All of VilleSokk's Comments + Replies
Thank you for this post. Really enjoyed your reflection. It was even more interesting than the actual question of what was right in the situation.
Multiple people suggested getting a simpler domain name. The website is now also accessible at foodimpacts.org.
Thank you for the feedback, Gina!
You are the first person to mention both culling of male chicks and fish who are fed to farmed salmon. You are correct that these are shortcomings. We must also be mindful of breeder chickens used in broiler farming. Unfortunately, accounting for all of these effects would be difficult and would require data that could be difficult to find. About your requests:
1. I will consider it.
2. I assume that understanding the impacts of eating wild animals would be even more difficult so for the sake of keeping it doable I would rath...
Thank you for the feedback Ramiro! Since people have asked so many questions about the results of this kind of analysis I was thinking about adding a FAQ section to the website. I could add the remarks about shrimp welfare there.
User RandomEA suggested here that there should be an option to use the number of animals consumed as part of a common diet instead of the current animals-per-2000kcal logic. Would you consider that a good solution to the issue that shrimp is realistically a delicacy?
Thank you for commenting, Devon. Culling of male chicks is not considered. Unfortunately the tool will not include every effect because that would be rather difficult. As someone pointed out the breeder chickens used in broiler farms are not considered nor are the fish who are killed to feed farmed salmon.
You are right. I spent time thinking about your comments and I agree that making the tradeoff clearer is one of the most important improvements I can make. Thank you for bringing it out.
Thank you Dominic! There is already a paragraph about transportation on the methods page of the website. I will add a paragraph about organic food as well.
Thank you for the feedback, MichaelStJules! I added all of your ideas to my todo list.
I definitely should have added probability of sentience to the model. I looked at Brian Tomasik's model which included sentience multipliers and I have read the OPP report you linked so I don't know why I didn't consider it.
Jason Schukraft's "Differences in the Intensity of Valenced Experience across Species" was great and I will be happy to study his other research. Thank you for linking to it.
I wish I was aware of kbog's post before I started. I managed to find multiple analyses of suffering but I didn't know someone had already devised a combined model!
Thank you for the thoughtful feedback, Benjamin! I will try to explain the model a bit more thouroughly than the methods section of the post.
Let's forget normalising and weights for a moment. If we measure suffering in hours/kcal and emissions in CO2eq/kcal then the subscales have different units and can't be added (unless we have a conversion formula from one unit to the other somehow). A common solution in this case is to multiply the subscale values. If we do this a 1% change in suffering changes the combined score by the same amount that a 1% change in...
That makes sense. The point I'm trying to make, though, is that the choice of how to do the conversion from CO2/kcal to hours/kcal is probably the most important bit that drives the results. I'd prefer to make that clearer to users, and get them to make their own assessment.
Instead, the WPM ends up coming up with an implicit conversion rate, which could be way different from what the person would say if asked. Given this, it seems like the results can't be trusted.
(I expect a WPM would be fine in domains where there are multiple difficult-to-compare criter...
Thank you for the feedback Brian!
1. Shrimp have a high suffering score because the suffering subscale measures hours lived on a farm to produce 2000 kcal of energy. Since shrimp are small you would have to eat a large number of small beings to gain 2000 kcal of energy. A beef cow's carcass yield is over 200 kg so 2000 kcal worth of beef is just a fraction of the yield.
If you turn off the "consider brain size" parameter you will see that the differences are even larger. This illustrates the concern of the small animal replacement problem: we might not be ve...
Thank you for the feedback! I took note about the per kcal issue and will try to fix it soon.
It would definitely be useful to also account for current levels of consumption. The impact of avoiding broilers would probably increase.
Thank you for the feedback Ben!
I completely agree about "caged hen" and "broiler". The issue was that there's not a lot of room on the plot (especially on phones). Initially I even had S-G broiler for slow-growth broiler which was even more misleading. I will try to come up with a better layout for the plot so I can use longer labels.
Currently the domain is a sub-domain on my personal website. Do you have suggestions for a new domain name?
Thank you for the feedback Florian! I will move this issue upwards in my to do list since so many of you have explained the issues with WPM.