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Zannika's avatar

Concern about wild animal suffering is slave morality

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Bentham's Bulldog's avatar

This is silly.

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Vikram V.'s avatar

CHAD Nietzsche DESTROYS VIRGIN Utilitarian Bulldog

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Matt Ball's avatar

This is an important post, and getting closer to a real-world ethic.

Two things:

1. Disagree about wild animal suffering. I'd rather be a wild animal who suffers in death than a factory-farmed chicken who suffers most of their life and is then boiled alive.

2. As I discuss in the Philosophical and Longtermist chapters here https://www.losingmyreligions.net/

I'm with the other commenters that the dust speck / expected value calculations just don't hold up. I did hold your view, once.

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Bentham's Bulldog's avatar

You very often link to your book. It might be helpful to just make the point or post the relevant quotes, so that people don't have to comb through your book. As for 1, I agree that factory farmed animals have worse lives than wild animals, but there are so many more wild animals.

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cinc's avatar

Fully agree. Except the dust specs thing, still not on board with that. And I've read about that horrific torture/murder before. Iirc, the psychopaths who did it got very light sentences.

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Vikram V.'s avatar

And yet, for all your emotional appeal, you would gladly cause each and every instance of suffering outlined in this post a thousand times over for just a 0.0000000001% chance of reducing risks from AI by 0.001%.

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Bentham's Bulldog's avatar

No, I wouldn't.

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Vikram V.'s avatar

Really? I recall you saying that the entirety of the suffering caused by the US prison industrial complex was less valuable then a 10^-37 chance of extinction.

The number I have just now is 10^-21. The best high-end estimate for combined factory and wild animal suffering is that it’s ~10^16 times worse then the negative experiences of one human life (though that’s a bit fuzzy).

Maybe I’m misremembering, but this seems like an inconsistency.

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