My name is Saulius Šimčikas. I’m currently on a career break. Previously, I worked as an animal advocacy researcher at Rethink Priorities for four years. I also did some earning-to-give as a programmer, did some EA community building, and was a research intern at Animal Charity Evaluators. I love meditation and talking about emotions.
Personal feedback form: https://forms.gle/3QBCJ3wsJnjPPWqF6 It can be anonymous. I especially welcome negative feedback.
I remember talking about screwworms with @kcudding and @Holly_Elmore, I don’t know how deeply they looked into it but maybe they could comment.
As I understand it, all this data about the impact of events is collected through surveys that are attendees fill immediately after an event. I think that this might introduce some biases. For example, maybe attendees get excited about new connections they made and think that they will collaborate but then never do. If that’s not done already, one way to somewhat mitigate this bias would be to also ask at the annual EA survey about the impact of EA events (that year, and in their lifetime). I wonder if conclusions like the one in this article would hold up.
I have a nitpicky comment that may not be very important in the end.
It seems that estimates of how long cage-free and caged hens live and how many eggs they lay are partially based on Norwood and Lusk 2011. I once did that as well but I was told that the book describes small scale cage-free systems that don’t use optimal genetics. Large scale cage-free systems (which perhaps didn’t exist at the time to the same extent) are likely much more similar to current caged systems, especially after industry will have some time to optimize things. If it was the case that caged hens lay 467 eggs while cage-free eggs lay 325, I would be concerned about the higher number of pullets (hens who are too young to lay eggs) needed to produce the same number of eggs. I see that in your estimates you use a “Length of laying” variable, not a “lifespan” variable. I don’t know if “length of laying” includes the pullet phase, which according to industry breed specification requirements like this lasts about 17 weeks. If it doesn’t include the pullet phase, then you may be implicitly assuming that hens don’t suffer during the pullet phase or something. I failed to understand how exactly your estiamte works so I’m not sure. Anyway, I don’t know what the differences between cage-free and caged actually are. I was told by a vet that cage-free and caged birds have the same lifespan nowadays and saw a few indications that same breeds are used. But I also saw this article that claims that caged hens lay 500 eggs, while cage-free lay 420-430 eggs. I don’t know whom to believe. I can send you an unpublished document where I examined a few more sources but I’m still confused about it.
Anyway, in a way, this stuff doesn’t really matter that much for the estimate. Cage-free reforms may or may not increase the number of hens by say 5% (I’m saying a random number here because I don’t remember. If anyone’s decisions depend on this, I can try to write something about it). But if we use Welfare Footprint’s estimates, then it follows that the switch to cage-free reduces the suffering by like 60%, so that 5% doesn’t have that much impact on the final estimate. The biggest uncertainty is the years of impact. You chose 4 years but you could’ve also chosen 40 years and then everything would’ve been 10 times more cost-effective.
Thank you very much for doing this. However, I’m surprised by the claim that “research organizations have trouble filling a senior-level researcher talent gap”. I’ve worked as an animal advocacy researcher in EA orgs for five years and had the title of senior researcher. I am looking for a researcher job right now and I can’t even find anywhere to apply for, at least without a PhD. Well, GiveWell is hiring but I don’t want to work in global health. I was loosely following animal welfare researcher and non-longtermist generalist researcher open jobs at EA orgs this whole year and that was the situation most of the time. I found maybe 7 jobs I could apply for (although I wasn’t genuinely looking for a job until now so I might have missed some). Most of them would’ve required me to compromise on what topics I work for or where I live. In two cases where I talked to people advertising these jobs, I was told that there was a lot of competition (I wasn’t rejected from these jobs so I wasn’t told that as an excuse). For an animal welfare job that required to do cost-effectiveness analyses, people with a background in cost-effectiveness analyses in global health applied. I basically concluded that at least for now, I either need to make up my own topics and apply to EA funds to research them, or to change my career. So I was a bit surprised by this claim. But I don’t want to overstate my surprise, perhaps the situation in global health, mental health, and biosecurity is different.
