5 ms·

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 intensel

by 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.
- probably_wrong 2y ago
  I read the paper and I believe the same objections applies: the reasoning only works if you assume "pain" to be a constant number subject to the additive property. If we have to use math, I'd say: the headaches are temporal - the effect of all the good you've done today is effectively gone tomorrow one way or another. But killing a person means, to quote "Unforgiven", that "you take away everything he's got and everything he's ever gonna have". So the calculation needs at least a temporal discount factor. I also believe that the examples are too contrived to be actually useful. Comparing a room with one person to another with five million is like comparing the fine for a person traveling at twice the speed limit with that of someone traveling at 10% the speed of light - the results of such an analysis are entertaining to think about, but not actually useful.
  - BenthamsBulldog 2y ago
    No, that isn't true. We can consider some metric like being at some temperature for an hour. Start with some truly torturous pain like being at 500 degrees for an hour (you'd die quickly, ofc). One person being at 500 degrees is less bad than 10 at 499 degrees which is less bad than 100 at 498 degrees...which is less bad than some number at 85 degrees (not torture, just a bit unpleasant).
    - n4r9 2y ago
      I think OP's objection is that - even granting that a "badness value" can be assigned to headaches and that 3 people with headaches is worse than 2 - there's no clear reason to suppose that 3 is exactly half again as bad as 2. It may be that the function mapping headaches to badness is logarithmic, or even that it asymptotes towards some limit. In mathematical terms it can be both monotonic and bounded. Thus, when comparing headaches to a man being tortured, there's no clear reason to suppose that there is a number of headaches that is worse than the torture.
      - sdwr 2y ago
        That's reversed. The number of people can be mapped linearly, but not the intensity of the pain. (Intuitively, it's hard to say saving 100 people is 100x as good as saving 1, because we can't have 100 best friends, but it doesn't affect the math at all)
InsideOutSanta 2y ago
The article mentions that issue in passing ("I reject the claim that no number of mild bads can add up to be as bad as a single thing that’s very bad, as do many philosophers"), but I don't understand the actual argument behind this assertion. Personally, I believe that you can't just add up mildly bad things and create a very bad thing. For example, I'd rather get my finger pricked by a needle once a day for the rest of my life than have somebody amputate my legs without anesthesia just once, even though the "cumulative pain" of the former choice might be higher than that of the latter. Having said that, I also believe that there is sufficient evidence that shrimp suffer greatly when they are killed in the manner described in the article, and that it is worthwhile to prevent that suffering.
- aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
  Their point isn't that it's merely "worthwhile," but that donating to Sudanese refugees is a waste of money because 1 starving child = 80 starving shrimp, or whatever their ghoulish and horrific math says.
  - 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
    >donating to Sudanese refugees is a waste of money Donating to Sudanese refugees sounds like a great use of money. Certainly not a waste. Suboptimal isn't the same as wasteful. Suppose you sit down to eat a great meal at a restaurant. As you walk out, you realize that you could have gotten an even better meal for the same price at the restaurant next door. That doesn't mean you just wasted your money. >ghoulish and horrific math It's not the math that's horrific, it's the world we live in that's horrific. The math just helps us alleviate the horror better. Researcher: "Here's my study which shows that a new medication reduces the incidence of incredibly painful kidney stones by 50%." Journal editorial board: "We refuse to publish this ghoulish and horrific math."
  - BenthamsBulldog 2y ago
    It's not a waste as another commenter noted, just probably not the best use of money. I agree this is unintuitive, but I submit that's because of speceisism. What about shrimp makes it so that tens of millions of them painfully dying is less bad than a single human death? It doesn't seem like the fact that they aren't smart makes their extreme agony less bad (the badness of a headache doesn't depend on how smart you are).
dfedbeef 2y ago
It is regular absurd.
aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
