Co-founder of Shrimp Welfare Project, which aims to improve the lives of billions of farmed shrimps
Aaron Boddy
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This is great thanks I hadn’t considered this! I found the Zvi post you’re referring to if anyone else is interested.
Do you know if there has been any work to try and quantify this added value from Amazon? (Like in Meatonomics, David Robinson Simon discusses the hidden costs of meat, so a $4 Big Mac really costs society $11, so that extra $7 cost is absorbed by society). Is there any potential to calculate something similar with Amazon? e.g. every $1 someone spends on Amazon typically saves the consumer/society $X.
I’m not an economist and I know that its very difficult to calculate value added by technology etc. and this value would likely vary by product, but just wondering if that’s something that could be possible while I’m trying to explore this idea?
How bad is it to exploit bees?
I agree that taking action to improve the welfare of farmed bees is positive.
But with other farmed animals such as chickens/pigs/cows, a significant goal to aim for is to ultimately bring fewer of those animals into existence in order to reduce overall suffering.
But is that also the case for bee farming? Or do we instead want to increase the number of bees we farm because we need to increase commercial pollination services for a greater good? And if so, even if we weren’t to intervene in bee welfare in any way, would we still be aiming to increase the number of farmed bees from a consequentialist point of view?
Is it possible to calculate the net utility (positive or negative) from bringing one suffering bee into existence?
I found this really interesting and the difference between realization and belief reminded me of the Toyota Production System’s concept of Genchi Genbutsu (“real location, real thing” or “go and see”). It basically states that you cannot be sure you really understand any part of any business problem unless you go and see for yourself firsthand—It is unacceptable to take anything for granted or to rely on the reports of others.
We are actually going to discuss this article at my local university group next week, so it would be interesting to consider how we might apply the ideas to the group—thanks for the suggestion! :)
Ahh that’s really interesting to know!
But yeah, I definitely would feel a bit manipulative if I didn’t feel like I knew the person properly—I want to present to them ideas that I think they’d really engage with and would interest them, rather than giving them the impression I’m trying to force a viewpoint on them
I love this!
I think for me a real barrier is the fact that I barrel ahead with the ideas too quickly… like I want to jump straight in at the deep-end with “we should think of all lives as equally important and we should be trying to consider the ways our donation can go farthest”—that idea on its own maybe isn’t controversial, but probably hasn’t engaged my conversational partner in the same way as in your example.
One of the main motivations for me writing this post was to have a mental checklist when discussing EA so that I don’t barrel ahead without bringing the other person along for the ride :)
So for me, I think it’s useful to have a framework in my head so I can ensure that these ideas build upon each other:
1. do they want to do some good in the world
2. do they agree that all lives are equally important
3. do they agree that there are some situations where your donation/time will make far more of a difference than others
4. do they agree that it is possible/worthwhile to figure out which interventions are the most effective
5. this stuff is really engaging and there is already a whole movement that you can join so you don’t have to do all this on your own!
That’s a simplified framework (I just tried to pick out the key beats in your conversation example) but it definitely helps for me to have a framework :)
I loved watching this talk, thanks for sharing!
It would be great to talk further about this idea (though based on your talk, it would seem you have already given way more thought to it than I have)
Great questions!
Advocacy: You’re absolutely right, that’s been our impressions of corporate advocacy work too and we’re currently not expecting to drum up grassroots campaigns, or do any significant work on public awareness. Our expectation as it stands is that we can frame the benefits of shrimp welfare as a lever for sustainability. The Seafood Task Force has managed to make shrimp supply chain improvements driven by retail largely without the buy-in of consumers [1]. In addition, we hope to enable corporations to be leaders in this area, as consumer awareness of aquatic welfare increases (i.e. due to Seaspiracy etc.).
Production: It’s pretty concentrated on a country level in terms of distribution [2]. In South-East Asia there are often many smaller farmers, but they work with agents who deliver the shrimps to a centralised processing plant for export [3]. Our understanding of importing at a company level is that there are a few key importers that dominate the market [4].
You’ve hit the nail on the head! The idea on the face of it seems so unusual, but once I talk through the scale, neglectedness and tractability of the problem, I’ve yet to find anyone who isn’t convinced by it (except maybe my parents...)
I have been slightly bowled over by the number of people who have “got it”, but as you say, this is largely because I’m talking to EAs. But even with non-EAs, describing welfare issues such as eyestalk ablation, dying of disease or suffocating due to lack of oxygen seems to be pretty well understood and hasn’t come across as controversial...
We’re really excited to see what lies ahead for us, and can’t wait to see the progress you make on insect welfare! :)
There are lots of overlaps between welfare and sustainability, with a great overview provided by the Aquatic Life Institute [1] (we’re hoping to publish a shrimp-focused look at the overlap of sustainability and welfare on our website soon!)
