Thanks for the quick thoughts, Guillaume.

I would not base my estimates on their number of neurons (although it might be a good enough proxy for larger animals).

The graph below illustrates that "individual number of neurons"^0.188 explains pretty well the estimates for the sentience-adjusted welfare ranges presented in Bob's book. I also do not think the specific proxy matters that much. In allometry, "the study of the relationship of body size to shape,^[1] anatomy, physiology and behaviour", "The relationship between the two measured quantities is often expressed as a power law equation (allometric equation)". If the sentience-adjusted welfare range is proportional to "proxy 1"^"exponent 1", and "proxy 1" is proportional to "proxy 2"^"exponent 2", the sentience-adjusted welfare range is proportional to "proxy 1"^("exponent 1"*"exponent 2"). So the results for "proxy 1" and exponent "exponent 1"*"exponent 2" are the same as those for "proxy 2" and "exponent 2".

whatever our current "place-holder" estimates are for sentience or welfare in shrimps, more research will most likely answer both

I very much agree. On the other hand, I think research on sentience criteria mostly decreases the uncertainty about anatomy and behaviour, and I believe there is way more uncertainty in how to go from those to quantitative comparisons of welfare across species.

RE welfare comparisons: I could imagine a difference between us being relative confidence that empirical research will improve our understanding?

I am not confident (empirical or philosophical) research on welfare comparisons across species will significantly decrease their uncertainty. However, the alternative for me is never finding out interventions that robustly increase welfare in expectation.

Would you expect the most useful work for reducing your own uncertainty to be philosophical or empirical?

I do not have a strong view either way. I think it is much easier to decrease i) the empirical uncertainty about anatomy and behaviour than ii) the philosophical uncertainty about how to go from those to quantitative comparisons of welfare across species. On the other hand, I believe ii) is much larger than i).

RE nematodes: I agree that this isn't clear cut in some sense, but I feel fairly confident that they should be bracketed out unless we significantly advance in our understanding of animal consciousness

Would medium confidence that nematodes engage in motivational trade-offs be enough for you to consider effects on them?

This report was entirely and carefully crafted by Guillaume Reho, with recurrent reviews and discussions with Aaron Boddy [co-founder of and chief strategy officer at the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP)], whom I deeply thank for his time and help on this project.

I am glad @Aaron Boddy🔸 is interested in this. I think funders have been assuming that all species of shrimps have a similar sentience-adjusted welfare range. So bringing attention to the weaker evidence for the sentience of Penaeidae shrimps may decrease funding for helping them, and they are the ones SWP has been targeting.

Thanks for this great research, Guillaume.

in his Welfare Range Estimates, (Fischer, 2023) argues that all invertebrates probably have welfare ranges “within two orders of magnitude of the vertebrates nonhuman animals [presented in his report]”

Do you have any thoughts on this? I read the whole book about welfare comparisons across species from @Bob Fischer, and I really liked it. However, I think the above vastly underestimates uncertainty. Here are my estimates for sentience-adjusted welfare ranges proportional to "individual number of neurons"^"exponent", and "exponent" from 0 to 2, which covers the best guesses that I consider reasonable.

Here are a few other grantmakers that might be interested in funding such research or welfare interventions: Animal Charity Evaluators, Animal Welfare Fund from EA Funds, Animal Welfare Fund from Founders Pledge, and Farm Animal Welfare fund from Coefficient Giving. Also feel free to comment or tag other grantmakers or funds that would be interested in shrimp sentience research.

There is also the Strategic Animal Funding Circle (SAFC), and maybe Falcon Fund ("We also expect to place some bets on non-AI opportunities that are unusually strong"). 

Hi titotal. Thanks for the post. I have also looked into the spread in the extinction risk predictions made in the Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament (XPT). Here are all these predictions in a single graph.

Hi Abraham. Thanks for the great post.

This science alone won’t solve every issue in wild animal welfare. Even with the scientific knowledge necessary to make progress, there might be tricky philosophical questions that can’t be answered empirically (When is a life worth living? How do we make decisions about tradeoffs between different species of animals?).

Have you considered reliable welfare comparisons across species as another necessarily pillar for robustly increasing welfare? I do not think perfect welfare measures, remote monitoring, and ecological modelling would be enough. I am very uncertain about how to compare welfare across species. Here are my estimates for sentience-adjusted welfare ranges proportional to "individual number of neurons"^"exponent", and "exponent" from 0 to 2, which covers the best guesses that I consider reasonable.

Putting aside nematodes (which I believe we should do), to a first approximation

Are you confident that nematodes can be neglected? I am not. I can see the welfare of nematodes being much smaller or larger than than of arthropods. Research on the sentience of nematodes is one of the “Four Investigation Priorities” mentioned in section 13.4 of chapter 13 of the book The Edge of Sentience by Jonathan Birch.

So, our best models are basically at the level of: "we can sort of say what will happen to 9 varieties of quasi-organisms at ~100-square-kilometer resolution,” an area that contains approximately 10 quadrillion insects.

Do you mean 10 trillion arthropods? 100 km^2 are 10^8 m^2 (= 100*(10^3)^2). Tropical and subtropical forests have 10^5 soil arthropods per m^2 based on Table S4 of Rosenberg et al. (2023). So I think 100 km^2 of tropical and subtropical forests have around 10^13 soil arthropods (= 10^8*10^5), 10 trillion.

For context, a community of just 500 species has 250,000 possible pairwise interactions.

Nitpick. 125 k (= 500*499/2) possible pairwise interactions, because you are only counting interactions between difference species, and the interaction between species A and B is the same as that between B and A?

And I think we should make a giant risky bet on cage-free eggs.

Despite potentially dominant effects on ants and termites?

Thanks for the post, James. It made sense to me.

I worked at HM Treasury

This is "the Government of the United Kingdom’s economic and finance ministry".

The real value of forecasting is in the moment you realise two people in the same room have forecasts 40% apart.

You mean 40 pp apart?

You can sign up for updates via the website.

It may be better to replace "via" with "on the left menu of". It was not immediately obvious to me where I should sign up.

Hi Guy and Ian. To clarify, I have in mind bets which involve winning or losing amounts of money of at least 1 % of the net annual income, and ideally at least 10 %. For example, for some earning 30 k$ of net income per year, at least 300 $ (= 0.01*30*10^3), and ideally at least 3 k$ (= 0.1*30*10^3). For a sufficiently large amount of money at stake, people would either not accept the bet, or accept it after significant investigation.

Yes, exactly the one you linked to. Since you linked it, I assumed it was clear from the context.

I asked to confirm because the page is not technically a paper.

This is why empirical data from those accustomed to suffering would be so valuable.

I very much agree.

The natural equivalent would be contraception for wild animal. A practice that holds significant promise.

I think controlling the fertility of rodents can easily increase or decrease welfare. I believe it may impact soil animals way more than rodents, and I have very little idea about whether it increases or decreases the welfare of soil animals.

While many people try to help birds by using bird-safe glass, providing nesting boxes, or feeding them during winter, the downside is that an artificially inflated population can negatively impact the birds themselves and the insects they hunt.

I agree.

Do you have any specific species in mind?

No. I think I would guess random animals of many species to have negative lives with a probability of around 50 %, including species of nematodes. In addition, I do not expect the uncertainty about whether animals have positive or negative lives to be super correlated across species. So random animals of some species having positive lives would still leave me believing that random animals of some other species could easily have negative lives.