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?”
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?”