Vasco Grilo🔸 comments on Poll: How convinced are you that whiteleg shrimps are sentient?

[Vasco Grilo🔸]

Thanks for the post, Guillaume.

I think hedonistic welfare per unit time should be represented as a practically continuous distribution. This implies a probability of practically 0 for the welfare per unit time being equal to any particular value, including 0, which results in a probability of sentience of practically 100 %. Here is a related article arguing for accepting that all animals are conscious, and focussing on how they are conscious.

I believe increasing the welfare of shrimps can still have negligible benefits despite the above.

You may be interested in my post Are you overestimating the importance of the probability of sentience?.

Summary

• If you trust there is as little variation in the probability of sentience as suggested by the values used by Ambitious Impact (AIM) and Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE), or presented in Bob Fischer’s book about comparing welfare across species, I believe there are other factors which may be more important for the probability of a small donation increasing animal welfare:

  • Donating to incremental instead of hits-based interventions.

  • Donating to smaller organisations.

  • Donating to organisations in lower income countries

• I wonder to what extent people donate to interventions targeting animals which are more likely to be sentient to boost the probability of increasing welfare. People routinely take actions which are super unlikely to actually matter:

  • I calculate driving a car for 10 km in Great Britain without a seatbelt leads to 1 additional death with a probability of 1 in 73.0 M. AIM uses a probability of sentience of shrimps which is 34.2 M times as high.

  • Andrew Gelman found the probability of a voter in a small US state polling around ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ in a close election nationally changing the outcome of the national election could get as high as 1 in 3 million. AIM uses a probability of sentience of shrimps which is 1.40 M times as high.