Hello.

Perhaps the largest uncertainty is the impact on wild animal welfare. One could consider second-order effects on soil nematode wildlife, which, taken seriously, would violently swing the estimates of whether cage-free is indeed good or bad; see @Vasco Grillo's posts. However, it contains a lot of uncertainty and has a stronger dependence on fully embracing utilitarianism, which gives pause to many, including myself.

Thanks for covering this. My take that corporate campaigns for cage-free layers could be good or bad for animals does not depend on caring about soil nematodes, or fully embracing utilitarianism. I think their effects on soil ants and termites could be much larger than those on chickens. So my take would not change if I attributed a moral weight of exactly 0 to soil springtails, mites, and nematodes. One can also be concerned about such campaigns decreasing the welfare of soil ants and termites a lot without fully embracing utilitarianism.

Here are my estimates for the cost-effectiveness of funding The Navigation Fund's cage-free campaigns fund assuming moral weight is proportional to "individual number of neurons"^"exponent".

As illustrated below, an exponent of 0.188 explains the sentience-adjusted welfare ranges in Bob Fischer's book very well. In agreement with the bottom left graph above, such exponent implies a 50 % chance of the campaigns increasing welfare. This results from very uncertain effects on soil animals being much larger than the effects on chickens, as it is illustrated in the bottom right graph above.

Hello Toby. I do not know whether the following would be good topics for a themed week. However, I would like to know how effects on soil invertebrates affect people's cause prioritisation, or why they neglect such effects. Here is a related analysis I did.

Thanks. Makes sense.

Hello. I agree. Here are related analyses I did.

Thanks, Tom. That makes sense. You estimate the deaths from "Stream 2 — N/W Africa + South Asia (monsoon disruption)" are 41.8 (= 16.7/0.4) times the deaths from "Stream 1 — N. & W. Europe (cooling-driven yield loss)". I had noted the vast majority of deaths came from stream 2, but should have mentioned it in my comment. I think judgement calls made in one part of the model offer a bit of evidence about ones made in other parts. However, I see now that your assumption to model the deaths from stream 2 that the share of people with food insecurity would increse by 13 pp if AMOC collapsed is much less of a judgement call. From the cell notes here:

Randell et al. (Tanzania): "To provide additional insight into the magnitude of this relationship, moving from a year with average rainy season precipitation (10 dm) to a particularly dry year in the 10th percentile of precipitation (6.6 dm) increases the predicted probability of being food insecure on both measures simultaneously by 13 percentage points."

IMF 2020 (Sub-Saharan Africa): "In Ethiopia, Malawi, Mali, Niger, and Tanzania, food insecurity increases by 5–20 percentage points with each flood or drought."

I wonder whether the association from Randell et al. (2022) would hold after controlling for temperature. If not, and AMOC's collapse is expected to change the temperature in the relevant regions of stream 2 less than the temperature difference between the 10th percentile and mean rainfall, it could be that the result from Randell et al. (2022) should be adjusted downwards.

Thanks for putting this together.

Brian subsequently wrote the essay My Confusions about the Hard Problem of Consciousness, which I think (though Vasco disagrees) basically contradicts this one.

Relatedly, I liked Brian's post The Many Fallacies of Dualism.

I think we most likely lose our entire vocabulary of non-physically-descriptive nouns

What do you mean by "lose"? I think the vocabulary you listed is useful regardless of one's views about consciousness.

I won't put words into Vasco's mouth, but I wonder whether he thinks there's a way of describing that process without using 'reference classes' that's simpler than '{full mathematical derivation that} that's the all the interacting fields and forces in that local area'.

I am not sure I understand the question. Human behaviour can be described via natural language, or incomplete mathematical models.

I also want to ask Vasco how he can be confident that, even if it's true that he has no consciousness (and it does seem to be a contingent and disablable property in humans), that lack of a light would generalise to those of us who profess to have one.

I think awake humans (including me) are conscious based on Wikipedia's definition (and interpreting the words there as defined in the dictionary).

Consciousness is being aware of something internal to one's self, or of states or objects in one's external environment.

Hi Liam. Thanks for sharing. Here is a quick check of one of the assumptions. The share of people with food insecurity in Northern and Western Europe in 2023 was 7.30 % and 6.00 %, around 6.65 % (= (0.0730 + 0.0600)/2). @Rethink Priorities (RP) assumes AMOC's collapse would increase that share by 6 pp (with a range of 1pp to 10 pp), 90.2 % (= 0.06/0.0665), thus bringing it to 12.6 % (= 0.0665 + 0.06). The share of people with food insecurity almost doubling seems high to me, but I do not know. The sheet only says the increase of 6 pp is "based on expected crop yield losses of ~30% in Europe".

I cannot tag this post with "Microorganisms", "Farmed animal welfare", or "Impact assessment". The popups say the tag was added (see print below), but it was not.

Hi Ollie. This post I published was labelled as "more than 90 % human-written", but I only wrote the 1st sentence. Everything else was AI-written.

Hello.

AIM has some data comparing Excruciating pain to Annoying between community surveys and the literature. For the literature showing trade off people would make the ratio is more like 1 : 30

Here is a discussion of AIM's pain intensities. None of the studies reviewed by AIM analysed excruciating pain as defined by the Welfare Footprint Institute (WFI).

If annoying pain was 30 times as intense as excruciating pain, 1 min of “severe burning in large areas of the body, dismemberment, or extreme torture” (excruciating pain) would be as bad as 30 min of "A mild discomfort that slightly distracts but does not impair normal functioning" (annoying pain). Excruciating pain in humans would “mark the threshold of Pain under which many people choose to take their lives rather than endure the Pain”. I doubt this would happen if people were indifferent between 1 min of excruciating pain and 30 min of annoying pain. In this pain, “Performance of cognitive tasks demanding attention are either not affected or only mildly affected”.

I feel like I am roughly indifferent between 0.864 s of excruciating pain and 10 d of annoying pain. So I guess excruciating pain is 1 M (= 10*24*60^2/0.864) times as intense as annoying pain.

At the same time, I have practically no idea about whether I would like more or fewer wild invertebrates. I prefer describing my views in these terms instead of saying I have practically no idea about whether wild invertebrates have positive or negative lives, which is much more vague.