Yeah this (along with the "billion headaches" inanity) rests on a fallacy: insisting an abstraction can be measured as a quantity when it clearly cannot. This trick is usually done by blindly averaging together some concrete quantities and claiming it represents the abstraction. The illusion is fostered by "local continuity" of these abstractions - if pulling your earlobe causes suffering, pulling harder causes more suffering. And of course the "mathiness" gives an aura of rigor and rationality. But a terrible error in quantitative reasoning occurs when you break locality: going from pulled earlobe to emotional loss, or pulled earlobe to pulled antennae, etc. The very nature of the abstraction - "suffering," "badness," - changes between entities and situations, so the one formula cannot possibly apply. ETA: see also the McNamara fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
- sdwr 2y ago
  It's not about the numbers. The core argument is: - they suffer - we are good people who care about reducing suffering - so we spend our resources to reduce their suffering And some (most!) people balk at one of those steps But seriously, pain is the abstraction already. It's damage to the body represented as a feeling.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mistercow 2y ago
I don’t really doubt that it’s in principle possible to assign percentage values to suffering intensity, but the 3% value (which the source admits is a “placeholder”) seems completely unhinged for an animal with 0.05% as many neurons as a chicken, and the source’s justification for largely discounting neuron counts seems pretty arbitrary, at least as presented in their FAQ.
- adrian_b 2y ago
  The ratio of the neuron numbers may be somewhat meaningful when comparing vertebrates with vertebrates and arthropods with arthropods, but it is almost completely meaningless when comparing vertebrates with arthropods. The reason is that the structure of the nervous systems of arthropods is quite different from that of the vertebrates. Comparing them is like comparing analog circuits and digital circuits that implement the same function, e.g. a number multiplier. The analog circuit may have a dozen transistors and the digital circuit may have hundreds of transistors, but they do the same thing (with different performance characteristics). The analogy with comparing analog and digital circuits is quite appropriate, because parts of the nervous systems that have the same function, e.g. controlling a leg muscle, may have hundreds or thousands of neurons in a vertebrate, which function in an all-or-nothing manner, while in an arthropod the equivalent part may have only a few neurons that function in a much more complex manner in order to achieve fine control of the leg movement. So typically one arthropod neuron is equivalent with much more vertebrate neurons, e.g. hundreds or even thousands. This does not mean that the nervous system of arthropods is better than that of vertebrates. They are optimized for different criteria. Neither a vertebrate can become as small as the smallest arthropods, nor an arthropod can become as big as the bigger vertebrates, the systems that integrate the organs of a body into a single living organism, i.e. the nervous system and the circulatory and respiratory systems, are optimized for a small size in arthropods and for a big size in vertebrates.
  - 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
    Interesting. I'm fairly puzzled by sensation/qualia. The idea that there's some chemical reaction in my brain which produces sensation as a side effect is very weird. In principle it seems like you ought to be able to pare things down in order to produce a "minimal chemical reaction" for suffering, and do "suffering chemistry" in a beaker (if you were feeling unethical). That's really trippy. People often talk about suffering in conjunction with consciousness, but in my mind information processing and suffering are just different phenomena: * Children aren't as good at information processing, but they are even more capable of suffering. * I wouldn't liked to be kicked if I was sleeping, or blackout drunk, even if I was incapable of information processing at the time, and had no memory of the event. So intuitively it seems like more neurons = more "suffering chemistry" = greater moral weight. However, I imagine that perhaps the amount of "suffering chemistry" required to motivate an organism is actually fairly constant regardless of its size. Same way a gigantic cargo ship and a small children's toy could in principle be controlled by the same tiny microchip. That could explain the moral weight result. Interested to hear any thoughts.
0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
The way I think about it is that we're already making decisions like this in our own lives. Imagine a teenager who gets a summer job so they can save for a PS5. The teenager is making an implicit moral judgement, with themselves as the only moral patient. They're judging that the negative utility from working the job is lower in magnitude than the positive utility that the PS5 would generate. If the teenager gets a job offer, but the job only pays minimum wage, they may judge that the disutility for so many hours of work actually exceeds the positive utility from the PS5. There seems to be a capability to estimate the disutility from a single hour of work, and multiply it across all the hours which will be required to save enough. It would be plausible for the teenager to argue that the disutility from the job exceeds the utility from the PS5, or vice versa. But I doubt