The mistake I think you consistently make here is overconfidence in your ability to evaluate the relative well being of organisms very different than yourself. This overconfidence leads you to hastily conclude that humans are doing good by preventing the lives of nearly all future nonhuman animals.
Advocating for the widespread annihilation of irreplaceable living things we poorly understand on very limited evidence does not seem wise.
But the overconfidence cuts both ways. I might be wrong, but so might the rewilders, in which case they are causing hideous suffering to countless trillions of beings.
But it does not cut both ways equally, at least not without forced abstraction, which I think you argue reasonably well against.
Your position also commits a kind of base rate neglect, given that critters of our level of complexity are afforded on a vast "food chain" (more of a crazy ass webs) that is not currently replaceable with the provably unsuffering. Part of the rewilding movement is based on the idea of hedging against possible catastrophic cascades (which include death by scarcity rather than sustainable death by consumption).
It is clear to no one what constitutes "action v inaction" in any meaningful way, at this level of complexity, that would require rewilding to take on some special burden of proof. Unless they are putting beehives in your schoolhouses. Then you might get a bee in your bonnet.
I’ve said before: the destruction of all life on Earth is the only rational response to Bentham’s argument. Kill everything and no more suffering.
By the way, it’s not clear that Bentham should oppose Trump’s cuts to aid to Africa. People eat meat and sometimes even step on insects. Every additional African alive might or might not suffer in life, but such African probably causes untold insect suffering. Some might even eat shrimp!
It's actually worse than that. We currently have a nearly empty universe given the current Drake equation updates. Bentham would preemptively try to erase the possibility of less noetic life forms taking hold on other planets. Trillions of planets would need to be sterilized for their capacity for future suffering.
The argument depends on overconfidence, of whatever arbitrary flavor. Doing math with "suffering" strikes my ear as consequentialist.
To be clear, I support you sharing your opinions freely and widely. I also like your kind disposition, which I failed to reflect in tone. It seems to me, however, that you are not as careful as you are kind.
Suppose there was a way to prevent lots of kittens from suffering intensely for a dollar. Would it be objectionably consequentialist to suggest that was a good use of money because it prevented lots of suffering at low cost?
Consequentialist is a word with a meaning. It means that consequences are the only things that count for or against actions. What I've said here doesn't commit one to consequentialism.
It would not be "objectionably consequentialist," or objectionably anything else. Preventing suffering and taking into account opportunity costs are both pragmatic motivations. That there are elements of proportionality does not imply that the use of mathematical formalism is appropriate, or that the use of mathematical formalism in attempt to capture both suffering and opportunity in a single framework does not itself have opportunity costs. There is no guarantee that the best estimation of moral actions, prescriptions or proscriptions fit well into human working memory, excel spreadsheets or PowerPoint slides. Perhaps carrying one's dissonance is itself and act of character, rather than burning it all, overfitting to currently available models and methods.
Interesting way of thinking about these things, but it feels like you make some fairly large assertions about suffering and build your argument on top of them in a way that feels like it doesn't hold up for me. When you say "Let’s assume conservatively that half that many insects would have lived and died on the land if it wasn’t rewilded and that insects suffer 1% as intensely as people (which I think is an underestimate in expectation)", and use that number to "calculate" the total suffering equal to 2,927,400,000 human deaths, I don't think you really are going off of much other than your own emotional reaction to these things.
For example, if we take something like a mosquito which according to this paper has somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 neurons (happy to be corrected here, this is just a cursory glance) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8121336/ , and compare that to the number of neurons in a human brain, which at a glance people have estimated to be around 86,000,000,000, it leads me to think that humans might possess just a orders of magnitude more computational overhead to burn some extra energy on things like emotional reaction to stimuli and processing pain to be something like suffering that they can feel sad about. On the other hand, I would think that a mosquito or other insects have to make every single one of those 200,000 neurons work so brutally efficiently that there is very little room for anything like a conscious experience. Again, we're comparing the capacities for feeling and emotion from a brain where every cell could have a seat in two Dallas Cowboys football stadiums, to a brain where fitting every cell in a seat would need about 860,000 Dallas Cowboys football stadiums, a number so much larger that neither you or I can actually physically conceptualize.
I also think that you're making some pretty sweeping generalizations about what life in nature is actually like for these animals, mostly stemming from the fact that you are unable to picture life and existence from any other perspective than a human being with a massively oversized brain compared to all other life on earth. The reality is, we as humans have very little idea what life inside the brain the even the next smartest animals on earth is like, how much they feel, what they desire, what brings them the most pleasure and pain and in what ways. We know next to nothing about what the the experience of living as something like a lizard or a worm or an insect is, if there is even a fleck of conscious cognition, or of life in one of those bodies is efficient to the point that they might as well be a roomba, moving in a direction with no knowledge and foresight as to why and only changing course when their sensors tell them that they bumped into a wall. To decide for all animals from your limited human perspective that it's better for animals not to have lived at all, without ever having the ability to consult with them about how they feel about existing, I think is ridiculous.
