The idea that keeping 5500 crickets in farmed insect conditions then killing them is equivalent to ~1500 days of a human’s suffering (the expected value from your analysis) seems very high and seems wildly incompatible with the behaviors and beliefs of everyone I’ve ever met, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.
My guess is that your suffering/​day of life is too high (expected value of 0.7!, they seem to have a chill life just bouncing around and eating) and that the sentience multiplier is too high (I think most people would give up a lot more than the torture of 6000 crickets for a day to prevent the torture of a human for a day)
I think the big problem with the suffering/​day of life estimate is that it assumes suffering can’t go negative. If you think suffering can go as low as 0.015 suffering-units it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to think their lives could be net positive.
(this is a general problem with reducing-suffering derived estimates imo)
I think that’s a really interesting point. Curious as to what you think the lower bound for suffering would be assuming it could go negative (basically, if they’re living net positive lives)?
What do you think would be most people’s cutoff? My guess would be that most people see the two types of suffering as qualitatively different such that no amount of insect suffering is comparable to human suffering.
The idea that keeping 5500 crickets in farmed insect conditions then killing them is equivalent to ~1500 days of a human’s suffering (the expected value from your analysis) seems very high and seems wildly incompatible with the behaviors and beliefs of everyone I’ve ever met, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.
My guess is that your suffering/​day of life is too high (expected value of 0.7!, they seem to have a chill life just bouncing around and eating) and that the sentience multiplier is too high (I think most people would give up a lot more than the torture of 6000 crickets for a day to prevent the torture of a human for a day)
I think the big problem with the suffering/​day of life estimate is that it assumes suffering can’t go negative. If you think suffering can go as low as 0.015 suffering-units it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to think their lives could be net positive.
(this is a general problem with reducing-suffering derived estimates imo)
I think that’s a really interesting point. Curious as to what you think the lower bound for suffering would be assuming it could go negative (basically, if they’re living net positive lives)?
What do you think would be most people’s cutoff? My guess would be that most people see the two types of suffering as qualitatively different such that no amount of insect suffering is comparable to human suffering.