It feels fairly alarming to me that this post didn’t get more pushback here and is so highly upvoted.
I think it makes a couple interesting points, but then makes extremely crazy sounding claims, taking the Rethink Priorities 7 − 15% numbers at face value, when the arguments for those AFAICT don’t even have particular models behind them. This is a pretty crazy sounding number that needs way better argumentation than “a poll of people said so”, and here it’s just asserted without much commentary at all.
(In addition to things other people have mentioned here, like the 97% number being very sus, and “why are we assuming they have net negative lives?”, describing “10% as bad as a chicken” as a “conservative assumption” that’s like basically made up. Also, it has some random political potshots that aren’t really affecting the core claim but also seem bad for EA Forum culture)
(By contrast it has negative karma on LessWrong. I have weak disagreement with Oliver there about whether it should be more like −9 karma or more like “-2 to 10”, but it was at 85 karma when I found it here before me and a couple people strong downvoted and that seems like EA forum basically has no filter for poorly argued claims)
I basically disagree with this take on the discussion.
Most clearly: this post did generate a lot of pushback. It has more disagree votes than agree votes, the top comment by karma argues against some of its claims and is heavily upvoted and agree-voted, and it led to multiple response posts including one that reaches the opposite conclusion and got more karma & agree votes than this one.
Focusing on the post itself: I think that the post does a decent job of laying out the reasoning for its claims, and contains insights that are relevant and not widely considered/discussed, especially for readers who already (e.g.) think that fish matter to a non-negligible extent and are willing to avoid eating salmon because of that. It takes a lot more bee-days to make a serving of honey than salmon-days to make a serving of salmon, and when Rethink Priorities looked into moral weights they found as about as strong a case for bee sentience/welfare as they did for carp or salmon. So the claim that one should avoid eating honey for basically the reasons given in the post seems like a plausible hypothesis, especially conditional on the views that lead many EAs to avoid eating factory farmed chicken or salmon, and it seems good that people are thinking through that claim.
I don’t buy this post’s conclusion, for reasons that are pretty well covered in existing responses. And I agree that there are some epistemic problems with the way it lays out its arguments, such as using a kilogram-to-kilogram comparison instead of serving-to-serving, incorrectly claiming that RP found that bees display “every” behavioral proxy of consciousness, and its choices about when to label estimates as being “conservative”. And it’s not good that these all point in the same direction, of overstating the case for avoiding honey.
So we at least have a fair amount of agreement about the post itself. But turning it into an exhibit of a general EA-vegan-specific problem feels like a stretch, especially given the response it has received. And even just considering the post by itself, there are posts which have gotten a positive reception on LW that I’ve found to be worse-argued than this. (Though perhaps that could be flipped around to say that there are some bad epistemic patterns in both intellectual subcultures.)
This post did generate a lot of pushback. It has more disagree votes than agree votes, the top comment by karma argues against some of its claims and is heavily upvoted and agree-voted, and it led to multiple response posts including one that reaches the opposite conclusion and got more karma & agree votes than this one.
I agree that this somewhat rebuts what Raemon says. However, I think a large part of Raemon’s point—which your pushback doesn’t address—is that Bentham’s post still received a highly positive karma score (85 when Raemon came upon it).
My sense is that karma shapes the Forum incentive landscape pretty strongly—i.e., authors are incentivized to write the kind of post that they expect will get upvoted. (I remember Lizka[1] mentioning, somewhere, that she/the Forum team found (via user interviews?) that authors tend to care quite a lot about karma.) So, considering how Bentham’s posts are getting upvoted, I kind of expect them to continue writing similar posts with similar reasoning. (Further, I kind of expect others to see Bentham’s writing+reasoning style as a style that ‘works,’ and to copy it.)