A benevolent alien civilization, who have evolved to live 100,000 years and float through the cosmos in a state of existential bliss and communication and creation, might come across our civilization and come to the same conclusion as you did. "Wow, these poor miserable creatures have such short lives filled with such pain and suffering, we should do the humane thing and end them now so they don't have to suffer any further". However, if they stopped down to earth and took a poll of most people, they would find that most people would tell them despite the fact that they spend 50% of their waking hours staring at blinking pixels on a screen, or left their offspring at home to spend their days on an offshore oil rig pulling sludge from the crust of the earth, or lying on the streets asking for change, they would rather still have the opportunity to live and have the agency to find their way in the difficult world they reside in, rather than be wiped out for the sake of reducing suffering.
Maybe a mosquito is born in a lush swamp, and has abundant food for it's entire life, never needing to move far or work hard to satisfy that most basic urge. Maybe a bee is born in a healthy colony, next to a blooming flower field in the spring where it gains a level of satisfaction unknowable to you from running back and forth every day to those brightly colored spots in it's vision, providing for the colony, finally concluding it's life by busting a nut in the glorious queen so good that it's the last thing he ever does. Maybe a female mouse has 6 out of the 8 of her offspring survive the winter healthily, ensuring her genetics are passed on while she quietly passes away at the base of the tree her burrow resides under, her body giving nutrients back to the organism that gave her shelter her entire life. You speak of unknowable suffering, which absolutely does exist, but you have to consider that there are simple pleasures and satisfaction unknowable to you as well.
What humans are very good at is empathizing with others. It is our ability to see anther person and feel an echo of their emotions with our mirror neurons and react accordingly that allowed us to build small communities, then larger ones, and then eventually get to where we are today. I think your argument comes from a place of empathy which is a good thing, I just think has more legs is when you apply it to animals like pigs, cows, chickens, animals that I guess have the cranial overhead to feel things similar to our emotions. Animals we often grow in squalid, torturous conditions, and the real sin is that we never give them the chance to experience those pleasures unique to their existence that they so deserve.
I also don't think neuron count is a particularly accurate metric of intelligence when you zoom in, I just think it might be one of the most physically concrete metrics we have for comparing what is otherwise a difficult thing to nail down. If anything it's most useful as a way to get a sense of the differences in size, we don't know what's actually going on in the brain to make us conscious, all I'm saying is some insect brains have about 1/430,000th of the space to make it happen than we do.
Also, you seem to really like to cite sources from one think tank "Rethink Priorities" and quote things like "the most detailed report ever on animal sentience" as a way to appeal to authority, but when I open up the report I see a 15 page google doc written by someone who graduated with a Bachelor's in Statistics at the University of Chicago, who's only real work experience is summer camp counselor/grading assistant before working for this think tank for a couple years. I'm sure she still has much more talent in research than I do, and I think work like that can absolutely be useful, but this source doesn't seem to pass the sniff test of the standards we should hold academic literature to. There's no mention of academic review, I can't see a list of sources anywhere (outside of citing things like the guesstimate model in footnotes), and reading through it it's clear that this short paper was written by someone smart who has a genuine interest in the subject but has not had the experience to create experiments that produce defendable, replicable results.
To me it calls into question the rest of the reports generated by this think tank, and I would caution you against pulling all your evidence from one non-academically verifiable source, as well as searching for evidence that supports the conclusion you have set in your mind, vs arriving at a conclusion supported by a diverse set of sources you've explored.
If you're extremely uncertain about the overall values then you shouldn't give a low end estimate. You need to be extremely confident that the value is low to get a low estimate.
Laura wrote up the draft for one parts, but in total like a dozen experts collaborated on the report including Meghan Barrett, Marcus Davis, Laura Duffy, Jamie Elsey, Leigh Gaffney, Michelle Lavery, Rachael Miller, Martina Schiestl, Alex Schnell, Jason Schukraft, Will McAuliffe, Adam Shriver, Michael St. Jules, Travis Timmerman, and Anna Trevarthen. It also got turned into a book published by a prestigious publication (OUP).
Hey it sounds like you maybe have some skin in the game there, so I completely understand why you might feel defensive of it and I meant no disrespect to you or your organization. I just wanted to point out some ways you could strengthen your argument to those used to more traditional academic standards of scientific review. While I might not agree with it as a whole, I really appreciate your unique perspective as it inspired me to think about new facets of animal conservation that I had never considered before, and I hope you keep writing :)
You come across as somewhat defensive and unwilling to engage with critique, which would fall in line with most undergrad philosophy students I've had to interact with. The sooner you learn to open the doors of your castle and embrace new ideas as exotic traders from far off lands that bring possibility for growth and development in new directions, instead of pushing them away with pikes as you champion the strength of the walls that surround you, you might find yourself feeling smarter than you ever have (and might find people enjoying your company a bit more as well).
