Ren Ryba

Karma: 1,695

“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 30 May 2024 2:15 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: EdoArad’s comment on: Modelling the outcomes of animal welfare interventions: One possible approach to the trade-offs between subjective experiences
Thanks for your feedback and thoughts :)
Re your questions 1 and 2 - Yep I definitely agree that there are better approaches to moral uncertainty. I indeed chose mine for illustrative purposes, as you point out. Moreover, in our application of this framework, the end-line result of “value weighted by framework” just isn’t that important to our decision-making—it’s a small piece of information within a framework that we don’t weight that strongly. For me, the useful information that arises from the moral uncertainty step is seeing whether particular interventions are only strong under particular moral frameworks or whether particular interventions are strong across frameworks. Systematic ways to incorporate a variety of moral frameworks might have value (and I’m certainly not an expert here), but for me the point of these exercises is more to serve as a quantitative guide to qualitative reasoning.
Re your question 3 - yep, you’re right. I noticed this, but didn’t develop the pleasure definitions because it’s pretty rare for positive welfare to be relevant in our day-to-day research/prioritisation (kinda linked to the point above—if an intervention’s strength is conditional on positive welfare being assigned moral importance, then that would serve as an argument against that intervention). In any case, Michael’s comment above links to much better pleasure definitions.
If I understand correctly, one approach you suggest would be to start by saying that, say, one unit of hurtful pain hour is not species-dependent. Then, to account for species differences we would “shrink” the pain-pleasure scale for each animal in some way. Is this a correct interpretation? If so, doesn’t that stand against the behavioral definitions of the pain categories?
Yeah there are a few ways to do it. If you adopt the Rethink approach of welfare ranges, then that should probably be incorporated before the pain scale is used (I think what I just wrote is true given the definition of welfare ranges as used by Rethink, but probably fact check that before you quote me on this!!). I’m still not totally convinced by the welfare range approach (or even by weighting species at all). Again, the point for me is more to ask “Does this intervention depend on lobsters / fly larvae / silk worms / whatever being assigned a particular level of moral importance?” If so, that might be one argument (among many others) that could weaken the intervention.

Ren Ryba 30 May 2024 1:55 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Neil_Dullaghan🔹 ’s comment on: Modelling the outcomes of animal welfare interventions: One possible approach to the trade-offs between subjective experiences
do you intend to make a shareable version of this framework that allows users to plug in their own values (like a spreadsheet template with your toy example)
I have no plans to do so. Generally speaking, I have a preference for users to produce their own spreadsheets, so they can be much more deliberate and conscious about their choices, model details, values for inputs/parameters, etc. This is especially the case for a framework like this, which is naturally speculative and rudimentary.

Ren Ryba 30 May 2024 1:53 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Modelling the outcomes of animal welfare interventions: One possible approach to the trade-offs between subjective experiences
Excellent, thanks. I’d advise any readers to throw my pleasure categories in the dustbin and use those instead. (It’s a case in point for my caution that “In fact, this article was written in early 2023 and posted in early 2024, so there might be important, recent developments that are not included in this article.”!)

Ren Ryba 28 Mar 2024 21:27 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jamie_Harris’s comment on: Global performance indicators: Could they help improve animal welfare policy?
Great suggestion, I’ll adopt for future reports. Thank you :)

Ren Ryba 27 Mar 2024 20:43 UTC
15 points
6 ∶ 0
in reply to: mildlyanonymous’s comment on: AIM Animal Initiatives
I don’t think donors should take much guidance from them, compared to OpenPhil or the EA Animal Welfare Fund, and I would personally wager that CE leading giving in the animal space would be net-negative for the space compared to the status quo (which, to be fair, is very bad already).
If you had total control over all donations in the EA animal space, how would you change things compared to the status quo?
For the main point of your argument, I echo Vasco Grilo’s point that your critiques of specific would be more compelling with justification or sources backing up your views. For any given charity idea, I have no reason to think that the fact that somebody on the internet thinks it’s a bad idea prior to launch correlates with that idea actually being bad. Every new idea has people who are sceptical of it—that doesn’t provide much information one way or the other. I’d be more interested to see a detailed evaluation of each charity in terms of actual impact they may have (or have not) delivered. I can only speak for my experience at Animal Ask, but a couple of recent, detailed evaluations do exist, and we invest a great deal of energy into critically evaluating our own work (and having it evaluated by others).
(As always, my views are my own, not those of my employer.)

