I started out as a animal advocate in 2001 at the age of 12. Nearly a decade later, I discovered effective altruism and decided to start down an earning to give career path as a physician. Currently, I own a health services business and donate my time and money to direct work in animal advocacy. You usually can find me at the Hive (formerly known as Impactful Animal Advocacy) slack community.
Constance Li
Karma: 1,470
Yes I am also curious about the difference. I’ve been using them interchangeably.
Impactful Animal Advocacy: Building Community Infrastructure
Thank you for creating such a wonderful resource. It’s kind of a plug and play MEL system! I’ll be sharing this around.
I think perhaps the reason you don’t think your argument was properly considered in my comment is because I’m perhaps not understanding core parts of it? To be honest, I’m still quite confused after reading your response. It’s possible I just addressed the parts that I could understand, which happened to be what you considered to be more supplementary information. I’ll respond to your points here:
The “specifically” part is not precise, as it’s not just the presence of pain receptors but also behaviour to seek, avoid, make trade-offs, etc., and many other things. There’s a specific way I consider the inference people are making to be invalid.
I thought I listed all the ways in which you mentioned ways people infer sentience. The additional examples you give generally seem to fall under the “shallow behavioral observations” that I mentioned so I don’t see how I misconstrued your argument here.
I would like them to be what people consciously understand to be the reason of certain facts being evidence one way or another. Those are not specific factors, it was an attempt to describe possible indirect evidence.
I am very unclear on what these sentences are trying to convey.
I think if something talks about qualia without ever hearing about it from humans, you should strongly expect it to have qualia. I wouldn’t generalise this to the automatic inclusion of the whole species, as it would be a weaker statement and I can imagine edge cases.
I broadly do agree with this being strong support for possessing qualia. Do you agree with my point that talking about qualia is a very human-centric metric that may miss many cases of beings possessing qualia, such as all babies and most animals? If so, then it seems to be a pretty superfluous thing to mention in cases of uncertain sentience.
It is not just about a lack of evidence, it is about a fundamentally invalid way of thinking shrimp have subjective experience in the first place, and I don’t think there’s enough valid evidence for subjective experience in shrimp. The evidence people tend to cite is not valid.
And it was not what I was trying to say, but it might still be valuable to reply to your comment.
I would really appreciate if you would lay out the evidence that people cite and why you think it is invalid. What I saw in the post were the weakest arguments and not reflective of what the research papers cite, which is a much more nuanced approach. At no point in the post did you bring up the stronger arguments so I figured you were basing your conclusions off of things that EAs have mentioned to you in conversation.
I’m guessing the thing you are saying was “not what I was trying to say,” was referring to “It’s OK to eat shrimp.” I’m only 80% certain this is what you were trying to say so forgive me if the following is a misrepresentation. For me, it seemed reasonable to infer that was what you are trying to say since it is in the title of your post and at the end you also state, “I hope some people would update and, by default, not consider that things they don’t expect to talk about qualia can have qualia.” That last statement leads me to believe you are saying, “since you wouldn’t expect shrimp to talk about qualia, then just assume they don’t and that it is OK to eat them.”
The first time I wanted to write this post was a couple of years ago when I saw Rethink Priorities research using many markers that have approximately nothing to do with meaningful evidence for the existence of experience of pain.
I don’t understand how the evidence is not meaningful. You did explain any of their markers in your post. Presenting the context of the markers seems pretty important too.
I’ll skip some parts I don’t have responses to for brevity.It’s maybe okay to defer to them and feel free to eat biological organisms from Earth without [neuroanatomical structures], although I’m not a biologist to verify.
Note that the presence of these things doesn’t say much unless you have reasons to believe their evolutionary role is tied to the role of qualia. It is Bayesian evidence if you didn’t know anything about a thing and now know it has these properties, but most of it is probably due to (8 billion humans + many mammals and maybe birds) : all things with it compared to all things without it, including rocks or something.
I’m not a biologist either, but I do defer to the researchers who study sentience. It seems reasonable to assume that the role of some neuroanatomical structures are evolutionarily tied with the evolutionary role of qualia since the former is necessary for the later to exist. I’m not clear on the point that the later half of the second paragraph is making with regards to the Bayesian evidence.
