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Kawoomba comments on Effective Altruism Through Advertising Vegetarianism? - Less Wrong
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My problem with this question is that if I see video of someone torturing a cat when I am confident there was no actual cat-torturing involved in creating those images (e.g., I am confident it was all photoshopped), what I feel is pretty much indistinguishable from what I feel if I see video of someone torturing a cat when I am confident there was actual cat-torturing.
So I'm reluctant to treat what I feel in either case as expressing much of an opinion about suffering, since I feel it roughly equally when I believe suffering is present and when I don't.
So if you can factor-out, so to speak, the actual animal suffering: If you had to choose between "watch that video, no animal was harmed" versus "watch that video, an animal was harmed, also you get a biscuit (not the food, the 100 squid (not the animals, the pounds (not the weight unit, the monetary unit)))", which would you choose? (Your feelings would be the same, as you say, your decision probably wouldn't be. Just checking.)
What?
A biscuit provides the same number of calories as 100 SQUID, which stands for Superconducting Quantum Interference Device, which weigh a pound apiece, which masses 453.6 grams, which converts to 4 * 10^16 joules, which can be converted into 1.13 * 10^10 kilowatt-hours, which are worth 12 cents per kW-hr, so around 136 billion dollars or so.
...plus a constant.
Reminds me of ... Note the name of the website. She doesn't look happy! "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."
Edit: Also, 1.13 * 10^10 kilowatt-hours at 12 cents each yields 1.36 billion dollars, not 136 billion dollars! An honest mistake (cents, not dollars per kWh), or a scam? And as soon as Dmitry is less active ...
"squid" is slang for a GBP, i.e. Pound Sterling, although I'm more used to hearing the similar "quid." One hundred of them can be referred to as a "biscuit," apparently because of casino chips, similar to how people in America will sometimes refer to a hundred dollars as a "benjamin."
That is, what are TheOtherDave's preferences between watching an unsettling movie that does not correspond to reality and watching an unsettling movie that does correspond to reality, but they're paid some cash.
"Quid" is slang, "squid" is a commonly used jokey soundalike. There's a joke that ends "here's that sick squid I owe you".
EDIT: also, never heard "biscuit" = £100 before; that's a "ton".
Does Cockney rhyming slang not count as slang?
In this case it seems to. It's the first time I recall encountering it but I'm not British and my parsing of unfamiliar and 'rough' accents is such that if I happened to have heard someone say 'squid' I may have parsed it as 'quid', and discarded the 's' as noise from people saying a familiar term in a weird way rather than a different term.
Well, I figured that much out from googling, but I was more reacting to what seems like a deliberate act of obfuscation on Kawoomba's part that serves no real purpose.
Nested parentheses are their own reward, perhaps?
It amuses me that despite making neither head nor tail of the unpacking, I answered the right question.
Well, to the extent that my noncommital response can be considered an answer to any question at all.
So to be clear - you do some Googling and find two videos, one has realistic CGI animal harm, the other real animal harm; assume the CGI etc is so good that I wouldn't be able to tell which was which if you hadn't told me. You don't pay for the animal harm video, or in any way give anyone an incentive to harm an animal in fetching it; just pick up a pre-existing one. I have a choice between watching the fake-harm video (and knowing it's fake) or watching the real-harm video and receiving £100.
If the reward is £100, I'll take the £100; if it's an actual biscuit, I prefer to watch the fake-harm video.
I'm genuinely unsure, not least because of your perplexing unpacking of "biscuit".
Both examples are unpleasant; I don't have a reliable intuition as to which is more so if indeed either is.
I have some vague notion that if I watch the real-harm video that might somehow be interpreted as endorsing real-harm more strongly than if I watch the fake-harm vide, like through ratings or download monitoring or something, which inclines me to the fake-harm video. Though whether I'm motivated by the vague belief that such differential endorsement might cause more harm to animals, or by the vague belief that it might cause more harm to my status, I'm again genuinely unsure of. In the real world I usually assume that when I'm not sure it's the latter, but this is such a contrived scenario that I'm not confident of that either.
If I assume the biscuit is a reward of some sort, then maybe that reward is enough to offset the differential endorsement above, and maybe it isn't.