Invertebrate welfare is the study of the distribution of sentience across invertebrates, and of interventions aimed at improving the welfare of these animals.
Further reading
Schukraft, Jason (2019) Invertebrate welfare cause profile, Effective Altruism Forum, July 9.
External links
Invertebrate Welfare. A compilation of research on invertebrate welfare.
Related entries
farmed animal welfare | insect welfare | wild animal welfare
I’m confused by the tag for Center for Reducing Suffering being listed as a Related entry, because:
I don’t think invertebrate welfare is a major focus for them
I’m not aware of any outputs of theirs that are focused primarily on invertebrate welfare
There are multiple other orgs who have more more outputs on the topic
More generally, maybe we should have a recommended policy/norm written somewhere regarding when to list org tags in the Related entries sections of other entries/tags. Some quick thoughts on that:
I think it’s straightforwardly fine to list org tags in Related entries sections of other tags when the other tag is also an org tag, and the orgs are clearly related
E.g., CEA, GWWC, and EA Funds were all recently part of the same thing, and are still connected in some ways (I think?), so listing each of those org’s tags on the other org’s tags seems fine
Maybe we should basically have a blanket policy against any other instance of this sort of thing?
If the org has indeed done relevant things, there will in many/most cases be some post/link-post related to those things that can be given the tag, so people can find out the org is relevant that way
If the org has indeed done relevant things but there’s no relevant post/link-post on the Forum
Maybe list some relevant link in a Bibliography or Further reading section
Maybe make a link-post and tag it
That seems useful anyway, in my view (if the work seems high-quality and relevant)
Maybe list the org’s site in an External links section
Not sure about that
If the org hasn’t yet done relevant things but is considering doing so, they’re probably not worth listing in Related entries anyway
One bad outcome would be that lots of orgs list themselves (for self-promotional reasons) in the Related entries sections for any entry they’ve done any work relevant to
That would be kind-of cluttering and spammy
But I think it seems unlikely that this’d happen?
But maybe it’s more likely in worlds where the EA Forum Wiki gets lots of readers, and those are the worlds we should focus most on for policies like this?
[written while sleepy; let me know if anything’s unclear]
Concerning the inclusion of links to organizations in the ‘related entries’ section, I feel I don’t have clear enough intuitions that I can codify in an explicit general policy. I suspect we’d usually want to link to organizations only in the ‘related entries’ section of entries about organizations, as you suggest, but I don’t expect this to always be the case. For instance, I added a link to Giving What We Can in the entry on Toby Ord, given Toby’s close connection to that organization. Perhaps a link to GWWC should also be included in Global poverty, though I’m not sure. I suggest we keep an eye on this and note any relevant observations in the appropriate comments thread, so that we can eventually update the Style Guide with a more detailed policy.
Sounds good to me.
FWIW, on those particular examples:
I think listing GWWC in the Related entries for Toby Ord makes sense
I think we can generalise that to “Only include org entries in the Related entries sections of other org entries or entries on people who are/were closely associated with that org”
(I’m not saying that that’s literally the best policy, but I think that that would elegantly capture The Ord Exception and other things like that)
I intuitively feel averse to including a GWWC link in the Global poverty entry
But less averse than in this CRS-invertebrate welfare case
Partly because GWWC are both a larger / more notable org than CRS and because they have historically been more focused on global poverty than CRS has been on invertebrate welfare
But that sounds hard to codify as a clear rule
And my personal intuitive aversions can just be one of very many inputs in what policies we settle on, of course!
Thanks for flagging this. I listed ‘CRS’ under ‘related entries’ in the ‘invertebrate welfare’ entry only because I had previously listed ‘invertebrate welfare’ under the corresponding section of the ‘CRS’ entry. The basis for the latter was that they write this in their ‘about us’ page:
I haven’t studied their research closely. If they haven’t done substantive research on invertebrate welfare, the link to that entry should be removed. Moreover, even if the link should be preserved, it’s an open question whether the reciprocal link should exist; ‘entry relatedness’, as used here, doesn’t seem to be a symmetric relation (we are using ‘related’ in the sense of sufficiently intuitively related, and it doesn’t follow that, if x is intuitively related to y to some degree, y is intuitively related to x to that same degree; hence it is not the case that the sufficiency condition is satisfied in one case iff it’s satisfied in the other). To complicate things, I haven’t followed this process for most other orgs, so adding ‘CRS’ under ‘related entries’ in the ‘invertebrate welfare’ entry makes that organization stand out in a way that it wouldn’t if all the other related entries were already listed. In any case, since CRS is not primarily doing research on invertebrate welfare, I think we can already establish that it shouldn’t be listed there; if you think ‘invertebrate welfare’ should also be removed from ‘CRS’, feel free to do so—otherwise I’ll make a decision once I have time to look at their research more closely.
I’ll respond to the rest of your comment later.
I think I agree with all of that.
I also feel more comfortable with the topics an org works on being listed in Related entries from the org’s tag, rather than vice versa.
(But I could also probably be convinced to change my mind on either half of that.)