Ren Ryba

Karma: 1,866

“The easiest pain to bear is someone else’s.”

My research can be found at:

Animal Ask research page
Google Scholar
This EA Forum profile page

About me:

Ren (they/them), living on Kaurna Land (South Australia)
Preferred form of communication is email: info (at) animalask (dot) org. I don’t check my DMs on the Forum.
My work focuses on animal advocacy.
I have experience in ecology, fisheries science, and statistics from my time in academia and government. I enjoy thinking about politics and social justice.
I like soccer!

I recently changed my surname (formerly Springlea) 😊

Ren Ryba Oct 9, 2023, 11:09 PM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: JamesÖz 🔸’s comment on: Party Politics for Animal Advocacy: Part 1: Animal-focused minor political parties
This report will probably be published in a few weeks. As a teaser, it looks like there are low-hanging fruit for working with mainstream parties (specifically for animal advocacy) in: Australia (+ some of its states/territories), India (+ its states), South Africa (+ its provinces), Sweden, Germany (+ its states), Hungary, Indonesia, New Zealand, Norway, and numerous states of the USA. I haven’t yet estimated the impact, though I’m near-certain that the animal advocacy movement would benefit from participating in party politics and/or legislative lobbying more than it currently is in most/almost all jurisdictions.

Ren Ryba Oct 8, 2023, 11:50 PM
1 point
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in reply to: emre kaplan🔸’s comment on: Party Politics for Animal Advocacy: Part 1: Animal-focused minor political parties
Thank you, fixed :)

Ren Ryba Sep 28, 2023, 10:57 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: lukasj10🔸’s comment on: Resources: Pursuing a career in animal advocacy (even if you’re a longtermist!)
Thanks, fixed :)

Ren Ryba Sep 25, 2023, 11:46 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Meat consumption and production in developing countries: who bucks the trend?
I would also add that I have a colleague in India (@ishankhire) who is building on this report with an analysis of Indian states. The analysis is not yet complete, but it seems promising—it looks like it might indeed give us some useful policy lessons for ways that jurisdictions can develop while keeping intensification of animal agriculture relatively low.

Ren Ryba Aug 9, 2023, 12:06 AM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: JP Addison🔸’s comment on: EA Forum feature suggestion thread
Thanks, this is cool and I’ll use it.
I think more broadly, my comment is roughly equally motivated by three main things: my own psychology; concerns about an author’s karma influencing readers’ subconscious evaluations of that author’s posts and opinions; and, specifically for people who work full-time in the EA community, a vague sense that it feels a bit strange to have a numeric score attached to what is in many ways a professional, and often philosophical, body of work. (The third point of course has an analogy with academic research, but I think that’s also a problem with academia.) But since you gave me a solution, I’m personall happy. Thanks again.

Ren Ryba Aug 7, 2023, 1:22 AM
1 point
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on: EA Forum feature suggestion thread
I would love an option to switch off the total karma count from one’s profile. I’ve found myself noticing that it can occasionally create perverse incentives.

Ren Ryba Jun 19, 2023, 1:38 AM
2 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ubuntu’s comment on: EA Forum feature suggestion thread
Strongly agree. I came on this thread to suggest this.
I have posted on the forum before, but I have recently developed some health problems (fatigue etc) that mean I can no longer afford the energy necessary to participate in comment discussions. This is the main reason why I am no longer posting. I would be far more incentivised to make future posts if I could turn off the options for people to make comments where I deem that comments would not add much value to the post (i.e. I would use this feature on lifestyle suggestions or resource recommendations, but not on philosophical hot takes).

Ren Ryba Apr 21, 2023, 5:56 AM
1 point
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in reply to: Aaron_Scher’s comment on: A freshman year during the AI midgame: my approach to the next year
Thank you, I appreciate you taking the time to construct this convincing and high-quality comment. I’ll reflect on this in detail.
I did do some initial scoping work for longtermist animal stuff last year, of which AGI-enabled mass suffering was a major part of course, so might be time to dust that off.

