[optymizer]

It doesn't matter. This is the real world, not the imaginary world where dogs can speak.

You have to accept that in the real world a dog's life is objectively worth less to humans than a human life.

If that were not true, then it would be generally accepted that saving a dog would take priority over a child, whereas the reverse is true.

I'm not advocating for mistreating dogs, I'm advocating for distinguishing between how we would like the world to be and how the world really is.

[taylorius]

Interesting that you point out the fact that they can't speak. I wonder how much of our willingness to mark animals out as, in some sense, lower than us is down to their lack of human vocalisation ability. I sometimes worry that their thoughts are closer to ours than we give credit for.

[optymizer]

I only used 'speak' because the person I was replying to had said:

> What would a dog answer

To me it's interesting that they chose to give a dog the ability to answer. Certainly the ability to speak like a human would factor in 'how much like humans they are'. It's a way of humanizing the dog, which introduces bias, making the dog more human than it really is.

There is no need to pretend dogs are almost people to justify treating them well.

[taylorius]

Sure, I wasn't trying to catch you out :-) and I agree that animals should be treated well, of course.

Your mention of speaking just reminded me of a thought I'd had, regarding how we measure where animals' sit on the human-ness scale. I think that metric has a lot of biases in how we weight its constituent factors. I.e. how well an animal can communicate with us - which might be quite orthogonal to its intelligence. (For example an octopus)

[colmvp]

Your statement made me realize I should empathize with the machines in the Matrix. After all, a human life is objectively worth less to machines than to humans. A machine can last for centuries and can have more utility on a daily basis than a human.

[stametseater]

Different things have different values, which you seem to have realized here: "a human life is objectively worth less to machines" "To machines" is the important part. But unless you're a machine, it would be strange for you to have machine values, so I don't understand why you say that you should empathize with the machines. Unless... are you an LLM?

Anyway, different sorts of things having different values is why so many people are concerned about powerful non-human entities with inhuman motivations (AIs generally, and corporations particularly.) It's also the reason people are afraid of hungry bears (the bear cares more about itself than you.)

[optymizer]

I wasn't arguing utility. I'm arguing there there's some value we place on human life that is above a dog's life. It doesn't depend on how much utility one derives from humans vs dogs.

The value judgement could simply come from the fact that we need to preserve our own species, and if we need to sacrifice some small percentage of dogs to do so, than this is perfectly reasonable. We can still exhibit empathy by accepting that this situation is not ideal and striving to reduce that percentage down to 0, maybe by inventing substitutes.

As for the machines example, I would expect the machines to place higher value on their own life than on human life, precisely because they would be objectively superior, which is why I would not let machines exist without any restrictions, even if the machines would be a more useful dominant species.

[nottathrowaway3]

Utility (= (pleasure minus pain) x time) is the essential good when we're talking about animal and human welfare. Good actions increase expected utility; bad actions decrease expected utility.

Machines experience no pleasure or pain and thus there is zero utility gained/lost by destroying them. Dogs and humans do; it's bad to kill or torture them.

Throwing a dog in front of a train (or killing/torturing it for research) to save a child depends on how likely it is that it will work, and how many QALYs the dog and child have left.

[gowld]

What about a million dogs?

A stranger's life is also worth less than my daughter's life. A million strangers?

[optymizer]

Sure. To me, my daughter's life is worth more than yours, your family's and everyone else who reads HN. I accept that the inverse is true for you.

If I had to press a button to choose between my daughter or all the strangers on HN and their dogs, I would press it and wouldn't even blink.

If it were a stranger's daughter, though, I'd probably ask some questions about the daughter, and if I can't determine that there's something about her that would be worth a million strangers, she would have the same value as an average stranger, so I would opt to save a million strangers.

If I had to choose between a stranger and all dogs on Earth, I would ask some questions about the human, and, absent any red flags, I would choose the human, simply out of the need to preserve my own species, even if I think there's more than enough of us and having dogs around would probably make a lot of people's life better than that one person.

[midoridensha]

There's plenty of research showing what an ecological disaster dogs are (and other pets too, but dogs are the worst by a large margin for various reasons, including body size). Objectively speaking, if you had to choose between a stranger human and all the dogs on Earth, you'd be doing the planet a big favor by choosing to keep the human alive.

Of course, humans are an ecological disaster too, but a single human out of 8B is a drop in the ocean, and we're not comparing 1 human to 1 dog.

And honestly, I don't see how dogs make anyone's life "easier": they require more care and attention than a toddler, and it never stops until they die. People I know with dogs basically never travel or take any kind of vacation, because they can never leave their dog alone for more than ~8 hours at a time. Any kind of pet is truly a luxury, but dogs require a level of commitment and caretaking well above and beyond almost any other.

[jjtheblunt]

Citation for that research would be very interesting, as i've not seen that.

Part of the beauty of living with nonhumans is the invigoration of sharing understanding and cooperation across species.

I think this is normally called "A dog is a man's best friend." or something similar.

I suspect it holds across millenia because that cross species relation is at times more dependable and communicative than individuals of the same species often are capable of, and that's not sarcasm, I mean it's where that phrase comes from. And i say that as someone not averse to humans collaborating, just as someone who lives among many species.

[midoridensha]

Here's an article from UCLA:

https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/the-truth-about-cats-and-...

>Part of the beauty of living with nonhumans is the invigoration of sharing understanding and cooperation across species.

I don't see this with dogs at all. People with dogs are basically slaves to the dogs; their entire life revolves around the dog. It's absolutely no different than having a small toddler, except that you can bring toddlers with you places. I don't see how it's healthy or productive to not be allowed to leave your home for more than 6 hours because your dog will destroy stuff or pee or poop if you're gone too long, you can never go on a vacation, everything in your daily life has to be planned around the dog. How this ever got normalized, I have no idea, but it wasn't like this a generation ago.