Does anyone know why @William_MacAskill says he is “not convinced by the shrimp argument” on his recent appearance on Sam Harris’s podcast?
SAM HARRIS
So yeah, so this is one area where perhaps my own cynicism creeps in. I worry that any focus on suffering beyond human suffering, it risks confusing enough people so as to damage people’s commitment to these principles. So I mean, I’m not, there’s zero defense of factory farming coming from me here, but When I see a philosopher who’s clearly EA or EA-adjacent arguing on behalf of the welfare of shrimp and claiming that maybe the worst atrocity perpetrated by humans is all of the mistreatment of shrimp because they exist in such numbers and live such terrible lives, one imagines.
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WILL MACASKILL
Okay, great. So lots to unpack there. And so I actually personally am not convinced by the shrimp argument. But the thing I want to defend is people really taking ethical, including quite weird-seeming ethical ideas seriously and trying to reason that through for themselves.
Hi Aaron and Will. I estimated how much cage-free corporate campaigns for layers, and the Shrimp Welfare Project’s (SWP’s) Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI) increase the welfare of their target beneficiaries for individual welfare per fully-healthy-animal-year proportional to “individual number of neurons”^”exponent”, and “exponent” from 0 to 2, which covers the best guesses that I consider reasonable. An exponent of 1 would correspond to the linear weighting preferred by Will. Below is a graph with the results. I calculate cage-free corporate campaigns increase the welfare of chickens more cost-effectively than HSI has increased the welfare of shrimps for an exponent of at least 0.94. For exponents of 0 and 2, cage-free corporate campaigns increase the welfare of chickens 6.71*10^-4 and 4.43 k times as cost-effectively as HSI has increased the welfare of shrimps.
The above only looks into effects on the target benefeciaries. However, I believe effects on soil animals resulting from changes in land use can easily dominate, as illustrated below. I assume that increasing agricultural land increases the welfare of soil animals, but I have very little idea about whether this is the case. So “Increase in the welfare” in the title of the graph should be read as “Absolute value of the change in the welfare”. The graph does not look into HSI (electrically stunning shrimp), but I also do not know whether this increases or decreases welfare in expectation due to potentially dominant effects on soil animals and microorganisms.
Hi Charlie. I agree it is better to target soil animals instead of farmed shrimps (at the margin) if individual welfare is proportional to the individual number of neurons as suggested by @William_MacAskill. Hereare my estimates for the total number of neurons of animal populations. I calculate soil nematodes have 5.93 M times as many neurons in total as farmed shrimps.
It is also worth noting that only wild finfishes and soil animals have more neurons in total than humans.
As a fun fact, @Ajeya was early to the potential importance of nematodes. In her biological anchors report about transformative AI (TAI) timelines, she calculated the compute performed by evolution considering just nematodes.
Ajeya estimates 10^41. I [Scott Alexander] can’t believe I’m writing this. I can’t believe someone actually estimated the number of floating point operations involved in jellyfish rising out of the primordial ooze and eventually becoming fish and lizards and mammals and so on all the way to the Ascent of Man. Still, the idea is simple. You estimate how long animals with neurons have been around for (10^16 seconds), total number of animals at any given second (10^20) times average number of FLOPS per animal (10^5) and you can read more here but it comes out to 10^41 FLOs. I would not call this an exact estimate—for one thing, it assumes that all animals are nematodes, on the grounds that non-nematode animals are basically a rounding error in the grand scheme of things [emphasis mine].
Does anyone know why @William_MacAskill says he is “not convinced by the shrimp argument” on his recent appearance on Sam Harris’s podcast?
Full unofficial transcript here and video below
Discussed on twitter here.
Hi Aaron and Will. I estimated how much cage-free corporate campaigns for layers, and the Shrimp Welfare Project’s (SWP’s) Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI) increase the welfare of their target beneficiaries for individual welfare per fully-healthy-animal-year proportional to “individual number of neurons”^”exponent”, and “exponent” from 0 to 2, which covers the best guesses that I consider reasonable. An exponent of 1 would correspond to the linear weighting preferred by Will. Below is a graph with the results. I calculate cage-free corporate campaigns increase the welfare of chickens more cost-effectively than HSI has increased the welfare of shrimps for an exponent of at least 0.94. For exponents of 0 and 2, cage-free corporate campaigns increase the welfare of chickens 6.71*10^-4 and 4.43 k times as cost-effectively as HSI has increased the welfare of shrimps.
The above only looks into effects on the target benefeciaries. However, I believe effects on soil animals resulting from changes in land use can easily dominate, as illustrated below. I assume that increasing agricultural land increases the welfare of soil animals, but I have very little idea about whether this is the case. So “Increase in the welfare” in the title of the graph should be read as “Absolute value of the change in the welfare”. The graph does not look into HSI (electrically stunning shrimp), but I also do not know whether this increases or decreases welfare in expectation due to potentially dominant effects on soil animals and microorganisms.
more bang for your buck with soil nematodes
Hi Charlie. I agree it is better to target soil animals instead of farmed shrimps (at the margin) if individual welfare is proportional to the individual number of neurons as suggested by @William_MacAskill. Here are my estimates for the total number of neurons of animal populations. I calculate soil nematodes have 5.93 M times as many neurons in total as farmed shrimps.
It is also worth noting that only wild finfishes and soil animals have more neurons in total than humans.
As a fun fact, @Ajeya was early to the potential importance of nematodes. In her biological anchors report about transformative AI (TAI) timelines, she calculated the compute performed by evolution considering just nematodes.