many teenagers would tell you "I can't figure out if I want to get a job, because the utilities simply aren't comparable!" Incomparability just doesn't seem to be an issue in practice for people making decisions about their own lives. Here's another thought experiment. Imagine you get laid off from your job. Times are tough, and your budget is tight. Christmas is coming up. You have two children and a pet. You could get a fancy present for Child A, or a fancy present for Child B, but not both. If you do buy a fancy present, the only way to make room in the budget is to switch to a less tasty food brand for your pet. This might be a tough decision if the utilities are really close. But if you think your children will mostly ignore their presents in order to play on their phones, and your pet gets incredibly excited every time you feed them the more expensive food brand, I doubt you'll hesitate on the basis of cross-species incomparability. I would argue that the shrimp situation sits closer to these sort of every-day "common sense" utility judgments than an exotic limiting case such as torture vs dust specks. I'm not sure dust specks have any negative utility at all, actually. Maybe they're even positive utility, if they trigger a blink which is infinitesimally pleasant. If I change it from specks to bee stings, it seems more intuitive that there's some astronomically large number of bee stings such that torture would be preferable. It's also not clear to me what I should do when my intuitions and mathematical common sense come into conflict. As you suggest, maybe if I spent more time really trying to wrap my head around how astronomically large a number can get, my intuition would line up better with math. Here's a question on the incomparability of excruciating pain. Back to the "moral judgements for oneself" theme... How many people would agree to get branded with a hot branding iron in exchange for a billion dollars? I'll bet at least a few would agree.
BenthamsBulldog 2y ago
Seems possible in principle. Experiences can cause one to feel more or less pain--what's wrong with quantifying it? Sure it will be a bit handwavy and vague, but the alternative of doing no comparisons and just going based on vibes is worse https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/refusing-to-quantify-is-refusing https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/refusing-to-quantify-is-refu.... But as I argue, given high uncertainty, you don't need any fine grained estimates to think giving to shrimp welfare is valuable. Like, if there was a dollar in front of you and you could use it to save 16,000 shrimp, seems like that's a good use of it.
- kaashif 2y ago
  > Like, if there was a dollar in front of you and you could use it to save 16,000 shrimp, seems like that's a good use of it. Uhh, that's totally unintuitive and surely almost all people would disagree, right? If not in words, people disagree in actions. Even within effective altruism there are a lot of people only giving to human centred causes.
jjcm 2y ago
No the proposition doesn’t make sense. The 3% number comes from this: https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/welfare-range-estimates/ https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/welfare-range-es... The page gives 3% to shrimp because their lifespan is 3% that of humans. It’s a terrible avenue for this estimate. By the same estimate, giant tortoises are less ethical to kill than humans. The heavens alone can judge you for the war crimes you’d be committing by killing a Turritopsis dohrnii. Number of neurons is the least-bad objective measurement in my eyes. Arthropods famously have very few neurons, <100k compared to 86b in humans. That’s a 1:1000000 neuron ratio, which feels like a more appropriate ratio for suffering than a lifespan-based ratio, though both are terrible.
- aziaziazi 2y ago
  Not only lifespan. From the link you quote: > Capacity for welfare = welfare range × lifespan. An individual’s welfare range is the difference between the best and worst welfare states the individual can realize. > we rely on indirect measures even in humans: behavior, physiological changes, and verbal reports. We can observe behavior and physiological changes in nonhumans, but most of them aren’t verbal. So, we have to rely on other indirect proxies, piecing together an understanding from animals’ cognitive and affective traits or capabilities. First time I see this "warfare range" notion and it seems quite clever to me. Also the original article says 3.1% is the median while the mean is 19%. I guess that may be caused by individuals havûg différents experiences each other’s.
  - BenthamsBulldog 2y ago
    This is to model uncertainty not difference across species. The 50th percentile guess is that shrimp feel pain 3.1% as intensely as humans while the mean is 19%
- BenthamsBulldog 2y ago
  No, it's not about lifespan. They have a very complicated report that tries to quantify intensity of suffering relying on a variety of proxies
hazbot 2y ago
I'm willing to run with the 3% figure... But I take issue with the linearity assumption that torturing 34 shrimp is thus worse than torturing a human!

