I first want to respond to the mention of my statement that the Shrimp Welfare Project want shrimp to suffer. I did not want to frame my piece as a direct attack on the project, and rather as an exploration of shrimp consciousness and suffering capabilities, as this aligns more with my interests. I wrote my first draft without closely reading their output, from first principles and my own research. I independently read much of the literature on shrimp brains, and have read much of what has been published in the neuroscience of consciousness over the last year. What surprised me, when I started reading the rethink priorities and SWP literature, was that they had read the same papers as I had, and had chosen to misrepresent a lot of the information. They mention findings in crabs, insects, worms and fundamentally different organisms as evidence for shrimp sentience. They stack probabilities based on their own assumptions on top of each other, and have made the justifications for these probabilities and insights unreasonably difficult to find. Their argument against neuron counts as a proxy for suffering and sentience weakens their argument for shrimp sentience, as it mentions factors like neuron density, which is lesser in shrimp. This argument is, however, presented as a counterpoint to certain critiques of the project.
“It just intuitively seems like they are.” This is proposed as a rebuttal for critiques of the shrimp welfare project, not very convincing to me, yet they claim that those who don’t support them are “irrational, evil or both”. I find that making that claim with sparse, scattered and unclear evidence is not great, and paints anyone who opposes their views as as flawed person.
I would prefer if they had purely appealed to emotion and provided philosophical arguments, but bringing in empirical research, and picking and choosing the evidence that supports their argument weakens it in my view.
As for your second argument, I would like to point you to my mention of the ACC. Pain is processed in your brain, not in the pain receptors. You probably evolved the ability to suffer, and I doubt it is an inherent component of consciousness or matter. Your personal experience with migraines does not relate to shrimp as your nervous system evolved independently. I understand the desire to empathise with shrimp, and to imagine them freezing to death and suffering, but they can’t experience anything remotely similar to your migraine.
My arguments were meant to compound, not to be taken independently. Shrimp are probably not conscious, they probably can’t feel pain, and even if they could it would be an extremely basic and surface level unpleasantness. There are millions of neurons in your brain encoding negative signals when the shopping cart is squeaky, orders of magnitude more than a shrimp freezing to death. What would make the experience of their neurons stronger or more morally relevant? I personally believe that, if shrimp can experience, it would just be the basic substrate of experience with no valence at all.
In my perspective, I was not attacking anyone but was mentioning something inherent to humans, however rational they may be. When you want to believe something, it is very easy to convince yourself that it true.
If the above is true, I think this is really good information that would have been very nice to have cited within the article. That would make me a lot more skeptical of SWP and of their conclusions, and it’d be great to see links for these examples if you could provide them.
Especially this paragraph:
“It just intuitively seems like they are.” This is proposed as a rebuttal for critiques of the shrimp welfare project, not very convincing to me, yet they claim that those who don’t support them are “irrational, evil or both”. I find that making that claim with sparse, scattered and unclear evidence is not great, and paints anyone who opposes their views as as flawed person.
I agree with the value claims in this paragraph completely, so if you have sources for those quotes I think that would be very persuasive to a lot of us here on this site, and it might even be worth a labelled edit to the main post.
I’ll write a more detailed piece in the near future, less focused on the science which no-one seems to care about and more focussed on the semantics which everyone seems to care about.
I can see why you might find that frustrating. I think a lot of us, myself included, do think that the science is the most important part of the argument—but we don’t understand the science well enough to distinguish true arguments from false ones, in this domain.
I don’t have the proper expertise to evaluate your claims about pain receptors properly, but I do have the proper expertise to conclude that SWP calling their opponents “irrational, evil, or both” is bad, and that this correlates with shoddy reasoning everywhere else, including the parts I don’t understand. Thus, there’s a limit to how much I can update even from an incredibly strong neurological takedown, if that takedown requires knowledge of neurology that I don’t have in order to fully appreciate its correctness.
So, in terms of what we care about, think of it less as “How many bits of information should this point be worth” and more “How many bits of information can your audience actually draw from this piece of information?”
