I feel like I don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about the relative importance of things, you know?
I wanna start doing something like: whenever I hear someone mention a problem, or read about it on twitter, or think about it and get annoyed, try and calculate how bad it is and place it on a list.
I started this today and here’s what I have so far: numbers are really bullshit but I feel like it can be nice to just try to get the relative senses of things?
May I ask why you picked wild fish suffering? Was it just easier to calculate than all wild animal suffering, or would it somehow be easier to address? Who is talking about wild fish suffering that prompted you to add it to your list?
yeah it seemed easier to calculate just for fish :P
my vague impression is that there aren’t actually that many wild mammals and birds, so to the extent wild animal suffering is a big problem it’s prob coming from fish, insects, and other dumber animals.
I don’t think anyone was talking about it, I just added it on as a natural comparison to factory farming. I was trying to just do proportional to number of neurons as a dumb baseline prior (idk if that’s the right way to think about it or if I got the numbers right)
how big is human suffering in general given that there are eight billion of us?
the total human QALYs/day is 21m: that’s 120x my farmed chickens number and 20x my wild fish number.
if you think that moral weight is sublinear in number of neurons, then you can get that chickens are higher relative to humans, but also of course that wild animal suffering is way higher relative to farmed animal suffering. (looks like if you do square root you get that humans are 6x as important as chickens and wild fish are 5x as important as humans)
idk, seems not obvious to me how the total of present-day human experience compares in importance to present-day wild animal experience. farmed animals seem less important either way, but also seem way more tractable than either humans or wild animals
there are some old Carl Shulman blog posts about this
is this using those trillion dark fish they discovered down in the deep?
yeah idk I just took the first result I got from google …
now that I look more closely it is unclear to me if anyone has any idea how many fish there are and if so who