I see BB did a more expansive reply on Substack but just commenting on a couple of things:
Beekeepers are further incentivized to keep their hives living and healthy, which likely is a positive contributor to farmed bee welfare.
This seems not that strong at all? You could make the exact same case for chicken or egg farmers but I don’t think many people would be arguing that those chickens have net positive lives.
Finally, the empirical evidence for welfare is both limited and mixed but in my opinion points mildly towards farmed bees having net positive lives, or at least better than pollinators in the wild.
How come you’re using pollinators in the wild as the reference point? I would assume the counterfactual is less honeybees are bred/managed, so the reference point should be whether their lives are worth living at al,l rather than having less suffering than wild bees (taking the latter half of your clause).
Bees are not locked down and have exit options like swarming. Thus, revealed preferences point towards them preferring to be in managed hives over wild ones.
Again, it would be perfectly rational for bees to stay in managed scenarios if they believe their lives will go from −5/10 to −8/10 by swarming. But I also generally think this is a weak argument for the reasons BB laid out e.g. bees being bred for docility, queen bees having their wings clipped, in conjunction with pheremones from the queen.
With this, it feels like most of your “On balance, I think it’s likely that farmed bees have net positive lives.” argument falls away.
Also, I’m curious to hear more about your thinking on:
I think many EAs take it as a given that insects have net negative lives. I think this is a mistaken inference drawn from swapping intuitions of K-selected species unto the actual experiences of r-selected species.
First of all I should mention that the Forum post above is only a subset (~22%, ~850 words) of the whole Substack post (~3700 words) that covers the summary and intro. Totally fine if you didn’t notice that, it’s my fault for not making the formatting more transparent.
I see BB did a more expansive reply on Substack
(I don’t think his reply was more expansive than yours; don’t sell yourself short!)
This seems not that strong at all? You could make the exact same case for chicken or egg farmers but I don’t think many people would be arguing that those chickens have net positive lives.
Footnote 1 addresses that.”The case for farmed bees is dissimilar to the case of (e.g.) farmed broiler chickens or pigs. Because farmed chickens are used only for their meat, the incentives of the farmers are to cram them with as much food as possible and for the chickens to grow as fast as possible. They do not need to be happy (unless happier animals taste better, and I think there is little to negative empirical evidence of this). The pain-pleasure signaling mechanisms are almost completely irrelevant to caged animals since their display of complex behavior is incidental to their use as farmed animals, while for bees it’s critical.”
How come you’re using pollinators in the wild as the reference point? I would assume the counterfactual is less honeybees are bred/managed, so the reference point should be whether their lives are worth living at al,l rather than having less suffering than wild bees (taking the latter half of your clause).
Addressed in the post; basically if pollination by bees don’t happen, the crops are still out there and farmers still need to find alternative pollination sources. Also my wording above is (relatively) careful (“mildly towards farmed bees having net positive lives, or at least better than pollinators in the wild.”) to indicate two different reference points, rather than conflating the two as the same reference point.
But I also generally think this is a weak argument for the reasons BB laid out e.g. bees being bred for docility, queen bees having their wings clipped, in conjunction with pheremones from the queen.
See this comment reply. Frequency of wing-clipping is an empirical question and I agree it’s somewhat cruxy.
With this, it feels like most of your “On balance, I think it’s likely that farmed bees have net positive lives.” argument falls away.
That said, I don’t think the exit options argument is central or the strongest piece of evidence.
Also, I’m curious to hear more about your thinking on:
I think many EAs take it as a given that insects have net negative lives. I think this is a mistaken inference drawn from swapping intuitions of K-selected species unto the actual experiences of r-selected species.
See here. Though the wording could be tidied up a bit.
See here. Though the wording could be tidied up a bit.
I read that now and think there’s something to the idea that some animals suffer less from death/injury than we would assume (if early death is a statistical near-certainty for those animals and there’s nothing they can do to control their luck there, so they’d rather focus on finding mates/getting the mating ritual right, which is about upsides more than downsides). The most convincing example I can think of are mayflies. It seems plausible that mayflies (who only live 1-2 days in their adult form) don’t suffer when they get injured because avoiding injury is a comparatively low priority. (I remember reading that there’s behavioral evidence that some adult insects keep eating or mating even as they get seriously physically injured, which supports this point. At the same time, this isn’t the case with all insects and may not even be the case for the larval stage of the adult insect in question: Mayfly *nymphs* – the baby stage – live a lot longer before they morph into adult mayflies, and their nymph lifestyle involves less seeking and risk-taking behavior and more maintenance and avoidance behavior.)
