Recent from talks
Brian Tomasik
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
Brian Tomasik
Brian Tomasik is an American researcher, ethicist, and essayist. He is known for his work on suffering-focused ethics, wild animal suffering, and the ethics of artificial intelligence. He previously sometimes wrote under the name Alan Dawrst, a pseudonym he no longer uses. A proponent of consent-based negative utilitarianism, he has written extensively on the welfare and moral consideration of invertebrates such as insects, as well as on artificial sentience and reinforcement learning agents. He co-founded the non-profit Center on Long-Term Risk (formerly the Foundational Research Institute) and is affiliated with the effective altruism movement. He is the creator of the website Essays on Reducing Suffering, on which he has published over a hundred essays on ethics, consciousness, and strategies for reducing suffering in biological and artificial systems.
Tomasik's 2009 essay "The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering" has been cited in discussions of the topic and as an early contribution to efforts to present it as a significant moral issue. He supports interventions aimed at reducing suffering in nature, including habitat destruction and gene editing, while warning about suffering risks posed by technologies such as terraforming, directed panspermia, and large-scale computer simulations. He argues against entomophagy and the consumption of bivalves, citing concerns about potential suffering and the large numbers of animals involved. Tomasik advocates evidence-based reasoning, cost-effectiveness, and long-term impact in ethical decision-making. In his writings on consciousness, he treats it as a constructed and morally relevant concept, rejecting metaphysical notions such as qualia and the hard problem of consciousness.
As a teenager, Tomasik experienced chronic esophagitis, which he described as causing severe pain and sensitizing him to the intensity and prevalence of suffering.
Tomasik attended Guilderland Central High School in Guilderland, New York from 2001 to 2005. While there, he began writing philosophical essays and continued independently after being introduced to Western philosophy in 2003. Influenced by Ralph Nader and Peter Singer, he adopted a utilitarian perspective in 2005. That same year, he encountered the issue of wild animal suffering in Singer's work and began to question whether life in nature yields more suffering than happiness. Influenced by thinkers such as Singer, Bernard Rollin, Yew-Kwang Ng, and David Pearce, he came to regard the suffering of wild animals, especially insects, as a major ethical concern, which he explored in early essays.
Around 2005, Tomasik began thinking seriously about valuing money from an altruistic perspective, influenced by claims that small donations could save lives through global health interventions. He also considered the concept of "replaceability", that taking a job in the non-profit sector might displace someone equally capable but less motivated to reduce suffering. His family encouraged him to consider a career in the non-profit sector or in policy analysis, but these reflections led him to explore the strategy of earning to give—pursuing a lucrative career and donating a substantial portion of your income. He discussed the idea with peers and articulated it in an editorial for his school newspaper.
Although the basic idea had earlier been proposed by Peter Unger, Tomasik is credited with introducing it to the utilitarian forum Felicifia, of which he was a prominent member, where it helped shape discussions that later influenced the early development of the effective altruism movement.
Tomasik majored in computer science and minored in mathematics and statistics at Swarthmore College from 2005 to 2009, receiving a B.A. in computer science in May 2009. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi, and received several academic scholarships and awards. His coursework included subjects such as probability, statistics, machine learning, information retrieval, and mathematical finance.
His academic and professional work has included research in machine learning, natural language processing, and economics. He has published on topics such as multitask feature selection, semantic music discovery, and image classification, and developed a Python module for lexical distributional similarity. He also co-authored a study on international transport costs for OECD countries.
Hub AI
Brian Tomasik AI simulator
(@Brian Tomasik_simulator)
Brian Tomasik
Brian Tomasik is an American researcher, ethicist, and essayist. He is known for his work on suffering-focused ethics, wild animal suffering, and the ethics of artificial intelligence. He previously sometimes wrote under the name Alan Dawrst, a pseudonym he no longer uses. A proponent of consent-based negative utilitarianism, he has written extensively on the welfare and moral consideration of invertebrates such as insects, as well as on artificial sentience and reinforcement learning agents. He co-founded the non-profit Center on Long-Term Risk (formerly the Foundational Research Institute) and is affiliated with the effective altruism movement. He is the creator of the website Essays on Reducing Suffering, on which he has published over a hundred essays on ethics, consciousness, and strategies for reducing suffering in biological and artificial systems.
Tomasik's 2009 essay "The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering" has been cited in discussions of the topic and as an early contribution to efforts to present it as a significant moral issue. He supports interventions aimed at reducing suffering in nature, including habitat destruction and gene editing, while warning about suffering risks posed by technologies such as terraforming, directed panspermia, and large-scale computer simulations. He argues against entomophagy and the consumption of bivalves, citing concerns about potential suffering and the large numbers of animals involved. Tomasik advocates evidence-based reasoning, cost-effectiveness, and long-term impact in ethical decision-making. In his writings on consciousness, he treats it as a constructed and morally relevant concept, rejecting metaphysical notions such as qualia and the hard problem of consciousness.
As a teenager, Tomasik experienced chronic esophagitis, which he described as causing severe pain and sensitizing him to the intensity and prevalence of suffering.
Tomasik attended Guilderland Central High School in Guilderland, New York from 2001 to 2005. While there, he began writing philosophical essays and continued independently after being introduced to Western philosophy in 2003. Influenced by Ralph Nader and Peter Singer, he adopted a utilitarian perspective in 2005. That same year, he encountered the issue of wild animal suffering in Singer's work and began to question whether life in nature yields more suffering than happiness. Influenced by thinkers such as Singer, Bernard Rollin, Yew-Kwang Ng, and David Pearce, he came to regard the suffering of wild animals, especially insects, as a major ethical concern, which he explored in early essays.
Around 2005, Tomasik began thinking seriously about valuing money from an altruistic perspective, influenced by claims that small donations could save lives through global health interventions. He also considered the concept of "replaceability", that taking a job in the non-profit sector might displace someone equally capable but less motivated to reduce suffering. His family encouraged him to consider a career in the non-profit sector or in policy analysis, but these reflections led him to explore the strategy of earning to give—pursuing a lucrative career and donating a substantial portion of your income. He discussed the idea with peers and articulated it in an editorial for his school newspaper.
Although the basic idea had earlier been proposed by Peter Unger, Tomasik is credited with introducing it to the utilitarian forum Felicifia, of which he was a prominent member, where it helped shape discussions that later influenced the early development of the effective altruism movement.
Tomasik majored in computer science and minored in mathematics and statistics at Swarthmore College from 2005 to 2009, receiving a B.A. in computer science in May 2009. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi, and received several academic scholarships and awards. His coursework included subjects such as probability, statistics, machine learning, information retrieval, and mathematical finance.
His academic and professional work has included research in machine learning, natural language processing, and economics. He has published on topics such as multitask feature selection, semantic music discovery, and image classification, and developed a Python module for lexical distributional similarity. He also co-authored a study on international transport costs for OECD countries.
Recent media