As comments by Max and Vasco hint at, I think it might still be the case that considering effects on wild animals is essential when evaluating any short-termist intervention (including those for farmed animals and human welfare). For example, I remain uncertain whether vegetarianism increases or decreases total suffering because of wild-animal side effects, mainly because beef may (or may not!) reduce a lot of suffering even if all other meat types increase it. (I still hope people avoid eating chicken and other small farmed animals.)
In my opinion, the most important type of WAW research is getting more clarity on big questions, like what the net impact is of cattle grazing, climate change, and crop cultivation on total invertebrate populations. These are some of the biggest impacts that humanity has on wild animals, and the answers would inform analysis of the side effects of various other interventions like meat reduction or family planning.
I haven’t followed a lot of the recent WAW work, but my experience is that many other people working on WAW are less focused on these questions about how humans change total population sizes. Researchers more often think about ways to improve welfare while keeping population size constant. Those latter interventions may have more public support and are more accommodating to non-suffering-focused utilitarians who don’t want to reduce the amount of happiness in nature. But as you mention, those interventions also seem more subject to cluelessness (is vaccination net good or bad considering side effects? it’s super unclear) and often target big animals rather than invertebrates. From this perspective, I think efforts to improve the welfare of farmed chickens and fish may be more cost-effective (though it’s still worth exploring wild-animal interventions too, as you say). Research and advocacy of less painful killing of wild-caught fish also seems extremely important, and it’s unclear whether to count this as a farmed-animal or wild-animal intervention.
Apart from less painful killing of wild animals (fish, rodents, insect on crop fields), or maybe some other large-scale interventions like reducing aquatic noise, I think the cost-effectiveness of work on wild animals would come from trying to reduce (or avoid increasing) population sizes, via reducing plant productivity. Reducing the amount of plant growth in an ecosystem helps invertebrates (including mites, springtails, and nematodes, which are extremely numerous but also hard to help in ways other than preventing their existence) and is somewhat less subject to cluelessness problems because you don’t have to model internal ecosystem dynamics as much—you just have to reduce the productivity of the first trophic level. But I haven’t found a lot of people who are interested in working on population-reduction interventions. This apparent lack of interest in reducing populations is one reason I’ve done less thinking about WAW in recent years. Another reason is that I respect the efforts of WAW organizations to put a more mainstream face on the WAW movement, and I wonder if my continuing to harp on why we should actually be focusing on reducing populations would seem to them as counterproductive.
I compiled a list of possible interventions to reduce total invertebrate populations that could possibly be lobbied for at the government level in some fashion. Some of them don’t seem super cost-effective, but some might be, such as trying to reduce irrigation subsidies, which is an intervention that could be argued for on other grounds as well. Taxing fertilizer and/or water use on crop fields, pastures, and/or lawns might be pretty valuable if it could be achieved. (Some local regions do have subsidies for people who reduce their lawn’s water use.) If geoengineering to fertilize oceans ever happens, opposing it would be extremely important, though doing a campaign about that now might be net harmful via increasing the salience of the idea.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment, Brian. I should’ve mentioned that I think that WAW might be tractable for people who think that reducing wild animal populations is good. I don’t think that reducing populations is good because:
I remain very uncertain whether wild animals experience more suffering than happiness (see this talk). I still think it’s more likely that there is more suffering due to painful deaths but not by much. This is partly because I give less weight to short but very intense pain than you do.
Reducing wild animal populations usually goes against various human interests [EDIT: actually, this doesn’t apply to some interventions in your list. I’m now thinking about whether any of them are promising.]
It’s not what most people want. Hence, even if I did think that reducing wild populations is good, I’d be afraid that I’ll change my mind in 10 years.
I worry that researching the big questions you mention might be intractable. You wrote a detailed analysis about the impact of climate change on wild animal suffering, and concluded that your “probabilities are basically 50% net good vs. 50% net bad when just considering animal suffering on Earth in the next few centuries (ignoring side effects on humanity’s very long-term future).” Correct me if I’m wrong, but your analysis rests on the assumption that reducing wild populations is good. An analysis without this assumption would be vastly more difficult because it would require analyzing whether various populations would become happier (instead of just analyzing changes in population). I worry that we wouldn’t have enough confidence in that analysis to inform our decisions.
