“Right now, if humans and farmed animals are considered together, total global welfare may be declining at increasing speed, and could already be well below zero.” Given that there are way more wild animals than farmed animals, this is probably determined by whether wild animal lives are net negative, and how much humans are reducing their population overall, right?
I’m not sure this metric is relevant : biomass weight is massively dominated by the largest mammals just for the reason that they are big.
Going by this metric, it would mean that having one super obese 400kg individual, or one small cow, counts the same as having 100 human babies (not to talk about elephants).
I think number of individuals is much more relevant here. And there just happens to be a lot of smaller individuals.
Yeah, I didn’t intend to suggest that biomass is actually the metric, but more like, if you believe that the “intensity of experience” ratio is at least as large as the mass ratio (not because of the mass, but because the larger creatures tend to also have more complex brains and behaviour and so on), then actually farmed animals may have at least comparable if not more “total experience” than wild animals.
Great point—it was flagged in the linked post, but I forgot to explicit that.
Regarding wild animals, it is so hard to estimate whether their lives are overall net negative (or positive) and to what extent, that I forgot to precise this huge caveat here. We still don’t have good enough data, and there are large uncertainties (e.g. what is the impact of climate change if it makes siberia more habitable?)
But this could indeed change the overall sign of the impact of humanity (and there are some futures where we take better care of wild animals—which would be great).
But yeah, more solid data is needed on that topic.
“Right now, if humans and farmed animals are considered together, total global welfare may be declining at increasing speed, and could already be well below zero.” Given that there are way more wild animals than farmed animals, this is probably determined by whether wild animal lives are net negative, and how much humans are reducing their population overall, right?
This is surely true by number but I’m not sure it would be true on all reasonable weightings? See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_(ecology)#/media/File:Terrestrial_biomass.jpg
I’m not sure this metric is relevant : biomass weight is massively dominated by the largest mammals just for the reason that they are big.
Going by this metric, it would mean that having one super obese 400kg individual, or one small cow, counts the same as having 100 human babies (not to talk about elephants).
I think number of individuals is much more relevant here. And there just happens to be a lot of smaller individuals.
Yeah, I didn’t intend to suggest that biomass is actually the metric, but more like, if you believe that the “intensity of experience” ratio is at least as large as the mass ratio (not because of the mass, but because the larger creatures tend to also have more complex brains and behaviour and so on), then actually farmed animals may have at least comparable if not more “total experience” than wild animals.
Oh, as a proxy of that.
I don’t think I agree since I am not convinced that neural count is the relevant metric but I understand better the use of this proxy.
Great point—it was flagged in the linked post, but I forgot to explicit that.
Regarding wild animals, it is so hard to estimate whether their lives are overall net negative (or positive) and to what extent, that I forgot to precise this huge caveat here.
We still don’t have good enough data, and there are large uncertainties (e.g. what is the impact of climate change if it makes siberia more habitable?)
But this could indeed change the overall sign of the impact of humanity (and there are some futures where we take better care of wild animals—which would be great).
But yeah, more solid data is needed on that topic.