Ren Ryba 21 Mar 2024 20:45 UTC
9 points
4 ∶ 0
on: Maternal Health Initiative is Shutting Down
Top notch work. My two favourite things about this community are 1) the willingness to take a serious crack at working on whatever project seems like it will help most people and 2) the integrity to shut down projects that do not meet expectations. Your work exemplifies both.

Ren Ryba 27 Feb 2024 19:30 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Angelina Li’s comment on: How we started our own EA charity (and why we decided to wrap up)
Thank you for your comments :) I can’t speak for Koen, but some rough thoughts:
- At least for me, my view going into this was “we have like a 30% chance to succeed, and it won’t be the ~~first~~ (edit!) last project/charity we take a crack at”. I’m very happy to fail fast, as it means I can move onto the next promising idea.
- Re shrimp paste—my thoughts are basically summarised in this paper that I recently posted to the forum. I’m very very excited about wild shrimp stuff (as I am with farmed shrimp stuff), though shrimp paste specifically seems to have a few tricky hurdles—not a reason not to do it, but a shrimp paste charity would definitely need to spend a bit of time thinking very hard about the theory of change and tractability. Definitely lots of room for impact if navigated well. That said, I think there’s loads of room for new wild shrimp charities to work in Northern Europe, the United States, etc.
- As for your last point, my general strategic view is simply “do the thing that has the highest impact”. I think the problems we are facing are immense and urgent. That said, the specific intervention (installing electric stunners on farmers’ harvest vessels in the Mediterranean) does already have a fair bit of support among farmers for various reasons.

Ren Ryba 20 Dec 2023 21:41 UTC
7 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Benevolent_Rain’s comment on: Shrimp welfare in wild-caught fisheries: New detailed review article
I think it’s definitely worth some thought, though I don’t really have any hot takes beyond what has been discussed in the comments of this post.

