Disenangling “nature.”
It is my favorite thing, but I want to know its actual value.
Is it replaceable. Is it useful. Is it morally repugnant. Is it our responsibility. Is it valuable.
“I asked my questions. And then I discovered a whole world I never knew. That’s my trouble with questions. I still don’t know how to take them back.”
Tandena Wagner
Karma: 788
As someone ignorant about development and the African context, but enthusiastic about pursuing development for all the reasons you listed: My perception is that the bottlenecks are cultural, not economic. This might be a stupid question, but are corruption and kinship culture serious problems that might undermine your efforts where you are operating?
Somewhat agreed—the psychological dimension is large across the whole world. I sort of gestured at it in my first post about the revealed preference for nature. Maybe I should have tried to estimate the combined value of premium housing near healthy ecosystems. (Hm, it would be conflated with “ocean views” and other aesthetic physical landscapes, and some of the value comes from being a positional good....)
The typical scientific justification in the vein of psychological value mostly comes down to “greenery” which could be equally provided by unnatural and low biodiversity park walks. There are some other examples like birdsong, but it’s still not evidence that biodiversity is important for our wellbeing. I admit I did a cursory check, but I feel pretty confident that it’s not good justification for the sort of global biodiversity conservation that environmentalists (like myself) value.
That’s wonderful to hear, wow. I’m surprised it provoked such a negative reaction but pleased that she enjoyed the second one!
Thank you for the words of support! So nice to hear from someone who doesn’t empathize, aha. I’m delighted.
I hope to shed light… So that environmentalists see their own position clearly, with all the giant gaps that have been glossed over. I hope to demonstrate rigor to folks who think environmental positions are all just confused & wishful thinking. I hope people who care about nature feel seen, and want to get involved in building environmentalism with EA principles. I want EAs to see it’s okay to care about nature and things that are meaningful to them, even if they aren’t the most effective or the most universal.
And most of all, for my own sake, I want to interrogate myself and reflect the real world!
(I posted my next follow-up, and would be happy if you read it.)
I know what you mean! I am trying to provide a critical approach and would like to hear what you think of how it turned out.
Nature’s value mostly doesn’t come from present-day benefits to humanity
Should forecasting receive more or less EA funding?
Mildly surprised how much is going into it. Mildly surprised how little is coming out of it. Still have high expectations for the return on improving decision-making. I’m a low information voter. Voting without factoring in a large increase in funds in the near future which would slam everything to the right.
I just came back from my first retreat and (due to unlucky events) had a pretty negative outcome. This gave me back some hope that there is something actually good out there for me yet. Thank you. Quality timing.
Total number is richness.
Buncha pedantics: The problem with that is it’s easy to add more “weedy” species to increase biodiversity per local area, even as you decrease global biodiversity. The real number is global extant species but we aren’t perfectly coordinated to know what this specific place should do best relative to what everywhere else is doing. Aaand you can’t totally re-establish density with reduced genetic diversity if it gets bad enough, but you are correct. Its the irreversible damage that is most concerning.
Thanks for noticing that! I’ll fix it.
People really care about something they call nature
Its been a week and I’ve spent some time trying to get a fuller picture of the insect welfare space. Thanks to Toby for urging me to do so.
Some things I knew previously but are worth repeating:
Evolution isn’t welfare optimizing.
Insects have different life histories than other animals. They are in bit of a different class.
Avoidance of danger is urgent so insects (probably) experience intense impulses. (aka pain and panic, even if they are otherwise very simple impulses)
Insects might be too simple for hedonic adaptation (normalizing/numbing).
Insects might experience each moment (of pain) as a discrete event. This might make painful experiences less bad (a single moment of shock), or it might make them worse (full blast isolated meaningless torture) depending on how you interpret it.
Disease.
Losing a leg would be proportionally bad to how much it reduces their survival odds.
Most of the wildlife I see and interact with is pretty happy. But most of the wildlife I see are birds/mammals/large bodied/adult/healthy/k-strategists.
It is very suspicious to me that we think that animals we understand the least are the ones we think have the most horrifying lives.
Some things I learned:
Like 10% of insects die in minutes or hours of existing. Before they have time to have positive valence experiences.
Another 10% die a bit later without getting to experience much and having probably bad experiences the whole time. (don’t take these numbers too seriously, they keep changing as I try to figure out what is going on)
Newly hatched larvae have tiny energy reserves relative to their metabolic rate, so starvation might be quicker and less devastating for insects than our default picture of starvation.
Like 20%??? of insects get consumed from the inside by parasites for long periods of time. The parasites keep them alive and eat their non-essential organs first. This seems really bad.
Insects might be more prone to fitness critical (life and death) events than other animals.
R-selection might produce different welfare profiles.
