Lobby group for wild animal suffering?

spindoctor · by **spindoctor** on 2010-03-02T07:35:00

Has anyone here discussed forming a lobby group to press for more awareness (and ultimately action) on wild animal suffering?

It only took Alan Dawrst a couple pages of text to convince me this was one of the key ethical questions we face. Admittedly I was already coming from a utilitarian, strongly pro-AR position. But there must be many, many other low-hanging fruit who are capable of being won over. I'd feel much more confident about the future of this meme if there were 1000 people actively committed to spreading it rather than (<100? <50? How widespread is this position currently?).

(There was a great example of how intuitively right it seems to intervene in wild animal suffering in the recent BBC nature documentary Life. The scene showed a cow receive a minor wound from a komodo dragon, then successfully fight it off. The komodo and its pals then waited, day after day after day, as the cow's wound became infected and it very gradually weakened and sickened, all while its legs were stuck in this muddy swamp. They finally moved in to kill it after several days of intense suffering. In the behind-the-scenes documentary that followed the show, the hardened cameraman talked of his deep emotional turmoil at having to watch the cow's suffering and his guilt at not intervening. Anyone who had this emotional response, I suggest, is at least partially accepting the notion that we should actively intervene to prevent wild animal suffering.

Two more quick examples. In the previous BBC documentary Planet Earth, one of the behind-the-scenes mini-features showed a cameraman who consciously broke the BBC's rule about non-intervention in nature to rescue a cute penguin which had fallen into a small hole in the snow and would otherwise have died; his decision to break the rule and intervene on this occasion was portrayed as a highly moral, feel-good, humanitarian act. Finally: perhaps the most iconic image to come out of the 2009 Australian bushfires was Sam the Koala being given a drink of water by a firefighter after being burned. This was referred to as a beacon of hope in a week of suffering, Sam was "the most famous koala in the world", the image was featured on international wire services and the NYT; I believe the Prime Minister even gave a press conference about Sam. What people were responding to with such strong emotions was nothing other than direct intervention in wild animal suffering. These examples do give me some hope that there is a large potential wellspring of support for the wild-animal-suffering-matters meme.)

Arepo · by **Arepo** on 2010-03-02T13:42:00

I think all utilitarians agree with the idea in principle, or will do if given cause to think about it. I've seen the idea used as a reductio ad absurdum against vegetarianism - 'if you're going to avoid killing farm animals, why not stop *all* animals from dying you crazy hippie?', so any util reading such a complaint would have cause to contemplate it.

I suspect a few impediments to its being taken up:

1) its impracticality - large-scale human interventions into nature have had notoriously unpredictable effects - as we've been discussing in the other thread, wiping out predators leads to population boom-and-busts, widespread famines and disease etc.

2) lack of interest in many of the suffering species. Few of the empathic ecology crowd care that much if a few spiders suffer - they tend to be more interested in the cute and cuddly/anthropomorphisable animals (I notice all your examples are of such animals, for eg)

3) predators often tend to be cute and cuddly/anthropomorphisable (eg...), or at least 'noble' (ie sharks).

4) we quite possibly benefit indirectly from the suffering. If we were to try to prevent it, I can think of little we could do with current technology besides wipe out a lot of predator species and hope things eventually settle down. But that means a large loss of biodiversity that we might have learned from, especially since predators tend to be some of the most complex animals.

5) what we might do about it varies according to what you think the net welfare of the biosphere is. If, like me, you expect it to be negative, the most realistic solution in the near future might be to just wipe out most or all the non-human life on earth once (if) our technology reaches the point where we can reliably do without it (not a very seductive solution - even I find it very emotionally unpalatable). If you expect it to be positive then the 'problem' of wild animal suffering becomes much less problematic. Sure, you'd like to eliminate suffering in theory, but (if you're a total utilitarian) you just want the highest net score, which might mean ignoring animal suffering indefinitely in favour of (for eg) haphazardly seeding the universe with life - almost the opposite conclusion.

Gee Joe · by **Gee Joe** on 2010-03-02T16:12:00

It's all very good and well intentioned. But at the end of the day, I'm sure that man with the camera, while wanting to cure that cow, was eating cow and chicken himself weekly.

If you want to really overall cause a good effect on animal life, extend the meme that humans should not be speciecist self-centered assholes. They don't even want to cure diseases of people that don't live in their same country, and they certainly don't even want to stop eating cow meat, you think a meme telling to cure diseases of wild life will succeed in our current state of affairs? If it does, it'll be with very small results.

I am not saying your meme is a bad one. It's just not as good as other memes I think. I think the suffering of cows in nature is lower than the suffering inflicted by us to cows in the industry. So before you think of spreading a meme about life in the wild, do soundly declare memes about animal rights and proper animal care amongst humans.

Now if you already do that, and still want to spread the meme of animal wild life care, I'd point out some major problems that Arepo mentions as well. Mainly that e.g. when Peter Singer speaks in his conferences, because he mentions in a positive light ideas that are instinctively silly to most people (like zoophilia or infanticide) (and people are stupidly closed minded), they use those strange ideas of his to dismiss his very much worthy statements on other much major subjects, like world poverty or animal treatment in farm industry. I see talking about wild life care as backfiring in the same way. Arepo invokes reductio ad absurdum. If society already has problems with behaviours that should become mainstream in the coming decades, imagine giving major moral consideration to behaviours that will become mainstream in the coming centuries: they will label you looney / dismiss you altogether. And here I mention another big problem: while we can nowadays effectively change for the better the overall lives of domesticated animals, the fact remains that our possible positive treatment to wild life remains technologically and resourcefully much limited in comparison.

spindoctor · by **spindoctor** on 2010-03-02T19:12:00

I'm not sure that cows in nature suffer less than farmed cows. They may well suffer much more than some farmed cows. Take beef cows raised where I'm from, Australia. They are not factory farmed, but spend their lives out on the pasture, roaming free. Their food supply is more or less assured in case of lean times or drought. Summers and winters are reasonably mild. There is no risk from predators. Their deaths do involve suffering from transport and the stress of the abbatoir but that is relatively brief and (if/when the stunning works) to some extent the pain is mitigated. I'd wager that is a significant improvement in utility on the life of a wild bovine in its native habitat (Eurasia?), which contends with starvation, freezing winters and slow, drawn out, torturous deaths from hunger, injury and predation?

Having said that, few species in nature endure such constant suffering as the battery hen, foie gras goose, crated veal. Which is why factory farming is such a pressing concern. But wild animal suffering is also a pressing concern, because even if individual animals suffer less than factory farmed animals, the sheer number of wild animals is orders of magnitude greater (especially so once you factor in the small but significant risk that insects feel pain). Surely there is room to think, and care, about both categories.

But here's the key point I wanted to raise in defence of a lobby group for wild animal suffering. There isn't a kind of dialectical materialism that is slowly but surely leading us towards a greater recognition of the suffering of animals -- none of us can say what future humans will think on this issue. Perhaps, if we press for veganism and AR-consciousness, they will come to look on wild animal suffering as important. But perhaps they won't. Perhaps future humans will simply maintain the current distinction between animals in the human sphere of influence, which we should intervene to help, and animals in nature, which should remain pristine and apart. For that reason -- because this meme is NOT assured in the slightest of suceeding in the battleground of ideas -- I think spadework needs to be put in now to try to give it legs.

I don't think it mattters that we don't have the technological power to intervene yet. This lobby group (perhaps at first simply a website?) could be up front about being future-oriented and largely interested in spreading ideas and encouraging debate/research at this stage (akin to other existing lobby groups which aim to preserve the long-term viability of the human species, for example).

Finally, on the charge that this meme woud look silly to the man in the street and may contribute to making the AR movement appear crazy/absurd, this is perhaps a risk, but I think that risk is offset massively by the vital importance of spreading this meme into the future and ensuring it doesn't just die out. (Also, it's not like the group would be arguing that we should declaw tigers and set up bear hospitals in Yellowstone; it would presumably be discussing more credible future interventions such as some kind of genetically engineered or nano-tech painblocking apparatus).

Gee Joe · by **Gee Joe** on 2010-03-02T23:19:00

Well, I, for one, would totally favour genetic engineering to make animals in general more resistant to diseases. But you know how people link eugenics to Evil and Nazi, even though we're already doing it with plants. And the regular average citizen has enough worries already with his family's own well-being, social causes in favour of other humans, and now the added worries for the animals we eat or wear that animal rights activists are "pushing on us".

I think the answer relies in spreading the meme, but remarkably less frequently than spreading the meme of overall caring towards mistreated animals. That's my general impression.

Arepo · by **Arepo** on 2010-03-03T14:04:00

I agree with much of what you said, SD, but I have a couple of objections (they're not necessarily key points)

spindoctor wrote:the small but significant risk that insects feel pain

This seems like potentially seriously misrepresenting the insect issue. There's some risk that insects feel any emotion. If they do, the amount they might feel per insect ranges from so miniscule that all the insects in the world sum to less emotion than one vole to - well, whatever seems remotely plausible to you. Say equivalent to a person for the highest I can possibly imagine it being if my worldview isn't so fundamentally flawed as to make this calculation irrelevant.

Which areas of that spectrum we should think are more likely is difficult to rationalise. Alan would probably guess probabilities weighted towards greater emotion than I would - given we have no strong evidence they even hit the bottom of it and given that it doesn't seem like they perform complex enough tasks to actually need any emotional nudge I think they weight distinctly towards the low utilons-per-biomass-gram range. So as you increase the supposed ratio, the probability of it drops - meaning it's not obvious that the total risk is that high. Worth considering, but not worth treating as a black hole for resources.

If they do emote, there's also a question of whether they do so positively as well, which would skew things a lot.

I think that risk is offset massively by the vital importance of spreading this meme into the future and ensuring it doesn't just die out.

I think the risk of it dying out (assuming current trends continue) is miniscule. The idea of concern for insect suffering follows directly from the broader utilitarianism meme. If utilitarianism continues, then concern for possible insect welfare should, too.

spindoctor · by **spindoctor** on 2010-03-03T16:23:00

I think the risk of it dying out (assuming current trends continue) is miniscule. The idea of concern for insect suffering follows directly from the broader utilitarianism meme. If utilitarianism continues, then concern for possible insect welfare should, too.

