Jul 12, 2022·edited Jul 12, 2022Liked by Holly Elmore
Some loose thoughts from a reader who is not involved in EA, philosophy, or the rationalist community...
EA seems like a self-evidently valuable exercise in clarifying our thinking about ethics. WAW seems like accelerating that process in a vertiginous way to where it's hard to have much confidence in anything. As the shrimp cartoon suggests.
We usually think of the interactions between non-human organisms, each other, and their environment as a space where our ethical principles are completely irrelevant, like a naive category error. Our own interactions with animals are a liminal space where most people feel confortable with being uncertain and inconsistent. As a vegetarian opposed to factory farming, I oppose this vagueness: we need to take responsibility and wind down our regime of cruelty. At that point, though, thinking about WAW becomes unavoidable. I’m glad you’re doing this work.
In trying to see and map the macro landscape of life, the experience of suffering begins to look like the overwhelming majority of experience, for organisms generally. Thinking too hard about this seems like a possible pathway to mental illness, or Buddhism.
In Stapledon's "Last and First Men," one of the successive human races learns how to obtain direct sensory access to the past. Their explorations in the human past, and its overwhelming sadness, lead to an epidemic of despair and psychosis that almost destroys them.
In one of her stories, James Tiptree Jr. describes a series of scenes in a man's life which each end in terrible disappointment. At the end, it emerges that his consciousness is somehow being held and farmed by an alien species which extracts and feeds on painful emotions.
From some angles, taking responsibility for the welfare of organisms quite different from us looks like hubris, because of the weakness of our understanding. We struggle to build a coherent account of our own “welfare,” but let’s stipulate that we can identify our own welfare in certain respects. Ethical reasoning involves modeling other people’s subjectivity on our own, a theory of mind. Given the variation of human culture and experience, this can be trickier than it seems. Members of previous generations, who tried really hard to identify and act on their ethical responsibilities, look very misguided to us: Victorian missionaries in the Pacific, etc. etc. The further we get from humans, the more uncertain the concept of welfare would seem to be.
In one possible scenario in which we do take responsibility for the welfare of other organisms, and intervene to improve it, we would evolve into something like gods. In that scenario, we would also take responsibility for the welfare of plants, fungi, microorganisms, and inanimate matter at various scales, and for improving the welfare of the past as well as the future.
As you point out, a possible near-future AGI may overtake us and assume responsibility for our welfare as well as other species’. I suspect that aligning an AI’s values with our own is intrinsically impossible.
> Some loose thoughts from a reader who is not involved in EA, philosophy, or the rationalist community...
Could have fooled me! You seem to grasp the issue well and you've identified a lot of the cruxes here.
> In Stapledon's "Last and First Men," one of the successive human races learns how to obtain direct sensory access to the past. Their explorations in the human past, and its overwhelming sadness, lead to an epidemic of despair and psychosis that almost destroys them.
> In one of her stories, James Tiptree Jr. describes a series of scenes in a man's life which each end in terrible disappointment. At the end, it emerges that his consciousness is somehow being held and farmed by an alien species which extracts and feeds on painful emotions.
Wow these sound brutal but you totally nailed a vibe in WAW. I usually refer to these sentiments by the earlier name, wild animal suffering or WAS. Personally, I think it's unlikely that animal suffering is as protracted as we imagine our suffering would be in many of the situations they face, and I think we overlook situations where they are likely happier than we realize, like in doing their natural behaviors. So I have a more balanced take on the welfare value of nature, which makes doing WAW interventions way more complicated than if most animals are suffering most of the time.
Working on WAW has been very emotionally difficult for me, more than I've probably realized, and it has forced me to clarify my ethics a lot. It has made me admit that I'm not a not a pure hedonic utilitarian and I don't aspire to be a pure hedonic utilitarian (which of course has implications for my relationship to the rest of EA). For instance, I learned I value other things than welfare, like biodiversity, at least somewhat. Having to acknowledge moral subjectivism and just having to get through the day with this (currently) intractable suffering hanging all around me has taught me to abide with it more. I don't think being able to see the sadness of the past would make me lose my mind anymore, because, for better or for worse, you learn to have better boundaries between your suffering and others' when it's protracted and not solvable in your lifetime. I am naturally a very overresponsible person who needs to fix everything, but being stared in the face with the immense suffering with which we are delicately enmeshed has been like exposure therapy. I've had to become more emotionally okay with the fact that the world is not how I want it.