If rewilding is bad, then does it follow that "de-wilding," i.e. deliberately destroying natural environments to decrease wild animal populations, is good? Is it a moral commandment to destroy as much nature as is possible less whatever is necessary to sustain humanity's existence? If we ever reach a point where we can survive without relying on the biosphere, should we destroy it all?
It may not follow as a matter of logic, but it almost does.
The only impediment seem to be potential deontological prohibitions against destroying nature, as you remarked yourself. So I do think anyone who is unsympathetic to deontology and accepts your argument against rewilding is under enormous pressure to promote dewilding as well.
On the other hand, if one accepts deontological prohibitions against destroying nature, I think it's not a long shot to also accept deontological obligations towards restoring nature. (Certainly the latter do not follow necessarily, but they are clearly related.)
I suspect that Bentham's Bulldog recognizes that there is some small chance that he is wrong about this- in this situation, delaying re-wilding until the mistake is noticed and fixed is not symmetrical to attempting to un-dewild after noticing that de-wilding was a mistake.
It comes down to whether animals have indexical values like humans, or just the cumulative weight of suffering / joy.
Imagine three scenarios:
North Carolina is allowed to continue unmolested to the end of the scenario
North Carolina is instantly and painlessly depopulated, then re-populated by new Yorkers after 100 years
North Carolinal is instantly painlessly depopulated, then re-populated by New Yorkers after 200 years.
Human indexicality is why our preference for scenario 1 over scenario 2 is much stronger than our preference for scenario 2 over scenario 3, even though both are seperated by the same amount of (joy - suffering) * years. We can recognize that the North Carolinians in scenario 2 and 3 are not made whole.
If animals have indexical values, and in particular if a large fraction of the net positive value of their lives is indexical (potentially indexical over their descendants, like humans), then the damage from "helping" north carolina by depopulating it is not repairable (say, if the aliens who did this realized that humans are actually net positive.)
However, if aliens are delayed 100 years in their helpful decision to re-populate north carolina (perhaps by a faulty argument against re-wilding), we don't care as much- there is a difference in joy years, but no indexical loss
I intended to ask as much, but you did it well enough that I no longer feel the need to.
However, why not end humans while doing so? If suffering surpasses pleasure, then the best course of action might be to destroy as much as the planet as possible with the aid of hydraulic bombs and such, regardless of human life loss which would be a necessary cost for the suffer prevented.
Based on the calculations in this article, existence of life itself is a calamity.
The bombs wouldn't be enough - keep in mind that the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs had roughly the energy of a 100 million megaton bomb, and life as a whole made it through just fine. I suppose you could try to redirect a much larger asteroid onto a collision course using near-future technology, but there's still the risk that some lifeforms will survive, repopulate the globe, and go on to suffer for billions of years.
Whether you want utopia or complete annihilation, you have to wait until the appropriate technology becomes available.
You’re making huge assumptions about the experience of these animals/insects. These are creatures with radically different life experiences. You have no idea whether a fly’s life (or whatever) is worth living. It seems just as likely to me you are going to cause a massive loss of possible joy (or whatever it is insects and animals feel when they’re feeling good) by *not* rewilding.
In the article you link justifying why you think most animals have bad lives, you say that you think a painful death outweighs a short life. But how do you know that? Your whole argument rests on this, but it’s not at all clear to me. In fact, my intuition is strongly in the other direction-I think even a brief life could be worth suffering 10 minutes of pain before death.
You also are making a large assumption that most animals deaths are “painful.” Probably there’s some pain involved, but it’s also possible lots of deaths from starvation or cold are relatively devoid of pain and are more akin to falling into a coma. You assume predation is awful, and no doubt it often is, but it also is often over quickly. And if you’ve ever been in a life threatening/dangerous situation you also know that adrenaline + etc. often mean you’re not actually “suffering” in the moment. So it seems totally plausible to me that during a chase or whatever the predated animal may not be “suffering” at all.
Hey, super interesting article! Was just wondering why you published an article about "rewilding" now of all times, a week before the biggest Lincoln-Douglas Debate tournament on the rewilding topic where several of your colleagues are coaching serious competitors? I also found it interesting how you argued that "Now, the only serious argument for rewilding ... is that doing so can reduce existential threats" which doesn't seem to at all be an argument grounded in current literature but rather a causal chain invented by high school debates. It's entirely possible I'm mistaken here so please let me know if possible which article refers to this in the rewilding literature.
There is a guy in this comment section saying BB is an idiot for not understanding that biodiversity decline will threaten human survival and another guy saying that he appreciates the evidence on biod being a small existential threat because that was his objection to the post. As far as we know neither are debaters yet they were both able to conceive of this argument.
