Persuasive! I’ve been leery about the whole shrimp-welfare angle but the Titanic dialogue tipped me over the edge. Just donated $50 to the SWP. Keep up the great work.
I recall wondering in response to your earlier shrimp welfare post - what would you say grounds the claim that suffering is bad? I think suffering *is* bad, so for the purposes of the argument here that’s an undisputed premise, but I wouldn’t say that’s true a priori, or even necessarily a conclusion that can be deduced.
To me, “suffering is bad” is simply a highly salient explanation for why it *seems* bad, making it more or less an empirical, inductive conclusion. But if I recall, you’ve criticized this sort of a posteriori moral naturalism and comparable approaches in other writings - so I wonder, for you, why is it that suffering is bad? Is there a way to check?
If it’s brute, then, would you say there is simply no methodology we can use to derive/prove/conclude that “if a thing feels bad, it is bad to the extent it does”?
Ordinarily, if a claim strikes me as intuitive (and "suffering is bad" certainly does), I take that to mean it "seems true to me" - but it seems like an extra step, and one which is not obviously warranted, to say that intuition and introspection are themselves the means by which the claim is *known* - that seems comparable to saying, "I know X is true, because it seems true to me."
And it's certainly the case that the means by which we come to know of suffering's badness is distinct from what makes it bad, and really I'm only interested in the former (which is why I'm asking what grounds the claim, in particular). A world in which suffering *is bad, but never seems to be*, is conceivable - but in such a world, would "suffering is bad" be similarly intuitive?
But of course, this is getting rather far from the topic of the article, and I know you're busy - I don't mean to pester. Happy to DM if you ever want to chat. I think your ideas and approach are really interesting!
It just seems so trivial to say that the existence or nonexistence of potential people is a matter of good and bad. Isn’t that a big part of the reason why genocide, extinction, forced sterilization, etc. are so bad?
One gripe: as much as I want the wordplay to work, “amuck” has nothing to do with muck… It’s better written as “amok,” from a Malay word for a strange, sort-of-Malay-specific psychotic disorder that causes people to run around trying to kill their friends if they get especially sad. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amok_syndrome; also, I think Scott mentioned it offhand in his review of that book about the penis-stealing witch panics, which I’m a little too lazy to dig up)
and I agree that your posts are state of the art: the long article does not acomment on the hard and pretty hard problem of consciousness, there is not discussion on the difference between conscious pain and neurological penalty, and there checklists all around. So probably my amateur rebuttal is also state of the art:
I'm more than a little confused by someone who follows consequentialism as far as shrimp welfare breezing past the Poor Meat-eater's Problem when it comes to human charities. My own conclusion is that charities with strong strategies for improving global moral norms are the most important.
I am going to suggest this as an American born in the late 60s. I am old. The present moment we are experiencing has a lot to do with the lack of long term thinking in the previous generations. They kicked the can down the road and didn’t think about the future consequences of low taxes, plastics, infrastructure, offshoring manufacturing, etc. And now we pay the price. I am all for long term thinking because actions have consequences and I don’t want the humans of the future to have to deal with what are dealing with here today. Of course, I am in the minority. But. It is was it is.
"Trillions of shrimp suffer in horrendous conditions for their entire lives, before being slowly suffocated to death."
No, no, no. This is shockingly wrong. You are thinking about how it would feel to you if your cns were transplanted into a crustacean. You erroneously think that you intuitively know What It Is Like To Be A Shrimp. You don't.
Imagine I have a robotic vacuum cleaner. It's designed for use in posh houses with open fires so it has a very basic thermostat which says If temp exceeds x, move away from heat source.
Now imagine I sell a lot of these things to Dubai, where posh folk want their apartment vacuumed even in 45C heat, even when the apartment is temporarily unoccupied and so the aircon is off. Probably easiest to disable the move away functionality and leave the thermostat as is. Does this count as unimaginable torture of robovacuums? It does not. If you touch something hot you flinch and move away from the heat source. The robovacuum response is ostensibly identical but actually rather different.
Why would we think shrimp are more like robovacuums than they are like philosophers? Because evolution is parsimonious. Your pain sensing mechanism is hugely expensive to design and maintain compared to a simple pain free thermostatic set-up, presumably because it is capable of provoking a wide range of survival-enhancing behaviours in you. As there's comparatively little shrimp can do in response to predators it's predictable that their pain sensing dial goes from 1 to 2, where yours goes from 1 to 10.