This is a bit nitpicky, but I would flag that the above is somewhat orthogonal to the r-/K-selection distinction, and that this distinction doesn’t seem to carve reality at its joints particularly well, in the first place. Claude claims that sea turtles qualify as K-selected since they don’t reach fertility quickly and have long lifespans (50-80+ years). At the same time, they have huge infant mortality. Thinking back to the nature documentaries I watched, I don’t recall that the baby turtles seemed aware of predators—so I’m sympathetic to the view that all that is on their mind is excitedly getting to the ocean for that amazing swimming feeling. Still, since they’re long-lived when they succeed, they probably need to learn to look after their limbs and bodies, so I also suspect that, unfortunately, getting eaten by birds or crocodiles is very painful for them. Evolution lacks compassion, so it won’t pay the extra cost to only turn on “pain when your limbs get injured” after the turtles made it through the most difficult first couple of hours or days.
Claude btw also says that bees are K-selected because the parental investment is high—but that seems like another edge case and some of the logic you mentioned regarding bees and eusociality does seem plausible to me (even if I would put very little weight on it compared to considerations like “when we observe them, do they show signs of distress, and how often?”).
Male elephant seals are also K-selected even though only 5-10% of them successfully reproduce. (You might think that the successful ones experience so much pleasure that it’s worth all the frustration of the unsuccessful ones—but that’s questionable and it may also be that being an unsuccessful male elephant seal is particularly unpleasant because their experience may dominated by status anxiety and sexual frustration.)
Next to species longevity leading to the need to look after one’s limbs and body, another thing that I think matters a lot for species welfare ranges is whether animals have prey animal psychology. For animals who are aware enough to understand the concept of predation (hopefully baby turtles will not qualify here just yet?), predation often seems like a massive source of stress and suffering even if the animal is not currently under attack. I’ve read that some prey animals exhibit signs of PTSD in the mere presence of predators. Mice can die from anxiety/stress when they are trapped in an area where they don’t feel like they can hide. In the book series Animorphs, the idea of being a shrew is portrayed as stress- and fear-dominated (which left quite the impression on me as a kid). While I understand that this is fiction rather than facts-based, it does seem pretty congruent with how I’d feel if I imagine being a mouse or shrew.
By contrast, while marmots are technically prey animals too, they probably have much less of a prey animal psychology (or at least one that isn’t constantly “on”) because they can at least feel very safe whenever they go inside their burrows – no snakes high up in the mountains, foxes are too big to fit inside the burrow, and predatory birds are bad at fighting underground so they don’t go into the burrows either, even though they’d probably fit in there. (Being a marmot also seems extra cozy because part of their strategy is to slow down their metabolism and just chill during the winter.)
These considerations about the interaction of threats, places of safety, how this affects animal psychology, etc., gets me to a more general critique of the economics reasoning that underlies some of the methodology here. It seems too simplistic to me and it seems to misunderstand what suffering is about.
As Anni Leskelä writes in a post on whether social animals suffer more:
Contrary to the standard biology textbook view, suffering is more than just a signal of a harmful situation. Intense suffering especially is primarily a motivational state that facilitates not only direct avoidance of harmful acts and environments but also complex decisions under threat or risk, long-term learning, social investment and bonding, competition and communicating, all depending on the other aspects of an animal’s evolutionary history, cognition, and lifestyle.
[...]
Suffering as a motivational state is typically the mental component of an animal’s homeostatic regulation, i.e. the processes that keep all the relevant physiological variables between healthy parameters. Most things that threaten your homeostasis in a way that humans have historically been able to survive when motivated to do so will cause some kind of suffering: thirst when your blood volume starts to drop, pain when a wound opens and leaves you vulnerable to pathogens and blood loss, sickness when you have ingested toxins and need to expel them. When the threat isn’t currently actual but can pretty reliably be predicted to come true unless you take physiological or behavioural precautions, your species will evolve predictive homeostatic processes. Many of these predictive processes are cognitive or emotional in nature, e.g. people often feel distress in darkness and high places – things that cause absolutely no damage in themselves, but correlate with future homeostatic disturbances.
