Some people hold more hopeful beliefs about the world and the future than are justified. These include the feeling that life for wild animals isn’t so bad and the expectation that humanity’s future will reduce more suffering than it creates. By feeding these dreams, optimistic visions of suffering reduction, while noble, may in fact cause net harm. We should explore ways of increasing empathy that also expose the true extent of suffering in the world, e.g., information about factory farming, brutality in nature, and unfathomable amounts of suffering that may result from space colonization.
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