Yes, you can reject NU while still thinking shrimp welfare matters at the margin. The question is how much it matters relative to alternatives. My argument is that standard EA reasoning on this often smuggles in assumptions about moral weight (neuron count, nociceptive capacity) that don’t track what we actually care about.
If you accept the depth-weighting framework in sections 3-5, then even a pluralist who includes suffering-reduction as one value among many should weight interventions differently than the neuron-counters suggest. The shrimp intervention might still have positive value—I’m not arguing it’s worthless—but the cost-effectiveness comparison to, say, x-risk work shifts significantly.
So the steel-manned version of my claim: “Given limited resources, the depth-weighting framework implies shrimp welfare is probably not among the highest-impact interventions, even granting uncertainty about shrimp experience.” That’s weaker than “shrimp don’t matter” and doesn’t depend on NU being false.
I would be very surprised if [neuron count + noiciceptive capacity as moral weight] are standard EA assumptions. I haven’t seen this in the people I know nor in the major funders, who seem to be more pluralistic to me.
My main critique to this post is that there are different claims and it’s not very clear which arguments are supporting what conclusions. I think your message would be more clear after a bit of rewriting, and then it would be easier to have an object-level discussion.
Yes, you can reject NU while still thinking shrimp welfare matters at the margin. The question is how much it matters relative to alternatives. My argument is that standard EA reasoning on this often smuggles in assumptions about moral weight (neuron count, nociceptive capacity) that don’t track what we actually care about.
If you accept the depth-weighting framework in sections 3-5, then even a pluralist who includes suffering-reduction as one value among many should weight interventions differently than the neuron-counters suggest. The shrimp intervention might still have positive value—I’m not arguing it’s worthless—but the cost-effectiveness comparison to, say, x-risk work shifts significantly.
So the steel-manned version of my claim: “Given limited resources, the depth-weighting framework implies shrimp welfare is probably not among the highest-impact interventions, even granting uncertainty about shrimp experience.” That’s weaker than “shrimp don’t matter” and doesn’t depend on NU being false.
I would be very surprised if [neuron count + noiciceptive capacity as moral weight] are standard EA assumptions. I haven’t seen this in the people I know nor in the major funders, who seem to be more pluralistic to me.
My main critique to this post is that there are different claims and it’s not very clear which arguments are supporting what conclusions. I think your message would be more clear after a bit of rewriting, and then it would be easier to have an object-level discussion.