BenthamsBulldog

I'm using the standard definition of consciousness--having subjective experience. Not sure what "BS math" I used.

I agree that lots of people in the real world need help. Helping them is good. But so is averting enormous amounts of pain and suffering. In expectation, even given a low credence in shrimp sentience, giving averts huge amounts of pain and suffering, which is quite good.

I also think that people shouldn't eat them, but donating is much more effective. In total, fewer shrimp die painfully, which is good (it a second doctor provides an anesthetic for a patient before death, that wouldn't be bad by making two people complicit in death).

What about the brain? https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00441-017-2607-y#...

Seems silly that one post from one person would cause you to rethink a movement.

But thinking that extreme suffering is bad doesn't require thinking that wireheading for tons of pleasure is good.

Sure but if we're not sure then the possible infliction of huge amounts of horrendous suffering on trillions of them is quite serious. If there's even a 5% chance that shrimp feel pain as intensely as humans, the SWP is an excellent bet.

Right but Norcross gives an argument against that. You either have to think that slightly reducing pain and making it 1000 times as prevalent doesn't always make a worse state of affairs or deny that worse than is transitive.

But if neuron counts, as they show, have no reliable correlation (and in some cases an inverse correlation) with valenced experience, why would we use them to rule out intense experiences?

No, it's not about lifespan. They have a very complicated report that tries to quantify intensity of suffering relying on a variety of proxies

This is to model uncertainty not difference across species. The 50th percentile guess is that shrimp feel pain 3.1% as intensely as humans while the mean is 19%

But the numbers didn't come from me but from the RP report.

I'm also against exploiting them.

Thanks for the kind words! I agree lots of people would value a human more than any number of shrimp. Now, in the article, I'm talking about which is worse--extreme suffering for one human or extreme suffering for millions of shrimp. So then the question is: can the common sense verdict be defended? What about shrimp is it that makes it so that their pain is of negligible importance compared to humans? Sure they aren't smart, but being dumb doesn't seem to make your pain less bad (hurting babies and mentally disabled people is still very very bad).

No, that isn't true. We can consider some metric like being at some temperature for an hour. Start with some truly torturous pain like being at 500 degrees for an hour (you'd die quickly, ofc). One person being at 500 degrees is less bad than 10 at 499 degrees which is less bad than 100 at 498 degrees...which is less bad than some number at 85 degrees (not torture, just a bit unpleasant).

It's not a waste as another commenter noted, just probably not the best use of money.

I agree this is unintuitive, but I submit that's because of speceisism. What about shrimp makes it so that tens of millions of them painfully dying is less bad than a single human death? It doesn't seem like the fact that they aren't smart makes their extreme agony less bad (the badness of a headache doesn't depend on how smart you are).

Seems possible in principle. Experiences can cause one to feel more or less pain--what's wrong with quantifying it? Sure it will be a bit handwavy and vague, but the alternative of doing no comparisons and just going based on vibes is worse https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/refusing-to-quantify-is-refu.... But as I argue, given high uncertainty, you don't need any fine grained estimates to think giving to shrimp welfare is valuable. Like, if there was a dollar in front of you and you could use it to save 16,000 shrimp, seems like that's a good use of it.

Here I describe the insanity of the debate community.

Here is the article! It argues that it's wrong to eat meat.