Thanks for the question! This is something I’ve talked with people a lot about, so have a lot of thoughts on it — apologies for the long response in advance! Answering for myself, and not other people involved:
I’ve never been able to understand how any serious consideration of insect welfare doesn’t immediately lead to the unacceptable conclusion that any cause other than the welfare of demodex mites or nematodes is almost meaningless.
I broadly don’t buy that because conclusions seem strange, we shouldn’t engage with them. To me, it’s much more unacceptable to think that something could be unacceptable just because we don’t like the conclusion. We should pursue truth, and act according to what our best model of the world is.
Practical ideas have already emerged from this work, and been implemented. As with many animal welfare issues (e.g. insect welfare, wild animal welfare, etc), what people perceive as absurd isn’t due to taking the animals’ interest seriously, it’s due to utilitarianism being a particularly demanding moral philosophy. The idea of capturing a spider in a cup to take it outside being a good thing to do instead of killing it is a widely held belief.
The absurdity you sense all comes from the demandingness of specific ethical systems, so if you’re concerned about weird outcomes, I’d probably look there instead. If your moral philosophy is demanding you only care about nematodes and you find that to be a problem, I’d contend that’s an issue with your moral philosophy, not an issue with thinking about nematodes.
I don’t think EA would ever demand working on only one cause, or if it did, that seems like a bad formulation of EA.
Taking some insects and some other arthropods seriously does not imply taking nemotodes or demodex mites seriously as moral patients (or even consider those as remotely similar animals, though the mites are more complicated). An adult black soldier fly has ~1000x the neurons of a nemotode, and ~1/1000th the neurons of a dog (though neurons shouldn’t really be used this way). My understanding is that our last common ancestor with insects is something like 200 million years after our last common ancestor with nemotodes.
I’m pretty sure I’ve taken this issue as seriously as anyone else in the EA world has for longer than almost anyone else, and I’ve never believed that anyone should think about nematode welfare ~at all. I think that roughly 0 EA resources should go to nematode welfare. I don’t know anyone who thinks that the only causes that matter are nematode welfare or even insect welfare. This is not due to concerns about nematode being rejected out of hand. It’s because the evidence for their subjective experience is much weaker.
Even if demodex mites can suffer, say, it might be really hard to do anything about that. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do anything about insect farming or other places where we can have impact.
I think the evidence for insect sentience is incredibly disheartening — I would like to live in a world in which I had a high degree of confidence that insects don’t experience suffering. Instead, I live in one where it seems like a reasonable possibility.
It is the case that if insects suffer to a reasonable degree, and we take their suffering seriously, it probably implies incredibly significant things about what our relationship to the world ought to be like. I’m unhappy about that, but it seems like something we should face head on, if the evidence suggests it is worth doing.
How do you envision useful, practical ideas emerging from further insect/arthropod welfare work, rather than just a lot of absurd conclusions?
The insect farming industry takes this issue seriously, so seems perfectly reasonable for people concerned about animal welfare to do so too (e.g. the industry lobbying group in Europe had animal welfare guidelines well before anyone remotely connected to EA had engaged on this issue seriously).
Animal welfare based commitments based on insect welfare have been in place at retailers for years (e.g. Asos), and insect welfare is a discussion item at industry conferences, etc.
I think likely the single most impactful animal welfare campaign by number of animals impacted was insect-focused: this 2012 Starbucks cochineal campaign.
I’ll also note that this fund exclusively exists to fund scientific research, especially research targeting practical applications. I don’t think philosophy, except work like the moral weight project that has direct relevance to developing and evaluating interventions, has much use for animal welfare work at all, and wouldn’t personally be in favor of funding it.
I broadly don’t buy that because conclusions seem strange, we shouldn’t engage with them...
Sure but this is a post asking for money to set up a foundation to explore these conclusions, which, in the case of shrimp, insects, mites, and nematodes, are almost always either:
So uncertain as to be completely impractical (the confidence intervals in the Rethink Priority Welfare Estimates are so wide as to be almost meaningless, even if you agree with the underlying analysis)
Demanding of a complete upturn of human socioeconomic development goals (i.e. we’re not building factories or research institutes if we’re all Jains functionally paralysed by not wanting to step on ants)
I don’t think we need a(nother) foundation to tell us that, all else being equal, not torturing insects is better than torturing them, or that taking spiders outside (as I do, too) is better than killing them. This we can mostly all agree on. But any attempt to go beyond that and seriously quantify this suffering and run calculations on it is an intellectual dead end and a resource and reputation sink.
I think this comment misunderstands the kind of work I expect the Arthropoda foundation to be doing.
Right now, we are farming insects, but we don’t know very much about what is good or bad for them.
We might like to make recommendations like ‘don’t torture very large numbers of insects’, but because we don’t have really robust science on what conditions they might find torturous, this is hard.