Long-term behaviour alterations to avoid what got you an immediate big negative reward is a really helpful adaptation, but how is also having qualia more helpful? Taking the presence of things like that as meaningful evidence for subjective experience is exactly what shows confusion about ways to make valid inferences and surprised me about Rethink’s research a couple of years ago. These things are helpful for a reinforcement learning agent to learn; you need to explain how having qualia is additionally helpful/makes it easier to implement those/is a side effect of implementing those adaptations. Until you have not, this does not provide additional evidence after you know you’re talking about an RL adaptation, if you screen off the increased probability of talking about humans or mammals/birds/things we have other evidence about. (And I think some bacteria might have defensive behaviour and fighting back and moving away from certain things, though I’m not a biologist/might be wrong/didn’t google sources for that background sort-of-maybe-knowledge.)
I don’t think that Rethink was trying to say that long term behavioral adaptations were on their own meaningful evidence for subjective experience. It is usually considered in context with other indicators of sentience to tip the scales towards or away from sentience. In one of their reports, they even say, “Whether invertebrates have a capacity for valenced experience is still uncertain.”
Starting from the part where you mention reinforcement learning is where I start to lose track of what your argument is.Indicators are correlated, and a lot of them are not valid evidence if you’ve already conditioned on states of valid evidence.
I’m not sure what “conditioned on states of valid evidence” means here.
Yep. I want people to make valid experiments instead.
Perhaps it would be more epistemically accurate to say that you want people to make experiments that are up to your standard. Just because some experiments fall short of your bar doesn’t mean that they are not “valid”.
I don’t have reasons to believe newborn babies experience pain, but it is probably a good idea to use anaesthesia, as the stress (without any experience of pain) might have a negative impact on the future development of the baby.
Well I commend you on your moral consistency here.
Wanna bet fish don’t talk about having subjective experiences?
“Talking” is a pretty anthropocentric means of communication. Animals (including fish) have other modes of communication that we are only starting to understand. Plus, talking is only a small part of overall human communication as we are able to say a lot more through nonverbal signals.
I think for most of the UK history, the existence of god is also recognised by law (at least implicitly? and maybe it is still?). How is that evidence?
Also, I don’t eat octopuses.
This seems like a pretty bad faith argument and false analogy. The process of getting legal recognition of invertebrate sentience and the historical legal recognition of God relied on different evidence and methodology.
Nope, I have read a bunch of stuff written by Rethink and I think they should rethink their approach.
Why not reference Rethink more in your post then? The very first sentence talks about conversations you’ve had and some pretty ridiculous things people have mentioned like the possibility of balloons having sentience. Also, the title references “EA’s” who make invalid inferences. I think this misleads the reader into thinking that conversations with EA’s are what make up the basis of your argument. If you want to make a rebuttal to Rethink, then use their examples and break down their arguments.
If I were to make my best attempt to understand your core argument, I would start from this:
TL;DR: If a being can describe qualia, we know this is caused by qualia existing somewhere. So we can be pretty sure that humans have qualia. But when our brains identify emotions in things, they can think both humans and geometric shapes in cartoons are feeling something. When we look at humans and feel like they feel something, we know that this feeling is probably correct, because we can make a valid inference that humans have qualia (because they would talk about having conscious experiences). When we look at non-human things, this recognition of feeling in others is no longer linked to a valid way of inferring that these others have qualia, and we need other evidence.
To me, this essentially translates into:
Valid Method of Inference: subject can describe their qualia, therefore have qualia
Invalid Method of Inference: subject makes humans feel like they have qualia, therefore have qualia
Your argument here is that EA’s cannot rely on these invalid methods of inference to determine presence of qualia in subjects, which seems reasonable. However, it seems like a pretty large leap to then go on to say that the current scientific evidence (which is not fully addressed in the post) is not valid and we should believe it is ok to eat shrimp.
Research compiled by Rethink has only been used to update the overall estimated likelihood of sentience, not as a silver bullet for determining the presence of sentience. For example, the thing that has pain receptors is more likely to be able to experience pain than the thing without pain receptors. And if there is reasonable uncertainty regarding sentience, then shouldn’t the conclusion be to promote a cautious approach to invertebrate consumption?
Apologies again for not understanding the core of your position here. I tried my best, but I am probably still missing important pieces of it.
This post seems to take the weakest argument for sentience (or qualia as you put it) as understood by a layperson in casual conversation. I’ll use sentience/qualia interchangably in this response, but please let me know if you understand them differently.
Please let me know if I understand your argument correctly:
You believe the current focus on invertebrate (including shrimp) welfare is based on a flawed inference of sentience, specifically on shallow behavioral observations, presence of pain receptors, and natural human tendencies towards anthropomorphizing everything.
You would like these criteria to be more considered:
evolutionary reasons for the appearance of subjective experience existed in some animal species’ evolution,
something related to the role we think qualia plays is currently demonstrated by that species, or
something that we think could be a part of how qualia works exists in that species.
