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).
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.
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:
- 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.
When I made this point in my response post, people pointed out that in some cases the queen's wings are clipped to prevent the entire colony from leaving. This doesn't strictly prevent all the bees from leaving; an older queen can send out princesses ("virgin queens") with a fraction of the rest of the hive in a practice known as "swarming." However, it does limit the possibility of all of the bees leaving en masse ("absconding").
I couldn't figure out quickly how common wing-clipping is. My current guess is that it is not very common (in this beekeeper subreddit post, some beekeepers claimed to have never heard of it[1]). However I have high error bars and this is indeed cruxy for how much autonomy and exit rights managed honeybees in practice have.
This is unfortunately less evidence than it may initially sound. It could still be one of those common cases in factory farming where the majority of farmers have very different experiences than the majority of farmed animals, because (unlike with HR departments managing humans) it's very possible that Big Bee has on average worse practices than small hobbyist beekeepers who are both more active online and more charismatic.
(btw for people who haven't noticed, the substack itself has more details on the eusociality argument)
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.