by n4r9 2y ago

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.
probably_wrong 2y ago
I read the paper and I believe the same objections applies: the reasoning only works if you assume "pain" to be a constant number subject to the additive property. If we have to use math, I'd say: the headaches are temporal - the effect of all the good you've done today is effectively gone tomorrow one way or another. But killing a person means, to quote "Unforgiven", that "you take away everything he's got and everything he's ever gonna have". So the calculation needs at least a temporal discount factor. I also believe that the examples are too contrived to be actually useful. Comparing a room with one person to another with five million is like comparing the fine for a person traveling at twice the speed limit with that of someone traveling at 10% the speed of light - the results of such an analysis are entertaining to think about, but not actually useful.
- BenthamsBulldog 2y ago
  No, that isn't true. We can consider some metric like being at some temperature for an hour. Start with some truly torturous pain like being at 500 degrees for an hour (you'd die quickly, ofc). One person being at 500 degrees is less bad than 10 at 499 degrees which is less bad than 100 at 498 degrees...which is less bad than some number at 85 degrees (not torture, just a bit unpleasant).
  - n4r9 2y ago
    I think OP's objection is that - even granting that a "badness value" can be assigned to headaches and that 3 people with headaches is worse than 2 - there's no clear reason to suppose that 3 is exactly half again as bad as 2. It may be that the function mapping headaches to badness is logarithmic, or even that it asymptotes towards some limit. In mathematical terms it can be both monotonic and bounded. Thus, when comparing headaches to a man being tortured, there's no clear reason to suppose that there is a number of headaches that is worse than the torture.
    - sdwr 2y ago
      That's reversed. The number of people can be mapped linearly, but not the intensity of the pain. (Intuitively, it's hard to say saving 100 people is 100x as good as saving 1, because we can't have 100 best friends, but it doesn't affect the math at all)

InsideOutSanta 2y ago

The article mentions that issue in passing ("I reject the claim that no number of mild bads can add up to be as bad as a single thing that’s very bad, as do many philosophers"), but I don't understand the actual argument behind this assertion. Personally, I believe that you can't just add up mildly bad things and create a very bad thing. For example, I'd rather get my finger pricked by a needle once a day for the rest of my life than have somebody amputate my legs without anesthesia just once, even though the "cumulative pain" of the former choice might be higher than that of the latter. Having said that, I also believe that there is sufficient evidence that shrimp suffer greatly when they are killed in the manner described in the article, and that it is worthwhile to prevent that suffering.

aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
Their point isn't that it's merely "worthwhile," but that donating to Sudanese refugees is a waste of money because 1 starving child = 80 starving shrimp, or whatever their ghoulish and horrific math says.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
  >donating to Sudanese refugees is a waste of money Donating to Sudanese refugees sounds like a great use of money. Certainly not a waste. Suboptimal isn't the same as wasteful. Suppose you sit down to eat a great meal at a restaurant. As you walk out, you realize that you could have gotten an even better meal for the same price at the restaurant next door. That doesn't mean you just wasted your money. >ghoulish and horrific math It's not the math that's horrific, it's the world we live in that's horrific. The math just helps us alleviate the horror better. Researcher: "Here's my study which shows that a new medication reduces the incidence of incredibly painful kidney stones by 50%." Journal editorial board: "We refuse to publish this ghoulish and horrific math."
- BenthamsBulldog 2y ago
  It's not a waste as another commenter noted, just probably not the best use of money. I agree this is unintuitive, but I submit that's because of speceisism. What about shrimp makes it so that tens of millions of them painfully dying is less bad than a single human death? It doesn't seem like the fact that they aren't smart makes their extreme agony less bad (the badness of a headache doesn't depend on how smart you are).

dfedbeef 2y ago

It is regular absurd.