All that said, I think that attempting to research WAW impacts of vegetarianism might still be worth it, though I’m unsure.
Hi Saulius, I wonder if have factored in your points 2&3 above in your view that you think digital beings are a priority for longtermism, and factory farming a priority for non-longtermist animal welfare. It seems that both cause areas, if taken consistently and seriously enough, would go against (organic) human interests and is not what most people want.
I imagine that few people would say that it’s actively harmful to try to decrease s-risks to digital minds (especially when it involves trying to prevent escalating conflicts, sadism, and retributivism). Most people would say it’s just a waste of money and effort. Most people agree that it’s important that animals used for food are well cared for. Not everyone votes for welfare improvements in ballot initiatives but a significant proportion of people do. And if we had infinite money, I don’t think anyone would mind improving conditions for farmed animals. But if there was a ballot initiative asking “shall we actively try to decrease wild animal numbers?”, I imagine that almost everyone would passionately oppose it. I don’t feel comfortable working on things most people would passionately oppose (and not just because it’s a waste of resources, but because they think that our desired outcome is bad). It also makes it difficult to work on it as an EA cause and it could repulse some people from EA. But I now weakened (or changed) my position on reducing populations after realizing that it doesn’t always to lead to more environmental issues (see this comment). Also, people might not mind if we are only decreasing populations of tiny animals.
Hi again Brian. I agree that your vision for the WAW movement is different from what WAW organizations are currently doing. I criticized the latter and don’t have a strong opinion on your vision of focusing on very small animals and reducing populations. I said that I don’t want to reduce populations partly because that usually includes reducing plant productivity which in turn causes more climate change, which might increase s-risks, x-risks, poverty, etc. But perhaps some interventions in your list could reduce populations without causing more environmental issues. I hadn’t considered them because they didn’t qualify for my WAW intervention search, and I had forgotten about them.
I’m unsure how one would go about lobbying for these things. I’d be a bit afraid of PR risks too. Imagine a farmer lobby figuring out that the real motivation for people funding lobbying against their irrigation subsidies are weirdos from Effective Altruism who are worried about small invertebrate suffering. That could cause some bad press for EA. I also think that the few potential WAW funders I talked to wouldn’t have funded such interventions but there could be other funders.
Yeah, I think some ways of reducing plant growth are often supported by environmentalists, including
less growing of crops in dry areas requiring irrigation (and instead growing more crops in regions where rain provides more of the water)
less irrigation of pastures and lawns
fewer artificial fertilizers
less nutrient pollution into water bodies
lowering atmospheric CO2 concentrations, which reduces the “CO2 fertilization effect” (though as you note, the overall impact of climate change on wild-animal suffering is unclear)
not genetically engineering plants to have higher yields.
Some other activities like encouraging palm-oil production (which destroys rainforests) are bad for the environment but may reduce poverty. (I should note that I’m unsure about the net impact of palm-oil production for wild-animal suffering.)
I agree that the question of how to lobby for these things without seeming like weirdos is tricky. It would be easier if society cared more about wild animals from a suffering-focused perspective, which can be one argument for starting with philosophical advocacy regarding those topics, though it seems unlikely that concern for wild-animal welfare or suffering-focused ethics will ever become mainstream (apart from weak forms of these things, like caring about charismatic megafauna or Buddhist philosophy about suffering). These philosophical views would also help for various far-future scenarios. But from the standpoint of trying to reduce some short-term suffering, especially if we worry about cluelessness for longer-term efforts, then this approach of doing philosophical advocacy would be too slow and indirect (except insofar as it contributes to movement building, leading some other people to pursue more concrete interventions).
So overall I may agree with you that for short-term, concrete impact, we should plausibly focus on things like stunning of wild-caught fish and so on. This is why I feel a lot of fuzzies about the Humane Slaughter Association and related efforts. That said, it does seem worth pondering more whether there are ways to direct money toward opposing irrigation subsidies and the like.
Great post!
