Thank you so much for this article! (BTW: Are Gary David O’Brien and BrownHairedEevee the same person? If not, also thanks to the latter for sharing it.)

I was wondering myself for years why longtermists seemingly didn´t really account for (non-human) animals, since it seems quite obvious that in a lot (if not most) of the possible futures, humanity will be nothing but an insignificant minority of all the sentient beings. In fact, my personal motivation for caring about X-risks is mostly due to the instrumental value humanity might have in regards to non-human wellbeing.

Well, I still am wondering, since besides of Beckstead´s argument (which is not really about intrinsic values) you also didn´t mention any particuar arguments human-focused longtermists actually made in regards to this. So I´m still curious why this topic gets so little attention, aside of speciesist reasons (which I am hoping are less common among longtermists compared to the rest of society). Maybe part of this is because the argument for longtermism gets even harder if you also want to convince your audience to abolish speciesism at the same time?

In any case, I completely agree it is a mistake to neglect animals in longtermism.

Im less convinced that WAS is actually a net-negative state. (My guess, though I wouldn´t really call it an informed one, would be that in average an animal in the wild lives a moderate-positive life, despite all the horrors. This average probably depends mostly on insects and small animals in the ocean, however, and I´m really not an expert, so I cannot exculde the possibility that my guess is only wishful thinking.) While this discussion in general is probably better lead elsewhere, I would at least note that your "reasonable estimate" about 1-minute-suffering before any death seems like a good estimate about some of the suffering, but is not really a reason to believe it is also a good estimate about the net-value, since it focuses on one particularly bad minute in a far longer life and does not really tell us anything about the expected value of given life as a whole. (Which would probably be highly dependent on the species.)

If WAS were actually net-positive, it would change a lot in your conclusion about preventing the spread of animals outside of earth. (And sadly also about the current influence of humanity on the overall wellbeing.)

However, most of the arguments (and especially the conclusion that it is a mistake to ignore animas in longtermism) are valid regardless, since it is true in any case that humanity might heavily influence the duration, spread and quality of wildlife as well as the exploitation of farmed or engineered animals.

Best regards,

Marc

Thanks for citing the survey here, and thank you Joshua for your analysis.

Your post doesn´t seem strange to me at this place; at the very least I can´t find any harm in posting it here. (If someone is more interested in other discussions, they may read the first two lines and then skip it.) The only question would be if this is worth YOUR time, and I am confident you are able to judge this (and you apparently did and found it worth your time).

Since you already delved that deep into the material and since I don´t see myself doing the same, here a question to you (or whoever else feeling inclined to answer):

Were there a significant part of experts who thought that HLMI and/or FAOL are downright impossible (at least with anything resembling our current approaches)? I do hear/read doubts like these sometimes. If so, how were these experts included in the mean, since you can´t just include infinity with non-zero probability without the whole number going up to infinity? (If they even used a mean. "Aggregate Forecast" is not very clear; if they used the median ore something similar the second question can be ignored.)