Our main concern is with super-intensive systems, in which many of these welfare issues are managed very well, but there are very high stocking densities. In less intensive systems, lower stocking densities can reduce stress and susceptibility to diseases, so we have a pretty good case for asking that they’re reduced as part of our Ask. But in high-intensive systems, water quality and risk of disease are managed well, so stocking densities can be very high—and the overlap of welfare and sustainability falls down. In this case, we’re hoping that being able to provide the farmers with access to a higher-welfare market becomes our main lever for justifying an ask to reduce stocking densities.
No problem, these are great questions!
And yes that’s true, each stakeholder in the shrimp supply chain is usually driven by the demands of the next link (i.e. farmer—processor—importer—distributor—consumer). So when it comes down to it, often the distributor (retailer/restaurant etc.) can only make a change if they have reason to believe that the public is demanding change...
Though we are anticipating that we can make lots of progress before we reach public awareness as our limiting factor (the scale is just so huge!).
And we expect that in the meantime, progress towards public awareness of aquatic animal suffering will increase significantly thanks to the work of other NGOs (such as all the great NGOs in the Aquatic Animal Alliance ! [1])
Hey there!
I’ve only recently finished the book, so don’t have much advice regarding putting the principles into practice unfortunately… though hopefully someone else does and can comment here too :)
A lot of the Principles relate to managing a bigger organisation than mine… Having said that I am trying to implement more robust decision tracking etc. in my org based on the ideas of thinking of your organisation as an optimisation “machine” to achieve a goal (and some of the suggestions he has in the book of how to do that)
The reason I pulled this out as a list though is that I find it really valuable just being able to see the key 20 principles as the section headers, then I can dig down into the sub-principles if I need a reminder
Happy to chat more but please don’t think of me as the Principles guru, just someone who wanted an on-the-go reference/refresher :)
Absolutely, go for it :)
One of the co-founders from Shrimp Welfare Project here :)
I agree—it was a real priority for us to not have a curled shrimp in our logo (which was tricky!) for this reason. And you’re right, most shrimps that are farmed are whiteish or brownish (though there are over 2,000 species of shrimps, and some are very colourful!). Finally, as an alternative to the “go vegan” message that could accompany it, you could also explore an “expanding the moral circle” message (though as it’s been noted previously with the “do good better” message, that this could come off as preachy without context).
I’d be happy to share the shrimp we used in our logo if you wanted to use that instead, though I don’t want this to seem like we’re pitching Shrimp Welfare Project specifically rather than shrimp welfare in general :)
Hi all—one of the co-founders of Shrimp Welfare Project (and a co-author of this report) here :)
Unfortunately, Lucas, our Research Lead (and primary author of this report), will be leaving the team at the end of April. We are sad to see him go and are thankful for all the great work he has done within Shrimp Welfare Project.
We are therefore looking for a new Research Lead to take over from April, before Lucas leaves, so that he can pass on all relevant information! If you are interested, you can find out more here. Applications can be submitted until February 17!
Can I ask what your idea for an EA board game was? I’ve recently started designing board games as a hobby and I was thinking about trying to do an EA one :)
Really enjoyed this—thanks for sharing!
Can’t wait to hear/see the full musical when you’re finished :)
Thanks very much for this write-up MHR! We’ve recently published a “two-year update” post on the Forum, and wanted to reflect on some considerations we think most likely affect the Cost-Effectiveness of this project. Rather than including the below in that post, we thought it made sense to continue the discussion that had already started here.
Considerations around the “Pain-Track” for this intervention, for example:
The intervention targets acute rather than chronic suffering. In some Pain-Tracks, Time spent suffering can overwhelmingly dominate the calculation of suffering (though this also depends on the relative intensity of the chronic suffering compared to the acute suffering).
Similarly, how you weigh the relative suffering of Annoying, Hurtful, Disabling, and Excruciating pains can be a deciding factor. It’s possible that these are within orders of magnitude of each other, but it’s also possible to view “Excruciating” pain as being infinitely worse than other types of pain (and similarly to Time as a factor, if Excruciating pain is weighted high enough, then any time in this state can end up dominating the overall calculation for the Pain-Track).
The relative welfare range of shrimps—in particular, whether the undiluted experience model of welfare is correct or not—is another consideration that can dominate cost-effectiveness calculations (largely because the number of shrimps used and killed for food is so large),
The likelihood that we accelerate the adoption of humane slaughter practices—both in terms of the shorter term goal of producers buying further stunners themselves, and the longer-term goal of electrical stunning becoming the norm in the industry.
