- Plus #1: I assume that anything the animal industry doesn’t like would increase costs for raising chickens. I’d correspondingly assume that we should want costs to be high (though it would be much better if it could be the government getting these funds, rather than just decreases in efficiency).
I think this feels like a very aggressive zero-sum mindset. I agree that sometimes you want to have an attitude like this, but I at least at the present think that acting with the attitude of “let’s just make animal industry as costly as possible” would understandable cause backlash, make it harder to come to agreements, and I think a reasonable justice system would punish people who do such things (even if they think they are morally in the right).
You asked for a “rough fermi estimate of the trade-offs”, I gave you a list of potential trade-offs.
If we’re willing to make decisions with logic like, “while genetically modifying unnaturally fast-growing chickens in factory farms would increase the pain of each one, perhaps the math works out so that there’s less pain overall”, I feel like adding considerations like, “this intervention will also make meat more expensive, which will reduce use” is a pretty vanilla consideration.
No, those are two totally separate types of considerations? In one you are directly aiming to work against the goals of someone else in a zero-sum fashion, the other one is just a normal prediction about what will actually happen?
You really should have very different norms about how you are dealing with adversarial considerations and how you are dealing with normal causal/environmental considerations. I don’t care about calling them “vanilla” or not, I think we should generally have a high prior against arguments of the form “X is bad, Y is hurting X, therefore Y is good”.
I think this feels like a very aggressive zero-sum mindset. I agree that sometimes you want to have an attitude like this, but I at least at the present think that acting with the attitude of “let’s just make animal industry as costly as possible” would understandable cause backlash, make it harder to come to agreements, and I think a reasonable justice system would punish people who do such things (even if they think they are morally in the right).
I feel like that’s pretty unfair.
You asked for a “rough fermi estimate of the trade-offs”, I gave you a list of potential trade-offs.
If we’re willing to make decisions with logic like, “while genetically modifying unnaturally fast-growing chickens in factory farms would increase the pain of each one, perhaps the math works out so that there’s less pain overall”, I feel like adding considerations like, “this intervention will also make meat more expensive, which will reduce use” is a pretty vanilla consideration.
No, those are two totally separate types of considerations? In one you are directly aiming to work against the goals of someone else in a zero-sum fashion, the other one is just a normal prediction about what will actually happen?
You really should have very different norms about how you are dealing with adversarial considerations and how you are dealing with normal causal/environmental considerations. I don’t care about calling them “vanilla” or not, I think we should generally have a high prior against arguments of the form “X is bad, Y is hurting X, therefore Y is good”.