I think one way 2 might not be appropriate here is that diet change may have more important effects on wild animals1 than on farmed animals, and also more important effects on wild animals than our targeted wild animal interventions2.
Say
Diet change gives you 100 utility per $ in expectation for farmed animals, and −1000 to 900 utility per $ in expectation for wild animals, and it’s very ambiguous, so you aren’t willing to commit to a single expected value, and you instead use this whole range of −1000 to 900 (or −700 to 1100 or whatever).
Wild animal-targeted interventions give you 100 utility per $.
Then donating $1 to diet change and $c to wild animal interventions would give the following utility in expectation:
(100-1000) + 100c to (100+900) + 100c, or
-900 + 100c to 1000 + 100c,
and you need c>9 to make sure this is positive, so you’d spend at least 9x more on wild animal interventions than diet change to ensure a positive expected value.
1. possibly counterfactually increasing the populations of wild invertebrates and wild aquatic animals, especially; many wild-caught fishes are also fed to farmed fishes.
2. because the population effects are more important.
Right. So I still might not be fully understanding.
I guess it seems hard for me to understand thinking both:
A) Diet change has more negative effects on wild animals than positive effects on farmed animals.
And B) Diet changes’ negative effects on wild animals are in expectation greater than the positive effects from further work on wild animal welfare (e.g., of the sort WAI completes).
But maybe I am misunderstanding. Do you think both of those?
Separately, and another quick thought, it could be helpful to more formally model it, as that could help with intuitions here.
Part of what seems to be going on in my head is very roughly something like, some diet change CEE gives say a 95% CI [60,140] utils/$, excluding impacts on wild animals. So say mu=100, sigma=20(?)
Then impacts specifically on wild animals cause the estimate to shift somewhat downward. Impacts on wild animals may be, say, [-1000, 900]. Say, mu=-50, sigma=~450
In my head that additional consideration on wild animals just doesn’t shift the mean util/$ estimate much. That is because the variance on that estimate is so large compared to the variance on the original.
I think what may end up mattering a lot for this type of thing is the ratio of the variance on the cee for utils/$ of diet change intervention for farmed animals, compared to the variance on the impact of diet change on wild animals.
I guess it seems hard for me to understand thinking both:
A) Diet change has more negative effects on wild animals than positive effects on farmed animals.
And B) Diet changes’ negative effects on wild animals are in expectation greater than the positive effects from further work on wild animal welfare (e.g., of the sort WAI completes).
But maybe I am misunderstanding. Do you think both of those?
In short, I think
A is reasonably likely to be true.
If A is true, then B is very likely to be true, too (I’m less sure about the reverse implication).
A’s probability itself seems really uncertain to me, and I’m not comfortable picking one number before seeing models. Picking 50% seems wrong, since I don’t have evidential symmetry as in simple cluelessness; this is a case of complex cluelessness.
On 1, the main reasons diet change would be bad for wild animals would be through wild fishes and wild invertebrates (and Brian Tomasik’s writing is where I’d start). Because of the number of animals involved (far more fishes and invertebrates than chickens, and there may be generational population effects since you prevent descendants, too, but maybe what matters most is carrying capacity), it seems pretty plausible these negative effects could heavily outweigh the positives for farmed animals. I think one thing Brian might not have been aware of at the time is that many wild fishes are caught to feed farmed fishes, so fish farming might be good for reducing wild fish populations. There’s also all the plastic pollution from fishing that plausibly reduces populations, and not just fish populations. On the other hand, maybe the wild fishes get replaced with more populous r-selected species, and that’s bad.
I think 2 is true, because
I already think the number of wild animals affected will be larger from diet change, since this is a major ecosystem change whereas wild animal welfare interventions will be more targeted.
A implies the negative effects of diet change are quite large (enough to make up for the benefits to farmed chickens and farmed aquatic animals), and the worlds in which A is true but B is not are the (in my view) unlikely ones in which we’re radically interfering in nature to help wild animals through population control or genetic interventions, because I’d guess that’s what it takes to have a similarly large effect.
So for the −1000 to 900 effect on wild animals from diet change, something towards the low end seems more likely (through increasing populations through rewilding or not increasing populations as much by not increasing land use for agriculture as much) than something towards the high end (through a small increase in the probability of radical intervention in nature to help wild animals).
Then impacts specifically on wild animals cause the estimate to shift somewhat downward. Impacts on wild animals may be, say, [-1000, 900]. Say, mu=-50, sigma=~450
The [-1000, 900] wasn’t intended to be a confidence interval. These are the expected values of different models, and I have a lot of model uncertainty that’s too hard to quantify to put everything together in one big model and get a single expected value out. I don’t have just one expected value I’m willing to run with; it seems too arbitrary to pick knowing so little. Still, as I said in my previous paragraph, something near the low end seems more likely than something near the high end.
