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The newest crop of utilitarians and adjacent on Substack are much worse than the old crop of the Good Scott era. Alas!
Someone on Twitter suggested Bentham is a psyop to make utilitariains look worse, and while I think it was a joke, it's more or less right. Anyone that believes bees suffer 7% as intensely as humans is a lost cause and should be ignored, only paid attention to the extent you should discourage others from paying any attention.
Even if bees did suffer 7% as much as humans, that isn't much. Consider that doctors use a 1/10 scale when asking patients to describe pain. A 1 on this scale barely registers, and dividing the scale into tenths is evidently the most useful way to do things (a 1/100 scale would be quite unwieldy). I know it's not the most useful analogy, but if 10 is the worst pain imaginable then a 1 on the scale is pretty low, definitely in the "mild annoyance category". So basically bees are capable of experiencing pain to the extent that my thumb knuckle decided to start hurting a few minutes ago or that my Achilles tendons are tight in the morning. And this is the most suffering they are capable of experiencing, i.e. the same suffering that the majority of people experience on a day to day basis without thinking about it, even excluding those who are suffering more.
I always treated the 1-10 pain scale as logarithmic, like earthquakes or sound. 7% of a magnitude 9.0 earthquake ("Near total destruction – severe damage or collapse to all buildings.") is 7.8 ("Causes damage to most buildings, some to partially or completely collapse or receive severe damage."), not 0.63 (the scale only goes to 1.0, which are not felt).
Or going the other way, stubbing a toe might be a 3. Stubbing three toes is definitely not a 9. It might not even reach a 4.
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