There is more than exactly zero evidence about whether soil animals have negative or positive lives. In this sense, I would not say we are clueless about it. I agree the uncertainty is very large, to the point I guess the probability of any intervention being beneficial/​harmful is close to 50 % due to the probability of soil animals having positive/​negative lives being close to 50 %. One can avoid this problem with a best guess that soil animals have neutral lives in expectation, but I do not think this is reasonable. It would be a huge coincidence because there are lots of positive and negative values, but a single neutral value (0).
In one of my posts, I used guesses from Gemini for the welfare per animal-year of soil animals as a fraction of the welfare per animal-year of fully healthy soil animals. However, I would now guess soil animals to have negative lives regardless of Gemini’s or other LLMs’ guesses. 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.
It would be great if Rethink Priorities (RP), the Welfare Footprint Institute (WFI), Wild Animal Initiative (WAI), or others investigated whether soil animals have positive or negative lives. I would be happy to donate myself. I emailed and tagged people from those organisations about this, but only Cynthia Schuck‑Paim from WFI replied, saying Wladimir Alonso from WFI is working on a project related to assessing differences in hedonic capacity, which I guess relates to this post.
Hi Jack,
There is more than exactly zero evidence about whether soil animals have negative or positive lives. In this sense, I would not say we are clueless about it. I agree the uncertainty is very large, to the point I guess the probability of any intervention being beneficial/​harmful is close to 50 % due to the probability of soil animals having positive/​negative lives being close to 50 %. One can avoid this problem with a best guess that soil animals have neutral lives in expectation, but I do not think this is reasonable. It would be a huge coincidence because there are lots of positive and negative values, but a single neutral value (0).
In one of my posts, I used guesses from Gemini for the welfare per animal-year of soil animals as a fraction of the welfare per animal-year of fully healthy soil animals. However, I would now guess soil animals to have negative lives regardless of Gemini’s or other LLMs’ guesses. 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.
It would be great if Rethink Priorities (RP), the Welfare Footprint Institute (WFI), Wild Animal Initiative (WAI), or others investigated whether soil animals have positive or negative lives. I would be happy to donate myself. I emailed and tagged people from those organisations about this, but only Cynthia Schuck‑Paim from WFI replied, saying Wladimir Alonso from WFI is working on a project related to assessing differences in hedonic capacity, which I guess relates to this post.