Also, among the proxies you’ve used, I’d be inclined to give almost all of my weight to a handful of hedonic proxies, namely panic-like behavior, hyperalgesia, PTSD-like behavior, prioritizes pain response in relevant context and motivational trade-off (a cognitive proxy) as indicating the extremes of welfare conditional on sentience, and roughly in that order by weight. The first three all came up “unknown” due to no studies for bees, but there were a few studies suggesting their presence (and none negative) for the fish. Giving almost all of your weight to these proxies would favor the fish over bees. That being said, I wouldn’t be that surprised to find out that bees display those behaviors, too, because I also think bees are very impressive and behaviorally complex.
I might use joy-like behavior and play behavior for the other end of the welfare range, but I expect them to be overshadowed by the intense suffering indicators above, and I don’t expect them to differ too much across the species. There was evidence of play behavior in all three, but only evidence for joy-like behavior in carps.
The next proxies that could make much difference that I think could matter on some models (although I don’t assign them much weight) would be neuron counts and the number of just-noticeable differences, and neuron counts would also favor the fish.
Thanks for all this, Michael. Lots to say here, but I think the key point is that we don’t place much weight on these particular numbers and, as you well know and have capably demonstrated, we could get different numbers (and ordinal rankings) with various small changes to the methodology. The main point to keep in mind (which I say not for your sake, but for others, as I know you realize this) is that we’d probably get even smaller differences between welfare ranges with many of those changes. One of the main reasons we get large differences between humans and many invertebrates is because of the sheer number of proxies and the focus on cognitive proxies. There’s an argument to be given for that move, but it doesn’t matter here. The point is just that if we were to focus on the hedonic proxies you mention, there would be smaller differences—and it would be more plausible that those would be narrowed further by further research.
If I had more time, I would love to build even more models to aggregate various sets of proxies. But only so many hours in the day!
Also, among the proxies you’ve used, I’d be inclined to give almost all of my weight to a handful of hedonic proxies, namely panic-like behavior, hyperalgesia, PTSD-like behavior, prioritizes pain response in relevant context and motivational trade-off (a cognitive proxy) as indicating the extremes of welfare conditional on sentience, and roughly in that order by weight. The first three all came up “unknown” due to no studies for bees, but there were a few studies suggesting their presence (and none negative) for the fish. Giving almost all of your weight to these proxies would favor the fish over bees. That being said, I wouldn’t be that surprised to find out that bees display those behaviors, too, because I also think bees are very impressive and behaviorally complex.
I might use joy-like behavior and play behavior for the other end of the welfare range, but I expect them to be overshadowed by the intense suffering indicators above, and I don’t expect them to differ too much across the species. There was evidence of play behavior in all three, but only evidence for joy-like behavior in carps.
The next proxies that could make much difference that I think could matter on some models (although I don’t assign them much weight) would be neuron counts and the number of just-noticeable differences, and neuron counts would also favor the fish.
Thanks for all this, Michael. Lots to say here, but I think the key point is that we don’t place much weight on these particular numbers and, as you well know and have capably demonstrated, we could get different numbers (and ordinal rankings) with various small changes to the methodology. The main point to keep in mind (which I say not for your sake, but for others, as I know you realize this) is that we’d probably get even smaller differences between welfare ranges with many of those changes. One of the main reasons we get large differences between humans and many invertebrates is because of the sheer number of proxies and the focus on cognitive proxies. There’s an argument to be given for that move, but it doesn’t matter here. The point is just that if we were to focus on the hedonic proxies you mention, there would be smaller differences—and it would be more plausible that those would be narrowed further by further research.
If I had more time, I would love to build even more models to aggregate various sets of proxies. But only so many hours in the day!