(Vasco asked me to take a look at this post and I am responding here.)
Hi Vasco,
I’ve been taking a minute to reflect on what I want to say about this kind of project. A few different thoughts, at a few different levels of abstraction.
In the realm of politics, I’m glad the ACLU and FIRE exist, even if I don’t agree with them on everything, because I think they’re useful poles in the ecosystem. I feel similarly about your work. I think this kind of detailed cost-benefit work on non-standard issues, or on standard issues but that leads to non-standard conclusions, is a healthy contribution to EA, separately from whether I agree with or even understand it.
The main barrier to my engaging deeply with your work is that your analyses hinge on strong assumptions that I have no idea how to verify even in theory. The claim that nematodes live net-negative lives, for instance, which you believe with 55% confidence: I have no clue if this is true. I’m not even sure how many hours I would need to devote to form any belief on this whatsoever. (Hundreds?) In general, I have about 2-3 hours of good thinking per day.
IMO, the top comment on this post expresses the “EA consensus” about your style of analysis—I notice that it has gotten more upvotes and such than the post itself. One implication of this is that there is some persuasion work to be done get folks onboard with some of your assumptions, stylistic choices, and modes of analysis. Perhaps a post along the lines of “why I write the way I write” (Nietzsche did this) or “The moral philosophical assumptions underpinning my style of analysis” would go some of the way to bridging that gap.
I get the sense that you are building an elaborate intellectual edifice whose many moving parts are distributed in many posts, comments, and external philosophical texts. That’s well and good, I also have a “headcanon” about my work and ideas that I haven’t fully systematized, e.g. I write almost exclusively about the results of randomized controlled trials without explaining theintellectualfoundations of why I do that. But I think your intellectual foundations are more abstruse and counterintuitive. Readers might enjoy a meta post about those foundations: a “start here to understand Vasco Grilo’s writing” primer.
I am generally on board with using the EA forum as an extended job interview, e.g. establishing a reputation as someone who can reason and write clearly about an arbitrary subject. I think you’re doing a fine job of that. On the other hand, the interaction with Kevin Xia about whether this work is appropriate for Hive, the downvotes that post received, and the fact that you are the only contributor to the soil animals topic here are face value evidence that writing about this topic as much as you do is not career-optimal. Perhaps it deserves its own forum: soilanimalsmatter.substack.com or something like that? And then you you can actually build up the whole intellectual edifice from foundations upwards. I do this (https://regressiontothemeat.substack.com/) and it is working for me. Just a thought.
Thanks for sharing, Mo! I think it is a pretty good sketch. Some points are a bit outdated, or not quite accurate, but I would say one can definetely get a sense of where I am coming from.
Do you have a sense as to why people haven’t quite bridged the inferential gap between wherever they are and your work, despite your (patient, repeated, very thorough) attempts to explain?
With respect to my work on soil animals? I guess people who have read the posts, and like quantitative analyses understand my arguments. However, many of those still disagree on empirical grounds. For example, if they believe the expected total welfare of soil animals is negligible compared with that of farmed animals, in contrast to my estimates. In addition, many disagree for fundamental moral reasons. For instance, if they value averting more intense pain much more strongly than what is justified by its intensity, in contrast to valuing averting pain proportionally to its duration, intensity, and probability as implied by expectationaltotalhedonisticutilitarianism (which I strongly endorse).
By all means, show us the way by doing it better 😃 I’d be happy to read more about where you are coming from, I think your work is interesting and if you are right, it has huge implications for all of us.
That’s interesting, but not what I’m suggesting. I’m suggesting something that would, e.g., explain why you tell people to “ignore the signs of my estimates for the total welfare” when you share posts with them. That is a particular style and it says something about whether one should take your work in a literal spirit or not, which falls under the meta category of why you write the way you write; and to my earlier point, you’re sharing this suggestion here with me in a comment rather than in the post itself 😃 Finally, the fact that there’s a lot of uncertainty about whether wild animals have positive or negative lives is exactly the point I raised about why I have trouble engaging with your work. The meta post I am suggesting, by contrast, motivate and justify this style of reasoning as a whole, rather than providing a particular example of it. The post you’ve shared is a link in a broader chain. I’m suggesting you zoom out and explain what you like about this chain and why you’re building it.
I was not clear in my last comment. I meant my top recommendation of investigating whether soil animals have positive or negative lives does not depend on whether the animal populations I analysed have positive or negative welfare. It depends on interventions changing the welfare of soil animals much more than that of their target beneficiaries in expectation. This is also supported by my estimates that the absolute value of the total welfare of soil animals is much larger than that of other animal populations.
Here is some context about how I make recommendations.
(Vasco asked me to take a look at this post and I am responding here.)
Hi Vasco,
I’ve been taking a minute to reflect on what I want to say about this kind of project. A few different thoughts, at a few different levels of abstraction.