Most predation is quick. Seconds or minutes of dying. Extreme, but short. Like 50% of insect deaths are this way.
Some other thoughts:
R-strategists might have different values than us. But I’m not sure I want to act on moralities that “pain doesn’t matter” even if the uplifted insects might want that. Its a separate question than “what does our own morality say is right.”
Insects might not be morally important. This is a separate question from suffering and sentience.
Generally, the insects with more evidence for memory, sentience, creativity, intelligence, etc are also not the ones that have the worst looking lives. (?)
I have a strong instinct to think that the hedonic baseline of species is set by their lifehistory. If so, many species would experience substantial mortality and stress as normal. “Routine” portions of insect life I think would be closer to neutral baseline, even though the niche looks harsh.
Bob Fisher pointed out that the goalposts keep moving, and that makes me very uncomfortable.
If we could press a button and fix all this I would be much more likely to think that insect lives are net negative. Which does not bode well for my objectivity here. For example, I am much more likely to think “disease is bad, really bad, we should do something about that for the insects” than I am to think “r-strategists have innately horrible-shaped lives. It’s really bad. We should do something about that.” I think this reveals something.
So right now I have updated to believe that some species probably do have truly miserable welfare profiles, bad enough to be seriously consider ending their way of existence. I’m not sure how many, probably few? (I already believed that some parasites might be overall bad and we should probably end their way of existence despite their amazing intricate biology) I probably think this circumstance is a lot rarer than other insect welfare supporters. I still anchor pretty strongly to expecting insect lives to be neutral as a default, despite frequent suffering events. I probably ought to create some serious goalposts and stick to them. I still have other objections along the lines of “the insects would have different values” and “its really suspicious that we think their lives are the worst when they are the most hard to sympathize with and we understand the least about them” and “we would not apply this moral system to ourselves” and “similar/small lives matter a lot less” and “suffering is less bad than weighted, enjoyment is more readily available and better than weighted.” I am pretty strongly in support of intervening in nature to make it better, and I don’t think the precautionary principal holds up under scrutiny.
In general I am confused whether I should be thinking about suffering as a proportion of all insects, proportion of time within a species average, proportion within a life, total number of individuals, or just total bad moments.
I’m really excited to see this. I’m optimistic that ecologists and conservation professionals will want to help with this. They WILL be excited to have an ally that cares about non-charismatic species. They are begging for more attention to the smaller foundational participants in the ecosystem. The field is also gradually becoming more pro-intervention. I am also optimistic that AI will contribute, and want to emphasize that a simple but important step is deploying far more field data loggers. The sooner you collect data, the sooner you have years of data to work with.
I did not find this patronizing! I recognize that this is a charged topic and really appreciate you moving the discussion to higher quality format/content. Don’t overthink too much, I am one person and being a little neurotic. You cleared the air.
I’ve probably missed quite a lot. I’m aware of this article about how animals die and the signs of distress very small animals exhibit. Gonna take your advice and try to get up to speed to see what I’ve missed.
The post you recommended seems like a very nice outline of the premises in (wild) animal welfare and problem with being able to tell how good an animal’s life is, and how that measures up in the grand scheme of things. It is unfortunately dense and long and from 10 years ago, but it make me see this is well-trodden ground and left me wanting to know what the more recent developments are.
Edit: I want to add that the tone of this comment felt dismissive to me when I first read it. I think I’m sensitive to being considered shallow for disagreeing so the word choices of “if you are new” and “this is a nice first engagement...to engage more deeply...is a great place to start” set me off. I’ve read a bit. I have heard some counter arguments. I’m not completely uninformed. I’m unconvinced. (So far.)
Among EAs that are focused on preventing suffering in the non-human world, United States based.
This is not what most conservation scientists and “animal lovers” tend to espouse. Those groups also have severe biases in what they pay attention to.
Net negative lives is a bit of a weird concept to grapple with, but I wouldn’t dismiss it immediately (despite how it sounds at first encounter). They’ve definitely thought about it. The problem with net positive lives is that you then might want to fill the world with slight net positive lives and get to a Malthusian state. Its not simple to reason about what a net positive/neutral/negative life is, nor how good/bad it is that lives that never come to be, nor how the world should be shaped in response to these things.
I think this is a brilliant contrast to the usual insect welfare discussion. I hope it sparks descriptions of some different possibilities.
