I wrote a reply to the Bentham Bulldog argument that has been going mildly viral. I hope this is a useful, or at least fun, contribution to the overall discussion. Intro/summary below, full post on Substack.
----------------------------------------
“One pump of honey?” the barista asked.
“Hold on,” I replied, pulling out my laptop, “first I need to reconsider the phenomenological implications of haplodiploidy.”
Recently, an article arguing against honey has been making the rounds. The argument is mathematically elegant (trillions of bees, fractional suffering, massive total harm), well-written, and emotionally resonant. Naturally, I think it's completely wrong.
Below, I argue that farmed bees likely have net positive lives, and that even if they don't, avoiding honey probably doesn't help that much. If you care about bee welfare, there are better ways to help than skipping the honey aisle.
Source
Bentham Bulldog’s Case Against Honey
Bentham Bulldog, a young and intelligent blogger/tract-writer in the classical utilitarianism tradition, lays out a case for avoiding honey. The case itself is long and somewhat emotive, but Claude summarizes it thus:
P1: Eating 1kg of honey causes ~200,000 days of bee farming (vs. 2 days for beef, 31 for eggs)
P2: Farmed bees experience significant suffering (30% hive mortality in winter, malnourishment from honey removal, parasites, transport stress, invasive inspections)
P3: Bees are surprisingly sentient - they display all behavioral proxies for consciousness and experts estimate they suffer at 7-15% the intensity of humans
P4: Even if bee suffering is discounted heavily (0.1% of chicken suffering), the sheer numbers make honey consumption cause more total suffering than other animal products
C: Therefore, honey is the worst commonly consumed animal product and should be avoided
The key move is combining scale (P1) with evidence of suffering (P2) and consciousness (P3) to reach a mathematical conclusion (
In Debiasing Decisions: Improved Decision Making With A Single Training Intervention they found that a 30-minute video reduced confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, and bias blind spot, by 19%.
The video is super cheesy, and that makes me suspicious.
It should be noted that playing a 60-minute "debiasing" game debiased people more than the video.
The rest of this short form is random thoughts about debiasing.
I tried finding tests for these biases so that I can do it myself, but I didn't find any. This made me worry that we don't have standardized tests for biases, which strikes me as bad. Although I didn't spend too much time looking into it. (More on this here)
I don't think training people to reduce 3 biases a time is a good way to go, since we have 100s of biases. If we use a taxonomy of biases like Arkes (1991) (strategy-based, association-based, and psychophysical errors). maybe we could have three interventions for each type of bias? But it's not clear how you would teach people to avoid say association-based biases by lecturing about it.
You could nudge them in small ways. From Arkes (1991)
In Sedlmeier & Gigerenzer they taught people Bayes by using frequencies rather than probabilities. E,g. Instead of saying (1% of people use drugs and they test positive 80% of the time while non-users 5% of the time), you say From 1000 people, 10 use drugs, 8 drug users test positive, while 50 non-users test positive).
It seems to work.
If it's really hard, we should target really bad, really harmful biases.
From here
Perhaps finding out which are the worst biases, and what are the best interventions for them are would be useful. But increasing the effectiveness of changing beliefs is potentially dangerous, so maybe not.
I think you're wise to point out the potential risk of increasing the effectiveness of changing others' beliefs. Like any technology or technique, when we consider whether to contribute to its development, we have to consider both the potential harm it could do in the wrong hands and the potential good it could do in the right ones. I'm not sure enough people in the education and debiasing communities realize that.