Outsourcing the welfare estimates to Gemini seems like a risky move to me. It’s a key part of the whole analysis, but is an extremely challenging question to begin answering. What’s the reason to expect Gemini to be able to do a good job of this, given the blind spots we know current AI models still have?
I put little trust in Gemini’s or anyone’s estimates about whether soil nematodes, mites, and springtails have positive or negative lives. However, my conclusions do not depend on the specific values of Gemini’s guesses. Any guesses for the hedonistic welfare per animal-year as a fraction of that of fully healthy animals which were negative, and not super close to 0 would lead to similar conclusions. In addition, my sense is that most people working on wild animal welfare would guess soil nematodes, mites, and springtails have negative lives. I have now clarified this in the post. In addition, Gemini’s estimates are in close agreement with Ambitious Impact’s estimate for wild bugs.
Gemini provided best guesses for soil nematodes, mites, and springtails of −67 %, −44 %, and −38 %, which are 1.60, 1.05, and 0.905 times Ambitious Impact’s estimate of −42 % for wild bugs based on their deprecated welfare points system.
If I’m understanding right, this would flip all your conclusions on their head, and instead of trying to eliminate wild animal habitats, the top priority would be to increase them?
Right.
Such extreme sensitivity to highly uncertain quantities strikes me as a strong reductio ad absurdum argument against this approach to decision making on this kind of question. Otherwise we find ourselves oscillating wildly between “destroy all nature” and “destroy all humans” on the basis of each piece of new information, never being especially confident in either.
Uncertainty about whether wild animals have positive or negative lives only directly translates into uncertainty about whether one should increase or decrease wild-animal-years at the margin, which is not absurd, and neither is my recommendation of saving human lives cost-effectively. Killing all wild animals or humans are not live options.
I like Bayesianism and expected value maximization as a framework for decision making under uncertainty, but when considering situations with enormous amounts of value described by extremely speculative probability estimates, I think we probably need to approach things differently (or at least adapt our priors so as to be less sensitive to these kind of problems). Something like Holden Karnofsky’s approach here (which Anthony DiGiovanni shared with me on a recent post on insect suffering).
Approaches neglecting the effects on wild animals would be implicitly considering them negligible. For this to be the case, I think one would need an unreasonably certain prior that wild animals have welfare almost exactly equal to 0.
Thanks for the comment, Toby.
I put little trust in Gemini’s or anyone’s estimates about whether soil nematodes, mites, and springtails have positive or negative lives. However, my conclusions do not depend on the specific values of Gemini’s guesses. Any guesses for the hedonistic welfare per animal-year as a fraction of that of fully healthy animals which were negative, and not super close to 0 would lead to similar conclusions. In addition, my sense is that most people working on wild animal welfare would guess soil nematodes, mites, and springtails have negative lives. I have now clarified this in the post. In addition, Gemini’s estimates are in close agreement with Ambitious Impact’s estimate for wild bugs.
Right.
Uncertainty about whether wild animals have positive or negative lives only directly translates into uncertainty about whether one should increase or decrease wild-animal-years at the margin, which is not absurd, and neither is my recommendation of saving human lives cost-effectively. Killing all wild animals or humans are not live options.
Approaches neglecting the effects on wild animals would be implicitly considering them negligible. For this to be the case, I think one would need an unreasonably certain prior that wild animals have welfare almost exactly equal to 0.