I also have deep uncertainty about the effects of climate change on wild animals, and diet change mitigates climate change.
I think one thing Brian might not have been aware of at the time is that many wild fishes are caught to feed farmed fishes, so fish farming might be good for reducing wild fish populations.
For whatever it’s worth, I was aware of that at the time. :) I’m uncertain about the net impact of fish farming, but like for most other farmed animals, I err on the side of thinking it’s bad in expected value because it’s bad for the farmed animals directly, and I’m fairly clueless about the indirect effects. For example, maybe reducing populations of small forage fish increases zooplankton populations. Or if the small forage fish are fished sustainably, then maybe fishing them just kills a bunch of them painfully without affecting their populations too much.
With things like crop cultivation, I’m also fairly uncertain. Some crop fields in the US Midwest have higher net primary productivity than native grassland, and in places like California, where there’s a lot of irrigation, it seems pretty plausible that crop cultivation increases invertebrate populations.
That said, I tend to agree with Michael’s thought that the indirect wild-animal impacts of diet may be more significant than many of the kinds of interventions that WAI could pull off because WAI-type interventions may not be focused on reducing numbers of wild animals, and without reducing numbers of wild animals, it’s difficult for me to know if suffering is actually being reduced in light of cluelessness.
Oh ya, you would probably have been aware of fishes caught for feed, but a recent estimate for their numbers is surprisingly huge (to me), to the extent that fish farming’s welfare effects could pretty plausibly be dominated by the effects on wild fishes (and other wild aquatic animals). From the Aquatic Life Institute:
● Approximately 1.2 trillion aquatic animals are fed to other aquatic animals each year. This is approximately one-third to one-half of all animals fished.
● In order to produce the billions of fish that end up on the human plate, trillions of fish are processed, or fed live, as fish feed.
● Many of the fish we feed Salmon have similar welfare needs, thus creating a ‘welfare pyramid’ effect, as each farmed salmon must eat the biomass equivalent to 9 herring, or 120 anchovies, to be brought to harvest weight.
I think ALI is going ahead with recommending the replacement of fish feed, but this seems plausibly a bad thing to do (and more so the more weight you give to fishes than invertebrates), although I’m not sure either way.
That said, I tend to agree with Michael’s thought that the indirect wild-animal impacts of diet may be more significant than many of the kinds of interventions that WAI could pull off because WAI-type interventions may not be focused on reducing numbers of wild animals, and without reducing numbers of wild animals, it’s difficult for me to know if suffering is actually being reduced in light of cluelessness.
I do think WAI could come up with interventions that we could agree net reduce expected suffering while keeping populations roughly constant by reducing causes of suffering or death, paired with (more) humane population control (wildlife contraceptives, sterilization, or CRISPR to manage fertility rates, or more humane methods to cull or euthanize animals). However, these seem much harder to implement and scale to me, due to the costs, complexity and public disinterest or opposition. Humane insecticides in particular seem promising, though.
I think one way 2 might not be appropriate here is that diet change may have more important effects on wild animals1 than on farmed animals, and also more important effects on wild animals than our targeted wild animal interventions2.
Say
Diet change gives you 100 utility per $ in expectation for farmed animals, and −1000 to 900 utility per $ in expectation for wild animals, and it’s very ambiguous, so you aren’t willing to commit to a single expected value, and you instead use this whole range of −1000 to 900 (or −700 to 1100 or whatever).
Wild animal-targeted interventions give you 100 utility per $.
Then donating $1 to diet change and $c to wild animal interventions would give the following utility in expectation:
(100-1000) + 100c to (100+900) + 100c, or
-900 + 100c to 1000 + 100c,
and you need c>9 to make sure this is positive, so you’d spend at least 9x more on wild animal interventions than diet change to ensure a positive expected value.
I’ve written more about this idea here.
1. possibly counterfactually increasing the populations of wild invertebrates and wild aquatic animals, especially; many wild-caught fishes are also fed to farmed fishes.
2. because the population effects are more important.
Right. So I still might not be fully understanding.
I guess it seems hard for me to understand thinking both:
A) Diet change has more negative effects on wild animals than positive effects on farmed animals.
And B) Diet changes’ negative effects on wild animals are in expectation greater than the positive effects from further work on wild animal welfare (e.g., of the sort WAI completes).
But maybe I am misunderstanding. Do you think both of those?
Separately, and another quick thought, it could be helpful to more formally model it, as that could help with intuitions here.
Part of what seems to be going on in my head is very roughly something like, some diet change CEE gives say a 95% CI [60,140] utils/$, excluding impacts on wild animals. So say mu=100, sigma=20(?)