That's good! I will defer to you and others on this, as I'm new(ish) to utilitarianism and I have no conception yet to how its various positions and schools of thought are regarded (I shouldn't assume that because wild animal suffering is obscure to me it's obscure to everyone!). (Off-topic, I'm going to get round to doing one of those introducing myself posts in the other subforum soon...there are a dozen other things I have to procrastinate first...)

Arepo · by **Arepo** on 2010-03-03T17:50:00

I have no conception yet to how its various positions and schools of thought are regarded

I wouldn't say it's a school of thought as such. It's just that once you'd decided to maximise (or satisfice, or whatever your goal is) utility, then unless you're one of the very few who think human utility is the only utility worth considering, you're naturally interested in finding out what the sources utility and disutility might be and creating more of the former/fewer of the latter, or changing the latter into the former. Wild animals are a pretty obvious potential source of both once you get as far as recognising that they have (or even might have) consciousness/emotion.

spindoctor · by **spindoctor** on 2010-03-03T18:55:00

Yet it seems that Peter Singer (among others?) studiously ignores it? (Maybe just for practical reasons -- because we can't do much about it yet, and he is focused on practical action?)

Arepo · by **Arepo** on 2010-03-03T19:03:00

I imagine it's for exactly that reason

Jesper Östman · by **Jesper Östman** on 2010-03-03T21:21:00

It may be because of a different reason. People heavily engaged in abolishing factory farming have emotional/personal and perhaps strategical reasons to ignore wild animals. The utilitarians I know who thinks/thought that meat eating may be justified accepted the importance of the wild animals question directly when I told them about it, or raised it independently. In contrast, some of the vegan utilitarians I've talked with did not accept it as easily.

Gee Joe · by **Gee Joe** on 2010-03-04T12:08:00

Well, I'm a vegan utilitarianist, I love animals with a passion, and if someone utilitarian positively agreed with me or you to improve wild life, yet that same day had a steak for lunch, I'd accuse him of strongly being a hypocrite. Making wild life better is relatively a much more difficult pursue than stopping to eat meat, stopping to support industrial farming. The effects of veganism are immediately recognizable in the present: less demand, thus quantitatively less suffering. The effects of well intended wild life interference are not as staggering or obvious in present conditions.

I will not accept with much ease well intended wild life interference. But even less I will accept the point of view of a utilitarian who says to care about animals yet isn't largely vegetarian-vegan. What a hypocrite.

If he is vegan-vegetarian, yet thinks eating meat may be justifiable, then that's a whole matter altogether. I don't think anyone who is truly utilitarian will think eating meat is undeniably wrong.
I'm OKAY with you wanting to improve wild animal life.
I'm NOT OKAY with you wanting to improve wild animal life yet not being largely vegetarian-vegan.

And yes, obviously Peter Singer doesn't address wild animal life improvement for practical reasons. I'd give him more intellectual credit than simply thinking he's not aware of the matter. He addresses animal well-being instead of animal killing for the same reason: practical obvious present implications. Humans aren't going to stop killing animals any time soon. Humans aren't going to genetically alter wild animals any time soon either. Humans will treat animals better in the coming years.

spindoctor · by **spindoctor** on 2010-03-04T14:25:00

Mike Retriever, I'm a vegetarian (have made some unsuccessful forays into veganism that haven't yet lasted). But visiting this forum has made me seriously consider whether it might not actually be morally permissible to eat "steak for lunch", assuming the cow was one of the Australian, pasture-raised beef cattle I mentioned before. The lives of these cows probably has net utility, in spite of their stressful deaths (to the extent we can ever really grok this issue; their lives certainly compare favourably with many wild mammals I can think of). Without humans to raise and eat them, those cows, and their utility, would not exist.

I won't be eating beef for a few reasons; (a) It squicks me out (b) It's much easier to live by a no-meat rule than a no-meat-except-for-occasional-free-range-beef-exceptions rule and (c) Perhaps the most important, agitating for consumption of free range beef is disastrous for the broader goals of spreading AR awareness, because it entrenches the idea of animals are for eating. But if a farmer privately raises a happy, free-range cow and kills it painlessly then eats it, and if the cow wouldn't have existed otherwise, I don't see the ethical concerns with this. There's a clear gain in utility: somewhat happy cow, versus no cow at all. I admit, this position seems highly counter-intuitive to me, and gives me a strong sense of unease (particularly the part where the farmer murders the poor cow!) but that's neither here nor there. I believe Singer has similar feelings about eating "happy meat" being permissible, in theory anyway. What do others here feel about the rights or wrongs of "happy meat"?

Arepo · by **Arepo** on 2010-03-04T18:53:00

Mike Retriever wrote:But even less I will accept the point of view of a utilitarian who says to care about animals yet isn't largely vegetarian-vegan. What a hypocrite.

I don't think hypocrisy is necessarily a bad thing (it's obviously hard to condemn outright from a utilitarian perspective). And honestly, though people tend to find arguments by people who don't follow their own logic persuasive, it must be better for any given person to claim that we should concern ourself with animal welfare while eating them than to claim we shouldn't care at all.

I'm vegetarian, but I think some of the posters here aren't, in some cases because although they feel they should be they haven't the motivation to - in which case it seems more productive to agree with and encourage than condemn them. Some follow Spindoctor's logic, though:

spindoctor wrote:visiting this forum has made me seriously consider whether it might not actually be morally permissible to eat "steak for lunch", assuming the cow was one of the Australian, pasture-raised beef cattle I mentioned before. The lives of these cows probably has net utility, in spite of their stressful deaths (to the extent we can ever really grok this issue; their lives certainly compare favourably with many wild mammals I can think of). Without humans to raise and eat them, those cows, and their utility, would not exist
...
if a farmer privately raises a happy, free-range cow and kills it painlessly then eats it, and if the cow wouldn't have existed otherwise, I don't see the ethical concerns with this. There's a clear gain in utility: somewhat happy cow, versus no cow at all.

This argument's well enough known to have taken a name - the 'Logic of the Larder'. While in certain circumstances it might hold, I think for most of us for most of the time it's very superficial, and has mainly been advanced by agents provocateur and non-empathic omnivores who're looking for some logic to support their predetermined conclusion.

Its key problems as I see them:

1) Environmental. Raising a cow produces more carbon emissions per calorie than growing a food crop, all things being equal (and usually even when they aren't equal) - see Wikipedia on the subject for more detail.

2) (admittedly related to 1) Opportunity cost (Gaverick Matheny and Kai Chan cover this in depth here). Growing a happy cow often (though not always) uses resources that could have been used for something else - eg growing a human.

If you're optimistic and think that on average humans are either happier than cows or have a brighter future than cows as we develop technologies to eliminate suffering, this is obviously a better deal than a happy cow (and it has the added bonus of not guaranteeing a violent and painful death).

If you're pessimistic and think that cows are happier than humans and even in the long run humans are likely to do worse, then you have much bigger conclusions to worry about than whether to eat a burger - you should probably be trying actively to wipe us out.

3) Where the 0 point of utility lies is unclear. I think there's a paper arguing that animals tend towards 0 for evolutionary reasons - it uses up energy to feel happy or sad - which seems highly plausible to me. Can't remember the citation off the top of my head, but I'll track it down if anyone wants.

If this is true, then sitting around a field eating grass is likely to be very close to 0 except for deviations from the norm - higher if you're mating, or cosy, or relatively undisturbed, perhaps, lower if it's cold or you're being hassled by a farmer or milked (if we're contemplating veganism), if you're sexually frustrated, or if your friend suddenly disappears never to return. Given the immense unpleasantness of fear of death (if not dying itself), any animals that aren't very carefully slaughtered could very easily tip the balance from lifelong net positive to net negative welfare on the day they die.

4) The value of animal welfare concern you've both mentioned.

I'm a vegetarian (have made some unsuccessful forays into veganism that haven't yet lasted)

It sounds as though you're thinking of veganism as an all-or-nothing proposition. Personally I've been quite successful at removing elements of dairy from my diet (eg I now have oat milk on my cereal) since I just started to think of consuming fewer animal products as a goal. Strict veganism is very difficult - animal products get everywhere, not just in food (and it's more likely than vegetarianism to be counter-productive if you take it too seriously, IMO, since it can cost you a lost of time and money, that you could be putting into utilitarian causes). I recommend thinking that way if you're struggling.

spindoctor · by **spindoctor** on 2010-03-04T19:30:00

Thanks Arepo, very useful and enlightening response. Regarding points 1 and 2, I don't see any reason that these arguments don't also apply to coffee, chocolate, strawberries, sugar, celery, lettuce -- or any of the other thousands of food items we consume that involve carbon emissions and opportunity costs that are significantly higher than a basic diet of calorically, nutritionally dense foods (eg lentils, wholewheat bread, soy beans). Not to mention all the leisure activities and products we consume. Having said that, eliminating meat consumption is a very simple and easy way to reduce carbon emissions (not to mention all the other benefits) and to be heartily encouraged. Regarding argument 3, I find this notion that animals may tend to have 0 utility fascinating and compelling, if true, it definitely seems to knock down the ethical permissibility of eating happy meat.

Arepo · by **Arepo** on 2010-03-06T00:48:00

spindoctor wrote:Thanks Arepo, very useful and enlightening response. Regarding points 1 and 2, I don't see any reason that these arguments don't also apply to coffee, chocolate, strawberries, sugar, celery, lettuce -- or any of the other thousands of food items we consume that involve carbon emissions and opportunity costs that are significantly higher than a basic diet of calorically, nutritionally dense foods (eg lentils, wholewheat bread, soy beans).

I'm sure they do - I mean, there's probably no action you'll ever take that you couldn't improve from a utilitarian perspective. But we tend to focus on the bigger gaps for maximum effectiveness while staying sane, and the difference between the average meat product and the average vegetable product (or at least the average vegetable product excluding a couple of gross offenders, like soy from plantations that have replaced the rainforest) is a lot larger than the difference between most vegetarian products (and also, as you say, just more convenient a line to draw).

Gee Joe · by **Gee Joe** on 2010-03-06T15:06:00

Thanks Arepo, your answer is very well educated and calm as usual.

It does frustrates me to know that being utilitarian I'm thinking in the same terms as someone else (avoiding animal harm), yet the point of domesticated animal suffering and veganism are not getting across. It's not like I'm vegetarian-vegan because it's just cool or fancy, it's for that same reason of wanting to avoid suffering. Any real attempt to make animal life better is so readily available and so much addressed by immediately increasing vegan habits as opposed to say, protest for fox hunting or write an article on animal bioengineering, that an insistence on the latter without a realization of the former seems to me like speculating on quantum physics not knowing newtonian mechanics. And I'm no quantum physicist.