In the realm of politics, I’m glad the ACLU and FIRE exist, even if I don’t agree with them on everything, because I think they’re useful poles in the ecosystem. I feel similarly about your work. I think this kind of detailed cost-benefit work on non-standard issues, or on standard issues but that leads to non-standard conclusions, is a healthy contribution to EA, separately from whether I agree with or even understand it.
The main barrier to my engaging deeply with your work is that your analyses hinge on strong assumptions that I have no idea how to verify even in theory. The claim that nematodes live net-negative lives, for instance, which you believe with 55% confidence: I have no clue if this is true. I’m not even sure how many hours I would need to devote to form any belief on this whatsoever. (Hundreds?) In general, I have about 2-3 hours of good thinking per day.
IMO, the top comment on this post expresses the “EA consensus” about your style of analysis—I notice that it has gotten more upvotes and such than the post itself. One implication of this is that there is some persuasion work to be done get folks onboard with some of your assumptions, stylistic choices, and modes of analysis. Perhaps a post along the lines of “why I write the way I write” (Nietzsche did this) or “The moral philosophical assumptions underpinning my style of analysis” would go some of the way to bridging that gap.
I get the sense that you are building an elaborate intellectual edifice whose many moving parts are distributed in many posts, comments, and external philosophical texts. That’s well and good, I also have a “headcanon” about my work and ideas that I haven’t fully systematized, e.g. I write almost exclusively about the results of randomized controlled trials without explaining the intellectual foundations of why I do that. But I think your intellectual foundations are more abstruse and counterintuitive. Readers might enjoy a meta post about those foundations: a “start here to understand Vasco Grilo’s writing” primer.
I am generally on board with using the EA forum as an extended job interview, e.g. establishing a reputation as someone who can reason and write clearly about an arbitrary subject. I think you’re doing a fine job of that. On the other hand, the interaction with Kevin Xia about whether this work is appropriate for Hive, the downvotes that post received, and the fact that you are the only contributor to the soil animals topic here are face value evidence that writing about this topic as much as you do is not career-optimal. Perhaps it deserves its own forum: soilanimalsmatter.substack.com or something like that? And then you you can actually build up the whole intellectual edifice from foundations upwards. I do this (https://regressiontothemeat.substack.com/) and it is working for me. Just a thought.
Thanks for the comment, @Seth Ariel Green 🔸. I strongly upvoted it.
Out of curiosity, what do you think of GPT5-medium’s attempt at sketching an answer to Seth’s request for the “start here to understand my work” post?
Thanks for sharing, Mo! I think it is a pretty good sketch. Some points are a bit outdated, or not quite accurate, but I would say one can definetely get a sense of where I am coming from.
Do you have a sense as to why people haven’t quite bridged the inferential gap between wherever they are and your work, despite your (patient, repeated, very thorough) attempts to explain?
With respect to my work on soil animals? I guess people who have read the posts, and like quantitative analyses understand my arguments. However, many of those still disagree on empirical grounds. For example, if they believe the expected total welfare of soil animals is negligible compared with that of farmed animals, in contrast to my estimates. In addition, many disagree for fundamental moral reasons. For instance, if they value averting more intense pain much more strongly than what is justified by its intensity, in contrast to valuing averting pain proportionally to its duration, intensity, and probability as implied by expectationaltotal hedonistic utilitarianism (which I strongly endorse).
By all means, show us the way by doing it better 😃 I’d be happy to read more about where you are coming from, I think your work is interesting and if you are right, it has huge implications for all of us.
Thanks, Seth. You may be interested in my post Total number of neurons and welfare of animal populations. There is lots of uncertainty about which wild animals have positive or negative lives. So you can ignore the signs of my estimates for the total welfare of populations of wild animals.
That’s interesting, but not what I’m suggesting. I’m suggesting something that would, e.g., explain why you tell people to “ignore the signs of my estimates for the total welfare” when you share posts with them. That is a particular style and it says something about whether one should take your work in a literal spirit or not, which falls under the meta category of why you write the way you write; and to my earlier point, you’re sharing this suggestion here with me in a comment rather than in the post itself 😃 Finally, the fact that there’s a lot of uncertainty about whether wild animals have positive or negative lives is exactly the point I raised about why I have trouble engaging with your work. The meta post I am suggesting, by contrast, motivate and justify this style of reasoning as a whole, rather than providing a particular example of it. The post you’ve shared is a link in a broader chain. I’m suggesting you zoom out and explain what you like about this chain and why you’re building it.
I was not clear in my last comment. I meant my top recommendation of investigating whether soil animals have positive or negative lives does not depend on whether the animal populations I analysed have positive or negative welfare. It depends on interventions changing the welfare of soil animals much more than that of their target beneficiaries in expectation. This is also supported by my estimates that the absolute value of the total welfare of soil animals is much larger than that of other animal populations.
Here is some context about how I make recommendations.