It's simple: I am willing to create as many factory-farmed chickens as you like for a QALY. A million? Sure. 3^^^3? Sure. I just don't care about the chickens; they are not a factor in the calculation; I am getting a free QALY. So my answer to the first question is "infinity".
My answer to the second question is "indifferent", although depending on how you construe "suffering", it could also be "No".
I have genuine uncertainty as to the nature of farmed chicken suffering - enough that I'd say it's bad to create your average meat-farmed chicken - otherwise I'd be right there with you at 10^20 or something similarly ridiculous.
The suggestion to genetically engineer suffering-knockout chicken seems a good one (though I'd have some residual uncertainty even then).
Chickens factory farmed for meat don't live anywhere near that long. 1.5 months per chicken destined for broiler meat is about the right figure.
Yes, I took 1.5yr from another comment, which which I guess might be for egg layers or the natural lifespan. I really should have specified lifespan in the poll.
Median answer - of 100 factory chickens (so 150 chicken-suffering-years) : 1 human QALY - impresses me.
Quite a few people take animal suffering pretty seriously. It must feel odd to have society's rules so far removed from that - like serious abortion-is-murder believers.
But wait; my answer to the other poll is not "yes". I mean... what? Either I am confused or you are.
Ok - I didn't see your "Note" at first. I'm not sure what you mean. Presumably your answer would be indifferent or yes, though. Otherwise, could you explain?
One additional QALY for whom? A human stranger? A human friend? Me?
I was thinking of the average human. So 1 part you, 20 parts friend, 10 parts family, 50 parts colleague, 6 billion parts stranger. Of course it shouldn't matter, since I said economic constraints don't apply. Assume everyone gets a QALY and 6 billion times your answer in chickens are farmed.
I agree that awareness promotion can be good, but another instinct tells me that Facebookers love to conclude that the best thing they can do is share/like/etc. - it's like finding the cheapest way possible to feel like a good person.
Yes, the "share/like/etc" phenomenon. I do think there's a big difference between "share this video because this will somehow help those child soldiers in some indefinite way" versus "get more people to care about this issue, but also we have no idea how to actually fix it so we can't really recommend anything beyond that." Many supports of reducing wild-animal suffering want to actually solve the problem, but it looks like the best way to do that is to bring the problem to the attention of more people who will potentially be able to help solve it.
It's a very different situation from, say, malaria, where we already know that donating to AMF is among the best things to do. But now that I think about it, a video promoting AMF that got popular on Facebook would probably elicit a lot of new donations.
Sure, and if the purpose of a group is to reduce animal suffering and voluntary changes in individual consumption patterns are the most effective route, then the likes/shares are presumably accompanied by those people using less farmed animal products.
Be wary of Facebook groups whose consensus is "it's most important to promote awareness at this stage".
I was just thinking about how I agree with you, but I realized that I don't know why. What's wrong with promoting awareness? Even though I find it intuitively unappealing, I think the reason why it's usually ineffective is because most interventions are ineffective. I don't see any other reason. Sometimes (e.g. when fundraising), promoting awareness is extremely effective.
I don't know about you, but my explanation for being leery is: what Facebook groups do I expect to encounter? Answer: those that devote a large amount of effort to promoting themselves. (I also expect to encounter Facebook groups that are popular/worthy, but note that the anthropic reason I gave first applies no matter whether the group is actually good). Be skeptical of things that come to your attention through Facebook - at least beware privileging the hypothesis.
I agree that awareness promotion can be good, but another instinct tells me that Facebookers love to conclude that the best thing they can do is share/like/etc. - it's like finding the cheapest way possible to feel like a good person.
But shouldn't such a person answer 0.001, not -0.001?
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.
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?
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.
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Actually, I wrote a refutation of it years ago. It's more vitriolic than I'd write if it were today (but then again, today I'd just say that my book contains the refutations for most of this in much more polished form), but it did get answered.
Here's the refutation: http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/index.php/about-polyphasic-sleep/an-attack-on-polyphasic-sleep/
And a follow-up discussion I thought was pretty helpful at the time: https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/polyphasic/_R4-kdZbpJI
Yes, the comments by "a reader" and Michael Turner helped me situate Wozniak's (supermemo polyphasic skeptic) point of view. Thanks for the link.