Contractor RA to Peter Singer, Princeton
Fai
Karma: 1,888
I’m working on plans to do more to support a rigorous search for approaches to animal-inclusive AI (or approaches to advancing wild animal welfare science broadly) that would also rank among the most promising ways to reduce human extinction risk from AI.
Interesting! I am interesting in discussing this idea further with you.
Could it be the case that another way to think about it is to search within the best approaches to reduce human x-risk, for a subset that is aslo animal inclusive? For example, if working on AI alignment is one of the best ways to reduce human x-risk, then we try to look for the subset within these alignment strategies that are also animal friendly?
Apparently Microsoft was also blindsided by this and didn’t find out until moments before the announcement.
Not sure how important this is: Judging from the behavior of Satya Nadella during OpenAI’s dev day 12 days ago, Microsoft quite likely didn’t see that coming at that moment.
Thank you Ren. I want to say take your time, and please prioritize your own welfare on this.
Thank you for the post!
It seems to me that a lot of how important this is also depends on how the shrimps die. Are they already dead, or still alive, when they are “processed” (e.g. sundried)? I heard shrimp paste companies bragging that from “harvest” to “processing”, there were less than 3 hours.
Does anyone have information on this?
However, there are reasons to doubt this. The probabilities of different gambles add up only when the outcomes of those gambles are independent of one another. Are facts about honeybee sentience independent of facts about black soldier fly sentience? That is, do the prospects of their sentience rise and fall together?
In reply to my own comment above. I think it is important to recognize one further point: If one believes a species portofio approach to reduce risk of inefficacy doesn’t work because prospects of the concerned species’ sentience “rise and fall” together, one very likely also needs to, epistemologically speaking, put much less weight on the existence (and non-existence) of experimental evidence of sentience in their updating of views regarding animal sentience. The practical implication of this is that one might no longer be justified to say things like “the cleaner wrasse (the first fish purported to have passed the mirror test) is more likely to be sentient than other fish species.”
Thank you, so much, for the post! I would like to quote the passage that had the most impact (insight) on me:
someone who is concerned with minimizing the risk of futility may avoid single-shot bets with a low probability of success but accept combinations of bets that collectively make success probable. A hierarchicalist would not deem the combination of gambles to be any better than the gambles individually. For example, Shane might resist spending money on shrimp welfare because he thinks that there is a .1 chance that shrimp are sentient. However, he might accept distributing money among shrimp, honeybees, black soldier fly, mealworms, and silkworms; though he thinks each of these has a .9 chance of making no difference, he believes that the probability that the combination of bets will make a difference is .5.
Which leads to the conclusion:
If Shane’s reasoning is correct, then risk aversion about efficacy might not avoid the conclusion that we ought to help the many small. Instead, it might tell us that we should distribute our money across different species of dubious sentience in order to optimize the combined probability of making a difference and maximizing value.
And of course, the caveat they raised it also important:
However, there are reasons to doubt this. The probabilities of different gambles add up only when the outcomes of those gambles are independent of one another. Are facts about honeybee sentience independent of facts about black soldier fly sentience? That is, do the prospects of their sentience rise and fall together?
Thank you for the post!
What concerns me is that I suspect people rarely get deeply interested in the moral weight of animals unless they come in with an unusually high initial intuitive view.
I also suspect this, and have concerns about it, but in a very different way than you I speculate. More particularly, I am concerned by the “people rarely get deeply interested in the moral weight of animals ” part. This is problematic because for many actions humans do, there are consequences to animals (in many cases, huge consequences), and to act ethically, even for some non-conseuquentialists, it is essential to at least have some views about moral weights of animals.
But the issue isn’t only most people not being interested in investigating “moral weights” of animals, but that for people who don’t even bother to investigate, they don’t use the acknowledgement of uncertainty (and tools for dealing with uncertainty) to guide their actions—they assign, with complete confidence, 1 to each human and 0 to almost everyone else.
The above analysis, if I am only roughly correct, is crucial to our thinking about which direction to move people’s view is a correct one. If most people are already assigning animals with virtual 0s, where else can we go? Presumably moral weights can’t go negative, animals’ moral weights only have one place to go, unless most people were right—that all animals have moral weights of virtually 0.
“I would expect working as a junior person in a community of people who value animals highly would exert a large influence in that direction regardless of what the underlying truth.”
For the reasons above, I am extremely skeptical this is worthy of worry. I think unless it happens to be true that all animals have moral weights of virtually 0, it seems to me that “a community of people who value animals highly exerting a large influence in that direction regardless of what the underlying truth” is something that we should exactly hope for, rationally and ethically speaking. (emphasis on “regardless of what the underlying truth” is mine)
P.S. A potential pushback is that a very significant number of people clearly care about some animals, such as their companion animals. But I think we have to also look at actions with larger stakes. Most people, and even more so for a collection of people (such as famailies, companies, governments, charities, and movements), judging from their actions (eating animals, driving, animal experiments, large scale constructions) and reluctance to adjust their view regarding these actions, clearly assign a virtual 0 to the moral weights of most animals—they just chose a few species, maybe just a few individual animals, to rise to within one order of magnitude of difference in moral weight with humans. Also, even for common companion animals such as cats and dogs, many people are shown to assign much less moral weight to them when they are put into situations where they have to choose these animals against (sometimes trivial) human interests.
