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The shrimp welfare project

82 points by 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago

sodality2 2y ago
I read this article after it was linked on Amos Wollen's substack this weekend. Thoroughly convinced. I have been preaching shrimp rights to everyone in my life. 15,000 shrimp will be given a death with dignity by my donation.
thinkingtoilet 2y ago
I love articles like this that challenge the status quo of morality. I find my self asking the question, "Would I rather save a billion shrimp or one human?" and I honestly think I'm siding on the human. I'm not saying that answer is "correct". It's always good to think about these things and the point the author makes about shrimp being a test of our morality because they're so different is a good one.
- barefoot 2y ago
  How about one million kittens or one human?
  - HansardExpert 2y ago
    Still the human. How about one million humans or one kitten? Where is the cut-off point for you>?
  - dartos 2y ago
    Where did the kittens come from? If they were spawned into existence for this thought experiment, then the human, probably. But if even one of those kittens were mine, entire cities could be leveled before I let anyone hurt my kitten.
    - some_random 2y ago
      This brings up an interesting point, our view of morality is heavily skewed. If you made me choose between something bad happening to my partner or 10 random people, I would save my partner every time and I expect every normal person in the world to choose the same.
      - dartos 2y ago
        Well humans aren’t perfectly rational. I wouldn’t think it moral to save my kitten over a random non-evil person, but I’d still do it.
        Iulioh 2y ago
        It is a rational choice tho. It wouldn't just hurt your partner, it would hurt you. We know that following a "objective morality" the 10 people would be a better choice but it would hurt (indirectly) you.
        dartos 2y ago
        You’re right. Maybe rational was the wrong word. Humans aren’t perfectly objective.
    - hansvm 2y ago
      Also, where did the human come from? Are they already on their deathbed, prolonged in this thought experiment for only a few fleeting moments? Were they themselves a murderer?
      - dartos 2y ago
        None of that matters if my kitten is in danger!
    - GJim 2y ago
      > entire cities could be leveled before I let anyone hurt my kitten Allowing that kitten to live will cause untold suffering for other small mammals. You have the power to stop that suffering!
  - saalweachter 2y ago
    Collectively we kill and eat around a billion rabbits a year, around 8 million in the US. They aren't kittens, but they do have a similar level of fluffy cuteness. It's not quite "one million to one"; the meat from 1 million rabbits meets the caloric needs of around 2750 people for 1 year.
  - mihaic 2y ago
    In that case I actually ask "Who's the human?", and in about 80% of the time I'd pick the human.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    One cat versus many humans. My spending on my cat makes the answer clear.
- himinlomax 2y ago
  The best way to save even more shrimps would be to campaign for and subsidize whaling. They are shrimp-mass-murdering machines. What's a few whales versus billions of shrimps?
  - xipho 2y ago
    You didn't read the article nor follow the argument, just jumped in. It's about suffering shrimps, not saving shrimps.
    - some_random 2y ago
      Do shrimp not suffer from being consumed by whales?
      - eightysixfour 2y ago
        In comparison to having their eyeballs crushed but left alive, or slowly frozen to death?
        some_random 2y ago
        The trade off here is eliminating mutilation, going from Pain + Death to just Death, or in the case of the whales, going from Death to normal, beautiful shrimp Life. I don't really have any interest in doing shrimp quality of life math this morning but there's clearly something there.
    - himinlomax 2y ago
      I did. It was a whole lot of nothing. In any case, I just wanted to point out that if you cared about the welfare of damn arthropods, you're going nowhere really fast. Consider this: the quickest, surest, most efficient way and ONLY way to reduce all suffering on earth to nothing forever and ever is a good ole nuclear holocaust.
      - xipho 2y ago
- anothername12 2y ago
  It’s the trolley problem https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/ https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- BenthamsBulldog 2y ago
  Thanks for the kind words! I agree lots of people would value a human more than any number of shrimp. Now, in the article, I'm talking about which is worse--extreme suffering for one human or extreme suffering for millions of shrimp. So then the question is: can the common sense verdict be defended? What about shrimp is it that makes it so that their pain is of negligible importance compared to humans? Sure they aren't smart, but being dumb doesn't seem to make your pain less bad (hurting babies and mentally disabled people is still very very bad).
  - theonething 2y ago
    For babies and mentally disabled people, we absolutely know beyond any doubt that they are capable of feeling pain, intense, blood curdling pain. I don't think we can say the same of shrimp. That's why humane killing of cattle (with piston guns to the head) is widely practiced, but nothing of the sort for crabs, oysters, etc. We know for sure cattle feel pain so we do something about it.
    - BenthamsBulldog 2y ago
      Sure but if we're not sure then the possible infliction of huge amounts of horrendous suffering on trillions of them is quite serious. If there's even a 5% chance that shrimp feel pain as intensely as humans, the SWP is an excellent bet.
- joegibbs 2y ago
  The whole idea of morality is totally arbitrary and only exists because we say it does. If you were an Aztec then sacrificing people to Huitzilopochtli was actually moral, and if you were alive two thousand years ago nobody would have batted an eye at owning slaves. In reality, nobody would actually choose to save the life of 34 crustaceans over the life of a human, even if killing the prawn results in 102% of the suffering of killing the human. It's the same with all the EA stuff like prioritising X trillion potential humans that may exist in the future over actual people who exist now - you can get as granular as you want and mess around with probability to say anything. Maybe it's good to grow brains in vats and feed them heroin - that'll increase total happiness! Maybe we should judge someone who has killed enough flies the same as a murderer! Maybe our goals for the future should be based on the quadrillion future sentient creatures that will evolve from today's coconut crabs!
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
n4r9 2y ago
Apologies for focusing on just one sentence of this article, but I feel like it's crucial to the overall argument: > ... if [shrimp] suffer only 3% as intensely as we do ... Does this proposition make sense? It's not obvious to me that we can assign percentage values to suffering, or compare it to human suffering, or treat the values in a linear fashion. It reminds me of that vaguely absurd thought experiment where you compare one person undergoing a lifetime of intense torture vs billions upon billions of humans getting a fleck of dust in their eyes. I just cannot square choosing the former with my conscience. Maybe I'm too unimaginative to comprehend so many billions of bits of dust.
- sodality2 2y ago
  Have you read the linked paper by Norcross? "Great harms from small benefits grow: how death can be outweighed by headaches" [0]. [0]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3328486 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3328486
  - n4r9 2y ago
    No; thanks for bringing it to my attention. The first page is intriguing... I'll see if I can locate a free copy somewhere.
    - sodality2 2y ago
      Here's a copy I found: https://philosophysmith.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/alistair-norcross-22how-harms-outweighed-by-headaches22.pdf https://philosophysmith.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/alist... It's pretty short, I liked it. Was surprised to find myself agreeing with it at the end of my first read.
      - n4r9 2y ago