I expect that the Arthropoda foundation will be focused on non-civilisation-upturning, action-relevant questions like that.
What would change my mind on the usefulness of this work is if I was shown some research from an animal welfare organisation that produced some concrete information (i.e. not qualified by massive confidence intervals) about “what is good or bad” for an animal or “what conditions they might find torturous”, beyond what we can already intuit.
So far have not seen anything like this, and I simply cannot imagine what sort of experiments or work you could do to get any useful information on this.
My experience with insect welfare science is that the conclusions are rarely intuitive because insects are so physiologically and behaviorally different than vertebrates. What about the work done on black soldier flies, slaughter methods, mealworm rearing, etc do you find to be not concrete, or to what extent do you find the conclusions to be intuitive? I would have had no idea, for example, based on intuition alone, what stocking density to rear yellow mealworm larvae at to minimize the risk of disease, cannibalism, or early mortality, or other indicators of stress. But because of science in this space, we now have a decent idea! The best way to reduce confidence intervals is to do relevant research.
I’m curious what you’ve been reading that’s made you say this generally, because animal welfare science is a highly concrete research field, that has made many recommendations for specific improvements for animals that would not have been obvious without the research, so I find this incredibly surprising to hear someone say who has read in the space. The experimental methodologies have been developed and critiqued for decades, they’ve just rarely been applied to insects.
A lot of the data assumes growth and survival as your main measures of welfare/stress which is just doing the industry’s yield optimisation research for them rather than welfare research. It is analogous to setting up a chicken welfare institute that tries to make bigger and longer-living chickens. A proxy of welfare, in a way, but we don’t need welfare research orgs to do this work.
The other concrete data in those papers are things like: the demonstrated preference of BSF maggots for honey over sugar water, data on the optimal grinding method to kill BSF maggots most quickly, and data on optimal densities to normalise breeding behaviours. The part that is betrayed by confidence intervals is the implementation. Without any way to define or measure the value of maggot suffering with any confidence, there’s no way to know whether the costs of implementing any of these changes are justified. At least with vertebrates we have some intuitions about how much their suffering matters to fall back on.
I haven’t actually watched this talk, but it’s titled ‘How can we know what is good for insects,’ and includes a section on why our intuitions might lead us astray
In general, the interaction between a species’ social dynamics and stocking density in farms. Different species will have very different reactions to close contact with lots of conspecifics — for some species this may be very stressful, whereas for others it seems ~totally fine, and this is basically (IIUC) not studied in many relevant species.
Thanks for the question! This is something I’ve talked with people a lot about, so have a lot of thoughts on it — apologies for the long response in advance! Answering for myself, and not other people involved:
I broadly don’t buy that because conclusions seem strange, we shouldn’t engage with them. To me, it’s much more unacceptable to think that something could be unacceptable just because we don’t like the conclusion. We should pursue truth, and act according to what our best model of the world is.
Practical ideas have already emerged from this work, and been implemented. As with many animal welfare issues (e.g. insect welfare, wild animal welfare, etc), what people perceive as absurd isn’t due to taking the animals’ interest seriously, it’s due to utilitarianism being a particularly demanding moral philosophy. The idea of capturing a spider in a cup to take it outside being a good thing to do instead of killing it is a widely held belief.
The absurdity you sense all comes from the demandingness of specific ethical systems, so if you’re concerned about weird outcomes, I’d probably look there instead. If your moral philosophy is demanding you only care about nematodes and you find that to be a problem, I’d contend that’s an issue with your moral philosophy, not an issue with thinking about nematodes.
I don’t think EA would ever demand working on only one cause, or if it did, that seems like a bad formulation of EA.
Taking some insects and some other arthropods seriously does not imply taking nemotodes or demodex mites seriously as moral patients (or even consider those as remotely similar animals, though the mites are more complicated). An adult black soldier fly has ~1000x the neurons of a nemotode, and ~1/1000th the neurons of a dog (though neurons shouldn’t really be used this way). My understanding is that our last common ancestor with insects is something like 200 million years after our last common ancestor with nemotodes.
I’m pretty sure I’ve taken this issue as seriously as anyone else in the EA world has for longer than almost anyone else, and I’ve never believed that anyone should think about nematode welfare ~at all. I think that roughly 0 EA resources should go to nematode welfare. I don’t know anyone who thinks that the only causes that matter are nematode welfare or even insect welfare. This is not due to concerns about nematode being rejected out of hand. It’s because the evidence for their subjective experience is much weaker.
Even if demodex mites can suffer, say, it might be really hard to do anything about that. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do anything about insect farming or other places where we can have impact.
I think the evidence for insect sentience is incredibly disheartening — I would like to live in a world in which I had a high degree of confidence that insects don’t experience suffering. Instead, I live in one where it seems like a reasonable possibility.