Ah, interesting! I like both the terminology and and idea of “adversarial collaboration”. For instance, I think incorporating debates into this research might actually move us closer to the truth.
But I am also wary that if we use a classical way of deciding who wins debate, the losing side would aljmost always be the group who assigned higher (even just slightly higher than average) “moral weights” to animals (not relative to humans, but relative to the debate opponent). So I think maybe if we use debate as a way to push closer to the truth, we probably use the classical ways of deciding debates.
There are a ton of judgement calls in coming up with moral weights.I’m worried about a dynamic where the people most interested in getting deep into these questions are people who already intuitively care pretty strongly about animals, and so the best weights available end up pretty biased
I agree there’s such a problem. But I think it is important to also point out that there is the same problem for people who tend to think they “do not make judgement calls about moral weights”, but have nonetheless effectively came up with their own judgement calls when they live their daily lives which “by the way” affect animals (eat animals, live in buildings that require constructions that kill millions of animals, gardening, which harms and give rise to many animals, etc).
Also, I think it is equally, maybe more, important to recognize those people who make such judgement calls without explicitly thinking about moral weights, let alone go into tedious research projects, are people who intuitively care pretty little about animals, and so their “effective intuition about moral weights” (intuitive because they didn’t want to use research to back it up) backing up their actions end up pretty biased.
I think I intuitively worry about the bias of those who do not particularly feel strongly about animals’ suffering (even those caused by them), than the bias of those who care pretty strongly about animals. And of course, disclaimer: I think I lie within the latter group.
Thank you for the post, and congratulations on the good work you are doing. I am excited to see your influence grow globally!
Wow this is so big! Congratulations! Thank you for doing this.
Thank you very much for the post! Very useful information.
For people who are working on or interested in animal welfare in Africa, this post might useful too:
I feel much better hearing this! And I do actually agree with you. Thank you!
I would add that besides PB paste. Another option is to use CM shrimp tissues to make the pastes.
Thank you for sharing these important information. It is important to remind people how important this issue is.
My extra worry about the consumption of aquatic animals is that they seem to be much less replaceable than terrestrial animal meats and eggs and milk by plant-based mock meat or cultivated meat (PB/CM). In fact for some popular shrimp dishes I just can’t see how PB/CM will ever replace the shrimps there in large scale, such as live shrimp salad, shrimp sashimi (traditionally served with the tails intact, sometimes even the heads), Chinese style steamed and fried shrimps, and hotpots with shrimps.
It seems to me the solution of some forms of meat eating has to be other than PB/CM.
Thank you for the post!
I wonder what a better slaughter of “small rainbow trout” looks like? It seems to me small fish are hard to handle and there are therefore bigger economic incentives for practitioners to refuse.
I heard that there were cage-free activists who claim that some global companies’ differential animal welfare policies in the West and in Asia is racist, and demand for equally good policies in Asia. I wonder if exporting some morally inferior (and abandoned) equipments to Africa is a form of racism, either rhetorically and genuinely.
I just don’t see any reason why thousands of years of cultural practice would not generate a behavior with such obvious and immediate benefits.
I disagree with this. I know of quite a lot of examples of people not using clearly beneficial methods.
One case study I have done quite extensive research on is the slaughter of a fish called pond loach, commonly consumed in China, Japan, and Korea. They are small and slimy and therefore hard to grab and handle. In most of Korea and many parts of China, pond loaches are put in buckets and then sprinkled with salt which kills or immobilizes (this method sometimes doesn’t kill all of them immediately) them by osmotic dehydration, and also deslime them a bit. This makes salt a very effective way of slaughtering pond loaches as it makes them easy to grab and handle. Another added benefit of using salt is that it is always needed in the dish anyway. But for some reasons, people in some parts of China and Japan are using some other much more dangerous and time-consuming ways of killing pond loaches. (DISCLAIMER: I am not claiming that people should use salt to kill pond loaches. In fact, I think it is one of the worst slaughters of animals in the world, and I am working on eliminating this practice.)
Another example is my experience working as a production manager in a garment factory. It took me less than 15 minutes to figure out that one of their processes can be done in a different way that saves >30% labor time, and it is literally as easy as holding a component backwards. They changed to my method and never went back (PM me if you are interested in the full details). My boss and all the previous production managers have huge incentives to optimize everything in the production line—I mean they are a business, in an extremely competitive environment! But no they didn’t figure this one out until I joined.
Thank you for the post!
Makes me wonder: If this could reduce animal product consumption by making easier to get calories and protein from beans?
Thank you for doing this!
I have a question about the translation of “utilitarianism” to “功利主義”. I have been thinking for very long that this is a bad translation in both the Japanese and Chinese contexts (for those who don’t know these languages: “功利主義” is the most popular translation for “utilitarianism” in both Japanese and Chinese). The bad thing seems to be that the words “功利” has a bad connotation, and one that is almost the reverse of utlitarianism, therefore causing people to misunderstand utilitarianism, or have bad impression against it.
My question is then: Do you think “功利主義” is a bad translation? (not bad as in it is bad that you, or any translator chose this as the translation. But bad that it was, historically speaking, chosen and established as the popular translation.)