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.

Using some italics with an edgy claim doesn't allow you to cut through centuries of philosophy. It's almost as if, when philosophers have coined this term in language "subjective experience" and thousands have used it often in coherent discussion, that it actually has semantic value. It exists in the intersubjective space between people who communicate with shared concepts.

I don't have much to say about the shrimp, but I find it deeply sad when people convince themselves that they don't really exist as a thinking, feeling thing. It's self repression to the maximum, and carries the implication that yourself and all humans have no value.

If you don't have certain measurable proof either way, why would you choose to align with the most grim possible skeptical beliefs? Listen to some music or something - don't you hear the sounds?

> Using some italics with an edgy claim

There is nothing edgy about it. You can't detect it, you can't measure it, and if the word had any applicability (to say, humans), then you're also misapplying it. If it is your contention that suffering is something-other-than-subjective, then you're the one trying to be edgy. Not I.

The way sane, reasonable people describe subjective phenomena that we can't detect or measure is "not real". When we're talking about decapods, it can't even be self-reported.

> but I find it deeply sad when people convince themselves that they don't really exist as a thinking, feeling thing. It's self repression to the maximum,

Says the guy agreeing with a faction that seeks to convince people shrimp are anything other than food. That if for some reason we need to euthanize them, that they must be laid down on a velvet pillow to listen to symphonic music and watch films of the beautiful Swiss mountain countryside until their last gasp.

"Sad" is letting yourself be manipulated so that some other religion can enforce its noodle-brained dietary laws on you.

> If you don't have certain measurable proof either way

I'm not obligated to prove the negative.