As comments by Max and Vasco hint at, I think it might still be the case that considering effects on wild animals is essential when evaluating any short-termist intervention (including those for farmed animals and human welfare). For example, I remain uncertain whether vegetarianism increases or decreases total suffering because of wild-animal side effects, mainly because beef may (or may not!) reduce a lot of suffering even if all other meat types increase it. (I still hope people avoid eating chicken and other small farmed animals.)
In my opinion, the most important type of WAW research is getting more clarity on big questions, like what the net impact is of cattle grazing, climate change, and crop cultivation on total invertebrate populations. These are some of the biggest impacts that humanity has on wild animals, and the answers would inform analysis of the side effects of various other interventions like meat reduction or family planning.
I haven’t followed a lot of the recent WAW work, but my experience is that many other people working on WAW are less focused on these questions about how humans change total population sizes. Researchers more often think about ways to improve welfare while keeping population size constant. Those latter interventions may have more public support and are more accommodating to non-suffering-focused utilitarians who don’t want to reduce the amount of happiness in nature. But as you mention, those interventions also seem more subject to cluelessness (is vaccination net good or bad considering side effects? it’s super unclear) and often target big animals rather than invertebrates. From this perspective, I think efforts to improve the welfare of farmed chickens and fish may be more cost-effective (though it’s still worth exploring wild-animal interventions too, as you say). Research and advocacy of less painful killing of wild-caught fish also seems extremely important, and it’s unclear whether to count this as a farmed-animal or wild-animal intervention.
Apart from less painful killing of wild animals (fish, rodents, insect on crop fields), or maybe some other large-scale interventions like reducing aquatic noise, I think the cost-effectiveness of work on wild animals would come from trying to reduce (or avoid increasing) population sizes, via reducing plant productivity. Reducing the amount of plant growth in an ecosystem helps invertebrates (including mites, springtails, and nematodes, which are extremely numerous but also hard to help in ways other than preventing their existence) and is somewhat less subject to cluelessness problems because you don’t have to model internal ecosystem dynamics as much—you just have to reduce the productivity of the first trophic level. But I haven’t found a lot of people who are interested in working on population-reduction interventions. This apparent lack of interest in reducing populations is one reason I’ve done less thinking about WAW in recent years. Another reason is that I respect the efforts of WAW organizations to put a more mainstream face on the WAW movement, and I wonder if my continuing to harp on why we should actually be focusing on reducing populations would seem to them as counterproductive.
I compiled a list of possible interventions to reduce total invertebrate populations that could possibly be lobbied for at the government level in some fashion. Some of them don’t seem super cost-effective, but some might be, such as trying to reduce irrigation subsidies, which is an intervention that could be argued for on other grounds as well. Taxing fertilizer and/or water use on crop fields, pastures, and/or lawns might be pretty valuable if it could be achieved. (Some local regions do have subsidies for people who reduce their lawn’s water use.) If geoengineering to fertilize oceans ever happens, opposing it would be extremely important, though doing a campaign about that now might be net harmful via increasing the salience of the idea.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment, Brian. I should’ve mentioned that I think that WAW might be tractable for people who think that reducing wild animal populations is good. I don’t think that reducing populations is good because:
I remain very uncertain whether wild animals experience more suffering than happiness (see this talk). I still think it’s more likely that there is more suffering due to painful deaths but not by much. This is partly because I give less weight to short but very intense pain than you do.
Reducing wild animal populations usually goes against various human interests [EDIT: actually, this doesn’t apply to some interventions in your list. I’m now thinking about whether any of them are promising.]
It’s not what most people want. Hence, even if I did think that reducing wild populations is good, I’d be afraid that I’ll change my mind in 10 years.
I worry that researching the big questions you mention might be intractable. You wrote a detailed analysis about the impact of climate change on wild animal suffering, and concluded that your “probabilities are basically 50% net good vs. 50% net bad when just considering animal suffering on Earth in the next few centuries (ignoring side effects on humanity’s very long-term future).” Correct me if I’m wrong, but your analysis rests on the assumption that reducing wild populations is good. An analysis without this assumption would be vastly more difficult because it would require analyzing whether various populations would become happier (instead of just analyzing changes in population). I worry that we wouldn’t have enough confidence in that analysis to inform our decisions.