It seems like if high schoolers come up with an argument when they apply longtermism to their topic, actual longtermists will at least consider similar arguments when they look at the same topic.
The reason there are no articles in the rewilding literature that directly make this argument is because rewilding literature is not written from a longtermist point of view.
There are not longtermist articles advocating for rewilding precisely because when EA funded people to consider whether there was a high expected value for biodiversity interventions, they concluded it was not an existential risk.
I've published such an article before https://benthams.substack.com/p/there-should-be-less-nature?utm_source=publication-search as well as discussed very similar themes. I don't have colleagues, and I certainly don't have several colleagues coaching LD competitors. The objection about ex-risk reduction was raised in the comments, repeated by several people here, and is one of the most obvious ones to an EA, because EAs tend to prioritize existential threat reduction.
I don't keep apprised of the LD tournament schedule. I don't think it's that surprising that the article would be published around the time of some tournament as there are a lot of tournaments. And if I was producing propagandistic drivel to benefit some specific LD team I would:
1) Include lots of overconfident extinction scenarios, as is fashionable in debate.
2) Release it right before the tournament so people don't have weeks to prepare.
3) Not make arguments that are broadly continuous with things I've said before and clearly believe.
Woah, slow down there. If you’re going to be building a conclusion this extreme, you better be sure your foundation is rock-solid. We don’t even know if insects are sentient, let alone what it’s like to be one. I mean, if you’ve evolved to produce hundreds of offspring and die after two weeks, there’s probably no evolutionary advantage in evolving the complex systems needed to experience much of anything.
Bentham, I was joking about the soil nematodes. Fortunately I think your point stands without them
I think this is really interesting and could get the ball rolling on meaningful "reduce wild animal suffering" interventions without the headache of unintended consequences on ecosystems.
"A few fleeting moments of joy aren’t enough to compensate for the intense suffering at their end of life."
This strikes me as not a particularly intuitive or obvious statement, and further it is a judgment which a lot of your argument hinges on (it seems to me). We don't (always) say this about other things in life, I think: say I fall deeply in love and have a few months of happiness with him, and then he dies, so I spend the rest of my long life grief-stricken. Do I think the love was not worth it to me? Or a parent who has a child who dies in the NICU--a few moments of joy, followed by a lifetime of mourning. Would the parent think the child's life was not worth it *to the parent*? And maybe your answer is: yes! But at the very least I think this is controversial and (in my experience) not the assessment people who actually live circumstances like this actually come to very often.
You confidently dismiss it, but based on your writings about FDT, you have failed to consider a key implication of subjunctive dependence and, as a result, are fundamentally mistaken about FDT.
"____is extremely immoral—worse than almost any other thing we do" I feel like this is the introduction to a large number of your articles and I'm getting action paralysis. Like, I need a comparison chart of all the immoral--worse than almost anything actives we routinely do. Is rewilding a factory farm net negative!?
I don't actually think I really do this very much and when I do, I'm talking in different sense/saying things that are consistent. The things I've described this way are:
Donating to effective charities. This is among the most important things for an individual to do, but that's distinct from macro societal-wide priorities.
Factory farming. I now normally say stuff like "this is worse than all human suffering," because I think it's probably dominated by wild animal suffering stuff.
Wild animal suffering stuff: this is my best guest for the most important thing we're doing today.
Ex risks stuff: this is most important *in expectation*. Probably it has no effect, so it's probably not the most important, but it could have such enormous impact that it's best in expectation.
Not sure about rewilding a factory farm. Might depend on what kind.
You don't need to feel action paralysis or to see charts, you can just simply follow your gut / heart / promptings from God on how best to make the world a better place. It may not actually be about reducing suffering. It could be coaching a children's soccer league, which actually might bring more suffering into the world bc of the exercise and time away from screens and game losses outweighing wins potential. But you'd be doing something meaningful for people, who are much more important than bugs.
Excellent, I appreciate the evidence on biodiversity loss being low risk, that was my objection to previous articles you wrote about this. I’ll have to check out Halstead
The mistake I think you consistently make here is overconfidence in your ability to evaluate the relative well being of organisms very different than yourself. This overconfidence leads you to hastily conclude that humans are doing good by preventing the lives of nearly all future nonhuman animals.
Advocating for the widespread annihilation of irreplaceable living things we poorly understand on very limited evidence does not seem wise.
But the overconfidence cuts both ways. I might be wrong, but so might the rewilders, in which case they are causing hideous suffering to countless trillions of beings.
But it does not cut both ways equally, at least not without forced abstraction, which I think you argue reasonably well against.
Your position also commits a kind of base rate neglect, given that critters of our level of complexity are afforded on a vast "food chain" (more of a crazy ass webs) that is not currently replaceable with the provably unsuffering. Part of the rewilding movement is based on the idea of hedging against possible catastrophic cascades (which include death by scarcity rather than sustainable death by consumption).