Not that you must go radically vegan overnight, as you say that can be counter-productive, but care to look for alternative plant sources of food, weight the pros and the cons, do something as opposed to nothing. And indeed there's more utilitarian and ethical reasons to lead a more vegan lifestyle than to not address the issue at all.

Maybe I should shut up already. If you wish to return to the topic of wild animal suffering please do, I think I caused this diversion in the first place.

Spindoctor you'll find many utilitarian resources on this forum, great resource compendium. If you personally most intrinsically stick to avoiding harm and supporting happiness, and lead an empathic and understanding life, you'll come to agree with most of what is said already by utilitarians.

spindoctor · by **spindoctor** on 2010-03-06T20:03:00

Mike Retriever, I wholeheartedly agree with you, I think going vegan is one of the greatest moral imperatives for utilitarians (and something I'm trying to move towards, currently lacto/free-range-ovo, but reducing the lacto). But it's important not to take this position for granted, which is why I occasionally interrogate veganism (especially interested in how veganism might conceivably clash with other utilitarian goals, such as caring for wild animals, or as I mentioned in another thread, the spending of lots of $$$ on expensive vegan substitutes that might have a far greater impact spent on (animal or human) charities). But I ask these questions as a zealous supporter of veganism, not as a critic.

Gee Joe · by **Gee Joe** on 2010-03-06T23:24:00

There is a very utilitarian path of reasoning I see in regards to opposing to eat "happy meat" I've been thinking about. My immediate reaction to someone saying "if all that matters is happiness, let's go for eating happy cows" is of profound disgust. In my deep abhorrence of speciecism I imagine how that would apply to defending an industry that raises humans for their meat and keeps them so very happy until they're 20 years old, at which point they're killed painlessly, and infuriate at the thought of it. But deep abhorrence of speciecism isn't ethical in itself, nor is that a cause one should ultimately aim for, that will adhere to utilitarian standards. One should be against speciecism as a means to make living beings happier; happiness is a much more agreeable universal pursue than the condemnation of speciecism.

If humanity were compelled to continue to eat meat: to eat cow meat, to eat chicken meat... then a utilitarianist indeed would say "eat happy meat, support happy meat", for eating happy meat is better than eating non-happy meat. Now imagine a human society in the near future in which farmed animals (cows, chickens...) were all killed painlessly and lead a happy life, at least the few months or years they let them. This would create net positive happiness.

But the reality would continue to be that humans could choose to not eat meat. The human resources used to raise crop for humans, raise crop for animals, and care for animals, would be much bigger than the human resources used to simply raise crop for humans alone. In that future scenario, if the resources used to raise and feed cows or chickens could be used to directly raise, instead, any other species that are potentially happier, like say dolphins, dogs, or humans themselves, it would be a brighter future than a future where cows or chickens are raised happily and then consumed. It would happen to be a worse future if those remaining resources instead were to be used to torture children instead of raising children, but I think we can confidently say (or at least hope) a future with widespread veganism and respect for human rights is more likely than a future with widespread veganism and human systematic torture. Thus if you think human society will improve, a world with widespread veganism is more utilitarianist than a world with widespread happy meat consumption.

So another answer you can give to "if happiness is all that matters, why not happy meat?", apart from the obvious "it extents environmental danger, methane, antibiotic resistance..." there's "the resources used for raising meat could be used to actually support better causes".

PS: I realize now Arepo has addressed all these same argument in his previous post. Man, I continue to be marveled by your utilitarianist capabilities in this forum. It took me much thought to come to that conclusion, and even now it doesn't seem trivial to me; to imagine that you had it figured out all along.

DanielLC · by **DanielLC** on 2010-03-07T02:15:00

Mike Retriever wrote:...defending an industry that raises humans for their meat and keeps them so very happy until they're 20 years old, at which point they're killed painlessly...

So living for twenty years and dying painlessly is bad, but living for eighty years and dying painfully is good?

...would be much bigger than the human resources used to simply raise crop for humans alone.

So the problem is wasting money? If people were prevented from spending money on meat, they'd presumably spend it on something that does a slightly worse job of making them happy, not donate it to charity.

Arepo · by **Arepo** on 2010-03-07T03:55:00

DanielLC wrote:So living for twenty years and dying painlessly is bad, but living for eighty years and dying painfully is good?

Depends how good the 80 and 20 yearses would be and what the opportunity costs are

Gee Joe · by **Gee Joe** on 2010-03-07T04:37:00

DanielLC, my point was that the deep abhorrence I have for p, where p is "an industry that raises -xxx- for their meat and keeps them so very happy until they're -xxx- years old", is not reason enough to deem p as morally bad, and thus follow to use utilitarian principles to balance it morally. And then you equate human resources to money. Money doesn't raise crops or care for farm animals; people do, human workmanship does, you clown.

DanielLC · by **DanielLC** on 2010-03-07T05:02:00

Sorry I misunderstood.

Money is representative of the work people do. It takes the same amount of resources to create anything with a given price (ignoring externalities, taxes, subsidies, etc.).

If you prevented people from producing and buying meat they'd produce and buy something that they like slightly less.

What about supply and demand?

People will supply what there's a demand for until the profit drops to where you get the same amount of money for using a given amount of resources as with doing anything else.

RyanCarey · by **RyanCarey** on 2010-03-07T22:04:00

The notion of people arguing to improve meat industries rather than destroy them (the happy meat argument) isn't new. I think our best response to it is that it is the correct cause of action in a hypothetical situation in which happy cheap meat was available. However, happy meat is fictional, so this happy meat approach is no good for the real world. Although ideologically, it is fine, practically it is not.

NB: due to an moderating mistake, one of Arepo's posts was lost. Unfortunately, we generally can't reverse edits, we can only fix them by editing again. The exception to this is when multiple mistakes are made, or when serious vandalism occurs, in which cases we can call our tech-guru in order to revert the database to a previous healthy state.

biznor · by **biznor** on 2010-03-21T07:59:00

To respond to the initial question that started this thread, there is a web-site that is advocating the abolition of all suffering--including that which goes on in the natural world. The idea is that eventually genetic engineering and nanotechnology will make this goal "technically feasible." It's a great site and I'd highly recommend it:
www.abolitionist.com
(It also has a bunch of other names, too but I find this one easiest to remember).

Here's an article that directly relates to the posted question: http://www.hedweb.com/abolitionist-proj ... ators.html

Brian Tomasik · by **Brian Tomasik** on 2010-04-23T08:25:00

I'm late in replying to this forum, but I thank spindoctor very much for starting it!

spindoctor, thanks for the great examples of empathy for wild animals that humans can show from time to time. I agree with Arepo, of course, that people are too often biased to want to help cute animals -- rather than, say, ugly fish or slimy parasites. And of course, these acts only occur in extremely rare circumstances when the animal suffering happens to become salient, when what's needed is a rational, comprehensive assessment of the cost-effectiveness of various options (in the long run, likely replacing nature with happier uses of those resources).

Arepo wrote:what we might do about it varies according to what you think the net welfare of the biosphere is. If, like me, you expect it to be negative, the most realistic solution in the near future might be to just wipe out most or all the non-human life on earth once (if) our technology reaches the point where we can reliably do without it (not a very seductive solution - even I find it very emotionally unpalatable). If you expect it to be positive then the 'problem' of wild animal suffering becomes much less problematic. Sure, you'd like to eliminate suffering in theory, but (if you're a total utilitarian) you just want the highest net score, which might mean ignoring animal suffering indefinitely in favour of (for eg) haphazardly seeding the universe with life - almost the opposite conclusion.

Arepo, the fact that many people find unpalatable wiping out the biosphere is precisely what worries me: Humans have a multiplicity of things they value, and few are as consistent as you in their commitment to reducing suffering. Many of the authors I’ve read who even address the question of wild animals come to the conclusion that humans ought not interfere with nature for intrinsic reasons – that nature ought to be kept pure, and that human manipulation just “wouldn’t be right.” I’m deeply worried by how common this position is even among vegetarians and vegans, as Jesper hinted. Just read the responses quoted here, including on the page to which I linked at the bottom.

While I think promoting vegetarianism is probably a net plus for wild animals – at least it helps to combat general anti-speciesism – I do worry that most of the vegetarians so created will share the pro-pristine-wilderness position that’s so common among such circles. What’s really needed – as spindoctor put it so eloquently – is an organization that can make the explicit argument that humans have obligations to consider the welfare of wild animals. As Arepo noted, this includes weighing both the suffering and happiness of wild animals. Perhaps we’ll ultimately come to the conclusion that wild animals are, on the whole, happy (though I fear that the opposite is probably true, especially since for most species, parents give birth to hundreds or thousands of offspring that die before maturity). But the point is that we need to make sure our technologically advanced descendants consider wild-animal welfare in general before blithely taking actions with potentially cosmic implications for the amount of animal happiness and suffering that exists.

spindoctor wrote:But here's the key point I wanted to raise in defence of a lobby group for wild animal suffering. There isn't a kind of dialectical materialism that is slowly but surely leading us towards a greater recognition of the suffering of animals -- none of us can say what future humans will think on this issue. Perhaps, if we press for veganism and AR-consciousness, they will come to look on wild animal suffering as important. But perhaps they won't. Perhaps future humans will simply maintain the current distinction between animals in the human sphere of influence, which we should intervene to help, and animals in nature, which should remain pristine and apart. For that reason -- because this meme is NOT assured in the slightest of suceeding in the battleground of ideas -- I think spadework needs to be put in now to try to give it legs.

Wow, spindoctor, I couldn’t have said it better myself! I completely agree with all of the points you made above and subsequently. Yes, meme-space is big, even among humans. As participants on online forums like this one, it can sometimes be hard to remember just how diverse human concerns are. And on this question in particular, if you take a representative sample of view on the matter, the “people shouldn’t interfere with nature” and “wilderness is intrinsically valuable” mindsets preponderate overwhelmingly.

Arepo wrote:I think there's a paper arguing that animals tend towards 0 for evolutionary reasons - it uses up energy to feel happy or sad - which seems highly plausible to me. Can't remember the citation off the top of my head, but I'll track it down if anyone wants.

