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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.
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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