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If you've ever come across someone on the Effective Altruism forum or ACX comments section who cares a lot about wild animal/insect welfare, you might have wondered if they'd thought things through.
Well, you'd be right.
Here we have the story of a bright-eyed young effective altruist who spent the better part of a year permitting a breeding colony of carpet moths to live in her apartment because she was concerned about the ethical implications of exterminating them.
I'll be honest. My first reaction was of sneering contempt. Animal welfare is IMO the most counterproductive idea that gets serious traction in rationalist spaces, so there is a good bit of schadenfreude from seeing, "I never thought the bugs would eat MY utility," out in the wild.
Still, I don't know anything about this person other than that she lives in a London flat and works for an EA organization (80,000 hours). I am reminded of that XKCD where even the most obvious facts are learned by someone for the first time thousands of times a day. Maybe Europe really is a commieblock hellscape where man lives entirely divorced from nature, where supposedly well-informed people can enter their late 20s without an intuitive understanding of the exponential growth of pest biomass. I remember well the time as a wee lad I saw an entire summer's growth of backyard tomato plants devoured in a week by 2 or 3 hornworms. Not everyone grows up with such a visceral demonstration of what civilization is up against.
Maybe these people really do need to touch grass.
This was my favorite part of the article, that she just casually and suddenly mentioned that she had a boyfriend who was suffering alongside her Effective Altruism all the while.
The things heterosexual men will put up with for sexual access.
But yeah, it’s not necessarily all EA specific. OOP reminds me a lot of young and not-so-young women I’ve known socially and professionally. The first to make a song and dance (“omg eww!”) when an insect appears, but also most insistent that someone (not her) deal with it or the greater building-dwelling insect population in a gentle and humane way. At least OOP owned up to much of the task, albeit in her own peculiar manner.
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The story feels like a weak-man to me. Personally, I don't consider insect welfare to be relevant, and I would be surprised if it would be a major area of action within the animal welfare part of EA.
Compared to a moth, median humans and pigs are basically the same in terms of genetics and intelligence. GPT-2 is probably more sentient than your average insect.
Of course, the idea to just let some species breed as much as it likes in a human-shaped environment is also stupid on the face of it if you care about the suffering of that species, because the outcome is likely to be a lot of suffering. Reputable animal charities don't allow wild cats or dogs to breed as much as they want, they will generally try to fix them.
If she had originally widely discussed this on EA and the consensus was that she should let the moths be because insect lives matter or something, then that would be sufficient to sneer at EA.
I suppose I do have to give them credit for eventually coming around to the "kill pest infestations immediately" camp, but I don't find their stated reasoning to be particularly compelling. It seems to rest on the assumption that the pest insects live net-negative lives. If I were a carpet moth, I might like spending 6 months chowing down on yummy carpet fibers in a climate-controlled environment, then emerging from my cocoon to immediately mate. A quick SMUSH is insufficient to counteract that.
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It sounds like your first reaction was also the one you decided to share.
As with your local pest populations, I’m going to have to ask you to keep your disdain under control.
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Was someone terribly allergic to cats?
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How were you supposed to kill the mice without using traps or poison? When we get mice infestations, I put down bait and set traps. Yes, it's terribly sad when you come to collect the poor little cute furry corpses, but I prefer that to having mouse shit and urine all over the place. Well, it's one room mainly where they get in, I think from an outside pipe. Joel and Charles sound like the only sensible people in the place.
Dispatching them after live trapping, perhaps?
Yeah, but as mentioned, that's just shifting the problem one step further. Now you have a live mouse which you either (a) release, which means it's going to head straight back into the building if at all possible or (b) you have to kill it. What method do you use to kill it? Drown the mice in a bucket of water? Smush their little heads in with a heavy rock? Poison is better for both you and the mouse as a killing method.
Sell them to someone with a pet snake?
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Smash its head in with a rock, as I’ve always done to captured possums. Tough little buggers, you gotta go the extra mile.
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That's better, I use fancy modern reusable snap traps where you put in some bait and the mousie ends up dedded, all that is left is to dispose of the corpse.
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Before I sink my head into my hands in despair, let me just point out that if she's living in a block of flats, it's not just her apartment that is getting infested, now everybody else has a colony of carpet moths that is going to infest their flat.
If she lived in a house on its own, then do your own thing, but when you're living in community with other people, if you're going to worry about ethical implications, then you have to worry about the effects of your actions on others who have not consented to be infested with bloody moths.
This brings me back to the days of my childhood, when my mother used to put mothballs in the wardrobe because yes the damn moths would eat the heavy clothing you weren't going to wear until winter.
You have to be a particular combination of smart, clueless, and insulated from living at the grubbier end of reality to do stuff like this. "Oooh the poor little insects!" Me, I'm grabbing a kettle of boiling water to pour on the ants crossing the threshold.