You think that being able to communicate details about one’s qualia is the ultimate standard for inclusion in the group of qualia possessing species.
You wouldn’t eat anything that passes the mirror test
Based on your perception that there is a lack of evidence for shrimp possessing qualia, you are recommending to readers that it is “OK to eat shrimp.”
Supposing this is what you are trying to say, I’d like to bring up some counterpoints:
There are many other markers of sentience/pain/qualia that have been used to form the foundation of invertebrate welfare work other than the ones you described. Here are a couple of criteria for the classification of “probable sentience” according to Rethink Priorities’ project on estimating invertebrate sentience:
Direct evidence that individuals of these taxa exhibit features which, according to expert agreement, seem to be necessary –although not sufficient– for consciousness (Bateson, 1991; Broom, 2013; EFSA, 2005; Elwood, 2011; Fiorito, 1986; Sneddon et al., 2014; Sneddon, 2017). These features are:
Neuroanatomical structures and physiological functions, such as nociceptors or equivalent structures, centralized information processing, vertebrate midbrain-like function, and physiological responses to nociception or handling. Additionally, it is expected that conscious individuals have opioid-like receptors and analgesics reduce their nociceptive reflexes and avoidant behaviors;
Behavioral responses that are potential indicators of pain experience, such as defensive behavior or fighting back, and moving away from noxious stimuli. These reactions seem to take into account a noxious stimulus’ intensity and direction. Other observed behaviors include pain relief learning, and long-term behavior alteration to avoid a noxious stimulus.”
The mirror test is classically designed for capturing human-like behaviors. In a new format that was designed for natural behaviors of roosters, they actually did pass the mirror test.
You said, “we don’t infer that humans have qualia because they all have “pain receptors”: mechanisms that, when activated in us, make us feel pain; we infer that other humans have qualia because they can talk about qualia.”
Couple points about this:I don’t know of any scientific research that states that the presence of pain receptors is sufficient for possession of qualia. Generally, the more sentience indicators found, the higher the assigned probability of sentience.
If we were in the age where we didn’t have tools for cross language comprehension, then this reasoning would support inferring that Japanese-only speaking people don’t understand the subject mater of a test written in english if they are unable to give satisfactory answers in english.
Like the example of the rooster experiment above illustrates, people have historically done a poor job trying to understand which communication signals to look for from other species when designing experiments. However, animal communication is a field that is advancing and can be thought of similarly to the development of cross language comprehension across different human groups.
There is a precedent set to avoid assuming individuals can’t experience pain just because they cannot communicate it the high standards we set. into the 1980s, many surgeons believed babies could not feel pain and so they rarely used anesthetics in surgery. They attributed the babies’ screaming and writhing as “just reflexes”. And even though we still can’t definitively prove babies feel pain, most medical professionals will use anesthetics in surgery because there is evidence of other indicators that they do. Unless it is a huge personal sacrifice to quality of life to not eat fish/shrimp, why not just go with the “better safe than sorry” approach of not eating them until you are more certain about their sentience?
I see the evidence base for invertebrate sentience growing all the time (see further reading links below). Recently, the evidence was even sufficient for invertebrate sentience to be recognized by law. Based on your post, it does not seem like you have a thorough literature review on it. It seems like you have judged the entire base of evidence on conversations with EAs that are not formally working on sentience research. Because of this, I think that the title and conclusion of your post (aka “It’s OK to eat shrimp) is based mostly on a straw man fallacy because it argues against the weakest arguments for invertebrate sentience. If you make any updates after exploring the evidence base further, please consider changing this wording to prevent potential harms from people looking for moral license to continue eating shrimp.
Further Reading:
How Should We Go About Looking For Invertebrate Consciousness?
Invertebrate sentience: A review of the neuroscientific literature
Pain, Sentience, and Animal Welfare (in fish)
Invertebrate Sentience, Welfare, & Policy
I’ll pick one of the examples: why do you still donate some even though you are being funded by EA donors?
This looks like a Notion page despite not having that in the URL. This is just a coincidence or did you find a way to embed notion onto another website?
Corrected, thank you!
Wow this is a great year for the field of insect welfare research. I want to add in a couple resources/opportunities that I know about:
Jonathan Birch at LSE (whose work was highly influential in the UK government including decapods and cephalopods in the Sentience Act of 2022) is co-leading a project with Lars Chittka at Queen Mary University of London. They have openings for 2 post-docs to study key evidence gaps in the science of insect sentience. Deadline to apply is Oct 11! (tomorrow)
Also, I just discovered this great substack on invertebrate welfare. We also have a channel for invertebrate welfare on the IAA slack.
