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Comment by wybiral | Hacker News Reader

I will never again feel safe in the woods.

I stopped obsessing about the supposed morality of eating meat after I learned these things. Just because you can't hear your veggies scream doesn't mean they aren't suffering.

(There are lots of really good reasons to limit meat consumption. But, the touchy-feely appeal to "think about the suffering of the animals" is species-ist (for lack of a better word).)

This is getting very off topic, but I think that's a terrible basis for disregarding the ethical argument against eating meat. Why is it "species-ist" to think that mammals and other animals with highly developed nervous systems might have a conscious experience similar to our own (and not plants)?

MEOW MEOW MEOW MEOW

Oh sorry my cat just wanted to comment on this. Hope it doesn't get downvoted for not being relevant, because he has a 'conscious experience similar to our own'...

The same argument leads a rational person to stop obsessing about the supposed morality of killing humans. The touchy-feely appeal to "think about the suffering of the _humans_" is likewise species-ist

So the rational path takes us to a horrible conclusion. Are you saying it's time to throw out rationality?

I think they're saying that you may have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. If your conclusion horrifies you—doesn't resemble what you were optimizing for—you may be optimizing for the wrong thing. Rationality isn't broken; revisit your optimization criteria. See the paperclip optimizer, the smiles optimizer, etc.

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