The shrimp welfare project

Apologies for focusing on just one sentence of this article, but I feel like it's crucial to the overall argument:

> ... if [shrimp] suffer only 3% as intensely as we do ...

Does this proposition make sense? It's not obvious to me that we can assign percentage values to suffering, or compare it to human suffering, or treat the values in a linear fashion.

It reminds me of that vaguely absurd thought experiment where you compare one person undergoing a lifetime of intense torture vs billions upon billions of humans getting a fleck of dust in their eyes. I just cannot square choosing the former with my conscience. Maybe I'm too unimaginative to comprehend so many billions of bits of dust.

I don’t really doubt that it’s in principle possible to assign percentage values to suffering intensity, but the 3% value (which the source admits is a “placeholder”) seems completely unhinged for an animal with 0.05% as many neurons as a chicken, and the source’s justification for largely discounting neuron counts seems pretty arbitrary, at least as presented in their FAQ.

> I don’t really doubt that it’s in principle possible to assign percentage values to suffering intensity, but the 3% value (which the source admits is a “placeholder”) seems completely unhinged for an animal with 0.05% as many neurons as a chicken,

There is a simple explanation for the confusion that this causes you and the other people in this thread: suffering's not real. It's a dumb gobbledygook term that in the most generous interpretation refers to a completely subjective experience that is not empirical or measurable.

The author uses the word "imagine" three times in the first two paragraphs for a reason. Then he follows up with a fake picture of anthropomorphic shrimp. This is some sort of con game. And you're all falling for it. He's not scamming money out of you, instead he wants to convert you to his religious-dietary-code-that-is-trying-to-become-a-religion.

Shrimp are food. They have zero moral weight.

Denying the existence of something that you and everyone else has experienced is certainly an approach.

Look, I’m not going to defend the author here. The linked report reads to me like the output of a group of people who have become so insulated in their thinking on this subject that they’ve totally lost perspective. They give an 11% prior probability of earthworm sentience based on proxies like “avoiding noxious stimuli”, which is… really something.

But I’m not so confused by a bad set of arguments that I think suffering doesn’t exist.