The question then becomes: Is this a good outcome? Do we want Forum discourse to look more like this type of post? Is the ‘wisdom of the EA Forum voting crowd’ where we want it to be? (Or, conversely, might there be an undesirable dynamic going on, such as tyranny of the marginal voter?) I have my own takes, here. I invite readers to likewise reflect on these questions, and to perhaps adjust your voting behaviour accordingly.
On the 7-15% figure I don’t actually see where the idea that smaller, less intelligent animals suffer less when they are in physical pain is commonsense comes from. People almost never cite a source for it being commonsense, and I don’t recall having had any opinion about it before I encountered academic philosophy. I think it is almost certainly true that people don’t care very much about small dumb animals, but that, but there are a variety of reasons why that is only moderate evidence for the claim that ordinary people think they experience less intense pain:
-They might not have ever thought about it, since most people don’t feel much need to give philosophical justifications for banal, normal opinions like not caring much about animals.
-Hedonistic utilitarianism is not itself part of commonsense, but without assuming it, you can’t quickly and easily move from “what happens to bees isn’t important” to “bees have low capacity for pain.”
-We know there are cases where people downgrade the importance of what happens to subjects who they see as outside of their community, even when they definitely don’t believe those subjects have diminished capacity for pain. Many ordinary people are nationalists who don’t care that much about foreigners, but they don’t think foreigners feel less pain!
-They might just assume that it is unlikely small simple animals can feel pain at all. This doesn’t necessarily mean they also think that, conditional on small simple animals being able to feel pain they only feel it a little bit.
Independently of what the commonsense prior is here, I’d also say that I have a PhD in the philosophy of consciousness, and I don’t think the claim that less neurons=less capacity for pain is commonly defended in the academic literature. At most some people might defend the more general idea that how conscious a state is comes in degrees, and some theories that allow for that might predict bee pains are not very conscious. But I’ve never seen any sign that this is a consensus view. In general, “more neurons=more intense pains” seems to play badly with the standard functionalist picture that what makes a particular mental state the mental state it is, is it’s typical causes and effects, not its intrinsic properties. Not to mention that it seems plausible there could be aliens without neurons who nonetheless felt pain.
taking the Rethink Priorities 7 − 15% numbers at face value, when the arguments for those AFAICT don’t even have particular models behind them. This is a pretty crazy sounding number that needs way better argumentation than “a poll of people said so”, and here it’s just asserted without much commentary at all.
I’m confused by this statement. The welfare range estimates aren’t based on a “poll” and are based on numerous “particular models.”
taking the Rethink Priorities 7 − 15% numbers at face value, when the arguments for those AFAICT don’t even have particular models behind them
I’m interested to hear what you think the relevant difference is between the epistemic grounding of (1) these figures vs. (2) people’s P(doom)s, which are super common in LW discourse. I can imagine some differences, but the P(dooms) of alignment experts still seem very largely ass-pulled and yet also largely deferred-to.
If you want to read the longer defense of the RP numbers, you can read the RP report or my followup article on the subject https://benthams.substack.com/p/you-cant-tell-how-conscious-animals. Suffice it to say, it strikes me as deeply unwise to base your assessments of bee consciousness on how they look, rather than on behavior. I think the strong confidence that small and simple animals aren’t intensely conscious rests on little more than unquestioned dogma, with nothing very persuasive having ever been said in its favor https://benthams.substack.com/p/betting-on-ubiquitous-pain. Also the RP report wasn’t a poll!
I agree about the 97% number and have corrected it! I think the point made by the number—many more bees than e.g. fish—is correct, but I failed to add the relevant caveats.
Regarding 10% as bad as chicken, that still strikes me as pretty conservative. I think bees spend much of their time suffering from extreme temperatures, disease, etc, and thinking that’s 10% as bad as the life of an average chicken (note: this is before adjusting for sentience differential) strikes me as pretty conservative.
The argument for insects mostly living bad lives is given in the linked post and in this post—if you live a super short life (days or weeks) you don’t get enough welfare to outweigh the badness of a painful death.