For example, we have one producer who is committed to stunning 100M shrimps, which represents 8% of their shrimps. If the “pilot” is successful, they will likely buy further stunners to stun most (if not all) of their shrimps. This would mean our investment of $65,000 would be the first domino leading to ~1.25B shrimps being stunned per year.
Additionally, once a buyer has seen that it’s possible for their suppliers to implement stunners, they can be empowered to require that all of their suppliers stun their shrimps (or otherwise source from suppliers who already stun).
Finally, many certifiers/policymakers are unwilling to require the industry to do things until it has been relatively established. We’re unsure what the timelines of work like this might be, but believe that by counterfactually introducing stunners to the industry earlier than they would have been, it could lead to widespread adoption being accelerated by a number of years.
Any potential “impact ceiling” we might hit with buying stunners—if the pool of producers large enough to stun a minimum of 100M shrimps and willing to take up our offer of a stunner is smaller than we currently estimate, then this could limit the potential scale of impact. Likewise, the potential pool could be larger than we realise, for example, we may find a number of smaller producers who want to take a stunner but can’t commit to 100M shrimps, in which case we could offer to pro-rata our contribution, and work with a larger pool of producers at a similar cost-effectiveness.
Finally, we see hard-to-quantify value in whether this intervention helps to diversify interventions in the animal welfare space. Both the decision to focus on shrimps, and to purchase equipment for the industry, are both somewhat novel “bets” that seem to have paid off. We hope that this is encouraging for the movement more broadly to continue to invest in exploratory work in the space.
Hi MHR! Thanks for your kind words, we’re really excited about entering this next phase :)
Regarding your questions:
The calculation is the same, but the number we’re reporting is different, this is due to a few factors:
~4,000/$/year is the actual cost-effectiveness of our stunners program to date, not including overheads other than the cost of the stunners themselves (1B / $247.5K)
~1,500/$/year in contrast, is the minimum cost-effectiveness of our stunners program going forward, which we commit to purchasing if the producer commits to stunning a minimum of 100M shrimps per year (100M / $65,000 = ~1,500).
Historically producers have committed to more than that, so we tend to say 1,500+ /$/year, because the actual number can fluctuate depending on the producer commitment
And just for further clarity, SWP’s overall cost-effectiveness (~1,300/$/year) is the cost-effectiveness of our stunners program to date while also factoring in SWP’s overheads to date (1B / ($525K+$247.5K))
It’s worth noting that in future our stunners program will likely become the majority of our budget (rather than overheads), so it’s likely SWP’s overall cost-effectiveness will increase as a result
Most of these numbers can also be seen in the Guesstimate model (except how we arrived at the ~1,500, which is instead in the stunners funding proposal)
By the way, the Guesstimate model builds on our original BOTEC spreadsheet, so the 4,000 number can also be seen in Guesstimate, as well as how that changes to 1,300 once the overheads are factored in
UoC stands for “Unit of Certification”, basically just whatever is being certified by ASC, typically the farm itself (I’ve updated the linked doc now to clarify that—thanks for spotting our jargon!)
There is, but unfortunately it’s only available to users with a login (i.e. those who bought a ticket) - we’ll email to ask if we’re allowed to download and share it
Regarding shrimp paste—this is definitely something I’d be most excited for someone to work on, but as I understand it there currently are quite a number of shrimp paste alternatives on the market—both in terms of just general vegan substitutes, but also explicitly vegan shrimp paste
I don’t know how widely available those alternatives are where shrimp paste is consumed the most, but my current sense is that the solution is likely more along the lines of cultural change, rather than technical innovation (though I’m sure a mix of the two would help)
Though I’m not super confident in this, and hopefully we’ll be able to share more insights once our volunteer has finished the report :)
How bad is Amazon?
So there are a lot of reasons people don’t like Amazon. It exploits its workers, it fights tax laws, it has a significant environmental impact etc.
But is Amazon net-negative from a consequentialist point of view, or is there a net-positive impact of Amazon? My rough thinking is:
Jeff Bezos has projects such as Blue Origin which might be positive for longtermism.
He recently donated $10billion to Climate Change with the Bezos Earth Fund (and this may continue?).
He has been interested in some other short term philanthropy in the past. His ex-wife (who now has a lot of his money) has also signed the giving pledge (though Bezos himself hasn’t).
Like I think this argument is easier to make with someone like Elon Musk. There may be reasons people personally dislike him, but I think its relatively easy to argue that because of OpenAI, SpaceX and Tesla, that he is likely to have a significant net-positive impact on the world, particularly the long-term.
I’m not sure really what I plan to do with the information. I’m not sure an “EA supports buying from Amazon” is particularly useful or accurate. It’s just something that’s played in the back of my mind a lot when I hear people badmouth Amazon.