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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.
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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