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shminux comments on [link] SMBC on utilitarianism and vegatarianism. - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (69)
"Funny" is subjective, so pointless to argue about that. Of course it's oversimplified, it's a web comic!
As for the vegetarians, those who do it for ethical reasons ("Singer, in his book Animal Liberation listed possible qualities of sentience in non-human creatures that gave such creatures the scope to be considered under utilitarian ethics, and this has been widely referenced by animal rights campaigners and vegetarians.") certainly consider sentience an important factor.
The author suggests one simple metric: minimize sentience/calorie, and makes a pretty convincing argument, as webcomics go. You know, an actual calculation, not just emotions. Seems like a much more rational approach than demonstrating against killing baby seals because they are aww so cute.
Agreed.
No, some of those who do it for ethical reasons consider sentience an important factor. The comic both strawmans all vegetarians as ones who do it for ethical reasons, and assumes that those ethical reasons are because they don't like killing "conscious" animals (whatever that is defined as). As a vegetarian (which I define as anyone whose utility function contains a negative term for eating meat), neither of those are true for me.
An actual calculation is probably a lot worse than your intuitions, when you oversimplify the neurobiology as much as the author does. If ey had actually gone into a discussion of glial cells versus neurons, labelled line vs across fiber organizations, etc. then ey might have a valid argument. But the author commits illusion of transparency when ey assumes that animals that move slowly and are slothful are the "stupidest".
There is something about calling Zach Weiner any 'ey' that just strikes me as offensive. He puts hard work into conveying overtly puerile masculine humor and to attribute him a non-existent gender is disrespectful to him as an artist.
1) This was hilarious. Upvoted.
2) As the sort of person who prefers people err on the side of saying "ey", I think it's totally appropriate to refer to him as a him, because he's a he, because the information is available, and for the reasons you cited.
3) I don't think there's anything wrong with using 'ey' to mean 'I don't know/don't care what this person's gender is." If we're just talking about this comic, it's not really relevant.
It doesn't. Saying "I am an X because Y" doesn't mean "all X are such because Y".
Even if the character did use the latter formulation, it would be a bit of exaggeration to interpret it as strawmanning. Characters in a joke aren't usually supposed to voice the author's opinions.
Just to clarify, do you assign negative utility to just you personally eating meat, to the total amount of meat being eaten by every human, to all animals killed by the activities required to feed the human species, or maybe to something else? Or maybe some weighted average of all of those?
I agree, this comic would be rejected by a peer-reviewed journal.
This. Generally speaking.