The claim “fish can suffer and this is morally important” is not uncontroversial. Also, not all possible points of disagreement are related to biology. I mean, the reaction you just got proved as much.
I’m pointing this out because you’ve written several posts about related topics before, and all of them assumed more background agreement than is actually there. I’m not saying that understanding these disagreements will cause you to change your mind (in fact I think that’s very unlikely), but just as a matter of effectively communicating, it would be worth trying; otherwise, you’ll keep being frustrated with people reacting strangely to your writing.
I think it kinda works here just because many people consider “fish can suffer and this is morally important” plausible enough to take seriously. As you pointed out, the quantitative case is very strong; even a small probability makes it a moral priority. But I would not write stuff like “But let’s be super conservative and say that there’s only a 50% chance that they can feel pain.” when e.g. Eliezer would put way less than 10% on fish feeling pain in a morally relevant way.
e.g. Eliezer would put way less than 10% on fish feeling pain in a morally relevant way
Semi-tangent: setting aside the ‘morally relevant way’ part, has Eliezer ever actually made the case for his beliefs about (the absence of) qualia in various animals? The impression I’ve got is that he expresses quite high confidence, but sadly the margin is always too narrow to contain the proof.
I don’t know any place where he wrote it up properly, but he’s said enough to infer that he’s confident that consciousness is about higher-order thoughts (i.e., self-reflection/meta-awareness/etc.) This explains the confidence that chickens aren’t conscious, and it would extend to fish as well.
If you can’t justify a large chance, just using a small chance instead allows you to be Pascal mugged when that small chance is combined with a calculation that shows a huge amount of suffering.
This is true—but the logic wrt brain function says to me that the proper chance that fish suffer is very high. The neural circuits are different in complexity but not fundamental type (representations about the world including bodily state, etc) from humans.
The claim “fish can suffer and this is morally important” is not uncontroversial. Also, not all possible points of disagreement are related to biology. I mean, the reaction you just got proved as much.
I’m pointing this out because you’ve written several posts about related topics before, and all of them assumed more background agreement than is actually there. I’m not saying that understanding these disagreements will cause you to change your mind (in fact I think that’s very unlikely), but just as a matter of effectively communicating, it would be worth trying; otherwise, you’ll keep being frustrated with people reacting strangely to your writing.
I think it kinda works here just because many people consider “fish can suffer and this is morally important” plausible enough to take seriously. As you pointed out, the quantitative case is very strong; even a small probability makes it a moral priority. But I would not write stuff like “But let’s be super conservative and say that there’s only a 50% chance that they can feel pain.” when e.g. Eliezer would put way less than 10% on fish feeling pain in a morally relevant way.
Semi-tangent: setting aside the ‘morally relevant way’ part, has Eliezer ever actually made the case for his beliefs about (the absence of) qualia in various animals? The impression I’ve got is that he expresses quite high confidence, but sadly the margin is always too narrow to contain the proof.
I don’t know any place where he wrote it up properly, but he’s said enough to infer that he’s confident that consciousness is about higher-order thoughts (i.e., self-reflection/meta-awareness/etc.) This explains the confidence that chickens aren’t conscious, and it would extend to fish as well.
If you can’t justify a large chance, just using a small chance instead allows you to be Pascal mugged when that small chance is combined with a calculation that shows a huge amount of suffering.
Pascal’s mugging usually involves tiny probabilities though, and you need to have pretty darn confident philosophical beliefs to go below 1% here.
This is true—but the logic wrt brain function says to me that the proper chance that fish suffer is very high. The neural circuits are different in complexity but not fundamental type (representations about the world including bodily state, etc) from humans.