If Iâm understanding your calculations correctly, the underlying assumption is that the pain you estimate a mosquito to experience for two minutes has the same weight as an entire afternoon of incomparably blissful human existence even taking into account the cognitive differences between a human and a mosquito?
Which 2 min of pain in mosquitoes are you referring to? âI infer that 392 mosquito-years of disabling pain neutralise the additional human welfare from saving 1 life under GWâs moral weightsâ.
In all seriousness, if you do attach such high weights to the possible suffering of individual insects, I highly recommend nontoxic spider repellent, especially around your light fittings as an extremely cost effective intervention.
I do not kill mosquitoes or other insects inside my house, but I guess quickly crushing insects causes them much less pain than ITNs. âI estimate mosquitoesâ welfare loss per mosquito killed by nets is equivalent to 19.9 k mosquito-minutes of disabling painâ.
I kill insects by driving, but I think this is fine. Firstly, the deaths are hopefully pretty quick. Secondly, driving saves me time, and I believe most of my impact comes from my work and donations, not from my direct impact on animals via my diet or driving. I calculate neutralising the harms caused to poultry birds and farmed aquatic animals per person in 2022 only requires donating 0.0214 $ to SWP. I guess my potentially negative direct impact on wild animals can also be neutralised with very little donations.
Some of your more quantifiable estimates also seem selected to be particularly unfavourable to humans. For example, the robustly established fact that humans experience days of pain from malaria infections, (including the vast majority of malaria infections which are nonfatal) is disregarded. Medical literature evaluating anti-malaria interventions often focuses on mortality rather than morbidity too, but itâs not weighing up human DALYs against a few minutes of mosquito morbidity!
I used GWâs estimate of 5.10 k$ per life saved by AMF in DRC, which is supposed to account for effects on mortality, morbidity, and income. GWâs estimate may well not be perfect, but I think the uncertainty is the cost to save a life is negligible in comparison with that of other parameters like the welfare range of mosquitoes.
Likewise, the assumption that a typical ITN is killing an average of 24 mosquitos per day seems to depend on an inflated number mosquitos per dwelling, even before the mild repellent effect and low killing efficiency of fleeting contact with the nets is considered.
I wish I had a better estimate, but I did not easily find one. My assumption was somewhat informed by a trip I did to Moshi (Tanzania) in early 2020. There were certainly more than 1 mosquito bitting me per hour during dust, and I was using repellent if I recall correctly. People most affected by malaria may sleep indoors, but have houses with very limited ability to prevent mosquitoes from entering. The roofs can be made of turf too, which would attract mosquitoes.
Which 2 min of pain in mosquitoes are you referring to?
The 2 minutes corresponds to the estimated 119 seconds of estimated excruciating pain per mosquito death in the aggregate estimate in your spreadsheet, comprising nearly all the estimated utility loss.
I do not kill mosquitoes or other insects inside my house, but I guess quickly crushing insects causes them much less pain than ITNs.
It was less about your personal footprint and more about the spiders. I once lived in a place by a river an enormous quantity of insects were attracted by any sort of light bulb, which was where the spiders liked to dine out (unless they were deterred with peppermint spray or their cobwebs repeatedly swept away). A web full of wriggling flies wasnât a particularly attractive sight, but Iâm disinclined to believe that web was experiencing utility loss far more significant than anything going on in my life[1] But since you are arguing a few minutes of a single insect ingesting a neurotoxin may be of extremely high negative value, keeping spiders away from insects using cheap peppermint spray seems like an highly net positive form of harm reduction worth considering?
My assumption was somewhat informed by a trip I did to Moshi (Tanzania) in early 2020. There were certainly more than 1 mosquito bitting me per hour during dust, and I was using repellent if I recall correctly
Outdoors at dusk is peak mosquito time though, and 2-3 mosquitos are capable of a lot of bites. I would imagine you had access to some sort of treated nets, and didnât have have to clean 20 or 30 dead mosquitos off the floor every day?