(What I call “prey animal psycholgy” is an instance of those predictive processes, as are anxiety disorders in humans.) I feel like these interactions between “situations where the animal’s reward circuit fires negative/positive rewards” and “how the animal develops negative or positive feelings that are somehow about that reward, but they come up in other situations via learning,” call into question the applicability of cost-balancing around reward circuitry and animal reward signals. All of that seems to be overshadowed by some of the ways that second-order negative feelings (negative feelings that are about the positive or negative signals from the reward circuit) seem asymmetric from second-order positive feelings. Namely, there are more ways to not get positive reward than there are ways to get positive reward, so animals will often be hungry, horny, struggle with addiction (and positive reward wearing off/becoming less satisfying), feel like they don’t have enough of something, etc, even if there’s a sense in which first-order reward signals would be symmetric or equally easily available/avoidable in the environment. Relatedly, there’s the (generalized) Anna Karenina principle (both in relation to psychology and biology): there are more ways for things to be off rather than perfect, so it rarely makes sense for animal to feel like all is good the way it is (unless you’re a marmot during hibernation!). Things can also go wrong in a mechanistic, biological way and cause chronic pain and conditions for extreme unhappiness. For instance, post-viral malaise and fatigue syndromes (which existed before Covid, possibly 1% of the US population already had significant issues of that sort, and it’s more prevalent in world regions where specific illnesses are common, like dengue fever). It seems to me that natural selection doesn’t “see” those causes of chronic suffering in an appropriately proportional way, because it’s not costly to create the conditions for chronic suffering (it’s the opposite—it would be costly to make the organism safe from malfunctions of that sort). Unfortunately, there’s no equally-frequent counterbalancing phenomenon where things happen to coincidentally go particularly well and then the person is chronically super blissed out and chronically invulnerable. (Some people are genetically very lucky or have life go well so that success attracts more success, but it’s not nearly equally common. Personally, I also think that the depths of things going wrong are higher than the highs of when they go right, but I acknowledge that this is a contested subjective impression.)
Lastly, in humans, there’s also some phenotypic variation in life-history strategies, “fast” and “slow”. Fast is associated with things we tend to think of as bad for welfare, such as cluster B personality disorder, low parental investment, unpredictable childhood stress, etc. Sure, cluster B personality disorders are not just associated with increased suicidality and other negative life outcomes, they are also associated with periods of (hypo)mania, or BPD is sometimes said to have extreme emotional highs that other people don’t get to experience. And maybe there’s some truth to that. But insofar as we are inclined to think that fast-paced life-history strategies in humans aren’t that great for individuals well-being-wise, this again calls into question why natural selection would somehow manage to make success so good in fast-selected animals at the species level that it outweighs all the statistically more common instances where life fails.
(I’m aware that a lot of that was very unrelated to bees—I ended up going down various detours because they seemed interesting and I wanted to illustrate how little I think of these evolutionary cost-balancing approaches, since there are other concerns that I deem to be way more straightforward and stronger. FWIW, even Zach Groff in his talk seems to flag that we should interpret these things with a lot of caution and that their main takeaway is uncertainty and correcting a previous mistake in a calculation, rather than some concrete/strong takeaway about anything welfare-related in particular.)
Thank you for the detailed response and serious engagement!
I’m aware that a lot of that was very unrelated to bees—I ended up going down various detours because they seemed interesting and I wanted to illustrate how little I think of these evolutionary cost-balancing approaches, since there are other concerns that I deem to be way more straightforward and stronger. FWIW, even Zach Groff in his talk seems to flag that we should interpret these things with a lot of caution and that their main takeaway is uncertainty and correcting a previous mistake in a calculation, rather than some concrete/strong takeaway about anything welfare-related in particular
To be clear I definitely don’t think my analyses here is anywhere close to the final word on these issues, nor do I think the existence of some models tells us much.
It’s not clear to me whether we actually disagree on the value of “evolutionary cost-balancing approaches”, or we disagree on the level and value of the existing empirical information we have about suffering in nature.
For example, I certainly would not consider evolutionary arguments to be compelling for analyzing human or chicken suffering. Both because both typical humans and typical chickens are very far from their evolutionary environments, and because we have substantially more available empirical evidence (though as always less than we’d like).
As I wrote in my post:
I consider the priors here to be among the strongest arguments, not because I think they’re rock-solid but because I think reasoning about animal suffering in general is hard, especially so for insects. So the theoretical arguments here are relatively stronger just because the other lines of evidence are so weak.
