It's interesting, but I would argue that suffering would be more importsnt than killing. And maybe if there was a way to measure a "suffering/price ratio" it would be definitely what I would look at before spending my money on something.
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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You're not wrong, but how would you measure that?
Kill counts are at least in principle very easy to count. Work out how many people die, divide that by the number of items produced. That's your death number.
Also add in the death number for all the constituent parts. If a shirt contains 10 metres of cotton from a source where cotton is produced at 1 nanodeath per metre, you add on 10 nD to your shirt's death count.
Very hard to do in practice (because who's sharing that data?), but it's quite simple to do in principle.
But how do you even begin to put a number on "suffering"?
I can’t speak to what the original poster was imagining, but one option is years of life lost as compared to the average in that country. So if a sweatshop worker lives an average of 64 years of that country’s 68, that’s 4 years of life lost.
I agree with this. And if a study on this where to include this data thatd be really good.
But I also thinks that's too hard to quantify. Even achieving proper data on death caused specifically from labour operations is going to be extreamly tough as the places causing these deaths will deny all accountability.
While you are correct that suffering is a better metric, there would be many in our society that would gravitate towards higher rated suffering items in the same way they want real fur coats and real leather in their Ferraris. That would backfire quickly.
As someone that looks for real leather jackets (they last longer in my experience) which means less garbage in the landfill, it also means less money out of my pocket. I sadly wouldn’t care about the kill count when to my jacket.
The jacket was just one example of many.
Leather is an interesting case, though, because regardless of whether or not people buy it, the cows will still be killed for meat (unless there’s a drastic change in food consumption habits).
You could make the argument that, at least in the current landscape, the purchase of leather doesn’t increase animal suffering or suffering due to the many deleterious effects of large scale beef production (deforestation for feed, the carbon output, etc.).
The only way to reduce the suffering created by a cow economy is to hit the main product driving it: beef. There are three times more beef cows than dairy cows in the U.S., so dairy consumption has an effect but it’s dwarfed by beef consumption.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
and that's my reminder buy milk today
Weirdest way ever to try and change your KDR.
Those are rookie numbers…
I understood the title totally the opposite way :D
Like, how many people die because of a every day objects for example a spoon or a bar of soap or an office chair etc.
After reading the whole post it reminded me so much of the points system from the series "The Good Place"
That’s exactly what I was thinking
It's not far off from that. Though I don't really belive in any kind if afterlife I belive we need to do our best while we in the boring place.
But I also belive the consequences of our daily actions, purchases ect. are obscured from us. Shirt conpanies are not exactlly going to willing advertise that by purchusing ther product your resonsbile for .0005 deaths. So it can be a bit difficult to know where we actually stand morally.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
Micromorts is an adjacent topic and has the data you're looking for, just not the grouping. Somewhere to start if you're curious.
This could be used. Though the examples here here are more oriented to risk of death for doing X. Micromorts could probably be used in determining values I am thinking of.
I am terrible at math so excuse the terrible example.
Let's say working in a sweatshop in Vietnam has a micromort of .6 and the resouce you are calculating uses up to one third of these shops. Then you'd be adding .3 to your count.
We can say 1000 micromorts is one probable death.
I hope you're not doing this for chasing a high KillToDeath-ratio, like we do in FPS games. 😅
They're undefined until post mortem.
No. It's just a terrible thought that plagues my mind from time to time. My goal whould be to keep that number as low as possible.
This reminds me of the point system used in The Good Place.
Back in earlier times, buying flowers for your mom was a net positive in your "goodness" points. But nowadays, doing the same action, because of the different new levels of consumption - basically, were the flower farms practicing ethically? was the plastic processed in a safe manner? how much carbon emissions did the shipping and transport of the flowers produce? did you walk/bike to the shop or did you use a car? - results in a net negative.
Perhaps we should create a new unit. Some options:
- Chidi stomach ache seconds
- Chidi indecision minutes
- Shawn chuckle seconds
- Trevor star rating
I prefer Jason's star rating. I rate your comment an 8 on his scale.
On a serious note, Jason's scale makes sense in a way. Anything over 8 is try hard range.
That's an interesting idea, I suppose it's possible if you have one or more databases with these statistics and then link them together and see. My instincts tell me that it'd be very impractical to implement though!
Mostly because corporate will do everything and anything to obfuscate this kind of data.