It is clear to no one what constitutes "action v inaction" in any meaningful way, at this level of complexity, that would require rewilding to take on some special burden of proof. Unless they are putting beehives in your schoolhouses. Then you might get a bee in your bonnet.
I’ve said before: the destruction of all life on Earth is the only rational response to Bentham’s argument. Kill everything and no more suffering.
By the way, it’s not clear that Bentham should oppose Trump’s cuts to aid to Africa. People eat meat and sometimes even step on insects. Every additional African alive might or might not suffer in life, but such African probably causes untold insect suffering. Some might even eat shrimp!
It's actually worse than that. We currently have a nearly empty universe given the current Drake equation updates. Bentham would preemptively try to erase the possibility of less noetic life forms taking hold on other planets. Trillions of planets would need to be sterilized for their capacity for future suffering.
Obviously we should build Berserkers and send them to wipe out all life. It’s the only moral choice.
Thank you for bringing critical attention to how increasingly absurd it is to be an overconfident consequentialist.
Consequentialism in principle is coherent. Consequentialism in common practice is mathematical laundering of all things poorly understood.
The argument doesn’t depend on consequentialism
The argument depends on overconfidence, of whatever arbitrary flavor. Doing math with "suffering" strikes my ear as consequentialist.
To be clear, I support you sharing your opinions freely and widely. I also like your kind disposition, which I failed to reflect in tone. It seems to me, however, that you are not as careful as you are kind.
Suppose there was a way to prevent lots of kittens from suffering intensely for a dollar. Would it be objectionably consequentialist to suggest that was a good use of money because it prevented lots of suffering at low cost?
Consequentialist is a word with a meaning. It means that consequences are the only things that count for or against actions. What I've said here doesn't commit one to consequentialism.
It would not be "objectionably consequentialist," or objectionably anything else. Preventing suffering and taking into account opportunity costs are both pragmatic motivations. That there are elements of proportionality does not imply that the use of mathematical formalism is appropriate, or that the use of mathematical formalism in attempt to capture both suffering and opportunity in a single framework does not itself have opportunity costs. There is no guarantee that the best estimation of moral actions, prescriptions or proscriptions fit well into human working memory, excel spreadsheets or PowerPoint slides. Perhaps carrying one's dissonance is itself and act of character, rather than burning it all, overfitting to currently available models and methods.
Interesting way of thinking about these things, but it feels like you make some fairly large assertions about suffering and build your argument on top of them in a way that feels like it doesn't hold up for me. When you say "Let’s assume conservatively that half that many insects would have lived and died on the land if it wasn’t rewilded and that insects suffer 1% as intensely as people (which I think is an underestimate in expectation)", and use that number to "calculate" the total suffering equal to 2,927,400,000 human deaths, I don't think you really are going off of much other than your own emotional reaction to these things.
For example, if we take something like a mosquito which according to this paper has somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 neurons (happy to be corrected here, this is just a cursory glance) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8121336/ , and compare that to the number of neurons in a human brain, which at a glance people have estimated to be around 86,000,000,000, it leads me to think that humans might possess just a orders of magnitude more computational overhead to burn some extra energy on things like emotional reaction to stimuli and processing pain to be something like suffering that they can feel sad about. On the other hand, I would think that a mosquito or other insects have to make every single one of those 200,000 neurons work so brutally efficiently that there is very little room for anything like a conscious experience. Again, we're comparing the capacities for feeling and emotion from a brain where every cell could have a seat in two Dallas Cowboys football stadiums, to a brain where fitting every cell in a seat would need about 860,000 Dallas Cowboys football stadiums, a number so much larger that neither you or I can actually physically conceptualize.
I also think that you're making some pretty sweeping generalizations about what life in nature is actually like for these animals, mostly stemming from the fact that you are unable to picture life and existence from any other perspective than a human being with a massively oversized brain compared to all other life on earth. The reality is, we as humans have very little idea what life inside the brain the even the next smartest animals on earth is like, how much they feel, what they desire, what brings them the most pleasure and pain and in what ways. We know next to nothing about what the the experience of living as something like a lizard or a worm or an insect is, if there is even a fleck of conscious cognition, or of life in one of those bodies is efficient to the point that they might as well be a roomba, moving in a direction with no knowledge and foresight as to why and only changing course when their sensors tell them that they bumped into a wall. To decide for all animals from your limited human perspective that it's better for animals not to have lived at all, without ever having the ability to consult with them about how they feel about existing, I think is ridiculous.