EDIT: Fucking hell, and pardon the swearing but this is my immediate reaction. What kind of person happily ignores insect larvae in their living space? God Almighty, I was born and raised for the first several years of my life in a country council cottage with no running water or bathroom facilities of any kind, and we had it drummed into us to be clean and not slatternly. This is being slatternly. They should never have stopped corporal punishment in schools.
Well, maybe if you hadn't let the mother-loving moths tra-la-la around your flat until it got to this stage that you were living in filth, you might have avoided this daunting task, but what do I know, I'm just a normie midwit who is too dumb and too poor and too low socio-economic class to work for some 80,000 Hours approved EA earn to give big bucks places.
I'm screaming here. Screaming. Real life re-enactment of a Dario Argento movie. And she's a vegan. Of course she is.
Yes, yes, it’s all very gross and outrageous. That doesn’t suspend our usual rules about civility and restraint.
Please refrain from performative booing at the outgroup. Including your sarcastic “dumb commoner” act below.
It's only partly sarcastic, because I am a dumb commoner by comparison with a lot of the posters on here. But I also think that the entire framework around this girl, her chosen values, where she works and the rest of it are all part of the package that ended up with her choosing to live in a moth infestation and finally ended up causing even more suffering by her attempts to be humane or higher thinking or whatever. So this should cause a reconsideration and reevaluation on her part, and I don't know if it did, since I don't see that in the post she made about it.
I certainly don't mean "stop being EA" but she seems to have doubled down on it; not "okay it would have been better if I took steps at the start to kill the larvae as soon as I noticed the first few" but the self-flagellation over "I genocided these moths, I acknowledge my responsibility for their suffering".
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If Moth Lives Matter, then moths enriching the rest of your community is a feature, not a… bug.
More moths proliferating means greater happiness in the world. Your neighbors should feel good and wholesome from having been blessed with the opportunity to be decent persons and allies in hosting moths, which would also increase the world’s net-happiness.
My living quarters having more than an occasional insect appearance would sound like hell to me.
Much less than a situation where insects and their larvae are omnipresent. This now sounds like a SAW movie torture room. If moths, why not bed bugs, mice then rats?
I accept that we are always going to be sharing living space with critters, be it ants, silverfish, spiders, etc. so the occasional moth or two isn't a big deal, but not when you have visible larvae and the damn moths hatching out of them. I can't understand this.
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I'm confident that her salary at 80000 hours is totally unremarkable, even for England.
Ah yes, but she's earning to give, you see, which is way more superior than being an ordinary working Joe (or Jill) doing a job to pay the bills.
I intend to be only a wee bit sarcastic there.
Your sarcasm is misplaced, because she's not earning to give. People earning to give are not employed by 80000 hours.
It is strange to sneer so excessively without even knowing the details you are sneering about.
Oh, pardon me I don't know the finer points of working while living in an insect-infested house. Remember, I'm just a dumb commoner who isn't smart enough to be EA.
Speak plainly and avoid the boo outgroup posts.
If I knew who my damn outgroup was, I'd boo them. Right now it's looking like the entirety of Western culture as currently constructed, does that make me an anarcho-monarchist or a Maoist? If you can identity the outgroup for me, lemme know.
EDIT:I think mentally I feel as if the late 12th to early 14th century was My Time, so does that make the Ghibellines my outgroup?
If no one is your in-group that makes things very simple, just don't boo anyone.
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The thought of having a viable insect population in my living quarters, nevermind of permitting its unchecked growth, gives me the twitchy eye and makes me mumble "Hans, get ze Flammenwerfer".
Beyond that, all I can see is "All quiet on the western front: effective altruists have their priorities backwards". Nothing new. Maybe touching grass would help those people, but I wonder about the mental ecosystem that produces such impossible notions of morality in the first place.
Hell, I've got ants in my kitchen and I've seen a few silverfish in the bathtub. No biggie.
"A few" is not a problem, you're always going to have silverfish. "The ants have set up a revolutionary commune in the kitchen and are plotting the war of expansion against the silverfish empire in the bathroom", that's a problem.
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They wouldn't touch grass, they might crush the invisible slime civilisation by doing so.
(I'm running out of exclamations that aren't strings of cursing and swearing to use here).
How the blinkin' heck did Scott manage to be the one sane individual in this bunch? Whatever his quirks of personality, he's Mr. Average Normal Guy Ordinary Person by these standards.
Insect welfare is what you get when you take ideas seriously, but normies have the ideas a lot without taking them seriously. Normies who "believe in animal welfare" don't take the idea seriously. Even vegetarians don't treat seriously the ideas that lead to vegetarianism. Actually believing the things the normies are saying and taking them seriously leads to this mess.