        Thanks. It's very clever how he uses probabilistic variants to move between scenarios. I've read to the end and whilst I'm not convinced, it's definitely given me food for thought. I'm stuck on two bits so far: * He slides between talking about personal decisions vs decisions about someone else. The argument for Headache is couched in terms of whether an average person would drive to the chemist. Whilst the argument for shifting from Headache to Many Headaches is couched in terms of decisions made by an external party. This feels problematic to me. There may be some workaround. * He describes rejecting transitivity as being overwhelmingly implausible. Is that obvious? Ethical considerations ultimately boil down to subjective evaluations, and there seems no obvious reason why those evaluations would be transitive.
dfedbeef 2y ago
Waiting for the funny reveal that this is a prank
- niek_pas 2y ago
  Why do you think this is a prank?
  - dfedbeef 2y ago
    Because it's funny enough and seems like an absolute S-tier performance artist critique of the effective altruism movement. Like who gives a shit about whether shrimp freeze to death or are electrocuted and then freeze to death. But this blog post uses a little BS math (.3 seconds IS shorter than 20 minutes! By an order of magnitude! Take my money!) and some hand wavey citations (Did you know shrimp MIGHT be conscious based on a very loose definition of consciousness? Now you too are very smart! You can talk about this with your sort-of friends (coworkers) from the job where you spend 80 hours a week now!) to convince some people that this is indeed an important and worthy thing. Because people who can be talked into this don't really interact with the real world, for the most part. So they don't know that lots of actual people need actual help that doesn't involve them dying anyway and being eaten en-masse afterwards.
    - dfedbeef 2y ago
      and it stimulates interesting conversations like this. Watch this comment section it's going to be great
    - dfedbeef 2y ago
      It's also just such a perfect half-measure. You're not asking people to not eat these little guys. They're not even confirmed to be fully conscious. This is a speculative fix for a theoretical problem. Plus like, there's some company making shrimp zappers. So by donating you're also kind of paying two people to kill the shrimp?
      - sodality2 2y ago
VyseofArcadia 2y ago
This is an intensely weird read. I kept waiting for the satire to become more obvious. Maybe throw in a reference or two to the Futurama episode "The Problem with Popplers". But by the end I can only conclude that it is sincere. I guess what strikes me the most odd is that not eating shrimp is never suggested as an alternative. It starts from the premise that, well, we're going to eat shrimp anyway, so the least we could do is give them a painless death first. If you follow this logic to its extremes, you get things like, "well, it's expensive to actually feed these starving children, but for just pennies a day you can make sure they at least die painlessly".
- InsideOutSanta 2y ago
  You have no control over other people's eating habits, but you do have control over your own charitable spending. If you're considering how to best spend your money, it doesn't matter that not eating shrimp would be an even better solution than preventing pain when they are killed. It only matters what the most effective way of spending your money is.
  - AlexandrB 2y ago
    If we're talking ethical giving, I'd rather give that money to a panhandler where there's a chance it relieves even a little bit of human suffering.
    - DangitBobby 2y ago
      TFA addresses this. Many humans believe that no amount of animal suffering is as bad as any amount of human suffering, which is just a failure of humans to empathetize. Human suffering is not all that matters, and people who can't be convinced otherwise probably aren't the target audience.
erostrate 2y ago
Did the author factor in the impact of this kind of article on the external perception of the rationalist / utilitarian / EA community when weighing the utility of publishing this? Should you push arguments that seem ridiculously unacceptable to the vast majority of people, thereby reducing the weight of more acceptable arguments you could possibly make?
- sodality2 2y ago
  Should we stop making logically sound but unpalatable arguments?
  - erostrate 2y ago
    How palatable an argument is determines its actual impact. It's not logical to spend effort making arguments that are so unpalatable that they will just make people ignore you.
    - sodality2 2y ago
      Deontologically, maybe it's principally better to make an argument you know you can't refute. Maybe even just to try to convince yourself otherwise. I know the person making this argument isn't necessarily aligned with deontology. Maybe that was your original point.
- slothtrop 2y ago
  That may be part of the intent.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
  The article seems to have been well-received: https://benthams.substack.com/p/you-all-helped-hundreds-of-millions https://benthams.substack.com/p/you-all-helped-hundreds-of-m... I think this is a tough call in general. Current morality would be considered "ridiculously unacceptable" by 1800s standards, but I see it as a good thing that we've moved away from 1800s morality. I'm glad people were willing to challenge the 1800s status quo. At the same time, my sense is that the environmentalists who are ruining art in museums are probably challenging the status quo in a way that's unproductive. To some degree, I suspect the rationalist / EA crowd has decided that weird contrarians tend to be the people who have the greatest impact in the long run, so it's OK to filter for those people.
tengbretson 2y ago
Gotta hand it to the author– no one here is arguing over whether ChatGPT wrote the article.
delichon 2y ago
By this logic someone who kills a person and lets them decay in a swamp such that billions or trillions of microbes benefit, we should hail them as a paragon of charity. I hope this point of view doesn't catch on.
- sodality2 2y ago
  To draw this parallel situation, you're stipulating a few things: microbes feel pain, X good is as good as X bad is bad, and that actively bringing about a good thing is equivalent to avoiding a harmful thing. I don't think any of these are true, so I disagree.
  - rep_lodsb 2y ago
    But what if the person you murder will be responsible for the suffering of billions of shrimp? Or argues convincingly against Effective Altruism? The reason nobody actually does this, is that EA is a belief system adopted by (at least) comfortably well-off Silicon Valley people to make themselves feel better about their effect on society. If there is a 0.00001% chance they can prevent AI MegaHitler, everything they do to make more money is justified.
bhelkey 2y ago
This two thousand word article boils down to, 1) every dollar donated saves ~1,500 shrimp per year from agony in perpituaty and 2) saving 32 shrimp from agony is morally equivalent to saving 1 human from agony. Neither of these points are well supported by the article. Nor are they well supported by the copious links scattered through the blog post. For example, "they worked with Tesco to get an extra 1.6 billion shrimp stunned before slaughter every year" links to a summary about the charity NOT to any source for 1.6 billion shrimp saved.
- sodality2 2y ago
  > For example, "they worked with Tesco to get an extra 1.6 billion shrimp stunned before slaughter every year" links to a summary about the charity NOT to any source for 1.6 billion shrimp saved. It's in the exact webpage linked there. You just didn't scroll down enough. > Tesco and Sainsbury’s published shrimp welfare commitments, citing collaboration with SWP (among others), and signed 9 further memoranda of understanding with producers, in total committing to stunning a further ~1.6B shrimps per annum. https://animalcharityevaluators.org/charity-review/shrimp-welfare-project/ https://animalcharityevaluators.org/charity-review/shrimp-we...
  - bhelkey 2y ago
    The purpose of a citation is to provide further evidence supporting the claim. This instead links to a ~thousand word article. A single sentence of which is relevant. Instead of supporting the claim, it instead restates the claim.
    - sodality2 2y ago
      It's a primary source from the organization doing the partnership with Tesco. Why would they cite anything? Who would they cite? https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2024/08/17/2931776/0/en/Mercy-for-Animals-Secures-Landmark-Commitment-for-Shrimp-Welfare-From-Tesco.html https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2024/08/17/293...
      - 2y ago
vasco 2y ago
