Cattle have a bit less than 1/3rd the brain mass of humans, chickens about 1/40th, and fish are down more than an order of magnitude (moreso by cortex). If you weight expected value by neurons, which is made plausible by thinking about things like split-brain patients and local computations in nervous systems, that will drastically change the picture.
My quick back-of-the envelope (which didn’t take into account the small average size of the mostly feed fish involved, and thus reduced neural tissue) is that making this adjustment would cut the cost-effectiveness metric by a factor of at least 400 times, and plausibly 1000+ times. This reflects the fact that fish make up most of the life-days in the calculation, and also have comparatively tiny and simple nervous systems. Personally, I would pay more to ensure a painless death for a cow than for a small feed fish with orders of magnitude less neural capacity.
The bit about desirability bias, or the fact that the optimistic estimates involve claiming that vegetarian ads are vastly more effective than other kinds of moralized behavior-change ads with more accurate measurements of effect?
Both points. The question “why should vegetarianism advocacy be so much more effective than get out the vote advocacy?” is a good point. Since the study quality for get out the vote advocacy is so much higher, we should expect vegetarianism advocacy to end up about the same.
On the other hand, I do think vegetarianism advocacy is a lot more psychologically salient (pictures of suffering) than any case that can be made for voting. I’ve personally distributed some pro-voting pamphlets, and they’re not very compelling at all.
Good points, Carl! Jonah Sinick actually made the GOTV argument to me on a prior occasion, citing your essay on the topic.
One additional consideration is that nearly everyone knows about voting, but many people don’t know about the cruelty of factory farms. This goes along with the low-hanging-fruit point.
I would not be surprised if, after tempering the figures by this outside-view prior, it takes a few hundred dollars to create a new veg year. Even if so, that’s at most 1-2 orders of magnitude different from the naive conservative estimate.
This is actually a really good point that makes me less confident in the effectiveness of vegetarianism advocacy.
An additional point:
Cattle have a bit less than 1/3rd the brain mass of humans, chickens about 1/40th, and fish are down more than an order of magnitude (moreso by cortex). If you weight expected value by neurons, which is made plausible by thinking about things like split-brain patients and local computations in nervous systems, that will drastically change the picture.
My quick back-of-the envelope (which didn’t take into account the small average size of the mostly feed fish involved, and thus reduced neural tissue) is that making this adjustment would cut the cost-effectiveness metric by a factor of at least 400 times, and plausibly 1000+ times. This reflects the fact that fish make up most of the life-days in the calculation, and also have comparatively tiny and simple nervous systems. Personally, I would pay more to ensure a painless death for a cow than for a small feed fish with orders of magnitude less neural capacity.
Ah, but now I can turn myself into a utility monster by artificially enlarging my brain! Game over.
We’re trying to work out how to make progress on moral questions today, not trying to lay down a rule for all eternity that future agents can’t game.
It was a joke.
Oops, sorry!
Or by having kids. Or copying your uploaded self. Or re-engineering your nervous system in other ways...
The bit about desirability bias, or the fact that the optimistic estimates involve claiming that vegetarian ads are vastly more effective than other kinds of moralized behavior-change ads with more accurate measurements of effect?
Both points. The question “why should vegetarianism advocacy be so much more effective than get out the vote advocacy?” is a good point. Since the study quality for get out the vote advocacy is so much higher, we should expect vegetarianism advocacy to end up about the same.
On the other hand, I do think vegetarianism advocacy is a lot more psychologically salient (pictures of suffering) than any case that can be made for voting. I’ve personally distributed some pro-voting pamphlets, and they’re not very compelling at all.
Good points, Carl! Jonah Sinick actually made the GOTV argument to me on a prior occasion, citing your essay on the topic.
One additional consideration is that nearly everyone knows about voting, but many people don’t know about the cruelty of factory farms. This goes along with the low-hanging-fruit point.
I would not be surprised if, after tempering the figures by this outside-view prior, it takes a few hundred dollars to create a new veg year. Even if so, that’s at most 1-2 orders of magnitude different from the naive conservative estimate.