Thanks for the post, Tristan. I am pessimistic about finding interventions that robustly increase welfare (in expectation) accounting for soil animals and microorganisms. I do not think electrically stunnning qualifies, although it decreases intense pain experienced by the target beneficiaries, and the ratio between effects on target beneficiaries and other organisms is much smaller than for the vast majority of interventions.
This is unclear to me. I estimated the above is not the case for individual welfare per fully-healthy-animal-year proportional to “individual number of neurons”^”exponent”, and “exponent” = 1.5, which is the upper bound of the range of 0.5 to 1.5 that I guess covers reasonable best guesses. For that exponent, I calculate the absolute value of the total welfare of wild birds, mammals, and finfishes is 4.12 % of the total welfare of humans, and that the absolute value of the total welfare of soil ants, termites, springtails, mites, and nematodes is 1.89 % of the total welfare of humans.
Thanks for the post, Tristan. I am pessimistic about finding interventions that robustly increase welfare (in expectation) accounting for soil animals and microorganisms. I do not think electrically stunnning qualifies, although it decreases intense pain experienced by the target beneficiaries, and the ratio between effects on target beneficiaries and other organisms is much smaller than for the vast majority of interventions.
This is unclear to me. I estimated the above is not the case for individual welfare per fully-healthy-animal-year proportional to “individual number of neurons”^”exponent”, and “exponent” = 1.5, which is the upper bound of the range of 0.5 to 1.5 that I guess covers reasonable best guesses. For that exponent, I calculate the absolute value of the total welfare of wild birds, mammals, and finfishes is 4.12 % of the total welfare of humans, and that the absolute value of the total welfare of soil ants, termites, springtails, mites, and nematodes is 1.89 % of the total welfare of humans.