaphor from Alan Watts with Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi's ideas on complexity.
In the same way an apple tree apples, the universe peoples. It also dogs, and weathers and softwares and cows. Of it emerge these beautiful structures, including plants. If I was capable of surviving the endeavor, cherishing and protecting every single one of those things that the universe expresses would be my ultimate ethical goal. I don't know if there's farther expansive rings of morality. I imagine I might be able to peek at some with the help of deep, deep meditative practice or other tools.
The thing that re-embodies me is the Buddhist idea of bodhisattvas. They are beings who have reached enlightenment, but then rejected paradise in honor of the work still left to do on this plane of existence.
That's basically the outline of my metaphysical beliefs.
Finally, specifically regarding pain and plants, I agree that we bend our intuitions to the experiences that make sense to us. My argument is that the word "pain" and what we understand pain to be, is predicated on a specific biological structure, nociceptors. To speak of pain without nociception is like saying the water in my hand isn't wet. They're enmeshed, dependent properties. So, if plants do experience something that increments the universe's suffering counter, which I leave as a possibility, we would have to imagine some other form of communication. Language and thought extrudes from the human body. As a consequence of that fact, there are just some things it can't capture, and attempting to do so places us closer to the choice: bodhisattva or buddha.