I think you’re referring to Yew-Kwang Ng’s excellent “Toward Welfare Biology” (which, by the way, also argues that the net amount of happiness vs. suffering in the wild is negative because there are far more non-surviving offspring than surviving ones).

Arepo and spindoctor, as a sidenote, both of you mentioned working to remove dairy from your diets, but this puzzles me. In terms of the amount of direct suffering per kilogram caused by milk compared against all other animal foods, dairy should be your last concern, since a single cow produces 16-20 liters of milk in a day. (A single egg contributes to a day of hen suffering.)

In any event, spindoctor, I agree with your idea of putting together a nice website (and, more ambitiously, organization) focused on promoting the wild-animal meme. What would you think of actually getting involved with such a project? Perhaps we could work together. I know a few others who are also interested in such an effort. Feel free to reply publicly here unless you’d rather write a personal message.

Brian Tomasik · by **Brian Tomasik** on 2010-05-02T07:09:00

A friend of mine made the following comment:

If the main reason for promoting concern about wild animals is to reduce the likelihood of humans creating huge amounts of suffering by the creation of new ecosystems (whether through new universes, seeding planets or something else) then it could be more effective to focus on "the problem of evil". Unlike the suffering of current wild animals the suffering of the inhabitants of these human-created eco-systems would intuitively seem like something the humans are clearly responsible for (compare how intuitive the "problem of evil" charge against god is). It seems like both people's intuitions about naturalness (or of "playing god") and about responsibility should favor the utilitarian action (forbidding such creation). On the other hand, when it comes to interventions in current eco-systems it seems hard to give people an intuition that we are responsible and intuitions about naturalness (or playing god) go against the utilitarian actions (intervening in current ecosystems).

An interesting idea indeed. I guess my main question would be, "What does it look like to 'focus on the problem of evil' apart from pointing out specific instances of suffering that particular actions would entail?" In other words, it seems to me as though the main way to implement the problem-of-evil strategy would be to highlight the wild-animal suffering that would be caused by directed panspermia, lab-universe creation, and the like, which is part of promoting concern for wild animals in general. I suppose the problem of evil could be a convenient rhetorical device or intuition-pump for such arguments, of course.

I'm also concerned that in some cases, support for wilderness preservation and propagation doesn't diminish when people are reminded of the wild-animal suffering involved. For instance, the Panspermia Society's Panbiotic Ethics values the propagation of life as an intrinsic good, and I actually met someone who said that he agrees that wildlife contains lots of suffering but that humans should still spread life throughout the universe because spreading life -- not preventing suffering -- is the most important thing. And I worry about environmental ethicists like Ned Hettinger, who said: "Respecting nature means respecting the ways in which nature trades values, and such respect includes painful killings for the purpose of life support" (quoted in this piece). I'm not sure Hettinger would approve of spreading pain-free wilderness as a substitute for regular wilderness....

Brian Tomasik · by **Brian Tomasik** on 2010-05-02T08:18:00

This forum provides an interesting sample of activist perspectives on wild animals.

I was amused by this comment from 'Pilgrim':

Well, if tomorrow we stopped all human activities that hurt animals, wild animals would still suffer a lot because of the way nature is. So I wouldnt necessarily say that we don't need to do a jot more research into how to alleviate wild animal suffering.

The way I view moral obligation was inspired by animalrightsmalta, back in the day, and it might help.
I think we have a moral obligation not to cause suffering to others, but we don't have a moral obligation to spend our time counter-acting the suffering caused by others.

So, people should be vegan, no excuses. Use, forced confinement and slaughter of farm animals causes too much suffering. However, its not our fault if others choose to be cruel and eat meat. We shouldn't feel morally obliged to carry out animal rights activism, and if we choose to then we are simply choosing to do a good thing, which is great.

If you are trying to look for a logical argument against trying to interfere with nature then you probably won't find one. I think what Alan Dawrst says in his article is sensible and true. I would have thought he would be smart enough not to write about subjects which make him seem crazy to the people he is trying to convince, like creating universes, but I'm sure thats all logical too.

However, if, like me, the thought of destroying nature, breaking food chains, laying cement over areas of grassland to purge it of life, and therefore purge it of suffering, causes you a lot of distress - then don't worry. We aren't obliged to go out of our way to prevent life, to stop spiders from hurting flies (something advocated, perhaps logically, by a new stream of activists). I think we have plenty of work for the rest of our lives if we just focus on ending human-induced cruelty.

If we ever do achieve the anti-speciesist world we are working for then perhaps then will be the time people look deeply into the rights or wrongs of destroying nature's cycles for the good of it's animals.
Personally, I think I'll choose not to stress myself out over this new wave of logic because I doubt I'll ever feel comfortable with destroying nature. I'll just carry on trying to end peoples' cruelty towards animals.

You may want to do the same.
_________________
The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who commit evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing

(The signature quote at the end seems a bit ironic in view of the comment that "we don't have a moral obligation to spend our time counter-acting the suffering caused by others.")

From KRITTER:

We need to leev nature to its bizness as much as we can.Its not always prity.But nature knos best.The only species we shood sterlize is our own.

And the participant who started the thread, Veganomante:

I realize serious animal right activists do take environmentalism as a logical consequence of their veganism/anti-speciesism. All of us here on the forum do, actually, I think.

I was encouraged by this further note:

There have been 5 major extinctions on these planet since the beginning of life. In-between there have been smaller extinctions. Climate has changed cyclically. Environments have changed drastically, and species have disappeared periodically. Up to 95% of life has been devastated on those extinctions. Even humans have gone extinct (homo neanderthalensis). The point is, for wild animals, life is always hard as hell. We, through science and technology, and our societies and our morality, have progressively made our lives better. And most probably, we'll continue to do so. Should we not extend a hand to wild animals as well?

And later:

In our case we're all for abolishing suffering, not merely exploitation. Though we might recognize some forms of suffering are destined to teach us about the ways of the world, we still go to great pains in order to minimize human suffering as much as we can. That's what we are doing with all types of medicine, at least. Medicine is not destined to abolish exploitation, is for abolishing suffering through improved health. And to extent this to other animals we should only invoke the argument for marginal cases, right?

This forum provides an interesting sample of activist perspectives on wild animals.

I was amused by this comment from 'Pilgrim':

Well, if tomorrow we stopped all human activities that hurt animals, wild animals would still suffer a lot because of the way nature is. So I wouldnt necessarily say that we don't need to do a jot more research into how to alleviate wild animal suffering.

The way I view moral obligation was inspired by animalrightsmalta, back in the day, and it might help.
I think we have a moral obligation not to cause suffering to others, but we don't have a moral obligation to spend our time counter-acting the suffering caused by others.

So, people should be vegan, no excuses. Use, forced confinement and slaughter of farm animals causes too much suffering. However, its not our fault if others choose to be cruel and eat meat. We shouldn't feel morally obliged to carry out animal rights activism, and if we choose to then we are simply choosing to do a good thing, which is great.

If you are trying to look for a logical argument against trying to interfere with nature then you probably won't find one. I think what Alan Dawrst says in his article is sensible and true. I would have thought he would be smart enough not to write about subjects which make him seem crazy to the people he is trying to convince, like creating universes, but I'm sure thats all logical too.

However, if, like me, the thought of destroying nature, breaking food chains, laying cement over areas of grassland to purge it of life, and therefore purge it of suffering, causes you a lot of distress - then don't worry. We aren't obliged to go out of our way to prevent life, to stop spiders from hurting flies (something advocated, perhaps logically, by a new stream of activists). I think we have plenty of work for the rest of our lives if we just focus on ending human-induced cruelty.

If we ever do achieve the anti-speciesist world we are working for then perhaps then will be the time people look deeply into the rights or wrongs of destroying nature's cycles for the good of it's animals.
Personally, I think I'll choose not to stress myself out over this new wave of logic because I doubt I'll ever feel comfortable with destroying nature. I'll just carry on trying to end peoples' cruelty towards animals.

You may want to do the same.
_________________
The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who commit evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing

(The signature quote at the end seems a bit ironic in view of the comment that "we don't have a moral obligation to spend our time counter-acting the suffering caused by others.")

From KRITTER:

We need to leev nature to its bizness as much as we can.Its not always prity.But nature knos best.The only species we shood sterlize is our own.

And the participant who started the thread, Veganomante:

I realize serious animal right activists do take environmentalism as a logical consequence of their veganism/anti-speciesism. All of us here on the forum do, actually, I think.

I was encouraged by this further note:

There have been 5 major extinctions on these planet since the beginning of life. In-between there have been smaller extinctions. Climate has changed cyclically. Environments have changed drastically, and species have disappeared periodically. Up to 95% of life has been devastated on those extinctions. Even humans have gone extinct (homo neanderthalensis). The point is, for wild animals, life is always hard as hell. We, through science and technology, and our societies and our morality, have progressively made our lives better. And most probably, we'll continue to do so. Should we not extend a hand to wild animals as well?

And later:

In our case we're all for abolishing suffering, not merely exploitation. Though we might recognize some forms of suffering are destined to teach us about the ways of the world, we still go to great pains in order to minimize human suffering as much as we can. That's what we are doing with all types of medicine, at least. Medicine is not destined to abolish exploitation, is for abolishing suffering through improved health. And to extent this to other animals we should only invoke the argument for marginal cases, right?

Brian Tomasik · by **Brian Tomasik** on 2010-08-08T02:45:00

Here is another forum discussion on the topic. As usual, the overwhelming sentiment is that nature should be left alone:

* "Nature does not need our help. Nature balances itself. It seems like you're placing human thinking, feeling and emotions into animals in nature. They have their own point of view."
* "Humans should just leave other animals alone. Just that."
* "Nature isn't cruel, it's nature, it has no concept of cruel. Cruelty is a man-made concept. Nature is life, and that's just how life is."
* "What I care about isn't just plain suffering, but rather suffering which I as a human participate in. Just as with Human Rights, I do not concern myself with situations in which people suffer because they choose crappy situations; I care about when crappy situations are imposed on others. I guess my real concern is freedom, not just happiness."
* "I can understand it would be nice for all suffering to stop, but I think it is wrong to interfere even more into nature and wild animals lives."
* "Animals in nature are doing just fine. They are meant to live in the wild."

I found this remark ironic:

Besides, us humans face danger everyday too. We get diseases, die in car crashes and airplane crashes, get killed by people with guns or knives, get mugged, fall and brake our bones, die in wars, etc.