These were just some very conservative guesses rather than estimates. Also, I think that the effect depends on circumstances:
In the case of eggs and Prop 12, by the time it was passed, most companies in the U.S. had already committed to only use cage-free eggs, often by 2025 or 2026. So I guess you could say that Prop 12 made California do it sooner (2022) and hence sped it up (although it’s unclear if that is even a good thing in itself).[1] But a more important effect of Prop 12 is that it increased the probability that California and the whole U.S. will go cage-free in 2020s, and this is how I might model the impact of Prop 12. That is, I’d probably ask various people about what would they expect future cage-free rates to be with and without Prop 12.
For some other animals, I imagine that there were no corporate commitments or anything? The situation in such cases seems very different.
According to King (2019b), some producers react to cage-free commitments by building new cage-free facilities, but not destroying old conventional caged houses which don’t yet need to be replaced. This could increase the overall amount of hens (and suffering) in the short term. O’Keefe (2020) claims that between December 2016 and December 2019, “U.S. egg producers added 33.2 million head of cage-free hens, the number of cage-housed hens only declined by 4.3 million head.” Even if the number of caged hens will decline eventually, this trend during the transition period is worrying.
Nice post. It reminds me that I want to consider this option. By the way, someone once tried to very roughly estimate the cost-effectiveness of volunteering at a suicide hotline here.
You may know this already, but No Means No Worldwide works with children and adolescents. E.g., the mean age of girls in this study is 12.3 years. Founders Pledge evaluated them (see here for a summary and here for a full report) and provisionally recommended them. I don’t know if the person is particularly looking into tackling sexual abuse of younger children, but this charity seems worth mentioning as an option.
I want to illustrate the “larger organizations are much more risk averse” point. When I worked at Rethink Priorities, I felt less freedom to publicly share unpolished and controversial thoughts because that could hurt Rethink Priorities reputation. And the bigger Rethink Priorities grew, the more there was to lose, the more this became a problem. Because of this, articles that I didn’t think were very promising but worth publishing (e.g., aquatic noise) took more time to finish as every claim went through more scrutiny than it would be optimal if I was an independent researcher. Also, I never publicly shared my preliminary findings on things that I didn’t think were promising because it would’ve taken too much time. Finally, it was more difficult to express some bold opinions like Wild Animal Welfare is not very promising because it could hurt Rethink Priorities’ Wild Animal Welfare funding and relationships with some other organizations.
Note that aggressively seeking a serious monogamous relationship within EA is also problematic. For example, it might be a bad idea to ask out every other EA woman you had a nice 30 minute conversation with (e.g., see this comment).
Some EA parties (including some EA Global afterparties) involve cuddle puddles or hot tubs. The post made me wonder if that is also problematic. I’ve never heard anyone say that but some people might feel pressure to comply in order to fit in and possibly make important connections. It also probably increases the probability of various problems like touching without consent. Such things might also repulse some new commers from EA, especially after all the scandals. Perhaps people should consider whether such things are appropriate for a given gathering a bit more?
I imagine that few people would say that it’s actively harmful to try to decrease s-risks to digital minds (especially when it involves trying to prevent escalating conflicts, sadism, and retributivism). Most people would say it’s just a waste of money and effort. Most people agree that it’s important that animals used for food are well cared for. Not everyone votes for welfare improvements in ballot initiatives but a significant proportion of people do. And if we had infinite money, I don’t think anyone would mind improving conditions for farmed animals. But if there was a ballot initiative asking “shall we actively try to decrease wild animal numbers?”, I imagine that almost everyone would passionately oppose it. I don’t feel comfortable working on things most people would passionately oppose (and not just because it’s a waste of resources, but because they think that our desired outcome is bad). It also makes it difficult to work on it as an EA cause and it could repulse some people from EA. But I now weakened (or changed) my position on reducing populations after realizing that it doesn’t always to lead to more environmental issues (see this comment). Also, people might not mind if we are only decreasing populations of tiny animals.
Hi again Brian. I agree that your vision for the WAW movement is different from what WAW organizations are currently doing. I criticized the latter and don’t have a strong opinion on your vision of focusing on very small animals and reducing populations. I said that I don’t want to reduce populations partly because that usually includes reducing plant productivity which in turn causes more climate change, which might increase s-risks, x-risks, poverty, etc. But perhaps some interventions in your list could reduce populations without causing more environmental issues. I hadn’t considered them because they didn’t qualify for my WAW intervention search, and I had forgotten about them.