I first want to respond to the mention of my statement that the Shrimp Welfare Project want shrimp to suffer. I did not want to frame my piece as a direct attack on the project, and rather as an exploration of shrimp consciousness and suffering capabilities, as this aligns more with my interests. I wrote my first draft without closely reading their output, from first principles and my own research. I independently read much of the literature on shrimp brains, and have read much of what has been published in the neuroscience of consciousness over the last year. What surprised me, when I started reading the rethink priorities and SWP literature, was that they had read the same papers as I had, and had chosen to misrepresent a lot of the information. They mention findings in crabs, insects, worms and fundamentally different organisms as evidence for shrimp sentience. They stack probabilities based on their own assumptions on top of each other, and have made the justifications for these probabilities and insights unreasonably difficult to find. Their argument against neuron counts as a proxy for suffering and sentience weakens their argument for shrimp sentience, as it mentions factors like neuron density, which is lesser in shrimp. This argument is, however, presented as a counterpoint to certain critiques of the project.
“It just intuitively seems like they are.” This is proposed as a rebuttal for critiques of the shrimp welfare project, not very convincing to me, yet they claim that those who don’t support them are “irrational, evil or both”. I find that making that claim with sparse, scattered and unclear evidence is not great, and paints anyone who opposes their views as as flawed person.
I would prefer if they had purely appealed to emotion and provided philosophical arguments, but bringing in empirical research, and picking and choosing the evidence that supports their argument weakens it in my view.
As for your second argument, I would like to point you to my mention of the ACC. Pain is processed in your brain, not in the pain receptors. You probably evolved the ability to suffer, and I doubt it is an inherent component of consciousness or matter. Your personal experience with migraines does not relate to shrimp as your nervous system evolved independently. I understand the desire to empathise with shrimp, and to imagine them freezing to death and suffering, but they can’t experience anything remotely similar to your migraine.
My arguments were meant to compound, not to be taken independently. Shrimp are probably not conscious, they probably can’t feel pain, and even if they could it would be an extremely basic and surface level unpleasantness. There are millions of neurons in your brain encoding negative signals when the shopping cart is squeaky, orders of magnitude more than a shrimp freezing to death. What would make the experience of their neurons stronger or more morally relevant? I personally believe that, if shrimp can experience, it would just be the basic substrate of experience with no valence at all.
In my perspective, I was not attacking anyone but was mentioning something inherent to humans, however rational they may be. When you want to believe something, it is very easy to convince yourself that it true.
I realize it was a mistake to phrase it that way.
If the above is true, I think this is really good information that would have been very nice to have cited within the article. That would make me a lot more skeptical of SWP and of their conclusions, and it’d be great to see links for these examples if you could provide them.
Especially this paragraph:
“It just intuitively seems like they are.” This is proposed as a rebuttal for critiques of the shrimp welfare project, not very convincing to me, yet they claim that those who don’t support them are “irrational, evil or both”. I find that making that claim with sparse, scattered and unclear evidence is not great, and paints anyone who opposes their views as as flawed person.
I agree with the value claims in this paragraph completely, so if you have sources for those quotes I think that would be very persuasive to a lot of us here on this site, and it might even be worth a labelled edit to the main post.
I’ll write a more detailed piece in the near future, less focused on the science which no-one seems to care about and more focussed on the semantics which everyone seems to care about.
I can see why you might find that frustrating. I think a lot of us, myself included, do think that the science is the most important part of the argument—but we don’t understand the science well enough to distinguish true arguments from false ones, in this domain.
I don’t have the proper expertise to evaluate your claims about pain receptors properly, but I do have the proper expertise to conclude that SWP calling their opponents “irrational, evil, or both” is bad, and that this correlates with shoddy reasoning everywhere else, including the parts I don’t understand. Thus, there’s a limit to how much I can update even from an incredibly strong neurological takedown, if that takedown requires knowledge of neurology that I don’t have in order to fully appreciate its correctness.
So, in terms of what we care about, think of it less as “How many bits of information should this point be worth” and more “How many bits of information can your audience actually draw from this piece of information?”