Apologies for focusing on just one sentence of this article, but I feel like it's crucial to the overall argument:

> ... if [shrimp] suffer only 3% as intensely as we do ...

Does this proposition make sense? It's not obvious to me that we can assign percentage values to suffering, or compare it to human suffering, or treat the values in a linear fashion.

It reminds me of that vaguely absurd thought experiment where you compare one person undergoing a lifetime of intense torture vs billions upon billions of humans getting a fleck of dust in their eyes. I just cannot square choosing the former with my conscience. Maybe I'm too unimaginative to comprehend so many billions of bits of dust.

I'm reminded of the novel "Venomous Lumpsucker" by Ned Beauman, a deeply weird satire about the perverse incentives and behaviors engendered by the union of industrial consumption, market-based conservation, and the abstract calculus of ethics at scale.

In particular, one portion features an autonomous bioreactor which produces enormous clouds of "yayflies"; mayflies whose nervous systems have been engineered to experience constant, maximal pleasure. The system's designer asserts that, given the sheer volume of yayflies produced, they have done more than anyone in history to increase the absolute quantity of happiness in the universe.

I love articles like this that challenge the status quo of morality. I find my self asking the question, "Would I rather save a billion shrimp or one human?" and I honestly think I'm siding on the human. I'm not saying that answer is "correct". It's always good to think about these things and the point the author makes about shrimp being a test of our morality because they're so different is a good one.

This is an intensely weird read. I kept waiting for the satire to become more obvious. Maybe throw in a reference or two to the Futurama episode "The Problem with Popplers". But by the end I can only conclude that it is sincere.

I guess what strikes me the most odd is that not eating shrimp is never suggested as an alternative. It starts from the premise that, well, we're going to eat shrimp anyway, so the least we could do is give them a painless death first. If you follow this logic to its extremes, you get things like, "well, it's expensive to actually feed these starving children, but for just pennies a day you can make sure they at least die painlessly".

Whenever I see the backlash to conversations about animal suffering, I wonder if one reason is because it is a sort of “inconvenient truth”, ala global warming, where we are doing grave damage but we prefer to collectively ignore it because that damage aligns with our material incentives. That animals of many kinds are capable of substantial suffering seems honestly obvious to me from first hand observation, and I suspect it is obvious to most others too, at least when we are children. But I think we intentionally “unlearn” this culturally, because for most of human history it was a necessarily evil to sustain ourselves. To bring this truth up begins to break a spell we cast on ourselves that we don’t want unbroken. I look forward to the day when more people feel that their materials needs are satisfied enough that we can collectively approach this topic with an unencompromised intellectual honesty.