I’m unsure how one would go about lobbying for these things. I’d be a bit afraid of PR risks too. Imagine a farmer lobby figuring out that the real motivation for people funding lobbying against their irrigation subsidies are weirdos from Effective Altruism who are worried about small invertebrate suffering. That could cause some bad press for EA. I also think that the few potential WAW funders I talked to wouldn’t have funded such interventions but there could be other funders.
Sorry, I still plan to look into microbes someday but now I don’t know when I’ll get to it anymore. I suddenly got quite busy and I am extremely slow at reading. For now I’ll just say this: I criticized the WAW movement as I currently see it. That is, a WAW movement that doesn’t focus on microbes, nor on decreasing wild animal populations. I currently simply don’t have an opinion about a WAW movement that would focus on such things. There were some restrictions on the kind of short-term interventions I could recommend in my intervention search. Interventions that would help microbes (or help wild populations just by reducing their populations) simply didn’t qualify.
Ok, let’s consider this for each type of farmed animal welfare intervention:
Humane slaughter of farmed animals and wild-caught fish. I’m guessing that it doesn’t impact WAW that much.
Reducing animal product production. E.g., diet change advocacy, meat alternatives. Such interventions increase wild populations a lot. If you believe that wild animals live bad lives (which is questionable but I’d give it a 65% probability), then it follows that reducing meat production is likely bad for short-term animal welfare. I personally still think that reducing meat production is good but not for short-term animal welfare reasons. For example, it reduces climate change. According to 80,000 hours, climate change could “destabilise society, destroy ecosystems, put millions into poverty, and worsen other existential threats such as engineered pandemics, risks from AI, or nuclear war.” But I probably wouldn’t myself fund reducing animal product production, at least not with money dedicated to animal welfare, partly due to WAW issues.
Improving farmed animal welfare. Raising higher welfare animals usually requires more resources and more land.[1] So it probably decreases wild animal populations (which is maybe good for WAW?) but causes a bit more of those environmental problems. But I’d say that if environmental costs are ever worth it, this is the case (especially for chickens because they don’t require that much resources per individual either way). I’m not going to sit here with my radiator on and say that chickens should continue suffering bone fractures and not being able to extend their wings because of the small environmental cost.
It seems I hadn’t considered this enough, so thank you very much for the question :)
For example, National Chicken Council argues that slower growing (and hence higher welfare) broiler breeds will have higher environmental costs: more feed, fuel, land, and water will be needed (I think it’s a biased source but the general conclusion makes sense). Similarly, according to Xin et al. (2011), “hens in noncage houses are less efficient in resource (feed, energy, and land) utilization, leading to a greater carbon footprint.” (I adapted this text from this post of mine).
Thank you for your thoughtful comment, Brian. I should’ve mentioned that I think that WAW might be tractable for people who think that reducing wild animal populations is good. I don’t think that reducing populations is good because:
I remain very uncertain whether wild animals experience more suffering than happiness (see this talk). I still think it’s more likely that there is more suffering due to painful deaths but not by much. This is partly because I give less weight to short but very intense pain than you do.
Reducing wild animal populations usually goes against various human interests [EDIT: actually, this doesn’t apply to some interventions in your list. I’m now thinking about whether any of them are promising.]
It’s not what most people want. Hence, even if I did think that reducing wild populations is good, I’d be afraid that I’ll change my mind in 10 years.
I worry that researching the big questions you mention might be intractable. You wrote a detailed analysis about the impact of climate change on wild animal suffering, and concluded that your “probabilities are basically 50% net good vs. 50% net bad when just considering animal suffering on Earth in the next few centuries (ignoring side effects on humanity’s very long-term future).” Correct me if I’m wrong, but your analysis rests on the assumption that reducing wild populations is good. An analysis without this assumption would be vastly more difficult because it would require analyzing whether various populations would become happier (instead of just analyzing changes in population). I worry that we wouldn’t have enough confidence in that analysis to inform our decisions.
All that said, I think that attempting to research WAW impacts of vegetarianism might still be worth it, though I’m unsure.
Great question. Yes, I think the claim still holds. It’s a bit tricky to explain why so you will have to stick with me. Let’s assume that:
Chicken welfare reforms are the most cost-effective intervention we found if we only consider the direct impact on chickens,
The indirect impacts of these welfare reforms on WAW are so bad that they outweigh the impact on chickens,
Each 1$ we spend to oppose welfare reforms negates 1$ spent on welfare reforms.
