One of the things I find most frustrating in this area is how there are such wildly differing views on 3.1: we should be able to get some measurements on this—are there EAs working on that? Just looking at how long offspring typically starve in different varieties of k-selected species?
The first time I read this I was perplexed at the lack of a clear conclusion, but now I realize that the argument seems to be against concluding that we have reason to believe net wild animal suffering is different from zero in a negative direction without making a claim about it being positive, is that correct? So: the conclusion is that we should focus on areas where we have more certainty, and wild animal suffering is likely not one of those areas. That seems like a conclusion many EAs share who still care about WAS prima facie.
This page includes an interactive calculator that lets you plug in your own numbers for happiness and suffering for various species to compute an estimate of total welfare that accounts for lifespan and infant mortality.
As far as the painfulness of starvation, I wrote a bit here.
The painfulness of other kinds of deaths and life experiences is something that Sentience Politics wild-animal researchers will write more about in the future, and Animal Ethics also writes about such things.
One of the things I find most frustrating in this area is how there are such wildly differing views on 3.1: we should be able to get some measurements on this—are there EAs working on that? Just looking at how long offspring typically starve in different varieties of k-selected species?
The first time I read this I was perplexed at the lack of a clear conclusion, but now I realize that the argument seems to be against concluding that we have reason to believe net wild animal suffering is different from zero in a negative direction without making a claim about it being positive, is that correct? So: the conclusion is that we should focus on areas where we have more certainty, and wild animal suffering is likely not one of those areas. That seems like a conclusion many EAs share who still care about WAS prima facie.
This page includes an interactive calculator that lets you plug in your own numbers for happiness and suffering for various species to compute an estimate of total welfare that accounts for lifespan and infant mortality.
As far as the painfulness of starvation, I wrote a bit here.
The painfulness of other kinds of deaths and life experiences is something that Sentience Politics wild-animal researchers will write more about in the future, and Animal Ethics also writes about such things.