Great suggestion, I'll adopt for future reports. Thank you :)

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 sour... (read more)

Top notch work. My two favourite things about this community are 1) the willingness to take a serious crack at working on whatever project seems like it will help most people and 2) the integrity to shut down projects that do not meet expectations. Your work exemplifies both.

Thank you for your comments :) I can't speak for Koen, but some rough thoughts:

• At least for me, my view going into this was "we have like a 30% chance to succeed, and it won't be the first (edit!) last project/charity we take a crack at". I'm very happy to fail fast, as it means I can move onto the next promising idea.
• Re shrimp paste - my thoughts are basically summarised in this paper that I recently posted to the forum. I'm very very excited about wild shrimp stuff (as I am with farmed shrimp stuff), though shrimp paste specifically seems to have a few t

I think it's definitely worth some thought, though I don't really have any hot takes beyond what has been discussed in the comments of this post.

Afterword: Are they called "shrimp" or "prawns"?!

This was a great rabbit hole. Some people distinguish between "shrimp" and "prawns" on biological grounds, arguing that some species are only correctly called "shrimp" while others are only correctly called "prawns". However, I think that the only defensible conclusion is that both "shrimp" and "prawns" are terms for the same thing, and the one to use basically depends on the country you're in.

During my 2023 visit to London, when I arrived at the tattoo studio for my appointment to get a shrimp tattoo, ... (read more)

The review article on wild shrimp fisheries (which I mentioned in a previous discussion in the comments) is now up here :)

Thank you, fixed.

I did search for related articles on the EA Forum before posting mine, but I missed that one. The irony!! I'll add a link to that post in this article.

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... (read more)

I'll have detailed information in the report I mentioned - looking into this specific question over the next few days. (Though I'm being careful to take my time with it, as this is quite a horrific topic even compared to the topics I normally research.)

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).

Yep I agree with all of this. I think the important thing for discussions like these is that, as you propose in your article, retiring the term "moral circle" in favour of more specific hypotheses (as we're discussing) will facilitate more rigorous evaluation of claims and therefore better decision-making.

Thank you for this high-quality and thoughtful post. I found myself agreeing with most of the key claims.

Overall, I’d actually rather use the term “moral circle” less, and instead focus on finer-grained consequences of work to benefit groups like nonhuman animals or artificial sentience. [...] These all point to important flawed assumptions in standard framings of the moral circle, and may merit retiring the term “moral circle” altogether to prevent confusion.

I strongly agree here. I think it's a little dangerous that the "moral circle" was introduced as a... (read more)

Thank you very much, I would love to hear anything you learn :)

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 (a... (read more)

Thanks for the positive feedback :)

I haven't looked in detail, but there are three main differences between our analysis and the analysis of Whitton et al:

• We included fish, while Whitton et al did not.
• We calculated the slope, while Whitton et al (I think) calculated the percentage difference between the first year and the last year.
• We used data from 1960-2020, while Whitton et al used data from 1990-2017.

(Our analysis was also done on a per capita basis.)

More generally, this raises an important point regarding our analysis. Our analysis was conducted at a ... (read more)

Yep, that's probably the case in some of these countries. I don't think such laws would be fatal to this approach in most jurisdictions. In countries where such laws exist, there are probably solutions, though the best solution would need to be informed by on-the-ground knowledge. From the perspective of party politics as a whole, it is relatively small amounts of money that we're talking about.

This report will probably be published in a few weeks. As a teaser, it looks like there are low-hanging fruit for working with mainstream parties (specifically for animal advocacy) in: Australia (+ some of its states/territories), India (+ its states), South Africa (+ its provinces), Sweden, Germany (+ its states), Hungary, Indonesia, New Zealand, Norway, and numerous states of the USA. I haven't yet estimated the impact, though I'm near-certain that the animal advocacy movement would benefit from participating in party politics and/or legislative lobbying more than it currently is in most/almost all jurisdictions.

Thank you, fixed :)

Thanks, fixed :)

I would also add that I have a colleague in India (@ishankhire) who is building on this report with an analysis of Indian states. The analysis is not yet complete, but it seems promising - it looks like it might indeed give us some useful policy lessons for ways that jurisdictions can develop while keeping intensification of animal agriculture relatively low.

