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Unknowns comments on When should an Effective Altruist be vegetarian? - Less Wrong
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I wasn't sure what she meant by that exactly either, but if did mean something like that, it should have been much, much smaller. Suppose you have a trolley problem where you have the possibility to push your neighbor Peter onto the track in order to save 21 chickens...
That's definitely putting the chicken on a high pedestal, but I don't see that as an issue. I think the intention was to grossly over-estimate, which is a valid thing to do in this scenario..
The main problem is that no matter what you set the ratio of animal to human worth, you still end up with the 4 cent figure for human meat, which means that any price estimate coming out of this model will be ridiculously low.
I think a lot of this kind of vegetarianism argument relies on humans' tendency to grossly overestimate in certain situations. Numbers like 0.05 seem like nice sensible small numbers. They feel reasonable. Few people when thinking "maybe this has a small ratio" will spontaneously pick 0.000000001. That feels like too small a number and if you're even thinking about something you feel it should have some value higher than that.
Then the vegetarian calculates using the overestimate and concludes eating animals is horrific.
The Drake Equation does something similar for calculating how many extraterrestrial civilizations there might be.