The reason it has political potshots is that it was originally a blogpost and I just added it here. If I were writing it specifically for the forum, I wouldn’t have added that—but I also am somewhat irritated by the EA forum culture where it feels like you have to write like you’re making an academic paper rather than having any whimsy or fun!
It feels fairly alarming to me that this post didn’t get more pushback here and is so highly upvoted.
I think it makes a couple interesting points, but then makes extremely crazy sounding claims, taking the Rethink Priorities 7 − 15% numbers at face value, when the arguments for those AFAICT don’t even have particular models behind them. This is a pretty crazy sounding number that needs way better argumentation than “a poll of people said so”, and here it’s just asserted without much commentary at all.
(In addition to things other people have mentioned here, like the 97% number being very sus, and “why are we assuming they have net negative lives?”, describing “10% as bad as a chicken” as a “conservative assumption” that’s like basically made up. Also, it has some random political potshots that aren’t really affecting the core claim but also seem bad for EA Forum culture)
This feels like sort of the central example of why EA Vegan Advocacy is not truthseeking, and it’s everyone’s problem needed to get written. (disclaimer: I am close with the author of that post)
(By contrast it has negative karma on LessWrong. I have weak disagreement with Oliver there about whether it should be more like −9 karma or more like “-2 to 10”, but it was at 85 karma when I found it here before me and a couple people strong downvoted and that seems like EA forum basically has no filter for poorly argued claims)
I basically disagree with this take on the discussion.
Most clearly: this post did generate a lot of pushback. It has more disagree votes than agree votes, the top comment by karma argues against some of its claims and is heavily upvoted and agree-voted, and it led to multiple response posts including one that reaches the opposite conclusion and got more karma & agree votes than this one.
Focusing on the post itself: I think that the post does a decent job of laying out the reasoning for its claims, and contains insights that are relevant and not widely considered/discussed, especially for readers who already (e.g.) think that fish matter to a non-negligible extent and are willing to avoid eating salmon because of that. It takes a lot more bee-days to make a serving of honey than salmon-days to make a serving of salmon, and when Rethink Priorities looked into moral weights they found as about as strong a case for bee sentience/welfare as they did for carp or salmon. So the claim that one should avoid eating honey for basically the reasons given in the post seems like a plausible hypothesis, especially conditional on the views that lead many EAs to avoid eating factory farmed chicken or salmon, and it seems good that people are thinking through that claim.
I don’t buy this post’s conclusion, for reasons that are pretty well covered in existing responses. And I agree that there are some epistemic problems with the way it lays out its arguments, such as using a kilogram-to-kilogram comparison instead of serving-to-serving, incorrectly claiming that RP found that bees display “every” behavioral proxy of consciousness, and its choices about when to label estimates as being “conservative”. And it’s not good that these all point in the same direction, of overstating the case for avoiding honey.
So we at least have a fair amount of agreement about the post itself. But turning it into an exhibit of a general EA-vegan-specific problem feels like a stretch, especially given the response it has received. And even just considering the post by itself, there are posts which have gotten a positive reception on LW that I’ve found to be worse-argued than this. (Though perhaps that could be flipped around to say that there are some bad epistemic patterns in both intellectual subcultures.)
I agree that this somewhat rebuts what Raemon says. However, I think a large part of Raemon’s point—which your pushback doesn’t address—is that Bentham’s post still received a highly positive karma score (85 when Raemon came upon it).
My sense is that karma shapes the Forum incentive landscape pretty strongly—i.e., authors are incentivized to write the kind of post that they expect will get upvoted. (I remember Lizka[1] mentioning, somewhere, that she/the Forum team found (via user interviews?) that authors tend to care quite a lot about karma.) So, considering how Bentham’s posts are getting upvoted, I kind of expect them to continue writing similar posts with similar reasoning. (Further, I kind of expect others to see Bentham’s writing+reasoning style as a style that ‘works,’ and to copy it.)