Exactly, but then why do we have hospitals, vehicle-safety standards, police, doctors, and so on?

This remark was unsettling but at least honest:

I won't say I don't think nature is cruel, it is in that a lot of animals suffer. Nature is cruel as life is and I don't like to think about a lot of the stuff that happens naturally in the world. I don't think about it because I am vegan by nature and it upsets me.

[...]

I want nature to win.
Human beings make animals suffer due to the 'nurture' of society, that it is ok to do that. I am vegan because I want that attitude to end.

kamekora · by **kamekora** on 2011-10-10T10:22:00

What are the best websites to learn about wildlife? I am interested in learning more about wildlife. What are the best websites to do so? Also, how about books? Any good books I can learn from?
_________________________________
external keyword tool ~ keyworddiscovery.com ~ keycompete.com ~ compete.com ~ webmasterworld.com

linoula · by **linoula** on 2011-10-31T14:14:00

So the problem is wasting money? If people were prevented from spending money on meat, they'd presumably spend it on something that does a slightly worse job of making them happy, not donate it to charity.

Brian Tomasik · by **Brian Tomasik** on 2012-12-20T10:33:00

A friend asked me, Which ways of spreading concern for wild-animal suffering (WAS) should we focus on with an eye toward making a difference "on the ground" in the long term? I replied as follows.

IMO, the most important thing is to make sure post-humans don't multiply wild suffering into space, in sentient simulations, etc. This requires changing the long-term values of the culture so that not needlessly creating WAS becomes as obvious as, say, not needlessly discriminating against women.

If the future is determined by a "seed AI" that takes over the world, then it would be most important to influence the values of this AI. To do this, we might focus efforts on possible AI developers, although we don't know who will build the AI -- maybe the military or government of some country -- so diffuse value-spreading still makes sense here, with some bias toward those more likely to be influential on seed AI. I like the idea of reaching out to young people in math/science because they don't have the intense competition for their time and attention that current AI developers do, and in general, young people are more open to new ideas.

That said, measurements of effectiveness just based on number of people affected -- weighted by the influence of those people on others -- could be pretty decent. Culture blends across boundaries. Even science people read the NYT. Science people have spouses and friends who aren't science people. Etc. That said, I would prefer to focus on people more likely influential to AI when we have the chance. For example, LessWrong people might be more important than average to influence (although some can also be extremely stubborn, even compared with many other smart people).

If the future isn't determined by a seed AI that takes over the world but by regular democracy, etc., then diffuse value spreading is about equally good as targeted value spreading, although it remains true that science innovators will likely hold a large share of wealth in a post-human future.

Hedonic Treader · by **Hedonic Treader** on 2012-12-20T13:49:00

It is worth noting that the bulk of expected suffering that comes from a seed AI building a big future does not lie in wild animals or simulations thereof. It probably lies in the "suffering subroutines" department, or something other that does not match the phenotypes of wild animals we see now. If there is a meta-meme of concern for unpleasantness-over-pleasantness creation, and if we can spread that meta-meme effectively without pushing people in the wrong direction, it would have higher expected utility than addressing WAS.

RyanCarey · by **RyanCarey** on 2012-12-20T19:59:00

Yeah, Hedonic Treader - this meme is Effective Altruism?

Hedonic Treader · by **Hedonic Treader** on 2012-12-20T20:51:00

RyanCarey wrote:Yeah, Hedonic Treader - this meme is Effective Altruism?

Could be! Or anything that slightly shifts people to hedonistic utilitarianism from other forms of altruism. My problem is that I never really know if I end up annoying people or convincing people. But if we had a solid method of marginally increasing acceptance for utilitarianism-type morality (anti-speciesist!), it could do more good than focusing on WAS specifically.

peterhurford · by **peterhurford** on 2012-12-21T20:45:00

Hedonic Treader wrote:But if we had a solid method of marginally increasing acceptance for utilitarianism-type morality (anti-speciesist!), it could do more good than focusing on WAS specifically.

I remember a talk with Brian where we both mentioned how people can be convinced of utilitarianism but not convinced of effective altruism (see "Helping Along 'Shallow' Utilitarians" and "Why Are Some Utilitarians Not Also Effective Altruists?"). Thus I've preferred the direct antispeciesist approach of veg ads. WAS might work too but I worry about it not being actionable in the same way veganism/vegetarianism is (behavior change is a great way to inspire belief change). Though I could see the meme change in favor of gay marriage being an example for WAS to follow.

Brian Tomasik · by **Brian Tomasik** on 2012-12-25T09:29:00

Thanks, Hedonic Treader! This is something I wonder about myself a lot, so I have several things to say. I've broken my reply into a few parts to avoid making it horrendously long/confusing.

First, let me share a slightly redacted email exchange with two friends from mid-Oct 2012:

[Friend1:]
As you've commented, it seems as though most future suffering will be experienced by simulated subroutines of man-made computer programs. I don't see a reason why these subroutines would resemble existing wild animals in much detail. I also think that the transferability of concern for wild animals to concern for non-animal subroutines would be low relative to the transferability of general empathy. The strongest argument for spreading concern for wild animals that I see is that basically nobody is doing it, so that the marginal value (in transferability) may be higher than the marginal value of (in transferability) trying to spread general empathy.

[Brian:]
When I contemplate the future, the only thing I can seriously imagine working on besides WAS is suffering subroutines, sentient simulations, etc. (call them SSSS). Alternatively, maybe I'll find someone who wants to work on SSSS.

The tricky thing is to figure out what to do about SSSS now. I agree that the issue isn't insurmountable. At the very least, one could study economic drivers toward SSSS, how plausible SSSS according to different theories of consciousness, etc. That said, what matters most is spreading empathy and concern for suffering, because the factual details will fall into place later.

Just as veg*ism may be something of a gateway drug for WAS, WAS may be something of a gateway drug for SSSS. Even if not, one of the most salient ways to describe SSSS is that it would increase WAS (for example, simulations might contain wild animals). I think similar groups of people will be attracted to WAS and SSSS. Also, sometimes you need something concrete like WAS to keep people from thinking the problem is hopeless and giving up.

The reasons listed above are relevant, although one can also muster arguments against focusing on WAS directly.

I'd be glad to hear further thoughts.

BTW, it seems to me that antispeciesism is very closely tied with SSSS, such that working on antispeciesism and working on empathy for SSSS are almost the same. Some of the quickest antispeciesists are sci fi readers, and probably some of the quickest people to care about SSSS are antispeciesists.

[Friend2:]
My intuition about suffering subroutines is that they're pretty unlikely. Sentient simulations seem more likely, but if they were anthropomorphic, I think mainstream people would be concerned about them. It seems more useful to promote antispeciesism (and general concern for sentients) without focusing on the specifics. Prediction is a tricky business, with a lot of hidden assumptions. On the other hand, if you weren't specific, the cause of preventing future suffering would probably be too vague to catch on.

I think we should emphasize WAS as an example of the broader principle of preventing suffering in sentients. Sort of like how a lot of organizations have general statements of purpose.

[Brian:]
I agree that the optimal strategy is to combine the general philosophy you're trying to advance with something concrete for people to latch onto. Our general principle is antispeciesist concern for massive amounts of suffering by organisms regardless of whether we've caused that suffering. The specific application here and now is WAS. The application in the future might be SS or SS. Jonah makes a good point that we should keep the big picture in mind in our presentation and not dwell entirely on WAS alone. But being too vague doesn't seem so good either. Kindergarten teachers tell their students to care about others' feelings, and probably that's a good thing, but it's not clear if it's the optimal thing in terms of steering the future in a good direction. (OTOH, I do wonder whether shows like Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood have unexpectedly large impacts on empathy by later adults. Dunno.)

My intuition about suffering subroutines is that they're pretty unlikely.

Me too. But are they unlikely enough to offset their potential scale? There I'm less sure.

Sentient simulations seem more likely, but if they were anthropomorphic, I think mainstream people would be concerned about them.

Yes, that's precisely why I think discussions about "robots rights" and such may not be the single most important topic. There's already quite a bit of writing about it, and when the robots become human-like, these moral dilemmas will be mainstream. My biggest concern is about suffering by non-human-like minds that might still be conscious.

Simulations of the world might include simulations of WAS, and in that case, spreading concern for WAS would again be useful. Even if there's a bias in the simulations toward "higher" minds like those of humans, keep in mind that a single simulation of nature with its 10^18 insects will be comparable to many millions of simulations of just the humans on the planet.

It seems more useful to promote antispeciesism (and general concern for sentients) without focusing on the specifics.

I think we can give specifics as examples without claiming they're accurate, and we ask people to envision their own future visions. Just like WAS, thinking about specific scenarios gives you something useful and concrete to do with your imagination while you wait to see how the future develops.

I think AE should emphasize WAS as an example of the broader principle of preventing suffering in sentients. Sort of like how a lot of organizations have general statements of purpose.

Yup.

Brian Tomasik · by **Brian Tomasik** on 2012-12-25T09:33:00

Here's an email I sent to some friends on 23 Nov 2012:

B1 and B2 are two parts of Brian's brain.