I appreciate the nuances in your post! I also like
These considerations about the interaction of threats, places of safety, how this affects animal psychology, etc., gets me to a more general critique of the economics reasoning that underlies some of the methodology here. It seems too simplistic to me and it seems to misunderstand what suffering is about.
I think this is fair but also it feels a bit like an isolated demand for rigor here. I think of my post, admittedly written quickly and on various subjects I’m not an expert in, primarily as a critique of another post that to me feels much more simplistic in comparison.
It’s not clear to me whether we actually disagree on the value of “evolutionary cost-balancing approaches”, or we disagree on the level and value of the existing empirical information we have about suffering in nature.
On reflection, it’s certainly possible that I was assuming we had more evidence on suffering/wellbeing in nature (and in bees specfically) than we do. I haven’t looked into it too much and it intuitively felt to me like we could probably do better than the evolutionary reasoning stuff, but maybe the other available lines of evidence are similarly brittle.
I think this is fair but also it feels a bit like an isolated demand for rigor here. I think of my post, admittedly written quickly and on various subjects I’m not an expert in, primarily as a critique of another post that to me feels much more simplistic in comparison.
That might be right—I didn’t read the original post and I commented on your post not because I wanted to defend a particular side in the bee debate, but rather because I always found the evolutionary welfare arguments fascinating but dubious. I somehow decided to use this opportunity to get more towards the bottom of them. :)
Btw I really appreciate your substantive engagement and both your carefulness and detail of thought, I’ll probably revisit this thread in the future if I ever want to write another post/detailed comment about insects/wild animals!
That might be right—I didn’t read the original post and I commented on your post not because I wanted to defend a particular side in the bee debate, but rather because I always found the evolutionary welfare arguments fascinating but dubious. I somehow decided to use this opportunity to get more towards the bottom of them. :)
That’s very fair! Yeah I feel the same way albeit maybe more relatively happy about the evolutionary arguments; certainly part of the value of writing up the evolutionary argument is having them critiqued; the eusociality stuff in particular I don’t think is original to me but I’m not aware of a clear writeup elsewhere (and I didn’t find when I was trying to look for something to link).
I see BB did a more expansive reply on Substack but just commenting on a couple of things:
This seems not that strong at all? You could make the exact same case for chicken or egg farmers but I don’t think many people would be arguing that those chickens have net positive lives.
How come you’re using pollinators in the wild as the reference point? I would assume the counterfactual is less honeybees are bred/managed, so the reference point should be whether their lives are worth living at al,l rather than having less suffering than wild bees (taking the latter half of your clause).
Again, it would be perfectly rational for bees to stay in managed scenarios if they believe their lives will go from −5/10 to −8/10 by swarming. But I also generally think this is a weak argument for the reasons BB laid out e.g. bees being bred for docility, queen bees having their wings clipped, in conjunction with pheremones from the queen.
With this, it feels like most of your “On balance, I think it’s likely that farmed bees have net positive lives.” argument falls away.
Also, I’m curious to hear more about your thinking on:
First of all I should mention that the Forum post above is only a subset (~22%, ~850 words) of the whole Substack post (~3700 words) that covers the summary and intro. Totally fine if you didn’t notice that, it’s my fault for not making the formatting more transparent.
(I don’t think his reply was more expansive than yours; don’t sell yourself short!)
Footnote 1 addresses that.”The case for farmed bees is dissimilar to the case of (e.g.) farmed broiler chickens or pigs. Because farmed chickens are used only for their meat, the incentives of the farmers are to cram them with as much food as possible and for the chickens to grow as fast as possible. They do not need to be happy (unless happier animals taste better, and I think there is little to negative empirical evidence of this). The pain-pleasure signaling mechanisms are almost completely irrelevant to caged animals since their display of complex behavior is incidental to their use as farmed animals, while for bees it’s critical.”
Addressed in the post; basically if pollination by bees don’t happen, the crops are still out there and farmers still need to find alternative pollination sources. Also my wording above is (relatively) careful (“mildly towards farmed bees having net positive lives, or at least better than pollinators in the wild.”) to indicate two different reference points, rather than conflating the two as the same reference point.
See this comment reply. Frequency of wing-clipping is an empirical question and I agree it’s somewhat cruxy.
That said, I don’t think the exit options argument is central or the strongest piece of evidence.
See here. Though the wording could be tidied up a bit.