It is the case that if insects suffer to a reasonable degree, and we take their suffering seriously, it probably implies incredibly significant things about what our relationship to the world ought to be like. I’m unhappy about that, but it seems like something we should face head on, if the evidence suggests it is worth doing.
The insect farming industry takes this issue seriously, so seems perfectly reasonable for people concerned about animal welfare to do so too (e.g. the industry lobbying group in Europe had animal welfare guidelines well before anyone remotely connected to EA had engaged on this issue seriously).
Animal welfare based commitments based on insect welfare have been in place at retailers for years (e.g. Asos), and insect welfare is a discussion item at industry conferences, etc.
I think likely the single most impactful animal welfare campaign by number of animals impacted was insect-focused: this 2012 Starbucks cochineal campaign.
I’ll also note that this fund exclusively exists to fund scientific research, especially research targeting practical applications. I don’t think philosophy, except work like the moral weight project that has direct relevance to developing and evaluating interventions, has much use for animal welfare work at all, and wouldn’t personally be in favor of funding it.
Sure but this is a post asking for money to set up a foundation to explore these conclusions, which, in the case of shrimp, insects, mites, and nematodes, are almost always either:
So uncertain as to be completely impractical (the confidence intervals in the Rethink Priority Welfare Estimates are so wide as to be almost meaningless, even if you agree with the underlying analysis)
Demanding of a complete upturn of human socioeconomic development goals (i.e. we’re not building factories or research institutes if we’re all Jains functionally paralysed by not wanting to step on ants)
I don’t think we need a(nother) foundation to tell us that, all else being equal, not torturing insects is better than torturing them, or that taking spiders outside (as I do, too) is better than killing them. This we can mostly all agree on. But any attempt to go beyond that and seriously quantify this suffering and run calculations on it is an intellectual dead end and a resource and reputation sink.
[I’m an unaffiliated amateur]
I think this comment misunderstands the kind of work I expect the Arthropoda foundation to be doing.
Right now, we are farming insects, but we don’t know very much about what is good or bad for them.
We might like to make recommendations like ‘don’t torture very large numbers of insects’, but because we don’t have really robust science on what conditions they might find torturous, this is hard.
I expect that the Arthropoda foundation will be focused on non-civilisation-upturning, action-relevant questions like that.
What would change my mind on the usefulness of this work is if I was shown some research from an animal welfare organisation that produced some concrete information (i.e. not qualified by massive confidence intervals) about “what is good or bad” for an animal or “what conditions they might find torturous”, beyond what we can already intuit.
So far have not seen anything like this, and I simply cannot imagine what sort of experiments or work you could do to get any useful information on this.
My experience with insect welfare science is that the conclusions are rarely intuitive because insects are so physiologically and behaviorally different than vertebrates. What about the work done on black soldier flies, slaughter methods, mealworm rearing, etc do you find to be not concrete, or to what extent do you find the conclusions to be intuitive? I would have had no idea, for example, based on intuition alone, what stocking density to rear yellow mealworm larvae at to minimize the risk of disease, cannibalism, or early mortality, or other indicators of stress. But because of science in this space, we now have a decent idea! The best way to reduce confidence intervals is to do relevant research.
I’m curious what you’ve been reading that’s made you say this generally, because animal welfare science is a highly concrete research field, that has made many recommendations for specific improvements for animals that would not have been obvious without the research, so I find this incredibly surprising to hear someone say who has read in the space. The experimental methodologies have been developed and critiqued for decades, they’ve just rarely been applied to insects.
A lot of the data assumes growth and survival as your main measures of welfare/stress which is just doing the industry’s yield optimisation research for them rather than welfare research. It is analogous to setting up a chicken welfare institute that tries to make bigger and longer-living chickens. A proxy of welfare, in a way, but we don’t need welfare research orgs to do this work.
The other concrete data in those papers are things like: the demonstrated preference of BSF maggots for honey over sugar water, data on the optimal grinding method to kill BSF maggots most quickly, and data on optimal densities to normalise breeding behaviours. The part that is betrayed by confidence intervals is the implementation. Without any way to define or measure the value of maggot suffering with any confidence, there’s no way to know whether the costs of implementing any of these changes are justified. At least with vertebrates we have some intuitions about how much their suffering matters to fall back on.
That makes sense!
Again, very much not an expert, but some examples that might qualify:
The work of Dr Amaya Albalat and her team at the University of Stirling. Crustaceans are so different from vertebrates that I think some of this is quite non-intuitive to me.
I haven’t actually watched this talk, but it’s titled ‘How can we know what is good for insects,’ and includes a section on why our intuitions might lead us astray
In general, the interaction between a species’ social dynamics and stocking density in farms. Different species will have very different reactions to close contact with lots of conspecifics — for some species this may be very stressful, whereas for others it seems ~totally fine, and this is basically (IIUC) not studied in many relevant species.