Thanks, this is cool and I'll use it.

I think more broadly, my comment is roughly equally motivated by three main things: my own psychology; concerns about an author's karma influencing readers' subconscious evaluations of that author's posts and opinions; and, specifically for people who work full-time in the EA community, a vague sense that it feels a bit strange to have a numeric score attached to what is in many ways a professional, and often philosophical, body of work. (The third point of course has an analogy with academic research, but I think that's also a problem with academia.) But since you gave me a solution, I'm personall happy. Thanks again.

I would love an option to switch off the total karma count from one's profile. I've found myself noticing that it can occasionally create perverse incentives.

Strongly agree. I came on this thread to suggest this.

I have posted on the forum before, but I have recently developed some health problems (fatigue etc) that mean I can no longer afford the energy necessary to participate in comment discussions. This is the main reason why I am no longer posting. I would be far more incentivised to make future posts if I could turn off the options for people to make comments where I deem that comments would not add much value to the post (i.e. I would use this feature on lifestyle suggestions or resource recommendations, but not on philosophical hot takes).

Thank you, I appreciate you taking the time to construct this convincing and high-quality comment. I'll reflect on this in detail.

I did do some initial scoping work for longtermist animal stuff last year, of which AGI-enabled mass suffering was a major part of course, so might be time to dust that off.

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 interve... (read more)

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.

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 th... (read more)

I mostly agree with what you've said, and I think that your view and my view are pretty much consistent. My main message isn't really "physical pain is worse than other types of suffering", rather: "I found even moderate physical pain to be really, really awful, which suggests that it's probably really, really morally urgent to prevent both extreme physical pain and other types of extreme suffering".

The hedonistic focus probably arose from the fact that I can subject myself to physical pain quite easily, but less so other types of suffering. I mention this in the limitations section.

Sure, makes sense. Thanks for your reply.

If I wanted to prove or support the claim: 
"given the choice between preventing extreme suffering and giving people more [pleasure/happiness/tranquility/truth], we should pick the latter option"
How would you recommend I go about proving or supporting that claim? I'd be keen to read or experience the strongest possible evidence for that claim. I've read a fair bit about pleasure and happiness, but for the other, less-tangible values (tranquility and truth) I'm less familiar with any arguments.

It would be a major... (read more)

I'm happy to consider this further if there are people who would find value in the outcome (particularly if there are people who would change decisions based on the outcome). I think it would be tractable to design something safe and legal, whether through psychedelics or some other tool.

Ah I wasn't aware Schmidt had recently died. That's a shame, he must have died after I wrote the first draft of this article. I read his book (The Sting of the Wild) which helped inform this article. Thanks for sharing this, I'll read the obituary.

I think this is a fair point, if you believe that pleasure can outweigh really awful suffering in practice. I do not currently believe this, for all practical purposes. Basically, my position is that these other human values - while somewhat valuable - are simply trivial in the face of the really awful suffering that is very common in our world.

Do you know of any ways I could experimentally expose myself to extreme amounts of pleasure, happiness, tranquility, and truth?

I'd be willing to expose myself to whatever you suggest, plus extreme suffering, to see if this changes my mind. Or we can work together to design a different experimental setup if you think that would produce better evidence.

Thanks for your positive feedback :)

I haven't thought too hard about specific charities. Since I work for a relatively young charity startup, I don't take a very high salary and it wouldn't make sense to increase my salary just to donate.

If I had a large amount of money to donate, I'd probably pick an animal advocacy charity with a strong, well-backed theory of change that focuses on reforms that a) are large-scale and b) prevent high-intensity suffering. Examples of this might include charities working on cage-free hen reforms, the Better Chicken Commitme... (read more)

Yes this should probably say "Hurtful". In my personal interpretation of the PainTrack categories, doing a day of work would only really be possible at "Hurtful" or less.

They felt awful, but I kept going with them voluntarily (albeit with some breaks). Under the definition of Excruciating-level pain, that would typically be impossible: "the threshold of pain under which many people choose to take their lives rather than endure the pain". So, there is no way that pain could be Excruciating-level, even though it hurt really bad.

