Doxbridge Pre WUDC 2022 SF

この音源、あまり知っている人は多くない部類だと思うのですが、個人的に好きなので上げておきます。ちなみにこの試合、OOのAteneoは負けているんですが、LOのDavid Africaのスピーチが、かなり参考になると思います。今はどうか分からないですが、こういうAnti-natalism系のMotionがよくブレイクラウンドで出る大会があるので、そのOppとして、かなりいい感じな気がします。

Doxbridge Pre WUDC 2022 Semi Final

Motion: You come across a button which, if pressed, will instantly and painlessly erase all of human existence. If not pressed immediately, the button will permanently disappear.

THW press the button.

LO: David Africa

1. Intro

You come across a button with the potential to instantly shoot a bullet into the forehead of everyone sleeping. You have attachments to these people, you believe in these people, you know they have hopes and dreams. This is murder and goes against every moral intuition you have.

2. Signpost

In this speech, we will advance 4 claims.

1. That this is murder and goes against, again, every moral intuition you have

2. That you have attachments to your own life, and moreover, not pressing the button will drastically improve your quality of life moving forward

3. Humanity is likely to get structurally better and happier as time goes on,

4. and four, the animal rights case, that leaving humanity to die will effectively push climate change and a variety of other anthropogenic problems forward without any solution because animals do not have the tools to save themselves.

1st and by the way, responses are integrated into the material.

3. Sub1

This is murder to you, which will go against every moral intuition you have. This is analogous to walking into the room of every person's house while they are sleeping and shooting them. We have very, very strong aversions to killing people and the loss of life, the loss of experience and the basic destruction of everything people have ever had for five structural reasons.

1. Number one is revulsion. We feel a strong sense of empathy that is part biological and part evolutionary, where depriving people of their choice and happiness is anathema to us, because we internally value our own happiness and because we empathise with other people that they may value their own happiness and choice as well. This is why we don't kill slaves even if their life might suck. This is why we experience extreme revolution if we shoot somebody that might be sleeping or going through extreme pain, because we should give them the decision to make that themselves and not assume it for them.

2. Secondarily, socialisation. This person has been historically taught about the wonders of humanity. Human achievement. Genius. Overcoming the limitations of the human body. Feeling like you are preventing the future progress. Basically society socialises most people into believing humanity is an inherent good and this is feel-good so it catches on quick. Hence, this narrative is structurally likely to be deeply embedded in your worldview, you are going against every social factor that has influenced you in your life.

3. Thirdly, they have personal connections to many of the people they are disappearing, whom they care about. You want to see them flourish. You want to see them happy. You want to see them reach their full potential. Imagine, you had a mum who will never get to see you grow old. You have a kid who will never get to finish college, a wife or husband you will never get to grow old with. You have relationships with these people. You care about them, and you are taking their lives away.

4. Fourthly, obligations. You feel extreme and obliterating guilt, like you are portraying everyone that trusted you, everyone that raised you.

5. And fifthly, afterlife. The fear of going to hell, that you were the one that murdered all these people. You will have to face penance for your actions, you will have to greet them and you will have to answer for the reckoning of why you took away their lives.

Why are these structural reasons the most important to you? Number one, this is not just emotion about whether or not it’s net morally good, but from the perspective of the info slide, you, an average person are coming across a button, and you are making the choice to end the world.

4. Hence there are four weighing meta reasons for why you should care about this, more than their meta reasons.

1. Number one, this is the prevailing mindset as this is related to the relevant factors in your thought process. These structural reasons are themselves the meta weighing for why certain reasons are more important, because even if theoretically you can consider other reasons like the future end of humanity, these are the top of mind fears for a decision as momentous as this.

2. Secondarily though. Principally, they assert that there is some negative utility. But the problem is that they are asserting this utility for people, when everyone has their own utility calculus that you and only you can know. This means it makes no sense to kill everyone for the sake of some arbitrary utility, since we assigned the utility value and you remove, obviously, the person's capacity to assign the utility value for themselves. You are effectively turning everyone into slaves, and deciding for them that their life is not worth living, as opposed to letting them decide.

