Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Even if you assume the lives of farm animals to be worth living (according to your standards?), it is still the sign of an optimization failure. Surely farm animals aren't the best possible causal vector to maximize happiness in the universe? They are a by-product of something else, namely sustenance for interesting human lives, which means there is waste in the process of sustaining interesting human lives, which means that a better system without animals could potentially sustain a greater number of interesting human lives.

Alternatively, maybe you just want to maximize your own happiness, and screaming animals make you uncomfortable? Then do exactly what you have to do in order to discharge those emotions, at minimal cost.

In the spirit of Eliezer Yudkowsky and Katja Grace, find out what best approximates your values and then be efficient about implementing them. Don't rationalize sub-par optimization and don't pretend efficiency is a bad thing. Claiming the existence of farm animals is good because their lives are worth living implies that this is the best available way of creating lives worth living, and that hypothesis is unlikely to hold true upon critical examination.

Expand full comment
Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I don't think i'm so much ambivalent as I just accept that nobody's suffering really matters until it's personal. You make a personal connection and it's going to matter to you. Otherwise it's just a drop in the bucket. Genocide wipes out a whole people and I don't lose any sleep. My best friend gets killed and I mourn for a month.

In general none of this stuff matters ("feelings" or cruelty or whatever). What matters is when you get into the strange additives used to help make the most money out of the slaughter and their eventual bad side-effects on the consuming population. This is more related to the general trend of food-tampering that's been going on for decades though.

I have a question which I don't think anyone has an answer for: is my food safe? If it isn't, why the fuck are we eating it?

Expand full comment
53 more comments...

No posts