Your first point seems like a legitimate question to me. I’ve not read much about those animals, but I would assume there are many of them, perhaps far more than there are insects. I would be curious to read about indicators of their sentience. The author, however, described evidence of several indicators of insect sentience (“responding to anesthetic, nursing their wounds, making tradeoffs between pain and reward, cognitively modeling both risks and reward in decision-making, responding in novel ways to novel experiences, self-medicating”), but doesn’t seem to think the animals you listed are conscious. I would guess they are missing some of these indicators.
Your second point is less interesting. A couple of your claims seem false, or at least incompatible. For example, the conclusion that every other moral pursuit of humanity is relatively meaningless if insects are given consideration also requires that helping insects be tractable, which you don’t seem to think. If we cannot and could never help insects, the greatest moral pursuits must be other (likely more normal) things, which I suppose would make them relatively meaningful. If we do say that helping insects is tractable and conclude that other pursuits are relatively meaningless, we can still acknowledge that on an absolute scale those other pursuits are incredibly meaningful, and that many of those pursuits are instrumentally useful for our goal of helping insects.
You also make the claim that “the average person can intuit that there’s no reasonable alternative to just politely ignoring the suffering of the quintillions of insects, worms and mites on the planet.” Again, I think one ought to be skeptical of their intuitions, especially surrounding issues that they have very little knowledge of. A nascent field of research has sprung up around these issues, and I suspect that more insights and paths forward will emerge as we learn more. There are, however, things we can do already. Brian Tomasic has written “How to Kill Bugs Humanely,” which almost everyone can apply in day-to-day life. A quick search of Wild Animal Initiative’s research library revealed “Improving pest management for wild insect welfare,” which says that “Agricultural pest insect management practices may be a particularly tractable avenue for improving the expected welfare of a large number of insects.”
If I wanted to write something to disagree with the post, I’d have explored other avenues such as these:
The alleged indicators of sentience cited in the research aren’t good at indicating sentience—here are some better ones, and here’s why I think they’re better
Some insects do show evidence of indicators cited in the research, but many don’t
Insects generally fail to show evidence of the indicators that I think are best
The insects that are most likely to be sentient (based on some set of indicators) are also the hardest to help (or something else arguing intractability)
The methodology in the research coming up with moral weights/welfare capacities is weak (This would be a critique that I’d be particularly interested in from someone trained in research methods, and I think it’s an easier target)
Extreme suffering matters so much more than moderate suffering that the likely aggregation of far more instances of moderate suffering is insufficiently significant to make intervening worthwhile
Sentience isn’t the trait we should be focused on; the metaethical foundations are weak
I think the early questions are particularly interesting and underexplored, but there are many other options too! I downvoted your comment because I think it doesn’t effectively engage with the substance of the disagreement, not because I disagree. I would be excited to see more comments from people whose views don’t overlap with mine, which currently lean towards supporting work on issues affecting small non-human animals, provided that they engage with the core disagreements in a meaningful way.
I didn’t say anything about the tractability of insect welfare interventions but I’m sure there are many things you could do to help insects. Almost all of those things will be at the direct or indirect cost of people. There are very few worlds in which you can consider insects sentient and not go completely off the rails sacrificing human welfare to insect welfare.
If we do say that helping insects is tractable and conclude that other pursuits are relatively meaningless, we can still acknowledge that on an absolute scale those other pursuits are incredibly meaningful
In a world with limited resources, meaningfullness is necessarily measured on a relative scale to triage resources. A toddler dropping their ice cream is “absolutely important” but I don’t spend much time daily preventing that when there are families struggling to put food on the table, or 600,000 people dying of malaria annually, or chickens in cages. When one moral issue is magnitudes greater than any existing moral issue it requires a similarly large reorientation of attention and resources. I think you’re too flippant in dismissing how disruptive this would be.
I may have made an incorrect assumption! I thought that when you said “the average person can intuit that there’s no reasonable alternative to just politely ignoring the suffering of the quintillions of insects, worms and mites on the planet,” you were arguing that solving the problem wasn’t tractable.
Generally people on the EA Forum prioritize work on problems that do well under the ITN framework. If you suggested that we ignore the suffering, then perhaps you partly accept that there is suffering, and it’s important, though now I’m curious whether you actually think that. Do you believe that insects suffer? If they do suffer, is it important?