aithrowawaycomm 2y ago

Yeah this (along with the "billion headaches" inanity) rests on a fallacy: insisting an abstraction can be measured as a quantity when it clearly cannot. This trick is usually done by blindly averaging together some concrete quantities and claiming it represents the abstraction. The illusion is fostered by "local continuity" of these abstractions - if pulling your earlobe causes suffering, pulling harder causes more suffering. And of course the "mathiness" gives an aura of rigor and rationality. But a terrible error in quantitative reasoning occurs when you break locality: going from pulled earlobe to emotional loss, or pulled earlobe to pulled antennae, etc. The very nature of the abstraction - "suffering," "badness," - changes between entities and situations, so the one formula cannot possibly apply. ETA: see also the McNamara fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

sdwr 2y ago
It's not about the numbers. The core argument is: - they suffer - we are good people who care about reducing suffering - so we spend our resources to reduce their suffering And some (most!) people balk at one of those steps But seriously, pain is the abstraction already. It's damage to the body represented as a feeling.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mistercow 2y ago

I don’t really doubt that it’s in principle possible to assign percentage values to suffering intensity, but the 3% value (which the source admits is a “placeholder”) seems completely unhinged for an animal with 0.05% as many neurons as a chicken, and the source’s justification for largely discounting neuron counts seems pretty arbitrary, at least as presented in their FAQ.

adrian_b 2y ago
The ratio of the neuron numbers may be somewhat meaningful when comparing vertebrates with vertebrates and arthropods with arthropods, but it is almost completely meaningless when comparing vertebrates with arthropods. The reason is that the structure of the nervous systems of arthropods is quite different from that of the vertebrates. Comparing them is like comparing analog circuits and digital circuits that implement the same function, e.g. a number multiplier. The analog circuit may have a dozen transistors and the digital circuit may have hundreds of transistors, but they do the same thing (with different performance characteristics). The analogy with comparing analog and digital circuits is quite appropriate, because parts of the nervous systems that have the same function, e.g. controlling a leg muscle, may have hundreds or thousands of neurons in a vertebrate, which function in an all-or-nothing manner, while in an arthropod the equivalent part may have only a few neurons that function in a much more complex manner in order to achieve fine control of the leg movement. So typically one arthropod neuron is equivalent with much more vertebrate neurons, e.g. hundreds or even thousands. This does not mean that the nervous system of arthropods is better than that of vertebrates. They are optimized for different criteria. Neither a vertebrate can become as small as the smallest arthropods, nor an arthropod can become as big as the bigger vertebrates, the systems that integrate the organs of a body into a single living organism, i.e. the nervous system and the circulatory and respiratory systems, are optimized for a small size in arthropods and for a big size in vertebrates.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
  Interesting. I'm fairly puzzled by sensation/qualia. The idea that there's some chemical reaction in my brain which produces sensation as a side effect is very weird. In principle it seems like you ought to be able to pare things down in order to produce a "minimal chemical reaction" for suffering, and do "suffering chemistry" in a beaker (if you were feeling unethical). That's really trippy. People often talk about suffering in conjunction with consciousness, but in my mind information processing and suffering are just different phenomena: * Children aren't as good at information processing, but they are even more capable of suffering. * I wouldn't liked to be kicked if I was sleeping, or blackout drunk, even if I was incapable of information processing at the time, and had no memory of the event. So intuitively it seems like more neurons = more "suffering chemistry" = greater moral weight. However, I imagine that perhaps the amount of "suffering chemistry" required to motivate an organism is actually fairly constant regardless of its size. Same way a gigantic cargo ship and a small children's toy could in principle be controlled by the same tiny microchip. That could explain the moral weight result. Interested to hear any thoughts.

