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).
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).