For several years, I've been vegan basically other than bivalves, but I started taking actual fish oil supplements (anchovy-based) a few months ago.^[1] I started taking actual fish oil, because:

1. I was more confident in the benefits of >50% EPA omega-3 supplements than I was in >50% DHA omega-3 supplements^[2][3],
2. I couldn't find cheap enough vegan supplements for which the omega-3 was >50% EPA (I used these for some time, but they are pretty expensive, because I was taking multiple per day) or cheap and practical bivalve sources that were consistently >50% EPA from omega-3 and had low omega-6,
3. I was concerned that EPA and DHA might compete, so that just taking more of an omega-3 supplement that's >50% DHA might not help as much, although I'm very unsure about this, and
4. the effects on animals aren't clearly worse (rather than better) than not eating them or eating alternatives (see my sequence, and this thread on this post.)

I just got Perplexity to do some related "Deep Research" here. Its answer to the first prompt suggests competition isn't much of a concern, while its answer to the second suggests that >50% EPA omega-3 supplements tend to be better for brain function than >50% DHA omega-3 supplements, but it depends on the brain functions you're most interested in; higher DHA is recommended for memory and cognitive aging. Also, the usual warning about LLMs hallucinating or otherwise not being accurate.

1. ^{^}

   I take 4 of these per day, for 1600 mg of EPA and 800mg of DHA per day.

2. ^{^}

   Firth et al., 2019, figure 2 suggests >50% EPA supplements are effective in treating depression, and there's not enough evidence to suggest >50% DHA supplements are effective in treating depression, despite multiple studies with many participants in total. However, I didn't check doses.

3. ^{^}

   From the Wikipedia page on EPA:

   Although studies of fish oil supplements, which contain both docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and EPA, have failed to support claims of preventing heart attacks or strokes,^[2][3][4] a recent multi-year study of Vascepa (ethyl eicosapentaenoate, the ethyl ester of the free fatty acid), a prescription drug containing only EPA, was shown to reduce heart attack, stroke, and cardiovascular death by 25% relative to a placebo in those with statin-resistant hypertriglyceridemia.^[5][6]

Even just the effects on wild insects could be important, so anyone who is interested in insect welfare should be interested in these effects, too, or have good reason to ignore them, which I'd be interested in knowing (and possibly challenging).

I'd also tentatively put mites, springtails and farmed insect larvae at similar welfare ranges and probabilities of sentience, although quite uncertain. So, if you count farmed insect larvae as worthy of moral consideration at all, you should probably count mites and springtails, too, and to similar degrees on welfarist grounds.

I think some potentially good reasons to ignore the effects on wild terrestrial invertebrates are the following:

1. You think we'll have much larger expected impact on invertebrates with the invertebrate work we (or you) support or will support. Maybe (y)our portfolio of interventions will be positive in expectation across groups of welfare ranges and probabilities of sentience.
   1. I think this requires at least comparing to estimates of the effects of vertebrate-targeting interventions on wild terrestrial invertebrates, e.g. Vasco's, to be justified. So you aren't exactly ignoring the effects at all. That ~36% of the world's habitable land is used for animal agriculture, directly or for feed,^[1] seems like a good reason to believe that animal agriculture is one of the main ways we affect wild (terrestrial) invertebrates and that some of the highest leverage vertebrate interventions will be among the highest leverage for wild invertebrates.
2. You think the impacts on wild terrestrial invertebrates are generally good anyway, but don't differ enough between interventions to outweigh reasons for sometimes prioritizing vertebrates (e.g. normative uncertainty or a portfolio that's robustly good across sentience and welfare range groups).
   1. I'd want to know why. I have some doubts for animal product reduction, e.g. work to support alternative proteins and veg food advocacy.
3. You're clueless about the effects on wild terrestrial invertebrates (e.g. given uncertainty about their expected average welfare, or tradeoffs between natural deaths and crop deaths) and you ignore them on the basis of cluelessness, using imprecise credences.
   1. Even as someone suffering-focused, I'm currently clueless about the expected effects of crop agriculture on wild terrestrial invertebrates. It seems like pesticide deaths could be far worse than natural deaths, generally at least as intense at their worst as natural deaths and often more drawn out, enough to make up for and possibly outweigh the reduction in population sizes. I think the (expected) effects could go either way, and we probably need more primary research to decide which way.
      1. However, I do think beef/grazing/pasture reduces wild terrestrial invertebrate suffering. So, if you're ignoring some effects, it seems like you should separate the crop and pasture effects and deal with them separately. They affect different individuals living in different areas.
   2. FWIW, this is not the same as assuming the expected effects are precisely 0 and then ignoring them because of that. It would be an incredibly suspicious coincidence if the expected effects were exactly 0. You'd have to ignore (almost) all evidence about the actual lives of these animals and the effects of agriculture, and rely (almost) entirely on a symmetric prior, and that doesn't seem justified to me.
4. Non-consequentialist / non-welfarist reasons.
   1. I don't personally consider these to be good reasons, but I see ethics as mostly subjective, so they can be good reasons to other people.

