Suppose you rescue an injured cat and bring it to your home. Through your care, it gets healed. You have a wild garden with little mice and the recovered cat ends up eating 10 of them over a period of time. **Have you caused more harm than good?** Can you really claim to have reduced suffering in the world? (Or, say you save a person from dying from malaria and the person grows up to be a dictator of a country. Have you caused increase or decrease in net suffering in the world?) Generally speaking, **acting upon [[Suffering focused ethics]] calls for incorporating second order or third order consequences of your actions** and all such downstream [[Measures of suffering]] need to be added to decide the impact of your actions. How to go about doing that? #### Key principle of incorporating uncertanity into calculations of impact **The more uncertainity you have about future consequences (i.e. the more possibilities / open-endedness you have in future consequences), the _less_ you should worry about consequences.** This is because such future consequences can go either way (+ve or -ve). Taking the same example as above, the person you saved from dying could end up becoming a charity founder (instead of a dictator). So, positive and negative consequences effectively cancel out if there's wide uncertainity about how future will unfold. However, if you know for sure (with high degree of confidence), a 2nd or 3rd order consequence that will emerge from your actions, you need to account for them in your calculations. **Uncertainity is not an excuse for sloppy thinking.** ### Actions that are uncontroversially good There are certain actions that have a high liklihood of _not_ leading to a negative consequence. These are related to promotion of a mindset / attitude that generally lead to positive outcomes in the world. In a [public twitter poll](https://twitter.com/paraschopra/status/1413072510321528835), many suggestions of such actions were proposed, but the three below seem to be the most uncontroversial ones. 1. **Mindful reflection towards impact of one's actions** in the world (where the idea of world includes all beings capable of suffering) - This reflection should help people converge automatically by themselves on [[Suffering focused ethics]], and hence possibility of multiplicative reduction in suffering. 3. **Promotion of an attitude that seeks win-win / positive sum collaborations** - This helps people get unstuck from [[Zero-sum situations where one's reduction in suffering depends on another's increase of suffering]] and come up with new original solutions where _both_ see a decrease in suffering. 4. **Rationality / open-mindedness** - This helps people engage in rational action where they see an argument they don't agree with as a learning opportunity rather than an attack. We can reduce a lot of suffering in the world if people approach their discussion with an open-mind, ready to change their beliefs and actions when data and logic persuades them to do so. #### Worldview diversification https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/worldview-diversification#top #inbox