Vasco Grilo🔸 comments on To a first approximation, all farmed animals are bugs

[Vasco Grilo🔸]

Thanks for the clarifications, Bob! @Bentham’s Bulldog, you may be interested in the 2 comments above from Bob.

In my view, the evidential situation for most arthropods is so sparse that I don’t actually believe we’re in a position to assign meaningful probabilities of sentience—even extremely rough ones. We’re squarely in the domain of the precautionary, not the probabilistic. [...]

This is one of several reasons why focusing on well-studied insects makes sense to me. It’s not that I think BSF larvae are 10× or 100× more likely to be sentient than springtails. It’s that we have a type of evidence for some insects—convergent behavioral, physiological, and neuroanatomical findings—that simply doesn’t exist at all for mites, springtails, and nematodes. And without that evidential base, I’m wary of using a first-pass model to set priorities. Expected value becomes extremely fragile under those conditions, as the inputs aren’t grounded: they’re guesses stacked on guesses.

In this case, I feel like it would also be reasonable to argue that the evidential situation with respect to comparing the individual welfare per animal-year (not probability of sentience) of different species is so sparse that one should just focus on increasing the welfare of vertebrates. At least from my perspective, any comparison of the welfare (not probability of sentience) of shrimps with that of humans involves “guesses stacked on guesses”.

In addition, I see the lack of robust evidence for the sentience of soil springtails, mites, and nematodes as a case for further research on their sentience (although I would be surprised if it updated me towards thinking their expected individual welfare per animal-year is much lower than suggested by “number of neurons”^”exponent”). At some point, there was not robust evidence for the sentience of BSF larvae.

In any case, I assume the points about the robustness of evidence do not apply to soil ants and termites.

So the way I think about prioritization has less to do with estimated probabilities and more to do with where precautionary reasoning can actually get traction. Work on farmed and research arthropods produces immediate welfare improvements, helps develop welfare indicators, and builds the scientific ecosystem we’ll need if we ever hope to understand smaller arthropods.

This makes sense to me. I ranked Arthropoda 1st in the Donation Election on that basis. At the same time, I suspect the optimal spending on research on soil animals is not 0. I got no results for “ants”, “termites”, “springtails”, “mites”, or “nematodes” on WAI’s grantees page.

That’s a much more stable basis for action than trying to set priorities via BOTECs.

I wonder whether there are some calculations one could do to compare the cost-effectiveness of building capacity for research on soil animals via doing this directly, or indirectly through research on farmed invertebrates.

Lastly, this article is good. The possibility the they’re right is one of the things that makes me inclined to see insects as the limit case.

Thanks for sharing! I will have a look.

[Bob Fischer]

Strongly agree about “the evidential situation with respect to comparing the individual welfare per animal-year”! I’ve always taken the numbers from the MWP much less seriously than others. I see that work as one part of a large picture, depending heavily on other arguments.

And thank you for voting for Arthropoda!