Even if we grant that punishment is more effective than positive reward in shaping behavior, what about the consideration that once the animal learns, it'll avoid situations where it gets punished, but it actively seeks out (and gets better at) obtaining positive reward? 

Fair point, though then:

• Any being that is motivated by severe pain where yours is motivated by pleasure (or lighter pain like small frustration, indeed) should be selected for over yours.
• Your animal will presumably still need reminders of what it feels like not to avoid these situations to actually be motivated to avoid them. (Unless the suffering it felt the last time was so traumatizing that it'll never make the mistake again but then, this hardly goes against the suffering-prevalence thesis.)
• We know (from empirical findings, this time) that many of those pain-inducing situations are common and hard to (systematically) avoid.
• (EDIT to add:) Why would your learning animal need rewards if it can just not repeat past mistakes? Maybe learning abilities say things about how large the welfare range is more than about pain vs. pleasure (see Schukraft et al. 2024, sec. 3.1.4, and 4.4.3).

But overall I'd be pretty hesitant to give much weight to theoretical arguments of this sort, especially since you can sometimes think of counterconsiderations like the one above.

In absolute terms, fair. I'm just skeptical that judgment calls on net welfare after empirically studying the lives of wild animals are any better. If there's a logical or evolutionary reason to expect X, this seems like a stronger reason for X than "we've looked at what some wild animals commonly experience and we feel like what we see means X." 

Maybe stronger does not mean strong in absolute, though. But then, the conclusion would not be that we shouldn't update much based on theoretical arguments of this sort, but that there is no evidence we can find (whether theoretical or empirical) on which we could base significant updates.

And as a possible counterpoint to the premise, I remember this review of a book on parenting and animal training where it says that training animals with attention on positive reward (but also trying not to reward undesired behavior) works best. That's a different context than evolution's, though.

Interesting, I'll look into this. Thanks!

I think we’d get the best sense of net wild animal welfare not from abstract arguments but by studying individual animals up close.

Tangential to your main point, but I'm actually not sure about this. For example, O'Brien (2021, §2.4) makes a theoretical argument according to which suffering is indirectly selected for by evolution. In this paper draft (sec. 5), I make a similar argument, defending that suffering is directly selected for (although it is partly based on the empirical findings that punishment is often more effective than reward at motivating behaviors). I think this kind of "suffering is a feature, not a bug" argument might in fact be more robust than our impression after looking at empirical stuff,^[1] although I'd need to think more about this.

Interesting post, Lukas! Thanks for writing this :)

1. ^{^}

   Related thoughs (on the potential strengh of logical and evolutionary arguments, in particular) in the second paragraph of this section.
    

I'd be curious to have your take (and anyone else's) on the following.

Say you have a friend who is buying and reselling items. She offers you the following deal A:

• She gives you $20.
• Whatever the net balance of her activity is at the end of the month, you share the benefits or losses with her, which can mean anything from -$1000 to +$1000 for you, and you have no expectation at all. You're clueless. (Importantly, this does not mean EV = 0, but rather EV = ??? although within an order of magnitude of 1k.)

She also offers you deal B, where she gives you $1, and that's it.

You want to maximize your money in a risk-neutral neutral way, and value money linearly, here. Also, assume we have a theory of bracketing that overcomes these two problems in a way that makes bracketing recommend deal A. 

Still, it is not clear whether you should follow bracketing, happily take the $20, and ignore the rest. Maybe you should prefer robustly good deal B, even though this means you have to accept avoiding transformative changes... I feel conflicted, here.

Thoughts? What are your intuitions in this case? And do you think our real-world situation with animals is disanalogous in a crucial way?

Nice, thanks for engaging! :)

Effects on AW are an important consideration for GHD but they're not the only or most important factor going into the overall positivity of the cause. Does that make sense?

It sounds like this is actually the core crux of your view, then. If so, it might be worth making that explicit in the post. As it stands, the discussion of WAW could give the impression that it plays a more decisive role in your evaluation than it ultimately does, whereas your judgment seems to rest mainly on the effects on human welfare, given what you say here.