It would follow that if we ignored the impact on chickens, then opposing welfare reforms would be the new most cost-effective intervention because of its impact on WAW. But that would be a very surprising coincidence. I’d call it surprising divergence (as opposed to surprising convergence).
But ah, I’m now realizing that there is much more to this problem. It gets a lot messier. I’ll write more about this later.
To clarify, we might be doing much more good by decreasing catch but it seems equally possible that we are doing a lot of harm. If stunning fish has an impact of +1, then I think that decreasing catch has an impact somewhere from −100 to +100, and my probability weights average out at 0.
If I could very confidently say that the impact of reducing the catch was −98 to +102, and that the median outcome is +2, I would prioritize reducing the catch over stunning. Some risk-averse people wouldn’t, it’s a matter of personal preference. But this is if it was like casino odds, this can’t happen.
What might happen is that I might work on a very complex cost-effectiveness model of reducing the catch for a year. In the model, I’d try to determine all the impacts on animal populations and well-being, assign subjective weights to each of them, and then average them out. In the end, I’d say that according to the model, the impact of reducing catch could be anywhere from −98 to +102 but the best guess of the model is +2.
This is very different from casino odds. I’m unsure that I modeled what would happen correctly, whether my subjective weights are correct, and whether my model is free from mistakes. In terms of Bayesianism, I’d say that this model wouldn’t update me much on my prior of 0. In layman’s terms, I’d say that I’d still choose stunning over reducing catch for the same reason I’d choose a hotel with 1,000 reviews that average out to 4.5 stars over a hotel with one five-star review (I’m borrowing this illustration from this blog, I think). The evidence that reducing catch (or a hotel with one review) is a good choice is just too weak.
Hi Tyner. This is one of the questions that I decided to not clarify in the article for the sake of conciseness, so thank you for asking.
Wild-caught fish die under human control. So working on killing them more humanely doesn’t have any complicated uncertain consequences of WAW interventions that I discuss. Relatively to WAW issues, it is easy to research and is unambiguously good if we can do it right. To me, it is precisely the kind of intervention we should be focusing on first before tackling super complex WAW issues. So everything that I say about farmed animal welfare applies to humane fish slaughter.
Decreasing the catch of wild fish (e.g., by buying catch shares) does have complicated WAW consequences and it is very unclear whether they are good or bad. Those fish would’ve died anyway. Would their deaths have been better or worse if they weren’t caught? Maybe we can answer that question. But more importantly, fish catch changes the populations of various wild animals. Are those changes good or bad? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Also, if we catch fewer fish now, maybe we make the fishery more sustainable, and hence more fish will be caught in the fishery in the long term… It feels like we are doing a random thing here. Things that I say about WAW apply to decreasing the catch of fish.
First, there are still huge uncertainties about whether there will actually be digital minds who are actually sentient. The uncertainties are much higher than for wild animals. We know both that sentient wild animals can exist, and that a lot of them will exist (for a certain amount of time), but we have uncertainties on whether sentient digital minds are possible, and also, if they are possible, whether they will actually be produced in huge numbers.
I agree but I don’t think this changes much. There can be so many digital minds for so long, that in terms of expected value, I think that digital minds dominate even if you think that there is only a 10% chance that they can be sentient, and a 1% chance that they will exist in high numbers (which I think is unreasonable). I explain why I think that here. Although I’ve just skimmed it and I don’t think I did a great job at it, I remember reading a much better explanation somewhere, I’ll try to find it later.
For now, I’ll just add one more argument to it: Stuart Armstrong makes it seem like it’s not that difficult to build a Dyson Sphere by disassembling a planet like Mercury. I imagine that the materials and energy from disassembling planets could also be probably used to build A LOT of digital minds. Animals are only able to use resources from the surface layer of a small fraction of planets and they are not doing it that efficiently. Anyway, I want to look into this topic deeper myself, I may write more here when I do.
It wouldn’t solve the “Aging populations with lower percentages of working age adults threaten developed economies” problem, which I think is low-key one of the biggest problems in the world and the strongest argument to work on aging.