I am a Senior Research Manager in the Animal Welfare department at Rethink Priorities. The views I express here do not represent Rethink Priorities unless stated otherwise.
Before working in effective altruism, I completed a Ph.D. in psychology studying the evolution of cooperation in humans, with a concentration in quantitative psychology. After that, I was a postdoctoral fellow studying public health. My main interests now are animal welfare and social science methodology/statistics.
A lot of this attention, I suspect, is based on the false impression that this is happening to most or all of the shrimp.
That is an worthwhile hypothesis to investigate. My speculation is that scope-sensitive people who have heard a bit about shrimp farming may share this misconception, while others simply feel that ablation resonates with them at a gut level. My overall sense of what people specifically find engaging about the most “egregious” practices on industrial farms is not that they represent the largest source of suffering that the species in question endures, but rather they capture in a nutshell the low intrinsic moral value that humans are assigning to that species. A breeder undergoing eyestalk ablation might be likened to an “identifiable victim,” standing in for a larger number of “statistical victims” that endure a variety of chronic issues in ponds and tanks, which are logistically difficult to depict in an evocative way.
Other potentially relevant considerations:
There is some indication that ablated breeders produce offspring that are more susceptible to disease. If true, the amount of aggregate suffering caused by eyestalk ablation may well be much greater than just the direct effects on breeders.
Much advocacy on behalf of shrimp pairs the ask to phase out eyestalk ablation along with other addressing other issues (e.g., slaughter) that affect a larger percentage of shrimp.
Tractability often plays some role in which specific issues are highlighted, at least early on in a movement that is looking for momentum. Slaughter is also a small issue relative to chronic issues on ongrowing farms (though still much larger issue than eyestalk ablation in terms of the number of individuals directly affected). But, so long as advocacy doesn’t start and end with reforming slaughter, it is consistent with a scope-sensitive long-term strategy. (Plus, reforming slaughter may be directly cost-effective in its own right.)
Anchoring vignettes may also sometimes lack stability within persons. That said, it’s par for the course that any one source of evidence for invariance is going to have its strengths and weaknesses. We’ll always be looking for convergence across methods rather than a single cure-all.
The phenomenon you describe as “rescaling” is generally known as a (violation of) measurement invariance in psychometrics. It is typically tested by observing whether the measurement model (i.e., the relationship between the unobservable psychological construct and the measured indicators of that construct) differ across groups (a comprehensive evaluation of different approaches is in Millsap, 2011).
I would interpret the tests of measurement invariance you use.…
If people are getting happier over time — but reporting it on a stretched or stricter scale — then the link between how happy someone says they are, and what they do when they’re unhappy, should weaken over time.
In other words: if life satisfaction is increasing, but the reporting scale is stretching, then big life decisions — like leaving a job or ending a relationship — should become less predictable from reported happiness
....to actually be measures of “prediction invariance”: which holds when a measure has the same regression coefficient with respect to an external criterion across different groups or time.
But as Borsboom (2006) points out, prediction invariance and measurement invariance might actually be in tension with each other under a wide range of situations. Here’s a relevant quotation:
In 1997 Millsap published an important paper in Psychological Methods on the relation between prediction invariance and measurement invariance. The paper showed that, under realistic conditions, prediction invariance does not support measurement invariance. In fact, prediction invariance is generally indicative of violations of measurement invariance: if two groups differ in their latent means, and a test has prediction invariance across the levels of the grouping variable, it must have measurement bias with regard to group membership. Conversely, when a test is measurement invariant, it will generally show differences in predictive regression parameters.
This is stretching my knowledge of the topic beyond its bounds, but this issue seems related to the general inconsistency between measurement invariance and selection invariance, which has been explored independently in psychometrics and machine learning (e.g., the chapters on facial recognition and recidivism in The Alignment Problem).
We don’t currently have any plans to, but I would definitely be interested in the results.
I haven’t reviewed the literature on what weights are reasonable but Gómez-Emilsson (2019) argues that worse pains are many orders of magnitude worse than mild pains. I think that the question of how to weight different pain intensities used by the Welfare Footprint Institute deserves more research, and I imagine it could be researched in many different ways.
