Eric S. Raymond's Blog, page 44

Time preference and latitude

A few days ago I was thinking about one of the most provocative Damned Facts from population genetics, and came up with a prediction that as far as I know nobody has uttered or tested before. I throw it out here because someone with access to the right kind of primary data might be able to test it.

Here’s the Damned Fact: the measured average IQ of breeding populations varies inversely with the average temperature to which their ancestors were long-term adapted. Anthropologists who have studied the matter believe this is because cold climates put more of a premium on tool use and long-term planning than hot ones. A New Guinea tribesman can farm, hunt, and survive year-round naked with nothing but a spear and a digging stick; an Inuit requires complex clothing, ice shelters, and elaborate space-framed boats.

Note that “environment of ancestral adaptation” is not the same as where people live now; if the latter were true we might expect that Inuit would have the most impressive average IQ on the planet, but they expanded into the high Arctic only within the last millennium or so. Inuit do, interestingly enough, seem to have a freakishly high average of mechanical and 3-D spatial ability relative to other populations, but it is unknown whether this is genetic or due to some kind of training effect of their environment.

(My suspicion is that it’s genetic, but not because a thousand years is enough to select for it. Rather, my guess is that Inuit are descended from a small founder population that was able to colonize the high Arctic precisely because it already had those traits.)

A quality that has not been as well studied as IQ is “time preference”. People with high time preference discount future rewards in favor of present ones; conversely, people with low time preference more easily defer rewards and invest now to capture higher gains later. Time preference has mainly been studied by economists and sociologists rather than anthropologists and, as far as I am aware, nobody knows to what extent variations in it are genetically rather than culturally transmitted.

One thing that is known about IQ and time preference is that they correlate inversely and fairly strongly. Economists have studied both IQ and time preference as predictors of the wealth of nations. As one might expect, wealthier countries exhibit higher average IQ and lower average time preference (the latter being reflected in comparative savings rates).

This sets up my prediction: if the distribution of time preference by breeding population is studied carefully enough, it will be found to be as strongly correlated with temperature in the ancestral environment as IQ is. Furthermore, that correlation will be largely independent of IQ variation – that is, it will still exist if variations in IQ are statistically masked out.

Here’s why I think so: as a pre-industrial human in cold climates, you get a survival reward for doing things that are more difficult if you have high time preference – most notably, saving food and other resources that you might consume now for later when they are more difficult to obtain. The main feature of colder climates drive this need is larger seasonal variations in food availability and (in very cold climates) the critical importance of hunting.

In hot climates, plant food and game animals are abundant year-round. The value of saving food is low, and the climate makes preserving it difficult. At higher latitudes and lower average temperatures, seasonal variations in availability both become significant and saving food increasingly necessary. In Siberia and the Arctic, crops won’t grow at all; indigenes must live by hunting and storing food.

There you have it. A question for some enterprising scientist to look into. I suspect the primary data has already been collected and just needs the right statistical questions put to it.

Sugar has passed on

Sugar’s NYT appearance last week was her last hurrah. We had to have her euthanized today. She died peacefully about an hour ago.

Her decline had been extremely rapid. Three weeks ago, even, Sugar barely looked aged and it was still possible to believe she might live another year. But the chronic nephritis, and possibly other organ failures, caught up with her. She started losing weight rapidly and her legs (already affected by arthritis) weakened. Her appetite waned, and her frequency of self-grooming diminished.

The signs were clear, but we hoped that she would bounce back – she was a very tough cat and had surprised us and our veterinarians that way before. Over the weekend she showed serious problems walking. When I saw her fall partway down the basement stairs Saturday evening because she couldn’t keep her footing, I suspected it was time. Sunday she almost couldn’t walk, and began sounding distress calls a few times an hour – stopped eating and drinking. Then I knew it was time. So did Cathy.

It’s hard to write a eulogy for a cat without descending into cliche or mawkishness. All cat people think their beloved moggies are special. But Sugar really was an outlier, if only by living to 21 and – until very recently – remaining so healthy and youthful-looking that humans we introduced her to had trouble believing her actual age.

Part of that was good genes, of course; we think Sugar was part Maine Coon, a breed which tends to be longer-lived than average. But most of it was personality. Sugar was a happy cat – friendly, alert, outgoing, and extremely sociable with humans in the way Coons often are. She retained all those qualities until she was getting so weak that she seldom had the energy to exercise them. Even then, there wasn’t anything she liked as much as snuggling up to a friendly person for a good purr and some petting.

