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
Case Study of EA Global Rejection + Criticisms/Solutions
Animal Advocacy in the Age of AI
Funding Opportunity: AI in LMICs (100k per project, Deadline June 5)
Hi Evie,
I appreciate that you decided to post this.
Tone—I did worry that the tone might read like that. To me, getting into EAG was only instrumental for my greater goal of making the world a better place. I do have a tendency to focus a lot of energy into on perceived barriers to efficicacy so it might have come off like getting into EAG was my final objective. Please feel free to point out various parts of the post that seem to suggest otherwise and I can update them.
Making the world a better place—This is a really difficult thing to measure and there is not a lot of transparency around how they are measuring it. Part of why I made this post was to provide more data points to answer Eli’s other question of, “how costly is rejection?” That needs to be factored into calculating how much good EAG is producing. I just don’t think it is properly accounted for.
Hesitant to criticize—I would agree with Vaidehi and say that there are many factors to consider in how comfortable individuals are to criticize EA organizations. Just to add my own data point, there were a couple people that reviewed this post to that were hesitant to be identified in one way or another out of concern for a negative consequence in the future. Starting 1-2 weeks ago since I found out about my rejection, I have probably talked to 15-20 EA’s and about 80% have expressed wariness about saying/doing something that would upset a large EA organization.
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. :)
Nomadic EA Co-living House for Jan-Apr 2024
AI, Animals, and Digital Minds Conference 2024: Accepting applications and speaker proposals
I took the “unless we can guarantee” part to mean something like, “we need to meet rigorous conditions before we can ethically seed wild animals onto other planets.”
The issue many people are taking with this post is semantic in nature. Having measured/methodical language does help with having more productive conversations. However, focusing on the specific words used detracts from the post’s main point.
Kurzgesagt videos have an outsized influence. This video was released just 17 hours ago and already has 1 million views and is the #2 trending video on YouTube. Additionally, the studio was recommended for almost $3 million in grant money from Open Phil to “support the creation of videos on topics relevant to effective altruism and improving humanity’s long-run future.”
With great power (and grant money), comes great responsibility.
It would have only taken a couple seconds to say something like the following:
“Given the large amount of suffering experienced by animals in the wild on Earth, we have the opportunity to design the ecosystem of this new planet with just flora and microbe species that are carefully selected to support human life.”
That’s just one example of an alternative direction. My main point is that there was a moral opportunity that was lost. This Kurzgesagt video casually spread an idea (seeding wild animals to new planets) that could lead to s-risk and didn’t even mention that the potential for s-risk exists. They also missed the opportunity to spread awareness of the neglected issue of wild animal suffering. It’s a double loss.
Open Phil has also recommended a $3.5 million grant to Wild Animal Initiative, but the potential impact of their funding is now discounted because they missed the opportunity to increase the tractability of wild animal welfare through this Kurzgesagt video.
I think pointing this concern on the EA forum could potentially lead to the issue of wild animal suffering being considered more in future videos, whether it be directly through the creators of Kurzgesagt or indirectly through Open Phil suggesting it to Kurzgesagt. So in the end, I’m glad OP decided to make this post.
Whoa, this is huge! Major props to you and the LIC team for stepping up and taking the fight directly to the big guys like Case Farms. It’s really inspiring to see you using the legal system as a tool to protect animals. I’m on eager to see how this case unfolds!
I’ve just watched the undercover video from the Animal Outlook investigation that your case will be based on, and it’s a stark reminder of the harsh realities we’re fighting against. I think we sometimes lose sight of the actual suffering behind the numbers and strategies we discuss on the EA Forum. So, I strongly recommend everyone here to take a few minutes to watch this video to remind ourselves of what suffering looks like on the ground.
For those who can’t or choose not to watch it, here’s a brief description of what it reveals:
Newly-hatched chicks killed, mangled, maimed or trapped in equipment or machinery that was improperly operated or set up.
Some chicks were not mangled by machines but were deformed, hatched improperly, hatched early and died, etc.
Chicks being roughly handled, thrown, having plastic trays dragged across them and crushing their throats, and driven over with machinery.
Injured or deformed chicks in trays with dead ones left to languish for hours.
Gassing sick or injured birds before dumping them into a macerator to be sliced and rendered; in some instances, dumping fully conscious chicks into the macerator to be ground alive.
Alene, your work is reminding us of the urgency and significance of this cause. Please continue to keep us posted on your progress and victories.
Keep fighting the good fight!
I’ll be doing that pre-order now and I’ll be attending the NYC talk next week!
Thoughts on AI and Animal Ethics:
I think there is a lot of room to align AI with animal ethics in the datasets that we feed into the models. For example, I can’t get Midjourney to produce a picture of a chicken in a battery cage. There either just isn’t enough accurately labeled pictures with metadata scraped from the internet or the pictures (and possibly also writings) about factory farming are somehow filtered from the data sets. I’d really like to investigate this matter further. If anyone reading this wants to help, please shoot me a message!
Hi Maya! Thank you for posting about your experience. I think it is a valuable to have this perspective and I’m sure it wasn’t easy to write and post publicly. I’m not sure if you reached out to Scott, but if you did and made any updates regarding your belief of Kathy Forth’s accusations, then I do think it would be very impactful if you could update your post to reflect that. It seems like this one part of your post triggered a lot of old trauma in the community and likely overshadowed the other concerns contained in the post. I believe an update (no matter in which direction) could really improve trust in the capacity for good-faith discussions around this difficult topic.
Hi Amy,
I’m still trying to figure out how to best use the comments on this forum, but I did make a reply with a clarification on what you said about me not being interested in EAGx. I just want to comment it again here to make sure that it is seen.
“I also want to mention that I am actually open to going to EAx conferences and was just talking to Dion today about my desire to go to EAxSingapore next year. I think I might have said I wasn’t able to go to EAGxVirtual because it is the same weekend as the AVA Summit, which I am a speaker for. It might also have been that I didn’t have a desire to travel so far for a conference at that time and all the EAx conferences that were listed on the events page would have required me to fly since I’m in the US on the east coast. EAxBoston had already passed at that point so the only conference left on the list that would have been readily accessible to me in terms of location was EAG DC. This might have been construed as a lack of interest in attending EAx events in general, but I assure you this is not the case. I do not have an exact memory of what was said, but hopefully, this provides some clarity.”
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.
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. :)
Is it just me or does anyone else feel like this is moving faster and more decisively than other white collar crimes?
I have a suspicion that it is escalating quickly due in large part to having so much public attention.
You are absolutely right. I’ve adjusted the numbers in the post.
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.
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
I can definitely attest to this timeline as someone who does earning to give and had a hard time with EA in 2022. I am so glad you wrote this. We can all do a little bit more to do good in the world and it wouldn’t even need to cost anything. I hope we can come back to sanity. Here’s to third wave EA!
Have you heard of ribon.io? They are a giving platform via an app and have a cool giving game-style concept.
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:
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