My notes on what I liked about the post, from the announcement:
Jason Schukraft published several posts on invertebrate sentience in June, but judges were especially impressed by “A Useful Empirical Resource”, which ably summarizes more than 1000 citations’ worth of research on the behavior of ants, bees, cows, and many other creatures.
Questions about the experience of other species are inherently very difficult to think about (we still don’t know what it’s like to be a bat), but I appreciate the work of Schukraft (and other contributors from Rethink Priorities) to attack the problem from many different angles. Learning about the spatial memory of spiders hasn’t helped me settle whether I should stop squashing the ones I find in my shower, but as I read this post, I felt myself developing a more sophisticated model of how I’d define “consciousness”, and how my moral intuitions related to different features of cognition.
I’d also like to point out the author’s exemplary “Limitations” section. Including this makes the post far more useful, by helping readers understand how they should update on its findings, providing a jumping-off point for discussion, and giving future researchers a sense of how they might be able to improve on the work.
This post was awarded an EA Forum Prize; see the prize announcement for more details.
My notes on what I liked about the post, from the announcement: