Comment by OzyM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by OzyM | Hacker News Reader

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I do think there's a big moral difference between species. I care about protecting a human from suffering much more than a dog, a dog more than a mouse, a mouse more than a cricket...

But I see no reason for some cutoff, where I arbitrarily decide to care for everything above a certain level of complexity, and decide not to care about anything below. "Vertebrates and octopuses" does not seem like a group that share any exclusive traits, i.e. any moral reason I have to care about an octopus seems like it would lead me to care about an insect, just maybe to a lesser extent.

Even if you value insect lives extremely lowly - if there's any moral value to them at all, mass farming them in the trillions or, possibly someday, quadrillions would be a moral travesty, even of their moral value is extremely small per individual, right?

I feel like "there seems to be a reasonable possibility that insects suffer" implies that we should have some level of interest in preventing their excess suffering, where practical.

Three things occur to me: 1: I think there is a reason for a cutoff. To take the AI case: I have no doubt that any AI worth its salt could suffer. But that AI will (probably) be build from transistors and I think that it is meaningless to consider the suffering of a thermostat. So there's a cutoff somewhere - maybe it isn't that 'hard' but some things are on one side and some on the other. Flies, I think, are more like thermostats and I value each one of them at very close to zero. But you are right, possibly not >exactly< zero and that eps might add up in some way. Would destroying a billion thermostats be ethically problematic?

2: Scott Alexander has written on this recently and it covers much of the same ground that we are covering here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/i-will-not-eat-the-bug...

3: Some time ago I seem to remember the Swiss Government discussing a proposition to recognise the 'dignity' of insect and plants. Dignity was held to be a property distinct from suffering and I think part of the argument was that it was somehow mutual: damaging life in any form was harmful to the dignity of both the damager and the damagee. I have some sympathy with that idea. In other words, we should care about the bugs because we care about ourselves.

Disclosure, I do a lot of scientific work with Drosophila and this is something that I mull over from time to time as I slaughter them in their thousands...

Insofar as I can tell, thermostats have a 0% chance of feeling pain (or as close to 0 as is logically possible), so I see no need to afford them moral consideration. If we had evidence suggesting that AI who could suffer currently existed, and if there was any overlap between the suffering-relevant pieces of that AI and thermostats, I'd start to worry about "killing" thermostats. It still seems like the chance of insects subjectively suffering is orders of magnitude greater than the chance of modern thermostats suffering.

I really enjoyed the ACX article; thank you for the recommendation! I agreed with a lot of the general points he was making.

Not sure about the "dignity" of e.g. plants, as I think there are plenty of ways to harm plants and animals that is helpful to humans. It's an interesting idea, though, and I do like the attempt to make a practical argument instead of a moral one.

In any case, while (to some extent) I care about the possible suffering of insects who are farmed in the trillions, I'm not particularly morally concerned about thousands killed for greater scientific gain. Could I ask generally what work you're doing with them? I'd be interested in learning more about it

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