Are you aware there is a campaign to double bean consumption by 2028? It is called Beans is How and it seems to be backed by a pretty big and well-funded organization. Bean soaking could potentially be added to their educational materials for additional tractability.
That’s a very good point! I just have a lot of bad experience dealing with Wise, but I also haven’t had to deal with very large grants so the tradeoff wasn’t as large.
Wise is awful.. their customer service was not very helpful to me, setting up the account to connect to my bank is hard, and their UI is beautiful but not functional. I just use Paypal for international payments now and it is so much easier. Is there a reason you chose Wise over Paypal?
Sent you a dm in the slack! :)
I had never seen the RP piece you linked. I am posting it all over the slack and adding it to the resource guide!!
With regards to the taste/texture parity of plant-based meats, I don’t take a firm stance on it. I remember going to a vegan asian fusion restaurant 20 years ago and being blown away by how accurate I thought the taste/texture was. Sure it is somewhat different, but I would argue in some cases it is actually better. Many people have meat that is too dry, fatty, or has pieces of cartilage in it. And yet, they keep purchasing animal products because they think of those bad cases as anomalies. Whereas with the plant-based alternatives, people are much more picky. One bad experience can label all of the products as bad. I think that is the result of culture. People want to find reasons to keep doing what the in-group is doing. Being vegan is kind of hard in many mainstream social contexts.
I am surprised as well. Here is a good paper on how it could be done. The authors that the feasibility of using Unsupervised Machine Translation (UMT) to decode animal language, specifically that of highly intelligent animals like sperm whales, depends on the complexity of the source language and the amount of “common ground” between the source language and target prior. Even with limited common ground, successful translation may be possible if the source language is sufficiently complex. Some of the obstacles include understanding the goal of sperm whale vocalizations, the lack of shared linguistic structure with human languages, and the domain gap. Overall, it seems possible to collect animal communication data and analyze them using machine learning, looking for structure or the ability to predict the next utterance or action of the animal in question.
There are a couple organizations I know of that do this:Earth Species Project—company using AI to decode languages of many different species
The SOUNDWEL project—EU funded project for correlating pig vocalizations on farms with their emotional states
Project CETI—nonprofit located in Dominica that are taking recordings of sperm whales to try and decode their complex language
Animal Advocacy in the Age of AI
Question: Are you still coming out with the new reactions?
Comment/Feedback: It seems the AI narration only captures the initial post and not the edited sections. This only plays for 55s until the end of the first set of bullet points and before it says that it was edited to add something.
Comment/Feedback: Are you able to make it so that clicking the top right link icon on comments automatically copies the URL to that comment instead of users needing to navigate to the new page and then copying the URL from the address bar?
I was drawn to this post because of the word “Goldilocks,” which reminded me of The Goldilocks Challenge. Is it just a coincidence that this post contains the word Goldilocks or is it related to the book?
Btw, I am curious because I was planning on “reading” this book, but couldn’t find the PDF anywhere. And I say “reading” because these days I mostly upload the PDF to the chatGPT PDF reader and chat with it since I lack the time to read a whole book.
Hey Spencer, just wanted to say a big thank you for your excellent research and clear writing on ContraPest. Your work is really helping people to understand this complex issue better.
I live in NYC and the rat problem is pretty bad here. A lot of it has to do the unfettered access the rats have to food in trash. Unlike most other cities, NYC was built without any alleyways, making it very hard to keep trash contained. The trash ends up in bags on the sidewalks where rodents can easily chew through the plastic and have an all-they-can-eat buffet.
I’ve been thinking about this and recently someone pointed out that some cities in Europe are using underground garbage bins.
These bins could help cut down the rat problem by making it harder for them to get to the trash. It’s a non-pharmaceutical intervention that could significantly cut down on the rat population!
Thanks again for your great work, Spencer. It’s really making a difference. :)
Hey, loved reading your post, really resonated with me! I’ve personally witnessed those capacity building, collaboration, and funding gaps you mentioned. I’ve been wrestling with these issues myself, and it’s why I decided to throw my support behind this new initiative, the Impactful Animal Advocacy Slack Community, which seems to fill a lot of these gaps. There are almost 800 members now and about a dozen of posts each day with a strong no infighting culture. Plus, there are some funders and philanthropy advisors hanging out there! Everyone is welcome to join. :)
Wow, seeing as HILTS is hands down my favorite podcast so now I’m quite excited to see what new and exciting content will come from the forum. Welcome to the EA Forum team!