I’ve met one who assigned double-digit probabilities to bacteria having qualia and said they wouldn’t be surprised if a balloon flying through a gradient of air experiences pain because it’s trying to get away from hotter air towards colder air.
on the post: remember that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence when we do not yet have the technologies to collect relevant evidence. the conclusion in the title does not follow: it should be ‘whether shrimp suffer is uncertain’. under uncertainty, eating shrimp is taking a risk whose downsides are suffering, and upsides (for individuals for whom there are any) might e.g taste preference satisfaction, and the former is much more important to me. a typical person is not justified in ‘eating shrimp until someone proves to them that shrimp can suffer.’
The justification that I’ve heard for that position wouldn’t make the statement better; I’d be able to pass an ITT for the specific person who told me it, and I understand why it is wrong. I consider the mistake they’re making and the mistake Rethink Priorities are making to be the same and I try to make an argument why in the post.
I’m separately pretty sure evolutionary reasons for qualia didn’t exist in fish evolution (added this to the post, thanks!), and from my experience talking to a couple of EAs about this they agreed with some correlations enough to consider a suggested experiment to be a crux, and I’m pretty certain about the result of the experiment and think they’re wrong for reasons described in the post.
It’s not obvious how to figure out the priors here, but my point is people update on things that aren’t valid evidence. The hope is that people will spend their resources more effectively after correctly considering shrimp welfare to be by orders of magnitude less important and deprioritizing it. Maybe they’ll still avoid eating shrimp because they don’t have intuitions about evolutionary reasons for qualia similar to my, but that seems less important to me than reducing as much actual suffering as possible, other things being equal.
though this may be an arguable position (see, e.g., https://reducing-suffering.org/is-there-suffering-in-fundamental-physics/), the way you’ve used it (and the other anecdotes) in the introduction decontextualized, as a ‘statement of position’ without justification, is in effect a clown attack fallacy.
on the post: remember that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence when we do not yet have the technologies to collect relevant evidence. the conclusion in the title does not follow: it should be ‘whether shrimp suffer is uncertain’. under uncertainty, eating shrimp is taking a risk whose downsides are suffering, and upsides (for individuals for whom there are any) might e.g taste preference satisfaction, and the former is much more important to me. a typical person is not justified in ‘eating shrimp until someone proves to them that shrimp can suffer.’
The justification that I’ve heard for that position wouldn’t make the statement better; I’d be able to pass an ITT for the specific person who told me it, and I understand why it is wrong. I consider the mistake they’re making and the mistake Rethink Priorities are making to be the same and I try to make an argument why in the post.
I’m separately pretty sure evolutionary reasons for qualia didn’t exist in fish evolution (added this to the post, thanks!), and from my experience talking to a couple of EAs about this they agreed with some correlations enough to consider a suggested experiment to be a crux, and I’m pretty certain about the result of the experiment and think they’re wrong for reasons described in the post.
It’s not obvious how to figure out the priors here, but my point is people update on things that aren’t valid evidence. The hope is that people will spend their resources more effectively after correctly considering shrimp welfare to be by orders of magnitude less important and deprioritizing it. Maybe they’ll still avoid eating shrimp because they don’t have intuitions about evolutionary reasons for qualia similar to my, but that seems less important to me than reducing as much actual suffering as possible, other things being equal.