A benevolent alien civilization, who have evolved to live 100,000 years and float through the cosmos in a state of existential bliss and communication and creation, might come across our civilization and come to the same conclusion as you did. "Wow, these poor miserable creatures have such short lives filled with such pain and suffering, we should do the humane thing and end them now so they don't have to suffer any further". However, if they stopped down to earth and took a poll of most people, they would find that most people would tell them despite the fact that they spend 50% of their waking hours staring at blinking pixels on a screen, or left their offspring at home to spend their days on an offshore oil rig pulling sludge from the crust of the earth, or lying on the streets asking for change, they would rather still have the opportunity to live and have the agency to find their way in the difficult world they reside in, rather than be wiped out for the sake of reducing suffering.
Maybe a mosquito is born in a lush swamp, and has abundant food for it's entire life, never needing to move far or work hard to satisfy that most basic urge. Maybe a bee is born in a healthy colony, next to a blooming flower field in the spring where it gains a level of satisfaction unknowable to you from running back and forth every day to those brightly colored spots in it's vision, providing for the colony, finally concluding it's life by busting a nut in the glorious queen so good that it's the last thing he ever does. Maybe a female mouse has 6 out of the 8 of her offspring survive the winter healthily, ensuring her genetics are passed on while she quietly passes away at the base of the tree her burrow resides under, her body giving nutrients back to the organism that gave her shelter her entire life. You speak of unknowable suffering, which absolutely does exist, but you have to consider that there are simple pleasures and satisfaction unknowable to you as well.
What humans are very good at is empathizing with others. It is our ability to see anther person and feel an echo of their emotions with our mirror neurons and react accordingly that allowed us to build small communities, then larger ones, and then eventually get to where we are today. I think your argument comes from a place of empathy which is a good thing, I just think has more legs is when you apply it to animals like pigs, cows, chickens, animals that I guess have the cranial overhead to feel things similar to our emotions. Animals we often grow in squalid, torturous conditions, and the real sin is that we never give them the chance to experience those pleasures unique to their existence that they so deserve.
I don't think neuron count is a good proxy https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/why-neuron-counts-shouldnt-be-used-as-proxies-for-moral-weight/ especially not for simple organisms https://benthams.substack.com/p/betting-on-ubiquitous-pain
That aliens might mistakenly think we have bad lives doesn't mean that we're totally in the dark about whether other animals have bad lives.
I also don't think neuron count is a particularly accurate metric of intelligence when you zoom in, I just think it might be one of the most physically concrete metrics we have for comparing what is otherwise a difficult thing to nail down. If anything it's most useful as a way to get a sense of the differences in size, we don't know what's actually going on in the brain to make us conscious, all I'm saying is some insect brains have about 1/430,000th of the space to make it happen than we do.
Also, you seem to really like to cite sources from one think tank "Rethink Priorities" and quote things like "the most detailed report ever on animal sentience" as a way to appeal to authority, but when I open up the report I see a 15 page google doc written by someone who graduated with a Bachelor's in Statistics at the University of Chicago, who's only real work experience is summer camp counselor/grading assistant before working for this think tank for a couple years. I'm sure she still has much more talent in research than I do, and I think work like that can absolutely be useful, but this source doesn't seem to pass the sniff test of the standards we should hold academic literature to. There's no mention of academic review, I can't see a list of sources anywhere (outside of citing things like the guesstimate model in footnotes), and reading through it it's clear that this short paper was written by someone smart who has a genuine interest in the subject but has not had the experience to create experiments that produce defendable, replicable results.
To me it calls into question the rest of the reports generated by this think tank, and I would caution you against pulling all your evidence from one non-academically verifiable source, as well as searching for evidence that supports the conclusion you have set in your mind, vs arriving at a conclusion supported by a diverse set of sources you've explored.
If you're extremely uncertain about the overall values then you shouldn't give a low end estimate. You need to be extremely confident that the value is low to get a low estimate.
Laura wrote up the draft for one parts, but in total like a dozen experts collaborated on the report including Meghan Barrett, Marcus Davis, Laura Duffy, Jamie Elsey, Leigh Gaffney, Michelle Lavery, Rachael Miller, Martina Schiestl, Alex Schnell, Jason Schukraft, Will McAuliffe, Adam Shriver, Michael St. Jules, Travis Timmerman, and Anna Trevarthen. It also got turned into a book published by a prestigious publication (OUP).
Hey it sounds like you maybe have some skin in the game there, so I completely understand why you might feel defensive of it and I meant no disrespect to you or your organization. I just wanted to point out some ways you could strengthen your argument to those used to more traditional academic standards of scientific review. While I might not agree with it as a whole, I really appreciate your unique perspective as it inspired me to think about new facets of animal conservation that I had never considered before, and I hope you keep writing :)
The book was peer reviewed.
You come across as somewhat defensive and unwilling to engage with critique, which would fall in line with most undergrad philosophy students I've had to interact with. The sooner you learn to open the doors of your castle and embrace new ideas as exotic traders from far off lands that bring possibility for growth and development in new directions, instead of pushing them away with pikes as you champion the strength of the walls that surround you, you might find yourself feeling smarter than you ever have (and might find people enjoying your company a bit more as well).
