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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.
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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