I am a generalist quantitative researcher. I am open to volunteering and paid work. I welcome suggestions for posts. You can give me feedback here (anonymously or not).
Vasco Grilođ¸
Karma: 11,332
Hi Clara.
I donât care if TechnoBro 3000 celebrates his birthday in the asteroid belt with his 10^30 gold plated robot friends, but I do care if he can buy the elections of Democratistan.
You care about whether he can buy the elections intrinsically or instrumentally (in particular, because of its impact on the welfare of the people in Democratistan)? The latter is still very much compatible with rejecting egalitarianism and prioritarianism. Buying elections may decrease total welfare.
Hi Itsi. Thanks for the post.
I think it is difficult to assess AI x animals as a whole given its very broad scope. Likewise, it would have been difficult to evaluate âAI x steam enginesâ, âAI x electricityâ, or âAI x internetâ.
I believe there are large differences in the cost-effectiveness of projects covered by AI x animals. So I find it more useful to discuss particular interventions.
Thanks for the quick thoughts, Guillaume.
I would not base my estimates on their number of neurons (although it might be a good enough proxy for larger animals).
The graph below illustrates that âindividual number of neuronsâ^0.188 explains pretty well the estimates for the sentience-adjusted welfare ranges presented in Bobâs book. I also do not think the specific proxy matters that much. In allometry, âthe study of the relationship of body size to shape,[1] anatomy, physiology and behaviourâ, âThe relationship between the two measured quantities is often expressed as a power law equation (allometric equation)â. If the sentience-adjusted welfare range is proportional to âproxy 1â^âexponent 1â, and âproxy 1â is proportional to âproxy 2â^âexponent 2â, the sentience-adjusted welfare range is proportional to âproxy 1â^(âexponent 1â*âexponent 2â). So the results for âproxy 1â and exponent âexponent 1â*âexponent 2â are the same as those for âproxy 2â and âexponent 2âł.
whatever our current âplace-holderâ estimates are for sentience or welfare in shrimps, more research will most likely answer both
I very much agree. On the other hand, I think research on sentience criteria mostly decreases the uncertainty about anatomy and behaviour, and I believe there is way more uncertainty in how to go from those to quantitative comparisons of welfare across species.
RE welfare comparisons: I could imagine a difference between us being relative confidence that empirical research will improve our understanding?
I am not confident (empirical or philosophical) research on welfare comparisons across species will significantly decrease their uncertainty. However, the alternative for me is never finding out interventions that robustly increase welfare in expectation.
Would you expect the most useful work for reducing your own uncertainty to be philosophical or empirical?
I do not have a strong view either way. I think it is much easier to decrease i) the empirical uncertainty about anatomy and behaviour than ii) the philosophical uncertainty about how to go from those to quantitative comparisons of welfare across species. On the other hand, I believe ii) is much larger than i).
RE nematodes: I agree that this isnât clear cut in some sense, but I feel fairly confident that they should be bracketed out unless we significantly advance in our understanding of animal consciousness
Would medium confidence that nematodes engage in motivational trade-offs be enough for you to consider effects on them?
This report was entirely and carefully crafted by Guillaume Reho, with recurrent reviews and discussions with Aaron Boddy [co-founder of and chief strategy officer at the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP)], whom I deeply thank for his time and help on this project.
I am glad @Aaron Boddyđ¸ is interested in this. I think funders have been assuming that all species of shrimps have a similar sentience-adjusted welfare range. So bringing attention to the weaker evidence for the sentience of Penaeidae shrimps may decrease funding for helping them, and they are the ones SWP has been targeting.
Thanks for this great research, Guillaume.
in his Welfare Range Estimates, (Fischer, 2023) argues that all invertebrates probably have welfare ranges âwithin two orders of magnitude of the vertebrates nonhuman animals [presented in his report]â
Do you have any thoughts on this? I read the whole book about welfare comparisons across species from @Bob Fischer, and I really liked it. However, I think the above vastly underestimates uncertainty. Here are my estimates for sentience-adjusted welfare ranges proportional to âindividual number of neuronsâ^âexponentâ, and âexponentâ from 0 to 2, which covers the best guesses that I consider reasonable.
Here are a few other grantmakers that might be interested in funding such research or welfare interventions: Animal Charity Evaluators, Animal Welfare Fund from EA Funds, Animal Welfare Fund from Founders Pledge, and Farm Animal Welfare fund from Coefficient Giving. Also feel free to comment or tag other grantmakers or funds that would be interested in shrimp sentience research.
There is also the Strategic Animal Funding Circle (SAFC), and maybe Falcon Fund (âWe also expect to place some bets on non-AI opportunities that are unusually strongâ).
Hi Abraham. Thanks for the great post.
