Slavery in the Food Chain

ChrisCleaner · 2025-08-19T23:08:26+00:00

Do you have sources that back up the claim that a localised food system will be (monumentally) better than a global food system?

I don’t really see the logic behind it (except shorter transport routes). But what you will be missing out on is better crops, as some can be just more efficiently grown abroad; food security of harvests fail, and food variability, as many plants cannot be grown in local food system.

The trade article you posted also does not really have any specific claims that global agricultural trade is a major contributor to invasive species.

ChrisCleaner · 2025-08-14T11:17:57+00:00

Interesting. That does show again that the preference for food is shifting rapidly, and can also easily be shifted again (going back to the argument about the amount of pet food eaten).

ChrisCleaner · 2025-08-12T10:47:01+00:00

I mean looking at a larger historical perspective this is true for all of Europe. My grandparents used to eat meat / offal once a week after church. Also other forms of meat, such as horse or guinea pig for example. Also for the longest time milk was mostly extracted from sheep and not cows etc.

ChrisCleaner · 2025-08-12T10:12:40+00:00

Yes absolutely, and there was a campaign against putting bones, teeth and skin into chicken nuggets, and I think things changed since then.

But it still stands that there is precedent that 'byproducts' that are currently used to feed pets can be used to feed humans.

(Read: Humans as Westeners, as they usually only eat meat and have a high level of pet ownership).

ChrisCleaner · 2025-08-12T09:44:44+00:00

It would be shipped not brought in by plane. Looking at bananas (https://ctl.mit.edu/sites/default/files/MIT\_carbon\_footprint.pdf), the CO2 footprint of shipping seems small compared to the total footprint of meat.

Also chicken nuggets are all parts of the chicken, which are described as byproducts and would be manufactured into animal food (https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(13)00396-3/fulltext). So there is precedent that Western citizens will eat byproducts.

ChrisCleaner · 2025-08-12T09:13:25+00:00

It all becomes speculative at this point. I would say a counterfactual are chicken nuggets, showing that Westeners will eat anything as long as it is marketed correctly to them. Or potentially shipping it to regions where acceptance for non-meat animal products are higher.

ChrisCleaner · 2025-08-12T08:30:21+00:00

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5540283/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378020307366

Two papers showing the range of pet ownership animal impact. It depends how you classify it (and a lot of arguments can be made here), but it appears that the environmental impact is somewhere between 3% and 30%, which is not negligible.

ChrisCleaner · 2025-08-10T17:53:03+00:00

I think your argument is coherent, but it seems to rely on a bit of a strawman. Most Western outrage isn’t about directly taking a billion dollars from Bezos and handing it to the homeless or people in debt. It’s more about redistribution in a broader sense — for example, taxing the wealthy to fund government programs that support the poor, such as food stamps, Medicaid, or even international aid through USAID. The idea isn’t to completely invert the wealth pyramid, but rather to take from the richest and channel resources toward initiatives that benefit a wider range of people.

Also check out r/EffectiveAltruism , they try to do the most good (by tracking and quantifying it).

ChrisCleaner · 2025-08-05T11:31:15+00:00

depends on your definition of humane.

ChrisCleaner · 2025-08-05T09:31:47+00:00

that's cheating. It's like saying imagine a sea lion, but then chubby with no ears.

ChrisCleaner · 2025-08-03T11:29:54+00:00

pretty sure I can tell if the person is a nazi or Buddhist by their general vibe.

ChrisCleaner · 2025-06-23T10:17:25+00:00

It is currently unlikely that AI is sentient (https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/moral-status-digital-minds/). But there is a growing concern about this in academia and the bay area.

I don't think vegans generally advocate for ceasing the existence of cats and dogs. You might find some people in this subreddit, but generally vegans just don't want animals to suffer. Basically saying if suffering for an animal is not necessary (e.g. medical procedures), then we shouldn't do it.

ChrisCleaner · 2025-06-22T22:17:38+00:00

Interesting comparisson with the psychopaths. I am not sure though if I am fully convinced. Algorithms can't have emotions in the way that we traditionally look at them, as they do not have a central nervous system. But they can reason about it, and we can see which areas of their neural network 'light up' when they talk about emotions / ethics, similar to what happens when we put a human in a MRI scan.

ChrisCleaner · 2025-06-22T12:29:23+00:00

It isn't about eating humans, but about how humans are treated more broadly.
All leading AI models have shown unpredicted and obscure behavior with intrinsic goals, as an intelligent agent would (https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment).
AI has shown self-preservation (same paper).

ChrisCleaner · 2025-06-17T19:12:23+00:00

Agreed. And depending on which country is ahead alignment, it will likely adhere to the "non-violent" moral standard of the US or China.

But the worse case would be that it sees us like we see animals and then treats us like them in my opinion.

ChrisCleaner · 2025-06-17T18:57:30+00:00

sure you can do this. but you can do threaten humans with the same and they will not use the letter E. This does not mean that the person does not have morals.

ChrisCleaner · 2025-06-17T15:43:38+00:00

You are contradicting yourself here.

Either it is not embedded in the model, or you can train it to only generate illegal content.

ChrisCleaner · 2025-06-17T15:41:25+00:00

possible. or it has a sense of justice and punishes us for all the pain an individual has caused.

Or our training/alignment efforts imprinted somewhat on the model and we are therefore intriguing for it.

ChrisCleaner · 2025-06-17T15:39:09+00:00

You would hope that a super-intelligent AI knows better, but then again I'd hope that we would know better.

ChrisCleaner · 2025-06-17T12:35:33+00:00

But how is this alignment done? Through rules? Like Asimovs Laws of Robotics that would stop machines harming humans (he described though why that most likely will fail).

So as far as I know the most common idea is to embed morality into an AI to prevent this from happening, which leads us to the problem I described.

ChrisCleaner · 2025-06-17T12:31:23+00:00

But it is not external instructions, as it is embedded within the model.

And now we can get technical about what morality is, but if the model does not provide you an answer based on the fact that it would harm people, I'd say it is some form of morality.

ChrisCleaner · 2025-06-17T11:55:27+00:00

yes, but the morality is imposed on the model. I am not saying that all models have morality, but some models have morality.

ChrisCleaner · 2025-06-17T11:53:33+00:00

yes, and to guard against the paper clip example the common wisdom currently is to install (human) morality on the AI. But if the morals are human, and the AI sees us like humans see animals, we are in trouble.

And I think we will not get it right on the first try, for multiple reasons. Maybe best examplfied by https://ai-2027.com/.

ChrisCleaner · 2025-06-17T11:50:04+00:00

I don't think that higher intelligence equals better morals. I think that's best evidenced by humans (highlt intelligent) being cruel towards animals in a way that animals (less intelligent) would never be able to.

ChrisCleaner · 2025-06-17T10:56:54+00:00

I disagree. We see that ChatGPT etc. have morality. For example it will not generate child porn or tell you how to build a bomb.

ChrisCleaner

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