(In this case I don't think even rationalism would support letting the insects live. Insect welfare falls out from animal welfare because the sentience of an insect is small but there are billions of them. There are not billions of insects in your apartment, so the disutility of killing them is low even if you take animal welfare seriously. I would agree that this sounds more like OCD.)
I might quibble with "take ideas seriously" here. I don't think what's happening is so much "taking ideas seriously" as "taking ideas to the farthest endpoints still supported by the underlying logic while not performing any real cost-benefit analysis on any of the steps on the road to that endpoint." It's a form of pretending that trade-offs don't exist, and not engaging in that kind of analysis by saying that logic doesn't require it. That's a consistent position, but precise logical consistency isn't necessarily the most important factor when considering a pragmatic policy choice.
There's a combination of excessive sentiment (while concern for animal welfare is good, concern to the levels of worrying about being a moth genocider are excessive), extreme sensitivity, and vulnerability to influence. Scrupulosity is part of it, as is the point about "cute animals".
This level of worrying about insects does seem, to me, to be because of being the type of person to take the concerns seriously on an almost religious level (and I'm going to bring in that she is a vegan, so that's already predisposed to be very ritually pure around consumption of non-animal food and resources), to incorporate the values to a degree that goes this far, and not see it as going far because you're in the bubble of like-minded people. Any ordinary midwit can be concerned about cows or pigs, the higher, more refined, 'shut up and multiply' person worries about fish and shrimp and moths.
I'm not doubting her sincerity, I am doubting her good judgement. As she admits, she ended up killing the moths anyway, and caused excess suffering in the end, besides the time spent living with a moth infestation.
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I think that's a good point.
This comment brought to you courtesy of the seagulls crying outside my window (because it's bin day and the little buggers are smart enough to have figured out that on certain days stuff is left outside that sometimes drops tasty morsels).
If you're used to seeing gulls and crows following the plough when the farmers start ploughing, because they're eating the worms and insects turned up when the soil is ploughed, then this is nature to you. To be brutal, everything is something else's food. To quote Willy Shakes, "We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots." In that context, insect suffering is meaningless, or at least not morally significant.
But if you're worried about the moral implications of insect suffering vis-à-vis taking action to kill a moth infestation, then you are in fact going against that nature you claim to value or prioritise. You are imposing human values on the natural world. If moths should not be killed because their suffering is morally significant, gulls and crows shouldn't eat insects either, because that is also "meat is murder".
So if we are going to impose human values on such categories, then there is no reason "humans are entitled to eat meat animals" is inferior to "I am a moth genocider" as values systems. Certainly, humans should not be deliberately cruel to animals, but that's not the moral question here.
'You are objectively evil for meat eating' is as artificial and arbitrary as any other imposition of our morals on those who don't share those values. Objective by what metric? Certainly not that of nature. Objective by human systems? Ah, there we come back again to "socially constructed" and "there is no objective moral system of right and wrong" and the likes.
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This was the most surprising thing in the text. If she lived there alone, ok, it is like boiling the frog and people can get accustomed to everything. But there has to be some social control going on, so this wasn't only her fault but that of her bf too.
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I’m an animal rights activist but only for highly advanced lifeforms. Certain kinds of bird, orangutan, killer whale, octopus, elephant. No chimpanzees as I find them vulgar. I still eat octopus but it increasingly makes me feel bad and I justify it because they’re a cannibalistic species, so I’m only doing what they do to each other.
This is so incredibly funny to me, but you're indisputably correct, chimpanzees are indeed rather vulgar.
I suppose orcas made it and dolphins didn't because the latter are rapist, onanist necrophiliacs who happen to have great PR?
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In case anyone's wondering...
1: Pest-control companies said they didn't know which pesticide they used because they hadn't diagnosed the problem yet. They hadn't chosen a pesticide. (edit: or, more likely, the person on the phone isn't an exterminator and doesn't know)
2: The company that didn't say she had to wash all her clothes, etc. just skipped that step to get a customer. The moths will likely be back within a year, because they laid eggs in the folds of old clothes or stacks of cardboard or ruffles on the edge of a couch cushion. I realize it's a pain, but it's the only way to solve the problem (thereby minimizing the total number of "murdered" moths, the cost of treatment and the amount of pesticide used).
3: This seems more like burgeoning OCD than legitimate animal welfare concerns. Switch to hardwood floors, synthetic fabrics and no whole cereal grains if you really care so damn much about moths.
4: Carpet moths don't eat carpets. They eat human hair, insects and animal leavings, etc. Actually carpet moths don't eat, but carpet-moth caterpillars do.
Oh don't worry, she investigated the hygiene implications and was happy to have them on her towels. You know, the towels she used after bathing to dry herself?