B1: Futurism stuff is super important. The magnitudes of computational suffering in the future could be orders of magnitude higher than the amounts of wild-animal suffering by biological organisms.
B2: Yeah, but the long-term future is so uncertain. We would barely know if we were making things better or worse by our actions.
B1: Maybe, but if the probability of making things better is even 1 in a million or 1 in a billion more than the probability of making things worse, it will be worth it when you multiply by the magnitudes of suffering at stake.
B2: Ok, that's a good point. But what do you propose to do to make the probability of bad things ever-so-slightly lower?
B1: Well, we could talk about how it would be bad if there were astronomical amounts of computational suffering.
B2: Yes, that's important, but isn't it obvious that that's a bad thing? In other words, pretty much any group of people working on a friendly AI would realize it. Even Eliezer worries about producing massive suffering a little bit.
B1: Ok. What if we focus on something slightly less obvious, where the low-hanging fruit hasn't already been picked?
B2: Well, how about the suffering of wild animals in simulations, etc.? People today favor spreading life without a second thought about what this means for quintillions of organisms.
B1: Hmm, yes. It would be good to make people think harder about that fact, especially since status-quo bias and the sentiment that nature can do no wrong are so prevalent among even elite humans. That seems like a glaring hole in people's moral sensibilities.
B2: Yup.
B1: Here's another idea that's not totally obvious: What if we encourage concern for artificial sentients that aren't so human-like?
B2: That's good too. On the one hand, I suspect moral debate on that topic might arise on its own, because there aren't status-quo bias and nature preservationism getting in the way. On the other hand, there will be more expected artificial sentients than there will be animals, so even smaller improvements may matter more.
B1: And the causes feed into each other. Antispeciesism is one of the building blocks of concern for artificial sentients. And people who care about artificial sentients may be more likely to care about wild animals?
B2: Yeah. I think there could be room to work on both of these issues. For example, jumpstart the wild-animal topic now, and once that movement is established, say in 5-10 years, then begin thinking more about the artifical-sentients topic. And you can always keep a foot in both worlds to some degree.
B1: Sounds good. In general, it seems that I may have the most utilitarian leverage by being the "angel investor" in new projects/movements. Once they become more established, other people can take over more of the funding and maturation.
B2: Yes, that sounds reasonable, as long as the projects that you start have roughly comparable expected value. If there were one single cause that you thought was way better than the rest, you should work on that forever to the exclusion of everything else.
B1: Point taken.
B2: Great.
B1: Well, thanks for the chat, B2.
B2: My pleasure.

Brian Tomasik · by **Brian Tomasik** on 2012-12-25T09:45:00

Email to friends from 22 Dec 2012:

My main sentiment is that WAS is the best thing to do right now (next few years) because the momentum is already building and we already have our organization. With the other stuff like SSSS we'd have to start from scratch. Now, this argument be a sunk-cost fallacy except that I think that even without those factors, WAS would be at least tied with all the other options on my list. There's a reason I gave it priority among the things that I talked about the most for the last few years, and now that our wild-animal organization has finally arrived (after ~3 years in the making), I think it's time to execute on it and see where it can go. A few years from now, either it won't have done much or else it will be a huge success with increasing interest, and either way, I'll consider moving on to other things then.

Other smaller reasons to do WAS now:
SSSS needs more thinking about before I'm ready to dive into it. Given that I work full-time, this is going to be a slow process. Of course, other people could work on it more, but it's also true that as you get older, you learn a lot of things just by osmosis, and focused study can't necessarily do the same, because it doesn't teach you things you never knew you never knew. So sometimes just waiting on an idea until it's hatched is the best approach. Of course, you do need to do some study of the topic, so I hope I can do a little of that, and maybe my friends can do more of it over the coming years.
WAS is the most concrete of the possible things to work on and, IMO, the most likely to turn into something really big. If I had to bet on a cause that would make you famous, it would be WAS rather than the others. Not suggesting it's likely you'll be famous, since most startups like ours don't hit the jackpot, but it's remotely possible.
Along similar lines, I think WAS is the least likely thing to fail, so it'd probably look better on your resume than the other things.

Influencing AI people ties in with WAS meme-spreading and is potentially not even different from it. If we want to influence the powerful, the first thing to do is expand our base of supporters, rather than try to do the influencing work ourselves. This is often true. I always used to win Monopoly against my grandmother because she saved her money, but I spent everything I had to buy as much property as I could right from the beginning. He who owns the most property (i.e., has the biggest base of supporters) wins. So presumably targeting AI people would be part of either WAS or SSSS work. I agree that in a few years, once we've picked the low-hanging fruit and built enough momentum that the WAS movement is self-sustaining, we could change course and encourage people to focus on SSSS more explicitly.

What if life in the wild isn't that bad? Well, I think it is when you consider the dying baby insects, etc., but even if it's not, encouraging concern for WAS could still be the best thing, because even if life in the wild were net positive, there's TONS of room for improvement. We should still try to dissuade post-humans from spreading wildlife, because they could be spreading much happier things, and we should still support efforts to help wild animals. It's just that some of our near-term policies (e.g., encouraging habitat reduction) would be not so good, but the memetic value would still largely be there. In any event, it seems extremely unlikely to me that the expected balance of happiness minus suffering is positive, and in any event, promoting the topic of WAS will encourage more researchers to explore the question and come up with their own answers.

As far as whether we should just promote utilitarianism, I do wonder about this. It's comparable to WAS and SSSS in my list of future possibilities, although I really don't know how best to do it. As you suggest, I think WAS and SSSS are pretty decent ways to implicitly promote utilitarianism, because even if people don't realize it, the mindset that underlies wild-animal-welfare calculations is utilitarian, and this will shape the way people approach similar problems going forward. I think a big reason why I was utilitarian before I knew the philosophy existed was because I had heard other people make arguments along utilitarian lines in the past (e.g., cost-benefit comparisons, risk analysis, opportunity cost, etc.), and those concepts became part of my common-sense approach to decisions. That's promoting utilitarianism even when people don't know the word.

Also, promoting utilitarianism in the abstract runs the risk of not getting people to follow through on anything. You might create a lot of philosophers instead of a lot of activists. I think promoting WAS as part of utilitarianism is ideal.

Should we research what is sentient? I agree that it's largely good to lean on others for this research, because unlike with ethical values, facts are objective and will eventually be figured out by future scientists. One exception is that doing sentience research could have PR value. In fact, promoting this as one way to help wild animals in the near term might be a decent strategy. E.g., one way to help wild animals that we can do right now is study more whether insects can suffer. So it's not a bad idea, but IMO it should be done as part of a bigger-picture memetic movement.

Brian Tomasik · by **Brian Tomasik** on 2012-12-25T09:50:00

peterhurford wrote:Thus I've preferred the direct antispeciesist approach of veg ads. WAS might work too but I worry about it not being actionable in the same way veganism/vegetarianism is (behavior change is a great way to inspire belief change). Though I could see the meme change in favor of gay marriage being an example for WAS to follow.

For a full discussion of this, see "Don't 'Raise Awareness'" and the comments therein. There's too much to quote here, but I very much do see gay marriage, etc. as examples of how raising awareness alone can change a culture, probably permanently. I said:

In any event, it's easy to underestimate the power of raising awareness. Consider the civil-rights movement. Part of the reason for greater tolerance toward blacks was due to enforced change (e.g., required desegregation of schools), but as far as I know, a decent part of it was purely an intellectual/cultural shift in social consciousness. Once something like that takes hold, it seems hard to imagine going back. Similar for women's rights, gay rights, and the rest. If we can do something analogous for wild animals -- making it conventional wisdom that the suffering of animals in nature is no more acceptable than the suffering of humans from cancer or starvation -- then wild animals will be on the agenda, and future electoral debates will include this as an issue.

Brian Tomasik · by **Brian Tomasik** on 2012-12-25T10:03:00

Last words for now.

As noted above, I think it's pretty likely I'll work on both WAS and artificial sentients during my lifetime. I think both of the causes are important enough that one doesn't dominate the other, and I there are diminishing returns to each. Each has its low-hanging fruit that should be picked.

It's not 100% obvious to me that suffering subroutines entail more expected suffering in the future, because as I've suggested, industrial-use reinforcement-learning algorithms probably wouldn't need to be sentient, so I don't know if suffering subroutines will be an issue at all. It's just that if they are an issue, their scale could be quite a bit bigger than nature simulations. But I don't think nature simulations are trivial, either. AIs would run lots of nature sims to learn about science and history and predict what sorts of minds might have evolved elsewhere in the universe. So you have industry (running possibly-suffering subroutines) vs. science (which would likely focus on the sentient simulations). In general, there are more industrial computations than scientific computations, but the industrial ones are also less likely to be sentient.

Finally, Hedonic Treader, would you be interested in working on the artificial-sentients issue at some point in the future? Would you like to start an organization a few years down the road and collaborate? (Yes, I'm not kidding.

) I would guess I'll be ready in ~5-7 years depending on how the WAS movement takes off.

Brian Tomasik · by **Brian Tomasik** on 2012-12-27T15:22:00

I wrote some additional thoughts about what sorts of message an SSSS organization should adopt. For example, should we use popular films like The Matrix in our outreach materials?

My general sentiments on this topic, borrowed from David Pearce quoting Margaret Sanger, are that “the more radical the message, the more conservative the dress.” Almost everyone knows about The Matrix and sci-fi movies, and I hope they won’t rule us out as just one more sci-fi group.

It’s fairly straightforward that human-like AIs -- even human-like sims like in The Matrix -- shouldn’t suffer. The point where we actually need to have an impact on people’s views is more on the antispeciesist end of artificial sentients -- i.e., minds that might be animal-like or insect-like or even of another type that we still have reason to think might suffer. As far as I can see, this is really the main point that we’re trying to get across: Examine suffering algorithms in general and make sure we’re not running them, whether for computational purposes or in sims. IMO, it might be better to only talk about the non-human-like ones except when we need intuition pumps or ways to hook people in to the cause, because if we talk about human-like stuff, people will already think they agree and might not hear what’s new about our message.

One reason I like the animal cause so much is that it’s challenging people’s attitudes -- speciesism and, with wild animals, the notion that nature is good the way it is. Those are big points of leverage in changing how people feel and act. With artificial sentients, there’s almost less to do, because people already probably agree with us for the most part. Where that may not be totally the case is with the animal-like or really alien minds.

Another thing to mention about an SSSS organization is that the problem space is really hard. Ecology is challenging enough, but with SSSS, you might need to have a pretty deep grasp of neuroscience to know if what you were researching / funding was useful. Of course, as with the WAS cause, we could reach out to students and encourage them to explore the topic, but it might be harder to evaluate what they do. Not impossible -- only that it would require sophistication on our part. I need to do more exploring of the topic myself before I feel qualified in recommending where to begin, unlike for WAS, where things are more straightforward.

Brian Tomasik · by **Brian Tomasik** on 2013-01-20T05:50:00

Here are snippets from a new email conversation with a different friend.

The friend pointed out that there are already a lot of people working on antispeciesism (relative to really obscure causes), so antispeciesism meme-spreading seems unlikely to be the point of highest leverage. What about, for example, working on friendliness or expanding human intelligence? I replied:

Yes, there are lots of people doing antispeciesism -- good point. There aren't lots of people working to reduce WAS, so there's higher leverage there, especially since most antispeciesists tend by default to assume that preserving nature is good due to (a) hatred of humans and (b) general ecological sentiments that are prevalent among those circles.

As far as friendliness and human knowledge, I think those are distinct, so I'll talk about them separately.