It seems weird to genetically engineer, force reproduce and grow other species just for us to eat them but worry about the specific aspect of how they die. Their whole existence is for our exploitation. I know it's still a good thing to not cause extra suffering if we can avoid it for cheap, and I support this kinda thing, but it's always weird.
- BenthamsBulldog 2y ago
  I'm also against exploiting them.
goda90 2y ago
A purely selfish, human-centric argument for this initiative might be that electrical stunning before freezing might improve the taste and texture of the shrimp. I know some animals reportedly have worse tasting meat if their death was stressful.
ajkjk 2y ago
This person seems to think they have engaged with the counterarguments against their way of looking at the world, but to my eye they are clueless; they just have no idea how most other people think at all. They've rationalized their morality into some kind of pseudo-quantitative ethical maximization problem and then failed to notice that most people's moralities don't and aren't going to work like that. Indeed, people will resist being "tricked" into this framework: debating on these terms will feel like having their morals twisted into justifying things they don't believe in. And although they may not have the patience or rhetorical skill to put into words exactly why they resist it, their intuitions won't lead them astray, and they'll react according to their true-but-hard-to-verbalize beliefs (usually by gradually getting frustrated and angry with you). A person who believes in rationalizing everything will then think that someone who resists this kind of argument is just dumb, or irrational, or stubborn, or actually-evil, to see that they are wrong. But it seems to me that the very idea that you can rationalize morality, that you can compute the right thing to do at a personal-ethics level, is itself a moral belief, which those people simply do not agree with, and their resistance is in accordance with that: you'd be trying to convince them to replace their moral beliefs with yours in order to win an argument by tricking them with logic. No wonder they resist! People do not release control over their moral beliefs lightly. Rather I think it's the people who are very insecure in their own beliefs who are susceptible to giving them up to someone who runs rhetorical circles around them. I've come to think that a lot of 21st century discord (c.f. American political polarization) is due to this basic conflict. People who believe in rationalizing everything think they can't be wrong because the only way to evaluate anything is rationally--a lens through which, of course rationality looks better than anything else. Meanwhile everyone who trusts in their own moral intuitions feels tricked and betrayed and exploited and sold out when it happens. Sure, they can't always find the words to defend themselves. But it's the rationalizers who are in the wrong: pressuring someone into changing their mind is not okay; it's a basic act of disrespect. Getting someone on your side for real means appealing to their moral intuition, not making them doubt theirs until they give up and reluctantly agree with yours. Anyway it's a temporary and false victory: theirs will re-emerge years later, twisted and deformed from years of imprisonment, and often set on vengeance. At that point they may well be "wrong", but there's no convincing them otherwise: their moral goal has been replaced with a singular need to get to make their own decisions instead of being subjugated by yours. Anyway. IMO to justify animal welfare utilitarianism to people who don't care about it at all, you need to take one of two stances: 1. We (the animal-empathizers) live in a society with you, and we care a lot about this, but you don't. But we're in community with each other, so we ought to support each other's causes even if they're not personally relevant to us. So how about you support what we care about and you support what we care about, so everyone benefits? In this case it's very cheap to help. 2. We all live in a society together which should, by now, have largely solved for our basic needs (except for our basic incompetence at it, which, yeah, we need to keep working on). The basic job of morality is to guarantee the safety of everyone in our community. As we start checking off basic needs at the local scale we naturally start expanding our definition of "community" to more and more beings that we can empathize with: other nations and peoples, the natural world around us, people in the far future who suffer from our carelessness, pets, and then, yes, and animals that we use for food. Even though we're still working on the "nearby" hard stuff, like protecting our local ecosystems, we can also start with the low-hanging-fruit on the far-away stuff, including alleviating the needless suffering of shrimp. Long-term we hope to live in harmony with everything on earth in a way that has us all looking out for each other, and this is a small step towards that. "(suffering per death) * (discount rate for shrimp being 3% of a human) * (dollar to alleviate) = best charity" just doesn't work at all. I notice that the natural human moral intuition (the non-rational version) is necessarily local: it's focused on protecting whatever you regard as your community. So to get someone to extend it to far-away less-sentient creatures, you have to convince the person to change their definition of the "community"--and I think that's what happens naturally when they feel like their local community is safe enough that they can start extending protection at a wider radius.
sys32768 2y ago
How does the author know that shrimp experience "extreme agony" the way humans experience it? Trees and bushes and vegetables might experience extreme agony too when dying.
- sodality2 2y ago
  > How does the author know that shrimp experience "extreme agony" the way humans experience it? https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/welfare-range-estimates/ https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/welfare-range-es...
addicted 2y ago
Or more simply, don’t kill animals when we don’t need to.
burnt-resistor 2y ago
Okay, plausible, I guess. The problem boils (no pun intended) down to a problem of anthropocentric one; that is, it's impossible to ask a shrimp how much it hurts. Perhaps it hurts a lot or only hurts a little, or it varies based on other factors. It's not necessarily an unknowable, but it's an unknowable in human-relatable terms because (human) intelligence and theory of mind frame taking requires a prerequisite of linguistic understanding and compatibility. (Has not almost every conquering civilization deemed every indigenous group it encountered to be "dumb" or "subhuman" simply by not being able to converse? And, I'll take it one further that "intelligence" is purely a qualitative property inferred by performative interaction often respecting either strategy signals, complexity of response, or academic fashions... all requiring a shared language. This leaves out all other species because humans haven't yet evolved the intelligence or tools to communicate with other species.) Also, why not endeavor to replace meat grown by slaughtering animals with other alternatives? The optimization of such would reduce the energy, costs, biothreats, and suffering that eating other living beings creates.
- IncreasePosts 2y ago
  Yes, if individuals suffering is a metric, then we should be shutting down shrimp farms and only eating large animals that provide a whole lot of calories per individual - like cows or elephants.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
  >why not endeavor to replace meat grown by slaughtering animals with other alternatives? Utilitarians tend to be very interested in this, too. I've been giving to this group: https://gfi.org/ https://gfi.org/
sixo 2y ago
This is one of those arguments that you reach when you go in a certain direction for long enough, and you can divide people into two camps at this point by whether: * they triumphally declare victory--ethics is solved! We can finally Do The Most Good! * or, it's so ridiculous that it occurs to them that they're missing something--must have taken a wrong turn somewhere earlier on. By my tone you can probably tell I take the latter position, roughly because "suffering", or "moral value", is not rightly seen as measurable, calculatable, or commensurable, even between humans. It's occasionally a useful view for institutions to hold, but imo the one for a human.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
  You can read and respond to my reply here if you like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42173441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42173441
