Would be curious why people are downvoting.
Bentham's Bulldog
Karma: 4,103
Thanks!
I don’t think the analogy with subsistence humans is a good one because the basic argument for net negative animal welfare doesn’t apply to them. The basic argument is: most animals have very short lives that culminate in a painful death, and a few days of life isn’t enough to recoup the harms of a painful death. This doesn’t apply to long-lived hunter-gatherers. Fwiw, I don’t think it applies to animals either—it seems plausible that elephants mostly live good lives, for example. But the most numerous animals are worms, then insects, then fish, then amphibians, then reptiles—nearly all the most numerous animals have bad lives.
I don’t think hedonic utilitarianism is a complete frame either—I’m an objective list theorist fwiw, but I don’t think that it has huge implications because animals don’t have many significant non-hedonic goods. I don’t think nature has intrinsic value, but even if I did, this would be outweighed by the staggeringly large amount of suffering that exists even in small plots of lands (hundreds of bugs per square feet). As I said in that piece, I think even pretty small chunks of land could contain extreme suffering, so this probably swamps whatever intrinsic value nature might have.
I agree that biodiversity isn’t automatically the same as increasing ecosystem productivity. In fact, I’d generally tend to support preserving herbivores, as they lower plant populations—so we could find common ground there. I’m skeptical about carnivores generally, though depends on the detail. I’d also be skeptical of insect zoos because those might be used to argue for preserving nature. I saw your recent post where you describe precision agriculture which would prevent conversion of nature into farmland. I find this very alarming! I think farmland has fewer arthropods!
Want to come on the podcast to discuss more?
I’m pretty worried about this because I think most wild animals have bad lives, and so increasing their numbers is very bad https://benthams.substack.com/p/against-biodiversity?utm_source=publication-search
I don’t think the case for Vasco’s argument depends really on sentience in non-arthropods. There are like a billion soil arthropods for every person, so funding research on soil animals looks similarly important. And a lot of these are ants who are more likely to be sentient than black soldier flies.
I do find the comment “I also want robustness in the case for sentience,” a bit puzzling in context. As I understood it, Vasco’s argument was that it’s not very unlikely that animals even simpler than arthropods are sentient (mites, springtails, etc). That there’s not a robust case that they are analogous isn’t a strong argument for them not being analogous (and will, in fact, be a reason for uncertainty and research).
Broadly agree with a lot of the document though, especially the funding stuff! I think funding Arthropoda is great!
Yes it would imply that a bit of extra energy can vastly increase consciousness. But so what? Why be 99.9999% confident that it can’t?
I think it’s a bad result of a view if it implies that no actions we perform are good or bad. Intuitively it doesn’t seem like all chaotic actions are neutral.
Thanks!
Thank you!
It’s a somewhat long post. Want to come on the podcast to discuss?
I don’t agree with that. Cluelessness seems to only arise if you have reason to think that on average your actions won’t make things better. And yet even a very flawed procedure will, on average across worlds, do better than chance. This seems to deal with epistemic cluelessness fine.
Why can’t you take seriously every plausible argument with huge implications?
What sorts of things do they do?
Thanks, yes I think I fired this post off too quickly without taking time to read deeper analysis of it. I’ll try to give your post a read when I get the chance.
Interesting point, though I disagree—I think there are strong arguments for thinking that you should just maximize utility https://joecarlsmith.com/2022/03/16/on-expected-utility-part-1-skyscrapers-and-madmen/
It’s made me a bit more Longtermist. I think that one of the more plausible scenarios for infinite value is that God exists and actions that help each other out infinitely strengthen our eternal relationship, and such a judgment will generally result in doing conventionally good things. I also think that you should have some uncertainty about ethics, so you should want the AI to do reflection.
Thanks!
Majorly disagree! I think that while probably you’d expect an animal to behave aversively in response to stimuli, it’s surprising that:
This distracts them from other aversive stimuli (nociception doesn’t typically work that way—it’s not like elbow twitches distract you and make you less likely to have other twitches.
They’d react to anaesthetic (they could just have some aversive behavior without anaesthetic).
They’d rub their wounds.
etc
No! It implies only that if you inflict some comparable injury on a human and bee (adjusting for e.g. bees diminshed size) the human will feel, on average (though lots of uncertainty), around 10X as much pain. Moral evaluation of this is something different!
If you want to read the longer defense of the RP numbers, you can read the RP report or my followup article on the subject https://benthams.substack.com/p/you-cant-tell-how-conscious-animals. Suffice it to say, it strikes me as deeply unwise to base your assessments of bee consciousness on how they look, rather than on behavior. I think the strong confidence that small and simple animals aren’t intensely conscious rests on little more than unquestioned dogma, with nothing very persuasive having ever been said in its favor https://benthams.substack.com/p/betting-on-ubiquitous-pain. Also the RP report wasn’t a poll!
I agree about the 97% number and have corrected it! I think the point made by the number—many more bees than e.g. fish—is correct, but I failed to add the relevant caveats.
Regarding 10% as bad as chicken, that still strikes me as pretty conservative. I think bees spend much of their time suffering from extreme temperatures, disease, etc, and thinking that’s 10% as bad as the life of an average chicken (note: this is before adjusting for sentience differential) strikes me as pretty conservative.
The argument for insects mostly living bad lives is given in the linked post and in this post—if you live a super short life (days or weeks) you don’t get enough welfare to outweigh the badness of a painful death.
The reason it has political potshots is that it was originally a blogpost and I just added it here. If I were writing it specifically for the forum, I wouldn’t have added that—but I also am somewhat irritated by the EA forum culture where it feels like you have to write like you’re making an academic paper rather than having any whimsy or fun!
Awesome post!