FlowVoid @ FlowVoid @midwest.social

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I'm not sure why you linked me to a chart of mammals. Hunting mammals may be a good way to feed a small population, but as you point out it's not feasible for the entire world.

Three fourths of all animal biomass is aquatic (fish, crustaceans, and mollusks), together accounting for 30-40 times more biomass than humans. Mollusks are the smallest component, but they still have more biomass than all the mammals in your link put together. Fish by themselves account for seven times as much biomass as all animal livestock put together. And crustaceans have even more combined biomass than fish.

I'm not even suggesting that people eat only fish. Rather, by including some fish in our diet we would reduce our reliance on farm-grown vegetables.

Globally, humans currently eat an average of 20 kg of fish/crustaceans/molluscs per year. That might be a bit too much, but I have no doubt that we could sustainably eat 10-15 kg per year.

What makes you think I'm shitposting?

I am perfectly serious when I say that I believe veganism is incompatible with the stated goal of reducing animal deaths.

And I am serious when I say that I have increased my intake of wild fish to support that goal, even though it is not my only goal.

To me, the unspoken goal of veganism is to protect appealing animals at the expense of unappealing animals. That is why they show pictures of farmed cows, but not flooded rice fields. I can't ever get behind that goal.

I think that is the best way to avoid unnecessary animal deaths (honey is also on that list).

It is something I often consider when shopping, but I don't always try to minimize unnecessary animal deaths. Just as I generally try to avoid big box stores and products made in certain countries, but sometimes buy those things anyway.

Why do I make exceptions? Because I don't believe that every single thing I do needs to be aimed at improving the world. It is simply an aspiration.

I don't need to jump in a lake for the same reason I don't need to operate a farm. It is equally moral if others do it for me, so I buy wild fish and vegetables from my grocery just like most people.

Also, pure veganism isn't necessary. For example, honey is not vegan but producing honey likely kills fewer animals than producing almonds. Beekeeping might even be a net positive given the benefits to the ecosystem at large

People do kill feral dogs and cats. Even PETA does this. Morally, they should be eaten afterwards.

A wild fish can kill other animals every day. Cats do kill a lot of birds, but not quite at the same rate since they can also subsist by scavenging.

So while it's moral to kill and eat feral cats, wild fish are preferred. Even if you have to pay someone to catch them.

Dog meat is farmed. The whole point is to avoid farmed food when possible, whether it's plant or animal.

So neither pure fish based nor pure plant based, but rather a combination of the two. Also one could occasionally eat other wild animals obtained via hunting, like deer.

Well, since farming vegetables kills more animals than killing a wild fish, it makes sense to include wild fish in my diet.

Animal farming isn't going to be abolished in my lifetime. And I can't make decisions for everyone.

So the relevant question is what I should do, personally, to reduce my personal impact. A purely vegan diet is not the answer.

Fair enough.

I would never eat a dog, but it's not my place to tell Koreans what to do.

Sure, you could reduce land use for farm raised animals.

But I'm not talking about eating those, I'm talking about eating wild caught animals. Unlike vegetables, wild caught animals require no land use at all.

Well, there are children dying in parts of the world. Is it morally ok to give your children birthday gifts, take them to movies, and help them pay for college, when that money could be used to save the life of a distant child?

Noted vegans like Peter Singer argue that it's not ok. If a distant child's life is at risk, then, you must prioritize all your gifts towards helping the distant child. He uses the same kind of reasoning for his vegan arguments: a child is equivalent to a child just as a dog is equivalent to a pig.

I think that's ridiculous. "Irrational" or not, humans will always prioritize those close to them, whether their own children over others or their own pet over random animals.

Killing animals is inevitable regardless of diet. Your plant based diet requires growing crops, but tilling soil and harvesting plants kills millions or billions of invertebrates. They are so small that they escape everyone's attention, yet they are still animals killed to make your food.

Fishing and hunting kills animals too, of course. But it does not require literally uprooting an ecosystem.

Finally, a trolley has no moral agency either. That doesn't mean nobody should interfere with it, or even destroy it if it threatens enough other lives.

Then don't eat animals you have to feed. If you really want to reduce animal suffering as much as possible, then you should try to survive via hunting and fishing as much as possible.

In fact, if you consider that a wild-caught fish was likely about to kill other fish, then catching a fish may be as morally necessary as flipping a switch on a runaway trolley.

I would never eat dogs. I like dogs.

More generally, I think it's perfectly ok to have emotions, and I think it's ok to make distinctions between those who I'm emotionally attached to and those who I'm not emotionally attached to.

For example, I have houseplants that I nurture and I don't want to see die, but I don't really care if see some other plant of dying in the wild.

On Mother's Day, do you give every Mom a present or just your own Mom?

Should we love mesofauna and other invertebrates as much too? Because plenty of those are killed in the process of growing vegan food.

First of all, nothing in the Constitution gives courts the power of judicial review. They sort of made up that power all by themselves.

Regardless, if Congress decided to regulate the SCOTUS then they would most likely strip jurisdiction only from the SCOTUS itself, not from all federal courts. This is also how it was done in the past. The SCOTUS basically conceded that as long as some judge still had the power of judicial review, then Congress could remove the SCOTUS itself from the process.

Which means that the DC Circuit Court would make a final, non-appealable decision on whether the Constitution allows their colleagues in the SCOTUS to be bound by ethics laws - just as they are.

Using the same process, Congress could strip appellate jurisdiction from the SCOTUS in any case that involves a particular law. Which includes a law that they just passed.

The key is that when the SCOTUS reviews laws, it is nearly always exercising its power of appellate jurisdiction, not original jurisdiction. And the Constitution allows Congress to impose whatever regulations it wants over appellate jurisdiction. So if the SCOTUS isn't allowed to hear cases involving a law, then it can't strike down that law.

In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

It doesn't matter if the answer is right. If the AI does not have an abstract understanding of "red" then it is using a different process to get to the answer than humans. And according to Searle, a Turing machine cannot have an abstract understanding of "red", no matter how complex the question or how complex an internal model is used to determine its answers.

Going back to the Chinese Room, it is possible that the instructions carried out by the human are based on a complex model. In fact, it is possible that the human is literally calculating the output of a trained neural net by summing the weights of nodes, etc. You could even carry out these calculations yourself, if you could memorize the parameters.

Your use of "black box" gets to the heart of it. Memorizing all of the parameters of a trained NN allows you to calculate an answer, but they don't give you any understanding what the answer means. And if they don't tell you anything about the meaning, then they don't tell the CPU doing that calculation anything about meaning either.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_parte_McCardle