Iâd have a particularly hard time believing insects had evolved a complex and intense appreciation of neurological pain whilst far more useful traits like navigation were as simplistic and mechanistic as repeatedly flying into a light sourceâŚ
The 2 minutes corresponds to the estimated 119 seconds of estimated excruciating pain per mosquito death in the aggregate estimate in your spreadsheet, comprising nearly all the estimated utility loss.
Thanks for clarifying. For my guess that excruciating pain is 100 k (= 10*10^3/â0.1) times as intense as fully healthy life, the 119 mosquito-seconds of excruciating pain per mosquito killed by ITNs neutralise 138 mosquito-days (= 119/â60^2/â24*100*10^3) of fully healthy life, or 1.79 human-days (= 138*0.013) of fully healthy life based on RPâs median welfare range of black soldier flies.
It was less about your personal footprint and more about the spiders.
Got it. I estimate paying farmers to use more humane pesticides to decrease the suffering of wild insects helps 5.74 M insects per $. So, valuing my time at 20 $/âh, I would have to save 115 M insects per hour (= 5.74*10^6*20) to be similarly cost-effective. One can support research on more humane pesticides by donating to WAI. They intend âto use current and new fundingâ for, among other activities, âConducting an analysis of agricultural pest control to better understand the best targets for welfare interventions â first identifying scientific gaps and then developing research plans to help fill themâ.
Outdoors at dusk is peak mosquito time though, and 2-3 mosquitos are capable of a lot of bites.
There were certainly more than 1 different mosquito per hour too. I was indeed outdoors at dusk, which is peak mosquito time, so I used a value corresponding to much less mosquitoes than what I seem to recall. In any case, my takeaways would be the same if the number of mosquitoes killed per net was e.g. 10 % as high. This would correspond to only 2.4 mosquitoes (= 0.1*24) killed per net-day, but still result in AMF causing 76.3 (= 0.1*763) times as much harm to mosquitoes via ITNs as it benefits humans. With large uncertainty, such that it would still be âunclear to me whether ITNs increase or decrease welfareâ.
For my guess that excruciating pain is 100 k (= 10*10^3/â0.1) times as intense as fully healthy life, the 119 mosquito-seconds of excruciating pain per mosquito killed by ITNs neutralise 138 mosquito-days (= 119/â60^2/â24*100*10^3) of fully healthy life, or 1.79 human-days (= 138*0.013) of fully healthy life based on RPâs median welfare range of black soldier flies.
Thanks for that clarification. So essentially your claims rest on the utility value of over a day and a half of human life being lower than that of two minutes of a dying insect.
Two comments here:
this, like some of your other estimates relies rather heavily on an unconventional and extremely skewed pain scale, whereby a certain degree of pain is worth many times more than maximal pleasure[1], as well as confidently attributing that maximal degree of pain that vastly exceeds the pleasure experienced by more complicated creatures to a particular scenario
I âm not sure this is actually how RP intend their welfare ranges to be used. My understanding (and I welcome clarification/âcorrection from RP on this point) is that when their researchers estimate that $creatureâs welfare range is 1.3% that of humans, they intend that to be interpreted as â$creatureâs pain sensations are at most 1.3% as intense as human experienceâ, not âto establish how intensely $creature feels pain, multiply 1.3% by a pain scale which may contain an arbitrarily large number of digits, to reach the conclusion that this creatureâs pain is potentially thousands of times as intense as human pleasure.â
Iâd also point out that even with those pain scales and welfare ranges, the calculation looks completely different if one also factors in potentially intense human pain from [nonfatal] malaria infections multiple times per year and experienced over several days, with [rare] neurological systems which may persist for the rest of a natural human life. Again, Iâm not sure exactly what a pain scale for celebral malaria should look like but Iâm unconvinced there are reasons for regarding it as so much less intense than mosquito pain it can be disregarded when comparing between species.
