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People butcher livestock for pay on a daily basis, rendering a live animal dead and cutting it to bits, on a massive scale to provide the food that we eat. Res

People butcher livestock for pay on a daily basis, rendering a live animal dead and cutting it to bits, on a massive scale to provide the food that we eat. Rescue and medical personnel deal with the injured, ill, and dying on a daily basis on a massive scale. Merely watching videos, even of disturbing material, doesn't even come close to being as bad as those and some other professions.

D-Machine 9mo ago
[flagged]
- pavel_lishin 9mo ago
  > Yes, images and videos can be horrific, but that horror absolutely pales in comparison to what the world has to offer. "Eat your dinner, there's kids starving in Africa."
- rramadass 9mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921505
  - D-Machine 9mo ago
    As I've said, images can be horrific, and some people can be traumatized by them. That must not be dismissed. However, It is also important to carefully and properly quantify these things and not sensationalize. You've linked a 50+ minute documentary, without comment, that seems to prove that one person hired to curate content can become traumatized by that process. I can't be certain that is what it is about, because I will not waste time watching documentaries (the vast majority of which are outright propaganda or incredibly biased, while pretending to be objective), but still, I've no doubt the general claim is true, since I never claimed or believed otherwise. But you've not provided meaningful statistical or scientific evidence properly quantifying such harms in general.
    - rramadass 9mo ago
      You stated an opinion but i gave you hard data by pointing you to a documentary which you are refusing to watch. You have not even read the description for the video which gives you a ToC with timestamps to jump to for the major themes. I can point you to lots of relevant data on the web but the onus of educating yourself is on you. If you had just spent 5-10mins watching excerpts from above timestamps you would have seen interviews with workers doing such jobs from rural America/Canada/Spain/France/etc., sleazeball CEOs of sleazy companies taking these sort of contracts from Facebook/etc. and then farming it off to poorer parts of the World in Asia/Africa/South America/etc., psychologists who study and warn of the very real dangers of such a job etc. So before asking for more data, start with the one i have already given you. The psychological harm caused by repeated exposure to graphic imagery is well studied; AI image annotation is one subset of that. Here is a detailed article; The Ghosts in the Machine: Inside AI’s Hidden Human Trauma - https://www.thebrink.me/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-inside-ai-hidden-human-trauma/ https://www.thebrink.me/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-inside-ai-...
      - D-Machine 9mo ago
        From the article you linked: "Some workers report nightmares in which the violent images they reviewed replay in gruesome loops. Others experience intrusive flashbacks while riding the bus or shopping for groceries. Over time, many describe a numbing of their emotions-a flattening of joy, sorrow, or empathy-because the only way to cope is to feel nothing at all." and bla bla bla. "Some", "Others", "many"... Wikipedia itself couldn't generate a better example of "weasel words". Like I said, we all know some people are traumatized, but all that matters is the amount. What if some is less than 1%? Less than 5%? More than 50%? The answer matters, but you are not providing answers to this. Also, learn to basic science. Anecdotes are not data. No, I am not watching a documentary for a collection of anecdotes, I clearly explained why documentaries don't count as serious sources of info when trying to accurately quantify things. EDIT: And if you really know that traumatization from images on computer screens is "well-studied", you can surely link to one to three of such studies, rather than lame documentaries telling cherry-picked sob-stories.
        9mo ago
tomcam 9mo ago
I think watching children being butchered or prisoners being tortured to death could be equally or more traumatic. Killing in processing animals is at least socially acceptable and (arguably) necessary for survival.
mmooss 9mo ago
> Merely watching videos, even of disturbing material, doesn't even come close to being as bad as those and some other professions. The research and reporting, which looks at actual people's experiences says otherwise. This issue has been coming up for years. People live through war, murder, torture, rape, etc. We can always find something worse but that doesn't make the current situation better. Human experience of pain and trauma isn't scaled relative to the worst possible pain and trauma.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

D-Machine 9mo ago

[flagged]

pavel_lishin 9mo ago
> Yes, images and videos can be horrific, but that horror absolutely pales in comparison to what the world has to offer. "Eat your dinner, there's kids starving in Africa."
rramadass 9mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921505
- D-Machine 9mo ago
  As I've said, images can be horrific, and some people can be traumatized by them. That must not be dismissed. However, It is also important to carefully and properly quantify these things and not sensationalize. You've linked a 50+ minute documentary, without comment, that seems to prove that one person hired to curate content can become traumatized by that process. I can't be certain that is what it is about, because I will not waste time watching documentaries (the vast majority of which are outright propaganda or incredibly biased, while pretending to be objective), but still, I've no doubt the general claim is true, since I never claimed or believed otherwise. But you've not provided meaningful statistical or scientific evidence properly quantifying such harms in general.
  - rramadass 9mo ago
    You stated an opinion but i gave you hard data by pointing you to a documentary which you are refusing to watch. You have not even read the description for the video which gives you a ToC with timestamps to jump to for the major themes. I can point you to lots of relevant data on the web but the onus of educating yourself is on you. If you had just spent 5-10mins watching excerpts from above timestamps you would have seen interviews with workers doing such jobs from rural America/Canada/Spain/France/etc., sleazeball CEOs of sleazy companies taking these sort of contracts from Facebook/etc. and then farming it off to poorer parts of the World in Asia/Africa/South America/etc., psychologists who study and warn of the very real dangers of such a job etc. So before asking for more data, start with the one i have already given you. The psychological harm caused by repeated exposure to graphic imagery is well studied; AI image annotation is one subset of that. Here is a detailed article; The Ghosts in the Machine: Inside AI’s Hidden Human Trauma - https://www.thebrink.me/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-inside-ai-hidden-human-trauma/ https://www.thebrink.me/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-inside-ai-...
    - D-Machine 9mo ago
      From the article you linked: "Some workers report nightmares in which the violent images they reviewed replay in gruesome loops. Others experience intrusive flashbacks while riding the bus or shopping for groceries. Over time, many describe a numbing of their emotions-a flattening of joy, sorrow, or empathy-because the only way to cope is to feel nothing at all." and bla bla bla. "Some", "Others", "many"... Wikipedia itself couldn't generate a better example of "weasel words". Like I said, we all know some people are traumatized, but all that matters is the amount. What if some is less than 1%? Less than 5%? More than 50%? The answer matters, but you are not providing answers to this. Also, learn to basic science. Anecdotes are not data. No, I am not watching a documentary for a collection of anecdotes, I clearly explained why documentaries don't count as serious sources of info when trying to accurately quantify things. EDIT: And if you really know that traumatization from images on computer screens is "well-studied", you can surely link to one to three of such studies, rather than lame documentaries telling cherry-picked sob-stories.
      - 9mo ago

tomcam 9mo ago

I think watching children being butchered or prisoners being tortured to death could be equally or more traumatic. Killing in processing animals is at least socially acceptable and (arguably) necessary for survival.

mmooss 9mo ago

> Merely watching videos, even of disturbing material, doesn't even come close to being as bad as those and some other professions. The research and reporting, which looks at actual people's experiences says otherwise. This issue has been coming up for years. People live through war, murder, torture, rape, etc. We can always find something worse but that doesn't make the current situation better. Human experience of pain and trauma isn't scaled relative to the worst possible pain and trauma.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]