This science alone wonât solve every issue in wild animal welfare. Even with the scientific knowledge necessary to make progress, there might be tricky philosophical questions that canât be answered empirically (When is a life worth living? How do we make decisions about tradeoffs between different species of animals?).
Have you considered reliable welfare comparisons across species as another necessarily pillar for robustly increasing welfare? I do not think perfect welfare measures, remote monitoring, and ecological modelling would be enough. I am very uncertain about how to compare welfare across species. Here are my estimates for sentience-adjusted welfare ranges proportional to âindividual number of neuronsâ^âexponentâ, and âexponentâ from 0 to 2, which covers the best guesses that I consider reasonable.
Putting aside nematodes (which I believe we should do), to a first approximation
Are you confident that nematodes can be neglected? I am not. I can see the welfare of nematodes being much smaller or larger than than of arthropods. Research on the sentience of nematodes is one of the âFour Investigation Prioritiesâ mentioned in section 13.4 of chapter 13 of the book The Edge of Sentience by Jonathan Birch.
So, our best models are basically at the level of: âwe can sort of say what will happen to 9 varieties of quasi-organisms at ~100-square-kilometer resolution,â an area that contains approximately 10 quadrillion insects.
Do you mean 10 trillion arthropods? 100 km^2 are 10^8 m^2 (= 100*(10^3)^2). Tropical and subtropical forests have 10^5 soil arthropods per m^2 based on Table S4 of Rosenberg et al. (2023). So I think 100 km^2 of tropical and subtropical forests have around 10^13 soil arthropods (= 10^8*10^5), 10 trillion.
For context, a community of just 500 species has 250,000 possible pairwise interactions.
Nitpick. 125 k (= 500*499/â2) possible pairwise interactions, because you are only counting interactions between difference species, and the interaction between species A and B is the same as that between B and A?
And I think we should make a giant risky bet on cage-free eggs.
Despite potentially dominant effects on ants and termites?
Thanks for the post, James. It made sense to me.
I worked at HM Treasury
This is âthe Government of the United Kingdomâs economic and finance ministryâ.
The real value of forecasting is in the moment you realise two people in the same room have forecasts 40% apart.
You mean 40 pp apart?
You can sign up for updates via the website.
It may be better to replace âviaâ with âon the left menu ofâ. It was not immediately obvious to me where I should sign up.
Hi Guy and Ian. To clarify, I have in mind bets which involve winning or losing amounts of money of at least 1 % of the net annual income, and ideally at least 10 %. For example, for some earning 30 k$ of net income per year, at least 300 $ (= 0.01*30*10^3), and ideally at least 3 k$ (= 0.1*30*10^3). For a sufficiently large amount of money at stake, people would either not accept the bet, or accept it after significant investigation.
EgalÂiÂtarÂiÂanism Is False
Yes, exactly the one you linked to. Since you linked it, I assumed it was clear from the context.
I asked to confirm because the page is not technically a paper.
This is why empirical data from those accustomed to suffering would be so valuable.
I very much agree.
The natural equivalent would be contraception for wild animal. A practice that holds significant promise.
I think controlling the fertility of rodents can easily increase or decrease welfare. I believe it may impact soil animals way more than rodents, and I have very little idea about whether it increases or decreases the welfare of soil animals.
While many people try to help birds by using bird-safe glass, providing nesting boxes, or feeding them during winter, the downside is that an artificially inflated population can negatively impact the birds themselves and the insects they hunt.
I agree.
Do you have any specific species in mind?
No. I think I would guess random animals of many species to have negative lives with a probability of around 50 %, including species of nematodes. In addition, I do not expect the uncertainty about whether animals have positive or negative lives to be super correlated across species. So random animals of some species having positive lives would still leave me believing that random animals of some other species could easily have negative lives.
Thanks for clarifying, Marcus.
I am very open to funding research on the sentience of nematodes.
Great.
Regarding intensities of pain, Iâm open to it, but would be surprised.
Why would you be surprised? I think the uncertainty of the intensity of excruciating pain is a major driver of the uncertainty of the cost-effectiveness of humane slaughter interventions, like advocating for electrically stunning farmed shrimps as done by the Shrimp Welfare Projectâs (SWPâs) Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI).
Welfare comparisons across species are also in scope. I consider Bob Fischer to be one of our best people who has a strong hunch for making his research useful, and as much as is practicable/âpossible, he should have free rein to do the work he finds most valauble.
I would agree Bob is among the best people to lead research on welfare comparisons across species.
This talk in 2023 is responsible for a lot of my thinking around smaller animals and very much cemented the idea that helping non-human animals was going to be far more cost-effective.