And to Sugar every person was friendly. She had no fear of strangers at all – in fact, in her later and less active years new company would noticeably perk her up. It was usual for houseguests sleeping in our basement that Sugar would join them on the folding bed as they settled in for a night’s rest. Many are the wandering hackers who Sugar charmed; it was wonderful to see them relax, stress and weariness soothed away by her innocent affection.

She understood about children, too. I’ll never forget watching her play with my niece Rosalie, when Rosalie couldn’t have been over five and didn’t know cat etiquette yet. Sugar taught her, gently. And there were a couple of big burly contractors I recall, meeting Sugar while working on our house and instantly melting into a state of awwww – I’m convinced this got us superior service more than once.

Sugar was not especially remarkable at first sight – a rather ordinary American tabby in gray, black and white. It was her sunny disposition, grace, and good manners that made her attractive. That whole aloof-and-mysterious thing cats are supposed to do was utterly not her. She loved people, and wanted to be loved back, and pretty much always got what she wanted in that.

We were so very lucky. Many of our cat-owning friends told sad stories of destructive habits, expensive medical conditions, bites and scratches, or just cats that for no good reason were nervous and shy all their lives. Meanwhile Sugar sailed along, tail high and eyes bright, costing us almost nothing but catfood and sharing her gift for happiness with humans in ways that never failed to make us proud of her.

When we came home, you could bet your fillings that if Sugar wasn’t asleep she’d greet us at the door – sometime meowing reproachfully as if to ask “Where have you been?”, which is as close as she ever got to bad temper – ten seconds of petting would fix that right up, bringing thunderous purrs. And when we were ill or unhappy, she tried to comfort us as though we were her kittens. Her constant trust and love got us through a couple of crisis times.

When I sat at my desk programming, so my hands weren’t available, Sugar would lie against my legs and rest her furry chin just behind the toes of my right foot – always on the same spot, for some reason. When Cathy and I went to bed at night, Sugar would prowl around the edge of the bed looking for intruders, then oscillate a couple of times between sprawling over Cathy and sprawling over me until she was satisfied that we’d both had our minimum nightly requirement of purring. Then she’d randomly pick a human to sleep beside, serene in the knowledge that her day was complete.

We want to have another cat, but…Sugar was such a sweetheart that I fear we’ll make unfair comparisons. We’ll miss her a lot. We’re not as desolated as we could be, though, because we know her last several years were overtime. On the odds, she should have died six years ago, and her good health three years past an acute kidney infection was a minor miracle that visibly amazed our vets. But we knew this was coming (if not when) and have been gradually saying our goodbyes for months.

At least we know we did everything we could for her. And, if cats had any representation of such things, I’m sure Sugar would know she did right by her humans. Not just Cathy and myself, either, but everyone who knew her and found in her sweetness a respite from their cares.

Cathy’s reminiscence is here.

Review: The White List

Nina D’Aleo’s The White List (Momentum Books) is a strange combination of success and failure. The premise is preposterous, the plotting is perfunctory – but the prose is zippy and entertaining and the characters acutely observed.

Genetic superhumans walk among us, most unaware that they have the ‘Shaman’ trait. A few awaken to manifest their powers, usually in violently destructive ways. Silvia Denaglia (code name: Silver!) is an operative for a super-secret agency that exists to capture and suppress them. But she has increasing doubts about the agency – its methods seem callous and its operatives careless of human life.

Of course there’s a conspiracy within a conspiracy, and the agency is tainted by evil, and there’s a rebel mutant good-guy underground, and her contact with it is the enigmatic man of her dreams. To call the worldbuilding cardboard would be an insult to honest cardboard, and anyone even marginally genre-savvy can see each breathless reveal in the plot coming from miles away. On these levels the book is dumb, dumber, dumbest – really embarrassingly bad.

And yet, it’s oddly charming. The prose is energetic and well-constructed. The characters work even though they’re trapped by the tropes they’re assigned to. There’s a good deal of wry comedy and quite a number of laugh-out-loud lines, especially in the earlier parts of the book. Ms. D’Aleo is not beyond hope; in fact I’d say she’s one half of a terrific writer. She would benefit from collaborating with somebody who knows how to do setting and plot but lacks her gift for the microlevel of writing.

Finally, a warning: This is one of those dishonestly-packaged books that is volume one of a series without being so labeled, and ends unresolved.