And shrimp are probably only a bit conscious because of the limitations on their available responses to pain.
As I said to someone, possibly you, the other day: look at the large prey mammals in Africa grazing without a care in the world amongst the lions and cheetahs. You and I, whether as ourselves or magically transplanted into a zebra, would be too terrified to function. Evolution has decided that it's more economical for zebras to not feel fear in these circumstances because frightened zebras lose weight and muscle and reproductive ability. Given such a stark difference between higher prey mammals, how can we possibly assert analogies between mammals and crustaceans over pain?
Thought experiment, when we sent rovers to Mars they encountered a hominid civilization who live in houses with autonomous (and heat-avoidant) vacuum cleaners in them. How can we tell whether these are domestic animals or machines just by looking at the video? Do we really have better info about shrimp?
Evolution only gets you so far because it's parsimonious - if shrimp can't do much in response to pain there's no point in maximising pain detection. And fearless gazelles tell us that equivalence can be misleading.
I can't really tell what Shrimpgal's actual argument is about the shrimp, if he has one. Maybe it's in the podcast episode, haven't listened to it, but I scrolled through the other writing you linked to and I couldn't find an argument mentioning animal welfare.
I'm assuming that he just doesn't think animal suffering matters nearly at all, comparative to human suffering, or is unwilling to put a number on it?
Singal's a vegetarian. I think he takes animal welfare pretty seriously. He just doesn't take the welfare of small, weird animals seriously, like shrimp.
Persuasive! I’ve been leery about the whole shrimp-welfare angle but the Titanic dialogue tipped me over the edge. Just donated $50 to the SWP. Keep up the great work.
Awesome!
I recall wondering in response to your earlier shrimp welfare post - what would you say grounds the claim that suffering is bad? I think suffering *is* bad, so for the purposes of the argument here that’s an undisputed premise, but I wouldn’t say that’s true a priori, or even necessarily a conclusion that can be deduced.
To me, “suffering is bad” is simply a highly salient explanation for why it *seems* bad, making it more or less an empirical, inductive conclusion. But if I recall, you’ve criticized this sort of a posteriori moral naturalism and comparable approaches in other writings - so I wonder, for you, why is it that suffering is bad? Is there a way to check?
I think that the badness of suffering is brute--it's bad in virtue of how it feels.
If it’s brute, then, would you say there is simply no methodology we can use to derive/prove/conclude that “if a thing feels bad, it is bad to the extent it does”?
We know it is bad through intuition and introspection. What makes a thing some way is different from how we know it's that way.
Ordinarily, if a claim strikes me as intuitive (and "suffering is bad" certainly does), I take that to mean it "seems true to me" - but it seems like an extra step, and one which is not obviously warranted, to say that intuition and introspection are themselves the means by which the claim is *known* - that seems comparable to saying, "I know X is true, because it seems true to me."
And it's certainly the case that the means by which we come to know of suffering's badness is distinct from what makes it bad, and really I'm only interested in the former (which is why I'm asking what grounds the claim, in particular). A world in which suffering *is bad, but never seems to be*, is conceivable - but in such a world, would "suffering is bad" be similarly intuitive?
But of course, this is getting rather far from the topic of the article, and I know you're busy - I don't mean to pester. Happy to DM if you ever want to chat. I think your ideas and approach are really interesting!
It just seems so trivial to say that the existence or nonexistence of potential people is a matter of good and bad. Isn’t that a big part of the reason why genocide, extinction, forced sterilization, etc. are so bad?
One gripe: as much as I want the wordplay to work, “amuck” has nothing to do with muck… It’s better written as “amok,” from a Malay word for a strange, sort-of-Malay-specific psychotic disorder that causes people to run around trying to kill their friends if they get especially sad. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amok_syndrome; also, I think Scott mentioned it offhand in his review of that book about the penis-stealing witch panics, which I’m a little too lazy to dig up)
Otherwise, great read!
I do not think that etymology should restrict dumb word play.
Just a fundamental value difference then.