1. ^{^}

   7% for crops for direct human consumption, 1% for urban and built-up land, including settlements and infrastructure, and 12-13% for logging for wood. I expect almost all of the rest of habitable land to be left alone, some possibly abandoned and allowed to rewild.

If we're talking about an increasing demand shift for sardines and anchovies from people who would otherwise abstain from eating fish, this would increase the price of fishmeal and make farmed insects look relatively more attractive as a potential feed for farmed fish, especially salmon. So, this could increase insect farming, too.

On the other hand, shifting people from eating farmed fish to eating sardines and anchovies could reduce both fish farming and insect farming (as well as crop agriculture for feed, but I'm not sure whether that's good or bad).

Under 4, we should consider possibilities of massive wealth gains from automation, and that the cage-free shift would have happened anyway or at much lower (relative) cost without our work before the AI transition and paradigm shift. People still want to eat eggs out of habit, food neophobia or for cultural or political or any other reasons. However, consumers become so wealthy that the difference in cost between caged and cage-free is no longer significant to them, and they would just pay it, or are much more open to cage-free (and other high welfare) legislation..

Or, maybe some animal advocates (who invested in AI or even the market broadly) become so wealthy that they could subsidize people or farms to switch to cage-free. If this is "our money", then this looks more like investing to give and just optimal donation timing. If this is not "our money", say, because we're not coordinating that closely with these advocates and have little influence on their choices, then it looks like someone else solving the problem later.

FWIW, I wouldn’t consider planktonic animals necessarily brainless or unworthy of moral consideration. Peruvian anchoveta eat krill, which I imagine to be sentient with modest probability, and copepods, which I consider worth researching more.

Also, the primary beneficiaries of GiveWell-recommended charities are mostly infants and children, who eat less.

In case anyone is interested, I also have:

1. unpublished material on the conscious subsystems hypothesis, related to neuron count measures, with my own quantitative models, arguments for my parameter choices/bounds and sensitivity analysis for chickens vs humans. Feel free to message me for access.
2. arguments for animals mattering a lot in expectation on non-hedonistic stances here and here, distinct from RP's.

Maybe you can turn this into a FAQ by pulling out quotes or having an LLM summarize the explanations in your citations? I'm not sure if it's worth the effort, though, because people can just go read the citations.

I'd argue that cheaper higher animal welfare and alternative proteins in X years suggest that interventions will be more cost-effective in X years, which might imply that we should "save and invest" (either literally, in capital, or conceptually, in movement capacity). Do you have any thoughts on that?

I agree they could be cheaper (in relative terms), but also possibly far more likely to happen without us saving and investing more on the margin. It's probably worth ensuring a decent sum of money is saved and invested for this possibility, though.

Your 4 priorities seem reasonable to me. I might aim 2, 3 and 4 primarily at potentially extremely high payoff interventions, e.g. s-risks. They should beat 1 in expectation, and we should have plausible models for how they could.

It seems likely to me that donation opportunities will become less cost-effective over time, as problems become increasingly solved by economic growth and other agents. For example, the poorest people in the future will be wealthier and better off than the poorest people today. And animal welfare in the future will be better than today (although things could get worse before they get better, especially for farmed insects).