Hi Michael. I agree. On the other hand, I also think the Shrimp Welfare Projectâs (SWPâs) Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI), which leads to more farmed shrimps being electrically stunned, may have a very low cost-effectiveness even if their target shrimps are sentient with a probability of 100 %. Their subjective experiences can have a super low intensity. For individual welfare per fully-healthy-animal-year proportional to âindividual number of neuronsâ^âexponentâ, and âexponentâ from 0 to 2, which covers my reasonable best guesses, the individual welfare per fully-healthy-shrimp-year is 10^-12 (= (10^-6)^2) to 1 times that per fully-healthy-human-year, as shrimps have 10^-6 times as many neurons as humans. In that case, I estimatethat HSI has increased the welfare of farmed shrimps 2.26*10^-4 (= 2.06*10^-8/â(9.13*10^-5)) to 1.49 k (= 20.6*10^3/â13.8) times as cost-effectively as cage-free corporate campaigns increase the welfare of chickens.
Because sentience is a binary question, and intensity of subjective experience is a scale, I feel like that should also be asked separately. People might being conflating the two by giving a low confidence probability in sentience, when they really mean they are sentience but just have experiences which arenât that intense.
Hello. I would take for granted that all animals are sentient, and focus on assessing the distribution of the intensity of subjective experiences. I think asking about the probability of sentience of an animal shares some of the issues of asking about the probability that an object is hot. People have different concepts about what âhotâ means, and they do not depend just on temperature (for example, the minimum temperature for hot wood is higher than the minimum temperature for hot metal because this transfers heat more efficiently). I understand sentience as having subjective experiences whose intensity is not exactly 0. However, I suspect you are right that some people understand it as having subjective experiences which are sufficiently intense. Different bars for this will lead to different probabilities. Asking about the distribution of the intensity of subjective experiences mitigates this. For example, one could ask about the probability of the mean intensity of the pain shrimps experience during air asphyxiation exceeding the intensity of disabling pain in humans.
Hi Michael. I agree. On the other hand, I also think the Shrimp Welfare Projectâs (SWPâs) Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI), which leads to more farmed shrimps being electrically stunned, may have a very low cost-effectiveness even if their target shrimps are sentient with a probability of 100 %. Their subjective experiences can have a super low intensity. For individual welfare per fully-healthy-animal-year proportional to âindividual number of neuronsâ^âexponentâ, and âexponentâ from 0 to 2, which covers my reasonable best guesses, the individual welfare per fully-healthy-shrimp-year is 10^-12 (= (10^-6)^2) to 1 times that per fully-healthy-human-year, as shrimps have 10^-6 times as many neurons as humans. In that case, I estimate that HSI has increased the welfare of farmed shrimps 2.26*10^-4 (= 2.06*10^-8/â(9.13*10^-5)) to 1.49 k (= 20.6*10^3/â13.8) times as cost-effectively as cage-free corporate campaigns increase the welfare of chickens.
Because sentience is a binary question, and intensity of subjective experience is a scale, I feel like that should also be asked separately. People might being conflating the two by giving a low confidence probability in sentience, when they really mean they are sentience but just have experiences which arenât that intense.
Hello. I would take for granted that all animals are sentient, and focus on assessing the distribution of the intensity of subjective experiences. I think asking about the probability of sentience of an animal shares some of the issues of asking about the probability that an object is hot. People have different concepts about what âhotâ means, and they do not depend just on temperature (for example, the minimum temperature for hot wood is higher than the minimum temperature for hot metal because this transfers heat more efficiently). I understand sentience as having subjective experiences whose intensity is not exactly 0. However, I suspect you are right that some people understand it as having subjective experiences which are sufficiently intense. Different bars for this will lead to different probabilities. Asking about the distribution of the intensity of subjective experiences mitigates this. For example, one could ask about the probability of the mean intensity of the pain shrimps experience during air asphyxiation exceeding the intensity of disabling pain in humans.
This seems directionality correct. I would love some qualitative responses as well to try to gauge how people are understanding the question.