I ranked Arthropoda Foundation 1st. I think funding research on the welfare of soil animals would increase welfare more cost-effectively than research on the welfare of farmed invertebrates, but that this is the closest one can get, and that Arthropoda is the organisation best placed to do it.
i agree itās a great area for funding and Iām surprised thereās not more research ongoing on this. My concern is that Anthropoda is operated by some of the same people
Who did the RP moral weights project
Who are doing RPās current cause prioritisation work
Running the WAW initiative.
involved with the Insect Welfare research society
And most/āall of whom were not just welfare researchers, but at least to some extent animal welfare proponents/āactivists before this research started. As far as I can see there is no-one even moderately skeptical of animal welfare/āsentience working on these things, although i get that might be too high a bar here because why would skeptical people want to devote their lives to this kind of research?
I think this personel overlap has the potential to cause conflicts of interests.
I donāt know whether there are enough people in the field to be able to have less personel overlap between these orgs but it feels a bit icky at best and dangerous at worst.
Iām not recommending people donāt donate to these orgs Im just pointing out the extreme personel overlap in this funding/āresearch ecosystem and that i donāt love the situation.
For what itās worth (as someone who helped found Arthropoda but is no longer involved), Iād very much like there to be more convincing arguments against taking insects and other arthropods seriously. I feel pretty heavily incentivized to believe arguments against it as doing the animal welfare work I care more about emotionally (wild animal welfare) would be far easier. Working on animal welfare (and any other issue, if you care about second order effects) is vastly harder if you care about effects on insects, and Iād prefer the simpler world of only caring about vertebrates.
I think itās pretty typical for the people who work on a cause area to be convinced that cause area matters. This is of course a source of bias, but, for example, asking global health charities to hire at least some people skeptical that we should improve the lives of people in developing countries seems likeā¦. a hard request to fulfill at a minimum?
And, I believe that I and probably other people who have worked in this space are skepticsājust not extreme ones. I personally would not bet on any insects having morally relevant experiences, and put the odds at probably <30%. Relative to many this is less skeptical, but in absolute terms it still is skepticismāit sounds like youāre just advocating for there to be extreme skepticsāe.g. people who put the odds at, say, <1%. To analogize to global health again, it already feels odd to say āglobal health organizations should have folks who think there is a >70% chance this isnāt good thing to doā, let alone asking them to have staff who think there is a >99% chance.
itās good to hear that there are more skeptical people working in this space on your front. i take the point about life for all animal welfare people being harder if the consensus becomes we need to care a lot about insects
I donāt understand the comparison to working with humans at all though, it seems a bit absurd. Basically 100 percent of people think humans matter, so itās not even possible to find people who donāt care about them? whereas with insects getting people with 1% ā 30% priors on sentience working on that seems reasonable? Orgs like GiveWell and Global health researchers are often skeptical about what they are researching. Youāre right though that bias is an issue in all research, in itās just about mitigating it.
There are skeptical scientists out there Iāve even seen them commenting on the forumācould they not be brought on board? I get that might be impossible if itās a volunteer organization, but i would hope some people involved were on good terms/āfriends with more skeptical people.
My main point isnāt that i think people shouldnāt work on what they care about, itās that we have purely highly motivated people funding/ārunning a range of organizations that are researching a critically important question about animal welfare, which seems like potentially a strong source of bias.
I personally would not bet on any insects having morally relevant experiences, and put the odds at probably <30%.
Being sceptical about a high probability of sentience does not imply scepticism about work on increasing the welfare of arthropods being very cost-effective (I know you understand this). At least for people caring about expected welfare, I think endorsing a probability of sentience of 10 % leads to only slighly more scepticism about the cost-effectiveness of the work relative to one of 100 %.
Hey @Vasco Grilošø Abraham and i arenāt discussing the cost effectiveness of the work, weāre discussing the merits of having all people who believe in high probabilities of insect sentience working on and funding the work. He was making the point that he was one of the founders of Arthropoda even while his personal percentage chance on moral relevance of insects isnāt necessarily that high.
This is not an unreasonable take, but just in the interest of having an accurate public record, Iām actually the strategy director for WAI (although I was the executive director previously). Also, none of us at Arthropoda are technically animal welfare scientists. Our training is all in different things (for example, my PhD is in engineering mechanics and Bobās a philosopher who published a lot of skeptical pieces on insects).
Basically, I think we came to Arthropoda because the work we did before that changed our minds. More importantly, I donāt think the majority of Arthropodaās work will be about checking for sentience? Rather, weāre taking a precautionary framework about insects being sentient and asking how to improve their welfare if they are. In this context our views on sentience seem less likely to cause a COIāalthough I also expect all our research to be publicly available for people to red-team as needed :)
Finally, fully agree on the extreme personnel overlap. I would love to not be co-running a bug granting charity as a volunteer in addition to my two other jobs! But the resource constraints and unusualness of this space are unfortunately not particularly conducive to finding a ton of people willing to take on leadership roles.