In 2023, Adam Shriver and I ran a workshop to try to figure out how to best address this question empirically. The event summary is here, but my overall updates based on that event were:
In addressing why an individual wouldn’t be willing to endure Excruciating pain, even for a much shorter period of time than a less severe category of pain, there is more than one plausible explanation. While it could be that Excruciating pain is orders of magnitude worse than, say, Disabling pain, it could also be that, beyond a certain level of severity, individuals have reduced volition to choose a form of pain that is worse on a per-moment basis (brief explanation here).
Because both views are plausible and I am pessimistic that we will satisfactorily resolve the issue empirically anytime soon, I think sensitivity analysis on this parameter is often worthwhile.
It’s difficult to design studies that tease apart these competing explanations, and it would hard to get permission from ethical review boards to carry them out.
For comparing different levels of severe pain, that leaves us with asking humans to report on past experiences or integrating studies into situations where humans have to go through pain anyway. Welfare Footprint covers some of the relevant studies here.
If there is convergence among several different methodologies, then we’re getting somewhere, but if not, we might be stuck.
Hopefully results that apply to humans would apply to farmed animals, but the usual caveats apply about degree of evolutionary divergence.
Even more speculatively, it could be that pain severity is not a cardinal trait at all, something Adam and I briefly touch on here.
In case it’s useful, Adam Shriver and I ran a workshop about this issue with some pain scientists and animal welfare scientists, and reported some of our findings here: https://rethinkpriorities.org/publications/dimensions-of-pain-workshop-summary-and-updated-conclusions. Welfare Footprint also wrote about it recently: https://welfarefootprint.org/2024/02/20/shortagony-or-longache/. Both reports cover some of the relevant survey data.
Also, I have found it useful to directly incorporate uncertainty about the appropriate severity weights directly into welfare footprint-style models, as we recently did for shrimp aquaculture welfare threats: https://rethinkpriorities.org/publications/quantifying-and-prioritizing-shrimp-welfare-threats
Hey Vasco,
In our code, we estimate that shrimp live on ongrowing farms (this analysis doesn’t look at earlier stages of production) for about 115 days*24 hours = 2,760 hours. However, due to preslaughter mortality and variation in when farmers choose to harvest, the 90% interval is [~14 days, ~175 days].
The total raw number of hours in pain exceeds the lifespan of the average shrimp because we examined each welfare threat in isolation, whereas in practice many are occurring concurrently. This is an issue Welfare Footprint has considered but for simplicity we do not address it here. We do note, “We assume purely additive relationships between welfare threats. This means that some estimates of time spent in pain can exceed the lifespan of a shrimp.” But I am glad for the opportunity to mention this again, as it is also an example of why we caution against treating our headline results as representative of the life of an actual shrimp.
For more context, see also Box 2 and Figure 1 of Pre-slaughter mortality of farmed shrimp.
Reducing the influence of impression management on the measurement of prosocial and antisocial traits was the topic of my doctoral research. When I started, I thought that better behavioral paradigms and greater use of open-ended text analysis could meaningfully move the needle. By the time I moved onto other things I was much more pessimistic that there is low-hanging fruit that can both (a) meaningfully move the needle (here’s one example of a failed attempt of mine to improve the measurement of prosocial traits; McAuliffe et al., 2020), and (b) be implemented at scale in a practical context. The general issue is that harder-to-game measures are much noisier than easier-to-game measures (e.g., see Schimmack, 2021 on implicit measures), so the gameable measures tend to be more useful for making individual predictions in spite of their systematic biases. The level of invasiveness required to increase the signal on a non-gameable measure (e.g., scraping all of a person’s online text without their permission) would probably be at odds with other goals of the movement. The same probably goes for measures that do not rely on actual evidence of concerning behavior (e.g., polygenic scores).
