Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law • Hacker News Board

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#651

Post by jallen_dot_dev » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 4:19 AM UTC

cheese_goddess wrote: post #643

causasui wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... we prioritize saving our children from a burning building in a way that we don't prioritize saving the mice living in the basement of that burning building The building isn't burning. We don't have to choose between our children and mice. You can live a full, healthy life while minimizing to as full extent as possible the suffering you directly or indirectly inflict on other sentient creatures. The argument you…

You don't minimise suffering by not eating meat. You're maximising your bragging rights about your superior ethics. What minimises the suffering of farm animals is... farming. Because without farming they'd live in the wild where they'd suffer from disease, parasites and bad weather and they'd be eaten by predators. Each and every one of them. And most of the time, they'd die while being eaten alive. At least humans…

> Because without farming they'd live in the wild where they'd suffer from disease

No. Without farming, farm animals just wouldn't exist to live a miserable life. Farmers are not doing them any favors by bringing them into the world.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#652

Post by Lhiw » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 5:01 AM UTC

valenaut wrote: post #529

Lhiw wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a vegan how do you reconcile the thousands of insects and field animals that get culled during harvesting those lentils? I don't really have a problem with vegetarians but I do struggle to understand the lines they seemingly draw at random. Minimising harm should be a given for all but that doesn't rule out all meat eating that veganism somehow does.

Eating farm animals requires you to grow 9 times as many crops to feed them as if you had just eaten the crops directly, since only about 9% of the food they eat is converted into edible flesh. So even if you take this argument seriously, the insects and field animals are better off if you grow fewer crops, which you accomplish by directly eating the crops you grow, not feeding them to livestock.

I addressed that with my remark about minimising harm.

Veganism isn't about minimising harm, its drawing an arbitrary line around what constitutes animal harm and goes from there, I don't understand this as it isn't very realistic or usable in the real world where as minimising harm is.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#653

Post by Lhiw » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 5:06 AM UTC

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #614

Lhiw wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a vegan how do you reconcile the thousands of insects and field animals that get culled during harvesting those lentils? I don't really have a problem with vegetarians but I do struggle to understand the lines they seemingly draw at random. Minimising harm should be a given for all but that doesn't rule out all meat eating that veganism somehow does.

People love to ask me this. One guy said deer are being run over by tractors so as a vegan I’m killing deer. I don’t really see how only eating plants is a random line. As I said in my original comment living in an industrialized society includes some amount of harming animals (for example carbon dioxide emissions harm animals). I’m actually designing a solar powered farming robot for regenerative agriculture so we d…

I understand where you've drawn the line but I don't understand why.

Is it to minimise harm to animals or is it to avoid animal meat, because what you're doing with the line you draw is the latter which seems to go against what most vegetarians cite as their reasoning, the former.

Im it trying to disprove your life choices, just trying to understand why so many seem to draw inconsistent and illogical conclusions. (I suspect because they're saying one (harm) thing but meaning the other (meat)).

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#654

Post by post_from_work » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 5:12 AM UTC

kataklasm wrote: post #377

post_from_work wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>>And they'll ask us uncomfortable questions we won't have good answers for. Didn't you know about the health risks at the amounts you were consuming? Yup. Didn't care. Bacon-wrapped filet mignon tastes THAT good. Some things are worth the risk. Like driving too fast, riding motorcycles, or skydiving. >>>Didn't you know about the carbon footprint? Same answer here... >>>Most importantly, didn't you have ample eviden…

yikes. Bacon-wrapped filet mignon is worth sacrificing the only planet we have? You don't care about your carbon emissions at all? We are introducing such big amounts of greenhouse gasses just from our consumerism lifestyle and the convenience of it all is big enough to just "[not] care". And then you brag about having eating dogs like this post couldn't get any worse. When this is the mindset and opinion of average…

>>>You don't care about your carbon emissions at all? We are introducing such big amounts of greenhouse gasses just from our consumerism lifestyle and the convenience of it all is big enough to just "[not] care".