I also think this position of yours (that is now revealed) invites further scrutiny. Given how many more animals are plausibly affected by GDH compared to humans, concluding that AW is not the most important factor appears to rely on specific assumptions about moral weights that privilege humans to an extent that would be very controversial if it were made explicit. It could be helpful to spell those assumptions out, or at least acknowledge that they’re doing significant work here.

...if you think welfare is net positive either way, yes. This seems like a tough case to make. I see how one can opt for agnosticism over believing net negative but I doubt there exists anything remotely close to a good case that WAW currently is net positive (and not just highly uncertain).

We take the meat-eater problem^[3] seriously, but we don't at all think that the conclusion is to avoid donating in the Global Health and Development (GHD) space: the effects might actually even out if e.g. further development reduces the total amount of natural space, potentially counterbalancing increased meat consumption by reducing the number of suffering wild animals.

Is the positive effect on wild animal welfare really your crux for finding GHD net positive? If yes, that means you think WAW is more pressing than improving human health. And it feels weird to advocate for improving human health despite the meat-eating pb because of wild animal suffering. If you really think that, it feels like you should just advocate for reducing wild animal suffering instead (unless you think GDH happens to be the best way to do that).

Damn, a friend just made me realize that I had mispelled your first name too. So sorry aha

I think if we only do spatiotemporal bracketing, it tells us to ignore the far future and causally inaccessible spacetime locations, because each such location is made neither determinately better off in expectation nor determinately worse off in expectation.

Oh helpful thanks, this reasoning also works in my sniper case, actually. I am clueful about the "where Emily is right after she potentially shoots" ST location so I can't bracket out the payoff attached to her shoulder pain. This payoff is contained within this small ST region. However, the payoffs associated with where the bullet ends aren't neatly contained in small ST regions the same way! I want the terrorist dead because he's gonna keep terrorizing some parts of the world otherwise. I want the kid alive to prevent the negative consequences (in various ST regions) associated with an innocent kid's death. Because of this, I arguably can't pin down any specific ST location other than "where Emily is right after she potentially shoots" that is made determinately better or worse off by Emily taking the shot. Hence, ST bracketing would allow C but not A or B. 

To the extent that I'm still skeptical of C being warranted, it is because:

• 1) I find it weird that finding action-guidance depends on my inability to pin down any specific ST location other than "where Emily is right after she potentially shoots" that is made determinately better or worse off. Say I had a crystal ball randomly showing me a prison cell in Argentina that, for some reason, is empty if Emily shoots and filled with starving people if she doesn't. ST bracketing would now tell me shooting is better... It feels wrong to decide based on isolated ST regions in which I happen to know what happens depending on whether Emily shoots. There are plenty of other ST regions that would be made better or worse off. I just can't say where/when they are. And whether or not I can say this feels like it shouldn't matter.^[1]
• 2) I'm confused as to why we should bracket based on ST regions rather than on some other defensible value-bearers that may give a conflicting result.

And I guess all this also applies to A' vs B' vs C' and whether to bracket out near-term effects. Thanks for helping me identify these cruxes!

I'll take some more time to think about your point about bracketing out possibilities and AGI by date X.

1. ^{^}

   And that's one way to interpret Anthony's first objection to bracketing? I can't actually pin down a specific ST location (or whatever value-bearer) where donating to AMF is determinately bad, but I still know for sure such locations exist! As I think you alluded to elsewhere while discussing ST bracketing and changes to agriculture/land use, what stops us from acting as if we could pin down such locations?

Interesting, thanks for the update!

If you weren't doing [B] with moral weights, though, you would presumably have to worry about things other than effects on soil animals. So, ultimately, [B] remains an important crux for you.

(You could still say you'd prioritize decreasing uncertainty on moral weights if you thought there was too much uncertainty to justify doing [B], but the results from such research might never be precise enough to be action-guiding. You might have to endorse B despite the ambiguity, or one of the three others.)