I think improving human knowledge isn't that important as a cause because factual truth is absolute while moral truth is not. Evolution selects away those minds that are less rational and less informed, so eventually, better knowledge of the universe is inevitable if civilization survives. It can be useful to have more knowledge ahead of time insofar as that makes us more effective and allows us to focus on more important targets, but, e.g., questions like whether insects can suffer don't need to be figured out now, because they will be figured out one day. What matters is that people have the right values such that if insects can suffer, they would care about them. Values are as fleeting as the wind, so making sure the ones we want to win do win is important.

As far as friendliness, yes, it's not inevitable that future civilization will figure out friendliness because there isn't a Darwinian force pushing toward friendliness theory. If we could be sure the values we want to preserve actually do get preserved by a friendly goal-preservation system, that would be great. The problem is that friendliness could also lead to preservation of values that I don't like, including life propagation, deep ecology, running ancestor sims, and just generally preventing extinction. Even simply preventing extinction is dangerous because future civilizations might get into wars with each other and run hell sims, and it's decently likely that somewhere someone will create hells for one or another reason (for fun, out of religious nostalgia, because the person is psychopathic, because the person wants to threaten others, etc.). Survival of the future also means greater chance of spreading WAS to other planets and in simulations, the possibility of suffering subroutines, the possibility of lab unvierses, etc. Point is, I might prefer a runaway paperclipping AI over a "friendly" AI that preserves humanity and allows for these other forms of suffering to spread. So even though I'd love friendliness if it were applied to my values, I'm scared of what might happen if it's applied to the average of society's values.

The friend continued by saying s/he doesn't know if it's better to focus on WAS specifically or on promoting utilitarianism more generally. I replied:

I've been wondering this too, although in a slightly different way: Is it better to work on RWAS or on promoting (negative-leaning) utilitarianism at large? I think more people would see that human survival is dangerous if they were negative-leaning utilitarians, and the ideology doesn't seem that hard to spread.

I hopefully have a long life ahead of me, so I think it's pretty likely I'll focus on several different causes as time goes on. I first want to jumpstart RWAS, but after a few years, once the movement and organization are established and self-sustaining, I might move on to "sentient simulations and suffering subroutines" (SSSS). Or maybe to promoting utilitarianism in general, as long as it has an activist focus and isn't just philosophizing. Each of these things seems potentially to have high leverage, and there's no reason I can't try them all for a few years. RWAS has the biggest momentum right now, so that's where I'll focus for the next few years, but I'll keep the others in the background and may switch to them at some point.

This diversified approach to what I work on isn't just irrational risk aversion, but it also comes from the facts that (a) the highest leverage can sometimes come from starting a new cause, and once it gets going, further help is not as valuable, and (b) some of the efforts may genuinely be more successful than the others, but we won't know until we try them and see.

The friend added, Isn't it hard to get RWAS off the ground if you can't do a lot in the short term? I said:

There are many movements that don't involve current action. These can range from abstract debates about deontology vs. utilitarianism using hypothetical trolley scenarios to theological debates about whether God has 3 parts or just 1 to historical debates about whether World War I could have been avoided by such-and-such. I dare to say that many memes in society are not actionable -- just think of all the stuff people mention on talk radio and how little of it has practical relevance to the listeners' lives.
There's always at least one action we can take now, which is to do more research.
My own flavor of RWAS focuses not so much on reducing WAS on earth as it does on preventing the spread of WAS to space, simulations, lab universes, etc. This isn't actionable now either, but there's also no rocket science to what it involves, so people can't raise the objection that we don't know enough. Just don't do it!

Here's a snippet from a new email conversation with a different friend. The friend asked: Isn't it hard to get RWAS off the ground if you can't do a lot in the short term? I said:

There are many movements that don't involve current action. These can range from abstract debates about deontology vs. utilitarianism using hypothetical trolley scenarios to theological debates about whether God has 3 parts or just 1 to historical debates about whether World War I could have been avoided by such-and-such. I dare to say that many memes in society are not actionable -- just think of all the stuff people mention on talk radio and how little of it has practical relevance to the listeners' lives.
There's always at least one action we can take now, which is to do more research.
My own flavor of RWAS focuses not so much on reducing WAS on earth as it does on preventing the spread of WAS to space, simulations, lab universes, etc. This isn't actionable now either, but there's also no rocket science to what it involves, so people can't raise the objection that we don't know enough. Just don't do it!

Brian Tomasik · by **Brian Tomasik** on 2013-01-22T04:34:00

Related comments to yet another friend:

Well, lots of people can donate toward research, but beyond that, think of how many movements there are where there isn't a concrete action. I dare to say that most movements are like this, and veg*ism is the exception. Take religion: Apart from maybe volunteering, there isn't really any concrete action people do apart from focusing on the meme itself (going to church, praying, reading scripture, etc.). Take gay rights: Most people who support it don't have any concrete stake in the issue, but they still care about it and would take action if there were actions that became possible. Take most of politics: It often doesn't affect the man on the street very much, but people can become so passionate about it. [...]

And the same goes for a lot of policy groups: Organizations have think tanks that do research, and then they have people to spread those ideas through the press and social media, and then they get donations. And people do symbolic actions sometimes. That's it. There isn't something direct like going veg for a good number of political issues.

This isn't to say we shouldn't try to do useful concrete actions where we can (i.e., researching the issue more), but it is to suggest that a Gestalt shift in a culture can effect itself without important concrete actions to accompany it. Women's rights, civil rights, gay rights, feminism, etc. are in large part about ideas, and they don't necessarily need concrete actions to underlie them. The same is even more evident in the realms of art, literature, religion, culture, sports, etc.

Brian Tomasik · by **Brian Tomasik** on 2013-01-24T07:28:00

WAS has lots of practical consequences for your daily life too: Should you waste paper towels in a public restroom? Should you leave the lights on in a public building? Should you recycle? Should you encourage people to buy organic? Should you support animal charities with an eye toward the future memetic impacts? etc.

My tentative answers:

Yes, since deforestation may be net good (although non-recycled paper also means more energy used and maybe more non-tree fiber crops grown).
No, because global warming seems more likely bad than good, because it would increase insect populations.
Doesn't much matter except maybe "yes" for glass/aluminum. Glass/aluminum recycling saves energy, which is good by global warming. I've heard recycling other stuff is pretty neutral in that regard.
No, because organic crops have high insect densities, and organic insecticides may be some of the most painful.
Yes. No explanation needed.

There's very high uncertainty in these answers, except for the last one.

WWI certainly tells us things, but there's nothing we can do about it directly. Studying WAS also tells us things, and there are some things we can do about it even on a daily basis, as hinted above. Obviously these aren't cost-effective for their own sake, but if they provide a hook to get people interested, they could be worth exploring.

If we had a concrete case of a decision to spread wildlife to a new place, this would be a good hook for what I think is the most important part of WAS, which is not spreading it elsewhere. ("When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.") I'm sure there must be concrete cases like this, but we still need to find them.

Hedonic Treader · by **Hedonic Treader** on 2013-01-24T14:11:00

Quick estimate: What's the room for funding for special interest WAS research and advocacy?

When we have a charity that funds research in understanding wild-animal suffering (and maybe positive wellbeing, to provide a compelete picture), and then spreads the resulting information and concern advocacy in reasonably efficient ways - how much total money can that charity translate into reasonably effective action before hitting strongly diminishing returns in efficiency?

I probably asked this before, so forgive if I fogot. But can you name a number?

Brian Tomasik · by **Brian Tomasik** on 2013-01-25T16:03:00

Hedonic Treader wrote:I probably asked this before, so forgive if I fogot. But can you name a number?

Haha. Well, I can't say my estimates will be accurate, but in the spirit of Bayesianism, here are are some reasonable suggestions:

Highest returns: Starting the organization with one employee to do basic outreach and movement-building. $25K/year for salary and organization maintenance.
Still extremely high returns: 4-6 employees to do the same kinds of things: (1) Contact potential supporters / volunteers / donors, (2) recruit grad students in philosophy, ecology, and environmental ethics to write about WAS, (3) do popular publications, blog articles, forum discussions, social media, YouTube videos, etc. $125K/year.
High returns: 50 people doing the same sorts of things at a more refined scale. For example, getting deeper into specific ecological research. Looking into futurism considerations (panspermia, sentient simulations, etc.). Developing more nuanced arguments and scalable approaches to mass outreach. Shooting to influence big names. Publishing op-eds in the New York Times. $1.5 million/year.
Modest returns: 500 people, $15 million/year.

Even at the last rung, I think such a charity would still be competitive with Vegan Outreach. There's so much that can be done with this topic. There's not really an end to the refinements on research that can be done -- both ecological research and memetic research on what sorts of arguments are persuasive.

During a speech I saw in 2000, Ralph Nader suggested that you'd need 1000 full-time organizers to bring about universal health insurance in the US. The WAS movement could theoretically use at least that many people. Of course the returns per person will be lower than at the beginning (maybe, I don't know, ~10 times lower?) but still probably pretty high.

Hedonic Treader · by **Hedonic Treader** on 2013-01-25T16:07:00

Thank you for this detailed response!

Brian Tomasik · by **Brian Tomasik** on 2013-03-25T02:28:00

A friend told me that another friend didn't think suffering by small fish, etc. was such a big deal. The idea was that even if a bunch of fish are swallowed alive on day 1, that wouldn't be too painful, and their lives before that would be decent.

Here was my response:

Being swallowed on day 1 doesn't seem like a good deal to me. I would rather not exist than live for a day and then be swallowed. Maybe the friend wasn't visualizing what swallowing actually entails -- teeth grinding apart your organs and bones, digestive juices eating apart your flesh, etc. I don't know at what point consciousness is induced, but often predation takes several minutes to kill (see p. 7 of this). Plenty more small fish die from disease, starvation, etc., and those don't sound like pleasant ways to go either.

I think sometimes people have the idea that "it wouldn't be so bad to die at 1 day old because your normal lifespan is short anyway," as though having a short lifespan somehow makes death less painful. I think they're thinking about it in terms of "I don't want to die prematurely, but it's okay if I die when my time comes," and then they're thinking that the fishes' time comes a lot sooner. But the harm of death that I'm talking about isn't being sad that you died sooner than average for your species; it's the visceral pain and fear of having your body destroyed in agonizing ways.

