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peter_hurford comments on Effective Altruism Through Advertising Vegetarianism? - Less Wrong
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This is something I've considered a lot, though chicken also dominate the calculations along with fish. I'm not currently sure if I value welfare in proportion to neuron count, though I might. I'd have to sort that out first.
A question at this point I might ask is how good does the final estimate have to be? If AMF can add about 30 years of healthy human life for $2000 by averting malaria and a human is worth 40x that of a chicken, then we'd need to pay less than $1.67 to avert a year of suffering for a chicken (assuming averting a year of suffering is the same as adding a year of healthy life, which is a messy assumption).
First, there are multiple applications of accurate estimates.
The unreasonably low estimates would suggest things like "I'm net reducing factory-farming suffering if I eat meat and donate a few bucks, so I should eat meat if it makes me happier or healthier sufficiently to earn and donate an extra indulgence of $5 ."
There are some people going around making the claim, based on the extreme low-ball cost estimates, that these veg ads would save human lives more cheaply than AMF by reducing food prices. With saner estimates, not so, I think.
Second, there's the question of flow-through effects, which presumably dominate in a total utilitarian calculation anyway, if that's what you're into. The animal experiences probably don't have much effect there, but people being vegetarian might have some, as could effects on human health, pollution, food prices, social movements, etc.
To address the total utilitarian question would require a different sort of evidence, at least in the realistic ranges.
Correct. I make this claim. If vegetarianism is that cheap, it's reasonable to bin it with other wastefully low-value virtues like recycling paper, taking shorter showers, turning off lights, voting, "staying informed", volunteering at food banks, and commenting on less wrong.
This might be a minor point, but I don't think it's necessarily a given that one year of healthy, average-quality life offsets one year of factory farm-style confinement. If we were only discussing humans, I don't think anyone would consider a year under those conditions to be offset by a healthy year.
I think some weighting for the sophistication of a brain is appropriate, but I think the weighting should be sub-linear w.r.t. the number of neurones; I expect that in simpler organisms, a larger share of the brain will be dedicated to processing sensory data and generating experiences. I would love someone to look into this to check if I'm right.
I agree on that effect, I left out various complications. A flip side to that would be the number of cortex neurons (and equivalents). These decrease rapidly in simpler nervous systems.
We don't object nearly as much to our own pains that we are not conscious of and don't notice or know about, so weighting by consciousness of pain, rather than pain/nociception itself, is a possibility ( I think that Brian Tomasik is into this).