Moral Costs of Chicken vs. Beef (opens in new tab)

Often I can nod along with Scott's blog posts, but too much of the argument presented here is just embarrassing.

> Might cows be "more conscious" in a way that makes their suffering matter more than chickens? Hard to tell. But if we expect this to scale with neuron number we find cows have 6x as many cortical neurons as chickens, and...

People might expect it to scale abstractly, but they don't apply linear multipliers. I can already tell this analysis is going to go very wrong.

> most people think of them as about 10x more morally valuable. If we massively round up and think of a cow as morally equivalent to 20 chickens

Sorry, this loses me.

Scott's "most people" claim appears to come from some exceptionally low quality (and tiny) internet rando surveys that he had to then backpedal on but didn't backpedal on nearly strongly enough.

Here is a really choice quote from his first blog post:

"I asked Tumblr users who believed that animals had moral value to fill out a survey (questions, results) estimating the relative value of each animal, in terms of how many animals = 1 human. Fifty people answered, including 21 vegetarians and 29 nonvegetarians. Their numbers ranged from 1 to putting their hand on the 9 key and leaving it there a while, but when I took the median, here’s what I got"

(Side note: god, remember Tumblr?)

And here are the answers he got to the question "About how many chickens do you think are equal in moral value to one adult human?":

(I've sorted them)

1, 1, 2, 5, 5, 10, 10, 24, 50, 50, 60, 93, 100, 100, 155, 200, 200, 262, 300, 500, 500, 500, 750, 1000, 1000, 1050, 5000, 10000, 10000, 20480, 99999, 99999, 100000, 100000, 100000, 100000, 100000, 999999999, 1000000000, 1000000000000000

And his conclusion from that is "Chickens: 500, medians are science!"

Look at those people saying that 1 chicken life = 1 adult human life. Do we honestly believe that this answer set is representative of what "most people think"?

And besides which, "people think X" is not the same as "X is true"!

I find it appalling that the highly regarded supposedly extremely rational author is telling people to use "a handful of internet randos said" as a valid proxy for any kind of real measure of animal intellect or consciousness, as though "a tiny uncontrolled group of people think X without rhyme or reason" and "animals are Y" are in any way meaningfully related statements.

Hell, 1/20 of his responses said that 1 Lobster life = 1 Adult human life, and another one said 2 Lobster lives = 1 Adult human life. Are we really basing moral decisions about which animal we're going to eat on the answers of people who, when given a species trolley problem, would say "kill the human to save the lobster"?

Hellx2, 80% of his responses said they were "familiar with work by Brian Tomasik, OneStepForAnimals, etc urging people to eat beef rather than chicken for moral reasons". 80%!!!

Hellx3, most people have never seen a cow or a chicken alive, let alone up close. Having been close to both cows and chickens, I agree with the person in the blog comments who says "my wife and I do have chickens, and I'd intellectually rank them somewhere between potatoes and rocks."