The question then becomes: Is this a good outcome? Do we want Forum discourse to look more like this type of post? Is the ‘wisdom of the EA Forum voting crowd’ where we want it to be? (Or, conversely, might there be an undesirable dynamic going on, such as tyranny of the marginal voter?) I have my own takes, here. I invite readers to likewise reflect on these questions, and to perhaps adjust your voting behaviour accordingly.
our former Forum Khaleesi
On the 7-15% figure I don’t actually see where the idea that smaller, less intelligent animals suffer less when they are in physical pain is commonsense comes from. People almost never cite a source for it being commonsense, and I don’t recall having had any opinion about it before I encountered academic philosophy. I think it is almost certainly true that people don’t care very much about small dumb animals, but that, but there are a variety of reasons why that is only moderate evidence for the claim that ordinary people think they experience less intense pain:
-They might not have ever thought about it, since most people don’t feel much need to give philosophical justifications for banal, normal opinions like not caring much about animals.
-Hedonistic utilitarianism is not itself part of commonsense, but without assuming it, you can’t quickly and easily move from “what happens to bees isn’t important” to “bees have low capacity for pain.”
-We know there are cases where people downgrade the importance of what happens to subjects who they see as outside of their community, even when they definitely don’t believe those subjects have diminished capacity for pain. Many ordinary people are nationalists who don’t care that much about foreigners, but they don’t think foreigners feel less pain!
-They might just assume that it is unlikely small simple animals can feel pain at all. This doesn’t necessarily mean they also think that, conditional on small simple animals being able to feel pain they only feel it a little bit.
Independently of what the commonsense prior is here, I’d also say that I have a PhD in the philosophy of consciousness, and I don’t think the claim that less neurons=less capacity for pain is commonly defended in the academic literature. At most some people might defend the more general idea that how conscious a state is comes in degrees, and some theories that allow for that might predict bee pains are not very conscious. But I’ve never seen any sign that this is a consensus view. In general, “more neurons=more intense pains” seems to play badly with the standard functionalist picture that what makes a particular mental state the mental state it is, is it’s typical causes and effects, not its intrinsic properties. Not to mention that it seems plausible there could be aliens without neurons who nonetheless felt pain.
I’m confused by this statement. The welfare range estimates aren’t based on a “poll” and are based on numerous “particular models.”
I’m interested to hear what you think the relevant difference is between the epistemic grounding of (1) these figures vs. (2) people’s P(doom)s, which are super common in LW discourse. I can imagine some differences, but the P(dooms) of alignment experts still seem very largely ass-pulled and yet also largely deferred-to.
If you want to read the longer defense of the RP numbers, you can read the RP report or my followup article on the subject https://benthams.substack.com/p/you-cant-tell-how-conscious-animals. Suffice it to say, it strikes me as deeply unwise to base your assessments of bee consciousness on how they look, rather than on behavior. I think the strong confidence that small and simple animals aren’t intensely conscious rests on little more than unquestioned dogma, with nothing very persuasive having ever been said in its favor https://benthams.substack.com/p/betting-on-ubiquitous-pain. Also the RP report wasn’t a poll!
I agree about the 97% number and have corrected it! I think the point made by the number—many more bees than e.g. fish—is correct, but I failed to add the relevant caveats.
Regarding 10% as bad as chicken, that still strikes me as pretty conservative. I think bees spend much of their time suffering from extreme temperatures, disease, etc, and thinking that’s 10% as bad as the life of an average chicken (note: this is before adjusting for sentience differential) strikes me as pretty conservative.
The argument for insects mostly living bad lives is given in the linked post and in this post—if you live a super short life (days or weeks) you don’t get enough welfare to outweigh the badness of a painful death.
The reason it has political potshots is that it was originally a blogpost and I just added it here. If I were writing it specifically for the forum, I wouldn’t have added that—but I also am somewhat irritated by the EA forum culture where it feels like you have to write like you’re making an academic paper rather than having any whimsy or fun!