> Each year, there are 30 trillion wild-caught shrimp alone! (Rethink Priorities,^)
This statistic both seems unrealistically high and doesn’t seem to match the source.
I’m assuming “wild-caught shrimp” means “shrimp caught in the wild by humans to feed humans”. That means that the average human eats 30 trillion/7 billion = ~4000 shrimp per year or about 10 shrimp per day per human. Given that many humans do not eat any shrimp (either for moral reasons or lack of access), and many people might only eat a few shrimp per month, this implies that some subgroups of people must be eating a huge number of shrimp. This isn’t impossible, but it does seem unlikely. Perhaps the statistic means that many of the shrimp are caught and fed to non-humans, or are caught accidentally in nets? If so, it’s probably worth mentioning that. (And if not, it’s also worth mentioning!)
Beyond that, the source doesn’t seem to mention this statistic at all. It does say “Fishcount.org estimates that between 220 billion and 526 billion decapod crustaceans were slaughtered in aquaculture production in 2015 alone.” However, that refers only to aquaculture of decapod crustaceans (a group that contains shrimp) and not to wild-caught shrimp. It’s not impossible that there are 60x-130x more wild-caught shrimp than aquaculture decapod crustaceans, but it does seem somewhat unlikely.
I agree that animal welfare is important though and this post was very informative about the cause. Thank you!
I updated the text to reflect that the reasoning behind the 30 trillion estimate hasn’t been published yet, but it’s based on research at Rethink Priorities. When that report is published, it will cover all of the questions you raise about wild-caught vs farmed shrimp. The numbers are truly mind-boggling and everyone involved in writing that report was shocked at the scale of wild shrimp catch.
You guessed right— a huge portion of the shrimp are caught to make shrimp meal and to feed to farmed aquatic animals. The report (which I again apologize I did not realize was not included in that earlier published report I linked on invertebrates) will cover this.
Some loose thoughts from a reader who is not involved in EA, philosophy, or the rationalist community...
EA seems like a self-evidently valuable exercise in clarifying our thinking about ethics. WAW seems like accelerating that process in a vertiginous way to where it's hard to have much confidence in anything. As the shrimp cartoon suggests.
We usually think of the interactions between non-human organisms, each other, and their environment as a space where our ethical principles are completely irrelevant, like a naive category error. Our own interactions with animals are a liminal space where most people feel confortable with being uncertain and inconsistent. As a vegetarian opposed to factory farming, I oppose this vagueness: we need to take responsibility and wind down our regime of cruelty. At that point, though, thinking about WAW becomes unavoidable. I’m glad you’re doing this work.
In trying to see and map the macro landscape of life, the experience of suffering begins to look like the overwhelming majority of experience, for organisms generally. Thinking too hard about this seems like a possible pathway to mental illness, or Buddhism.
In Stapledon's "Last and First Men," one of the successive human races learns how to obtain direct sensory access to the past. Their explorations in the human past, and its overwhelming sadness, lead to an epidemic of despair and psychosis that almost destroys them.
In one of her stories, James Tiptree Jr. describes a series of scenes in a man's life which each end in terrible disappointment. At the end, it emerges that his consciousness is somehow being held and farmed by an alien species which extracts and feeds on painful emotions.
From some angles, taking responsibility for the welfare of organisms quite different from us looks like hubris, because of the weakness of our understanding. We struggle to build a coherent account of our own “welfare,” but let’s stipulate that we can identify our own welfare in certain respects. Ethical reasoning involves modeling other people’s subjectivity on our own, a theory of mind. Given the variation of human culture and experience, this can be trickier than it seems. Members of previous generations, who tried really hard to identify and act on their ethical responsibilities, look very misguided to us: Victorian missionaries in the Pacific, etc. etc. The further we get from humans, the more uncertain the concept of welfare would seem to be.
In one possible scenario in which we do take responsibility for the welfare of other organisms, and intervene to improve it, we would evolve into something like gods. In that scenario, we would also take responsibility for the welfare of plants, fungi, microorganisms, and inanimate matter at various scales, and for improving the welfare of the past as well as the future.
