Lukas_Gloor comments on Why Eat Less Meat? - Less Wrong

48 Post author: peter_hurford 23 July 2013 09:30PM

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Comment author: Jonathan_Graehl 25 July 2013 02:10:38AM *  0 points [-]

Ignoring economic/environmental cost, how many chickens would you create and breed into factory-farming suffering, in exchange for one additional QALY? That is, you wouldn't make the trade unless it took fewer than this number of farmed chickens.

(answers may be very small (less than 1) if you value avoiding chicken suffering more than healthy human life-years) or even negative if you'd give up human lives to create more suffering chickens.

(If you think factory-farmed chickens have lives worth creating, please don't answer the poll, as your answer of infinity will throw off the average - you can vote "yes" or "indifferent" to the poll below this instead; this poll is mostly for people who answer "no" to it)

(I don't claim that chickens can actually be traded for human QALY - I still haven't gotten the ritual exactly working yet).

Submitting...

Comment author: Lukas_Gloor 25 July 2013 02:34:28AM 1 point [-]

Are we assuming an average lifespan for a factory farmed chicken? That would be about 1.5 months. And do you perhaps mean numbers 0<x<1 rather than negative numbers?

Comment author: Jonathan_Graehl 25 July 2013 02:36:47AM 0 points [-]

No, I meant that someone who answers -0.001 would prefer removing 1000 human QALY in order to prevent the creation of a single factory farmed chicken. Though I wouldn't expect any such answers. It's a question about a trade.

Comment author: MTGandP 25 July 2013 03:01:33AM 2 points [-]

But shouldn't such a person answer 0.001, not -0.001?

Comment author: Jonathan_Graehl 25 July 2013 03:34:11AM 0 points [-]

Yes, I realized this as I as making a sandwich and came back to say so :) I'll leave my mistake unedited as a warning to others. -.0001 means what I said but with "prevent the creation" being "create". The sign changes the sign of one of the items in the exchange.