If rewilding is bad, then does it follow that "de-wilding," i.e. deliberately destroying natural environments to decrease wild animal populations, is good? Is it a moral commandment to destroy as much nature as is possible less whatever is necessary to sustain humanity's existence? If we ever reach a point where we can survive without relying on the biosphere, should we destroy it all?
It doesn't follow as a matter of logic, but yes I support dewilding.
It may not follow as a matter of logic, but it almost does.
The only impediment seem to be potential deontological prohibitions against destroying nature, as you remarked yourself. So I do think anyone who is unsympathetic to deontology and accepts your argument against rewilding is under enormous pressure to promote dewilding as well.
On the other hand, if one accepts deontological prohibitions against destroying nature, I think it's not a long shot to also accept deontological obligations towards restoring nature. (Certainly the latter do not follow necessarily, but they are clearly related.)
Agree
I suspect that Bentham's Bulldog recognizes that there is some small chance that he is wrong about this- in this situation, delaying re-wilding until the mistake is noticed and fixed is not symmetrical to attempting to un-dewild after noticing that de-wilding was a mistake.
Could you elaborate a bit? I'm genuinely unsure how to read your hypothetical.
It comes down to whether animals have indexical values like humans, or just the cumulative weight of suffering / joy.
Imagine three scenarios:
North Carolina is allowed to continue unmolested to the end of the scenario
North Carolina is instantly and painlessly depopulated, then re-populated by new Yorkers after 100 years
North Carolinal is instantly painlessly depopulated, then re-populated by New Yorkers after 200 years.
Human indexicality is why our preference for scenario 1 over scenario 2 is much stronger than our preference for scenario 2 over scenario 3, even though both are seperated by the same amount of (joy - suffering) * years. We can recognize that the North Carolinians in scenario 2 and 3 are not made whole.
If animals have indexical values, and in particular if a large fraction of the net positive value of their lives is indexical (potentially indexical over their descendants, like humans), then the damage from "helping" north carolina by depopulating it is not repairable (say, if the aliens who did this realized that humans are actually net positive.)
However, if aliens are delayed 100 years in their helpful decision to re-populate north carolina (perhaps by a faulty argument against re-wilding), we don't care as much- there is a difference in joy years, but no indexical loss
Thanks, this is a good point. I think I broadly agree. (Personally, it strikes me as though animals probably do have indexical values.)
I intended to ask as much, but you did it well enough that I no longer feel the need to.
However, why not end humans while doing so? If suffering surpasses pleasure, then the best course of action might be to destroy as much as the planet as possible with the aid of hydraulic bombs and such, regardless of human life loss which would be a necessary cost for the suffer prevented.
Based on the calculations in this article, existence of life itself is a calamity.
Humans reduce wild animal suffering. Humans mostly have good lives. And I think the far future could be enormously amazingly good
The bombs wouldn't be enough - keep in mind that the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs had roughly the energy of a 100 million megaton bomb, and life as a whole made it through just fine. I suppose you could try to redirect a much larger asteroid onto a collision course using near-future technology, but there's still the risk that some lifeforms will survive, repopulate the globe, and go on to suffer for billions of years.
Whether you want utopia or complete annihilation, you have to wait until the appropriate technology becomes available.
You’re making huge assumptions about the experience of these animals/insects. These are creatures with radically different life experiences. You have no idea whether a fly’s life (or whatever) is worth living. It seems just as likely to me you are going to cause a massive loss of possible joy (or whatever it is insects and animals feel when they’re feeling good) by *not* rewilding.
In the article you link justifying why you think most animals have bad lives, you say that you think a painful death outweighs a short life. But how do you know that? Your whole argument rests on this, but it’s not at all clear to me. In fact, my intuition is strongly in the other direction-I think even a brief life could be worth suffering 10 minutes of pain before death.
You also are making a large assumption that most animals deaths are “painful.” Probably there’s some pain involved, but it’s also possible lots of deaths from starvation or cold are relatively devoid of pain and are more akin to falling into a coma. You assume predation is awful, and no doubt it often is, but it also is often over quickly. And if you’ve ever been in a life threatening/dangerous situation you also know that adrenaline + etc. often mean you’re not actually “suffering” in the moment. So it seems totally plausible to me that during a chase or whatever the predated animal may not be “suffering” at all.
The annoying thing about philosophy is that I can find a conclusion deeply intuitively objectionable and still have to admit that it makes sense.
Hey, super interesting article! Was just wondering why you published an article about "rewilding" now of all times, a week before the biggest Lincoln-Douglas Debate tournament on the rewilding topic where several of your colleagues are coaching serious competitors? I also found it interesting how you argued that "Now, the only serious argument for rewilding ... is that doing so can reduce existential threats" which doesn't seem to at all be an argument grounded in current literature but rather a causal chain invented by high school debates. It's entirely possible I'm mistaken here so please let me know if possible which article refers to this in the rewilding literature.
