The justification that I’ve heard for that position wouldn’t make the statement better; I’d be able to pass an ITT for the specific person who told me it, and I understand why it is wrong. I consider the mistake they’re making and the mistake Rethink Priorities are making to be the same and I try to make an argument why in the post.
I’m separately pretty sure evolutionary reasons for qualia didn’t exist in fish evolution (added this to the post, thanks!), and from my experience talking to a couple of EAs about this they agreed with some correlations enough to consider a suggested experiment to be a crux, and I’m pretty certain about the result of the experiment and think they’re wrong for reasons described in the post.
It’s not obvious how to figure out the priors here, but my point is people update on things that aren’t valid evidence. The hope is that people will spend their resources more effectively after correctly considering shrimp welfare to be by orders of magnitude less important and deprioritizing it. Maybe they’ll still avoid eating shrimp because they don’t have intuitions about evolutionary reasons for qualia similar to my, but that seems less important to me than reducing as much actual suffering as possible, other things being equal.
The justification that I’ve heard for that position wouldn’t make the statement better; I’d be able to pass an ITT for the specific person who told me it, and I understand why it is wrong. I consider the mistake they’re making and the mistake Rethink Priorities are making to be the same and I try to make an argument why in the post.
I’m separately pretty sure evolutionary reasons for qualia didn’t exist in fish evolution (added this to the post, thanks!), and from my experience talking to a couple of EAs about this they agreed with some correlations enough to consider a suggested experiment to be a crux, and I’m pretty certain about the result of the experiment and think they’re wrong for reasons described in the post.
It’s not obvious how to figure out the priors here, but my point is people update on things that aren’t valid evidence. The hope is that people will spend their resources more effectively after correctly considering shrimp welfare to be by orders of magnitude less important and deprioritizing it. Maybe they’ll still avoid eating shrimp because they don’t have intuitions about evolutionary reasons for qualia similar to my, but that seems less important to me than reducing as much actual suffering as possible, other things being equal.