The Nonlinear Library EA - #182 - Comparing the welfare of humans, chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and more (Bob Fischer on the 80,000 Hours Podcast) by 80000 Hours
Mar 13, 2024
24:53
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: #182 - Comparing the welfare of humans, chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and more (Bob Fischer on the 80,000 Hours Podcast), published by 80000 Hours on March 13, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
We just published an interview: Bob Fischer on comparing the welfare of humans, chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and more. Listen on Spotify or click through for other audio options, the transcript, and related links. Below are the episode summary and some key excerpts.
Episode summary
[One] thing is just to spend time thinking about the kinds of things animals can do and what their lives are like. Just how hard a chicken will work to get to a nest box before she lays an egg, the amount of labour she's willing to go through to do that, to think about how important that is to her.
And to realise that we can quantify that, and see how much they care, or to see that they get stressed out when fellow chickens are threatened and that they seem to have some sympathy for conspecifics.
Those kinds of things make me say there is something in there that is recognisable to me as another individual, with desires and preferences and a vantage point on the world, who wants things to go a certain way and is frustrated and upset when they don't. And recognising the individuality, the perspective of nonhuman animals, for me, really challenges my tendency to not take them as seriously as I think I ought to, all things considered.
Bob Fischer
In today's episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Bob Fischer - senior research manager at Rethink Priorities and the director of the Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals - about Rethink Priorities's Moral Weight Project.
They cover:
The methods used to assess the welfare ranges and capacities for pleasure and pain of chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and other animals - and the limitations of that approach.
Concrete examples of how someone might use the estimated moral weights to compare the benefits of animal vs human interventions.
The results that most surprised Bob.
Why the team used a hedonic theory of welfare to inform the project, and what non-hedonic theories of welfare might bring to the table.
Thought experiments like Tortured Tim that test different philosophical assumptions about welfare.
Confronting our own biases when estimating animal mental capacities and moral worth.
The limitations of using neuron counts as a proxy for moral weights.
How different types of risk aversion, like avoiding worst-case scenarios, could impact cause prioritisation.
And plenty more.
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuire
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore
Highlights
Using neuron counts as a proxy for sentience
Luisa Rodriguez: A colleague of yours at Rethink Priorities has written this report on why neuron counts aren't actually a good proxy for what we care about here. Can you give a quick summary of why they think that?
Bob Fischer: Sure. There are two things to say. One is that it isn't totally crazy to use neuron counts. And one way of seeing why you might think it's not totally crazy is to think about the kinds of proxies that economists have used when trying to estimate human welfare. Economists have for a long time used income as a proxy for human welfare.
You might say that we know that there are all these ways in which that fails as a proxy - and the right response from the economist is something like, do you have anything better? Where there's actually data, and where we can answer at least some of these high-level questions that we care about? Or at least make progress on the high-level questions that we care about relative to baseline?
And I think that way of thinking about what neuron-count-based proxies ar...
We just published an interview: Bob Fischer on comparing the welfare of humans, chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and more. Listen on Spotify or click through for other audio options, the transcript, and related links. Below are the episode summary and some key excerpts.
Episode summary
[One] thing is just to spend time thinking about the kinds of things animals can do and what their lives are like. Just how hard a chicken will work to get to a nest box before she lays an egg, the amount of labour she's willing to go through to do that, to think about how important that is to her.
And to realise that we can quantify that, and see how much they care, or to see that they get stressed out when fellow chickens are threatened and that they seem to have some sympathy for conspecifics.
Those kinds of things make me say there is something in there that is recognisable to me as another individual, with desires and preferences and a vantage point on the world, who wants things to go a certain way and is frustrated and upset when they don't. And recognising the individuality, the perspective of nonhuman animals, for me, really challenges my tendency to not take them as seriously as I think I ought to, all things considered.
Bob Fischer
In today's episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Bob Fischer - senior research manager at Rethink Priorities and the director of the Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals - about Rethink Priorities's Moral Weight Project.
They cover:
The methods used to assess the welfare ranges and capacities for pleasure and pain of chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and other animals - and the limitations of that approach.
Concrete examples of how someone might use the estimated moral weights to compare the benefits of animal vs human interventions.
The results that most surprised Bob.
Why the team used a hedonic theory of welfare to inform the project, and what non-hedonic theories of welfare might bring to the table.
Thought experiments like Tortured Tim that test different philosophical assumptions about welfare.
Confronting our own biases when estimating animal mental capacities and moral worth.
The limitations of using neuron counts as a proxy for moral weights.
How different types of risk aversion, like avoiding worst-case scenarios, could impact cause prioritisation.
And plenty more.
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuire
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore
Highlights
Using neuron counts as a proxy for sentience
Luisa Rodriguez: A colleague of yours at Rethink Priorities has written this report on why neuron counts aren't actually a good proxy for what we care about here. Can you give a quick summary of why they think that?
Bob Fischer: Sure. There are two things to say. One is that it isn't totally crazy to use neuron counts. And one way of seeing why you might think it's not totally crazy is to think about the kinds of proxies that economists have used when trying to estimate human welfare. Economists have for a long time used income as a proxy for human welfare.
You might say that we know that there are all these ways in which that fails as a proxy - and the right response from the economist is something like, do you have anything better? Where there's actually data, and where we can answer at least some of these high-level questions that we care about? Or at least make progress on the high-level questions that we care about relative to baseline?
And I think that way of thinking about what neuron-count-based proxies ar...