I recognise that extremely wide-ranging and asymmetric pain scales are convenient to pure hedonic utilitarians who might otherwise be troubled by philosophical problems like utility monsters or trading off a single torture for a speck of dust in my eye: I just think theyâre unusual positions not well supported by evidence.
this, like some of your other estimates relies rather heavily on an unconventional and extremely skewed pain scale, whereby a certain degree of pain is worth many times more than maximal pleasure
My guess that excruciating pain is 100 k (= 10*10^3/â0.1) times as intense as fully healthy life ( 100 k times as intense as the maximally happy instant) implies that 0.864 s (= 24*60^2/â(100*10^3)) of excruciating pain in humans neutralises 1 day of fully healthy life in humans. Do you think this is âunconventional and extremely skewedâ? Examples of excruciating pain include âscalding and severe burning events [in large parts of the body]â, or âdismemberment, or extreme tortureâ. I have not experienced excruciating pain myself, so I would not be surprised if it was 10 % as intense as I assumed, but this would not change my takeaways. I estimate the harms caused to mosquitoes are proportional to the intensity of excruciating pain, so AMF would cause 76.3 (= 0.1*763) times as much harm to mosquitoes as it benefits humans according to the updated mainline numbers.
I am not assuming excruciating pain is 100 k times as intense as the maximally happy instant (as you implied above). This is much more intense than fully healthy life, so I guess excruciating pain is much less than 100 k times as intense as the maximally happy instant.
I âm not sure this is actually how RP intend their welfare ranges to be used. My understanding (and I welcome clarification/âcorrection from RP on this point) is that when their researchers estimate that $creatureâs welfare range is 1.3% that of humans, they intend that to be interpreted as â$creatureâs pain sensations are at most 1.3% as intense as human experienceâ, not âto establish how intensely $creature feels pain, multiply 1.3% by a pain scale which may contain an arbitrarily large number of digits, to reach the conclusion that this creatureâs pain is potentially thousands of times as intense as human pleasure.â
I assumed the welfare per living time of fully healthy life in a given species is proportional to the welfare range of that species. This does not directly follow from RPâs welfare ranges, but does not obviously favour helping animals or humans. My understanding it that RPâs median welfare ranges refer to the ratio (âwelfare per time of the practically maximally happy animal-year (positive)âââwelfare per time of the practically maximally sad animal-year (negative)â)/â(âwelfare per time of the practically maximally happy human-yearâââwelfare per time of the practically maximally sad human-yearâ).
0.864 s (= 24*60^2/â(100*10^3)) of excruciating pain in humans neutralises 1 day of fully healthy life in humans. Do you think this is âunconventional and extremely skewed
Yes. I canât think of any pain in which I would prefer to die than suffer for 0.864 seconds per day, particularly not if the remaining aspects of my life were âpractically maximally happyâ.[1]
I find it even harder to imagine that an insect can distinguish between painful sensations to the degree that a pain scale with at least 100k points on it would be appropriate to approximate their welfare on,[2] still less that an appropriate use of such a scale is to multiply a human/âinsect welfare ratio to conclude that the complete cessation of function of that simple insect nervous system is a few orders of magnitude more intense conscious experience than the âpractically maximally happyâ (or even average) utility of a human.
I mean, theyâve only got 200k neurons to divide between all their functions. (This isnât an argument for neuron count being a good proxy for moral weights overall, merely an observation of how extreme the pain scale looks in the context of how simple the insectâs system for parsing stimuli appears to be)
Thanks, David.
Which 2 min of pain in mosquitoes are you referring to? âI infer that 392 mosquito-years of disabling pain neutralise the additional human welfare from saving 1 life under GWâs moral weightsâ.
I do not kill mosquitoes or other insects inside my house, but I guess quickly crushing insects causes them much less pain than ITNs. âI estimate mosquitoesâ welfare loss per mosquito killed by nets is equivalent to 19.9 k mosquito-minutes of disabling painâ.
