Mapping Fun Theory onto the challenges of ethical foie gras

Agreed with the first part of that.

The second part I'm less sure of. It may already have happened iff the world as it is is consistent with what we'd expect such an entity to create, which is precisely what I'm wondering about.

My instinct is to say "nonsense; it could certainly create a world where irrevocable suffering and death aren't quite so common, without violating that constraint"... a point that the Fun Theory Sequence also makes at some length, IIRC. But on thinking about it I'm not at all sure that it could without spoiling the scenario altogether.

For example: even in the world as it is, we are remarkably willing as a species to behave as though we were being taken care of by an all-powerful supernatural force; it might be that any significant further reduction in our suffering that wasn't visibly our own doing would bring us over a tipping point where that willingness became a literally irresistable temptation.

Dunno. It seems as though it ought to be possible to make more specific predictions based on that speculation, perhaps even falsifiable ones, but thus far I've failed to get traction.

I went to the transcript and couldn't help but be struck by this quote:

Ira Glass: It's against the law to execute somebody who is so crazy he doesn't understand why he's being executed. And Scharlette said that was true for this guy.

Scharlette Holdman: When I would say, do you know what's going to happen on the 12th of June, he was kind of befuddled and, with pressure, he would finally say, well yeah, he thought he was going to be reupholstered.

That's really interesting if true. Can you find where you read that?

Actually, wouldn't that be ... *puts on sunglasses* ... gandering?

They have to do some bending to get people to notice its existence in the first place, let alone deem it worthy of trying a first time. The fact that people insist on calling it by its French name, rather than "fat liver", is a testament to the marketing that has to be done to support interest in it.

I don't pretend this is a cure-all, or that we can always end livestock torture by not promoting its tasty products -- that would be endorsing a "just world fallacy". But sometimes we really do make our hard choices a lot harder than they need to be.

I think most of the discussion of “bending preferences” and “acquired taste” underestimate the variance of tastes across the population. I've seen someone on LW saying that they didn't enjoy wine, and therefore suspecting that whoever claims to enjoy wine must be doing it for signalling. The idea that maybe some people actually enjoy wine and some don't doesn't seem to have occurred to them (where by some I mean ‘a sizeable fraction of the population’). Likewise, I'd be shocked to find that the fraction of people who actually like foie grass the first time they try it is 90%.

Visually pleasing food tastes better than visually unpleasing food; fragrant food tastes better than rank food; if ethical meant tastes better than unethical meat, it has nothing to do with the meat, and everything to do with the interconnected nature of the taster’s sensory network.

I have heard that too, but I fear it's just halo effect i.e. if you are kind to animals they will automatically taste better.

I'm not so much concerned about an animal's "ethical worth", I just don't want anybody force-feeding me in order to eat my liver.