No, being extremely overwhelmingly confident about morality such that even if you are given a choice to drastically alter 99.999999999999999999999% of the matter in the universe, you call the side of not destroying it “insane” for not wanting to give up a single human life, a thing we do routinely for much weaker considerations, is insane.
Hm. Okay, so my reasoning there went as follows:
Substitute shrimp for rocks.10100 rocks would also be an amount of matter bigger than exists in the observable universe, and we presumably should assign a nonzero probability to rocks being sapient. Should we then save 10100 rocks instead of one human?
Perhaps. But I think this transforms the problem into Pascal’s mugging, and has nothing to do with shrimp or ethics anymore. If we’re allowed to drag in outside considerations like this, we should also start questioning whether these 10100 rocks/shrimp actually exist, and all other usual arguments against Pascal’s mugging.
To properly engage with thought experiments within some domain, like ethics, we should take the assumptions behind this domain as a given. This implicitly means constraining our hypothesis space to models of reality within which this domain is a meaningful thing to reason about.
In this case, this would involve being able to reason about 10100 rocks as if they really were just “rocks”, without dragging in the uncertainty about “but what if my very conception of what a ‘rock’ is is metaphysically confused?”.
Similarly, surely we should be able to have thought experiments in which “shrimp” really are just “shrimp”, ontologically basic entities that are not made up of matter which can spontaneously assemble into Boltzmann brains or whatever.
“Shrimp” being a type of system that could implement qualia as valuable as that of humans seems overwhelmingly unlikely to me, not as unlikely as “rocks have human-level qualia”, but in the same reference class. Therefore, in the abstract thought-experiment setup in which I have no uncertainty regarding the ontological nature of shrimp, it’s reasonable to argue that no amount of them compares to a human life.
I’m not sure where you’d get off this train, but I assume the last bullet-point would do this? I. e., that you would argue that holding the possibility of shrimps having human-level qualia is salient in a way it’s not for rocks?
Yeah, that seems valid. I might’ve shot from the hip on that one.
The whole “tier” thing obviously fails. You always end up dominated by spurious effects on the highest tier
I have a story for how that would make sense, similarly involving juggling inside-model and outside-model reasoning, but, hm, I’m somehow getting the impression my thinking here is undercooked/poorly presented. I’ll revisit that one at a later time.
Edit: Incidentally, any chance the UI for retracting a comment could be modified? I have two suggestions here:
I’d like to be able to list a retraction reason, ideally at the top of the comment.
The crossing-out thing makes it difficult to read the comment afterwards, and some people might want to be able to do that. Perhaps it’s better to automatically put the contents into a collapsible instead, or something along those lines?
Edit: Incidentally, any chance the UI for retracting a comment could be modified? I have two suggestions here:
You should be able to strike out the text manually and get the same-ish effect, or leave a retraction notice. The text being hard to read is intentional so that it really cannot be the case that someone screenshots it or skims it without noticing that it is retracted.
Hm. Okay, so my reasoning there went as follows:
I’m not sure where you’d get off this train, but I assume the last bullet-point would do this? I. e., that you would argue that holding the possibility of shrimps having human-level qualia is salient in a way it’s not for rocks?
Yeah, that seems valid. I might’ve shot from the hip on that one.
I have a story for how that would make sense, similarly involving juggling inside-model and outside-model reasoning, but, hm, I’m somehow getting the impression my thinking here is undercooked/poorly presented. I’ll revisit that one at a later time.
Edit: Incidentally, any chance the UI for retracting a comment could be modified? I have two suggestions here:
I’d like to be able to list a retraction reason, ideally at the top of the comment.
The crossing-out thing makes it difficult to read the comment afterwards, and some people might want to be able to do that. Perhaps it’s better to automatically put the contents into a collapsible instead, or something along those lines?
You should be able to strike out the text manually and get the same-ish effect, or leave a retraction notice. The text being hard to read is intentional so that it really cannot be the case that someone screenshots it or skims it without noticing that it is retracted.