Respectfully Vasco, I believe you are gravely mistaken in this series of posts about insects. You start off with assumptions assumptions that have no verified foundation: we have no idea how insects suffer in nature, not even how do they experience reality. It is possible that their lives are generally difficult, but it’s also possible that they thrive without suffering, or even that they do not suffer at all in the way we understand it.
We have a responsibility to limit factory farming and its worst practices such as cages, and your obsessively precautionary stance regarding the hypothetical suffering of insects in the wild creates a dangerous inertia against the liberation of animals from exploitative practices that are the source of their worst and longest-lasting suffering, which must remain an ideal.
Moreover, even if insects were 100% sentient and your conclusions were valid, I believe you are mistaken even in the utilitarian application. In that case, why not concrete over all natural areas (as long as we survive) if the goal is to minimize a hypothetically painful existence for insects?
I want to reiterate that all these calculations are so speculative that the slightest change in assumptions could flip the outcome entirely in any direction. I strongly disagree with this approach and believe it to be extremely ineffective, as it is built on so little.
You start off with assumptions that all your castles in the air are built upon, assumptions that have no verified foundation
I agree there is lots of uncertainty. I tried to acknowledge this in the post:
I estimate broiler welfare (cage-free) reforms increase or decrease the welfare of wild arthropods 47.7 (4.66) times as much as they increase the welfare of broilers (hens). Nonetheless, the effects on arthropods can be anything from negligible to much larger. I estimate uncertainty in arthropods’ welfare range alone means broiler welfare reforms increase or decrease their welfare 0 to 1.74 k times as much as they increase the welfare of broilers, and cage-free reforms increase or decrease their welfare 0 to 170 times as much as they increase the welfare of hens (5th to 95th percentiles).
[...]
[...] it is unclear to me whether increased feed production increases or decreases arthropod-years, and whether arthropods have positive or negative lives.
[...] I am practically agnostic about whether increasing cropland benefits or harms arthropods, and therefore very uncertain about whether interventions with dominant effects on arthropods are beneficial or harmful.
Do you have any suggestions for improvement?
hypothetical suffering of insects in the wild
Have you had the chance to check wildanimalsuffering.org? In any case, the conclusions of my post do not depend on wild arthropods having positive/negative lives:
The effects of chicken welfare reforms on arthropods could be safely neglected if they were less than 10 % of those on chickens. Yet, I have a hard time seeing how one could be confident about this. Even just considering the uncertainty in each and one of the following inputs, for broiler welfare and cage-free reforms:
The increase or decrease in feed would have to be smaller than 0.0693 % and 0.108 %.
The increase or decrease in the density of arthropods would have to be smaller than 0.0630 % and 0.645 % of the density of arthropods in all of Earth’s land.
The increase or decrease in the welfare of arthropods would have to be smaller than 1.05*10^-7 and 1.08*10^-6 QALY/arthropod-year, which are 0.00525 % and 0.0540 % of Rethink Priorities’ (RP’s) median welfare range of silkworms of 0.002.
Increasing the welfare of arthropods by 1 QALY would have be less than 0.210 % and 2.15 % as valuable as increasing the welfare of chickens by 1 QALY, which implies strongly rejecting impartiality.
Moreover, even if insects were 100% sentient and your conclusions were valid, I believe you are mistaken even in the utilitarian application. In that case, why not concrete over all natural areas (as long as we survive) if the goal is to minimize a hypothetically painful existence for insects?
Decreasing arthropod-years would be beneficial/harmful if arthropods had negative/positive lives. However, I am super uncertain about whether their lives are positive or negative, so I do not recommend interventions which assume they are positive/negative. I favour supporting organisations like the ones I mentioned in the summary which decrease the uncertainty about the welfare of arthropods, and improve their lives, which is good regardless of whether their lives are positive or negative.
Respectfully Vasco, I believe you are gravely mistaken in this series of posts about insects. You start off with assumptions assumptions that have no verified foundation: we have no idea how insects suffer in nature, not even how do they experience reality. It is possible that their lives are generally difficult, but it’s also possible that they thrive without suffering, or even that they do not suffer at all in the way we understand it.
We have a responsibility to limit factory farming and its worst practices such as cages, and your obsessively precautionary stance regarding the hypothetical suffering of insects in the wild creates a dangerous inertia against the liberation of animals from exploitative practices that are the source of their worst and longest-lasting suffering, which must remain an ideal.
Moreover, even if insects were 100% sentient and your conclusions were valid, I believe you are mistaken even in the utilitarian application. In that case, why not concrete over all natural areas (as long as we survive) if the goal is to minimize a hypothetically painful existence for insects?
I want to reiterate that all these calculations are so speculative that the slightest change in assumptions could flip the outcome entirely in any direction. I strongly disagree with this approach and believe it to be extremely ineffective, as it is built on so little.
Thanks for the comment, Alexandre.
I agree there is lots of uncertainty. I tried to acknowledge this in the post:
Do you have any suggestions for improvement?
Have you had the chance to check wildanimalsuffering.org? In any case, the conclusions of my post do not depend on wild arthropods having positive/negative lives:
Decreasing arthropod-years would be beneficial/harmful if arthropods had negative/positive lives. However, I am super uncertain about whether their lives are positive or negative, so I do not recommend interventions which assume they are positive/negative. I favour supporting organisations like the ones I mentioned in the summary which decrease the uncertainty about the welfare of arthropods, and improve their lives, which is good regardless of whether their lives are positive or negative.