RodgerTheGreat 2y ago
If you find this line of argument compelling, consider another alternative: engineering an organism which is much smaller and consumes far fewer resources than shrimp but which exists in a neurologically stable state of perpetual bliss. The survival and replication of this species of biological prayer-wheels would rapidly become a far stronger moral imperative (within the logic of the article) than any consideration for shrimp, or indeed humans.
- sodality2 2y ago
  I don't think this is the same at all. Creation of good is not necessarily as good as avoidance of harm is bad.
  - VyseofArcadia 2y ago
    It depends on your goals, right? If your goal is "maximize total happiness", then engineering blisshrimp is obviously the winning play. If your goal is "minimize total suffering", than the play is to engineer something that 1. experiences no suffering, 2. is delicious, and 3. outcompetes existing shrimp so we don't have to worry about their suffering anymore. Ideally we'd engineer something that is in a state of perpetual bliss and wants to be eaten, not unlike the cows in Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
    - sodality2 2y ago
      > If your goal is "minimize total suffering", than the play is to engineer something that 1. experiences no suffering, 2. is delicious, and 3. outcompetes existing shrimp so we don't have to worry about their suffering anymore. Eh, only if you're minimizing suffering per living being. Not total suffering. Having more happy creatures doesn't cancel out the sad ones. But I see what you mean.
      - Vecr 2y ago
        > Eh, only if you're minimizing suffering per living being. Not total suffering. Having more happy creatures doesn't cancel out the sad ones. But I see what you mean. According to this guy it does.
Melonotromo 2y ago
Shrimps don't suffer. No one 'suffers'. Suffering is an expresion / concept we humans have because we called a certain state like this. Suffering is something a organism presents if that organism can't survive or struggles with survival. Now i'm a human and my empathy is a lot stronger for humans, a lot, than for shrimps. Btw. i do believe if we would really care and make sure fewllow humans would not need to suffer (they need to suffer because of capitalsm), a lot of other suffering would stop too. We would be able to actually think about shrimps and other animals.
KevinMS 2y ago
> They were going to be thrown onto ice where slowly, agonizingly, over the course of 20 minutes, they’d suffocate and freeze to death at the same time, a bit like suffocating in a suitcase in the middle of Antarctica. Imagine them struggling, gasping, without enough air, fighting for their lives, but it’s no use. How do we know this isn't just fiction?
qwertygnu 2y ago
Responses to animal welfare articles are sad. There are mountains of evidence[0] that many animals experience emotions (including suffering) in much the same way that we do. It's tough seeing people say, without hesitation, they'd kill millions of animals over a single human. > Shrimp are a test of our empathy. Shrimp don’t look normal, caring about them isn’t popular, but basic ethical principles entail that they matter. I think we'll be looking back in the not-so-far future with disgust about how we treated animals. [0] RTFA
- theonething 2y ago
  I find it not only sad, but horrifying that there are people that would actually consider sacrificing a human over animals.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
leephillips 2y ago
Shrimp do not have experience. There is no place within the shrimp, no anatomical structure, where experience can reside. The article, and many of the articles it links to, confuse the existence of pain receptors, complexity of behavior, memory, aversion, intelligence, learning capacity, and other measures for experience. Since they don’t have experience, they can’t suffer, in the morally relevant sense for this argument.
- BenthamsBulldog 2y ago
  What about the brain? https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00441-017-2607-y#Sec18 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00441-017-2607-y#...
  - leephillips 2y ago
    As is most clear in Figure 8 of the article you refer to (which is good science, but mainly of interest to specialists in the neural/sensory anatomy of certain classes of animals), the shrimp lacks, among other features, a cortex and a thalamus. These are known to be necessary for the generation of conscious experience.
telharmonium 2y ago
I'm reminded of the novel "Venomous Lumpsucker" by Ned Beauman, a deeply weird satire about the perverse incentives and behaviors engendered by the union of industrial consumption, market-based conservation, and the abstract calculus of ethics at scale. In particular, one portion features an autonomous bioreactor which produces enormous clouds of "yayflies"; mayflies whose nervous systems have been engineered to experience constant, maximal pleasure. The system's designer asserts that, given the sheer volume of yayflies produced, they have done more than anyone in history to increase the absolute quantity of happiness in the universe.
c0detrafficker 2y ago
[flagged]
AlexandrB 2y ago
Oh, boy. Site links to some "Effective Altruism" math on the topic[1]. This both reinforces my existing (negative) opinion of EA and makes me question the validity of this whole thing. [1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EbQysXxofbSqkbAiT/cost-effectiveness-of-shrimp-welfare-project-s-humane https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EbQysXxofbSqkbAiT/...
- BenthamsBulldog 2y ago
  Seems silly that one post from one person would cause you to rethink a movement.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
l1n 2y ago
I made these, proceeds go to the SWF folks https://www.etsy.com/listing/1371574690/shrimp-want-me-unaligned-ais-fear-me https://www.etsy.com/listing/1371574690/shrimp-want-me-unali...
RandallBrown 2y ago
I wonder if these donations would be better spent on lobbying for shrimp stunning regulations rather than just buying the shrimp farms shrimp stunners.
mrguyorama 2y ago
Pulling completely unsubstantiated numbers out of your ass is not an argument. No, calling it "an estimate" does not actually make a number you've pulled out of your ass an actual estimate. No, composing a bunch of """estimates""" doesn't make an argument, and it doesn't matter what kind of "error ranges" you give your made up numbers, the error range of the composed value is basically infinite. >The way it works is simple and common sense Claiming "common sense" in any argument is red flag number 1 that you don't actually have a self supporting argument. Common sense doesn't actually exist, and anyone leaning on it is just trying to compel you through embarrassment to support their cause without argument. There's a reason proving 1+1=2 takes a hundred pages. Randomly inserting numbers that "seem" right so that you can pretend to be a rigorous field is cargo cultism and pseudoscience. Numbers without data and justification is not rigor.
- BenthamsBulldog 2y ago
  But the numbers didn't come from me but from the RP report.
bulletsvshumans 2y ago
Whenever I see the backlash to conversations about animal suffering, I wonder if one reason is because it is a sort of “inconvenient truth”, ala global warming, where we are doing grave damage but we prefer to collectively ignore it because that damage aligns with our material incentives. That animals of many kinds are capable of substantial suffering seems honestly obvious to me from first hand observation, and I suspect it is obvious to most others too, at least when we are children. But I think we intentionally “unlearn” this culturally, because for most of human history it was a necessarily evil to sustain ourselves. To bring this truth up begins to break a spell we cast on ourselves that we don’t want unbroken. I look forward to the day when more people feel that their materials needs are satisfied enough that we can collectively approach this topic with an unencompromised intellectual honesty.
FearNotDaniel 2y ago
Oh wow so now we live in a world that tells us unborn humans are not actually human until a certain arbitrary number of months have passed, and that those non human living things do not have feelings or suffer in any way if we choose to kill them before this arbitrary date - but at the same time every single shrimp’s intense suffering is suddenly my problem?
RestartKernel 2y ago
This reads like a thought experiment, but its sincerity makes me uncomfortable in the way good art does. Thanks for sharing.