I read that now and think there’s something to the idea that some animals suffer less from death/injury than we would assume (if early death is a statistical near-certainty for those animals and there’s nothing they can do to control their luck there, so they’d rather focus on finding mates/getting the mating ritual right, which is about upsides more than downsides). The most convincing example I can think of are mayflies. It seems plausible that mayflies (who only live 1-2 days in their adult form) don’t suffer when they get injured because avoiding injury is a comparatively low priority. (I remember reading that there’s behavioral evidence that some adult insects keep eating or mating even as they get seriously physically injured, which supports this point. At the same time, this isn’t the case with all insects and may not even be the case for the larval stage of the adult insect in question: Mayfly *nymphs* – the baby stage – live a lot longer before they morph into adult mayflies, and their nymph lifestyle involves less seeking and risk-taking behavior and more maintenance and avoidance behavior.)
This is a bit nitpicky, but I would flag that the above is somewhat orthogonal to the r-/K-selection distinction, and that this distinction doesn’t seem to carve reality at its joints particularly well, in the first place. Claude claims that sea turtles qualify as K-selected since they don’t reach fertility quickly and have long lifespans (50-80+ years). At the same time, they have huge infant mortality. Thinking back to the nature documentaries I watched, I don’t recall that the baby turtles seemed aware of predators—so I’m sympathetic to the view that all that is on their mind is excitedly getting to the ocean for that amazing swimming feeling. Still, since they’re long-lived when they succeed, they probably need to learn to look after their limbs and bodies, so I also suspect that, unfortunately, getting eaten by birds or crocodiles is very painful for them. Evolution lacks compassion, so it won’t pay the extra cost to only turn on “pain when your limbs get injured” after the turtles made it through the most difficult first couple of hours or days.
Claude btw also says that bees are K-selected because the parental investment is high—but that seems like another edge case and some of the logic you mentioned regarding bees and eusociality does seem plausible to me (even if I would put very little weight on it compared to considerations like “when we observe them, do they show signs of distress, and how often?”).
Male elephant seals are also K-selected even though only 5-10% of them successfully reproduce. (You might think that the successful ones experience so much pleasure that it’s worth all the frustration of the unsuccessful ones—but that’s questionable and it may also be that being an unsuccessful male elephant seal is particularly unpleasant because their experience may dominated by status anxiety and sexual frustration.)
Next to species longevity leading to the need to look after one’s limbs and body, another thing that I think matters a lot for species welfare ranges is whether animals have prey animal psychology. For animals who are aware enough to understand the concept of predation (hopefully baby turtles will not qualify here just yet?), predation often seems like a massive source of stress and suffering even if the animal is not currently under attack. I’ve read that some prey animals exhibit signs of PTSD in the mere presence of predators. Mice can die from anxiety/stress when they are trapped in an area where they don’t feel like they can hide. In the book series Animorphs, the idea of being a shrew is portrayed as stress- and fear-dominated (which left quite the impression on me as a kid). While I understand that this is fiction rather than facts-based, it does seem pretty congruent with how I’d feel if I imagine being a mouse or shrew.
By contrast, while marmots are technically prey animals too, they probably have much less of a prey animal psychology (or at least one that isn’t constantly “on”) because they can at least feel very safe whenever they go inside their burrows – no snakes high up in the mountains, foxes are too big to fit inside the burrow, and predatory birds are bad at fighting underground so they don’t go into the burrows either, even though they’d probably fit in there. (Being a marmot also seems extra cozy because part of their strategy is to slow down their metabolism and just chill during the winter.)
These considerations about the interaction of threats, places of safety, how this affects animal psychology, etc., gets me to a more general critique of the economics reasoning that underlies some of the methodology here. It seems too simplistic to me and it seems to misunderstand what suffering is about.