I believe that there are hardly any actors in the insect welfare space, and that the resources allocated are very minimal. I guessed that you were aware of this situation as well and considered insect welfare neglected, at least in the sense that there is little being done to improve it (as opposed to in the sense that more resources should go towards it). Maybe you can correct me here too!
That left tractability, which I know is commonly questioned when the topic of insect welfare, especially for wild insects, comes up. I have this question too, despite there being some preliminary reason to think that there are some opportunities for useful work at scale.
I very much agree with you on the opportunity cost issue. The most likely source of donations and talented people for insect welfare work is the effective altruism community. Some of those resources (especially financial, I suspect) would presumably be diverted from global health and development work, which would mean sacrificing some human welfare.
You seem to be thinking more in terms of binaries and major changes than I would. If everyone were convinced that insect welfare was the best thing to work on, there would indeed be fundamental disruptions to the systems that are currently improving human welfare most cost-effectively. I do not think we are remotely close to being at risk for that sort of thing. While any reallocation would come with some loss of human welfare and life, amounts that could realistically be reallocated within the next few years could hardly be considered disruptive on a systemic level.
I also think some of the resources put towards insect welfare would support research that would be useful for future cause prioritization, and could result in meaningful increases or decreases in allocations to insect welfare in the future. I would be excited to learn that insects are not sentient, and we can reallocate resources back to other non-human animals or humans. I would also be happy to learn that we really had been missing something important for a long time, and we should be allocating far more to the insects. Though ultimately I would be aware of the large (on an absolute scale) human cost of the reallocation.
I was using meaningfulness differently than you are. Sometimes people feel negatively about discovering that their past efforts likely led to results that are far less meaningful than the results they could have gotten from doing different work. I think reframing the thought as, “My past work was very meaningful, but my future work can be far more meaningful than even that,” is more productive than, “My past work was relatively meaningless, and my future work will be relatively meaningful.” You seem to be using the word the way I’d choose to use importance. I think it’s more appropriate to focus on importance only on a relative scale when doing cause prioritization, because as you say, we’re doing triage. Reallocating scarce resources to the places they can have the greatest impact is the goal.
Your first point seems like a legitimate question to me. I’ve not read much about those animals, but I would assume there are many of them, perhaps far more than there are insects. I would be curious to read about indicators of their sentience. The author, however, described evidence of several indicators of insect sentience (“responding to anesthetic, nursing their wounds, making tradeoffs between pain and reward, cognitively modeling both risks and reward in decision-making, responding in novel ways to novel experiences, self-medicating”), but doesn’t seem to think the animals you listed are conscious. I would guess they are missing some of these indicators.
Your second point is less interesting. A couple of your claims seem false, or at least incompatible. For example, the conclusion that every other moral pursuit of humanity is relatively meaningless if insects are given consideration also requires that helping insects be tractable, which you don’t seem to think. If we cannot and could never help insects, the greatest moral pursuits must be other (likely more normal) things, which I suppose would make them relatively meaningful. If we do say that helping insects is tractable and conclude that other pursuits are relatively meaningless, we can still acknowledge that on an absolute scale those other pursuits are incredibly meaningful, and that many of those pursuits are instrumentally useful for our goal of helping insects.
You also make the claim that “the average person can intuit that there’s no reasonable alternative to just politely ignoring the suffering of the quintillions of insects, worms and mites on the planet.” Again, I think one ought to be skeptical of their intuitions, especially surrounding issues that they have very little knowledge of. A nascent field of research has sprung up around these issues, and I suspect that more insights and paths forward will emerge as we learn more. There are, however, things we can do already. Brian Tomasic has written “How to Kill Bugs Humanely,” which almost everyone can apply in day-to-day life. A quick search of Wild Animal Initiative’s research library revealed “Improving pest management for wild insect welfare,” which says that “Agricultural pest insect management practices may be a particularly tractable avenue for improving the expected welfare of a large number of insects.”