82 points by 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago

I read this article after it was linked on Amos Wollen's substack this weekend. Thoroughly convinced. I have been preaching shrimp rights to everyone in my life. 15,000 shrimp will be given a death with dignity by my donation.

thinkingtoilet 2y ago

I love articles like this that challenge the status quo of morality. I find my self asking the question, "Would I rather save a billion shrimp or one human?" and I honestly think I'm siding on the human. I'm not saying that answer is "correct". It's always good to think about these things and the point the author makes about shrimp being a test of our morality because they're so different is a good one.

barefoot 2y ago
How about one million kittens or one human?
- HansardExpert 2y ago
  Still the human. How about one million humans or one kitten? Where is the cut-off point for you>?
- dartos 2y ago
  Where did the kittens come from? If they were spawned into existence for this thought experiment, then the human, probably. But if even one of those kittens were mine, entire cities could be leveled before I let anyone hurt my kitten.
  - some_random 2y ago
    This brings up an interesting point, our view of morality is heavily skewed. If you made me choose between something bad happening to my partner or 10 random people, I would save my partner every time and I expect every normal person in the world to choose the same.
    - dartos 2y ago
      Well humans aren’t perfectly rational. I wouldn’t think it moral to save my kitten over a random non-evil person, but I’d still do it.
      - Iulioh 2y ago
        It is a rational choice tho. It wouldn't just hurt your partner, it would hurt you. We know that following a "objective morality" the 10 people would be a better choice but it would hurt (indirectly) you.
        dartos 2y ago
        You’re right. Maybe rational was the wrong word. Humans aren’t perfectly objective.
  - hansvm 2y ago
    Also, where did the human come from? Are they already on their deathbed, prolonged in this thought experiment for only a few fleeting moments? Were they themselves a murderer?
    - dartos 2y ago
      None of that matters if my kitten is in danger!
  - GJim 2y ago
    > entire cities could be leveled before I let anyone hurt my kitten Allowing that kitten to live will cause untold suffering for other small mammals. You have the power to stop that suffering!
- saalweachter 2y ago
  Collectively we kill and eat around a billion rabbits a year, around 8 million in the US. They aren't kittens, but they do have a similar level of fluffy cuteness. It's not quite "one million to one"; the meat from 1 million rabbits meets the caloric needs of around 2750 people for 1 year.
- mihaic 2y ago
  In that case I actually ask "Who's the human?", and in about 80% of the time I'd pick the human.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  One cat versus many humans. My spending on my cat makes the answer clear.
himinlomax 2y ago
The best way to save even more shrimps would be to campaign for and subsidize whaling. They are shrimp-mass-murdering machines. What's a few whales versus billions of shrimps?
- xipho 2y ago
  You didn't read the article nor follow the argument, just jumped in. It's about suffering shrimps, not saving shrimps.
  - some_random 2y ago
    Do shrimp not suffer from being consumed by whales?
    - eightysixfour 2y ago
      In comparison to having their eyeballs crushed but left alive, or slowly frozen to death?
      - some_random 2y ago
        The trade off here is eliminating mutilation, going from Pain + Death to just Death, or in the case of the whales, going from Death to normal, beautiful shrimp Life. I don't really have any interest in doing shrimp quality of life math this morning but there's clearly something there.
  - himinlomax 2y ago
    I did. It was a whole lot of nothing. In any case, I just wanted to point out that if you cared about the welfare of damn arthropods, you're going nowhere really fast. Consider this: the quickest, surest, most efficient way and ONLY way to reduce all suffering on earth to nothing forever and ever is a good ole nuclear holocaust.
    - xipho 2y ago
anothername12 2y ago
It’s the trolley problem https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/ https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/
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BenthamsBulldog 2y ago
Thanks for the kind words! I agree lots of people would value a human more than any number of shrimp. Now, in the article, I'm talking about which is worse--extreme suffering for one human or extreme suffering for millions of shrimp. So then the question is: can the common sense verdict be defended? What about shrimp is it that makes it so that their pain is of negligible importance compared to humans? Sure they aren't smart, but being dumb doesn't seem to make your pain less bad (hurting babies and mentally disabled people is still very very bad).
- theonething 2y ago
  For babies and mentally disabled people, we absolutely know beyond any doubt that they are capable of feeling pain, intense, blood curdling pain. I don't think we can say the same of shrimp. That's why humane killing of cattle (with piston guns to the head) is widely practiced, but nothing of the sort for crabs, oysters, etc. We know for sure cattle feel pain so we do something about it.
  - BenthamsBulldog 2y ago
    Sure but if we're not sure then the possible infliction of huge amounts of horrendous suffering on trillions of them is quite serious. If there's even a 5% chance that shrimp feel pain as intensely as humans, the SWP is an excellent bet.
joegibbs 2y ago
The whole idea of morality is totally arbitrary and only exists because we say it does. If you were an Aztec then sacrificing people to Huitzilopochtli was actually moral, and if you were alive two thousand years ago nobody would have batted an eye at owning slaves. In reality, nobody would actually choose to save the life of 34 crustaceans over the life of a human, even if killing the prawn results in 102% of the suffering of killing the human. It's the same with all the EA stuff like prioritising X trillion potential humans that may exist in the future over actual people who exist now - you can get as granular as you want and mess around with probability to say anything. Maybe it's good to grow brains in vats and feed them heroin - that'll increase total happiness! Maybe we should judge someone who has killed enough flies the same as a murderer! Maybe our goals for the future should be based on the quadrillion future sentient creatures that will evolve from today's coconut crabs!
- deleted 2y ago
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n4r9 2y ago

Apologies for focusing on just one sentence of this article, but I feel like it's crucial to the overall argument: > ... if [shrimp] suffer only 3% as intensely as we do ... Does this proposition make sense? It's not obvious to me that we can assign percentage values to suffering, or compare it to human suffering, or treat the values in a linear fashion. It reminds me of that vaguely absurd thought experiment where you compare one person undergoing a lifetime of intense torture vs billions upon billions of humans getting a fleck of dust in their eyes. I just cannot square choosing the former with my conscience. Maybe I'm too unimaginative to comprehend so many billions of bits of dust.

sodality2 2y ago
Have you read the linked paper by Norcross? "Great harms from small benefits grow: how death can be outweighed by headaches" [0]. [0]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3328486 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3328486
- n4r9 2y ago
  No; thanks for bringing it to my attention. The first page is intriguing... I'll see if I can locate a free copy somewhere.
  - sodality2 2y ago
    Here's a copy I found: https://philosophysmith.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/alistair-norcross-22how-harms-outweighed-by-headaches22.pdf https://philosophysmith.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/alist... It's pretty short, I liked it. Was surprised to find myself agreeing with it at the end of my first read.
    - n4r9 2y ago
      Thanks. It's very clever how he uses probabilistic variants to move between scenarios. I've read to the end and whilst I'm not convinced, it's definitely given me food for thought. I'm stuck on two bits so far: * He slides between talking about personal decisions vs decisions about someone else. The argument for Headache is couched in terms of whether an average person would drive to the chemist. Whilst the argument for shifting from Headache to Many Headaches is couched in terms of decisions made by an external party. This feels problematic to me. There may be some workaround. * He describes rejecting transitivity as being overwhelmingly implausible. Is that obvious? Ethical considerations ultimately boil down to subjective evaluations, and there seems no obvious reason why those evaluations would be transitive.