I kill insects by driving, but I think this is fine. Firstly, the deaths are hopefully pretty quick. Secondly, driving saves me time, and I believe most of my impact comes from my work and donations, not from my direct impact on animals via my diet or driving. I calculate neutralising the harms caused to poultry birds and farmed aquatic animals per person in 2022 only requires donating 0.0214 $ to SWP. I guess my potentially negative direct impact on wild animals can also be neutralised with very little donations.
I used GWâs estimate of 5.10 k$ per life saved by AMF in DRC, which is supposed to account for effects on mortality, morbidity, and income. GWâs estimate may well not be perfect, but I think the uncertainty is the cost to save a life is negligible in comparison with that of other parameters like the welfare range of mosquitoes.
I wish I had a better estimate, but I did not easily find one. My assumption was somewhat informed by a trip I did to Moshi (Tanzania) in early 2020. There were certainly more than 1 mosquito bitting me per hour during dust, and I was using repellent if I recall correctly. People most affected by malaria may sleep indoors, but have houses with very limited ability to prevent mosquitoes from entering. The roofs can be made of turf too, which would attract mosquitoes.
The 2 minutes corresponds to the estimated 119 seconds of estimated excruciating pain per mosquito death in the aggregate estimate in your spreadsheet, comprising nearly all the estimated utility loss.
It was less about your personal footprint and more about the spiders. I once lived in a place by a river an enormous quantity of insects were attracted by any sort of light bulb, which was where the spiders liked to dine out (unless they were deterred with peppermint spray or their cobwebs repeatedly swept away). A web full of wriggling flies wasnât a particularly attractive sight, but Iâm disinclined to believe that web was experiencing utility loss far more significant than anything going on in my life[1] But since you are arguing a few minutes of a single insect ingesting a neurotoxin may be of extremely high negative value, keeping spiders away from insects using cheap peppermint spray seems like an highly net positive form of harm reduction worth considering?
Outdoors at dusk is peak mosquito time though, and 2-3 mosquitos are capable of a lot of bites. I would imagine you had access to some sort of treated nets, and didnât have have to clean 20 or 30 dead mosquitos off the floor every day?
Iâd have a particularly hard time believing insects had evolved a complex and intense appreciation of neurological pain whilst far more useful traits like navigation were as simplistic and mechanistic as repeatedly flying into a light sourceâŚ
Thanks for clarifying. For my guess that excruciating pain is 100 k (= 10*10^3/â0.1) times as intense as fully healthy life, the 119 mosquito-seconds of excruciating pain per mosquito killed by ITNs neutralise 138 mosquito-days (= 119/â60^2/â24*100*10^3) of fully healthy life, or 1.79 human-days (= 138*0.013) of fully healthy life based on RPâs median welfare range of black soldier flies.
Got it. I estimate paying farmers to use more humane pesticides to decrease the suffering of wild insects helps 5.74 M insects per $. So, valuing my time at 20 $/âh, I would have to save 115 M insects per hour (= 5.74*10^6*20) to be similarly cost-effective. One can support research on more humane pesticides by donating to WAI. They intend âto use current and new fundingâ for, among other activities, âConducting an analysis of agricultural pest control to better understand the best targets for welfare interventions â first identifying scientific gaps and then developing research plans to help fill themâ.
There were certainly more than 1 different mosquito per hour too. I was indeed outdoors at dusk, which is peak mosquito time, so I used a value corresponding to much less mosquitoes than what I seem to recall. In any case, my takeaways would be the same if the number of mosquitoes killed per net was e.g. 10 % as high. This would correspond to only 2.4 mosquitoes (= 0.1*24) killed per net-day, but still result in AMF causing 76.3 (= 0.1*763) times as much harm to mosquitoes via ITNs as it benefits humans. With large uncertainty, such that it would still be âunclear to me whether ITNs increase or decrease welfareâ.
Thanks for that clarification. So essentially your claims rest on the utility value of over a day and a half of human life being lower than that of two minutes of a dying insect.
