Reducing Suffering

Agreed. For example: Animals in the wilderness also rely on violence and coercion. Even herbivores predate on plants. Clearly this violence and coercion is even less justifiable, as animals as a group have no social contract theory etc to speak of. Therefore, there should be no animals. There are people who genuinely believe this, such as https://reducing-suffering.org/ . But they definitely don't come at it from such a half baked angle.

I think now you're in the territory of gathering real data. To my best knowledge, the amount of mechanical harvest needed to feed an animal one unit of protein is no more than 4 units of protein in the most optimistic case[0]. Even with some fudge factor, it is enough to give me an 80% certainty that cutting the animals out reduces net cruelty. I don't know the conversion factor for lab meat, but I expect it to be somewhere between eating mechanically harvested plants and regular meat. There's also the aspect of how you weigh suffering of different beings, which is a complicated enough topic that I won't get into right now[1]. I'll get back to it once feeding cattle with harvested grain becomes rare. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/protein-efficiency-of-meat-and-dair… [1] https://reducing-suffering.org/crop-cultivation-and-wild-animals/

We need protein for our bodies to survive, and while I love chickpeas and soy, I seek higher protein. Further, studies that debate insects are less efficient for protein are comparing entomophagy to farmed animals, which I don't eat for ethical reasons: https://reducing-suffering.org/eating-insects-usually-less-efficient-e…

There are people who have tried to investigate this thoroughly. My understanding is that there is a direct correlation between your actions an the supply. > "If someone gives up 1 lb of chicken, total consumption falls by 0.76lb in expectation." https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fZp6Fpowmd5a8Lu2w/what-is-th… Directly: https://reducing-suffering.org/comments-on-compassion-by-the-pound/#El… The mechanism is simple: if the stores are 100% responsive to your demand, your purchase directly affects supply. If they are not 100% perfect, they still have a mechanism through which they buy in bulk. So, roughly speaking, you might have a 1% chance of triggering a batch order for an extra 100 lbs when you purchase 1 lb of meat. And the same goes up the supply chain.

That page has some wild topics... https://reducing-suffering.org/should-we-intervene-in-nature/

The vegan argument I've heard is that buying animal products creates demand for more animals, which leads to more miserable animal lives. See e.g. https://reducing-suffering.org/how-much-direct-suffering-is-caused-by-…

There are about as many mammals as birds, maybe a few more mammals. https://reducing-suffering.org/how-many-wild-animals-are-there/

Brian Tomasik argues that we should avoid insect farming entirely since it's likely worse (ethically speaking) than farming larger nonhuman animals: > Entomophagy (eating insects for food) is sometimes proposed as an alternative to factory farming because it has lower environmental impact. But entomophagy is not necessarily more humane than factory farming of livestock all things considered, and along some dimensions it's actually worse, because it involves killing vastly more animals per unit of protein. Rather than promoting insect consumption, let's focus on plant-based meat substitutes. https://reducing-suffering.org/why-i-dont-support-eating-insects/

Somewhat related essay from a negative utilitarian about consequences of insects feeling pain: https://reducing-suffering.org/the-importance-of-insect-suffering/

Factory farmed animals aren’t primarily fed on harmless waste products. They require production of corn or other plants to efficiently feed them. Do a google scholar search for land use of various diets. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0165… Personally, I don't mind eating hunted meat. It's just inconvenient because I don't like to hunt, nor could I do so conveniently. Regardless, you seem to be assuming that vegans care about minimizing the number of organisms harmed. I don't think that's generally true - most people care about subjective understanding of suffering. Personally I like Brian Tomasik's writings - he tries quantify suffering explicitly based on functional complexity of brain function (https://reducing-suffering.org/the-importance-of-insect-suffering/).

Thanks for posting, here's a post which describes the actual numbers of wild animals there are (by Brian Tomasik): http://reducing-suffering.org/how-many-wild-animals-are-there/

Did you consider animal welfare? We should do exactly the opposite: "Convert Grass Lawns to Gravel to Reduce Insect Suffering" http://reducing-suffering.org/convert-grass-lawns-to-gravel-to-reduce-…

Evolution has been running ~10^19 experiments in parallel for billions of years: http://reducing-suffering.org/how-many-wild-animals-are-there/ Evolution is a slow algorithm, but it had access to an absurd amount of compute (all neuronal organic matter on Earth) and environment simulation (all of physical reality on Earth) when discovering us; so the discovery of the algorithms/architectures/principles in our heads shouldn't be viewed as trivial.

