Brian Tomasik on comparing welfare across species

[Vasco Grilo🔸]

Link post

This is a linkpost for Brian Tomasik’s posts related to comparing welfare across species. I got the list below asking the following to Claude Opus 5 High. “Link to all the posts from Brian Tomasik describing his views on comparing welfare across species, and group them by categories”. I then added 5 posts that Claude did not initially mention, and removed posts that Brian suggested taking out due to not seeming super relevant to comparing welfare across species. The posts in each category are ordered by publication date.

1. Core: how to weight by brain/​body size

• Is Brain Size Morally Relevant? (19 Jun 2013)

• Fitness Considerations for the Suffering of Short-Lived Animals (30 Jun 2013)

• Two-Envelopes Problem for Uncertainty about Brain-Size Valuation and Other Moral Questions (2 Aug 2013)

• Haller’s Rule and Sentience Per Unit Biomass (1 Mar 2016)

• Do Smaller Animals Have Faster Subjective Experiences? (21 Jul 2016)

2. Applied weights and explicit numbers

• How Much Direct Suffering is Caused by Various Animal Foods? (2007)

• Suffering in Animals vs. Humans (summer 2012)

• The Importance of Insect Suffering (3 Feb 2015)

• Cost-Effectiveness Comparison for Different Ways to Reduce Insect Suffering (23 Feb 2016)

3. Graded sentience in very small minds

• Bacteria, Plants, and Graded Sentience (29 Jun 2013)

• Brain Sizes and Cognitive Abilities of Micrometazoans (17 Dec 2016)

• Cognitive Abilities of Unicellular Organisms (4 Jan 2017)

4. Probability of sentience and which beings count

• Do Bugs Feel Pain? (7 Apr 2009)

• Which Computations Do I Care About? (19 Jun 2013)

• Do Video-Game Characters Matter Morally? (30 Mar 2014)

• Why Your Laptop May Be Marginally Sentient (1 May 2014)

• Is There Suffering in Fundamental Physics? (17 Aug 2014)

• Do Artificial Reinforcement-Learning Agents Matter Morally? (Oct 2014)

• Why Digital Sentience is Relevant to Animal Activists (3 Feb 2015)

• Can Bivalves Suffer? (6 Feb 2017)

• Which Stimuli Are Painful to Invertebrates? (5 Jul 2017)

5. Why the comparison is fuzzy and definitional rather than factual

• Dissolving Confusion about Consciousness (2009)

• The Eliminativist Approach to Consciousness (9 Aug 2014)

• Fuzzy, Nested Minds Problematize Utilitarian Aggregation (27 Jan 2015)

• How to Interpret a Physical System as a Mind (30 Jan 2015)

6. Intensity and valence scaling

• On the Seriousness of Suffering (2006)

• Are Happiness and Suffering Symmetric? (7 Jan 2015)

7. Interviews and discussions

• Vox interview (23 Apr 2014)

• Conversation with Luke Muehlhauser on consciousness (PDF) (6 Oct 2016)