Contractor RA to Peter Singer, Princeton
Fai
Karma: 1,892
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 posting, and thank you for doing the presentation. This is for me the best presentation on wild animal suffering addressing a vegan audience so far (with some other options being quite impressive already).
Thank you for the reply, Toby. I agree that humanity have instrumental values to all sentient beings. And I am glad that you want to include animals when you say shaping the future.
This might work, though does have some surprising effects, such as that even after our extinction, the trajectory might not stay at zero
I wonder why you think this would be surprising? If humans are not the only beings who have intrinsic values, why is it surprising that there will be values left after humans go extinct?
Thank you for the post! I have a question: I wonder whether you think the trajectory to be shaped should be that of all sentient beings, instead of just humanity? It seems to me that you think that we ought to care about the wellbeing of all sentient beings. Why isn’t this prinicple extraopolated when it comes to longtermism?
For instance, from the quote below from the essay, it seems to me that your proposal’s scope doesn’t neccessarily include nonhuman animals. “For example, a permanent improvement to the wellbeing of animals on earth would behave like a gain (though it would require an adjustment to what v(⋅) is supposed to be representing).”
The work is appearing as a chapter for the forthcoming book, Essays on Longtermism, but as of today, you can also read it online here.
Thank you for providing this reading for free, and sharing this post! Inside this online PDF, under the section “Gains”, there’s a sentence now looking like this:
“We can all such a change a gain”
I suppose you meant to say “call” instead of “all”.
I’m curious what evidence convinced you about fish. So far I haven’t seen much on the subject of consciousness specifically, though I have seen some arguments around pain nerves and aversive stimuli.
There are a number of studies on fish that provides evidence of consciousness beyond just nociception and pain avoidance behavior (which is already a level higher than just nociception). I will just name a few. Most recently and shockingly, a species of fish passed the “mirror test” by passing the “mark test”. Other older studies include finding that fish engaging in trade-off thinking between rewards and pain, finding that fish engage in cooperative behavior, and finding that zebrafish can have “emotional fever” (which scientists used to think can only happen to birds, mammals, and reptiles)
Victoria Braithwaite, who wrote the book Do Fish Feel Pain, said “Given all of this (the evidence she and other researchers gathered), I see no logical reason why we should not extend to fish the same welfare considerations that we currently extend to birds and mammals.”
Edamame is soy. Just immature one still in pods.
Being allergic to fish really hurts, because I think fish probably suffer less than birds or mammals, if at all. If I could eat more fish instead of meat, I would.
First, I think the evidence for fish sentience seems to be almost as strong as birds’ now. Yes, probably less evidence than most mammals, but not significantly. Certainly not significant enough to compensate the effect coming from the fact that commonly eaten mammals are way heavier than most fish humans eat, which means the number of sentient beings eaten per weight of meat is much higher for fish.
Not suggesting people should learn from me, just saying what I did.
I got similar reactions from my family and what I did was keep reducing the number of animals I abstain from (originally I thought crustaceans can’t suffer, so I kept eating them but eventually I told my family that I won’t eat them either, and then I later cut even bivalves to become full vegan). Besides sticking with my dietary choice, I kept engaging in debates with them. I even have to distance myself a bit from them. It was a few painful years, but they have eventually accepted my change and even got influenced by me. Two of my family members reduced thei consumption of animal products (one became vegetarian), my mother agrees to slaughter fish in more humane ways.
I think the calculus doesn’t only involve the suffering induced vs hassle caused by the conflicts. The value one signals might be significant, or maybe the dominant effect in some cases.
Many of the philosophical ideas that underpin EA are also very close to those found in some “Eastern/Asian” traditions, including Mohism, Buddhism and Jainism.
Just want to point out that all of these schools of thought are minorities (maybe even unpopular) in their original countries. It seems to me that the stories of these schools of thoughts with similarities to EA ideas having a hard time in their original countries might be evidence supporting, rather than against, the notion that “the East” (I do have troubles with the use of the “East/West divide after discussing with some) doesn’t take EA ideas well.
There’s a nuance though, Buddhism, despite being not very successful in India, is a huge success in China. But my understanding is that, very naively speaking and oversimplifying, Buddhism had to lose a lot of ideas that we recognize as “EA-similar” in order to become successful in China. One of the ideas is “caring about actually doing good rather than just wanting to do good”. And maybe it isn’t only lost, but flipped. In China and Taiwan, from my observation, Buddhists’ most common attitude to altruism is “if your intention is good then it’s good, the consequence doesn’t matter”.
why should countries that have banned cages in their countries be able to export these cages to less developed countries? Is this not a transfer of animal cruelty to Africa?
I wonder if there is a problem of racism here, both rhetorically and genuinely.
My impression of top AGI researchers is that most take AI sentience pretty seriously as a possibility, and it seems hard for someone to think this without also believing animals can be sentient.
I am not saying this is common, but it is alarming that Eliezer Yudkowsky, a pretty prominent figure in the space, thinks that AI sentience is possible but nonhuman animals are not sentient.
Yip Fai Tse on animal welfare & AI safety and long termism
I got new upvotes for my above comment (even though it is still negative now) which reminds me of it. I suddenly have a question and I genuinely want to know the answer and do not wish to be offensive or sarcastic.
Question: Would people have voted (karma and agreement) differently if my comment happened a month later? (FTX collapse)
Also, at that time, quite a number of people are searching on the EA forum for evidence that they claim to support views like “EAs ignore laws and common sense morality”, “EAs think that ends always justify means”, etc. This means that I could have made a wrong decision to leave the above comment by letting non-EAs potentially see it (if I can reasonably expect the voting results to seem to support illegal things.)
And maybe, I should just delete this comment, now?
Thank you for doing it! All the best with it.
Our lawsuit attacks the notion that Big Ag is above the law.
And I want to mention that I particularly like this.
Yikes
Maybe relevant here:
Jeff Sebo: A utilitarian case for animal rights—EA Forum (effectivealtruism.org)
being as overwhelmingly correct about something as EA is on animal welfare.
I identify with the EA animal welfare cause area, and I believe I can claim to “come from” the farmed animal side of EA animal welfare. And I have to say that EA is still not yet “correct enough” about wild animal welfare—too little attention and resources relatively and absolutely.
But also, to be fair, EA is already one of the rare communities in the world, if not the THE community, that cares the most about wild animal welfare. So maybe EA is still more correct (or less wrong) than most others when it comes to wild animal welfare.
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.