If I wanted to write something to disagree with the post, I’d have explored other avenues such as these:
The alleged indicators of sentience cited in the research aren’t good at indicating sentience—here are some better ones, and here’s why I think they’re better
Some insects do show evidence of indicators cited in the research, but many don’t
Insects generally fail to show evidence of the indicators that I think are best
The insects that are most likely to be sentient (based on some set of indicators) are also the hardest to help (or something else arguing intractability)
The methodology in the research coming up with moral weights/welfare capacities is weak (This would be a critique that I’d be particularly interested in from someone trained in research methods, and I think it’s an easier target)
Extreme suffering matters so much more than moderate suffering that the likely aggregation of far more instances of moderate suffering is insufficiently significant to make intervening worthwhile
Altruists should be risk-averse, and insect work is risky in relevant ways (https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/how-can-risk-aversion-affect-your-cause-prioritization/)
Sentience isn’t the trait we should be focused on; the metaethical foundations are weak
I think the early questions are particularly interesting and underexplored, but there are many other options too! I downvoted your comment because I think it doesn’t effectively engage with the substance of the disagreement, not because I disagree. I would be excited to see more comments from people whose views don’t overlap with mine, which currently lean towards supporting work on issues affecting small non-human animals, provided that they engage with the core disagreements in a meaningful way.
I didn’t say anything about the tractability of insect welfare interventions but I’m sure there are many things you could do to help insects. Almost all of those things will be at the direct or indirect cost of people. There are very few worlds in which you can consider insects sentient and not go completely off the rails sacrificing human welfare to insect welfare.
In a world with limited resources, meaningfullness is necessarily measured on a relative scale to triage resources. A toddler dropping their ice cream is “absolutely important” but I don’t spend much time daily preventing that when there are families struggling to put food on the table, or 600,000 people dying of malaria annually, or chickens in cages. When one moral issue is magnitudes greater than any existing moral issue it requires a similarly large reorientation of attention and resources. I think you’re too flippant in dismissing how disruptive this would be.
I may have made an incorrect assumption! I thought that when you said “the average person can intuit that there’s no reasonable alternative to just politely ignoring the suffering of the quintillions of insects, worms and mites on the planet,” you were arguing that solving the problem wasn’t tractable.
Generally people on the EA Forum prioritize work on problems that do well under the ITN framework. If you suggested that we ignore the suffering, then perhaps you partly accept that there is suffering, and it’s important, though now I’m curious whether you actually think that. Do you believe that insects suffer? If they do suffer, is it important?
I believe that there are hardly any actors in the insect welfare space, and that the resources allocated are very minimal. I guessed that you were aware of this situation as well and considered insect welfare neglected, at least in the sense that there is little being done to improve it (as opposed to in the sense that more resources should go towards it). Maybe you can correct me here too!
That left tractability, which I know is commonly questioned when the topic of insect welfare, especially for wild insects, comes up. I have this question too, despite there being some preliminary reason to think that there are some opportunities for useful work at scale.
I very much agree with you on the opportunity cost issue. The most likely source of donations and talented people for insect welfare work is the effective altruism community. Some of those resources (especially financial, I suspect) would presumably be diverted from global health and development work, which would mean sacrificing some human welfare.
You seem to be thinking more in terms of binaries and major changes than I would. If everyone were convinced that insect welfare was the best thing to work on, there would indeed be fundamental disruptions to the systems that are currently improving human welfare most cost-effectively. I do not think we are remotely close to being at risk for that sort of thing. While any reallocation would come with some loss of human welfare and life, amounts that could realistically be reallocated within the next few years could hardly be considered disruptive on a systemic level.
I also think some of the resources put towards insect welfare would support research that would be useful for future cause prioritization, and could result in meaningful increases or decreases in allocations to insect welfare in the future. I would be excited to learn that insects are not sentient, and we can reallocate resources back to other non-human animals or humans. I would also be happy to learn that we really had been missing something important for a long time, and we should be allocating far more to the insects. Though ultimately I would be aware of the large (on an absolute scale) human cost of the reallocation.
I was using meaningfulness differently than you are. Sometimes people feel negatively about discovering that their past efforts likely led to results that are far less meaningful than the results they could have gotten from doing different work. I think reframing the thought as, “My past work was very meaningful, but my future work can be far more meaningful than even that,” is more productive than, “My past work was relatively meaningless, and my future work will be relatively meaningful.” You seem to be using the word the way I’d choose to use importance. I think it’s more appropriate to focus on importance only on a relative scale when doing cause prioritization, because as you say, we’re doing triage. Reallocating scarce resources to the places they can have the greatest impact is the goal.