Then impacts specifically on wild animals cause the estimate to shift somewhat downward. Impacts on wild animals may be, say, [-1000, 900]. Say, mu=-50, sigma=~450
In my head that additional consideration on wild animals just doesn’t shift the mean util/$ estimate much. That is because the variance on that estimate is so large compared to the variance on the original.
I think what may end up mattering a lot for this type of thing is the ratio of the variance on the cee for utils/$ of diet change intervention for farmed animals, compared to the variance on the impact of diet change on wild animals.
How does that all sound to you?:)
In short, I think
A is reasonably likely to be true.
If A is true, then B is very likely to be true, too (I’m less sure about the reverse implication).
A’s probability itself seems really uncertain to me, and I’m not comfortable picking one number before seeing models. Picking 50% seems wrong, since I don’t have evidential symmetry as in simple cluelessness; this is a case of complex cluelessness.
On 1, the main reasons diet change would be bad for wild animals would be through wild fishes and wild invertebrates (and Brian Tomasik’s writing is where I’d start). Because of the number of animals involved (far more fishes and invertebrates than chickens, and there may be generational population effects since you prevent descendants, too, but maybe what matters most is carrying capacity), it seems pretty plausible these negative effects could heavily outweigh the positives for farmed animals. I think one thing Brian might not have been aware of at the time is that many wild fishes are caught to feed farmed fishes, so fish farming might be good for reducing wild fish populations. There’s also all the plastic pollution from fishing that plausibly reduces populations, and not just fish populations. On the other hand, maybe the wild fishes get replaced with more populous r-selected species, and that’s bad.
I think 2 is true, because
I already think the number of wild animals affected will be larger from diet change, since this is a major ecosystem change whereas wild animal welfare interventions will be more targeted.
A implies the negative effects of diet change are quite large (enough to make up for the benefits to farmed chickens and farmed aquatic animals), and the worlds in which A is true but B is not are the (in my view) unlikely ones in which we’re radically interfering in nature to help wild animals through population control or genetic interventions, because I’d guess that’s what it takes to have a similarly large effect.
So for the −1000 to 900 effect on wild animals from diet change, something towards the low end seems more likely (through increasing populations through rewilding or not increasing populations as much by not increasing land use for agriculture as much) than something towards the high end (through a small increase in the probability of radical intervention in nature to help wild animals).
The [-1000, 900] wasn’t intended to be a confidence interval. These are the expected values of different models, and I have a lot of model uncertainty that’s too hard to quantify to put everything together in one big model and get a single expected value out. I don’t have just one expected value I’m willing to run with; it seems too arbitrary to pick knowing so little. Still, as I said in my previous paragraph, something near the low end seems more likely than something near the high end.
I also have deep uncertainty about the effects of climate change on wild animals, and diet change mitigates climate change.
Great discussion. :)
For whatever it’s worth, I was aware of that at the time. :) I’m uncertain about the net impact of fish farming, but like for most other farmed animals, I err on the side of thinking it’s bad in expected value because it’s bad for the farmed animals directly, and I’m fairly clueless about the indirect effects. For example, maybe reducing populations of small forage fish increases zooplankton populations. Or if the small forage fish are fished sustainably, then maybe fishing them just kills a bunch of them painfully without affecting their populations too much.
With things like crop cultivation, I’m also fairly uncertain. Some crop fields in the US Midwest have higher net primary productivity than native grassland, and in places like California, where there’s a lot of irrigation, it seems pretty plausible that crop cultivation increases invertebrate populations.
That said, I tend to agree with Michael’s thought that the indirect wild-animal impacts of diet may be more significant than many of the kinds of interventions that WAI could pull off because WAI-type interventions may not be focused on reducing numbers of wild animals, and without reducing numbers of wild animals, it’s difficult for me to know if suffering is actually being reduced in light of cluelessness.
Oh ya, you would probably have been aware of fishes caught for feed, but a recent estimate for their numbers is surprisingly huge (to me), to the extent that fish farming’s welfare effects could pretty plausibly be dominated by the effects on wild fishes (and other wild aquatic animals). From the Aquatic Life Institute:
I think ALI is going ahead with recommending the replacement of fish feed, but this seems plausibly a bad thing to do (and more so the more weight you give to fishes than invertebrates), although I’m not sure either way.
I do think WAI could come up with interventions that we could agree net reduce expected suffering while keeping populations roughly constant by reducing causes of suffering or death, paired with (more) humane population control (wildlife contraceptives, sterilization, or CRISPR to manage fertility rates, or more humane methods to cull or euthanize animals). However, these seem much harder to implement and scale to me, due to the costs, complexity and public disinterest or opposition. Humane insecticides in particular seem promising, though.