Thanks a lot for this post. I think it's really great to inform this debate with new data and a clever framework, as you've done - it's a useful contribution, and I hope similar experiments get conducted in other contexts.

Not directly related to this article, but I have a few broad thoughts on this general topic:

• When I began working in animal advocacy, I was definitely on the abolitionist end of the spectrum. Since then, I've developed a much more diversified view. In general, the debate between abolitionism vs welfarism a) is very speculative, in that we

I wrote the article on reducing catch shares, and just wanted to comment saying that I strongly agree with Saulius's analysis here.

Currently, implementing humane slaughter for wild-caught fish seems like a slam dunk.

Currently, reducing the catch of wild fish seems extremely ambiguous. My catch share article mostly concluded with "we should do more research on this to reduce these uncertainties". I also wrote a later article about subsidies - abolishing fisheries subsidies seems like a fairly easy way to reduce the catch. But in many cases, it would cause t... (read more)

Thanks, I've changed the language to make it clearer (possibly my Aussie vernacular getting the better of me)

The consequences on the welfare of all affected wild animals seem nearly impossible to determine, even with a lot of research. Also, research in one ecosystem might not generalize to other ecosystems. 

However, this is the same as the concern of cluelessness that applies to all causes. To me, cluelessness seems a bigger problem in WAW because first-order effects are usually dwarfed by second and third-order effects. For example, vaccinations may increase the population of that species, which could be bad if their lives are still full of suffe

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.

Thanks, this is a super useful article.

In case readers of this article are interested: we recently completed a collaboration with Animal Welfare Competence Centre for Africa, a new charity based in Uganda. Our recommendations centred on both welfare reforms and limiting the spread of industrialised farming practices. Our write-up is available here: https://www.animalask.org/post/farmed-animal-advocacy-in-uganda

Currently, we (Animal Ask) are also doing some research on the trajectory of animal agriculture in developing countries and how moldable it is, as the author mentions.

This is exciting to see. I definitely agree - sometimes getting your foot in the door, either at the local level or with a more limited version of the policy, can let you expand the policy later when people have seen the benefit. And your scorecard approach is similar to what Australian Alliance for Animals has recently done: https://www.allianceforanimals.org.au/victorian-election-2022

Very roughly, yes.

If you assume that bringing a wild fish into existence is bad (and outweighs the benefits from not catching fish), then  fishery subsidy reform looks bad. The assumption of net negative lives is one position from which you can arrive at this conclusion. There are other positions from which you can arrive at this conclusion too.

If you think that bringing a wild fish into existence is good or neutral, then fishery subsidies reform looks more promising.

In practice, we don't know whether bringing a wild fish into existence is good, bad, ... (read more)

Thanks a lot, I've sent you a message :)

Thanks for the feedback :)

No, that was probably poorly expressed on my part. What I'm saying is: if you catch reducing fishing effort now, you catch fewer fish in the short-term, but many more fish in the long-term. This means that the total number of fish being caught (and thus suffering) could increase.

Yes - all else being equal, a higher probability of detection is a good thing, as it would lead to a stronger deterrent effect (as long as the authorities respond to violations with clear, effective enforcement actions)

Thanks for the positive feedback :)

If you consider on-farm (rather than slaughterhouse) CCTV, the welfare benefits increase significantly, as you're monitoring a much longer period of each animal's life. However, the tractability of an on-farm CCTV campaign would probably* be much lower. Farmers often have closer, more personal relationships with their farms than slaughterhouse owners do with their slaughterhouses. Proposing to install CCTV on farms would likely trigger a lot of backlash from farmers (particularly given the common public image of the 'fami... (read more)

Hey Fai! According to the crime research, the deterrent effects of CCTV depend on the slaughterhouse workers' perceived  probability of detection, not the true probability of detection. So, in principle, it's possible for CCTV to have a meaningful deterrent effect even if the videos aren't watched 100%.

For example, a government could identify which slaughterhouses have the highest risk of non-compliance and focus on those footage, then very quickly and clearly respond to any incidents they do detect. These visible, rapid responses would help convey th... (read more)

Thank you for the positive feedback :)