This science alone wonât solve every issue in wild animal welfare. Even with the scientific knowledge necessary to make progress, there might be tricky philosophical questions that canât be answered empirically (When is a life worth living? How do we make decisions about tradeoffs between different species of animals?).
Have you considered reliable welfare comparisons across species as another necessarily pillar for robustly increasing welfare? I do notthink perfect welfare measures, remote monitoring, and ecological modelling would be enough. I am very uncertain about how to compare welfare across species. Here are my estimates for sentience-adjusted welfare ranges proportional to âindividual number of neuronsâ^âexponentâ, and âexponentâ from 0 to 2, which covers the best guesses that I consider reasonable.
Putting aside nematodes (which I believe we should do), to a first approximation
Are you confident that nematodes can be neglected? Iamnot. I can see the welfare of nematodes being much smaller or larger than than of arthropods. Research on the sentience of nematodes is one of the âFour Investigation Prioritiesâ mentioned in section 13.4 of chapter 13 of the book The Edge of Sentience by Jonathan Birch.
So, our best models are basically at the level of: âwe can sort of say what will happen to 9 varieties of quasi-organisms at ~100-square-kilometer resolution,â an area that contains approximately 10 quadrillion insects.
Do you mean 10 trillion arthropods? 100 km^2 are 10^8 m^2 (= 100*(10^3)^2). Tropical and subtropical forests have 10^5 soil arthropods per m^2 based on Table S4 of Rosenberg et al. (2023). So I think 100 km^2 of tropical and subtropical forests have around 10^13 soil arthropods (= 10^8*10^5), 10 trillion.
For context, a community of just 500 species has 250,000 possible pairwise interactions.
Nitpick. 125 k (= 500*499/â2) possible pairwise interactions, because you are only counting interactions between difference species, and the interaction between species A and B is the same as that between B and A?
And I think we should make a giant risky bet on cage-free eggs.
Despite potentially dominant effects on ants and termites?
Math nitpicks are helpful, thanks! Both were rightâjust doing math too quickly :).
RE welfare comparisons: I could imagine a difference between us being relative confidence that empirical research will improve our understanding? I think I might be less bullish on this sort of work because I donât feel confident weâll meaningfully reduce our uncertainty about welfare ranges. But, Iâm not confident in this. Would you expect the most useful work for reducing your own uncertainty to be philosophical or empirical?
RE nematodes: I agree that this isnât clear cut in some sense, but I feel fairly confident that they should be bracketed out unless we significantly advance in our understanding of animal consciousness (and see aboveâmaybe my own lack of confidence in our ability to make empirical progress on this is part of the reason Iâm more confident in casting them aside).
RE cage-free: yes â I think the meaningful counterfactual is that money spent on cage free otherwise not being spent on animal welfare at all, or being spent in mostly useless ways, and Iâd endorse cage-free campaigns over that most likely, despite agreeing with you on non-target uncertainty being high, but I havenât thought about it much.
RE welfare comparisons: I could imagine a difference between us being relative confidence that empirical research will improve our understanding?
I am not confident (empirical or philosophical) research on welfare comparisons across species will significantly decrease their uncertainty. However, the alternative for me is never finding out interventions that robustly increase welfare in expectation.
Would you expect the most useful work for reducing your own uncertainty to be philosophical or empirical?
I do not have a strong view either way. I think it is much easier to decrease i) the empirical uncertainty about anatomy and behaviour than ii) the philosophical uncertainty about how to go from those to quantitative comparisons of welfare across species. On the other hand, I believe ii) is much larger than i).
RE nematodes: I agree that this isnât clear cut in some sense, but I feel fairly confident that they should be bracketed out unless we significantly advance in our understanding of animal consciousness
Nice, that was useful. I agree that the downside to this is some risk of interventions not being robust. Iâm not really sure how to think about that trade offâon the other hand, increasing our certainty could make it really hard to do any interventions at all (e.g. a world where we think nematodes matter, but donât know if they have good or bad lives seems really hard to operate in).
On motivational trade-offs â I definitely agree that there is some evidence threshold that would change my mind. Iâm not totally ruling this possibility out. But maybe directly answering your question â no, motivational trade offs alone wouldnât change it I donât think. But, I havenât thought much about it, and not sure that position will hold up to scrutiny.
Hi Abraham. Thanks for the great post.
Have you considered reliable welfare comparisons across species as another necessarily pillar for robustly increasing welfare? I do not think perfect welfare measures, remote monitoring, and ecological modelling would be enough. I am very uncertain about how to compare welfare across species. Here are my estimates for sentience-adjusted welfare ranges proportional to âindividual number of neuronsâ^âexponentâ, and âexponentâ from 0 to 2, which covers the best guesses that I consider reasonable.
Are you confident that nematodes can be neglected? I am not. I can see the welfare of nematodes being much smaller or larger than than of arthropods. Research on the sentience of nematodes is one of the âFour Investigation Prioritiesâ mentioned in section 13.4 of chapter 13 of the book The Edge of Sentience by Jonathan Birch.
Do you mean 10 trillion arthropods? 100 km^2 are 10^8 m^2 (= 100*(10^3)^2). Tropical and subtropical forests have 10^5 soil arthropods per m^2 based on Table S4 of Rosenberg et al. (2023). So I think 100 km^2 of tropical and subtropical forests have around 10^13 soil arthropods (= 10^8*10^5), 10 trillion.
Nitpick. 125 k (= 500*499/â2) possible pairwise interactions, because you are only counting interactions between difference species, and the interaction between species A and B is the same as that between B and A?
Despite potentially dominant effects on ants and termites?
Math nitpicks are helpful, thanks! Both were rightâjust doing math too quickly :).
RE welfare comparisons: I could imagine a difference between us being relative confidence that empirical research will improve our understanding? I think I might be less bullish on this sort of work because I donât feel confident weâll meaningfully reduce our uncertainty about welfare ranges. But, Iâm not confident in this. Would you expect the most useful work for reducing your own uncertainty to be philosophical or empirical?
RE nematodes: I agree that this isnât clear cut in some sense, but I feel fairly confident that they should be bracketed out unless we significantly advance in our understanding of animal consciousness (and see aboveâmaybe my own lack of confidence in our ability to make empirical progress on this is part of the reason Iâm more confident in casting them aside).
RE cage-free: yes â I think the meaningful counterfactual is that money spent on cage free otherwise not being spent on animal welfare at all, or being spent in mostly useless ways, and Iâd endorse cage-free campaigns over that most likely, despite agreeing with you on non-target uncertainty being high, but I havenât thought about it much.
I am not confident (empirical or philosophical) research on welfare comparisons across species will significantly decrease their uncertainty. However, the alternative for me is never finding out interventions that robustly increase welfare in expectation.
I do not have a strong view either way. I think it is much easier to decrease i) the empirical uncertainty about anatomy and behaviour than ii) the philosophical uncertainty about how to go from those to quantitative comparisons of welfare across species. On the other hand, I believe ii) is much larger than i).
Would medium confidence that nematodes engage in motivational trade-offs be enough for you to consider effects on them?
Nice, that was useful. I agree that the downside to this is some risk of interventions not being robust. Iâm not really sure how to think about that trade offâon the other hand, increasing our certainty could make it really hard to do any interventions at all (e.g. a world where we think nematodes matter, but donât know if they have good or bad lives seems really hard to operate in).
On motivational trade-offs â I definitely agree that there is some evidence threshold that would change my mind. Iâm not totally ruling this possibility out. But maybe directly answering your question â no, motivational trade offs alone wouldnât change it I donât think. But, I havenât thought much about it, and not sure that position will hold up to scrutiny.