0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago

The way I think about it is that we're already making decisions like this in our own lives. Imagine a teenager who gets a summer job so they can save for a PS5. The teenager is making an implicit moral judgement, with themselves as the only moral patient. They're judging that the negative utility from working the job is lower in magnitude than the positive utility that the PS5 would generate. If the teenager gets a job offer, but the job only pays minimum wage, they may judge that the disutility for so many hours of work actually exceeds the positive utility from the PS5. There seems to be a capability to estimate the disutility from a single hour of work, and multiply it across all the hours which will be required to save enough. It would be plausible for the teenager to argue that the disutility from the job exceeds the utility from the PS5, or vice versa. But I doubt many teenagers would tell you "I can't figure out if I want to get a job, because the utilities simply aren't comparable!" Incomparability just doesn't seem to be an issue in practice for people making decisions about their own lives. Here's another thought experiment. Imagine you get laid off from your job. Times are tough, and your budget is tight. Christmas is coming up. You have two children and a pet. You could get a fancy present for Child A, or a fancy present for Child B, but not both. If you do buy a fancy present, the only way to make room in the budget is to switch to a less tasty food brand for your pet. This might be a tough decision if the utilities are really close. But if you think your children will mostly ignore their presents in order to play on their phones, and your pet gets incredibly excited every time you feed them the more expensive food brand, I doubt you'll hesitate on the basis of cross-species incomparability. I would argue that the shrimp situation sits closer to these sort of every-day "common sense" utility judgments than an exotic limiting case such as torture vs dust specks. I'm not sure dust specks have any negative utility at all, actually. Maybe they're even positive utility, if they trigger a blink which is infinitesimally pleasant. If I change it from specks to bee stings, it seems more intuitive that there's some astronomically large number of bee stings such that torture would be preferable. It's also not clear to me what I should do when my intuitions and mathematical common sense come into conflict. As you suggest, maybe if I spent more time really trying to wrap my head around how astronomically large a number can get, my intuition would line up better with math. Here's a question on the incomparability of excruciating pain. Back to the "moral judgements for oneself" theme... How many people would agree to get branded with a hot branding iron in exchange for a billion dollars? I'll bet at least a few would agree.

BenthamsBulldog 2y ago

Seems possible in principle. Experiences can cause one to feel more or less pain--what's wrong with quantifying it? Sure it will be a bit handwavy and vague, but the alternative of doing no comparisons and just going based on vibes is worse https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/refusing-to-quantify-is-refusing https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/refusing-to-quantify-is-refu.... But as I argue, given high uncertainty, you don't need any fine grained estimates to think giving to shrimp welfare is valuable. Like, if there was a dollar in front of you and you could use it to save 16,000 shrimp, seems like that's a good use of it.

kaashif 2y ago
> Like, if there was a dollar in front of you and you could use it to save 16,000 shrimp, seems like that's a good use of it. Uhh, that's totally unintuitive and surely almost all people would disagree, right? If not in words, people disagree in actions. Even within effective altruism there are a lot of people only giving to human centred causes.

jjcm 2y ago

No the proposition doesn’t make sense. The 3% number comes from this: https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/welfare-range-estimates/ https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/welfare-range-es... The page gives 3% to shrimp because their lifespan is 3% that of humans. It’s a terrible avenue for this estimate. By the same estimate, giant tortoises are less ethical to kill than humans. The heavens alone can judge you for the war crimes you’d be committing by killing a Turritopsis dohrnii. Number of neurons is the least-bad objective measurement in my eyes. Arthropods famously have very few neurons, <100k compared to 86b in humans. That’s a 1:1000000 neuron ratio, which feels like a more appropriate ratio for suffering than a lifespan-based ratio, though both are terrible.

aziaziazi 2y ago
Not only lifespan. From the link you quote: > Capacity for welfare = welfare range × lifespan. An individual’s welfare range is the difference between the best and worst welfare states the individual can realize. > we rely on indirect measures even in humans: behavior, physiological changes, and verbal reports. We can observe behavior and physiological changes in nonhumans, but most of them aren’t verbal. So, we have to rely on other indirect proxies, piecing together an understanding from animals’ cognitive and affective traits or capabilities. First time I see this "warfare range" notion and it seems quite clever to me. Also the original article says 3.1% is the median while the mean is 19%. I guess that may be caused by individuals havûg différents experiences each other’s.
- BenthamsBulldog 2y ago
  This is to model uncertainty not difference across species. The 50th percentile guess is that shrimp feel pain 3.1% as intensely as humans while the mean is 19%
BenthamsBulldog 2y ago
No, it's not about lifespan. They have a very complicated report that tries to quantify intensity of suffering relying on a variety of proxies

hazbot 2y ago

I'm willing to run with the 3% figure... But I take issue with the linearity assumption that torturing 34 shrimp is thus worse than torturing a human!