Ren Ryba 20 Dec 2023 21:39 UTC
8 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Shrimp welfare in wild-caught fisheries: New detailed review article
Afterword: Are they called “shrimp” or “prawns”?!
This was a great rabbit hole. Some people distinguish between “shrimp” and “prawns” on biological grounds, arguing that some species are only correctly called “shrimp” while others are only correctly called “prawns”. However, I think that the only defensible conclusion is that both “shrimp” and “prawns” are terms for the same thing, and the one to use basically depends on the country you’re in.
During my 2023 visit to London, when I arrived at the tattoo studio for my appointment to get a shrimp tattoo, the first thing the artist asked was: “So, what’s actually the difference between a shrimp and a prawn?” I realised that even with my expertise in marine ecology and shrimp welfare, I had no clue.
The Wiktionary entry for “shrimp” gives this definition: “Any of many swimming, often edible, crustaceans, chiefly of the infraorder Caridea or the suborder Dendrobranchiata, with slender legs, long whiskers and a long abdomen.”
The Wiktionary entry for “prawn” gives these definitions:
1. A crustacean of the suborder Dendrobranchiata.
2. (Commonwealth) A crustacean, sometimes confused with shrimp.
3. (Australia, slang) A fool, an idiot. (!!!)
Both refer to the suborder Dendrobranchiata, and “shrimp” adds on the infraorder Caridea. These are two non-overlapping groups that are both contained within decapod crustaceans (see above in this post—Dendrobranchiata includes both penaeid and sergestid shrimp).
Those same entries also tell us a bit about the etymology:
- Shrimp: From Middle English schrimpe (“shrimp, puny person”), ultimately from Proto-Germanic *skrimpaz (“shrivelled”) (compare Middle High German schrimpf (“a scratch, minor wound”), Norwegian skramp (“thin horse, thin man”)), from Proto-Germanic *skrimpaną (“to shrivel”)...
- Prawn: First attested early 1400s as various Middle English forms prayne, prane, praune, and prawne, which present no clear cognates in languages other than English. The forms suggest a hypothetical Old English form *prægn, where *æg would have evolved into Middle English *ay, but it is unclear if the word is of Germanic origin, from another European language, or loaned from a substrate.
It seems fair to say that “shrimp” and “prawn” both originated with the arbitrariness and whimsy typical of word origins, and that both terms are defined today to refer to mostly the same group of animals.
I’ve seen some people claim that “shrimp” and “prawn” are defined biologically, with particular morphological traits distinguishing between them—such distinctions tend to make reference to minute characteristics of the gills, the shell, or how the legs are spaced. If you accept the above definitions, it does admittedly seem to be true that animals in the infraorder Caridea can be called “shrimp” but not “prawns”. Perhaps biologists follow this usage. But I think it’s fair to doubt that the general public, or even farmers, are in the habit of checking the gill characteristics or reading the latest taxonomy papers before they risk using the wrong word.
It seems far more plausible to me that there is a much simpler rule: people in some countries say “shrimp”, while people in other countries say “prawn”. I’d bet that Australians would say “prawn” even if you show them an animal from the infraorder Caridea. (We Australians in particular get sensitive about this.) There’s even a lobster that is called a “prawn” in the United Kingdom—a lobster! Furthermore, both taxonomy and word meanings change over time, and classifications of animals are frequently revised, so I’d be wary of any strict definition based on taxonomy. This is basically the same conclusion reached by Gillett and by Rethink Priorities.
I found this gem published in a 1969 taxonomic study: “There has been much confusion in the usage of terms prawns and shrimps. At the Prawn Symposium of the Indo-Pacific Fisheries Council held at Tokyo in 1955 it was decided that the term prawn should be applied to the Penaeids, Pandalids and Palaemonids, while the use of the term shrimp should be restricted to the smaller forms belonging to other families. According to this most of the forms of economic importance here are to be termed prawns.”
I love the idea of a roomful of biologists in the 1950s thinking that the best thing to do in Toyko is to have a heated debate about marine invertebrate terminology. And I thought I needed to get out more.
Now, do not get me started on the difference between a pigeon and a dove.

Ren Ryba 19 Dec 2023 21:37 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Shrimp paste might cause more animal deaths than any other food product. Who’s working on this?
The review article on wild shrimp fisheries (which I mentioned in a previous discussion in the comments) is now up here :)

Ren Ryba 24 Nov 2023 20:16 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Niklas Lehmann’s comment on: How to publish research in peer-reviewed journals
Thank you, fixed.
I did search for related articles on the EA Forum before posting mine, but I missed that one. The irony!! I’ll add a link to that post in this article.

Ren Ryba 15 Nov 2023 2:02 UTC
22 points
3 ∶ 0
on: It’s OK to eat shrimp: EAs Make Invalid Inferences About Fish Qualia and Moral Patienthood
There is a considerable academic and scientific literature that engages with many of these points. It would make sense to engage with the literature on that post, as there are numerous papers that have debated and tested many of these points in detail. You mention experiments, but there are many studies that conduct such experiments. Have you reviewed these studies and found them to be missing something, e.g. having a consistent methodological flaw or missing a key indicator of consciousness?
If you think that the authors of those papers have not considered these points (e.g. if you think one indicator of qualia/sentience/moral patienthood is more valid than other indicators; or if you think there are specific methodological flaws in existing studies), then would it not be better to publish a scientific paper on this topic or at least conduct a more thorough literature review? If your argument is robust to criticism, and it withstands scrutiny when you show how your argument addresses shortcomings in the existing academic literature, then you may indeed cause society (and the EA community) to make more informed decisions about which lives to improve. I would be glad to work with you to write and publish this paper.
I think your argument would be more compelling if you listed the specific assumptions in the specific papers on the topic of invertebrate and/or fish sentience (whether academic, such as Birch et al 2021 or similar reviews for fish and insects, or the work by Rethink you are critical of) and then, point-by-point, made the argument that those assumptions are false. That would allow readers to more clearly see whether, and on which specific points, you are diverging from existing thinking. For what it’s worth, there are papers that have criticised those reviews I mentioned on various grounds, so this process would also help readers to see whether your criticism is adding anything new to existing debates and whether your points have been made before in the literature (as this has been an area of research and debate for decades). This also applies to the question of “burden of proof”, which I think was raised in another comment thread. It is well-accepted that investigations about the subjective experiences of non-human animals necessarily depend on the weight of evidence, rather than one particular smoking gun.
And re: the experiment on empathy—there are a number of studies that have looked at brain activity in various social situations in a few different types of fish. Do none of these studies meet your standards? If so, why not, and would your proposed experiment be an improvement on experiments that have been conducted already?
The title of the post is (“It’s OK to eat shrimp”) doesn’t really follow from the text of the article. There are many reasons, whether precautionary or strategic, why we might think it wise to spend resources on improving particular lives even if we, “by default, not consider that things they don’t expect to talk about qualia can have qualia.” The article seems more to support a title along the lines of “we should be cautious about attributing qualia to shrimp”.
I agree with the point asking for more high-quality studies, which would be a non-controversial view among most academics who research in this area.
(I am a marine biologist and familiar with the literature on fish sentience and shrimp sentience, both of which are pretty complex bodies of literature.)
(edited a bunch for focus and clarity)

