J_Taylor comments on Richard Dawkins on vivisection: "But can they suffer?" - Less Wrong

14 Post author: XiXiDu 04 July 2011 04:56PM

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Comment author: J_Taylor 25 January 2012 02:44:05AM 1 point [-]

If you possessed a talent for writing decent prose, you could be the next Lovecraft. Mind, Lovecraft's prose was less-than-decent, but that is beside the point.

My default position is that suffering as we know it is fundamentally tied in with extremely important and extremely complex social decision theoretic game theoretic calculus modeling stuff, and also all that metaphysics stuff. I will non-negligibly update if someone can show me a good experiment demonstrating something like "learned helplessness" in non-hominids or non-things-that-hunted-in-packs-for-a-long-time-then-were-artificially-molded-into-hominid-companions. That high-citation rat study looked like positive bias upon brief inspection, but maybe that was positive bias.

Aside from this paragraph, I am almost entirely unsure what you were stating in that post. However, it produced feelings of interest and dread.

By chance, do you have any capacity to summarize it? If this is the case, would you please be willing to do so?