What are the strongest arguments for the side you voted against in the AW vs GH debate?

Thanks Vasco, I did vote for animal welfare, so on net I agree with most of your points. On some specific things:

You could donate to organisations improving instead of decreasing the lives of animals

This seems right, and is why I support chicken corporate campaigns which tend to increase welfare. Some reasons this is not quite satisfactory:

1. It feels a bit like a "helping slaves to live happier lives" intervention rather than "freeing the slaves"
2. I'm overall uncertain about whether animals lives are generally net positive, rather than strongly thinking they are
3. I'd still be worried about donations to these things generally growing the AW ecosystem as a side effect (e.g. due to fungibility of donations, training up people who then do work with more suffering-focused assumptions)

But these are just concerns and not deal breakers.

Rethink Priorities' median welfare range for shrimps of 0.031 is 31 k (= 0.031/10^-6) times their welfare range based on neurons of 10^-6. For you to get to this super low welfare range, you would have to justify putting a very low weight in all the other 11 models considered by Rethink Priorities.

I am sufficiently sceptical to put a low weight on the other 11 models (or at least withhold judgement until I've thought it through more). As I mentioned I'm writing a post I'm hoping to publish this week with at least one argument related to this.

The gist of that post will be: it's double counting to consider the 11 other models as separate lines of evidence, and similarly double counting to consider all the individual proxies (e.g. "anxiety-like behaviour" and "fear-like behaviour") as independent evidence within the models.

Many of the proxies (I claim most) collapse to the single factor of "does it behave as though it contains some kind of reinforcement learning system?". This itself may be predictive of sentience, because this is true of humans, but I consider this to be more like one factor, rather than many independent lines of evidence that are counted strongly under many different models.

Because of this (a lot of the proxies looking like side effects of some kind of reinforcement learning system), I would expect we will continue to see these proxies as we look at smaller and smaller animals, and this wouldn't be a big update. I would expect that if you look at a nematode worm for instance, it might show:

1. "Taste-aversion behaviour": Moving away from a noxious stimulus, or learning that a particular location contains a noxious stimulus
2. "Depression-like behaviour": Giving up/putting less energy into exploring after repeatedly failing
3. "Anxiety-like behaviour": Being put on edge or moving more quickly if you expose it to a stimulus which has previously preceded some kind of punishment
4. "Curiosity-like behaviour": Exploring things even when it has some clearly exploitable resource

It might not show all of these (maybe a nematode is in fact too small, I don't know much about them), but hopefully you get the point that these look like manifestations of the same underlying thing such that observing more of them becomes weak evidence once you have seen a few.

Even if you didn't accept that they were all exactly side effects of "a reinforcement learning type system" (which seems reasonable), still I believe this idea of there being common explanatory factors for different proxies which are not necessarily sentience related should be factored in.

(RP's model does do some non-linear weighting of proxies at various points, but not exactly accounting for this thing... hopefully my longer post will address this).

On the side of neuron counts, I don't think this is particularly strong evidence either. But I see it as evidence on the side of a factor like "their brain looks structurally similar to a human's", vs the factor of "they behave somewhat similarly to a human" for which the proxies are evidence.

To me neither of these lines of evidence ("brain structural similarity" and "behavioural similarity") seems obviously deserving of more weight.

Farmed animals are neglected, so I do not think worldview diversidication would be at risk due to moving 100 M$ to animal welfare

I definitely agree with this, I would only be concerned if we moved almost all funding to animal welfare.

Farmed animals are neglected, so I do not think worldview diversidication would be at risk due to moving 100 M$ to animal welfare instead of global health and development. I calculated 99.9 % of the annual philanthropic spending is on humans.

I think it would be more appropriate to use something like human welfare spending for low-income countries rather than counting ~all charitable activity as in a broad "human" bucket. That is to maintain parity with the way you've sliced off a particularly effective part of the animal-welfare pie (farmed animal welfare). E.g., some quick Google work suggests animal shelters brought in 3.5B in 2023 in just the US (although a fair portion of of that may be government contracts). 

Companion animal shelters may be the animal-welfare equivalent of opera for human-focused charities (spending lots on relatively few individuals who are relatively privileged in a sense). While deciding not to give to farmed-animal charities because of dog shelter spending doesn't make much sense, I would submit that not giving to bednets because of opera spending poses much the same problem.