I really liked that talk from Bob. However, I have very little idea about whether interventions targeting invertebrates increase the welfare of their target beneficiaries more or less cost-effectively than ones targeting humans. For individual welfare per fully-healthy-animal-year proportional to âindividual number of neuronsâ^âexponentâ, and âexponentâ from 0 to 2, which covers the best guesses that I consider reasonable, I estimate that HSI has increased the welfare of shrimps 1.68*10^-6 to 1.68 M times as cost-effectively as GiveWellâs top charities increase the welfare of humans.
Thatâs what I meant by interest-indexed, unless that isnât capturing your concern?
Got it. I would give you 1 k$, and, if I won, you would give me 2 k$ times the ratio between the unit value of global stocks at the end of 2034 and time of my initial transfer.
What is your P(existentially bad outcomes) in the next 10 years? As maybe a starting point for finding a bet that sounds good to you.
The bet above sounds good to me. The unit value of global stocks can be that of Vanguard FTSE All-World UCITS - (USD) Accumulating, which is the one I invest in. I would want to make a post to formalise the bet. Let me know if you want to move forward.
So when assessing if an animal lives a good life we should not only consider the circumstances but how they experience it.
What ultimately matters for me is just the subjetive experience of the animals. I only care about the circumstances because they inform the subjective experiences.
So I wouldnât be surprised to learn that most insects are happier than most humans.
Me neither. However, there are good arguments for wild invertebrates having not only positive, but also negative lives.
They didnât mention torture in the welfare paper, probably because it is a combination of humiliation/âpain/âhelplessness. For the way they described it, yes I would.
Which paper are you referring to? Are you referring to WFIâs page about pain intensities? Here is how they describe excruciating pain.
Excruciating. All conditions and events associated with extreme levels of Pain that are not normally tolerated even if only for a few seconds. In humans, it would mark the threshold of Pain under which many people choose to take their lives rather than endure the Pain. This is the case, for example, of scalding and severe burning events. Behavioral patterns associated with experiences in this category may include loud screaming, involuntary shaking, extreme muscle tension, or extreme restlessness. Another criterion is the manifestation of behaviors that individuals would strongly refrain from displaying under normal circumstances, as they threaten body integrity (e.g. running into hazardous areas or exposing oneself to sources of danger, such as predators, as a result of Pain or of attempts to alleviate it). The attribution of conditions to this level must therefore be done cautiously. Concealment of Pain is not possible.
Torture is not mentioned above, but my quote above (âsevere burning in large areas of the body, dismemberment, or extreme tortureâ) is from Cynthia Schuck-Paim, WFIâs research director. In any case, if many prefer ending their lives over excruciating pain, it makes sense to assume they would prefer avoiding 10 min of excruciating pain over losing 24 h of fully healthy life?
I donât think that euthanasia would always go against her preferences. (Iâm imagining my mumâs dog here.) Humans definitely use euthanasia when it is available to them, and I certainly would. Also, in the wild she would hardly find herself in a situation where she is slowly decaying.
Imagine a pet is born with some disease that allows them to live a long live, but one which has way more suffering than happiness. Do you think such pet should be euthanised? If yes, do you think its birth should ideally have been avoided in the 1st place? If yes, would you apply the same reasoning to wild animals which experience way more suffering than happiness (I guess some do)?
Hi Marcus.
(We also expect to place some bets on non-AI opportunities that are unusually strong.)
Are you open to funding research on the sentience of nematodes? This is one of the âFour Investigation Prioritiesâ mentioned in section 13.4 of chapter 13 of the book The Edge of Sentience by Jonathan Birch.
How about funding research on the time trade-offs between the pains defined by the Welfare Footprint Institute (WFI) by surveying people who have recently experienced excruciating pain? I think people suffering from cluster headaches would be good candidates. Ambitious Impact (AIM) currently estimates suffering-adjusted days (SADs) assuming that excruciating pain is 48.0 (= 11.7/â0.244) times as intense as hurtful pain (you can ask Vicky Cox for the sheet), which I believe is very off. It implies 16 h of âawareness of Pain is likely to be present most of the timeâ (hurtful pain) is as bad as 20.0 min (= 16â48.0*60) of âsevere burning in large areas of the body, dismemberment, or extreme tortureâ (excruciating pain). Here is a thread where I discussed AIMâs pain intensities with the person responsible for their last iteration.
How about funding research on welfare comparisons across species? In Bob Fischerâs book about comparing welfare across species, the tentative sentience-adjusted welfare range of shrimps is 8.0 % of that of humans. However, if the sentience-adjusted welfare range is proportional to âindividual number of neuronsâ^âexponentâ, and âexponentâ can range from 0 to 2, which I consider reasonable, the sentience-adjusted welfare range of shrimp can range from 10^-12 (= (10^-6)^2) to 1 times that of humans.
I liked this chat I had with Gemini 3.1 Pro about the relationship between the intensity of subjective experiences, and the size of neuronal avalanches. You and @Bob Fischer may also find it interesting.