Who determines what types of energy consumption are just, and which are immoral and wrong? How much electricity and natural resources are burnt up in popular endeavors such as alcohol and marijuana production?

https://insidesources.com/resources-innovation-institute-how... https://emagazine.com/environmental-impact-of-alcohol/

We've got "climate activists" that fly in private jets to conferences just to chide the rest of us about "consumerism". Meanwhile I'm maintaining my physical fitness with an Army-surplus ammo can full of dirt, stuffed in a 30-year old backpack. I've had the same rugged Android phone for over 5 years. My two cars were manufactured in 2007 and 1994. Back when I still lived in the US, 2 of my 3 firearms were Communist surplus weapons from the ~1970s (SKSes). I wear mostly custom tailored shirts that I had made 9 years ago. I'm confident that my overall carbon footprint for the past 10 years or so is reasonably small. So No I don't stress out over said footprint. I just live frugally and buy stuff that lasts. I happen to like driving things with internal combustion engines and I like the taste of cow flesh.

Maybe there will come a time when climate change forces us all to no-shit fight each other for competition of scarce habitable land and food resources. If the planet melts....I'll fight to survive and thrive. If we are forced into Fallout-style vaults, I'll fight to survive and thrive. I'll teach my kids the same. My assessment is that I, and those I care about, have a higher probability of coming out on top in such a cataclysm than the people who tell me not to eat meat.

Climate alarmists/Polliver: "You lived your life for progress. You want to die for some chickens?" Omnivores/Clegane: "Someone is." https://youtu.be/LeYwkeX6xNI

If you want people to "care", be careful what you wish for. We could drastically reduce our human carbon emissions by feeding all the first-world vegans to pigs, and improve our signal-to-noise ratio on the Internet as well. /sarc

>>>And then you brag about having eating dogs like this post couldn't get any worse.

It's not a "brag", just a statement of factual reality: some major developed economies eat dog. It should cause people to reflect on their own positions. Who is "we" in the statement "we don't eat dog"? Isn't the whole point to reflect on the human integration with the ecosystem as a whole? In which case, global mores are important to consider.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#655

Post by wander_homer » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 6:10 AM UTC

imgabe wrote: post #637

wander_homer wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wait, so unless I can come up with an exactly perfect list that flawlessly prioritizes every possible action that humanity could ever undertake, then I'm not allowed to have any opinion whatsoever about whether any given action is more or less important than anything else? By that logic, we should never choose to prioritize anything over anything else, and we should just select all actions by pure random chance. No…

> Also did you even consider that you often can't anticipate the value of an action? And yet, we all must choose at some point to do one thing or another thing. Do you sit at home motionless all day, paralyzed by the inability to do choose the exactly most optimal action? Probably not. You make a choice based on some criteria. Is that criteria “will this make a lobster suffer for two seconds less”? I’m guessing proba…

First of all I'm wondering where you got the two seconds from? The numbers I find online are usually around 30 seconds or more for a lobster to die in boiling water.

Since I never had to kill a lobster I obviously never had to make that decision. However most of my decisions every day are much less important and don't require much attention, like what movie will I watch that night, what will I eat, how do I name that variable, what album do I listen to next,...

But I had used a similar criteria in the past when I had to do a rather important choice: The way we treat male chicks, like whether it's ok to kill them and how, was among other things one criteria which influenced how I placed my vote (and if I should buy eggs at all and if so, which ones) .

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#656

Post by abandonliberty » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 6:14 AM UTC

patagonia wrote: post #590

abandonliberty wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a vegan issue. Making it one, along with a smug characterization, doesn't help to convert more people over to your cause. Mature plants nurse their young, providing carbon to younger plants through a mycelial network[0]. They communicate with each other [1]. They generate compounds in response to pain, and might even have vision demonstrated by vines mimicking plastic plants they were grown on [2]. Give it…

If you read the comments you’ll see there is a conversation going on about vegan / non vegan issues. The conversion is happening in the comments. Regardless what the article’s issues are. You’ve grossly misused the word “nurse”. And “communicate”. Besides I, as a vegan, do not take issue with the taking of life for the purpose of sustaining life. Zero problem with that. That is how nature works. I only take issue wit…

Thanks for the measured response.