I don't think that changes your underlying point much at all, though!

I was assuming that a reduction in agriculture would result in an overall reduction in the biomass (and "neuron count"^[1]) of birds and mammals, because:

1. Currently the biomass of farmed birds + mammals is about 10x that of farmed birds + mammals (source, not sure how marine mammals are counted but only the ballpark is needed), and this is only using 45% of the habitable land as you say
2. Logically it makes sense that farming aims to efficiently convert land area into animal biomass, and has more of a top down ability to achieve this than nature does. The animals that are most widely farmed are partly chosen for having food chains of only one step, and not needing to run around a lot expending energy.
   1. A point against this is that animals are slaughtered earlier than their natural lifespan, which would result in fewer days experienced per unit of feed input. But given the numbers above I don't think this is an offsetting factor

Of course by number of individuals it would go the other way, which is presumably why you are concerned about reducing farming from a suffering-focused perspective. So I think this comes back to the issue of moral weights for small animals (as usual 😌).

...

I'm now trying to inhabit a position that I don't exactly believe, but is interesting and that I do find somewhat persuasive.

From a bigger picture perspective, you can imagine someone trying to derive the optimal arrangement of civilisation according to hedonic utilitarianism, where they accept something closer to my end of the suffering-focused and logarithmic-intensity axes^[2]. Suppose they have a good model of evolutionary theory and economics but lack the details of how life on earth currently looks.

They might think something like the following: "In order to expect any kind of top down control over the outcome you need an intelligent species + culture that can coordinate over the use of large areas (geographical, or in whatever relevant space). This species will probably be high maintenance, because they will need to have had very complex and demanding needs and wants in order for them to develop the necessary culture in the first place.

The ideal scenario would be for a relatively small population of this high maintenance species to act as stewards for a much larger population of creatures that are very low maintenance, in order to achieve a high total utility with the resources available. These low maintenance creatures should be chosen to not require a lot of energy, be easily satisfied with simple and cheap pleasures, and have simple social structures such that you can scale the number of individuals without too many side effects.

Of course, this is just a pipe dream, because this would require the advanced species to have some kind of intrinsic preference for stewarding this larger population. Among the set of all goals it seems unlikely they would have this specific one".

If you look at the actual world it is quite striking how close it is to this vision. Humanity does maintain large populations of low maintenance animals, using a large proportion of the resources that are available to do so, at minimum economic cost. The difference is that we currently torture them.

If you were to accept the vision above, it looks like an easier move from "maintaining large population and torturing them" to "maintaining large population and trying to give them happy lives", than it is from "large population + torturing them" to "90% smaller population of domesticated animals" to "later maybe we make the population large again for morally motivated reasons".

...

Anyway, sorry for getting on a tangent from directly replying to your comment, but this long term picture is the thing that makes me actually uneasy about going hard on interventions to end factory farming. That is, on the margin currently I'm pretty happy with a best guess of it being positive expected value to reduce the amount of animal farming, but would be more hesitant about ending farming overnight because of the potential for irreversible effects.

I would expect that if non-animal protein sources become clearly superior than animal sources, then this would result in a very rapid collapse in the number of farmed animals, and that once this has happened it could be a lot harder to move towards the "high population, high welfare" world (because we would start using all the land for something else, and the idea of using a large fraction of the land on earth for managed populations of animals would become seen as weird).

I think it's not widely conceptualised that potentially "PTC-dominant alternative protein => >50%^[3] collapse in the welfare-range-weighted population of creatures within 10 years".

1. ^{^}

   Used as a stand-in for some more accurate proxy for sentience, but which scales predominantly with brain size/complexity rather than number of individuals

2. ^{^}

   I.e. they think extremely bad experiences are not orders of magnitude worse than simply quite bad experiences

3. ^{^}

   Using ">50%" as a stand-in for "a quite surprising amount of the total fraction" and welfare-range-weighted as a stand-in for "weighted by the delta in welfare that humans could reasonably expect to achieve with some degree of confidence (e.g. without it being in animals that are so different from humans that their sentience is highly questionable)"