People may also have "just world" illusions that suggest it would be really unfair if there were as much suffering in the wild as is suggested by my view. But of course, the world isn't just, and nature has no problem causing massive amounts of suffering where there's no evolutionary incentive to avoid letting it happen.

Hedonic Treader · by **Hedonic Treader** on 2013-03-25T05:30:00

Brian Tomasik wrote:I think sometimes people have the idea that "it wouldn't be so bad to die at 1 day old because your normal lifespan is short anyway," as though having a short lifespan somehow makes death less painful.

I wonder if there's at least a mild biological case for that. Parts of what our pain does is to provide learning and aversive memory for future behavior. A short-lived organism has a lot less need for that, since the value of learning in that lifetime is smaller. Some functions of acute suffering could be replaced by aversive reflexes rather than suffering (assuming there's a difference), so species very different from us could have some of those that look to us like avoiding suffering. Another point is that a short-lived species can't afford to be deterred from successful fast reproduction, which means it can't be deterred by unnecessary suffering or fear. We would therefore expect natural selection to favor being very economical about their pain. It can however afford to lose a lot of individuals early, so the fitness value of pain and fear are smaller than in other species.

Brian Tomasik · by **Brian Tomasik** on 2013-03-29T03:55:00

Thanks! I must say I'm skeptical, but it would be good to learn more.

Hedonic Treader wrote:A short-lived organism has a lot less need for that, since the value of learning in that lifetime is smaller.

This may be an argument for not having sentience or having fewer things be painful, rather than having the intensity of the pain be less for a given painful experience, since I normalize intensities per organism. One exception would be if you thought high intensity was needed for the memory to compete strongly in the soup of salient memories, and organisms with fewer memories wouldn't need as much strength for that competition.

Hedonic Treader wrote:Another point is that a short-lived species can't afford to be deterred from successful fast reproduction, which means it can't be deterred by unnecessary suffering or fear.

Hmm, maybe. If you only have one round, all of your eggs are in that basket (pun intended), so you can afford to take a risk there because that's your last chance. OTOH, one could make arguments in the opposite direction: If that's your last chance, evolution doesn't need to curb the intensity of pain in order to prevent you from becoming debilitated in the future by PTSD or anxiety disorders or whatever.

Brian Tomasik · by **Brian Tomasik** on 2013-07-01T03:11:00

I wrote a new essay inspired by Hedonic Treader's last comment and related discussions with other people. "Fitness Considerations for the Suffering of Short-Lived Animals":

Summary. It seems plausible that evolution should sculpt short-lived animals to be more reckless than long-lived ones as far as taking risks for proximate gain. Naively this could be taken to imply that short-lived animals feel less fear and maybe less pain than long-lived ones, but one could also interpret it as saying that short-lived animals feel more pleasure upon success than long-lived ones. Calibrating the hedonic scales between short- and long-lived animals is undetermined purely by evolutionary considerations. That shorter-lived animals have less need for learning may be weak evidence to reduce their probability of sentience relative to long-lived animals.

Daniel Dorado · by **Daniel Dorado** on 2014-04-17T22:54:00

http://www.animal-ethics.org/

Animal Ethics was formed to provide information and promote discussion and debate about issues in animal ethics, and to provide resources for animal advocates. The wild animal suffering issue is taken into consideration too.

Brian Tomasik · by **Brian Tomasik** on 2014-04-18T06:26:00

Thanks, Daniel! Yes, it finally happened.

Daniel Dorado · by **Daniel Dorado** on 2014-07-15T00:12:00

Animal Ethics social networks:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Animal-E ... 57?fref=ts
https://twitter.com/animalethics

Hedonic Treader · by **Hedonic Treader** on 2014-07-31T17:05:00

Nice website, by the way.

But like New Harvest, it seems to focus entirely on the advocacy vector. I don't like this strategy very much since it requires trust in the benevolence of others as well as our ability to get them to care about something they wouldn't otherwise care about.

Could there be an alternative?

Perhaps scientific research in the factors that determine the total amount of WAS? Then there could be money spent to affect those factors directly. (Useful research is what I thought New Harvest would fund, before they turned to advocacy only.)

Control the resources, control the pain. If we are going to spend hard money on charity, shouldn't we control the resources, and therefore the pain, more directly?

Brian Tomasik · by **Brian Tomasik** on 2014-07-31T19:21:00

I (respectfully

) disagree with Hedonic Treader. I think spending on advocacy generally is generally more leveraged than spending on research.

First of all, research mainly helps in the short term, with unpredictable side-effects for the long term. In contrast, changing attitudes creates a movement that can respond to new situations as they arise, steer things back toward the goal when the get off course, and finding newer and better opportunities. In my mind, technology mainly matters through how it happens to change attitudes and social movements.

Secondly, greater interest in a topic is a good way to get bigger players to fund it. Advocacy for foreign-aid spending is more leveraged than donating to foreign aid directly. Big research projects are what governments fund, not individuals. That said, if you're thinking of lean, leveraged research, I can see a stronger case there.

Hedonic Treader · by **Hedonic Treader** on 2014-07-31T21:16:00

Brian Tomasik wrote:First of all, research mainly helps in the short term, with unpredictable side-effects for the long term. In contrast, changing attitudes creates a movement that can respond to new situations as they arise, steer things back toward the goal when the get off course, and finding newer and better opportunities. In my mind, technology mainly matters through how it happens to change attitudes and social movements.

If you wanted people to stop eating meat, and you could either give them better meat substitutes or more vegetarian advocacy ads, which would you choose? I would think better meat substitutes are more effective since they reduce the distance between the self-interested choice and the moral choice.

If you wanted people to have fewer children, would you rather give them better contraceptives or more chastity ads?

If you wanted a slave-owning society to end slavery, would you rather give them industrial agriculture and mass production or more anti-slavery speeches?

If you wanted people to care about WAS, would you rather give them cheaper WAS reducing knowledge, or more ads that they should really care about WAS?

When I wrote my less wrong post on artificial utility monsters, the highest-rated comment accused me of trying to get people to sacrifice their previous intestes at the "altar of Carethulu", which is basically just a negative expression for advocacy in general.

A pessimistic (realistic?) view of human nature would model its margin for self-sacrifice rather small, and of fixed size, and therefore the most leveraged action is that which makes the altruism more effective, instead of trying to make the person more altruisitc. The key to that would be research. [BIG exception: D-Mod technology that literally changes human nature, or replaces it with AI!]

Secondly, greater interest in a topic is a good way to get bigger players to fund it. Advocacy for foreign-aid spending is more leveraged than donating to foreign aid directly. Big research projects are what governments fund, not individuals.

Yes, that is a good point. If someone happens to have a lot of money, or a lot of power to spend the money of others, reaching them though advocacy could be quite leveraged. Perhaps I am also underestimating how much cheaper advocacy is.

Still, you should beware wishful thinking about changing minds long-term. if possible, check those hopes against objective evidence.

Brian Tomasik · by **Brian Tomasik** on 2014-08-01T08:03:00

From a far-future perspective, the short-term impacts of technology don't matter except insofar as they change either values or other aspects of trajectories (political dynamics, economic power, etc.) toward AI. If in-vitro meat beats veg advocacy, it may be by reducing cognitive dissonance and therefore increasing concern for animals. Same would probably be true for WAS tech.

That said, I'm not certain the far future dominates our calculations on account of anthropic considerations, so I do give more weight to the short run than the above paragraph suggests.

In any case, I might favor WAS tech if it were as targeted and as likely to change hearts and minds as in-vitro meat. I don't know of such a tech for WAS, though. (Parking lots don't count.)

Hedonic Treader · by **Hedonic Treader** on 2014-08-01T09:14:00

Brian Tomasik wrote:From a far-future perspective, the short-term impacts of technology don't matter except insofar as they change either values or other aspects of trajectories (political dynamics, economic power, etc.) toward AI. If in-vitro meat beats veg advocacy, it may be by reducing cognitive dissonance and therefore increasing concern for animals. Same would probably be true for WAS tech.

That said, I'm not certain the far future dominates our calculations on account of anthropic considerations, so I do give more weight to the short run than the above paragraph suggests.

In any case, I might favor WAS tech if it were as targeted and as likely to change hearts and minds as in-vitro meat. I don't know of such a tech for WAS, though. (Parking lots don't count.)

Perhaps not a tech per se, but scientific knowledge about the intersection of ecology and animal sentience could qualify. Especially if it provides plausible quantification methods to model WAS. You have some of this on the utilitarian essays website iirc, where you quantify suffering from predation etc. And I think Carl Shulman has some blog posts about wild-animal brain mass as potential proxies for senteince.

Perhaps it will not reduce cognitive dissonance like in-vitro meat but it could serve as a framing anchor to highlight both natural suffering (not just anthropogenic!) and scope sensitivity, both of which are crucial to WAS. Animal Ethics often focusses on anthropogenic factors, which may make strategic sense if you think people need human agency to blame, but still feels like missing the primary point of WAS, most of which is natural.

That said, I'm not sure increasing concern is the primary vector because I'm not convinced it works very well (again, modulo d-mod and AI). Making altruism easy through technology seems a more powerful vector to me. In this sense, I'm not sure parking lots don't count (metaphorically speaking; realistic solutions will probably need to affect marine life in humane ways)

I may be biased, though, perhaps I'm just personally not very good at convincing people, or maybe I have a pessimistic perception filter from my personal attempts.

jason · by **jason** on 2014-08-23T15:17:00

Brian Tomasik wrote:I (respectfully ) disagree with Hedonic Treader. I think spending on advocacy generally is generally more leveraged than spending on research.

What about research on advocacy? It seems to me we're mostly still working off best guesses as far as advocacy goes.

The only animal rights group I'm aware of that's given serious thought to really effective advocacy is Direct Action Everywhere - and honestly their case for how to build a society changing movement seems somewhat spare. Others seem very focused on changing individuals and hoping that has ripple effects.

Brian Tomasik · by **Brian Tomasik** on 2014-08-24T01:45:00

Animal Charity Evaluators aims to do some of this kind of thinking as well, but ACE is still in its early days. I think research on advocacy is important, but the problem is it's a hard topic where there have been many debates throughout the history of the AR movement and other movements (abolition, civil rights, etc.) -- not to mention billions of dollars worth of studies by marketing firms, academics, etc. If there were easy answers, people would have found them by now. That said, it does seem worth putting some effort into this.