A Pascal's mugging by nematodes? Nematodes as utility monsters?

@tobycrisford 🔸 's points about conclusions that are extremely sensitivity to small changes in highly uncertain values is very important and this post (which I don't think is parody based on the author's previous posts) is a great demonstration of the pitfalls.

I've commented before that these sorts of calculations that show astronomical but uncertain numbers for shrimp welfare or insect welfare or wild animal welfare could also lead down this nematode welfare route. It's not obvious to me why someone who concludes that that shrimps are hugely morally significant would not also conclude that black soldier fly maggots are hugely morally significant, and then that nematodes are hugely morally significant.
 

(the organism on the far right is Giardia)
 

Interested to hear from Insect Welfare and Wild Animal Welfare advocates why they disagree that nematodes are the primary moral concern of planet Earth.

Lowering energy costs might have bipartisan support but the approaches to achieve them don't.

Energy prices is a well-treaded political issue that comes out at most elections. Everyone wants cheaper electricity but conservatives lean anti-wind and anti-solar and liberals lean anti-nuclear and anti-fossil fuel so there's a bit of an impasse.

Saying "lower energy costs has bipartisan support" is like saying "improving education outcomes" or "fixing healthcare" has bipartisan support. The disagreements and intractability are in the details.

Do you have a more specific idea for how you would use $1M to lower energy costs in way that would have bipartisan support?

Expressing uncomfortable truths is important when it's useful, but these calculations are so riddled with uncertainty and so lacking in actionable conclusions that this post and posts like it are probably net harmful.

I think it's reasonable to say that loudly pondering uncomfortable ideas is not useful if it returns an answer with error bars so wide that you might as well have not written the post at all.

Appeal to absurdity is a reasonable objection and shouldn't be discouraged. We need to be able to say clearly why idea X doesn't also imply some similar absurd idea Y.

I didn't say anything about the tractability of insect welfare interventions but I'm sure there are many things you could do to help insects. Almost all of those things will be at the direct or indirect cost of people. There are very few worlds in which you can consider insects sentient and not go completely off the rails sacrificing human welfare to insect welfare.

If we do say that helping insects is tractable and conclude that other pursuits are relatively meaningless, we can still acknowledge that on an absolute scale those other pursuits are incredibly meaningful

In a world with limited resources, meaningfullness is necessarily measured on a relative scale to triage resources. A toddler dropping their ice cream is "absolutely important" but I don't spend much time daily preventing that when there are families struggling to put food on the table, or 600,000 people dying of malaria annually, or chickens in cages. When one moral issue is magnitudes greater than any existing moral issue it requires a similarly large reorientation of attention and resources. I think you're too flippant in dismissing how disruptive this would be.

Agreed Nick. One of my recent comments has 7 agrees, 11 disagrees but -10 karma. If 7 people agree with a comment it's unlikely to be disruptive trolling that needs to be buried.

Clear misuse of voting and evidence of heavy forum bias that I sense but can't prove.

I'm doubtful that any of those are conscious

Why? The average person says that same thing about insects.

Two points:

1. Why stop at insects, why not write this same article about demodex mites, earthworms or krill?

2. I think there’s a big reason why the concerns of insects and smaller animals are dismissed that you haven’t touched on, which is that any consideration of these animals leads to absurd conclusions, like that every moral pursuit of humanity up to now is actually meaningless compared to improving the lives of insects. Most people can see that this is not a fruitful avenue of thinking.

I think you’re underestimating the average person by suggesting that the only reason they’re not interested in insect welfare is entrenched social norms. Whereas there were reasonable alternatives to slavery, and there are reasonable alternatives to factory farming, I think the average person can intuit that there’s no reasonable alternative to just politely ignoring the suffering of the quintillions of insects, worms and mites on the planet.