Review: Sea Without A Shore

I’m not, in general, a fan of David Drake’s writing; most of his output is grimmer and far more carnographic than I care to deal with. I’ve made an exception for his RCN series because they tickle my fondness for classic Age-of-Sail adventure fiction and its pastiches, exhibiting Drake’s strengths (in particular, his deep knowledge of history) while dialing back on the cruelty and gore.

Drake’s sources are no mystery to anyone who has read Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey-Maturin series; Daniel Leary and his companion-in-arms Adele Mundy are obvious takes on the bumptious Jack Aubrey and physician/naturalist/spy Stephen Maturin. Drake expends great ingenuity in justifying a near-clone of the Napoleonic-era British Navy in a far future with FTL drives. And to his credit, the technological and social setting is better realized than in most exercises of this kind. It compares well in that respect to, for example, David Weber’s Honor Harrington sequence.

The early books in the RCN series, accordingly, seemed fresh and inventive. Alas, in this tenth installment the series is losing its wind. We’ve already seen a couple of variations of the plot; Daniel and Adele traipse off in the Princess Cecile on a sort-out-the-wogs mission backed by Cinnabar’s spooks. In a wry nod to another genre trope, they’re looking for buried treasure.

The worldbuilding remains pretty good, and provided most of the few really good moments in this novel. Alas, as the action ground on I found the characters’ all-too-familiar tics wearing on me – Adele’s nihilistic self-loathing, Daniel’s cheerful shallow bloodymindeness, Hogg’s bumpkin shtick, Miranda the ever-perfect girlfriend. The cardboard NPCs seem flatter than ever. The series always had strong elements of formula, but now Drake mostly seems to be just repeating himself. Even the battle scenes are rather perfunctory.

This is not a book that will draw in people who aren’t fans of its prequels. I’ll read the next one, but if it isn’t dramatically improved I’m done. Perhaps Drake is tiring of the premises; it may be time for him to bring things to a suitably dramatic close.

Sea Without A Shore

I’m not, in general, a fan of David Drake’s writing; most of his output is grimmer and far more carnographic than I care to deal with. I’ve made an exception for his RCN series because they tickle my fondness for classic Age-of-Sail adventure fiction and its pastiches, exhibiting Drake’s strengths (in particular, his deep knowledge of history) while dialing back on the cruelty and gore.

Drake’s sources are no mystery to anyone who has read Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey-Maturin series; Daniel Leary and his companion-in-arms Adele Mundy are obvious takes on the bumptious Jack Aubrey and physician/naturalist/spy Stephen Maturin. Drake expends great ingenuity in justifying a near-clone of the Napoleonic-era British Navy in a far future with FTL drives. And to his credit, the technological and social setting is better realized than in most exercises of this kind. It compares well in that respect to, for example, David Weber’s Honor Harrington sequence.

The early books in the RCN series, accordingly, seemed fresh and inventive. Alas, in this tenth installment the series is losing its wind. We’ve already seen a couple of variations of the plot; Daniel and Adele traipse off in the Princess Cecile on a sort-out-the-wogs mission backed by Cinnabar’s spooks. In a wry nod to another genre trope, they’re looking for buried treasure.

The worldbuilding remains pretty good, and provided most of the few really good moments in this novel. Alas, as the action ground on I found the characters’ all-too-familiar tics wearing on me – Adele’s nihilistic self-loathing, Daniel’s cheerful shallow bloodymindeness, Hogg’s bumpkin shtick, Miranda the ever-perfect girlfriend. The cardboard NPCs seem flatter than ever. The series always had strong elements of formula, but now Drake mostly seems to be just repeating himself. Even the battle scenes are rather perfunctory.

This is not a book that will draw in people who aren’t fans of its prequels. I’ll read the next one, but if it isn’t dramatically improved I’m done. Perhaps Drake is tiring of the premises; it may be time for him to bring things to a suitably dramatic close.

Sugar’s health may finally be failing

This is an update for friends of Sugar only; you know who you are.

Sugar may not have much time left. She’s been losing weight rapidly the last couple weeks, her appetite is intermittent, and she’s been having nausea episodes. She seems remarkably cheerful under the circumstances and still likes human company as much as ever, but … she really does seem old and frail now, which wasn’t so as recently as her 21st birthday in early February.

We’re bracing ourselves. If the rate she’s fading doesn’t change I think we’re going to have to euthanize her within six weeks or so. Possibly sooner. Possibly a lot sooner.