dfedbeef 2y ago

Waiting for the funny reveal that this is a prank

niek_pas 2y ago
Why do you think this is a prank?
- dfedbeef 2y ago
  Because it's funny enough and seems like an absolute S-tier performance artist critique of the effective altruism movement. Like who gives a shit about whether shrimp freeze to death or are electrocuted and then freeze to death. But this blog post uses a little BS math (.3 seconds IS shorter than 20 minutes! By an order of magnitude! Take my money!) and some hand wavey citations (Did you know shrimp MIGHT be conscious based on a very loose definition of consciousness? Now you too are very smart! You can talk about this with your sort-of friends (coworkers) from the job where you spend 80 hours a week now!) to convince some people that this is indeed an important and worthy thing. Because people who can be talked into this don't really interact with the real world, for the most part. So they don't know that lots of actual people need actual help that doesn't involve them dying anyway and being eaten en-masse afterwards.
  - dfedbeef 2y ago
    and it stimulates interesting conversations like this. Watch this comment section it's going to be great
  - dfedbeef 2y ago
    It's also just such a perfect half-measure. You're not asking people to not eat these little guys. They're not even confirmed to be fully conscious. This is a speculative fix for a theoretical problem. Plus like, there's some company making shrimp zappers. So by donating you're also kind of paying two people to kill the shrimp?
    - sodality2 2y ago

VyseofArcadia 2y ago

This is an intensely weird read. I kept waiting for the satire to become more obvious. Maybe throw in a reference or two to the Futurama episode "The Problem with Popplers". But by the end I can only conclude that it is sincere. I guess what strikes me the most odd is that not eating shrimp is never suggested as an alternative. It starts from the premise that, well, we're going to eat shrimp anyway, so the least we could do is give them a painless death first. If you follow this logic to its extremes, you get things like, "well, it's expensive to actually feed these starving children, but for just pennies a day you can make sure they at least die painlessly".

InsideOutSanta 2y ago
You have no control over other people's eating habits, but you do have control over your own charitable spending. If you're considering how to best spend your money, it doesn't matter that not eating shrimp would be an even better solution than preventing pain when they are killed. It only matters what the most effective way of spending your money is.
- AlexandrB 2y ago
  If we're talking ethical giving, I'd rather give that money to a panhandler where there's a chance it relieves even a little bit of human suffering.
  - DangitBobby 2y ago
    TFA addresses this. Many humans believe that no amount of animal suffering is as bad as any amount of human suffering, which is just a failure of humans to empathetize. Human suffering is not all that matters, and people who can't be convinced otherwise probably aren't the target audience.

erostrate 2y ago

Did the author factor in the impact of this kind of article on the external perception of the rationalist / utilitarian / EA community when weighing the utility of publishing this? Should you push arguments that seem ridiculously unacceptable to the vast majority of people, thereby reducing the weight of more acceptable arguments you could possibly make?

sodality2 2y ago
Should we stop making logically sound but unpalatable arguments?
- erostrate 2y ago
  How palatable an argument is determines its actual impact. It's not logical to spend effort making arguments that are so unpalatable that they will just make people ignore you.
  - sodality2 2y ago
    Deontologically, maybe it's principally better to make an argument you know you can't refute. Maybe even just to try to convince yourself otherwise. I know the person making this argument isn't necessarily aligned with deontology. Maybe that was your original point.
slothtrop 2y ago
That may be part of the intent.
0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
The article seems to have been well-received: https://benthams.substack.com/p/you-all-helped-hundreds-of-millions https://benthams.substack.com/p/you-all-helped-hundreds-of-m... I think this is a tough call in general. Current morality would be considered "ridiculously unacceptable" by 1800s standards, but I see it as a good thing that we've moved away from 1800s morality. I'm glad people were willing to challenge the 1800s status quo. At the same time, my sense is that the environmentalists who are ruining art in museums are probably challenging the status quo in a way that's unproductive. To some degree, I suspect the rationalist / EA crowd has decided that weird contrarians tend to be the people who have the greatest impact in the long run, so it's OK to filter for those people.

tengbretson 2y ago

Gotta hand it to the author– no one here is arguing over whether ChatGPT wrote the article.

delichon 2y ago

By this logic someone who kills a person and lets them decay in a swamp such that billions or trillions of microbes benefit, we should hail them as a paragon of charity. I hope this point of view doesn't catch on.

sodality2 2y ago
To draw this parallel situation, you're stipulating a few things: microbes feel pain, X good is as good as X bad is bad, and that actively bringing about a good thing is equivalent to avoiding a harmful thing. I don't think any of these are true, so I disagree.
- rep_lodsb 2y ago
  But what if the person you murder will be responsible for the suffering of billions of shrimp? Or argues convincingly against Effective Altruism? The reason nobody actually does this, is that EA is a belief system adopted by (at least) comfortably well-off Silicon Valley people to make themselves feel better about their effect on society. If there is a 0.00001% chance they can prevent AI MegaHitler, everything they do to make more money is justified.

bhelkey 2y ago

This two thousand word article boils down to, 1) every dollar donated saves ~1,500 shrimp per year from agony in perpituaty and 2) saving 32 shrimp from agony is morally equivalent to saving 1 human from agony. Neither of these points are well supported by the article. Nor are they well supported by the copious links scattered through the blog post. For example, "they worked with Tesco to get an extra 1.6 billion shrimp stunned before slaughter every year" links to a summary about the charity NOT to any source for 1.6 billion shrimp saved.

sodality2 2y ago
> For example, "they worked with Tesco to get an extra 1.6 billion shrimp stunned before slaughter every year" links to a summary about the charity NOT to any source for 1.6 billion shrimp saved. It's in the exact webpage linked there. You just didn't scroll down enough. > Tesco and Sainsbury’s published shrimp welfare commitments, citing collaboration with SWP (among others), and signed 9 further memoranda of understanding with producers, in total committing to stunning a further ~1.6B shrimps per annum. https://animalcharityevaluators.org/charity-review/shrimp-welfare-project/ https://animalcharityevaluators.org/charity-review/shrimp-we...
- bhelkey 2y ago
  The purpose of a citation is to provide further evidence supporting the claim. This instead links to a ~thousand word article. A single sentence of which is relevant. Instead of supporting the claim, it instead restates the claim.
  - sodality2 2y ago
    It's a primary source from the organization doing the partnership with Tesco. Why would they cite anything? Who would they cite? https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2024/08/17/2931776/0/en/Mercy-for-Animals-Secures-Landmark-Commitment-for-Shrimp-Welfare-From-Tesco.html https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2024/08/17/293...
    - 2y ago

vasco 2y ago

It seems weird to genetically engineer, force reproduce and grow other species just for us to eat them but worry about the specific aspect of how they die. Their whole existence is for our exploitation. I know it's still a good thing to not cause extra suffering if we can avoid it for cheap, and I support this kinda thing, but it's always weird.