As Anni Leskelä writes in a post on whether social animals suffer more:
(What I call “prey animal psycholgy” is an instance of those predictive processes, as are anxiety disorders in humans.) I feel like these interactions between “situations where the animal’s reward circuit fires negative/positive rewards” and “how the animal develops negative or positive feelings that are somehow about that reward, but they come up in other situations via learning,” call into question the applicability of cost-balancing around reward circuitry and animal reward signals. All of that seems to be overshadowed by some of the ways that second-order negative feelings (negative feelings that are about the positive or negative signals from the reward circuit) seem asymmetric from second-order positive feelings. Namely, there are more ways to not get positive reward than there are ways to get positive reward, so animals will often be hungry, horny, struggle with addiction (and positive reward wearing off/becoming less satisfying), feel like they don’t have enough of something, etc, even if there’s a sense in which first-order reward signals would be symmetric or equally easily available/avoidable in the environment. Relatedly, there’s the (generalized) Anna Karenina principle (both in relation to psychology and biology): there are more ways for things to be off rather than perfect, so it rarely makes sense for animal to feel like all is good the way it is (unless you’re a marmot during hibernation!). Things can also go wrong in a mechanistic, biological way and cause chronic pain and conditions for extreme unhappiness. For instance, post-viral malaise and fatigue syndromes (which existed before Covid, possibly 1% of the US population already had significant issues of that sort, and it’s more prevalent in world regions where specific illnesses are common, like dengue fever). It seems to me that natural selection doesn’t “see” those causes of chronic suffering in an appropriately proportional way, because it’s not costly to create the conditions for chronic suffering (it’s the opposite—it would be costly to make the organism safe from malfunctions of that sort). Unfortunately, there’s no equally-frequent counterbalancing phenomenon where things happen to coincidentally go particularly well and then the person is chronically super blissed out and chronically invulnerable. (Some people are genetically very lucky or have life go well so that success attracts more success, but it’s not nearly equally common. Personally, I also think that the depths of things going wrong are higher than the highs of when they go right, but I acknowledge that this is a contested subjective impression.)
Lastly, in humans, there’s also some phenotypic variation in life-history strategies, “fast” and “slow”. Fast is associated with things we tend to think of as bad for welfare, such as cluster B personality disorder, low parental investment, unpredictable childhood stress, etc. Sure, cluster B personality disorders are not just associated with increased suicidality and other negative life outcomes, they are also associated with periods of (hypo)mania, or BPD is sometimes said to have extreme emotional highs that other people don’t get to experience. And maybe there’s some truth to that. But insofar as we are inclined to think that fast-paced life-history strategies in humans aren’t that great for individuals well-being-wise, this again calls into question why natural selection would somehow manage to make success so good in fast-selected animals at the species level that it outweighs all the statistically more common instances where life fails.
(I’m aware that a lot of that was very unrelated to bees—I ended up going down various detours because they seemed interesting and I wanted to illustrate how little I think of these evolutionary cost-balancing approaches, since there are other concerns that I deem to be way more straightforward and stronger. FWIW, even Zach Groff in his talk seems to flag that we should interpret these things with a lot of caution and that their main takeaway is uncertainty and correcting a previous mistake in a calculation, rather than some concrete/strong takeaway about anything welfare-related in particular.)
Thank you for the detailed response and serious engagement!
To be clear I definitely don’t think my analyses here is anywhere close to the final word on these issues, nor do I think the existence of some models tells us much.
It’s not clear to me whether we actually disagree on the value of “evolutionary cost-balancing approaches”, or we disagree on the level and value of the existing empirical information we have about suffering in nature.
For example, I certainly would not consider evolutionary arguments to be compelling for analyzing human or chicken suffering. Both because both typical humans and typical chickens are very far from their evolutionary environments, and because we have substantially more available empirical evidence (though as always less than we’d like).
As I wrote in my post:
I appreciate the nuances in your post! I also like
I think this is fair but also it feels a bit like an isolated demand for rigor here. I think of my post, admittedly written quickly and on various subjects I’m not an expert in, primarily as a critique of another post that to me feels much more simplistic in comparison.
On reflection, it’s certainly possible that I was assuming we had more evidence on suffering/wellbeing in nature (and in bees specfically) than we do. I haven’t looked into it too much and it intuitively felt to me like we could probably do better than the evolutionary reasoning stuff, but maybe the other available lines of evidence are similarly brittle.
That might be right—I didn’t read the original post and I commented on your post not because I wanted to defend a particular side in the bee debate, but rather because I always found the evolutionary welfare arguments fascinating but dubious. I somehow decided to use this opportunity to get more towards the bottom of them. :)
Btw I really appreciate your substantive engagement and both your carefulness and detail of thought, I’ll probably revisit this thread in the future if I ever want to write another post/detailed comment about insects/wild animals!
Thanks! Here’s the 2019 RP report on honeybee welfare and interventions in case you’re interested, other people are welcome to comment if there’s more recent work.
That’s very fair! Yeah I feel the same way albeit maybe more relatively happy about the evolutionary arguments; certainly part of the value of writing up the evolutionary argument is having them critiqued; the eusociality stuff in particular I don’t think is original to me but I’m not aware of a clear writeup elsewhere (and I didn’t find when I was trying to look for something to link).