Sugar’s had a good long run. We’ll miss her a lot, but Cathy and I are both clear that it is our duty not to see her suffering prolonged unnecessarily.

If you’re a friend of Sugar and have any option to visit here to say your farewells, best do it immediately.

If you’ve somehow read this far without having met Sugar: I don’t normally blog about strictly personal things, but Sugar is a bit of an institution. She’s been a friend to the many hackers who have guested in our storied basement; I’ve seen her innocent joyfulness light up a lot of faces. We’re not the only people who will be affected by losing her.

Does the Heartbleed bug refute Linus’s Law?

The Heartbleed bug made the Washington Post. And that means it’s time for the reminder about things seen versus things unseen that I have to re-issue every couple of years.

Actually, this time around I answered it in advance, in an Ask Me Anything on Slashdot just about exactly a month ago. The following is a lightly edited and somewhat expanded version of that answer.

I actually chuckled when I read rumor that the few anti-open-source advocates still standing were crowing about the Hearbeat bug, because I’ve seen this movie before after every serious security flap in an open-source tool. The script, which includes a bunch of people indignantly exclaiming that many-eyeballs is useless because bug X lurked in a dusty corner for Y months, is so predictable that I can anticipate a lot of the lines.

The mistake being made here is a classic example of Frederic Bastiat’s “things seen versus things unseen”. Critics of Linus’s Law overweight the bug they can see and underweight the high probability that equivalently positioned closed-source security flaws they can’t see are actually far worse, just so far undiscovered.

That’s how it seems to go whenever we get a hint of the defect rate inside closed-source blobs, anyway. As a very pertinent example, in the last couple months I’ve learned some things about the security-defect density in proprietary firmware on residential and small business Internet routers that would absolutely curl your hair. It’s far, far worse than most people understand out there.

Friends don’t let friends run factory firmware. You really do not want to be relying on anything less audited than OpenWRT or one of its kindred (DDWRT, or CeroWRT for the bleeding edge). And yet the next time any security flaw turns up in one of those open-source projects, we’ll see a replay of the movie with yet another round of squawking about open source not working.

Ironically enough this will happen precisely because the open-source process is working … while, elsewhere, bugs that are far worse lurk in closed-source router firmware. Things seen vs. things unseen…

Returning to Heartbleed, one thing conspicuously missing from the downshouting against OpenSSL is any pointer to a closed-source implementation that is known to have a lower defect rate over time. This is for the very good reason that no such empirically-better implementation is known to exist. What is the defect history on proprietary SSL/TLS blobs out there? We don’t know; the vendors aren’t saying. And we can’t even estimate the quality of their code, because we can’t audit it.

The response to the Heartbleed bug illustrates another huge advantage of open source: how rapidly we can push fixes. The repair for my Linux systems was a push-one-button fix less than two days after the bug hit the news. Proprietary-software customers will be lucky to see a fix within two months, and all too many of them will never see a fix patch.

The reason for this is that the business models for closed-source software pretty much require software updates to be an expensive, high-friction process hedged about with fees, approval requirements, and legal restrictions. Not like open-source-land, where we can ship a fix minutes after it’s compiled and tested because nobody is trying to collect rent on it.

Sunlight remains the best disinfectant. Open source is no guarantee of perfect results, but every controlled comparison that has been tried has shown that closed source is generally worse.

Finally and in 2014 perhaps most tellingly…if the source of the code you rely on is closed, how do you know your vendor hasn’t colluded with some spy shop to install a back door?

Review: 1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies

The Ring Of Fire books are a mixed bag. Sharecropped by many authors, ringmastered by Eric Flint, they range from plodding historical soap opera to sharp, clever entertainments full of crunchy geeky goodness for aficionados of military and technological history.

When Flint’s name is on the book you can generally expect the good stuff. So it proves in the latest outing, 1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies, a fun ride that’s (among other things) an affectionate tribute to C.S. Forester’s Hornblower novels and age-of-sail adventure fiction in general. (Scrupulously I note that I’m personally friendly with Flint, but this is exactly because he’s good at writing books I like.)

It is 1636 in the shook-up timeline birthed by the town of Grantville’s translocation to the Thuringia of 1632. Eddie Cantrell is a former teenage D&D player from uptime who became a peg-legged hero of the Baltic War and then husband of the not-quite-princess Ann-Catherine of Denmark. Now the United States of Europe is sending him to the Caribbean with an expeditionary force, Flotilla X-Ray, to seize the island of Trinidad from the Spanish and harvest oil desperately needed by Grantville’s industry.