I recently read an Asterisk article supporting insect consciousness:
https://open.substack.com/pub/asteriskmag/p/the-case-for-insect-consciousness?r=biy76&utm_medium=ios
and I agree that your posts are state of the art: the long article does not acomment on the hard and pretty hard problem of consciousness, there is not discussion on the difference between conscious pain and neurological penalty, and there checklists all around. So probably my amateur rebuttal is also state of the art:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3nLDxEhJwqBEtgwJc/arthropod-non-sentience
.
I'm more than a little confused by someone who follows consequentialism as far as shrimp welfare breezing past the Poor Meat-eater's Problem when it comes to human charities. My own conclusion is that charities with strong strategies for improving global moral norms are the most important.
I am going to suggest this as an American born in the late 60s. I am old. The present moment we are experiencing has a lot to do with the lack of long term thinking in the previous generations. They kicked the can down the road and didn’t think about the future consequences of low taxes, plastics, infrastructure, offshoring manufacturing, etc. And now we pay the price. I am all for long term thinking because actions have consequences and I don’t want the humans of the future to have to deal with what are dealing with here today. Of course, I am in the minority. But. It is was it is.
"Trillions of shrimp suffer in horrendous conditions for their entire lives, before being slowly suffocated to death."
No, no, no. This is shockingly wrong. You are thinking about how it would feel to you if your cns were transplanted into a crustacean. You erroneously think that you intuitively know What It Is Like To Be A Shrimp. You don't.
Imagine I have a robotic vacuum cleaner. It's designed for use in posh houses with open fires so it has a very basic thermostat which says If temp exceeds x, move away from heat source.
Now imagine I sell a lot of these things to Dubai, where posh folk want their apartment vacuumed even in 45C heat, even when the apartment is temporarily unoccupied and so the aircon is off. Probably easiest to disable the move away functionality and leave the thermostat as is. Does this count as unimaginable torture of robovacuums? It does not. If you touch something hot you flinch and move away from the heat source. The robovacuum response is ostensibly identical but actually rather different.
Why would we think shrimp are more like robovacuums than they are like philosophers? Because evolution is parsimonious. Your pain sensing mechanism is hugely expensive to design and maintain compared to a simple pain free thermostatic set-up, presumably because it is capable of provoking a wide range of survival-enhancing behaviours in you. As there's comparatively little shrimp can do in response to predators it's predictable that their pain sensing dial goes from 1 to 2, where yours goes from 1 to 10.
Robots are not conscious. As for the degree of intensity of shrimp pain, I've written about that at some length https://benthams.substack.com/p/betting-on-ubiquitous-pain
And shrimp are probably only a bit conscious because of the limitations on their available responses to pain.
As I said to someone, possibly you, the other day: look at the large prey mammals in Africa grazing without a care in the world amongst the lions and cheetahs. You and I, whether as ourselves or magically transplanted into a zebra, would be too terrified to function. Evolution has decided that it's more economical for zebras to not feel fear in these circumstances because frightened zebras lose weight and muscle and reproductive ability. Given such a stark difference between higher prey mammals, how can we possibly assert analogies between mammals and crustaceans over pain?
See the roughly 10,000 word post responding to that at length that I just linked!
I was trying to be responsive to your responses
Thought experiment, when we sent rovers to Mars they encountered a hominid civilization who live in houses with autonomous (and heat-avoidant) vacuum cleaners in them. How can we tell whether these are domestic animals or machines just by looking at the video? Do we really have better info about shrimp?
Evolution only gets you so far because it's parsimonious - if shrimp can't do much in response to pain there's no point in maximising pain detection. And fearless gazelles tell us that equivalence can be misleading.
You are right:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3nLDxEhJwqBEtgwJc/arthropod-non-sentience
I hope it helps.
I can't really tell what Shrimpgal's actual argument is about the shrimp, if he has one. Maybe it's in the podcast episode, haven't listened to it, but I scrolled through the other writing you linked to and I couldn't find an argument mentioning animal welfare.
I'm assuming that he just doesn't think animal suffering matters nearly at all, comparative to human suffering, or is unwilling to put a number on it?
Singal's a vegetarian. I think he takes animal welfare pretty seriously. He just doesn't take the welfare of small, weird animals seriously, like shrimp.
Thats very simple-minded. Instead, he should be shrimple-minded.