Presumably yeah, if everyone could see the death / suffering count of various big companies we probably wouldn't be using them nearly as much.
It might be worth looking how the medical industry does calculations. I've not looked deep, but it seem similar to what you want.
They have a quality of life index. Basically you calculate both the increased life expectancy of a treatment, and the patients quality of life, as a percentage. By combining them together, you get a semi useful measure of treatment effectiveness. E.g. a treatment that gave a cancer patient 1 year of perfect health (100%) would have a score of 1 year. A treatment that give 4 bad years of life (20% quality) would only have a score of 0.8 years. The first one would win out, despite having 3 less years of life.
I believe the UK's NHS uses it. It helps balance things on a large scale. E.g. do they invest extra money in improving cancer treatment in children, or in improving hip replacements in OAPs? Both will help, but how to weigh them against each other? I also believe they have a soft figure for cost effectiveness. It's caught a few drugs companies short, when the NHS wouldn't pay for a cancer drug that only offered a minor improvement over the current one, with a huge cost difference.
In your case, the index can be reversed, giving a useful metric. The big challenge would be calculating the index in a reliable manner. A lot of it is subjective, and prone to manipulation.
Interestingly one of the disc world books plays with this. "Going Postal" I believe. A conman is forceably recruited to fix the post office. His golem guard informs him how many people he's killed, despite never raising a sword.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/451702
This seems exactly like what you want.
Ha! I remember this one.I think that exact quote from may be what caused me ponder this over many years.
I will try to get into those studies when I have better time to digest that knowledge but I thank you for sharing them.
You would share your shirt kill count with everyone else who's wearing a shirt that was made that day, so you're really responsible for many less deaths if you spread it out. If you wanted to narrow it in, you could just blame the one guy who's wearing the shirt that was actually being made when the assembly line malfunctioned, but they probably threw that one away. What do you think is the highest death product that's relatively common? Farming is pretty dangerous.
Slight tangent, but the kill count wouldn't stay the same, would it? Just because 1 person died for my shirt (adding up the cotton farmer, the sweatshop worker, the merchant mariners, the truckers, etc, etc) - well, my one theoretical dead-shirt-person isn't going to die again the second time I wear it. And in fact, my theoretical dead-shirt-person has still died even if I never wear the shirt at all. Wouldn't it be better to (cough) amortize the entire dead-shirt-person cost at the time of purchase?
Yeah, purchasewise, the shirt manufacturer counts on the number of sales being great enough that the dead shirt guy doesn't matter. If one guy dies making one shirt, that's really bad. If one guy dies making a thousand shirts, a million shirts, 10 million shirts? Where's the ok line on the shirt:dead guy ratio?
I whould disagree with shared accountability. At least for the purposes of this metric. Regardless of number of people other participating in the mechanisms causing these deaths, this is about an individual choice to participate.
Think of it like the classic button button of death. You press the button some random person you dont know but dies and you get $10k. It is 100% certain regardless of how many people have previously pressed the button that you will kill somone of you also the button.
In regards to the most dangerous I agree with farming and some foods are much worse then others. My doctor tells me to eat a banana every day to raise my potassium. I suspect the death number on those is huge compared to apples from my local apple orchard.
Oh this is interesting, I hope someone could chime in with data or something.
I'm just shocked this isn't a field study. This seems like somthing we'd need in order to make ethical choices.
I belive so, though it isn't to be trusted. You know the whole thing about coconuts kill more that sharks? That's a lie and was actually and experiment to see how far a lie could spread.
What about taxes?
Yhea thatd probably increase the score a bit. I whouldnt consider any kind if offsetting either. Even if your taxes go to Healthcare and support systems it doesn't subtract from the amount going to military spending, wars, weapons, ect. Even smaller things like road expansions, and law enforcement count. Depending on the area these can cause more death.
Depends on the country at that point tbh
Depends on the country for much of this I'd imagine. If your dependent on imports of common needs then you'd be creating a need for a massive transit network to supply it.
Though the study should focus on the number and not how people use it. I could speculate that if all your neighbours have the same number as you you'd be tolerant of that.
Can't wait until we can make a supercomputer that can calculate this. Tbh the algorithm might be the hardest bit
Agreed. I suspect we are nearly there.
We probably could calculate it. But we'd need the algorithm.
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