Merciful God in heaven. How is anyone this stupid and still able to write smarmy little "mea culpa I'm a moth genocider" pieces for the big brains online?
She thinks "Lepidoptera seem very likely to be sentient in my opinion." I'm beginning to have doubts about the whole vegan animal welfare EA bunch being sentient.
I call this 'city insanity' in which urban dwellers over fetishize what rural homeowners know as destructive pests. Squirrels, Rabbits, and Possums are other frequent pests that urbanites consider needing special protection. I believe it's some weird combination of personification and lack of personal experience that create these attitudes.
I blame over-exposure to Disney movies, myself.
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It's because they're cute. Ugly animals don't get as much protection and letting your brain get broken over how cute the bunny is even as it destroys your plants tends to lead to your brain getting broken over the more destructive animals with few to no redeeming qualities.
(Note that humans are also animals.)
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Wait, what’s wrong with opossums? (I assume that’s what you meant)
They like to live and dig near house foundations. Generally not as bad as other varmints but can be pretty destructive.
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I recently came across this: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/effective-altruism-thinks-youre-hitler
"Based on what EAs have written, I have replaced much of the shrimp and chicken in my diet with beef and pork, which they say gets rid of most of the harm".
Richard's thought is that you might only eat one cow per decade, but you kill thousands of shrimp. Better to kill one animal than thousands.
He clearly hasn't thought this idea through very well, so I'll help him. Why stop at cows? Larger animals exist. Ideally, we'd just hunt blue whales. A single organism could feed could feed my entire family for life. So effective. So altruistic.
Speaking of blue whales, did you know that a blue whale eats almost nothing but tiny shrimp-like creatures called krill? A blue whale eats about 1000 kg of krill every day. Wikipedia wouldn't tell me how much a krill weights, so I asked ChatGPT which told me "about 1 gram". That seems fair.
This means a blue whale eats 1 million individual krill per day, or nearly 30 billion during its lifetime. By switching to a 100% blue whale diet not only would I eat fewer shrimp and chicken, but I'd save billions of shrimp lives, shrimp that would be literally burned alive in the acid of the blue whale's stomach. In the EA community we call this "not being afraid to multiply". Simpler minds like Scott merely give their kidneys to strangers. My diet saves billions.
I'm being catty here, but my point is that when you really double down on EA thought it takes you to some weird places. I think the moth lady deserves to be mocked and hopefully comes away a little chastened. We're humans and we should live with human morality, which includes killing pest animals.
This doesn't actually seem obviously wrong. (Aside from the practical where we have no good way to raise large amounts of blue whales in captivity.)
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I think you’d have to consider the environment as well. Are billions of krill destructive to the oceans? I know cattle farming produces tones of animal waste which can end up in streams and rivers. There’s also Methane cow farts for global warming. Land used to grow feed and to house the animals would be important factors. In short I think the most ethical way to think about eating animals is the environmental impact of those animals, because that impacts entire ecosystems.
Of course. But Richard is talking about eating beef instead of chicken because EA taught him that killing fewer total organisms is a terminal goal.
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Unlike blue whales, cows are farmed (and for that reason are not endangered). Beyond that, I don't see a principled objection to eating blue whales from a meat eater's perspective.
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Is there anything to this post beyond sneering at a member of the outgroup?
Yes, the OP mentioned the fact that even if we take the EA utilitarianism into account it is hard to calculate utility lost by killing untold number of moths and larvae compared to inconvenience of not crushing them when walking around the tiny apartment. Another interesting thing that jumped at me was that the EA poster decided that next time she has to kill the insect ASAP, informed by emotional response of seeing moths dying slowly. To me it is interesting to compare with how EA is so obsessed by saving future unborn people. I am very glad that this got posted, unlike your accusatory oneliner.
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This isn't sneering at a member of the outgroup, it's policing the crazies of the ingroup.
Do not forget themotte.org's heritage, we're an offshoot of an offshoot of an offshoot of LessWrong. EA is kind of our great-aunt in terms of Internet genealogy.
It does sound like a textbook case of I Can Tolerate...'s saying that if you think you're criticizing your ingroup, and it was fun and pleasant to write and people read it for entertainment, consider the possibility that whoever you're criticizing isn't really your ingroup.
hmmm, my ingroup may consist only of me then.
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Regardless of whether EA is "themotte's outgroup" (for whatever sensible definition you want to use), it is really plain that animal EAs are Quantumfreakonomics's outgroup.
"Sneering at a member of the outgroup" seems like an apt description.
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EAs are not the in-group for most people here, ancient (by internet standards) genealogy notwithstanding.
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A polemic against the hubris of man? A defense of single-family greenspaces? A questioning of the practical expertise and experience of EA staffers? A concrete example of Kaszynskian oversocialization run amok?
None of those things are explicit in your post.
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