Thanks!

As someone ignorant about development and the African context, but enthusiastic about pursuing development for all the reasons you listed: My perception is that the bottlenecks are cultural, not economic. This might be a stupid question, but are corruption and kinship culture serious problems that might undermine your efforts where you are operating? 

Somewhat agreed - the psychological dimension is large across the whole world. I sort of gestured at it in my first post about the revealed preference for nature. Maybe I should have tried to estimate the combined value of premium housing near healthy ecosystems. (Hm, it would be conflated with "ocean views" and other aesthetic physical landscapes, and some of the value comes from being a positional good....) 

The typical scientific justification in the vein of psychological value mostly comes down to "greenery" which could be equally provided by unnatural and low biodiversity park walks. There are some other examples like birdsong, but it's still not evidence that biodiversity is important for our wellbeing. I admit I did a cursory check, but I feel pretty confident that it's not good justification for the sort of global biodiversity conservation that environmentalists (like myself) value.

That's wonderful to hear, wow. I'm surprised it provoked such a negative reaction but pleased that she enjoyed the second one!

Thank you for the words of support! So nice to hear from someone who doesn't empathize, aha. I'm delighted.

I hope to shed light... So that environmentalists see their own position clearly, with all the giant gaps that have been glossed over. I hope to demonstrate rigor to folks who think environmental positions are all just confused & wishful thinking. I hope people who care about nature feel seen, and want to get involved in building environmentalism with EA principles. I want EAs to see it's okay to care about nature and things that are meaningful to them, even if they aren't the most effective or the most universal.

And most of all, for my own sake, I want to interrogate myself and reflect the real world!

(I posted my next follow-up, and would be happy if you read it.)

I know what you mean! I am trying to provide a critical approach and would like to hear what you think of how it turned out.

Should forecasting receive more or less EA funding?

Mildly surprised how much is going into it. Mildly surprised how little is coming out of it. Still have high expectations for the return on improving decision-making. I'm a low information voter. Voting without factoring in a large increase in funds in the near future which would slam everything to the right.

I just came back from my first retreat and (due to unlucky events) had a pretty negative outcome. This gave me back some hope that there is something actually good out there for me yet. Thank you. Quality timing.

Total number is richness. 

Buncha pedantics: The problem with that is it's easy to add more "weedy" species to increase biodiversity per local area, even as you decrease global biodiversity. The real number is global extant species but we aren't perfectly coordinated to know what this specific place should do best relative to what everywhere else is doing. Aaand you can't totally re-establish density with reduced genetic diversity if it gets bad enough, but you are correct. Its the irreversible damage that is most concerning. 

Thanks for noticing that! I'll fix it.

Its been a week and I've spent some time trying to get a fuller picture of the insect welfare space. Thanks to Toby for urging me to do so.

Some things I knew previously but are worth repeating:

• Evolution isn't welfare optimizing.
• Insects have different life histories than other animals. They are in bit of a different class.
• Avoidance of danger is urgent so insects (probably) experience intense impulses. (aka pain and panic, even if they are otherwise very simple impulses)
• Insects might be too simple for hedonic adaptation (normalizing/numbing).
• Insects might experience each moment (of pain) as a discrete event. This might make painful experiences less bad (a single moment of shock), or it might make them worse (full blast isolated meaningless torture) depending on how you interpret it.
• Disease.
• Losing a leg would be proportionally bad to how much it reduces their survival odds.
• Most of the wildlife I see and interact with is pretty happy. But most of the wildlife I see are birds/mammals/large bodied/adult/healthy/k-strategists.
• It is very suspicious to me that we think that animals we understand the least are the ones we think have the most horrifying lives.

Some things I learned:

• Like 10% of insects die in minutes or hours of existing. Before they have time to have positive valence experiences.
• Another 10% die a bit later without getting to experience much and having probably bad experiences the whole time. (don't take these numbers too seriously, they keep changing as I try to figure out what is going on)
• Newly hatched larvae have tiny energy reserves relative to their metabolic rate, so starvation might be quicker and less devastating for insects than our default picture of starvation.
• Like 20%??? of insects get consumed from the inside by parasites for long periods of time. The parasites keep them alive and eat their non-essential organs first. This seems really bad.
• Insects might be more prone to fitness critical (life and death) events than other animals.
• R-selection might produce different welfare profiles.
• Most predation is quick. Seconds or minutes of dying. Extreme, but short. Like 50% of insect deaths are this way.

Some other thoughts:

• R-strategists might have different values than us. But I'm not sure I want to act on moralities that "pain doesn't matter" even if the uplifted insects might want that. Its a separate question than "what does our own morality say is right."
• Insects might not be morally important. This is a separate question from suffering and sentience.
• Generally, the insects with more evidence for memory, sentience, creativity, intelligence, etc are also not the ones that have the worst looking lives. (?)
• I have a strong instinct to think that the hedonic baseline of species is set by their lifehistory. If so, many species would experience substantial mortality and stress as normal. "Routine" portions of insect life I think would be closer to neutral baseline, even though the niche looks harsh.
• Bob Fisher pointed out that the goalposts keep moving, and that makes me very uncomfortable.

If we could press a button and fix all this I would be much more likely to think that insect lives are net negative. Which does not bode well for my objectivity here. For example, I am much more likely to think "disease is bad, really bad, we should do something about that for the insects" than I am to think "r-strategists have innately horrible-shaped lives. It's really bad. We should do something about that." I think this reveals something.

So right now I have updated to believe that some species probably do have truly miserable welfare profiles, bad enough to be seriously consider ending their way of existence. I'm not sure how many, probably few? (I already believed that some parasites might be overall bad and we should probably end their way of existence despite their amazing intricate biology) I probably think this circumstance is a lot rarer than other insect welfare supporters. I still anchor pretty strongly to expecting insect lives to be neutral as a default, despite frequent suffering events. I probably ought to create some serious goalposts and stick to them. I still have other objections along the lines of "the insects would have different values" and "its really suspicious that we think their lives are the worst when they are the most hard to sympathize with and we understand the least about them" and "we would not apply this moral system to ourselves" and "similar/small lives matter a lot less" and "suffering is less bad than weighted, enjoyment is more readily available and better than weighted." I am pretty strongly in support of intervening in nature to make it better, and I don't think the precautionary principal holds up under scrutiny. 

In general I am confused whether I should be thinking about suffering as a proportion of all insects, proportion of time within a species average, proportion within a life, total number of individuals, or just total bad moments.