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 Impactful Animal Advocacy slack community.
Constance Li
Karma: 961
Yeah.. I think I agree. We have thought and re-thought enough about shrimps and it is now the time to ACT! Will change it in the post.
Thank you for your devotion to the maximum utils!
Had to google Naming What We Can first… love it!
You are absolutely right. I’ve adjusted the numbers in the post.
Thanks for catching that. I also saw there are a few (billion) more farmed shrimp to add in to those numbers. We have accordingly adjusted the post to convert estimates of [hours worked/human career] to [shrimps lost/year].
This seems like a doozy of a question to try to answer. Have you done your market research? Make sure no one else has written something about this in a similar way to what you intend first.
I’d be interested in reading an analysis about the murder comparison. There seems to be some elements of direct vs. indirect harm, partial vs. full responsibility for death, and different societal values. I’m not sure if I can truly parse it out.
It’s really sad to hear about Steven Wise passing away. His work was a game-changer in how we see animals and their rights. Founding the Nonhuman Rights Project was a huge step forward, especially with those groundbreaking cases for chimps and elephants. Even though Happy the elephant’s case didn’t turn out as hoped, it sparked a massive conversation and got people thinking about animals in a way they hadn’t before.
Wise’s story is super inspiring. It’s a big loss, but what he started isn’t stopping anytime soon.
@Nicholas Kruus this is what the author, Chris Bryant, had to say:
You are quite right that there has been a tough couple of years for plant-based products recently. I think this is definitely an issue which warrants exploring, but I decided not to go into it here because I was pretty space-limited so I wanted to stick to the main question whether Veganuary has been impactful.
There are some graphs, like sales of vegetarian foods, where I didn’t have more recent data, so they stop in 2020-ish. There’s also a couple of places where I trimmed the graphs, because some data, while interesting, was not relevant to the point I wanted to make and made the graph much less clear.
For example, if you extend the ‘Google searches about veganism’ graph beyond 2020, you’ll see that it starts to go down slightly after 2021, but it still peaks in January. Since my point there is that it peaks in January (and it’s not relevant whether Jan 23 < Jan 22) I decided to go with a graph that would make the point most clearly in the limited space!
That said, there are a few things I discovered when researching this piece that didn’t make it into the publication, but are definitely worth looking at further!There does seem to be a peak in interest around 2020⁄21, and subsequent years have been more challenging
There may have been a surge in anti-vegan media since around the same time (the media stories per month graph breaks down massively after 2020, and shows so many stories in non-January months that it makes the rest of the graph impossible to read)
On Maya’s point about displacement, I’d recommend this piece that we wrote about the evidence for displacement: https://bryantresearch.co.uk/insight-items/alternative-meats-demand/
In terms of disentangling Veganuary vs. new years resolutions, I would say that the apparent uptick in vegan activity when Veganuary started around 2014 is some evidence that the campaign itself had an impact.I haven’t done this, but it would also be interesting to compare between countries! As you mentioned, Veganuary has been mostly UK-focused, so it would be interesting to compare interest/increase in veganism in January in the UK vs. the US, for example!Here is the link to the full Slack thread. If you are not a part of the Impactful Animal Advocacy Slack, you can join here.
Yeah I’m surprised this evidence was easily available, but not included in the article. Very interesting. I have tagged the author in a thread about this article on the Impactful Animal Advocacy Slack so I will report back anything he has to say on the matter.
FWIW I do have a lot of respect for the author and this is the first time I’ve found myself puzzled about his output.
@Karthik Tadepalli see my comment below:
UK vegan product sales (where Veganuary is most active) went down overall in 2023. This article from Nov 2023 highlights this fact and attempts to reconcile them in the context of outside economic forces.
However, we do have to consider that meat consumption is increasing and plant-based product sales are decreasing in most countries. So it is still very possible that Veganuary guarded against even worse outcomes in the UK.
Hey thanks for sharing this. This is quite impressive results from Veganuary.
My only criticism is that the article, despite being published in 2024, seems to leave out important context. For example, UK vegan product sales (where Veganuary is most active) went down overall in 2023. This article from Nov 2023 highlights this fact and attempts to reconcile them in the context of outside economic forces. The article also doesn’t mention that per capita meat consumption has been rising in the UK. Is there a reason why these details were left out of the article? They seem like important context to include.
This is a really great new initiative! I have one question and one plug.
Question: What does this mean for the animal charity meta-fundraising intervention (#5 on this list) that was supposed to be on the table for CE’s flagship nonprofit incubation program?
Plug: For folks that are already making grants (from their foundation/DAF/other), please check out CE’s effective grantmaking program. It is best suited for people who are newer to grantmaking and have a lot of initial applications to evaluate. If you don’t have the time to apply and go through the program, just get a copy of their book, How to Launch a High-Impact Foundation.
I would just like to second that AVA is a very welcoming conference that invites open discussion of different tactics and strategies. Impactful Animal Advocacy hosted a meetup at AVA in July 2023 where attendees respectfully shared their criticisms of EA.
An EA meetup was also held at AVA 2022 and was the most well attended meetup that wasn’t on the formal program. So if you come to AVA, you will both have plenty of like-minded folks to talk with and may benefit from learning about other perspectives.Edit 12-6-23: Corrected the post link
This seems like a good place to plug Dr. Michael Greger’s new book, How Not to Age. It has >13k citations and talks about what people can do to slow down aging. Pre-orders are quite important for determining the marketing and ranking of book and this particular book comes out Dec 5 so there are just a couple more days to contribute to pre-order numbers. I’m told his books are quite popular in China, which could be hugely meaningful in combating the rise of animal product consumption in that country. Additionally, in the spirit of ETG, 100% of book sales go to charity!
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!
Yes I am also curious about the difference. I’ve been using them interchangeably.
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
Fish welfare would be a big factor in my model about the net utility of free malaria nets. However, it seems really hard to calculate because we don’t know the average net qualia of fish in these regions. If it is negative, then overfishing may be a positive thing for their welfare.