This is extremely interesting and thought-provoking, but bees beating salmon really does undermine any attempt I can make to give this a lot of credence.
Moreso, though, I object to saying we can trade one week of human life for six days of chicken torture (in the comments). But this is more my critique of utilitarianism, as I lay out in “Biting the Philosophical Bullet” here.
Thanks, Matt. As we say, though, we don’t actually think that bees beat salmon. We think that the vertebrates are 0.1 or better of humans, that the vertebrates themselves are within 2x of one another, and that the invertebrates are within 2 OOMs of the vertebrates. We fully recognize that the models are limited by the available data about specific taxa. We aren’t going to fudge the numbers to get more intuitive results, but we definitely don’t recommend using them uncritically.
I hear—and sometimes share—your skepticism about such human/animal tradeoffs. As we argue in a previous post, utilitarianism is indeed to blame for many of these strange results. Still, it could be the best theory around! I’m genuinely unsure what to think here.
This is extremely interesting and thought-provoking, but bees beating salmon really does undermine any attempt I can make to give this a lot of credence.
Moreso, though, I object to saying we can trade one week of human life for six days of chicken torture (in the comments). But this is more my critique of utilitarianism, as I lay out in “Biting the Philosophical Bullet” here.
Thanks, Matt. As we say, though, we don’t actually think that bees beat salmon. We think that the vertebrates are 0.1 or better of humans, that the vertebrates themselves are within 2x of one another, and that the invertebrates are within 2 OOMs of the vertebrates. We fully recognize that the models are limited by the available data about specific taxa. We aren’t going to fudge the numbers to get more intuitive results, but we definitely don’t recommend using them uncritically.
I hear—and sometimes share—your skepticism about such human/animal tradeoffs. As we argue in a previous post, utilitarianism is indeed to blame for many of these strange results. Still, it could be the best theory around! I’m genuinely unsure what to think here.