estimate the cropland- and pasture-years per $ for the interventions they fund.
What would they do with such an estimate? I don’t think anyone, you included, knows with any more than very slim confidence, if it’s good or bad for soil animals to turn wild land into cropland or vice versa.
I would support interventions resulting in more m2-years of cropland and pasture per $. I guess soil animals have negative lives, and cropland and pasture are the 2 biomes besides desert with the least soil arthropods per unit area according to the means in Table S4 of Rosenberg et al. (2023), so I think increasing cropland and pasture implies less soil animals with negative lives in expectation.
I am not confident at all about whether soil animals have negative or positive lives. I havebeenhighlightingthat decreasing the uncertainty about this would be great. However, I still recommend interventions based on my best guess. I endorse maximising expected welfare (I see any alternatives as way worse), and I believe the expected effects on soil animals are much larger than those on target beneficiaries for the vast majority of interventions, so it makes sense I account for effects on soil animals despite their uncertainty.
Sorry for being this blunt, but EA is about using evidence and reason to identify the most effective ways to help others. I can’t possibly see how operating on a vague guess is on par with that.
This criticism is independent of the fact that I still claim a “negative life” is not a concept we should incorporate into moral theories, and that we definitely shouldn’t aim to just cull all animals whose lives we somehow think are negative.
My sense is that most people working on wild animal welfare would guess soil animals have negative lives. In addition, Karolina Sarek, Joey Savoie, and David Moss estimated in 2018, based on a weighted factor model, that wild bugs have a welfare per animal-year equal to −42 % of that of fully happy wild bugs. In my last post about soil animals, I assumed −25 %, which is less negative than they supposed.
What would they do with such an estimate? I don’t think anyone, you included, knows with any more than very slim confidence, if it’s good or bad for soil animals to turn wild land into cropland or vice versa.
Hi Guy,
I would support interventions resulting in more m2-years of cropland and pasture per $. I guess soil animals have negative lives, and cropland and pasture are the 2 biomes besides desert with the least soil arthropods per unit area according to the means in Table S4 of Rosenberg et al. (2023), so I think increasing cropland and pasture implies less soil animals with negative lives in expectation.
I am not confident at all about whether soil animals have negative or positive lives. I have been highlighting that decreasing the uncertainty about this would be great. However, I still recommend interventions based on my best guess. I endorse maximising expected welfare (I see any alternatives as way worse), and I believe the expected effects on soil animals are much larger than those on target beneficiaries for the vast majority of interventions, so it makes sense I account for effects on soil animals despite their uncertainty.
Sorry for being this blunt, but EA is about using evidence and reason to identify the most effective ways to help others. I can’t possibly see how operating on a vague guess is on par with that.
This criticism is independent of the fact that I still claim a “negative life” is not a concept we should incorporate into moral theories, and that we definitely shouldn’t aim to just cull all animals whose lives we somehow think are negative.
My sense is that most people working on wild animal welfare would guess soil animals have negative lives. In addition, Karolina Sarek, Joey Savoie, and David Moss estimated in 2018, based on a weighted factor model, that wild bugs have a welfare per animal-year equal to −42 % of that of fully happy wild bugs. In my last post about soil animals, I assumed −25 %, which is less negative than they supposed.