This might not be the place for a discussion of this, but I personally donât feel that the ârobustnessâ of Tomasikian chain of reasoning you note here is similar to the ârobustnessâ of the idea that factory farms contain a crazy amount of suffering.
In the first instance, the specific chain of arrows above seems quite speculative, since we really have no idea how land use would change in a world with no factory farming. Are we that confident net primary productivity will increase? Iâm aware there are good arguments for it, but Iâd be surprised if someone couldnât come up with good arguments against if they tried.
More importantly, I donât think thatâs a sufficient reasoning chain to demonstrate that wild animal effects dominate? Youâd need to show that wild+farmed animal welfare on post-factory farmed land uses is lower than wild+farmed animal welfare on current land uses, and that seems very sensitive to specific claims about moral weights, weights between types of suffering, empirical information about wild animal quality of life, what it means for a life to be net-negative, etc.
Or am I misunderstanding what you mean by robustness? Iâve just finished reading your unawareness sequence and mostly feel clueless about everything, including what it could mean for a reasoning chain to be robust.
Sorry this wasnât clear! I wasnât thinking about the choice between fully eliminating factory farming vs. the status quo. I had in mind marginal decreased demand for animal products leading to marginal decreased land use (in expectation), which I do think we have a fairly simple and well-evidenced mechanism for.
I also didnât mean to say the wild animal effects dominate, just that theyâre large enough to be competitive with the farmed animal effects. I agree the tradeoffs between e.g. cow or chicken suffering vs. wild insect suffering seem ambiguous. (And yep, from a non-suffering-focused perspective, it would also plausibly be ambiguous whether increased wild insect populations are bad.)
(I think when I wrote the above comment, I was thinking of pretty coarse-grained buckets of ârobustnessâ vs âspeculativenessâ.)
This might not be the place for a discussion of this, but I personally donât feel that the ârobustnessâ of Tomasikian chain of reasoning you note here is similar to the ârobustnessâ of the idea that factory farms contain a crazy amount of suffering.
In the first instance, the specific chain of arrows above seems quite speculative, since we really have no idea how land use would change in a world with no factory farming. Are we that confident net primary productivity will increase? Iâm aware there are good arguments for it, but Iâd be surprised if someone couldnât come up with good arguments against if they tried.
More importantly, I donât think thatâs a sufficient reasoning chain to demonstrate that wild animal effects dominate? Youâd need to show that wild+farmed animal welfare on post-factory farmed land uses is lower than wild+farmed animal welfare on current land uses, and that seems very sensitive to specific claims about moral weights, weights between types of suffering, empirical information about wild animal quality of life, what it means for a life to be net-negative, etc.
Or am I misunderstanding what you mean by robustness? Iâve just finished reading your unawareness sequence and mostly feel clueless about everything, including what it could mean for a reasoning chain to be robust.
Sorry this wasnât clear! I wasnât thinking about the choice between fully eliminating factory farming vs. the status quo. I had in mind marginal decreased demand for animal products leading to marginal decreased land use (in expectation), which I do think we have a fairly simple and well-evidenced mechanism for.
I also didnât mean to say the wild animal effects dominate, just that theyâre large enough to be competitive with the farmed animal effects. I agree the tradeoffs between e.g. cow or chicken suffering vs. wild insect suffering seem ambiguous. (And yep, from a non-suffering-focused perspective, it would also plausibly be ambiguous whether increased wild insect populations are bad.)
(I think when I wrote the above comment, I was thinking of pretty coarse-grained buckets of ârobustnessâ vs âspeculativenessâ.)