Asking why can reflect either genuine curiosity or a challenge. If it's genuine curiosity, then it's what you want. A chance to share your values.

Are you genuinely curious why you ask omnivores why? Do you actually want to know?

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#657

Post by robbrown451 » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 6:16 AM UTC

yummypaint wrote: post #644

robbrown451 wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should maybe feel bad about how much time you are wasting squishing them, compared to using one of those electric tennis racket bug zappers. They clear a kitchen of fruit flies in minutes, while giving you a most satisfying sound as you send them to the great fruit fly beyond.

Electric zappers make insects explode and spray atomized guts all over the space spreading disease

They don't. At least mine doesn't. I've cleaned up the remains, they are intact but with burned sections.

I think getting rid of them quickly outweighs germs flying off them. Regardless I don't think they are known for spreading disease.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#658

Post by GoblinSlayer » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 7:07 AM UTC

omnicognate wrote: post #612

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That model's phase space is about 2000 bits, realistically speaking its behavior never repeats. It can't be searched either, our computational limit today is about 70 bits.

I'm not clear what you're saying there. You shouldn't need to exhaust the phase space to check if the model exhibits a particular behaviour, but perhaps you're not claiming that?

The simulation derives behavior from the state of neural network, in order to produce desired behavior the state should be known first, in general case you need to search it if you don't have a reliable method to reach it from any other state.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#659

Post by TaylorAlexander » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 11:21 AM UTC

bumby wrote: post #625

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People love to ask me this. One guy said deer are being run over by tractors so as a vegan I’m killing deer. I don’t really see how only eating plants is a random line. As I said in my original comment living in an industrialized society includes some amount of harming animals (for example carbon dioxide emissions harm animals). I’m actually designing a solar powered farming robot for regenerative agriculture so we d…

I can't speak for the person you're replying to, but some people adhere to a consequentialist worldview, where intent does not matter (or matters relatively little). It's the same outlook that creates the need for good Samaritan laws. I don't agree with it in whole form, but it should be recognized as a valid philosophical framework.

I understand that, but I have a hard time believing a vegan diet could possibly harm animals more than an omnivore diet. Like it just sound so absurd and I run in to a lot of people online that just seem to want to bullshit themselves about veganism for some reason. Like the guy that said I was killing deer by eating only plants because it means more tractors and tractors can run over deer… that seems to me to be a shoddy leap of logic, not a genuine point I should consider.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#660

Post by cheese_goddess » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 12:30 PM UTC

jallen_dot_dev wrote: post #651

cheese_goddess wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't minimise suffering by not eating meat. You're maximising your bragging rights about your superior ethics. What minimises the suffering of farm animals is... farming. Because without farming they'd live in the wild where they'd suffer from disease, parasites and bad weather and they'd be eaten by predators. Each and every one of them. And most of the time, they'd die while being eaten alive. At least humans…

> Because without farming they'd live in the wild where they'd suffer from disease No. Without farming, farm animals just wouldn't exist to live a miserable life. Farmers are not doing them any favors by bringing them into the world.

Farm animals dont' live miserable lives. Animals in large scale, factory farms are mistreated, but they are still better off than in the wild. The majority of farms in the world are small-sale family farms were animals are treated at least as good as humans:

> Five of every six farms in the world consist of less than two hectares, operate only around 12 percent of all agricultural land, and produce roughly 35 percent of the world's food, according to a study published in World Development.

https://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/1395127/icode/

If you listen to vegan propaganda you may get the impression that all farming everywhere in the entire world means that animals must be tortured in factory farms, but that's a lie. There is nothing in small-scale farming to make animals' lives miserable.