More fundamentally, I disagree that this is a neglected topic– measuring malevolence and reducing responses biases are both mainstream topics within personality psychology, personnel psychology, developmental psychology, behavioral genetics, etc. For example, considerable effort has gone into testing whether multidimensional forced-choice personality questionnaires do a good job reducing faking (e.g., Wetzel et al., 2020). An academic psychologist who is EA-sympathetic and getting funding from standard academic sources might have more impact from pursuing this topic rather than whatever else they would have studied instead, but I see limited value in people changing careers or funding grants that would have otherwise gone to other EA causes. I also do not see a strong case for carrying on the discussion outside of the normal academic outlets where there is a lot more measurement expertise.
I personally would not make mortality the focus of the marginal research project, but I do think you would get it ‘for free’ in the sort of project I would prioritize. In my view, the main considerations are:
1. A lot of uncertainty is an artifact of inconsistent reporting practices. An article arguing for a standardized methodology in an aquaculture magazine signed by a bunch of prestigious researchers (or a presentation at an aquaculture industry event) might do more to reduce uncertainty than more data per se.
2. A lot of the basic trends are robust to the uncertainty. Cumulative mortality is probably around ~50% even in ideal circumstances, more intensive farms have less mortality, larval mortality is steeper than juvenile mortality, and wild shrimp have higher mortality rates than farmed shrimp.
3. Hannah’s upcoming report, a Monte Carlo model of which welfare issues cause the most harm in aggregate while shrimp are still alive, contains enormous uncertainty due to limitations in the surveys of farms that have been conducted. As a result, the rank-order of the badness of many issues is not robust, an issue that new, higher-quality data could address. Improved surveys would presumably also measure survival, so we would gain clarity on premature mortality even though it was not the main focus.
4. It would probably be at least as valuable to get larval mortality estimates for the farmed fish species to which we compared farmed shrimp in Figure 4.
Our next report explores preslaughter mortality in much greater depth, including cobbling together estimates from a wider variety of sources, some of which are broken down by extensive vs. intensive. We expect to publish it very soon, stay tuned!
This is why I thought your idea was an interesting hypothesis to investigate, as it applies to areas beyond shrimp (e.g., do people sympathetic to pig welfare initiatives think that all pigs are raised in gestation crates? do they have understand that most pigs are not sows?, etc.). If there is widespread misunderstanding, then I agree it would be worth being more proactive to preempt misconceptions. I say “proactive” because I don’t there think is an intentional effort to deceive people (I am one of the authors of the report you cited about how eyestalk ablation probably causes the least aggregate pain of the welfare issues that are commonly talked about). Given the highly abbreviated nature of most moral and political communication, it seems like one message, “breeders are ablated,” and another, “there are a lot of farmed shrimp,” could be integrated together in a naive way without there being any conspiracy to confuse people.
At least for me, it won’t feel productive to litigate what is and isn’t consistent with EA in this thread, so I’ll personally refrain. I’ll instead comment from two other perspectives below, one more intellectual and one more personal. You/others can have the last word.
As a psychologist, my read of the literature is that eliciting sympathy is often the critical ingredient to endorsing and consistently applying broader moral principles based in reason (e.g., Martin Hoffman’s work). If that’s true, then starting with a more relatable issue seems consistent with a broader goal of getting people to think about whether the moral revulsion they experience has implications for the principles that underlie their moral compass. I personally see this goal of facilitating “moral circle expansion” as distinct from the goal to get people to be more scope-sensitive (even though there are unique implications of both endorsing scope-sensitivity and granting moral consideration to shrimp), and call for different communication strategies.
By analogy, I initially got interested in animal issues from working at a seafood counter and handling live lobsters. After personally feeling uncomfortable with it for a while but having mostly inchoate thoughts about it, I read David Foster Wallace’s piece Consider the Lobster. I can’t prove it, but it seems to me that the personal experience with what was being described in the essay had a major impact in opening my mind to its arguments. When I later learned about scope-sensitivity, it was less counterintuitive for me to extend it to animals because of these aforementioned experiences. Even though I’ve never thought that prioritizing lobsters is cost-effective (not that I have well-developed thoughts on the topic either way), the highly personal nature of seeing them languish in crowded tanks and boiled alive was formative to the trajectory of my moral sensibilities.