BenthamsBulldog 2y ago
I'm also against exploiting them.

goda90 2y ago

A purely selfish, human-centric argument for this initiative might be that electrical stunning before freezing might improve the taste and texture of the shrimp. I know some animals reportedly have worse tasting meat if their death was stressful.

ajkjk 2y ago

This person seems to think they have engaged with the counterarguments against their way of looking at the world, but to my eye they are clueless; they just have no idea how most other people think at all. They've rationalized their morality into some kind of pseudo-quantitative ethical maximization problem and then failed to notice that most people's moralities don't and aren't going to work like that. Indeed, people will resist being "tricked" into this framework: debating on these terms will feel like having their morals twisted into justifying things they don't believe in. And although they may not have the patience or rhetorical skill to put into words exactly why they resist it, their intuitions won't lead them astray, and they'll react according to their true-but-hard-to-verbalize beliefs (usually by gradually getting frustrated and angry with you). A person who believes in rationalizing everything will then think that someone who resists this kind of argument is just dumb, or irrational, or stubborn, or actually-evil, to see that they are wrong. But it seems to me that the very idea that you can rationalize morality, that you can compute the right thing to do at a personal-ethics level, is itself a moral belief, which those people simply do not agree with, and their resistance is in accordance with that: you'd be trying to convince them to replace their moral beliefs with yours in order to win an argument by tricking them with logic. No wonder they resist! People do not release control over their moral beliefs lightly. Rather I think it's the people who are very insecure in their own beliefs who are susceptible to giving them up to someone who runs rhetorical circles around them. I've come to think that a lot of 21st century discord (c.f. American political polarization) is due to this basic conflict. People who believe in rationalizing everything think they can't be wrong because the only way to evaluate anything is rationally--a lens through which, of course rationality looks better than anything else. Meanwhile everyone who trusts in their own moral intuitions feels tricked and betrayed and exploited and sold out when it happens. Sure, they can't always find the words to defend themselves. But it's the rationalizers who are in the wrong: pressuring someone into changing their mind is not okay; it's a basic act of disrespect. Getting someone on your side for real means appealing to their moral intuition, not making them doubt theirs until they give up and reluctantly agree with yours. Anyway it's a temporary and false victory: theirs will re-emerge years later, twisted and deformed from years of imprisonment, and often set on vengeance. At that point they may well be "wrong", but there's no convincing them otherwise: their moral goal has been replaced with a singular need to get to make their own decisions instead of being subjugated by yours. Anyway. IMO to justify animal welfare utilitarianism to people who don't care about it at all, you need to take one of two stances: 1. We (the animal-empathizers) live in a society with you, and we care a lot about this, but you don't. But we're in community with each other, so we ought to support each other's causes even if they're not personally relevant to us. So how about you support what we care about and you support what we care about, so everyone benefits? In this case it's very cheap to help. 2. We all live in a society together which should, by now, have largely solved for our basic needs (except for our basic incompetence at it, which, yeah, we need to keep working on). The basic job of morality is to guarantee the safety of everyone in our community. As we start checking off basic needs at the local scale we naturally start expanding our definition of "community" to more and more beings that we can empathize with: other nations and peoples, the natural world around us, people in the far future who suffer from our carelessness, pets, and then, yes, and animals that we use for food. Even though we're still working on the "nearby" hard stuff, like protecting our local ecosystems, we can also start with the low-hanging-fruit on the far-away stuff, including alleviating the needless suffering of shrimp. Long-term we hope to live in harmony with everything on earth in a way that has us all looking out for each other, and this is a small step towards that. "(suffering per death) * (discount rate for shrimp being 3% of a human) * (dollar to alleviate) = best charity" just doesn't work at all. I notice that the natural human moral intuition (the non-rational version) is necessarily local: it's focused on protecting whatever you regard as your community. So to get someone to extend it to far-away less-sentient creatures, you have to convince the person to change their definition of the "community"--and I think that's what happens naturally when they feel like their local community is safe enough that they can start extending protection at a wider radius.

sys32768 2y ago

How does the author know that shrimp experience "extreme agony" the way humans experience it? Trees and bushes and vegetables might experience extreme agony too when dying.

sodality2 2y ago
> How does the author know that shrimp experience "extreme agony" the way humans experience it? https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/welfare-range-estimates/ https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/welfare-range-es...

addicted 2y ago

Or more simply, don’t kill animals when we don’t need to.

burnt-resistor 2y ago

Okay, plausible, I guess. The problem boils (no pun intended) down to a problem of anthropocentric one; that is, it's impossible to ask a shrimp how much it hurts. Perhaps it hurts a lot or only hurts a little, or it varies based on other factors. It's not necessarily an unknowable, but it's an unknowable in human-relatable terms because (human) intelligence and theory of mind frame taking requires a prerequisite of linguistic understanding and compatibility. (Has not almost every conquering civilization deemed every indigenous group it encountered to be "dumb" or "subhuman" simply by not being able to converse? And, I'll take it one further that "intelligence" is purely a qualitative property inferred by performative interaction often respecting either strategy signals, complexity of response, or academic fashions... all requiring a shared language. This leaves out all other species because humans haven't yet evolved the intelligence or tools to communicate with other species.) Also, why not endeavor to replace meat grown by slaughtering animals with other alternatives? The optimization of such would reduce the energy, costs, biothreats, and suffering that eating other living beings creates.

IncreasePosts 2y ago
Yes, if individuals suffering is a metric, then we should be shutting down shrimp farms and only eating large animals that provide a whole lot of calories per individual - like cows or elephants.
- deleted 2y ago
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0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
>why not endeavor to replace meat grown by slaughtering animals with other alternatives? Utilitarians tend to be very interested in this, too. I've been giving to this group: https://gfi.org/ https://gfi.org/

sixo 2y ago

This is one of those arguments that you reach when you go in a certain direction for long enough, and you can divide people into two camps at this point by whether: * they triumphally declare victory--ethics is solved! We can finally Do The Most Good! * or, it's so ridiculous that it occurs to them that they're missing something--must have taken a wrong turn somewhere earlier on. By my tone you can probably tell I take the latter position, roughly because "suffering", or "moral value", is not rightly seen as measurable, calculatable, or commensurable, even between humans. It's occasionally a useful view for institutions to hold, but imo the one for a human.

