I found Lyman's arguments weak and filled with baffling claims. Physical pain is not very morally weighty because life might still be worth living despite it? Most matter is not sentient, so we should assume animals aren't either? It's "plausible" that cows experience fear in the factory farming process? Has he never seen a cow in a slaughterhouse?
Peter — thank you not only for bringing up cluster headaches here, but also for already signing the ClusterFree letter. That means a lot. For everyone else: if you care about extreme suffering in any form, please read and sign it. Legal access to the only reliably effective abortives we’ve found is not a niche issue. It’s a humanitarian one.
On Lyman’s point: the NHIS “pain doesn’t predict suicide” result is a measurement artifact, not a deep truth about pain. NHIS pain scales capture average, mild-to-moderate chronic discomfort, not rare, catastrophic, paroxysmal agony like cluster headaches, trigeminal neuralgia, or sickle-cell crises. When the survey collapses the entire right tail of intensity into a single checkbox, of course you lose the suicide signal. Range restriction is doing everything.
When you look outside NHIS, the picture is unambiguous: cluster headache patients show dramatically elevated suicidality; trigeminal neuralgia has that nickname for a reason; acute neuropathic or burn pain crises also push people to the brink. These cases are just too rare to show up in a population survey with such coarse scales.
Yes, hopelessness and psychological pain strongly predict suicide — absolutely. But severe physical pain creates hopelessness. You can’t separate them cleanly. The causal chain runs through agony into meaning collapse.
And for what it’s worth (my prior on shrimp qualia is not low): if humans with our enormous cognitive buffers will kill ourselves to escape certain pain states, that strengthens the moral case for decapod welfare, not weakens it. Extreme pain is a tail phenomenon — and our measurement tools are blind to tails.
Leaving aside your incorrect understanding of the pain data generally— cognitive ability is not a bigger! Cognition intensifies pain! This is the nearly universal conclusion of the literature! The cerebrum doesn’t shut down pain, it heightens it!
"Cognition intensifies pain! This is the nearly universal conclusion of the literature!"
I thought the current conclusion of the literature was that the pre-frontal cortex, particularly regions like the dorsolateral, ventrolateral and dorsomedial prefrontal cortices, play an active role in down-regulating negative emotions by engaging cognitive control to reinterpret or suppress intense feelings, often working with subcortical areas like the amygdala.
wait. so it seems like both agree more research and clarity on shrimp sentience cuz Lyman is right that people are way less distant in evolution from chimps than studied shrimp from farmed shrimp speices
Lyman claims that the evidence for "trees suffering is a lot stronger" than for shrimp, saying that trees engage in communication and mutualistic behavior and that they socially interact with each other. First, these are not very good indicators of sentience. And secondly, for his claim to work he should believe that there's no evidence of shrimp communicating, engaging in mutualistic behavior and socially interacting with each other!
But they communicate through sound and vibration, visual signals, tactile and chemical cues, and they do these things in order to initiate social interactions such as courtship and mating, warn each other of the presence of predators, to defend territory, etc. So, what about that evidence?
Of course, there are more relevant indicators of sentience that have been studied and found in shrimp.
But to counter this, he immediately argues that we talk about shrimp as though they were all the same, infering evidence from some species to others, and that we can't just do that. Ok, but wasn't he talking about "trees" as though they were all this one thing, literally 15 seconds before? The alleged evidence that is "much stronger" for the suffering of trees comes from studies on which trees, exactly? All species of trees? Some magnolia trees? Mangrove trees? Pine trees? Oaks?
I find these kind of arguments very frustrating and kind of bad-faith, actually. They look more like debating tricks that try to "win" a debate instead of doing anything to actually engage and advance our knowledge on the topic at hand.
That pain doesn't predict suicide seems more telling about suicidality than of pain. My intuition is that we try to stop people from killing themselves because they're rarely in huge amounts of pain; and when they are, medically assisted euthanasia should be an option (IMO).
It does seem like there needs to be way more research on shrimp sentience. It seems like it's easy to anthropomorphize them just because they have eyes and can move. I was surprised at how few pain receptors and neurons they actually have. Still, it seems like Lyman and Jeff both kind of agree on this – that it's uncertain – and mostly disagree on how to deal with this uncertainty and whether moral value cleanly "multiplies" like that.
Interesting debate thanks all! On the tree/plant/fungi comms and potential sentience point this conversation with Justine Karst about the "Wood Wide Web" might be interesting: https://youtu.be/T2_n516nANw
I found Lyman's arguments weak and filled with baffling claims. Physical pain is not very morally weighty because life might still be worth living despite it? Most matter is not sentient, so we should assume animals aren't either? It's "plausible" that cows experience fear in the factory farming process? Has he never seen a cow in a slaughterhouse?
