> Iād certainly rather save a hundred duck-sized horses. Itās hard to know how to compare the moral importance of different creaturesā experiences. How many happy chicken-days is as good as a happy chimp-day? The best guess I currently have is to use the logarithm of neural mass. And I think that the total log(neural mass) of a hundred duck-sized horses is much greater than that of one horse-sized duck. Thereās just a lot more experiencing entities, and even if the horse-sized duckās experiences are a bit more valuable in light of greater computational resources powering them, itās not that much greater.Moreover, horses live a little longer than ducks (25-30 years compared to about 20 years, according to a quick google). Insofar as I think we should care not about number of lives saved, but number of quality-adjusted life-years saved, then saving the duck-sized horses is clearly going to have the bigger impact.
Not sure logarithm of neural mass is the best way to approach thisā¦ but the selection seems right to me!
For those interested, stay tuned, as RP has some really exciting work upcoming on moral weights that I think may help give a truly cutting edge response to this age old question :)
Ha! Excellent question and should be raised in every AMA :)
100 hundred duck-sized horses!
Hard to improve on Willās answer here:
> Iād certainly rather save a hundred duck-sized horses. Itās hard to know how to compare the moral importance of different creaturesā experiences. How many happy chicken-days is as good as a happy chimp-day? The best guess I currently have is to use the logarithm of neural mass. And I think that the total log(neural mass) of a hundred duck-sized horses is much greater than that of one horse-sized duck. Thereās just a lot more experiencing entities, and even if the horse-sized duckās experiences are a bit more valuable in light of greater computational resources powering them, itās not that much greater.Moreover, horses live a little longer than ducks (25-30 years compared to about 20 years, according to a quick google). Insofar as I think we should care not about number of lives saved, but number of quality-adjusted life-years saved, then saving the duck-sized horses is clearly going to have the bigger impact.
Not sure logarithm of neural mass is the best way to approach thisā¦ but the selection seems right to me!
For those interested, stay tuned, as RP has some really exciting work upcoming on moral weights that I think may help give a truly cutting edge response to this age old question :)