> Is it abuse if the AI doesn't feel agony? AI might be able to feel a kind of pain. If you think about the Reinforcement Learning framework, the reward signal drives learning. But negative rewards, or the impossibility to gain positive rewards could be agony for a system for which the sole purpose of existence is maximizing cumulative reward. There was even a paper about the morality of training RL systems and estimating the amount of suffering we subject them to. > Ethical Issues in Artificial Reinforcement Learning [ http://reducing-suffering.org/ethical-issues-artificial-reinforcement-… ]

"The biggest impostor, fittingly, was farmed Asian catfish, a fish with white flesh that is easily disguised when it’s filleted and drenched in sauce. It was sold in place of 18 types of more expensive fish, including perch, cod and grouper." This is especially concerning for people who try to avoid farmed fish (to minimize inflicting suffering). Farmed catfish has an incredibly high suffering/kg ratio, 6x that of salmon, 30x that of chicken meat, and 1000x that of beef. http://reducing-suffering.org/how-much-direct-suffering-is-caused-by-v…

The article notes that in South Korea, "from next year, cash bonuses of 2m won (£1,320) will be paid to every couple expecting a child, on top of existing child benefit payments". These cash awards for having children being paid by developed countries are laughably far too little, too late in their intention. Looking at the issue in financial terms, having a child and bringing them up well is an enormous cost both in money and time. The most significant being the opportunity cost of at least one parent's ability to participate economically being severely reduced for years. Brian Tomasik estimated that having a child may cost over $300k when measured in those terms, although there is some USA slant in his analysis (https://reducing-suffering.org/the-cost-of-kids/). Now, Tomasik does mention that having children cannot be judged economically, it's a special and important experience that you can't place a price on. On the other hand, there's no denying that raising a child in today's world is simply unthinkable for many young adults who are struggling with insecurity in housing, careers, and a bleaker outlook on the future. Many commodities are historically cheap today but property is extremely less affordable, and most prospective parents would rather delay having children until they can achieve career stability and afford a reasonably-sized house, which is happening very late in life (if at all) compared to previous generations. If governments were really serious about…

> studies seem to indicate that insects are not capable of feeling pain and suffering All of the articles (e.g. [0]) I found in a quick search in response to this citation-free assertion suggested that the answer is more nuanced that that. I'd also observe that higher primates (e.g. chimps) that have pain mechanisms that are biologically very similar to ours can have a very different response to us. If you watch film of social interactions of chimps, e.g. [1], it's a fairly routine occurrence for an individual to apparently ignore injuries that would have a human screaming (e.g. a finger partially severed in a fight with a rival), especially if it would affect their hierarchical status to run away. So I wouldn't read too much into observed behaviour as an indicator of what is actually going on, at least for primates. [0] https://reducing-suffering.org/do-bugs-feel-pain/ [1] https://monkeyworld.org/monkey-life/

>I dunno about you, but I would be really, really excited if other planets became infested with Earth organisms. http://reducing-suffering.org/applied-welfare-biology-wild-animal-advo… https://foundational-research.org/the-importance-of-wild-animal-suffer… http://reducing-suffering.org/will-space-colonization-multiply-wild-an… What is almost always ignored is that these animals would have feelings, and many would suffer enormously as a result of being created into Darwinian ecosystems in which predation, disease, and premature death are endemic. Theologians ask why a good God would create so much cruelty in nature. Future humans should likewise ponder whether it's morally acceptable to create new ecosystems containing vast amounts of suffering, or whether they should pause and seek more compassionate alternatives if they embark upon space colonization.

Do you have a fully-coherent, logical system for deciding which lives to care about, and how much? I'd be interested to hear. 'Animals' is not a natural kind. There's no logical reason to care about all animals just because they are animals. I care about dogs, pigs, other people, etc. not because they're 'animals', but because I think they are plausibly conscious (to varying degrees) and they can experience joy and suffering. Insects, not so much. I'm unwilling to care any nonzero amount about insects. Here is why. There are something like a billion billion insects in the world. Given their short lifetimes, it means dozens of billions of billions are born and die each year. Wild insect lives are mostly short and brutal. If you care at all about an insect's life, that tiny amount multiplied by dozens of billion billions means your moral concern for insects should pretty much swamp out any other concern. You'd have to select how much you care about each insect life with suspicious precision for the sum total to be significantly different from zero, but less than how much you care about human and dog lives. So to be coherent, you have to either not care at all about insects, or your first priority in life should be to help insects. I, uh, choose not to care. (Some people seriously care though. See: http://reducing-suffering.org/the-importance-of-insect-suffering)

Vegan and kosher or halal are not comparable. How Cauliflower is Harvested https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BwpM6prR8s Many people believe that Kosher slaughter is painless, quick and merciful. In reality, animals who undergo a Kosher slaughter suffer immensely and are subjected to extreme violence. All this while being fully conscious and aware, as required in a Kosher slaughter. https://www.kinderworld.org/videos/meat-industry/kosher-slaughter/ She told me that the first time she visited a kosher slaughter house, she heard screaming cattle from a half kilometer away. "Each terrified animal was forced with an electric prod to run into a small stall which had a slick floor on a forty-five degree angle. This caused the animal to slip and fall so that workers could attach the chain to its rear leg [in order to raise it into the air]. As I watched this nightmare, I thought, `This should not be happening in a civilized society.' In my diary I wrote, `If hell exists, I am in it.'" https://reducing-suffering.org/kosher-slaughter-humane/ PETA Reveals Extreme Cruelty at Kosher Slaughterhouses https://www.peta.org/features/agriprocessors/ Halal slaughter: Outcry after undercover film exposes brutality of industry https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/outcry-after-undercove…