Hi Tyner. This is one of the questions that I decided to not clarify in the article for the sake of conciseness, so thank you for asking.
Wild-caught fish die under human control. So working on killing them more humanely doesn’t have any complicated uncertain consequences of WAW interventions that I discuss. Relatively to WAW issues, it is easy to research and is unambiguously good if we can do it right. To me, it is precisely the kind of intervention we should be focusing on first before tackling super complex WAW issues. So everything that I say about farmed animal welfare applies to humane fish slaughter.
Decreasing the catch of wild fish (e.g., by buying catch shares) does have complicated WAW consequences and it is very unclear whether they are good or bad. Those fish would’ve died anyway. Would their deaths have been better or worse if they weren’t caught? Maybe we can answer that question. But more importantly, fish catch changes the populations of various wild animals. Are those changes good or bad? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Also, if we catch fewer fish now, maybe we make the fishery more sustainable, and hence more fish will be caught in the fishery in the long term… It feels like we are doing a random thing here. Things that I say about WAW apply to decreasing the catch of fish.
To clarify, we might be doing much more good by decreasing catch but it seems equally possible that we are doing a lot of harm. If stunning fish has an impact of +1, then I think that decreasing catch has an impact somewhere from −100 to +100, and my probability weights average out at 0.
If I could very confidently say that the impact of reducing the catch was −98 to +102, and that the median outcome is +2, I would prioritize reducing the catch over stunning. Some risk-averse people wouldn’t, it’s a matter of personal preference. But this is if it was like casino odds, this can’t happen.
What might happen is that I might work on a very complex cost-effectiveness model of reducing the catch for a year. In the model, I’d try to determine all the impacts on animal populations and well-being, assign subjective weights to each of them, and then average them out. In the end, I’d say that according to the model, the impact of reducing catch could be anywhere from −98 to +102 but the best guess of the model is +2.
This is very different from casino odds. I’m unsure that I modeled what would happen correctly, whether my subjective weights are correct, and whether my model is free from mistakes. In terms of Bayesianism, I’d say that this model wouldn’t update me much on my prior of 0. In layman’s terms, I’d say that I’d still choose stunning over reducing catch for the same reason I’d choose a hotel with 1,000 reviews that average out to 4.5 stars over a hotel with one five-star review (I’m borrowing this illustration from this blog, I think). The evidence that reducing catch (or a hotel with one review) is a good choice is just too weak.
Also, note that in the end, we are still clueless about the butterfly effects of both because we are always clueless about that. I’m just choosing to ignore 100th order effects because I want to avoid analysis paralysis.
I wrote the article on reducing catch shares, and just wanted to comment saying that I strongly agree with Saulius’s analysis here.
Currently, implementing humane slaughter for wild-caught fish seems like a slam dunk.
Currently, reducing the catch of wild fish seems extremely ambiguous. My catch share article mostly concluded with “we should do more research on this to reduce these uncertainties”. I also wrote a later article about subsidies—abolishing fisheries subsidies seems like a fairly easy way to reduce the catch. But in many cases, it would cause the population size of the target fish population to increase, causing more deaths by fishing over time even if effort remains low. (Plus, the effects on other wild animals...)
So I strongly agree with Saulius that:
Humane slaughter seems fantastic, and
We probably shouldn’t try to reduce the fish catch yet because we don’t know if it’s good or bad—though I do believe that dedicated research could quite readily make substantial progress on this question.
Hi Saulius, thank you for the interesting post. When you consider wild animal interventions do you include wild-caught fish?
e.g.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tykEYESbJkqT39v64/directly-purchasing-and-distributing-stunning-equipment-to
Hi Tyner. This is one of the questions that I decided to not clarify in the article for the sake of conciseness, so thank you for asking.
Wild-caught fish die under human control. So working on killing them more humanely doesn’t have any complicated uncertain consequences of WAW interventions that I discuss. Relatively to WAW issues, it is easy to research and is unambiguously good if we can do it right. To me, it is precisely the kind of intervention we should be focusing on first before tackling super complex WAW issues. So everything that I say about farmed animal welfare applies to humane fish slaughter.
Decreasing the catch of wild fish (e.g., by buying catch shares) does have complicated WAW consequences and it is very unclear whether they are good or bad. Those fish would’ve died anyway. Would their deaths have been better or worse if they weren’t caught? Maybe we can answer that question. But more importantly, fish catch changes the populations of various wild animals. Are those changes good or bad? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Also, if we catch fewer fish now, maybe we make the fishery more sustainable, and hence more fish will be caught in the fishery in the long term… It feels like we are doing a random thing here. Things that I say about WAW apply to decreasing the catch of fish.
To clarify, we might be doing much more good by decreasing catch but it seems equally possible that we are doing a lot of harm. If stunning fish has an impact of +1, then I think that decreasing catch has an impact somewhere from −100 to +100, and my probability weights average out at 0.
If I could very confidently say that the impact of reducing the catch was −98 to +102, and that the median outcome is +2, I would prioritize reducing the catch over stunning. Some risk-averse people wouldn’t, it’s a matter of personal preference. But this is if it was like casino odds, this can’t happen.
What might happen is that I might work on a very complex cost-effectiveness model of reducing the catch for a year. In the model, I’d try to determine all the impacts on animal populations and well-being, assign subjective weights to each of them, and then average them out. In the end, I’d say that according to the model, the impact of reducing catch could be anywhere from −98 to +102 but the best guess of the model is +2.
This is very different from casino odds. I’m unsure that I modeled what would happen correctly, whether my subjective weights are correct, and whether my model is free from mistakes. In terms of Bayesianism, I’d say that this model wouldn’t update me much on my prior of 0. In layman’s terms, I’d say that I’d still choose stunning over reducing catch for the same reason I’d choose a hotel with 1,000 reviews that average out to 4.5 stars over a hotel with one five-star review (I’m borrowing this illustration from this blog, I think). The evidence that reducing catch (or a hotel with one review) is a good choice is just too weak.
Also, note that in the end, we are still clueless about the butterfly effects of both because we are always clueless about that. I’m just choosing to ignore 100th order effects because I want to avoid analysis paralysis.
I wrote the article on reducing catch shares, and just wanted to comment saying that I strongly agree with Saulius’s analysis here.
Currently, implementing humane slaughter for wild-caught fish seems like a slam dunk.
Currently, reducing the catch of wild fish seems extremely ambiguous. My catch share article mostly concluded with “we should do more research on this to reduce these uncertainties”. I also wrote a later article about subsidies—abolishing fisheries subsidies seems like a fairly easy way to reduce the catch. But in many cases, it would cause the population size of the target fish population to increase, causing more deaths by fishing over time even if effort remains low. (Plus, the effects on other wild animals...)
So I strongly agree with Saulius that:
Humane slaughter seems fantastic, and
We probably shouldn’t try to reduce the fish catch yet because we don’t know if it’s good or bad—though I do believe that dedicated research could quite readily make substantial progress on this question.