Shitposting is a blessed epistemic mode. Or how I started caring about shrimp welfare

Shrimp welfare matters

The title of the post is inspired by one banana’s tweet.

Shitposting as a term has no single precise definition. The original meaning is low-effort and low-quality posting often of disruptive variety, hence the term ‘shit-posting’. However the word quickly came to have a much more nuanced meaning. .

Shitposting, especially on twitter, is posting on a whim without filtering and without regard for the resulting post quality — be it for comedic purposes, idea exploration or unabashed self-expression. Often this process results in accidentally generating nuggets of wisdom that would otherwise never see the light of day, typically because these are ‘obvious’ to the poster — i.e. the poster wrongly assumes they are uninteresting and mundane. Ephemeral nature of twitter means that good shitposts are amplified with likes and retweets, and bad ones are quickly forgotten.

Shitposting is a creative exploration of the possibility space of ideas, and one of the most important aspects of it is that it sidesteps the question of truth entirely. In this sense, it’s related to the epistemic category that we call ‘bullshit’ (which usually has strong negative connotations). Bullshit is not the same as lying: lying accepts the authority of truth, and attempts to paint a wrong picture of it, whereas bullshit ignores this authority completely. A university student bullshits on an essay homework assignment. A company asks you to fill in a sign up form and you put some bullshit in it. A taxi driver strikes a conversation about politics and instead of giving your nuanced take on Georgism and Land Value Tax you bullshit with him about how the government is run by bastards that must all be thrown into volcanoes immediately. Some categories of bullshit are harmful, but most bullshit is good — “bullshit makes the flowers grow”.

Shitposting plays its own game where the truth value of a shitpost doesn’t matter at all or is significantly traded against artistic qualities of the shitpost. The poster may capture a sincere emotional truth of their moment, a tiny ‘slice-of-life’ in a tweet, but they might also float a provocative ironic idea for their own amusement.

Shitposting has many varieties, subgenres and flavours. But I want to talk about one specific type of shitposting. 

Shitposting about shrimp welfare

A year ago, sometime in late 2022, a trend hit my twitter timeline. People started shitposting about shrimps and their welfare as if it’s one of the key issues the world faces rivaling in importance AI safety and climate change. 

As far as I can tell, originally the trend started because of Shrimp Welfare Project — an EA organization that aims to improve the lives of farmed shrimps: from killing them more humanely to making sure their water quality is appropriate. Shrimp welfare is an unusual thing to care about: if people care about animal welfare at all it’s about the welfare of their pets, and maybe large mammals and birds. 

It’s hard to know who started the trend of shrimpposting — shitposting about shrimps. There are reasons to think it was Julian Hazell aka @mealreplacer — twitter search shows him making tweets fairly early in the trend, but it could be somewhere else — internet trends often have complex origin stories. In any case, the most prominent figure in shrimpposting is @goth600, an anonymous poster with an AI-generated anime profile picture. He combines a great deal of artistic talent with the raw shitposting stamina of a marathon runner: the amount of tweeting he can do about the same topic without getting bored is truly magnificent.

His brand of shitposting about shrimps usually featured AI-enhanced neuralink-uplifted shrimps with radically increased amounts of intelligence. Here are some of my favorite shitposts of his (out of literally hundreds if not thousands).

Twitter is an interactive medium, if you are always merely reading it without tweeting yourself or replying to other people’s tweets, you are missing out. Naturally I started tweeting shitposts about shrimps too. For me, shitposting is highly psychoactive for a moment in the same way improv (improvisational theater) is psychoactive. It’s a state of mind that’s clearly altered in its own way: neural circuits synchronized to collaborate with each other to produce a tiny entertaining art piece for the sake of your own amusement and the audience’s enjoyment. A tiny flash of inner alignment and coherence.

It’s exhilarating to post ‘Good friend is single, early 30s, self-made wealthy, creative. But he’s consistently ignored, ghosted, or told “why do you keep talking about shrimp welfare?” after a few dates. Modern women are broken’ and get 135 likes. 

It’s incredibly satisfying to treat shrimp as an abbreviation and come up with “SHRIMP: Superintelligent Human Replacement In Most Professions” (30 likes). 