3. Thirdly, this is most proximate to you, the people you grew up with, your likely outlook in life. These are all the predominant prime factors in your decision-making calculus, hence, is more closely related to what you care about, than humanity’s net utility or whatever.

4. Fourthly and finally the sheer guilt and uncertainty in your head. The pain, aversion that most people have to potentially taking everything away. This is akin to being on the ledge of a cliff, on the ledge of a roof, and threatening to jump off, but taking everyone else with you. This is just not something that most people will do, people do not have the moral resiliency or will to do this. This is just evil. I think. I’ll take a POI from CG before I move on.

(POI: But these things are all based on moral intuitions. Can you justify why moral intuitions are best approximate to moral truth?)

No, no, no, no. These are moral intuitions the average person will have. You are making the decision from the perspective of an info slide, you’re the third party here. Hence, you're making it from your lens. So these moral intuitions are truths to you. Secondarily though, you also want to give your own life. Again, by construction, if you wanted to end your own life, you don't really need the button. Most people have strong intuitionist attachments to their pleasures and their hobbies. Moreover, when you don't use the button, you feel like you save the world, you feel like you prevented mass-scale genocide of the human race. You can always carry yourself with the feeling of self-importance, that you were at one point, the most important person in the world, and you're likely to experience a strong sense of satisfaction and relief, appreciating for your life, even for the parts that aren't so good, akin to the relief that people feel after a last-second-aversion of a suicide attempt, or near-death experience. It puts your life into sharp clarity, and every good thing that happens to you is magnified intensely. Every bad thing that happened to you could always be rationalised away as something worse could have happened.

5. OK, secondarily, the third, sorry, the third point. We also think humanity is likely to get structurally better and happier as time goes on. They sort of assert that humanity is net negative, that people are programmed to be never content. Capitalism is exploitative and atomises people, and climate change is irreversible and we have scarce resources. We have faced all these problems before. Global conditions are rapidly and persistently improving for four structural reasons.

1. One, we are reaching a point of scientific innovation that has erased the burdens of most human struggle, we’re allowing people to communicate across borders, solving most diseases that we could never have conceived of before.

2. Two, increasing democratisation and global trade, as well as increasing education in most communities around the world, gives nations mutual incentives to prosper and develop on a widespread scale. This is why capitalism is getting less and less exploitative, while there are increasing factors about every nation in the world on the rapacious nature of capitalism and corporations.

3. Thirdly, more and more educated societies are willing to criticize governments, provide crucial services necessary for the maintenance of life, etcetera. Reducing the optimization and forming communities for people as well as now living communicate to people across the world. You inform communities there and we assume that we could run out of natural resources several centuries ago. We were wrong every time because our technological passing allows us to make the most of limited resources and do things like find new lands or find new resources we can use with the different planets. This is all potential that you erase away with the assumption. You know better than every other person on earth beyond that they say humanity will die anyway one is a super speculative and I'm not sure how this will play out in the calculus of person, or the average person will be pressing this button. But secondarily, there's just a lot of assumptions about, oh, we might have a nuclear war. This is why, persistently, humanity is working towards defraying many of these worst harms, ensuring that we can come to solutions for most of these things. You basically take away the potential come out for any of these illusions through like a 10% chance that money might die in the future. Even if humanity will suffer, he let them make the choice suffer and die.

Finally, the animal rights case. They say animals are farmed. One. This is way better than being haunted and brutally killed, exposed to fuse food scarcity, being forcefully raped and killed to be made. That in order for like the genetic thing to advance, right? These are all experienced animals will have that. They don't have informed where they are fed, where they are kept safe, etcetera. And even like you know, most reasonable seats around the world have animal rights welfare regulations anyway. But think of the dangers of all the stuff that's left behind. Nuclear reactors, oil refineries, etcetera. Many of these problems are increasingly accelerating and were anthropogenic in nature. Climate change is already happening. Global warming is already happening. Animals don't have the tools to stop this. They're going to do think anyway. It's only our side that has tools to potentially verses in the future. They have condemned the world to death already. Them like, you know, taking the easy way out. Take me escape button is not going to solve things at the end of this speech. It is clear this is murder, horrible and basically revulsive to everything you've ever known. This is taking away everything you've ever cared about in your own life and is worse for humanity writ large.

For these reasons, Oppose.