Iāll say up front that I definitely agree that we should look into the impacts on worms a nonzero amount!
Cool! I think this is the main point. If one is thinking about eradicating millions or billions of worms, it is worth thinking at least some hours about their welfare.
I suspect this might be driven by it not being considered to be bad under your own worldview?
I meant bad under the worldview of a random person, not me.
Like itās unsurprising that your preferred worldview doesnāt recommend actions that you consider bad, but actually my guess is that not working on global poverty and development for the meat eater problem is in fact an action that might be widely considered bad in real life for many reasonable operationalisations (though I donāt have empirical evidence to support this).
Given my endorsement of impartial hedonism, and worries about the meat-eating problem, I do not know whether decreasing human mortality is good or bad in many cases, which is definitely a controversial view. However, I do not think it implies any controversial recommendations. I recommend taking into account the effects on animals of global health and development interventions, and also donating more to animal welfare instead of global health and development relative to a world where the meat-eating problem was not a concern. I guess most people would not see these recommendations as bad (and definitely not as bad as torturing people), although I assume many would see them as quite debatable.
Neither of which [extreme torture or excruciating pain] were my wording!
Among the categories of pain defined by the Welfare Footprint Project, I think your wording (ātortureā, not extreme torture) is the closest to excruciating pain.
That being said, I wasnāt actually using torture as a descriptor for the screwworm situation, more just illustrating what I might consider a point of difference between our views, i.e. that I would not be in favour of allowing humans to be tortured by AIs even if you created a BOTEC showed that this caused net positive utils in expectation; and I would not be in favour of an intervention to spread the new world screwworm around the world, even if you created a BOTEC that showed it was the best way of creating utilsāI would reject these at least on deontological grounds in the current state of the world.
I said the estimation of the effects on humans and digital minds would have to account āfor all considerationsā, so it would not be a āBOTECā (back-of-the-envelope-calculation). There is a strong prior against torturing humans, so one would need extremely strong evidence to update enough to do it. A random BOTEC from me would definitely not be enough.
Cool! I think this is the main point. If one is thinking about eradicating millions or billions of worms, it is worth thinking at least some hours about their welfare.
I meant bad under the worldview of a random person, not me.
Given my endorsement of impartial hedonism, and worries about the meat-eating problem, I do not know whether decreasing human mortality is good or bad in many cases, which is definitely a controversial view. However, I do not think it implies any controversial recommendations. I recommend taking into account the effects on animals of global health and development interventions, and also donating more to animal welfare instead of global health and development relative to a world where the meat-eating problem was not a concern. I guess most people would not see these recommendations as bad (and definitely not as bad as torturing people), although I assume many would see them as quite debatable.
Among the categories of pain defined by the Welfare Footprint Project, I think your wording (ātortureā, not extreme torture) is the closest to excruciating pain.
I said the estimation of the effects on humans and digital minds would have to account āfor all considerationsā, so it would not be a āBOTECā (back-of-the-envelope-calculation). There is a strong prior against torturing humans, so one would need extremely strong evidence to update enough to do it. A random BOTEC from me would definitely not be enough.