But it’s not a simple military mission. There are tensions among the factions in the allied fleet – the United States of Europe, the Danes, the Dutch, and a breakaway Spanish faction in the Netherlands. And the Wild Geese – exiled Irish mercenaries under the charismatic Earl Tyrconnell – have their own agenda. Cardinal Richelieu’s agents are maneuvering against the whole enterprise. And as the game opens, nobody in the fleet knows about the desperate, hidden Dutch refugee colony on Eustatia…

If the book has a fault, it’s that authors Flint and Gannon love their intricate wheels-within-wheels plotting and elaborate political intrigue a little bit too much. It’s fun to watch those gears turning for a while, but even readers who (like me) relish that sort of thing may find themselves getting impatient for stuff to start blowing up already by thirty chapters in.

No fear, we do get our rousing sea battles. With novel twists, because the mix of Grantville’s uptime technology with the native techniques of the 1600s takes tactics in some strange directions. I particularly chuckled at the descriptions of captive hot-air balloons being used as ship-launched observation platforms, a workable expedient never tried in our history. As usual, Flint (a former master machinist) writes with a keen sense of how applied technology works – and, too often, fails.

If some of the character developments and romantic pairings are maybe a little too easy to see coming, well, nobody reads fiction like this for psychological depth or surprise. It’s a solid installment in the ongoing series. Oh, and with pirates too. Arrr. I’ll read the next one.

1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies

The Ring Of Fire books are a mixed bag. Sharecropped by many authors, ringmastered by Eric Flint, they range from plodding historical soap opera to sharp, clever entertainments full of crunchy geeky goodness for aficionados of military and technological history.

When Flint’s name is on the book you can generally expect the good stuff. So it proves in the latest outing, 1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies, a fun ride that’s (among other things) an affectionate tribute to C.S. Forester’s Hornblower novels and age-of-sail adventure fiction in general. (Scrupulously I note that I’m personally friendly with Flint, but this is exactly because he’s good at writing books I like.)

It is 1636 in the shook-up timeline birthed by the town of Grantville’s translocation to the Thuringia of 1632. Eddie Cantrell is a former teenage D&D player from uptime who became a peg-legged hero of the Baltic War and then husband of the not-quite-princess Ann-Catherine of Denmark. Now the United States of Europe is sending him to the Caribbean with an expeditionary force, Flotilla X-Ray, to seize the island of Trinidad from the Spanish and harvest oil desperately needed by Grantville’s industry.

But it’s not a simple military mission. There are tensions among the factions in the allied fleet – the United States of Europe, the Danes, the Dutch, and a breakaway Spanish faction in the Netherlands. And the Wild Geese – exiled Irish mercenaries under the charismatic Earl Tyrconnell – have their own agenda. Cardinal Richelieu’s agents are maneuvering against the whole enterprise. And as the game opens, nobody in the fleet knows about the desperate, hidden Dutch refugee colony on Eustatia…

If the book has a fault, it’s that authors Flint and Gannon love their intricate wheels-within-wheels plotting and elaborate political intrigue a little bit too much. It’s fun to watch those gears turning for a while, but even readers who (like me) relish that sort of thing may find themselves getting impatient for stuff to start blowing up already by thirty chapters in.

No fear, we do get our rousing sea battles. With novel twists, because the mix of Grantville’s uptime technology with the native techniques of the 1600s takes tactics in some strange directions. I particularly chuckled at the descriptions of captive hot-air balloons being used as ship-launched observation platforms, a workable expedient never tried in our history. As usual, Flint (a former master machinist) writes with a keen sense of how applied technology works – and, too often, fails.

If some of the character developments and romantic pairings are maybe a little too easy to see coming, well, nobody reads fiction like this for psychological depth or surprise. It’s a solid installment in the ongoing series. Oh, and with pirates too. Arrr. I’ll read the next one.

A bloodmouth carnist theory of animal rights

Some weeks ago I was tremendously amused by a report of an exchange in which a self-righteous vegetarian/vegan was attempting to berate somebody else for enjoying Kentucky Fried Chicken. I shall transcribe the exchange here:

>There is nothing sweet or savory about the rotting
>carcass of a chicken twisted and crushed with cruelty.
>There is nothing delicious about bloodmouth carnist food.
>How does it feel knowing your stomach is a graveyard

I'm sorry, but you just inadvertently wrote the most METAL
description of eating a chicken sandwich in the history of mankind.