Peter — thank you not only for bringing up cluster headaches here, but also for already signing the ClusterFree letter. That means a lot. For everyone else: if you care about extreme suffering in any form, please read and sign it. Legal access to the only reliably effective abortives we’ve found is not a niche issue. It’s a humanitarian one.
clusterfree.org
On Lyman’s point: the NHIS “pain doesn’t predict suicide” result is a measurement artifact, not a deep truth about pain. NHIS pain scales capture average, mild-to-moderate chronic discomfort, not rare, catastrophic, paroxysmal agony like cluster headaches, trigeminal neuralgia, or sickle-cell crises. When the survey collapses the entire right tail of intensity into a single checkbox, of course you lose the suicide signal. Range restriction is doing everything.
When you look outside NHIS, the picture is unambiguous: cluster headache patients show dramatically elevated suicidality; trigeminal neuralgia has that nickname for a reason; acute neuropathic or burn pain crises also push people to the brink. These cases are just too rare to show up in a population survey with such coarse scales.
Yes, hopelessness and psychological pain strongly predict suicide — absolutely. But severe physical pain creates hopelessness. You can’t separate them cleanly. The causal chain runs through agony into meaning collapse.
And for what it’s worth (my prior on shrimp qualia is not low): if humans with our enormous cognitive buffers will kill ourselves to escape certain pain states, that strengthens the moral case for decapod welfare, not weakens it. Extreme pain is a tail phenomenon — and our measurement tools are blind to tails.
Leaving aside your incorrect understanding of the pain data generally— cognitive ability is not a bigger! Cognition intensifies pain! This is the nearly universal conclusion of the literature! The cerebrum doesn’t shut down pain, it heightens it!
"Cognition intensifies pain! This is the nearly universal conclusion of the literature!"
I thought the current conclusion of the literature was that the pre-frontal cortex, particularly regions like the dorsolateral, ventrolateral and dorsomedial prefrontal cortices, play an active role in down-regulating negative emotions by engaging cognitive control to reinterpret or suppress intense feelings, often working with subcortical areas like the amygdala.
To vote on the resolution: https://urbanpoll.com/polls/donating-help-shrimp-good-idea-poll-ia9894fx
To donate: https://www.farmkind.giving/international-shrimpact-day/?promo=shrimpact_debate
Viva la shrimp!
wait. so it seems like both agree more research and clarity on shrimp sentience cuz Lyman is right that people are way less distant in evolution from chimps than studied shrimp from farmed shrimp speices
Lyman claims that the evidence for "trees suffering is a lot stronger" than for shrimp, saying that trees engage in communication and mutualistic behavior and that they socially interact with each other. First, these are not very good indicators of sentience. And secondly, for his claim to work he should believe that there's no evidence of shrimp communicating, engaging in mutualistic behavior and socially interacting with each other!
But they communicate through sound and vibration, visual signals, tactile and chemical cues, and they do these things in order to initiate social interactions such as courtship and mating, warn each other of the presence of predators, to defend territory, etc. So, what about that evidence?
Of course, there are more relevant indicators of sentience that have been studied and found in shrimp.
But to counter this, he immediately argues that we talk about shrimp as though they were all the same, infering evidence from some species to others, and that we can't just do that. Ok, but wasn't he talking about "trees" as though they were all this one thing, literally 15 seconds before? The alleged evidence that is "much stronger" for the suffering of trees comes from studies on which trees, exactly? All species of trees? Some magnolia trees? Mangrove trees? Pine trees? Oaks?
I find these kind of arguments very frustrating and kind of bad-faith, actually. They look more like debating tricks that try to "win" a debate instead of doing anything to actually engage and advance our knowledge on the topic at hand.
Keep shrimping folks this is awesome
That pain doesn't predict suicide seems more telling about suicidality than of pain. My intuition is that we try to stop people from killing themselves because they're rarely in huge amounts of pain; and when they are, medically assisted euthanasia should be an option (IMO).
It does seem like there needs to be way more research on shrimp sentience. It seems like it's easy to anthropomorphize them just because they have eyes and can move. I was surprised at how few pain receptors and neurons they actually have. Still, it seems like Lyman and Jeff both kind of agree on this – that it's uncertain – and mostly disagree on how to deal with this uncertainty and whether moral value cleanly "multiplies" like that.
Interesting debate thanks all! On the tree/plant/fungi comms and potential sentience point this conversation with Justine Karst about the "Wood Wide Web" might be interesting: https://youtu.be/T2_n516nANw