The usual argument as I understand it, is that lives cut short is a Very Bad Thing. So when animals “die young” they have unfulfilled potential and traumatic lives. I don’t think that’s the correct way to look at it. Unfortunately, I don’t know what the correct way to look at it is. A hypothetical way to frame it, is that most insects have average lifespans, but they have the potential to achieve an almost god-like existence (for an insect). Another hypothetical framing is that daily life eating and sleeping and growing is pretty fulfilling, and the short amount of time spent suffering from dying doesn’t counteract that. Another hypothetical framing is that r-strategists find immense meaning in competition as it is such a huge part of their life history, and we wouldn’t be able to understand it. I don’t think these are obviously wrong nor do I think the going EA framing is obviously correct.I fully believe that things we think is terrible are likely to be experienced very differently for other organisms. I have a couple reasons for this. One is that we live very comfortable safe lives and this has skewed our perception of how bad bad things are. (and made good things look pretty bland too!) This is especially strong when it comes to pain. I think pain isn’t as bad as we think and we have mistakenly amped this up beyond all reason. People today are afraid of tiny amounts of pain. I don’t think animals have the same outlook. Mindset is a huge determinant of pain.
Another is that we anticipate the future in ways that exacerbate painful experiences, often way way beyond the experience itself. It sounds weird to say, but bodily harm and poverty and “adverse weather” are not that bad when your mind isn’t trying to prevent poor futures.
I appreciate the concept of “herbivores live in fear their entire life.” This is exactly the kind of wildly different experience that we should imagine! Drawing from humans, both good things and bad things seem to get flattened over time. So an herbivore “living in fear every second” is probably not actually in overdrive their entire life. They probably are either alert or relaxed for a good proportion of their life. I am being hypocritical applying human-extrapolated framing here.
Among humans the things we find meaning in, the things we find intolerable, and our very basic perceptions are very different among us. Not only are wild animals in a very different situation, living a very different lifestyle than us, but they have very different perceptions, bodies, and desires. Which to me indicates they would be even more wildly different in their experiences of happiness and meaning than we are between each other. Most of that I think comes out positive for the animals.
I am not nearly as eloquent as the OP, but I would be happy to give more explanation of my opinions if anyone is interested to explore this further.
Sidenote: I think the shape of the dialogue is an artifact how wild animal welfare proponents with extreme uncertainty sometimes say “I can’t be certain,” which doesn’t really register. And those who do feel confident have something (urgent) to express, which is that they think insects have net negative lives. There seems to be vague agreement that predators probably have net positive lives, but herbivores, insects, and r-selected species have net negative lives. This seems incorrect to me, or at least counterintuitive.
I’m very interested in this. I would very much like to know which pesticides kill less insects (but achieve their purpose of protecting crops) and which pesticides kill more humanely and what are the best blanket replacements for the biggest pesticides in use today.
I think this is very understudied for biodiversity off-target deaths as well. Unintended deaths and unnecessary suffering. I think it’s possible to do a truly huge amount of good here.
Does anyone have some initial leads on what these might be?
Just want to flag that this post doesn’t specify what kind of development. I was confused if this magazine was about nimbys, green infrastructure, poverty, civil engineering, or something else.
Oh I missed this post when it was first published. I think this might be the first piece on the EA forum regarding incorporating earth-systems into AI frameworks!
Some critique: I’m not sure if there are values beyond human/sentient preferences. I am not sure what the earth wants or needs. It makes it very difficult to incorporate those hypothetical values without someone defining them and giving a way to measure success at fulfilling them. Does the earth want to stay the same? Or change? In what way? (I am not aware of what the accepted thinking is on this, or if there is any commonly accepted thinking.)
I am somewhat hopeful that we can make more sense of the “right way to respect the earth” by feeding a ton of data into AIs. My hope would be that they could work on massive scales and disentangle some patterns, then condense it down to a message that makes sense to us. Or it might not help at all because the philosophy simply has to be worked out first.
In your piece I found it valuable that you summarized the other attempts at representing non-humans in governance. I learned about a few I had not heard of and learned what happened after they were implemented.
I also liked your suggestions for what to emphasize in training—The planetary boundaries framework, Earth System Models, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Life Cycle Assessment databases, and Real-time environmental sensors. I think this is a really good starting set. I do have a minor quibble with the planetary boundaries. I recently became aware that they are not quite so good as they first appear.
If the values and methods of maintaining ecosystem integrity and earth stability are not worked out yet, then it could be very high impact to work on developing them. I suggest that this is something that you would be well equipped to do, as it appears the other attempts have been weak on this front. “Legible ecological signals. Non-human interests must be translated into monitored, updated, and decision-relevant indicators that powerful actors cannot simply ignore.” This roughly translates to an actionable concrete objective. Extinction risk and biodiversity are too hard to measure directly according to what went wrong with some of the non-human governance examples. Perhaps some simpler indicator of those could be standardized? Perhaps eDNA could make this easier and more objective?
Personally I am excited about using EDGE (evolutionarily distinct, globally endangered) as a better method of evaluation and prioritization.
Thanks!