Ren Ryba

Re­mind­ing my­self just how awful pain can get (plus, an ex­per­i­ment on my­self)

Longter­mism and an­i­mals: Re­sources + join our Dis­cord com­mu­nity!

How to pub­lish re­search in peer-re­viewed journals

Minor poli­ti­cal par­ties as an ad­vo­cacy strat­egy: The case of an­i­mal politics

Slaugh­ter of farmed seabass and seabream in Europe: Liter­a­ture review

Five tools that make our re­search lives easier

Shrimp welfare in wild-caught fish­eries: New de­tailed re­view article

Re­sources: Pur­su­ing a ca­reer in an­i­mal ad­vo­cacy (even if you’re a longter­mist!)

Writ­ing about my (old) job: Fish­eries sci­en­tist in government

Self-care in an­i­mal ad­vo­cacy: Some re­sources I like

• Ren Ryba 16 Apr 2023 23:28 UTC

  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 16 Jan 2023 2:25 UTC

  21 points

  8 ∶ 0

  in reply to: BrownHairedEevee’s comment on: On Liv­ing Without Idols

  But what if we stopped putting the community on a pedestal? It’s kind of disorienting, but it might be freeing, as we could individually embrace the ideas of EA without feeling the need to defend the EA movement as much.

  This is well-expressed, and puts into words something I’ve been reflecting on a lot lately. One person’s answer to the question “How do we do the most good?” does not always have to mean being deeply involved with other members of the community who are trying to answer that same question.

A di­rect way to re­duce the catch of wild fish

Hu­mane slaugh­ter in Med­iter­ranean sea bass and bream aquaculture

• Ren Ryba 15 Nov 2023 2:02 UTC

  16 points

  2 ∶ 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 18 Mar 2023 5:47 UTC

  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 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 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 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 18 Mar 2023 5:34 UTC

  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.”)