MY STOMACH IS A GRAVEYARD

NO LIVING BEING CAN QUENCH MY BLOODTHIRST

I SWALLOW MY ENEMIES WHOLE

ESPECIALLY IF THEY'RE KENTUCKY FRIED

I am no fan of KFC, I find it nasty and overprocessed. However, I found the vegan rant richly deserving of further mockery, especially after I did a little research and discovered that the words “bloodmouth” and “carnist” are verbal tokens for an entire ideology.

First thing I did was notify my friend Ken Burnside, who runs a T-shirt business, that I want a “bloodmouth carnist” T-shirt – a Spinal-Tap-esque parody of every stupid trash-metal tour shirt ever printed. With flaming skulls! And demonic bat-wings! And umlauts! Definitely umlauts.

Once Ken managed to stop laughing we started designing. Several iterations. a phone call, and a flurry of G+ messages later, we had the Bloodmouth Carnist T-shirt. Order yours today!

By the way, the skull on that shirt is me, sort of. Ken asked me to supply a photo reference, so my wife and I went to a steakhouse and she snapped a picture of me grinning maniacally over a slab of prime rib. For SCIENCE!

This had consequences. An A&D regular challenged me in private mail to explain why my consequentialist ethics don’t require me to be a vegetarian.

I broadly agree with Sam Harris’s position in The Moral Landscape that the ground of ethics has to be the minimization of pain. But I add to this that for pain to be of consequence to me it needs to be have an experiencer who is at least potentially part of a community of reciprocal trust with me. Otherwise I would be necessarily paralyzed by guilt at killing bacteria every time I breathe.

The community of (potential) reciprocal trust includes all humans, possibly excepting a tiny minority of the criminally insane. It presumptively includes extraterrestrial sophonts, if we ever discover those. I think it is prudent and conservative (in the best sense of that term) to include borderline and near-borderline sophonts like higher primates, elephants, whales, dolphins, and squid. In principle it includes any animal that can solve the other-minds problem – which probably includes some of the brighter birds. I think this category can be roughly delimited using the mirror test.

For different reasons, the community of trust includes non-sophont human commensals. My cat, Sugar, for example, who shows only dim and occasional flashes of behavior that might indicate she models other minds, but has a strong mutual-trust relationship with my wife and myself. We know what to expect of each other; we like each other. This is a kind of reciprocity with ethical significance even though the cat is not sophont.

Another way to put this is to remember the Golden Rule, “Do as you would be done by” and ask: what animals have the ability to follow it, the right kind of informational complexity required to support it?

Cows, pigs, chickens, and fish are not part of my potential community of trust. They don’t have minds capable of it – the informational complexity required doesn’t seem to be there at all (though suspicions have occasionally been raised about pigs; I’ll revisit this point). Thus, their deaths are not intrinsically ethically significant to me, any more than harvesting a head of lettuce is.

Cruelty is a different matter. I think we ought not engage in cruelty because it is damaging and coarsening; people who make a habit of being cruel to non-sophonts are more likely to become cruel and dangerous to sophonts as well. Thus, merely killing a food animal is ethically neutral, but careless cruelty towards one is wrong and deliberate cruelty is evil.

(Nevertheless, I report that the above vegan rant inculcated in me a desire to stomp into a roomful of vegans and demand my food “twisted and crushed with cruelty”. I really don’t like it when people try to jerk me around by my sensibilities as though I’m some kind of idiot who is unreachable by reasoned argument. I find it insulting and want to punch back.)

These criteria could interact in interesting ways, and there are edge cases that need more investigation. I think I would have to stop eating pork if pigs could count the way that (for example) crows can – some pigs reportedly come close enough to passing the mirror test to worry me a little. I can readily imagine that pigs bred for intelligence might come near enough to sophont to be taboo to me. On the other hand, a friend who grew up on a hog farm assures me that pigs bred for meat are stone-stupid; according to her, it’s only wild pigs I should be even marginally concerned about.

Otters are another interesting case; they seem very playful and intelligent in the wild, occasionally use tools, and can form affectionate bonds with humans. I’d very much like to see them mirror-tested; in the meantime I’m quite willing to to give them the benefit of the doubt and consider them taboo for killing and eating.

There you have it. The bloodmouth carnist theory of animal rights. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go have a roast beef sandwich for lunch.