Not sure if relevant, but I've written up a post offering my take on the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics." My core argument is that we can potentially resolve Wigner's puzzle by applying an anthropic filter, but one focused on the evolvability of mathematical minds rather than just life or consciousness.

The thesis is that for a mind to evolve from basic pattern recognition to abstract reasoning, it needs to exist in a universe where patterns are layered, consistent, and compounding. In other words, a "mathematically simple" universe. In chaotic or non-mathematical universes, the evolutionary gradient towards higher intelligence would be flat or negative.

Therefore, any being capable of asking "why is math so effective?" would most likely find itself in a universe where it is.

I try to differentiate this from past evolutionary/anthropic arguments and address objections (Boltzmann brains, simulation, etc.). I'm particularly interested in critiques of the core "evolutionary gradient" claim and the "distribution of universes" problem I bring up near the end.

The argument spans a number of academic disciplines, however I think it most centrally falls under "philosophy of science." At any rate, I'm happy to clear up any conceptual confusions or non-standard uses of jargon in the comments.

Looking forward to the discussion.

Imagine you're a shrimp trying to do physics at the bottom of a turbulent waterfall. You try to count waves with your shrimp feelers and formulate hydrodynamics models with your small shrimp brain. But it’s hard. Every time you think you've spotted a pattern in the water flow, the next moment brings complete chaos. Your attempts at prediction fail miserably. In such a world, you might just turn your back on science and get re-educated in shrimp grad school in the shrimpanities to study shrimp poetry or shrimp ethics or something.

So why do human mathematicians and physicists have it much easier than the shrimp? Our models work very well to describe the world we live in—why? How can equations scribbled on paper so readily predict the motion of planets, the behavior of electrons, and the structure of spacetime? Put another way, why is our universe so amenable to mathematical description?

[...]

See more at: https://linch.substack.com/p/why-reality-has-a-well-known-math

Fun anecdote from Richard Hamming about checking the calculations used before the Trinity test:

Shortly before the first field test (you realize that no small scale experiment can be done—either you have a critical mass or you do not), a man asked me to check some arithmetic he had done, and I agreed, thinking to fob it off on some subordinate. When I asked what it was, he said, "It is the probability that the test bomb will ignite the whole atmosphere." I decided I would check it myself! The next day when he came for the answers I remarked to him, "The arithmetic was apparently correct but I do not know about the formulas for the capture cross sections for oxygen and nitrogen—after all, there could be no experiments at the needed energy levels." He replied, like a physicist talking to a mathematician, that he wanted me to check the arithmetic not the physics, and left. I said to myself, "What have you done, Hamming, you are involved in risking all of life that is known in the Universe, and you do not know much of an essential part?" I was pacing up and down the corridor when a friend asked me what was bothering me. I told him. His reply was, "Never mind, Hamming, no one will ever blame you."^[7]

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hamming 

Many people appreciated my Open Asteroid Impact startup/website/launch/joke/satire from last year. People here might also enjoy my self-exegesis of OAI, where I tried my best to unpack every Easter egg or inside-joke you might've spotted, and then some. 

eh I agree it's out of place and the alienation's not worth the benefits, but I still think it's mildly funny (similar to Eliezer's random New Atheism potshots at religion, which as a modern reader feels childish and unnecessary, but mildly funny for all of that).

mini-slider seems reasonable, "X% disagree with question" also seems fine to me, at least on desktop. "See vote" link seems bad for reasons you mention

Am i the only one who finds the X% disagree UX confusing? It's hard not to read it and intuitively think to myself that it's an alternative weighting/aggregation/expression of the Agree/Disagree votes. 

Note sure how to change the UX to be clearer, perhaps "X% disagree with question" would make it clearer to me.

Btw I really appreciate your substantive engagement and both your carefulness and detail of thought, I'll probably revisit this thread in the future if I ever want to write another post/detailed comment about insects/wild animals!

On reflection, it's certainly possible that I was assuming we had more evidence on suffering/wellbeing in nature (and in bees specfically) than we do

Thanks! Here's the 2019 RP report on honeybee welfare and interventions in case you're interested, other people are welcome to comment if there's more recent work. 