There is a guy in this comment section saying BB is an idiot for not understanding that biodiversity decline will threaten human survival and another guy saying that he appreciates the evidence on biod being a small existential threat because that was his objection to the post. As far as we know neither are debaters yet they were both able to conceive of this argument.
It seems like if high schoolers come up with an argument when they apply longtermism to their topic, actual longtermists will at least consider similar arguments when they look at the same topic.
The reason there are no articles in the rewilding literature that directly make this argument is because rewilding literature is not written from a longtermist point of view.
There are not longtermist articles advocating for rewilding precisely because when EA funded people to consider whether there was a high expected value for biodiversity interventions, they concluded it was not an existential risk.
I've published such an article before https://benthams.substack.com/p/there-should-be-less-nature?utm_source=publication-search as well as discussed very similar themes. I don't have colleagues, and I certainly don't have several colleagues coaching LD competitors. The objection about ex-risk reduction was raised in the comments, repeated by several people here, and is one of the most obvious ones to an EA, because EAs tend to prioritize existential threat reduction.
I don't keep apprised of the LD tournament schedule. I don't think it's that surprising that the article would be published around the time of some tournament as there are a lot of tournaments. And if I was producing propagandistic drivel to benefit some specific LD team I would:
1) Include lots of overconfident extinction scenarios, as is fashionable in debate.
2) Release it right before the tournament so people don't have weeks to prepare.
3) Not make arguments that are broadly continuous with things I've said before and clearly believe.
Glad you found the article interesting!
Go touch grass and read some Wageningen papers on why biodiversity is actually essential for human survival.
Interesting read though, and well-argued.
Woah, slow down there. If you’re going to be building a conclusion this extreme, you better be sure your foundation is rock-solid. We don’t even know if insects are sentient, let alone what it’s like to be one. I mean, if you’ve evolved to produce hundreds of offspring and die after two weeks, there’s probably no evolutionary advantage in evolving the complex systems needed to experience much of anything.
Bentham, I was joking about the soil nematodes. Fortunately I think your point stands without them
I think this is really interesting and could get the ball rolling on meaningful "reduce wild animal suffering" interventions without the headache of unintended consequences on ecosystems.
"A few fleeting moments of joy aren’t enough to compensate for the intense suffering at their end of life."
This strikes me as not a particularly intuitive or obvious statement, and further it is a judgment which a lot of your argument hinges on (it seems to me). We don't (always) say this about other things in life, I think: say I fall deeply in love and have a few months of happiness with him, and then he dies, so I spend the rest of my long life grief-stricken. Do I think the love was not worth it to me? Or a parent who has a child who dies in the NICU--a few moments of joy, followed by a lifetime of mourning. Would the parent think the child's life was not worth it *to the parent*? And maybe your answer is: yes! But at the very least I think this is controversial and (in my experience) not the assessment people who actually live circumstances like this actually come to very often.
"As Bostrom has argued, we might currently be in a simulation. If we are, then our actions potentially are mirrored across all simulated worlds."
Arguments like this are why I find Functional Decision Theory so important!
I fully agree with your message here btw.
It's important if true. The only problem is that it's false.
You confidently dismiss it, but based on your writings about FDT, you have failed to consider a key implication of subjunctive dependence and, as a result, are fundamentally mistaken about FDT.
"____is extremely immoral—worse than almost any other thing we do" I feel like this is the introduction to a large number of your articles and I'm getting action paralysis. Like, I need a comparison chart of all the immoral--worse than almost anything actives we routinely do. Is rewilding a factory farm net negative!?
I don't actually think I really do this very much and when I do, I'm talking in different sense/saying things that are consistent. The things I've described this way are:
Donating to effective charities. This is among the most important things for an individual to do, but that's distinct from macro societal-wide priorities.
Factory farming. I now normally say stuff like "this is worse than all human suffering," because I think it's probably dominated by wild animal suffering stuff.
Wild animal suffering stuff: this is my best guest for the most important thing we're doing today.
Ex risks stuff: this is most important *in expectation*. Probably it has no effect, so it's probably not the most important, but it could have such enormous impact that it's best in expectation.
Not sure about rewilding a factory farm. Might depend on what kind.
You don't need to feel action paralysis or to see charts, you can just simply follow your gut / heart / promptings from God on how best to make the world a better place. It may not actually be about reducing suffering. It could be coaching a children's soccer league, which actually might bring more suffering into the world bc of the exercise and time away from screens and game losses outweighing wins potential. But you'd be doing something meaningful for people, who are much more important than bugs.
Excellent, I appreciate the evidence on biodiversity loss being low risk, that was my objection to previous articles you wrote about this. I’ll have to check out Halstead
Ok you’ve lost me 😂
This would be hilarious if it wasn't so long