Ren Ryba 1 Nov 2023 21:53 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Fai’s comment on: Shrimp paste might cause more animal deaths than any other food product. Who’s working on this?
I’ll have detailed information in the report I mentioned—looking into this specific question over the next few days. (Though I’m being careful to take my time with it, as this is quite a horrific topic even compared to the topics I normally research.)

Ren Ryba 31 Oct 2023 3:10 UTC
15 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Shrimp paste might cause more animal deaths than any other food product. Who’s working on this?
I’m currently writing an in-depth report on wild-caught shrimp fisheries. It’ll focus more on global distribution (e.g. by species and country) and common industry practices, with a list of options for wild shrimp advocacy. I expect it’ll be done within a couple of weeks.
I’d definitely be keen to see people advocating for wild-caught shrimp welfare. I won’t be working on shrimp advocacy myself after finishing the report (though I do think it is an extremely impactful opportunity—if it were up to me, I’d put a large proportion of the movement’s resources into shrimp welfare).

Ren Ryba 26 Oct 2023 23:36 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: James Faville’s comment on: The hidden complexity of “moral circles”
Yep I agree with all of this. I think the important thing for discussions like these is that, as you propose in your article, retiring the term “moral circle” in favour of more specific hypotheses (as we’re discussing) will facilitate more rigorous evaluation of claims and therefore better decision-making.

Ren Ryba 26 Oct 2023 0:07 UTC
6 points
1 ∶ 0
on: The hidden complexity of “moral circles”
Thank you for this high-quality and thoughtful post. I found myself agreeing with most of the key claims.
Overall, I’d actually rather use the term “moral circle” less, and instead focus on finer-grained consequences of work to benefit groups like nonhuman animals or artificial sentience. [...] These all point to important flawed assumptions in standard framings of the moral circle, and may merit retiring the term “moral circle” altogether to prevent confusion.
I strongly agree here. I think it’s a little dangerous that the “moral circle” was introduced as a metaphor, but it has been unwittingly applied as an actual political strategy (“moral circle expansion”) without going through the intermediate process of rigorously testing whether a “moral circle” is actually a consistently measurable thing that exists (whether in an individual’s mind or society’s broad attitudes).
For example, I’ve noticed in my work that some people assume that “moral circle expansion” is a benefit of some animal advocacy campaigns (e.g. fish welfare) and not others (e.g. dog welfare). For any proposed psychological or social construct, wouldn’t we need to subject that construct to rigorous testing before making it the target of political and advocacy strategies? It might be more constructive to discuss these views (as you suggest) in terms like “advocating for fish welfare, rather than dog welfare, might have longer-term effects on people’s attitudes/behaviours towards other animals like shrimp”, which is more clearly a hypothesis that can be debated, tested, and falsified.

