Yes, but in the simulation animal advocacy could still help base reality chickens by giving animal considerations more power over our hypothetical light cone. Care about chickens, but only ones after the singularity lol
The argument works more generally. You not being a chicken is evidence that chickens don't have qualia, even without a simulation. Perhaps I should have included this argument in my post last year as, given the sheer number of shrimp, it's strong evidence against shrimp sentience.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zfWEkJxbraymvqtjS/meditations-on-suffering-1
Some context for those of you not familiar with recent Inkhaven lore:
2 days ago, Drew Schorno published "Against Veganism". It is either so absurdly gigabrained that I haven't understood any of the arguments, full of shit, or both. Itsi Weinstock took this personally and responded with "Dumb arguments Against Veganism", which was sufficiently rude it got him a public shaming by Inkhaven head Ben Pace. Alec Thompson promptly published "Contra Itsi Contra Drew", which argues... Something? I'm not sure what, but whatever it is, it's extremely entertaining. Drew took the opportunity to write about his first fight. Viv joined in on the pro vegan side "because she likes being in a mob".
I am now taking this opportunity to join the mob and make a bunch of nonsensical arguments myself. I hope you enjoy.
When considering the morality of an action, it is critical to consider all possible worlds in which one is taking said action. One which has particularly come to my attention lately is the possibility of being in a simulation.
It seems to me that the problem of AI Alignment is the most important problem in the history of our civilisation, with global stakes and a miniscule few working on solving it. With current estimates at ~2k people working on alignment and ~8 billion people worldwide, this gives us 4 million to one against odds of being in this particular group, given that we are humans on earth at this particular point in time.
If we are in a simulation, however, it makes absolute sense that they would spend time and effort on this particular group of people, as they are critical to the future of humanity. For more detail on this hypothesis, see this article, which gives astonishing detail about the nature of the simulation. Let's call it 4:1 odds against us being in this position assuming we're in a simulation. That's a million-to-one update in favour of the simulation hypothesis. So assume you previously had thousand-to-one odds in favour of the real world, and you're now doing AI safety research; you should now favour the simulation hypothesis over the real world at thousand-to-one odds.
Don't believe me? I don't believe me either; there's a bunch of other stuff to worry about when calculating these things, but this is the prior we're going in with. The question of being vegan or not now depends just about entirely on how the simulation handles other beings. According to the World Animal Foundation, there are currently 28 billion chickens in the world.
I note I am not a chicken and that this should count as extra evidence against me being in the real world. As a matter of fact, the more chickens and other animals we postulate to exist in our simulated world, the more likely I am to be one of them. As I am not a chicken, I deduce it is unlikely that they exist. As I am aware that I enjoy the taste of chicken, and the suffering of the chicken cannot exist if it does not exist, I deduce that eating meat is good, actually.
QED