Two comments here:
this, like some of your other estimates relies rather heavily on an unconventional and extremely skewed pain scale, whereby a certain degree of pain is worth many times more than maximal pleasure[1], as well as confidently attributing that maximal degree of pain that vastly exceeds the pleasure experienced by more complicated creatures to a particular scenario
I âm not sure this is actually how RP intend their welfare ranges to be used. My understanding (and I welcome clarification/âcorrection from RP on this point) is that when their researchers estimate that $creatureâs welfare range is 1.3% that of humans, they intend that to be interpreted as â$creatureâs pain sensations are at most 1.3% as intense as human experienceâ, not âto establish how intensely $creature feels pain, multiply 1.3% by a pain scale which may contain an arbitrarily large number of digits, to reach the conclusion that this creatureâs pain is potentially thousands of times as intense as human pleasure.â
Iâd also point out that even with those pain scales and welfare ranges, the calculation looks completely different if one also factors in potentially intense human pain from [nonfatal] malaria infections multiple times per year and experienced over several days, with [rare] neurological systems which may persist for the rest of a natural human life. Again, Iâm not sure exactly what a pain scale for celebral malaria should look like but Iâm unconvinced there are reasons for regarding it as so much less intense than mosquito pain it can be disregarded when comparing between species.
I recognise that extremely wide-ranging and asymmetric pain scales are convenient to pure hedonic utilitarians who might otherwise be troubled by philosophical problems like utility monsters or trading off a single torture for a speck of dust in my eye: I just think theyâre unusual positions not well supported by evidence.
My guess that excruciating pain is 100 k (= 10*10^3/â0.1) times as intense as fully healthy life ( 100 k times as intense as the maximally happy instant) implies that 0.864 s (= 24*60^2/â(100*10^3)) of excruciating pain in humans neutralises 1 day of fully healthy life in humans. Do you think this is âunconventional and extremely skewedâ? Examples of excruciating pain include âscalding and severe burning events [in large parts of the body]â, or âdismemberment, or extreme tortureâ. I have not experienced excruciating pain myself, so I would not be surprised if it was 10 % as intense as I assumed, but this would not change my takeaways. I estimate the harms caused to mosquitoes are proportional to the intensity of excruciating pain, so AMF would cause 76.3 (= 0.1*763) times as much harm to mosquitoes as it benefits humans according to the updated mainline numbers.
I am not assuming excruciating pain is 100 k times as intense as the maximally happy instant (as you implied above). This is much more intense than fully healthy life, so I guess excruciating pain is much less than 100 k times as intense as the maximally happy instant.
I assumed the welfare per living time of fully healthy life in a given species is proportional to the welfare range of that species. This does not directly follow from RPâs welfare ranges, but does not obviously favour helping animals or humans. My understanding it that RPâs median welfare ranges refer to the ratio (âwelfare per time of the practically maximally happy animal-year (positive)âââwelfare per time of the practically maximally sad animal-year (negative)â)/â(âwelfare per time of the practically maximally happy human-yearâââwelfare per time of the practically maximally sad human-yearâ).
Yes. I canât think of any pain in which I would prefer to die than suffer for 0.864 seconds per day, particularly not if the remaining aspects of my life were âpractically maximally happyâ.[1]
I find it even harder to imagine that an insect can distinguish between painful sensations to the degree that a pain scale with at least 100k points on it would be appropriate to approximate their welfare on,[2] still less that an appropriate use of such a scale is to multiply a human/âinsect welfare ratio to conclude that the complete cessation of function of that simple insect nervous system is a few orders of magnitude more intense conscious experience than the âpractically maximally happyâ (or even average) utility of a human.
If I did think [potential] sub second pain was as significant as an entire dayâs welfare, I would probably not endorse electrical stunning...
I mean, theyâve only got 200k neurons to divide between all their functions. (This isnât an argument for neuron count being a good proxy for moral weights overall, merely an observation of how extreme the pain scale looks in the context of how simple the insectâs system for parsing stimuli appears to be)