Hey @Vasco Grilo🔸 Abraham and i aren't discussing the cost effectiveness of the work, we're discussing the merits of having all people who believe in high probabilities of insect sentience working on and funding the work. He was making the point that he was one of the founders of Arthropoda even while his personal percentage chance on moral relevance of insects isn't necessarily that high.

it's not that surprising to me. getting Tax free donation status in the US  is far easier than most other countries. OneDay Health Charity is registered in New Zealand in primarily with governance based there, and in Uganda as an international NGO, but it's only in the US that people can donate tax deductable through our 501c3 there.....

"Rather, we're taking a precautionary framework about insects being sentient and asking how to improve their welfare if they are".

If this is the case, i think this mission could have been made a bit more clear on @Bob Fischer 's funding post and on the website itself. Re-reading the post though that sentiment does come through if a bit unclearly. On a first read i really did think a big part of it was still researching insect sentience.

Also on a completely side/ personal note I'm a bit concerned that you "would love to not be co-running a bug granting charity as a volunteer in addition to my two other jobs!" I think we are generally more productive if we are happy doing what we love and the work is sustainable. I've tried at times dying on the altar of important work and it wasn't helpful for me or the work!

it's good to hear that there are more skeptical people working in this space on your front. i take the point about life for all animal welfare people being harder if the consensus becomes we need to care a lot about insects

I don't understand the comparison to working with humans at all though, it seems a bit absurd. Basically 100 percent of people think humans matter, so it's not even possible to find people who don't care about them? whereas with insects getting people with 1% - 30% priors on sentience working on that seems reasonable? Orgs like GiveWell and Global health researchers are often skeptical about what they are researching. You're right though that bias is an issue in all research, in it's just about mitigating it.

 There are skeptical scientists out there I've even seen them commenting on the forum - could they not be brought on board? I get that might be impossible if it's a volunteer organization, but i would hope some people involved were on good terms/friends with more skeptical people.

My main point isn't that i think people shouldn't work on what they care about, it's that we have purely highly motivated people funding/running a range of organizations that are researching a critically important question about animal welfare, which seems like potentially a strong source of bias.

nice one that's excellent i agree with all of that. 

To clarify think a lot of forum EV calculation in the global health space (not necessarily maximization) is pretty reasonable and we don't see the wild settings you speak of. 

But yeah naive maximization based on hugely uncertain calculations which might tell us stopping factory is good one day, then bad the next - i don't take that seriously.

@Vasco Grilo🔸 I wasn't clear sorry, i meant negative findings in the scientific sense, in this case unremarkable findings that might provide evidence against insect sentience. Have edited above hope it's more clear now.

And my comment didn't address your soil arthropods concern, it was an unrelated point about Anthropoda. i think i failed on clarity here...

i agree it's a great area for funding and I'm surprised there's not more research ongoing on this. My concern is that Anthropoda is operated by some of the same people 

1. Who did the RP moral weights project
2. Who are doing RP's current cause prioritisation work
3. Running the WAW initiative.
4. involved with the Insect Welfare research society

And most/all of whom were not just welfare researchers, but at least to some extent animal welfare proponents/activists before this research started. As far as I can see there is no-one even moderately skeptical of animal welfare/sentience working on these things, although i get that might be too high a bar here because why would skeptical people want to devote their lives to this kind of research?

I think this personel overlap has the potential to cause conflicts of interests. 

I don't know whether there are enough people in the field to be able to have less personel overlap between these orgs but it feels a bit icky at best and dangerous at worst. 

I'm not recommending people don't donate to these orgs Im just pointing out the extreme personel overlap in this funding/research ecosystem and that i don't love the situation.

I like the idea of bracketing, but i feel like we're never completely clueless when it comes to animal welfare - there's always a "chance" of sentience right? I don't see how it could help here.

Is there then some kinds of probability range threshold we should consider close -to-clueless and bracket out?

Also It's easier for me who is pretty happy right now that insects and anything smaller aren't  important in welfare calculations, but if you do give extra weight to harm in calculations, and you do think insects have a non-negligible chance of pain, I agree with MichaelStJules's that's bound to lead to a lot of inaction.

As a side note i think we all want to do good, not just good in expectation, but "good in expectation" is the best we can do with limited knowledge right?