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.
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.