Weighing animal minds, part I

One of my biggest influences is Brian Tomasik. He’s an unusual character: a CS grad, he has no formal philosophy experience and spent most of his career working as a software engineer, but he’s written some incredible essays on animal welfare and reducing suffering.

Reading his essay How Much Direct Suffering Is Caused by Various Animal Foods? was what made me go vegetarian in the first place – when I really saw how much suffering I could cut out from my diet with relatively little effort on my part.

But a lot of this stuff is very hard to reason about, and the resources on it aren’t super easy to parse.

So I’m writing an interactive essay about weighing animal minds to try to make the subject more legible. You can play with some tools to build your intuitions about farmed animal welfare: how different animals might respond to pain, how we can weight their experiences against one another, and how much food each animal produces.

Check out part 1 here.

Part 1 is a bit anemic – there’s a lot of research required to get up-to-date numbers. Part 2 is coming soon, and will look at how farmed animals’ experiences vary depending on how they’re kept, and how that factors into your diet.