I'm curious actually why 80,000 hours didn't aggressively expand in the past. It seems crazy to me that one of the core EA organisations only has 50 staff after existing for 15 years. Did you not feel growth was justified before, or has it just been a gradual process that you're now pushing harder to accelerate?

I suppose it's a reaction to the tendency on the political left to not listen to a person at all because of some association they have with some group.

But I agree with you. We should be wary of these dynamics, without falling into black and white ways of thinking.

Also to second Nick, I really 'felt' and resonated with this post!

I find the difference between pain and suffering (1&2) plausible, and it also makes sense that the sense of self needed for suffering is more likely to arise in social species. It also seems plausible that this creates a greater welfare range, insofar as it adds on another type of unpleasant experience.

I'm hesitant to place too much importance on this when thinking about the badness of the experiences of simpler organisms, though. For one reason, as you pointed out, it doesn't seem to change the policies we should support most of the time. But secondly... I think it's easy to overestimate the importance of our own self-consciousness. I actually think that most of the time I'm not self-conscious - I'm just going about my day, doing things habitually. But physical pain can still be awful, for example a headache, or when I stub my toe after waking up. This is clearly different from e.g. depression, which I think plausibly does require self-consciousness. I doubt that insects can get depressed. But I feel like we can make pretty good assessments of the quality of their lives on the basis of non-reflective experience.

Those are just my thoughts, I don't think I'm disagreeing with anything in the post!

I also note that expected lifespan, while seeming like a pretty good indicator of welfare, is going to be extremely sensitive to assumptions about when an organism becomes sentient for r-selected species. E.g. whether a trout is already sentient in an egg, at the point of hatching, or only two days later might change its expected lifespan from 0, to <1 day, to maybe a week (these are guesses, but I think they're quite plausible).

I don't think that undermines the measure, it just shows how hard this is... :/

I really appreciate this as a summary of the literature on soil invertebrates, and for making much of it more accessible. It's quite eye-opening to see how enormous the number of soil invertebrates are, and how it varies across biomes. I have a couple of questions:

1. I find it very surprising that the number of nematodes is higher in boreal forests than tropic ones. Shouldn't NPP be much higher in tropical forests? Do you have any idea, then, why the number of nematodes is lower? Looking at the study by Rosenberg et al, I see tropical forests have higher numbers of arthropods - especially the larger termites, so it might just be that they exclude nematodes.
2. Since I'm wary of the assumption of net-negative lives, as I mentioned on the previous post, I like the focus on life expectancy. But I was a bit confused that this came in section 4, but sections 5 and 6 still focused on simply reducing total populations (on the assumption that doing so increases total welfare). So it's not clear to me, if we focus on increasing life expectancy, what interventions that would point to for soil invertebrates.

*edit to correct my first question, which had overlooked your table

Was I then reading too much into the tree being outside the last circle? 😄

I think this is so awesome, and I hope I can make a similar pledge someday, if I achieve enough financial security. 

I'm kinda curious how frugally you live with 5%. A concern I have is that as I get older, the lifestyles of those around me improve (since they have more money) and so it's quite hard not to raise my standards as well. 

Also I guess you have no concerns about potentially having to support family?

Just annually, unless something exceptional changes how I think about these things

Hi Dawn, thanks for this! I like the approach of letting people choose their assumptions at the start.

Ng argued that evolutionary dynamics – particularly the r-strategy of producing far more offspring than survive – imply that suffering probably dominates happiness in nature.

Are you aware that Groff & Ng subsequently published a correction to this claim? Specifically:

In this paper, we find an error in Ng’s model that, when fixed, negates the original conclusion. Instead, the model offers only ambiguity as to whether suffering or enjoyment predominates in nature.

But I'm not a fan of Ng's approach to this. His original argument was based on a weird and very crude assumption that if you don't manage to reproduce, evolution would probably give you more negative experiences than positive ones. And this just doesn't have to be true. I think Tomasik made the case for net-negative welfare better, but Browning & Veit present some pretty good reasons to be doubt that death will outweigh the other potentially positive experiences in wild animals' lives.

I think most of those working on WAW are now tending to agree that we don't know enough to make this judgement with any degree of confidence. Given how little we know about the experiences of most wild animals, this is just a hard call to make. For that reason, interventions that don't depend on this assumption tend to be favored. But I'm wondering if you have particular reasons for favoring the net-negative view?

I think this is a good question (and I see it's well intended), but it seems to me that you've overinflated your point. I don't think it's accurate say there is a dark downside - rather, there's just a reason for uncertainty.

Pointing out the number of shellfish (bivalves, to be specific) is potentially misleading if you don't also add some information about what reasons we have to think that they might or might not be sentient. I think these are the most important things to know:

• - Bivalves have no brains, at all. They have ganglia (nerve clusters) but no centre to their nervous system. In contrast, insects have (simple) brains).
• - There is no behavioral evidence for pain responses (some will suggest there are, but the behaviors can be explained mechanistically).
• + Bivalves have nociceptors (which are necessary for detecting pain).

The lack of a centralised nervous system seems pretty crucial to me. Given that, I don't think it makes sense to assume a very low degree of sentience. I  don't think there's much reason to think that intensity of sensation scales this way at all (it seems more charitable to them to assume they have less diverse but still intense feelings). So I would treat it as "sentient or not" and put only a tiny probability on them being sentient, although not a 0 probability. That changes the framing from: "I think there might be a small amount of suffering here, and there's a LOT of them" to "there is probably no suffering, but I'm unsure, and if I'm wrong then it would be huge".