As you point out, a possible near-future AGI may overtake us and assume responsibility for our welfare as well as other species’. I suspect that aligning an AI’s values with our own is intrinsically impossible.
> Some loose thoughts from a reader who is not involved in EA, philosophy, or the rationalist community...
Could have fooled me! You seem to grasp the issue well and you've identified a lot of the cruxes here.
> In Stapledon's "Last and First Men," one of the successive human races learns how to obtain direct sensory access to the past. Their explorations in the human past, and its overwhelming sadness, lead to an epidemic of despair and psychosis that almost destroys them.
> In one of her stories, James Tiptree Jr. describes a series of scenes in a man's life which each end in terrible disappointment. At the end, it emerges that his consciousness is somehow being held and farmed by an alien species which extracts and feeds on painful emotions.
Wow these sound brutal but you totally nailed a vibe in WAW. I usually refer to these sentiments by the earlier name, wild animal suffering or WAS. Personally, I think it's unlikely that animal suffering is as protracted as we imagine our suffering would be in many of the situations they face, and I think we overlook situations where they are likely happier than we realize, like in doing their natural behaviors. So I have a more balanced take on the welfare value of nature, which makes doing WAW interventions way more complicated than if most animals are suffering most of the time.
Working on WAW has been very emotionally difficult for me, more than I've probably realized, and it has forced me to clarify my ethics a lot. It has made me admit that I'm not a not a pure hedonic utilitarian and I don't aspire to be a pure hedonic utilitarian (which of course has implications for my relationship to the rest of EA). For instance, I learned I value other things than welfare, like biodiversity, at least somewhat. Having to acknowledge moral subjectivism and just having to get through the day with this (currently) intractable suffering hanging all around me has taught me to abide with it more. I don't think being able to see the sadness of the past would make me lose my mind anymore, because, for better or for worse, you learn to have better boundaries between your suffering and others' when it's protracted and not solvable in your lifetime. I am naturally a very overresponsible person who needs to fix everything, but being stared in the face with the immense suffering with which we are delicately enmeshed has been like exposure therapy. I've had to become more emotionally okay with the fact that the world is not how I want it.
It’s been a while since this post, but I’d love to read more from you about WAW!
It's the topic I'm most cautious about discussing publicly, but there will be more!
> Each year, there are 30 trillion wild-caught shrimp alone! (Rethink Priorities,^)
This statistic both seems unrealistically high and doesn’t seem to match the source.
I’m assuming “wild-caught shrimp” means “shrimp caught in the wild by humans to feed humans”. That means that the average human eats 30 trillion/7 billion = ~4000 shrimp per year or about 10 shrimp per day per human. Given that many humans do not eat any shrimp (either for moral reasons or lack of access), and many people might only eat a few shrimp per month, this implies that some subgroups of people must be eating a huge number of shrimp. This isn’t impossible, but it does seem unlikely. Perhaps the statistic means that many of the shrimp are caught and fed to non-humans, or are caught accidentally in nets? If so, it’s probably worth mentioning that. (And if not, it’s also worth mentioning!)
Beyond that, the source doesn’t seem to mention this statistic at all. It does say “Fishcount.org estimates that between 220 billion and 526 billion decapod crustaceans were slaughtered in aquaculture production in 2015 alone.” However, that refers only to aquaculture of decapod crustaceans (a group that contains shrimp) and not to wild-caught shrimp. It’s not impossible that there are 60x-130x more wild-caught shrimp than aquaculture decapod crustaceans, but it does seem somewhat unlikely.
I agree that animal welfare is important though and this post was very informative about the cause. Thank you!
I updated the text to reflect that the reasoning behind the 30 trillion estimate hasn’t been published yet, but it’s based on research at Rethink Priorities. When that report is published, it will cover all of the questions you raise about wild-caught vs farmed shrimp. The numbers are truly mind-boggling and everyone involved in writing that report was shocked at the scale of wild shrimp catch.
You guessed right— a huge portion of the shrimp are caught to make shrimp meal and to feed to farmed aquatic animals. The report (which I again apologize I did not realize was not included in that earlier published report I linked on invertebrates) will cover this.