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I think you should delete the post and resend it out another day (maybe on the 3rd?)
The rationale for today was it was the last day for the consultation.
(all April Fools posts will be labelled prominently as such from tomorrow. Got to say this in parentheses or it ruins the fun)
Thanks for the post, Matthew! Strongly upvoted.
I think it is very unclear whether wild insects have positive or negative lives. So I would focus on understanding their experiences, and how to improve them, instead of decreasing or increasing the number of insects. In any case, I like your recommendation to donate to the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) and Wild Animal Initiative (WAI). The Insect Institute may be good too, but I am not familiar with their work.
I have now checked their publications. They seem to be trying to slow down the growth of the insect industry. I think this may be beneficial if farmed insects have negative lives, but harmful if they have positive lives. In any case, the direction of the effect also depends on how farmed insects replace other farmed animals. I believe the Arthropoda Foundation is more robustly beneficial. They focus on improving the conditions of insects, which is beneficial regardless of whether they have positive or negative lives, and how they replace other farmed animals.
Executive summary: The author argues that insect suffering is plausibly the worst problem in the world due to the vast number of insects and the likelihood that many suffer intensely, and recommends supporting efforts to reduce insect suffering through donations, policy advocacy, and support for habitat loss and human civilization.
Key points:
Scale and plausibility of insect suffering: Insects likely can suffer, and given their enormous population (~10¹⁸ alive at a time), the collective scale of their suffering—especially through short, painful lives and deaths—could far exceed all human suffering in history.
Ethical reasoning: Even with conservative assumptions about insect sentience, their suffering remains orders of magnitude greater than human suffering; denying its moral importance would require rejecting common-sense ethical principles about the badness of pain.
Cognitive biases: The neglect of insect suffering stems from psychological biases like scope neglect, empathy gaps, and a preference for the natural, which distort our moral intuitions.
Intervention recommendations: Donating to insect-focused charities (e.g. Insect Institute), submitting policy feedback (e.g. against insect farming), and supporting organizations like Wild Animal Initiative are practical ways to reduce suffering.
Support for human civilization and habitat loss: Civilization and habitat destruction may reduce wild insect populations and thus overall suffering; rewilding is discouraged for increasing animal suffering.
Moral call to action: Insect suffering is described as the most important issue in the world today, and the author urges readers to prioritize it in their altruistic efforts.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
I think my three sources of uncertainty are:
1) How certain can we be that the average insect life is net negative? How much joy / happiness do they feel?
1b) I have a vague uncertain intuition that evolution (outer optimizer) in the long run should make the baseline happiness near zero for the inner optimizer (??)
2) What is the impact of reducing insect populations on other species?
3) I am very uncertain about what the relative intensities of pain mean.
I do want to note that this article convinced me that insect suffering is more important than I previously thought, and I will plan to give to some insect related charity.