Ezra Klein

He was so convinced of his own idea that when these animals screamed sounds that we would have no trouble interpreting as suffering, he didn't hear it as suffering.

He just thought it was automatic noise.

And it is hard to believe.

And it's true.

I mean, it tells you something about the power of an idea to overcome our feelings, our instincts.

But we do, you know, we do this all the time.

And, you know, he was so wrong about this.

It's not funny, but we see things through an ideological lens.

And it shapes what we actually see and hear.

And it changed the sound of those screams to him, to meaninglessness.

Okay, but you do get into this question of, yes, are we causing mass suffering to plants?

Yeah, and I talked to Stefano Mancuso about this and some other researchers.

One in particular believes, yes, we are causing pain to plants.

And his take was, but hey, that's just life.

If we don't eat plants, we're down to salt, basically, if you give up on animals and plants.

Mancuso doesn't think so.

He thinks pain would not be adaptive to a creature that can't run away.

And the big fact about plants, of course, is they're sessile.

They're stuck in place.

They're rooted.