My only feedback is that it would be nice if there was a top-line “sentience score” for how sentient a creature is. It’s hard to compare the sentience of cows to bees in a digestible way. Especially as an advocate and lay-person. For anyone though, I think this might make the information more digestible.
It might work something like this: a being would be granted the score of 1.0 if we categorize all taxa as a likely yes. They get “docked” points as the answers lean towards no. It would be great if this was weighted for how important a taxa is in determining sentience (if that’s even something we could do).
Can we even weigh out how “important” some taxa are? Might this sort of system be helpful to others? Please excuse my ignorance and if this wasn’t the best forum to voice this feedback!
Hi Sammy. I’m one of the researchers on Rethink Priorities’ invertebrate sentience team. Thanks for your comment. This is an issue our team has thought a lot about and plans to address explicitly in forthcoming work. I agree that our research would be more digestible if we provided an overall probability of sentience for each taxon. Unfortunately, assigning a “sentience score” is extraordinarily difficult. The 53 features we investigated are not equally important, and the context in which they are displayed often makes a substantial difference to their evidential weight. One would have to have an expert grasp on biology, philosophy, and neuroscience (as well as lots of time on her/his hands) to even justifiably begin such a scoring project. And because subjective experience is, well, subjective, strict calibration in this domain is necessarily impossible.
Despite the above difficulties, Rethink Priorities is considering reporting our best guesses about the probability of sentience for our studied taxa. We are still figuring out the best way to present these preliminary estimates. We want the estimates to be viewed as hypotheses to be further refined (or perhaps completely abandoned) as more evidence comes in rather than hard conclusions that our work definitively supports. One concern is that interested parties might skip straight to our (uncalibrated, somewhat unjustified, extremely speculative) numerical estimates without taking the time to understand the nuance and intricacy of the issue. Personally, I worry that assigning sentience scores sacrifices too much in the name of digestibility.
Nonetheless, it’s not as if our currently published findings are completely silent on the matter. Clearly, there is better evidence for sentience for cephalopods and arthropods than there is for annelids and nematodes. Stay tuned for our invertebrate welfare cause profile (slated to go up in late July) for more on the implications of our research.
Agree with the risks of presenting such a score. Agree that scores would be very speculative and your credibility intervals would be very wide. But I’d also guess that without this sort of score/summary measure, then it’s very hard to use this research in practical applications?
Perhaps a compromise is to compile these sorts of summary scores, but then to only share them with advocates or researchers that have specific purposes in mind for those figures? This way, if someone wanted to use the summary score to inform an estimate, or make some decision based off of your research here, they could do so and it would only take them a few minutes to send you an email, rather than several hours trying to come up with an equivalent estimate, using your research as a starting point.
It’s still possible that the figures would become more widely known if people find the numbers indirectly, e.g. in citations. But this seems unlikely to affect many people (unfortunately, I don’t imagine this research going viral).
PS thanks very much for this very thorough seeming research on this difficult topic!
(Quick sidenote: “if we categorize all taxa as a likely yes”… it sounds like you’re saying “taxa” are the features/rows, but “taxa” refers to groupings of animals. Sorry that the term is a bit unfamiliar.)
Great work, thank you for doing this.
My only feedback is that it would be nice if there was a top-line “sentience score” for how sentient a creature is. It’s hard to compare the sentience of cows to bees in a digestible way. Especially as an advocate and lay-person. For anyone though, I think this might make the information more digestible.
It might work something like this: a being would be granted the score of 1.0 if we categorize all taxa as a likely yes. They get “docked” points as the answers lean towards no. It would be great if this was weighted for how important a taxa is in determining sentience (if that’s even something we could do).
Can we even weigh out how “important” some taxa are? Might this sort of system be helpful to others? Please excuse my ignorance and if this wasn’t the best forum to voice this feedback!
Hi Sammy. I’m one of the researchers on Rethink Priorities’ invertebrate sentience team. Thanks for your comment. This is an issue our team has thought a lot about and plans to address explicitly in forthcoming work. I agree that our research would be more digestible if we provided an overall probability of sentience for each taxon. Unfortunately, assigning a “sentience score” is extraordinarily difficult. The 53 features we investigated are not equally important, and the context in which they are displayed often makes a substantial difference to their evidential weight. One would have to have an expert grasp on biology, philosophy, and neuroscience (as well as lots of time on her/his hands) to even justifiably begin such a scoring project. And because subjective experience is, well, subjective, strict calibration in this domain is necessarily impossible.
Despite the above difficulties, Rethink Priorities is considering reporting our best guesses about the probability of sentience for our studied taxa. We are still figuring out the best way to present these preliminary estimates. We want the estimates to be viewed as hypotheses to be further refined (or perhaps completely abandoned) as more evidence comes in rather than hard conclusions that our work definitively supports. One concern is that interested parties might skip straight to our (uncalibrated, somewhat unjustified, extremely speculative) numerical estimates without taking the time to understand the nuance and intricacy of the issue. Personally, I worry that assigning sentience scores sacrifices too much in the name of digestibility.
Nonetheless, it’s not as if our currently published findings are completely silent on the matter. Clearly, there is better evidence for sentience for cephalopods and arthropods than there is for annelids and nematodes. Stay tuned for our invertebrate welfare cause profile (slated to go up in late July) for more on the implications of our research.
Agree with the risks of presenting such a score. Agree that scores would be very speculative and your credibility intervals would be very wide. But I’d also guess that without this sort of score/summary measure, then it’s very hard to use this research in practical applications?
Perhaps a compromise is to compile these sorts of summary scores, but then to only share them with advocates or researchers that have specific purposes in mind for those figures? This way, if someone wanted to use the summary score to inform an estimate, or make some decision based off of your research here, they could do so and it would only take them a few minutes to send you an email, rather than several hours trying to come up with an equivalent estimate, using your research as a starting point.
It’s still possible that the figures would become more widely known if people find the numbers indirectly, e.g. in citations. But this seems unlikely to affect many people (unfortunately, I don’t imagine this research going viral).
PS thanks very much for this very thorough seeming research on this difficult topic!
(Quick sidenote: “if we categorize all taxa as a likely yes”… it sounds like you’re saying “taxa” are the features/rows, but “taxa” refers to groupings of animals. Sorry that the term is a bit unfamiliar.)