āRather, weāre taking a precautionary framework about insects being sentient and asking how to improve their welfare if they areā.
If this is the case, i think this mission could have been made a bit more clear on @Bob Fischer ās funding post and on the website itself. Re-reading the post though that sentiment does come through if a bit unclearly. On a first read i really did think a big part of it was still researching insect sentience.
Also on a completely side/ā personal note Iām a bit concerned that you āwould love to not be co-running a bug granting charity as a volunteer in addition to my two other jobs!ā I think we are generally more productive if we are happy doing what we love and the work is sustainable. Iāve tried at times dying on the altar of important work and it wasnāt helpful for me or the work!
Personally Iām dubious whether negative findings if they occurred would be promoted/ātaken seriously given how motivated most people involved here to be recognized/āfunded etc.
I am not sure I understand this. People at Arthropoda have an incentive to promote and take seriously negative findings about ways to help farmed arthropods such that the scarce available resources to do this are not wasted. You may be referring to findinds which should update one towards prioritising humans over animals, but Arthropoda is not focussed on this. My concern is that they are not prioritising soil arthropods enough.
@Vasco Grilošø I wasnāt clear sorry, i meant negative findings in the scientific sense, in this case unremarkable findings that might provide evidence against insect sentience. Have edited above hope itās more clear now.
And my comment didnāt address your soil arthropods concern, it was an unrelated point about Anthropoda. i think i failed on clarity here...
I thought quite some people who are doing insect sentience research were skeptical about it to start with. Yes, they mostly already cared about animals. Negative findings would help people to reorient toward animals that are more evidently sentient, and I do think people will be motivated to promote that conclusion.
Itās hard for me to glean what the consensus is in this thread/āon this issue. But if there seems to be a strong case that some outside scrutiny is needed, this might be something The Unjournal (Unjournal.org) could help with. Bringing āoutside the EA bubbleā academic expertise to weigh in is one of our key things
We generally focus on economics and social science but we might be able to stretch to this. (Feel free to dm/āsuggest/āping me).
hey @david_reinstein appreciate that! Perhaps though given the apparent strong disagreement to my concerns about conflicts of interest /ā the same people managing a bunch of intertwined orgs Iām not sure many other think thereās a big issue here.
I ranked Arthropoda Foundation 1st. I think funding research on the welfare of soil animals would increase welfare more cost-effectively than research on the welfare of farmed invertebrates, but that this is the closest one can get, and that Arthropoda is the organisation best placed to do it.
i agree itās a great area for funding and Iām surprised thereās not more research ongoing on this. My concern is that Anthropoda is operated by some of the same people
Who did the RP moral weights project
Who are doing RPās current cause prioritisation work
Running the WAW initiative.
involved with the Insect Welfare research society
And most/āall of whom were not just welfare researchers, but at least to some extent animal welfare proponents/āactivists before this research started. As far as I can see there is no-one even moderately skeptical of animal welfare/āsentience working on these things, although i get that might be too high a bar here because why would skeptical people want to devote their lives to this kind of research?
I think this personel overlap has the potential to cause conflicts of interests.
I donāt know whether there are enough people in the field to be able to have less personel overlap between these orgs but it feels a bit icky at best and dangerous at worst.
Iām not recommending people donāt donate to these orgs Im just pointing out the extreme personel overlap in this funding/āresearch ecosystem and that i donāt love the situation.
For what itās worth (as someone who helped found Arthropoda but is no longer involved), Iād very much like there to be more convincing arguments against taking insects and other arthropods seriously. I feel pretty heavily incentivized to believe arguments against it as doing the animal welfare work I care more about emotionally (wild animal welfare) would be far easier. Working on animal welfare (and any other issue, if you care about second order effects) is vastly harder if you care about effects on insects, and Iād prefer the simpler world of only caring about vertebrates.
I think itās pretty typical for the people who work on a cause area to be convinced that cause area matters. This is of course a source of bias, but, for example, asking global health charities to hire at least some people skeptical that we should improve the lives of people in developing countries seems likeā¦. a hard request to fulfill at a minimum?