It takes about zero effort to remake the old Buddhist koan “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him” into “if you meet a shrimp on the road — neuralink-uplift it into enlightenment” but it’s still fun and still gets 9 likes.

I’d reply to goth600’s 7k followers AMA and ask him “Would you still love me if I was a shrimp” and he’d reply “Yes 🦐🫶”, I’d follow up with “would you neuralink uplift me and give cerebrolysin injections?” and he’d reply “Ofc I would 🦾🦐💉💊”.

Shitposting is a great deal of fun. But it also led to me admitting shrimp welfare is a valid and important issue.

Actually starting to care about shrimp welfare

For the vast majority of people shrimp welfare is a weird thing to care about. Initially, I was no exception. There are many problems the world faces: from various existential risks to humans dying from malaria to just like deciding what to eat for lunch. Even factory farming of land animals seemed like a much bigger deal to me. Shrimp welfare felt like such an odd thing to make a thing out of. Like most other people, I tend to extend my emotional empathy first towards my loved ones first, then other fellow humans. Cute mammals trigger much more empathy than snakes, fish or shrimps. 

Sure I had some background philosophical beliefs that would incline me to care about shrimp welfare. The standard view of personal identity — your consciousness gets created at your birth and dies with your death — is inconsistent. It’s much more likely there is a single consciousness in the universe that’s used as a sort of a canvas on which the experience of each individual is projected. This view is called Open Individualism and it’s artistically represented in a short story “The Egg” by Andy Weir. Shrimps are likely conscious, and thus each individual shrimp is likely to be “you” (or “me”) just without your human memories and experiences and with experiences from its own shrimp life — in the same way “you” from 5 years ago is still “you” (but without 5 years of memories). 

Maybe this is confusing. Explaining my philosophical beliefs here would take another essay, and if you are interested — you can check out links from the previous paragraph. I’m not trying to convince you of these beliefs — my main point here is that in theory I was inclined to care about shrimp welfare, but in practice I found it weird. 

That is, until I shitposted about shrimps for a while. And treating hypothetical AI-enhanced neurolink-uplifted shrimps in my tweets as deserving respect, rights or as a force to be reckoned with made me more sensitive to the actual conditions in which actual real-world shrimps are cultivated, such as eyestalk ablation — cutting of an eye of to make it reproduce faster and more reliably. Posting about shrimp welfare for comedic purposes made me consider actual dimensions of the real problem.

Over the last few months I became more reluctant to eat shrimp and now I eat several times less shrimps than I would’ve otherwise. I am not vegan — but I tend to think if I eat animals, it’s best to reduce the amount of suffering per unit of meat — and all things being equal it’s better to eat bigger animals. It’s far from determined that smaller and simpler animals have reduced capacity for pleasure and pain — the most pleasant and painful states in humans are fairly simple and don’t rely on uniquely human capacity for general reasoning. So I think it’s best to eat one animal that can feed a person for half a year (like a cow) rather than one that’s barely a nibble (shrimp). 

At the end of the day shrimp welfare is probably not even in the top 50 priorities for me. But I am really glad that there are people in the world for whom shrimp welfare is the top idea in their heads — thank you so much, Shrimp Welfare Project. 

Shitposting is how humans learn

Humans aren’t creatures of pure reason carefully following implications of their beliefs using rules of logic and deliberately doing bayesian inference on formally stated beliefs. A lot of human learning actually comes from play. Shitposting is making tiny art pieces out of lego bricks that are words, it’s a way to play with ideas. 

When philosophizing people often contort their minds into a serious-ideas-shape while giving up authorship rights over their own minds to epistemic authorities. This serious-idea-shape creates a template for the kind of ideas they can see in the world — an automatic intellectual filter that removes the possibility of the right idea being fun, ridiculous or upsetting to people holding power. 

The fun of shitposting makes it much closer to the pure intellectual contemplation done for its own sake compared to effortposting of crafted arguments designed to convince other people to change their mind. The indifference to authority and legitimacy only adds to this: it’s you contemplating the idea on its own merits. 

Shitposting thrives best within non-judgemental environments. Cultures that restrict shitposting, jokes and other forms of play, end up hurting themselves by getting stuck in local optima of beliefs. To iterate on beliefs effectively is to play with them unabashedly and without reservations.

So be willing to let every permutation of your ideas potentially flourish.