That might be right -- I didn't read the original post and I commented on your post not because I wanted to defend a particular side in the bee debate, but rather because I always found the evolutionary welfare arguments fascinating but dubious. I somehow decided to use this opportunity to get more towards the bottom of them. :) 

That's very fair! Yeah I feel the same way albeit maybe more relatively happy about the evolutionary arguments; certainly part of the value of writing up the evolutionary argument is having them critiqued; the eusociality stuff in particular I don't think is original to me but I'm not aware of a clear writeup elsewhere (and I didn't find when I was trying to look for something to link). 

Thank you for the detailed response and serious engagement!

I'm aware that a lot of that was very unrelated to bees -- I ended up going down various detours because they seemed interesting and I wanted to illustrate how little I think of these evolutionary cost-balancing approaches, since there are other concerns that I deem to be way more straightforward and stronger. FWIW, even Zach Groff in his talk seems to flag that we should interpret these things with a lot of caution and that their main takeaway is uncertainty and correcting a previous mistake in a calculation, rather than some concrete/strong takeaway about anything welfare-related in particular

To be clear I definitely don't think my analyses here is anywhere close to the final word on these issues, nor do I think the existence of some models tells us much.

It's not clear to me whether we actually disagree on the value of "evolutionary cost-balancing approaches", or we disagree on the level and value of the existing empirical information we have about suffering in nature. 

For example, I certainly would not consider evolutionary arguments to be compelling for analyzing human or chicken suffering. Both because both typical humans and typical chickens are very far from their evolutionary environments, and because we have substantially more available empirical evidence (though as always less than we'd like).

As I wrote in my post:

I consider the priors here to be among the strongest arguments, not because I think they're rock-solid but because I think reasoning about animal suffering in general is hard, especially so for insects. So the theoretical arguments here are relatively stronger just because the other lines of evidence are so weak.

I appreciate the nuances in your post! I also like 

These considerations about the interaction of threats, places of safety, how this affects animal psychology, etc., gets me to a more general critique of the economics reasoning that underlies some of the methodology here. It seems too simplistic to me and it seems to misunderstand what suffering is about.

I think this is fair but also it feels a bit like an isolated demand for rigor here. I think of my post, admittedly written quickly and on various subjects I'm not an expert in, primarily as a critique of another post that to me feels much more simplistic in comparison. 

First of all I should mention that the Forum post above is only a subset (~22%, ~850 words) of the whole Substack post (~3700 words) that covers the summary and intro. Totally fine if you didn't notice that, it's my fault for not making the formatting more transparent.

I see BB did a more expansive reply on Substack

(I don't think his reply was more expansive than yours; don't sell yourself short!)

This seems not that strong at all? You could make the exact same case for chicken or egg farmers  but I don't think many people would be arguing that those chickens have net positive lives.

Footnote 1 addresses that."The case for farmed bees is dissimilar to the case of (e.g.) farmed broiler chickens or pigs. Because farmed chickens are used only for their meat, the incentives of the farmers are to cram them with as much food as possible and for the chickens to grow as fast as possible. They do not need to be happy (unless happier animals taste better, and I think there is little to negative empirical evidence of this). The pain-pleasure signaling mechanisms are almost completely irrelevant to caged animals since their display of complex behavior is incidental to their use as farmed animals, while for bees it's critical."

How come you're using pollinators in the wild as the reference point? I would assume the counterfactual is less honeybees are bred/managed, so the reference point should be whether their lives are worth living at al,l rather than having less suffering than wild bees (taking the latter half of your clause).

Addressed in the post; basically if pollination by bees don't happen, the crops are still out there and farmers still need to find alternative pollination sources. Also my wording above is (relatively) careful ("mildly towards farmed bees having net positive lives, or at least better than pollinators in the wild.") to indicate two different reference points, rather than conflating the two as the same reference point. 

But I also generally think this is a weak argument for the reasons BB laid out e.g. bees being bred for docility, queen bees having their wings clipped, in conjunction with pheremones from the queen.

See this comment reply. Frequency of wing-clipping is an empirical question and I agree it's somewhat cruxy.

With this, it feels like most of your "On balance, I think it’s likely that farmed bees have net positive lives." argument falls away.

That said, I don't think the exit options argument is central or the strongest piece of evidence.

Also, I'm curious to hear more about your thinking on:

1. I think many EAs take it as a given that insects have net negative lives. I think this is a mistaken inference drawn from swapping intuitions of K-selected species unto the actual experiences of r-selected species.

See here. Though the wording could be tidied up a bit.