I think doesn’t work if you think insects lead overwhelmingly net negative lives right now, and the world would be a better place if fewer insects are around to reproduce/create huge numbers of awful lives. But I might be missing something.
There is a non-negligible probability that insects suffer. Many insects have nociception. Furthermore, the argument-by-analogy approach to determining whether an animal suffer works—an insect’s response to stimuli that would cause pain in other animals is similar. It is estimated that there are 10^19 insects living at any point in time. If one believes that dust specks on a sufficiently large number of people (this doesn’t have to be 3^^^3 after all) is worse than torture of one person, does that mean insect suffering should swamp many other considerations when prioritizing social problems to address? (This is not meant to be a “proves-too-much” argument against siding with dust specks; it’s a genuine question.)
At the same time, it’s more than plausible that the extinction of humans would be very bad for insects, because their habitats would grow significantly without humans.
But anyway, I agree that even if insect suffering is really massive, it doesn’t swamp x-risk consideration. (Personally, I don’t think insect suffering matters much at all, though that’s really more of an instinct on “torture vs. dust specks” in general, though it does confuse me as an issue.) I’m just wondering how important it is in the scale of things.
Thanks for the response though! I appreciate it.