0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
You can read and respond to my reply here if you like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42173441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42173441

RodgerTheGreat 2y ago

If you find this line of argument compelling, consider another alternative: engineering an organism which is much smaller and consumes far fewer resources than shrimp but which exists in a neurologically stable state of perpetual bliss. The survival and replication of this species of biological prayer-wheels would rapidly become a far stronger moral imperative (within the logic of the article) than any consideration for shrimp, or indeed humans.

sodality2 2y ago
I don't think this is the same at all. Creation of good is not necessarily as good as avoidance of harm is bad.
- VyseofArcadia 2y ago
  It depends on your goals, right? If your goal is "maximize total happiness", then engineering blisshrimp is obviously the winning play. If your goal is "minimize total suffering", than the play is to engineer something that 1. experiences no suffering, 2. is delicious, and 3. outcompetes existing shrimp so we don't have to worry about their suffering anymore. Ideally we'd engineer something that is in a state of perpetual bliss and wants to be eaten, not unlike the cows in Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
  - sodality2 2y ago
    > If your goal is "minimize total suffering", than the play is to engineer something that 1. experiences no suffering, 2. is delicious, and 3. outcompetes existing shrimp so we don't have to worry about their suffering anymore. Eh, only if you're minimizing suffering per living being. Not total suffering. Having more happy creatures doesn't cancel out the sad ones. But I see what you mean.
    - Vecr 2y ago
      > Eh, only if you're minimizing suffering per living being. Not total suffering. Having more happy creatures doesn't cancel out the sad ones. But I see what you mean. According to this guy it does.

Melonotromo 2y ago

Shrimps don't suffer. No one 'suffers'. Suffering is an expresion / concept we humans have because we called a certain state like this. Suffering is something a organism presents if that organism can't survive or struggles with survival. Now i'm a human and my empathy is a lot stronger for humans, a lot, than for shrimps. Btw. i do believe if we would really care and make sure fewllow humans would not need to suffer (they need to suffer because of capitalsm), a lot of other suffering would stop too. We would be able to actually think about shrimps and other animals.

KevinMS 2y ago

> They were going to be thrown onto ice where slowly, agonizingly, over the course of 20 minutes, they’d suffocate and freeze to death at the same time, a bit like suffocating in a suitcase in the middle of Antarctica. Imagine them struggling, gasping, without enough air, fighting for their lives, but it’s no use. How do we know this isn't just fiction?

qwertygnu 2y ago

Responses to animal welfare articles are sad. There are mountains of evidence[0] that many animals experience emotions (including suffering) in much the same way that we do. It's tough seeing people say, without hesitation, they'd kill millions of animals over a single human. > Shrimp are a test of our empathy. Shrimp don’t look normal, caring about them isn’t popular, but basic ethical principles entail that they matter. I think we'll be looking back in the not-so-far future with disgust about how we treated animals. [0] RTFA

theonething 2y ago
I find it not only sad, but horrifying that there are people that would actually consider sacrificing a human over animals.
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leephillips 2y ago

Shrimp do not have experience. There is no place within the shrimp, no anatomical structure, where experience can reside. The article, and many of the articles it links to, confuse the existence of pain receptors, complexity of behavior, memory, aversion, intelligence, learning capacity, and other measures for experience. Since they don’t have experience, they can’t suffer, in the morally relevant sense for this argument.

BenthamsBulldog 2y ago
What about the brain? https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00441-017-2607-y#Sec18 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00441-017-2607-y#...
- leephillips 2y ago
  As is most clear in Figure 8 of the article you refer to (which is good science, but mainly of interest to specialists in the neural/sensory anatomy of certain classes of animals), the shrimp lacks, among other features, a cortex and a thalamus. These are known to be necessary for the generation of conscious experience.

telharmonium 2y ago

I'm reminded of the novel "Venomous Lumpsucker" by Ned Beauman, a deeply weird satire about the perverse incentives and behaviors engendered by the union of industrial consumption, market-based conservation, and the abstract calculus of ethics at scale. In particular, one portion features an autonomous bioreactor which produces enormous clouds of "yayflies"; mayflies whose nervous systems have been engineered to experience constant, maximal pleasure. The system's designer asserts that, given the sheer volume of yayflies produced, they have done more than anyone in history to increase the absolute quantity of happiness in the universe.

c0detrafficker 2y ago

[flagged]

AlexandrB 2y ago

Oh, boy. Site links to some "Effective Altruism" math on the topic[1]. This both reinforces my existing (negative) opinion of EA and makes me question the validity of this whole thing. [1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EbQysXxofbSqkbAiT/cost-effectiveness-of-shrimp-welfare-project-s-humane https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EbQysXxofbSqkbAiT/...

BenthamsBulldog 2y ago
Seems silly that one post from one person would cause you to rethink a movement.
- deleted 2y ago
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l1n 2y ago

I made these, proceeds go to the SWF folks https://www.etsy.com/listing/1371574690/shrimp-want-me-unaligned-ais-fear-me https://www.etsy.com/listing/1371574690/shrimp-want-me-unali...

RandallBrown 2y ago

I wonder if these donations would be better spent on lobbying for shrimp stunning regulations rather than just buying the shrimp farms shrimp stunners.

mrguyorama 2y ago

Pulling completely unsubstantiated numbers out of your ass is not an argument. No, calling it "an estimate" does not actually make a number you've pulled out of your ass an actual estimate. No, composing a bunch of """estimates""" doesn't make an argument, and it doesn't matter what kind of "error ranges" you give your made up numbers, the error range of the composed value is basically infinite. >The way it works is simple and common sense Claiming "common sense" in any argument is red flag number 1 that you don't actually have a self supporting argument. Common sense doesn't actually exist, and anyone leaning on it is just trying to compel you through embarrassment to support their cause without argument. There's a reason proving 1+1=2 takes a hundred pages. Randomly inserting numbers that "seem" right so that you can pretend to be a rigorous field is cargo cultism and pseudoscience. Numbers without data and justification is not rigor.

BenthamsBulldog 2y ago
But the numbers didn't come from me but from the RP report.

bulletsvshumans 2y ago

Whenever I see the backlash to conversations about animal suffering, I wonder if one reason is because it is a sort of “inconvenient truth”, ala global warming, where we are doing grave damage but we prefer to collectively ignore it because that damage aligns with our material incentives. That animals of many kinds are capable of substantial suffering seems honestly obvious to me from first hand observation, and I suspect it is obvious to most others too, at least when we are children. But I think we intentionally “unlearn” this culturally, because for most of human history it was a necessarily evil to sustain ourselves. To bring this truth up begins to break a spell we cast on ourselves that we don’t want unbroken. I look forward to the day when more people feel that their materials needs are satisfied enough that we can collectively approach this topic with an unencompromised intellectual honesty.

FearNotDaniel 2y ago

Oh wow so now we live in a world that tells us unborn humans are not actually human until a certain arbitrary number of months have passed, and that those non human living things do not have feelings or suffer in any way if we choose to kill them before this arbitrary date - but at the same time every single shrimp’s intense suffering is suddenly my problem?

RestartKernel 2y ago

This reads like a thought experiment, but its sincerity makes me uncomfortable in the way good art does. Thanks for sharing.