Ren Ryba Apr 16, 2023, 11:28 PM
28 points
6 ∶ 0
on: A freshman year during the AI midgame: my approach to the next year
Thank you for this post. I work in animal advocacy rather than AI, but I’ve been thinking about some similar effects of transformative AI on animal advocacy.
I’ve been shocked by the progress of AI, so I’ve been thinking it might be necessary to update how we think about the world in animal advocacy. Specifically, I’ve been thinking roughly along the lines of “There’s a decent chance that the world will be unrecognisable in ~15-20 years or whatever, so we should probably be less confident in our ability to reliably impact the future via policies, so interventions that require ~15-20 years to pay off (e.g. cage-free campaigns, many legislative campaigns) may end up having 0 impact.” This is still a hypothesis, and I might make a separate forum post about it.
It struck me that this is very similar to some of the points you make in this post.
In your post, you’ve said you’re planning to act as though there are 4 years of the “AI midgame” and 3 years of the “AI endgame”. If I translated this into animal advocacy terms, this could be equivalent to something like “we have ~7 years to deliver (that is, realise) as much good as we can for animals”. (The actual number of years isn’t so important, this is just for illustration.)
Would you agree with this? Or would you have some different recommendation for animal advocacy people who share your views about AI having the potential to pop off pretty soon?
(Some context as to my background views: I think preventing suffering is more important than generating happiness; I think the moral values of animals is comparable to humans, e.g. within 0-2 orders of magnitude depending on species; I don’t think creating lives is morally good; I think human extinction is bad because it could directly cause suffering and death, but not so much because of its effects on loss of potential humans who do not yet exist; I think S-risks are very very bad; I’m skeptical that humans will go extinct in the near future; I think society is very fragile and could be changed unrecognisably very easily; I’m concerned more about misuse of AI than any deliberate actions/goals of an AI itself; I have a great deal of experience in animal advocacy and zero experience in anything AI-related. The person reading this certainly doesn’t need to agree with any of these views, but I wanted to highlight my background views so that it’s clear why I believe both “AI might pop off really soon” and “I still think helping animals is the best thing I can do”, even if that latter belief isn’t common among the AI community.)

Ren Ryba Mar 18, 2023, 5:47 AM
16 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Reminding myself just how awful pain can get (plus, an experiment on myself)
Thanks everybody for the discussion on this post. I’m glad to see it has inspired some thought and debate, and that other people are sharing their experiences.
I’ve reached my limit for engaging with these comments, so now I need to return to my main tasks (doing my best to prevent suffering + self-care) and I won’t reply to future comments (but happy to correct objective errors). Thanks again everyone.

Ren Ryba Mar 18, 2023, 5:34 AM
11 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Molly’s comment on: Reminding myself just how awful pain can get (plus, an experiment on myself)
Thanks for sharing this. It sounds like you found childbirth to be qualitatively more awful than your other experiences? I definitely agree with one of your takeaways—the fact that some experiences have been rates as even worse than this on the pain scale, for me, serves as a very strong motivation to reduce suffering in any way I can.
(I did ask around a fair bit before posting this article, and got the opinions of a number of people close to me who have gone through different painful experiences, both acute and chronic, many of which are mentioned on the pain scale graph. This is part of why I point out that the PRI scores I report aren’t supposed to be taken as scientific or literal, emphasise that it’s n=1, I’m untrained, definitely only moderate level, etc. But it does reinforce my point, which is basically “wow, all I did was mess around with a tattoo gun for an afternoon and it was this bad, that’s all the more reason to do as much as we can to prevent others from experiencing actual pain.”)

Ren Ryba Mar 17, 2023, 8:21 AM
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: LGS’s comment on: Reminding myself just how awful pain can get (plus, an experiment on myself)
I mostly agree with what you’ve said, and I think that your view and my view are pretty much consistent. My main message isn’t really “physical pain is worse than other types of suffering”, rather: “I found even moderate physical pain to be really, really awful, which suggests that it’s probably really, really morally urgent to prevent both extreme physical pain and other types of extreme suffering”.
The hedonistic focus probably arose from the fact that I can subject myself to physical pain quite easily, but less so other types of suffering. I mention this in the limitations section.

Ren Ryba Mar 17, 2023, 7:31 AM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: riceissa’s comment on: Reminding myself just how awful pain can get (plus, an experiment on myself)
Sure, makes sense. Thanks for your reply.
If I wanted to prove or support the claim:
“given the choice between preventing extreme suffering and giving people more [pleasure/happiness/tranquility/truth], we should pick the latter option”
How would you recommend I go about proving or supporting that claim? I’d be keen to read or experience the strongest possible evidence for that claim. I’ve read a fair bit about pleasure and happiness, but for the other, less-tangible values (tranquility and truth) I’m less familiar with any arguments.
It would be a major update for me if I found evidence strong enough to convince me that giving people more tranquility and truth (and pleasure and happiness in any practical setting, under which I include many forms of longtermism) could be good enough to forego preventing extreme suffering. This would have major implications for my current work and my future directions, so I would like to understand this view as well as I can in case I’m wrong and therefore missing out on something important.

