EA - Scale of the welfare of various animal populations by Vasco Grilo

Link to original articleWelcome 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: Scale of the welfare of various animal populations, published by Vasco Grilo on March 19, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.SummaryI Fermi-estimated the scale of the welfare of various animal populations from the relative intensity of their experiences, moral weight, and population size.Based on my results, I would be very surprised if the scale of the welfare of:Wild animals ended up being smaller than that of farmed animals.Farmed animals turned out to be smaller than that of humans.IntroductionIf it is worth doing, it is worth doing with made-up statistics?MethodsI Fermi-estimated the scale of the welfare of various animal populations from the absolute value of the expected total hedonistic utility (ETHU). I computed this from the product between:Intensity of the mean experience as a fraction of that of the worst possible experience.Mean moral weight.Population size.The data and calculations are here.Intensity of experienceI defined the intensity of the mean experience as a fraction of that of the worst possible experience based on the types of pain defined by the Welfare Footprint Project (WFP) here (search for “definitions”). I assumed:The following correspondence between the various types of pain (I encourage you to check this post from algekalipso, and this from Ren Springlea to get a sense of why I think the intensity can vary so much):Excruciating pain, which I consider the worst possible experience, is 1 k times as bad as disabling pain.Disabling pain is 100 times as bad as hurtful pain, which together with the above implies excruciating pain being 100 k times as bad as hurtful pain.Hurtful pain is 10 times as bad as annoying pain, which together with the above implies excruciating pain being 1 M times as bad as annoying pain.The intensity of the mean experience of:Farmed animal populations is as high as that of broiler chickens in reformed scenarios. I assessed this from the time broilers experience each type of pain according to these data from WFP (search for “pain-tracks”), and supposing:The rest of their time is neutral.Their lifespan is 42 days, in agreement with section “Conventional and Reformed Scenarios” of Chapter 1 of Quantifying pain in broiler chickens by Cynthia Schuck-Paim and Wladimir Alonso.Humans and other non-farmed animal populations is as high as 2/3 of that of hurtful pain. 2/3 (= 16/24) such that 1 day (24 h) of such intensity is equivalent to 16 h spent in hurtful pain plus 8 h in neutral sleeping.Ideally, I would have used empirical data for the animal populations besides farmed chickens too. However, I do not think they are readily available, so I had to make some assumptions.In general, I believe the sign of the mean experience is:For farmed animal populations, negative, judging from the research of WFP on chickens.For humans, positive (see here).For other non-farmed animal populations, positive or negative (see this preprint from Heather Browning and Walter Weit).Moral weightI defined the mean moral weight from Rethink Priorities’ median estimates for mature individuals provided here by Bob Fischer. For the populations I studied with animals of different species, I used those of:For wild mammals, pigs.For farmed fish, salmon.For wild fish, salmon.For farmed insects, silkworms.For wild terrestrial arthropods, silkworms.For farmed crayfish, crabs and lobsters, mean between crayfish and crabs.For farmed shrimps and prawns, shrimps.For wild marine arthropods, silkworms.For nematodes, silkworms multiplied by 0.1.Population sizeI defined the population size from:For humans, these data from Our World in Data (OWID) (for 2021).For wild mammals, the mean of the lower and upper bounds provided in section 3.1.5.2 of Carlier 2020.For farmed chickens and pigs, these data from OWID (for 2014).F...