And, I believe that I and probably other people who have worked in this space are skepticsājust not extreme ones. I personally would not bet on any insects having morally relevant experiences, and put the odds at probably <30%. Relative to many this is less skeptical, but in absolute terms it still is skepticismāit sounds like youāre just advocating for there to be extreme skepticsāe.g. people who put the odds at, say, <1%. To analogize to global health again, it already feels odd to say āglobal health organizations should have folks who think there is a >70% chance this isnāt good thing to doā, let alone asking them to have staff who think there is a >99% chance.
itās good to hear that there are more skeptical people working in this space on your front. i take the point about life for all animal welfare people being harder if the consensus becomes we need to care a lot about insects
I donāt understand the comparison to working with humans at all though, it seems a bit absurd. Basically 100 percent of people think humans matter, so itās not even possible to find people who donāt care about them? whereas with insects getting people with 1% ā 30% priors on sentience working on that seems reasonable? Orgs like GiveWell and Global health researchers are often skeptical about what they are researching. Youāre right though that bias is an issue in all research, in itās just about mitigating it.
There are skeptical scientists out there Iāve even seen them commenting on the forumācould they not be brought on board? I get that might be impossible if itās a volunteer organization, but i would hope some people involved were on good terms/āfriends with more skeptical people.
My main point isnāt that i think people shouldnāt work on what they care about, itās that we have purely highly motivated people funding/ārunning a range of organizations that are researching a critically important question about animal welfare, which seems like potentially a strong source of bias.
Hi Abraham.
Being sceptical about a high probability of sentience does not imply scepticism about work on increasing the welfare of arthropods being very cost-effective (I know you understand this). At least for people caring about expected welfare, I think endorsing a probability of sentience of 10 % leads to only slighly more scepticism about the cost-effectiveness of the work relative to one of 100 %.
Hey @Vasco Grilošø Abraham and i arenāt discussing the cost effectiveness of the work, weāre discussing the merits of having all people who believe in high probabilities of insect sentience working on and funding the work. He was making the point that he was one of the founders of Arthropoda even while his personal percentage chance on moral relevance of insects isnāt necessarily that high.
This is not an unreasonable take, but just in the interest of having an accurate public record, Iām actually the strategy director for WAI (although I was the executive director previously). Also, none of us at Arthropoda are technically animal welfare scientists. Our training is all in different things (for example, my PhD is in engineering mechanics and Bobās a philosopher who published a lot of skeptical pieces on insects).
Basically, I think we came to Arthropoda because the work we did before that changed our minds. More importantly, I donāt think the majority of Arthropodaās work will be about checking for sentience? Rather, weāre taking a precautionary framework about insects being sentient and asking how to improve their welfare if they are. In this context our views on sentience seem less likely to cause a COIāalthough I also expect all our research to be publicly available for people to red-team as needed :)
Finally, fully agree on the extreme personnel overlap. I would love to not be co-running a bug granting charity as a volunteer in addition to my two other jobs! But the resource constraints and unusualness of this space are unfortunately not particularly conducive to finding a ton of people willing to take on leadership roles.
āRather, weāre taking a precautionary framework about insects being sentient and asking how to improve their welfare if they areā.
If this is the case, i think this mission could have been made a bit more clear on @Bob Fischer ās funding post and on the website itself. Re-reading the post though that sentiment does come through if a bit unclearly. On a first read i really did think a big part of it was still researching insect sentience.
Also on a completely side/ā personal note Iām a bit concerned that you āwould love to not be co-running a bug granting charity as a volunteer in addition to my two other jobs!ā I think we are generally more productive if we are happy doing what we love and the work is sustainable. Iāve tried at times dying on the altar of important work and it wasnāt helpful for me or the work!
Thanks, Nick.
I am not sure I understand this. People at Arthropoda have an incentive to promote and take seriously negative findings about ways to help farmed arthropods such that the scarce available resources to do this are not wasted. You may be referring to findinds which should update one towards prioritising humans over animals, but Arthropoda is not focussed on this. My concern is that they are not prioritising soil arthropods enough.
@Vasco Grilošø I wasnāt clear sorry, i meant negative findings in the scientific sense, in this case unremarkable findings that might provide evidence against insect sentience. Have edited above hope itās more clear now.
And my comment didnāt address your soil arthropods concern, it was an unrelated point about Anthropoda. i think i failed on clarity here...
I thought quite some people who are doing insect sentience research were skeptical about it to start with. Yes, they mostly already cared about animals. Negative findings would help people to reorient toward animals that are more evidently sentient, and I do think people will be motivated to promote that conclusion.
Itās hard for me to glean what the consensus is in this thread/āon this issue. But if there seems to be a strong case that some outside scrutiny is needed, this might be something The Unjournal (Unjournal.org) could help with. Bringing āoutside the EA bubbleā academic expertise to weigh in is one of our key things
We generally focus on economics and social science but we might be able to stretch to this. (Feel free to dm/āsuggest/āping me).
hey @david_reinstein appreciate that! Perhaps though given the apparent strong disagreement to my concerns about conflicts of interest /ā the same people managing a bunch of intertwined orgs Iām not sure many other think thereās a big issue here.