Ren Ryba 25 Oct 2023 23:52 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Eze Paez’s comment on: Party Politics for Animal Advocacy: Part 2: Establishing groups across or within major political parties
Thank you very much, I would love to hear anything you learn :)

Ren Ryba 24 Oct 2023 10:14 UTC
15 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Electric Shrimp Stunning: a Potential High-Impact Donation Opportunity
TL;DR: I think donations to SWP may be in the conversation for the single most cost-effective opportunity available to humanity.
Just saw this comment by chance when doing some of my usual late-night reading about shrimp welfare, and thought I’d reply because somebody mentioned me on the internet!
I’ve thought about this specific question (weightings between the different pain categories) at length, and there’s quite a bit of uncertainty as with any esoteric area of philosophy. I don’t put that much weight on my own experience that Michael described (as these decisions are too important to rely on my own experiences). I know a few people are thinking about this, so I’ve seen what various people have written about this; a small amount of academic research; some informal surveys; and a fair amount of philosophy. I think that any discussion of this topic needs to acknowledge this uncertainty. I think in a couple of years, we’ll be in a much more informed position about the trade-offs between pain categories, perhaps with the exception of excruciating pain.
I’ve also given shrimp welfare and shrimp stunning some detailed thought (and my colleagues will know just how critical and conservative I am when conducting research!).
That said:
- I agree that 6.67x (disabling:hurtful) and 5x (excruciating:disabling) are conservative.
- In my work, I use many sets of weightings, and I assign a rough probability to each one. The weighted mean is quite close to those above numbers. But averages obscure, which is why I use a set of weightings to arrive at a more informed judgement about any particular decision.
- I think there’s a >30% chance that disabling:hurtful is above 15x (rather than 6.67x) and that excruciating:disabling is above 100x (rather than 5x). I also think the idea that excruciating is infinitely worse should be taken seriously.
Overall, given this thinking as well as my own detailed research into various aspects of the animal advocacy movement, I think donations to SWP may be in the conversation for the single most cost-effective opportunity available to humanity today, possibly ever (subject to usual moral uncertainty stuff around the big worldview questions, of course). Some healthy uncertainty around the pain weightings doesn’t change that.
Also, might be worth saying that if anybody strongly disagrees with this claim, I’d be keen to collaborate on a cost-effectiveness analysis of SWP and some other highly cost-effective opportunity (especially outside of the animal space) to see where the cruxes are.

Ren Ryba 11 Oct 2023 5:41 UTC
9 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ben Stevenson’s comment on: Meat consumption and production in developing countries: who bucks the trend?
Thanks for the positive feedback :)
I haven’t looked in detail, but there are three main differences between our analysis and the analysis of Whitton et al:
- We included fish, while Whitton et al did not.
- We calculated the slope, while Whitton et al (I think) calculated the percentage difference between the first year and the last year.
- We used data from 1960-2020, while Whitton et al used data from 1990-2017.
(Our analysis was also done on a per capita basis.)
More generally, this raises an important point regarding our analysis. Our analysis was conducted at a global scale. The purpose of our report was to search for countries with interesting trends—then, if any interesting countries are identified, we can zoom in and look at those countries in more detail. If you (or anybody else) is interested in any country in particular, the first step would be to obtain and examine more detailed data that is specific to that country. When you look at the level of a specific country, the trends that we identify may or may not hold up (as we mentioned, we deliberately cast a wide net, as we’d rather have false positives than false negatives). Some countries in our analysis were edge cases, where small changes in our methods may well have ruled those countries in or out. I suspect Nigeria is one of these cases.

Ren Ryba 9 Oct 2023 23:12 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: JamesÖz’s comment on: Party Politics for Animal Advocacy: Part 1: Animal-focused minor political parties
Yep, that’s probably the case in some of these countries. I don’t think such laws would be fatal to this approach in most jurisdictions. In countries where such laws exist, there are probably solutions, though the best solution would need to be informed by on-the-ground knowledge. From the perspective of party politics as a whole, it is relatively small amounts of money that we’re talking about.

Ren Ryba

Afterword: Are they called “shrimp” or “prawns”?!