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.

Have you read the linked paper by Norcross? "Great harms from small benefits grow: how death can be outweighed by headaches" [0].

[0]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3328486

I read the paper and I believe the same objections applies: the reasoning only works if you assume "pain" to be a constant number subject to the additive property.

If we have to use math, I'd say: the headaches are temporal - the effect of all the good you've done today is effectively gone tomorrow one way or another. But killing a person means, to quote "Unforgiven", that "you take away everything he's got and everything he's ever gonna have". So the calculation needs at least a temporal discount factor.

I also believe that the examples are too contrived to be actually useful. Comparing a room with one person to another with five million is like comparing the fine for a person traveling at twice the speed limit with that of someone traveling at 10% the speed of light - the results of such an analysis are entertaining to think about, but not actually useful.

No, that isn't true. We can consider some metric like being at some temperature for an hour. Start with some truly torturous pain like being at 500 degrees for an hour (you'd die quickly, ofc). One person being at 500 degrees is less bad than 10 at 499 degrees which is less bad than 100 at 498 degrees...which is less bad than some number at 85 degrees (not torture, just a bit unpleasant).

I think OP's objection is that - even granting that a "badness value" can be assigned to headaches and that 3 people with headaches is worse than 2 - there's no clear reason to suppose that 3 is exactly half again as bad as 2. It may be that the function mapping headaches to badness is logarithmic, or even that it asymptotes towards some limit. In mathematical terms it can be both monotonic and bounded.

Thus, when comparing headaches to a man being tortured, there's no clear reason to suppose that there is a number of headaches that is worse than the torture.