All that said, I think that attempting to research WAW impacts of vegetarianism might still be worth it, though I’m unsure.
Hi Saulius, I wonder if have factored in your points 2&3 above in your view that you think digital beings are a priority for longtermism, and factory farming a priority for non-longtermist animal welfare. It seems that both cause areas, if taken consistently and seriously enough, would go against (organic) human interests and is not what most people want.
I imagine that few people would say that it’s actively harmful to try to decrease s-risks to digital minds (especially when it involves trying to prevent escalating conflicts, sadism, and retributivism). Most people would say it’s just a waste of money and effort. Most people agree that it’s important that animals used for food are well cared for. Not everyone votes for welfare improvements in ballot initiatives but a significant proportion of people do. And if we had infinite money, I don’t think anyone would mind improving conditions for farmed animals. But if there was a ballot initiative asking “shall we actively try to decrease wild animal numbers?”, I imagine that almost everyone would passionately oppose it. I don’t feel comfortable working on things most people would passionately oppose (and not just because it’s a waste of resources, but because they think that our desired outcome is bad). It also makes it difficult to work on it as an EA cause and it could repulse some people from EA. But I now weakened (or changed) my position on reducing populations after realizing that it doesn’t always to lead to more environmental issues (see this comment). Also, people might not mind if we are only decreasing populations of tiny animals.
Hi again Brian. I agree that your vision for the WAW movement is different from what WAW organizations are currently doing. I criticized the latter and don’t have a strong opinion on your vision of focusing on very small animals and reducing populations. I said that I don’t want to reduce populations partly because that usually includes reducing plant productivity which in turn causes more climate change, which might increase s-risks, x-risks, poverty, etc. But perhaps some interventions in your list could reduce populations without causing more environmental issues. I hadn’t considered them because they didn’t qualify for my WAW intervention search, and I had forgotten about them.
I’m unsure how one would go about lobbying for these things. I’d be a bit afraid of PR risks too. Imagine a farmer lobby figuring out that the real motivation for people funding lobbying against their irrigation subsidies are weirdos from Effective Altruism who are worried about small invertebrate suffering. That could cause some bad press for EA. I also think that the few potential WAW funders I talked to wouldn’t have funded such interventions but there could be other funders.
(Sorry for being slow to return here!)
Yeah, I think some ways of reducing plant growth are often supported by environmentalists, including
less growing of crops in dry areas requiring irrigation (and instead growing more crops in regions where rain provides more of the water)
less irrigation of pastures and lawns
fewer artificial fertilizers
less nutrient pollution into water bodies
lowering atmospheric CO2 concentrations, which reduces the “CO2 fertilization effect” (though as you note, the overall impact of climate change on wild-animal suffering is unclear)
not genetically engineering plants to have higher yields.
Some other activities like encouraging palm-oil production (which destroys rainforests) are bad for the environment but may reduce poverty. (I should note that I’m unsure about the net impact of palm-oil production for wild-animal suffering.)
I agree that the question of how to lobby for these things without seeming like weirdos is tricky. It would be easier if society cared more about wild animals from a suffering-focused perspective, which can be one argument for starting with philosophical advocacy regarding those topics, though it seems unlikely that concern for wild-animal welfare or suffering-focused ethics will ever become mainstream (apart from weak forms of these things, like caring about charismatic megafauna or Buddhist philosophy about suffering). These philosophical views would also help for various far-future scenarios. But from the standpoint of trying to reduce some short-term suffering, especially if we worry about cluelessness for longer-term efforts, then this approach of doing philosophical advocacy would be too slow and indirect (except insofar as it contributes to movement building, leading some other people to pursue more concrete interventions).
So overall I may agree with you that for short-term, concrete impact, we should plausibly focus on things like stunning of wild-caught fish and so on. This is why I feel a lot of fuzzies about the Humane Slaughter Association and related efforts. That said, it does seem worth pondering more whether there are ways to direct money toward opposing irrigation subsidies and the like.