Ren Ryba Mar 17, 2023, 5:22 AM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Reminding myself just how awful pain can get (plus, an experiment on myself)
I’m happy to consider this further if there are people who would find value in the outcome (particularly if there are people who would change decisions based on the outcome). I think it would be tractable to design something safe and legal, whether through psychedelics or some other tool.

Ren Ryba Mar 17, 2023, 2:57 AM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Geoffrey Miller’s comment on: Reminding myself just how awful pain can get (plus, an experiment on myself)
Ah I wasn’t aware Schmidt had recently died. That’s a shame, he must have died after I wrote the first draft of this article. I read his book (The Sting of the Wild) which helped inform this article. Thanks for sharing this, I’ll read the obituary.

Ren Ryba Mar 17, 2023, 2:50 AM
9 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: riceissa’s comment on: Reminding myself just how awful pain can get (plus, an experiment on myself)
I think this is a fair point, if you believe that pleasure can outweigh really awful suffering in practice. I do not currently believe this, for all practical purposes. Basically, my position is that these other human values—while somewhat valuable—are simply trivial in the face of the really awful suffering that is very common in our world.
Do you know of any ways I could experimentally expose myself to extreme amounts of pleasure, happiness, tranquility, and truth?
I’d be willing to expose myself to whatever you suggest, plus extreme suffering, to see if this changes my mind. Or we can work together to design a different experimental setup if you think that would produce better evidence.

Ren Ryba Mar 16, 2023, 10:53 AM
5 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Matt Goodman’s comment on: Reminding myself just how awful pain can get (plus, an experiment on myself)
Thanks for your positive feedback :)
I haven’t thought too hard about specific charities. Since I work for a relatively young charity startup, I don’t take a very high salary and it wouldn’t make sense to increase my salary just to donate.
If I had a large amount of money to donate, I’d probably pick an animal advocacy charity with a strong, well-backed theory of change that focuses on reforms that a) are large-scale and b) prevent high-intensity suffering. Examples of this might include charities working on cage-free hen reforms, the Better Chicken Commitment, or fish slaughter reform. I suspect Fish Welfare Initiative and Shrimp Welfare Project would also fare well from this perspective.
I haven’t researched this question specifically, so there’s a good chance my specific interventions/charities would change with further consideration.
Since my day job is in animal advocacy, I’m less informed about human charities. Other people probably have better-informed opinions on human charities for preventing extreme suffering than I could. A fair few people have written on the EA Forum about the importance of preventing extreme suffering, so those people might have some well-informed recommendations.

Ren Ryba Mar 16, 2023, 10:00 AM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Reminding myself just how awful pain can get (plus, an experiment on myself)
Yes this should probably say “Hurtful”. In my personal interpretation of the PainTrack categories, doing a day of work would only really be possible at “Hurtful” or less.

Ren Ryba Mar 16, 2023, 9:56 AM
6 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Reminding myself just how awful pain can get (plus, an experiment on myself)
They felt awful, but I kept going with them voluntarily (albeit with some breaks). Under the definition of Excruciating-level pain, that would typically be impossible: “the threshold of pain under which many people choose to take their lives rather than endure the pain”. So, there is no way that pain could be Excruciating-level, even though it hurt really bad.

Ren Ryba Mar 8, 2023, 10:31 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Animal welfare certified meat is not a stepping stone to meat reduction or abolition
Thanks a lot for this post. I think it’s really great to inform this debate with new data and a clever framework, as you’ve done—it’s a useful contribution, and I hope similar experiments get conducted in other contexts.
Not directly related to this article, but I have a few broad thoughts on this general topic:
- When I began working in animal advocacy, I was definitely on the abolitionist end of the spectrum. Since then, I’ve developed a much more diversified view. In general, the debate between abolitionism vs welfarism a) is very speculative, in that we have limited data to go on; and b) will profoundly affect the lives of millions or billions of animals living in extreme suffering. I think these are great reasons to have humility in either position.
- Even if we never abolish animal exploitation (which I dearly hope we do), welfare reforms can bring about major improvements in farmed animals’ lives. For example, Saulius’s comment here briefly shows how much suffering can be reduced by corporate campaigns on broiler chickens. I’m doing similar work at the moment, and I’ve arrived at similar findings to those of Saulius.
I’ve also enjoyed these two sources on this topic, which caused major updates in my thinking:
- EA Forum article ‘A new framing to replace “Welfarism vs. Abolitionism”’
- Academic paper ‘Transition rather than Revolution: The Gradual Road towards Animal Legal Personhood through the Legislature’