Top all-time · #2581
Essays on Reducing Suffering
Personal blog · reducing-suffering.orgphilosophy
Essays on Reducing Suffering is a personal blog at reducing-suffering.org about philosophy. Since 2014, 30 different Hacker News readers have linked it 39 times, most often “How Many Wild Animals Are There?”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (25) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters cite these essays by Brian Tomasik as sources on insect and wild animal suffering, animal population counts, and how diet choices affect animal suffering. No comment judges the essays directly.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 25 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- How Many Wild Animals Are There?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-10-20
- The Importance of Insect Suffering2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-05-10
- Essays on Reducing Suffering2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-06-01
- How to Kill Bugs Humanely2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-06-26
What Hacker News says?
Yep, it wasn't sarcasm. http://reducing-suffering.org/do-bugs-feel-pain/
Comment linking /do-bugs-feel-pain/
on “Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution”Submitted The Importance of Insect Suffering as a story · 46 points
HN discussionDo you have a fully-coherent, logical system for deciding which lives to care about, and how much? I'd be interested to hear. 'Animals' is not a natural kind. There's no logical reason to care about all animals just because they are animals. I care about dogs, pigs, other people, etc. not because they're 'animals', but because I think they are plausibly conscious (to varying degrees) and they can experience joy and…
Comment linking /the-importance-of-insect-suffering
on “Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution”Submitted How to Kill Bugs Humanely as a story · 5 points
HN discussionBrian Tomasik argues that we should avoid insect farming entirely since it's likely worse (ethically speaking) than farming larger nonhuman animals: > Entomophagy (eating insects for food) is sometimes proposed as an alternative to factory farming because it has lower environmental impact. But entomophagy is not necessarily more humane than factory farming of livestock all things considered, and along some dimension…
Comment linking /why-i-dont-support-eating-insects/
on “Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests”Submitted Do Video-Game Characters Matter Morally? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSomewhat related essay from a negative utilitarian about consequences of insects feeling pain: https://reducing-suffering.org/the-importance-of-insect-suff...
Comment linking /the-importance-of-insect-suffering/
on “Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests”Submitted Two-Envelopes Problem for Uncertainty about Brain-Size Valuation as a story · 1 points
HN discussionEvolution has been running ~10^19 experiments in parallel for billions of years: http://reducing-suffering.org/how-many-wild-animals-are-ther... Evolution is a slow algorithm, but it had access to an absurd amount of compute (all neuronal organic matter on Earth) and environment simulation (all of physical reality on Earth) when discovering us; so the discovery of the algorithms/architectures/principles in our heads…
Comment linking /how-many-wild-animals-are-there/
on “Why I’m Remaking OpenAI Universe”Submitted How to Kill Bugs Humanely as a story · 1 points
HN discussionDepends on the reason behind being vegan / vegetarian. If it's to reduce animal suffering, eating chicken is almost certainly causing a greater amount of animal suffering than if you eat cows. https://reducing-suffering.org/how-much-direct-suffering-is-...
Comment linking /how-much-direct-suffering-is-caused-by-various-animal-foods/
on “Chili pepper consumption associated with 25% reduction in death from any cause”Submitted Which Computations Do I Care About? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThat page has some wild topics... https://reducing-suffering.org/should-we-intervene-in-nature...
Comment linking /should-we-intervene-in-nature/
on “What Happened to David Graeber?”Submitted Essays on Reducing Suffering as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAgreed. For example: Animals in the wilderness also rely on violence and coercion. Even herbivores predate on plants. Clearly this violence and coercion is even less justifiable, as animals as a group have no social contract theory etc to speak of. Therefore, there should be no animals. There are people who genuinely believe this, such as https://reducing-suffering.org/ . But they definitely don't come at it from su…
Comment linking /
on “What Happened to David Graeber?”Submitted Convert Grass Lawns to Gravel to Reduce Insect Suffering as a story · 1 points
HN discussion>I dunno about you, but I would be really, really excited if other planets became infested with Earth organisms. http://reducing-suffering.org/applied-welfare-biology-wild-a... https://foundational-research.org/the-importance-of-wild-ani... http://reducing-suffering.org/will-space-colonization-multip... What is almost always ignored is that these animals would have feelings, and many would suffer enormously as a res…
Comment linking /will-space-colonization-multiply-wild-animal-suffering/
on “SpaceX craft overshot Mars’ orbit and is headed to asteroid belt”Submitted Omelas and Space Colonization as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe article notes that in South Korea, "from next year, cash bonuses of 2m won (£1,320) will be paid to every couple expecting a child, on top of existing child benefit payments". These cash awards for having children being paid by developed countries are laughably far too little, too late in their intention. Looking at the issue in financial terms, having a child and bringing them up well is an enormous cost both i…
Comment linking /the-cost-of-kids/
on “Ghost cities and abandoned areas with a declining population”Submitted Machine Sentience and Robot Rights as a story · 1 points
HN discussionDid you consider animal welfare? We should do exactly the opposite: "Convert Grass Lawns to Gravel to Reduce Insect Suffering" http://reducing-suffering.org/convert-grass-lawns-to-gravel-...
Comment linking /convert-grass-lawns-to-gravel-to-reduce-insect-suffering/
on “Climate Change Can Be Stopped by Turning Air into Gasoline”Submitted Should Altruists Leverage Investments? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThanks for posting, here's a post which describes the actual numbers of wild animals there are (by Brian Tomasik): http://reducing-suffering.org/how-many-wild-animals-are-ther...
Comment linking /how-many-wild-animals-are-there/
on “The Biomass Distribution on Earth”Submitted Caring about Animal Suffering as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThere are people who have tried to investigate this thoroughly. My understanding is that there is a direct correlation between your actions an the supply. > "If someone gives up 1 lb of chicken, total consumption falls by 0.76lb in expectation." https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fZp6Fpowmd5a8Lu2w/... Directly: https://reducing-suffering.org/comments-on-compassion-by-the... The mechanism is simple: if the sto…
Comment linking /comments-on-compassion-by-the-pound/
on “The Culture of Whales”Submitted How Many Wild Animals Are There? as a story · 1 points
HN discussion"The biggest impostor, fittingly, was farmed Asian catfish, a fish with white flesh that is easily disguised when it’s filleted and drenched in sauce. It was sold in place of 18 types of more expensive fish, including perch, cod and grouper." This is especially concerning for people who try to avoid farmed fish (to minimize inflicting suffering). Farmed catfish has an incredibly high suffering/kg ratio, 6x that of s…
Comment linking /how-much-direct-suffering-is-caused-by-various-animal-foods/
on “1 in 5 Seafood Samples Is Fake, Report Finds”https://reducing-suffering.org/is-there-suffering-in-fundame...
Comment linking /is-there-suffering-in-fundamental-physics
on “The case against plant consciousness”> studies seem to indicate that insects are not capable of feeling pain and suffering All of the articles (e.g. [0]) I found in a quick search in response to this citation-free assertion suggested that the answer is more nuanced that that. I'd also observe that higher primates (e.g. chimps) that have pain mechanisms that are biologically very similar to ours can have a very different response to us. If you watch fil…
Comment linking /do-bugs-feel-pain/
on “Bug-a-Salt (2013)”You're just claiming things based on theory you remember. I'm going by research: > "If someone gives up 1 lb of chicken, total consumption falls by 0.76lb in expectation." https://reducing-suffering.org/comments-on-compassion-by-the...
Comment linking /comments-on-compassion-by-the-pound/
on “Amazon rainforest now emitting more CO2 than it absorbs”
