So, I will be talking about one of the most
controversial and neglected topics in effective
altruism or in doing good.
Wild animal suffering.
So, for me it started basically with the following
line of reasoning.
We have in effective altruism our first focus
area: improving human well-being.
The strategy is economic development, saving
human lives, but then there's this small voice
in my head saying, "Okay, you can save lives,
but those people will eat meat and we know
economic development will increase meat consumption."
So we have to counteract this kind of negative
side effect if we save lives or increase the
problems.
So we go to our second focus area: avoiding
suffering of livestock animals.
The strategy is, of course, reducing consumption
of animal products and promoting veganism
and things like that.
But now there's a second voice in my head
saying, "Okay, but the ecological footprint
of meat is much higher than vegan protein
sources.
Plant-based protein requires less land.
So if we would switch to a vegan diet, we
will have more nature, unless we destroy all
nature."
But now, okay, is this good?
Do we know if improving, increasing the area,
natural habitats, is this a good thing?
Well we do not really know, but there is already
quite a lot of animal suffering in wild nature.
So that raises the second question.
It's possible that we might even increase
suffering by increasing natural habitats.
So what do we do then?
The third focus area would be decreasing wild
animal suffering.
That's the topic of this presentation and
then what is the strategy?
People always ask, "What are you going to
do about it?"
Well, a starting point is start with scientific
research for safe and effective interventions
to improve wild animal well-being.
Start with scientific research.
That's the intervention that we have to do
now.
We are not going to directly intervene in
nature and separate the lions from the zebras
or things like that.
Now start with scientific research.
Let's look at first the EA prioritization
criteria.
So how big is the problem, how treatable is
the problem and so on?
If you look at how big the problem is, if
you look at wild animal suffering, the intensity
of suffering can be huge.
So suffering from disease, starvation, parasites,
predators, injuries, venomous bites.
The next slide I will show will contain some
cruel images so if you are sensitive to that,
don't look, as these kind of things happening.
Okay, that is gone.
So it can be very serious.
When I imagine having those kind of parasitic
infections or so, I think I will be scared
enough and I guess the animals also don't
like it.
Next to intensity, we have the scope.
How many animals are involved there?
You can see the numbers.
Let's say humans, that's about 10 billion.
Then the terrestrial vertebrates, farm animals.
That's an order of magnitude higher.
But then if you look at the wild animals,
the wild mammals that's even one or two orders
of magnitude higher.
The birds again, amphibians and the fish it's
even more orders of magnitude higher.
For fish, it's pretty certain that they are
likely to feel pain and things like that.
Then we enter the arthropods and the copepods.
It's uncertain if they can feel pain.
Let's say you give it probability 10%, but
if you look at the numbers, that's, I don't
know how you pronounce it, 10 to the 19th,
that's quadrillion or something.
It's enough.
It's pretty much, even if you think that it's
10% probability that they can suffer, then
the expectation is very high.
So the importance, the scope of the problem
is really huge.
There is only one area that is bigger and
that's the far future, but if you are concerned
about the individuals who are affected now,
if you have any population ethics that's kind
of a person-affecting view, like we should
help the people who already exist and have
preferences to be helped.
In that sense, wild animal suffering is probably
the biggest problem.
Then we have tractability and neglectedness.
With neglectedness, it's very simple.
It's strongly neglected, more neglected than
artificial intelligence safety research or
things like that.
So it's probably the most neglected field
in effective altruism and in doing good in
general, I guess.
It's even neglected within the community of
animal rights activists, even the people who
are really concerned about animal welfare
and animal rights.
Even within these communities, this area is
until now still pretty neglected.
But then the basic question is what about
the tractability?
Can we solve this problem?
And here, the idea is again we should start
with scientific research.
We have to investigate the tractability.
Can we safely, effectively intervene or the
first question, if we study this kind of research,
can we find out if it's tractable or not?
Of course, if it's not tractable, then we
can stop doing something about it.
But no one can tell now at this moment that
it is definitely not tractable and it will
never be tractable, so we have the value of
new information when we do research, finding
out if it is tractable.
There is a huge value of information.
If we have this research and we find new ways,
that's very valuable.
So what is this basic idea?
What we would promote is a kind of new academic
discipline, a research discipline, welfare
biology.
You can compare it with conservation biology.
That's also an academic discipline founded
a few decades ago when people, biologists
started to realize, okay, biology is a science
of course, objective science, but we have
a conservation crisis, species extinction.
Now can we use our biological knowledge to
look for effective interventions to protect
biodiversity?
The value is biodiversity and then the academic
discipline is conservation biology.
Now if you do it the other way around and
say our value is now well-being, animal well-being,
for example, then we can start a new scientific
discipline, welfare biology.
Yew-Kwang Ng is most known, 20 years ago.
He wrote a famous article that started this
idea of founding a new discipline.
Studying the most effective and safe methods
to intervene in nature to improve wild animal
well-being.
That's the topic.
And why this is important, if you look at
basically the biggest ecological problem I
would say and the most important, one of the
most crucial things that we should know about
the world is this thing called R selection.
Has anyone heard about R selection?
One has heard about it, R selection.
For whom is it new?
Okay.
So for me, this is one of the most important
effects in the world if you want to do good.
This R selection, R refers to one of the parameters
in population growth of wild species.
So there is this logistic equation, the population
growth, and it's kind of an S-shaped curve.
It starts low and then the population increases
and then it levels off.
The R, it's the rate of growth parameter or
the rate of reproduction, how many offspring.
The higher this rate, the faster this initial
slope will be.
Then there's another parameter that you see
in the equation that's the capital K.
It's from the German carrying capacity.
That measures how big the optimal population
level will be.
When it reaches maximum, how many individuals
can survive the carrying capacity of the Earth?
What happens in nature in evolution is roughly
speaking, species reproduce, but this kind
of reproduction, they can choose between two
kinds of strategies.
On the one hand, on the left you have the
R reproduction strategists.
They get a lot of offspring, a lot of children,
most of them dying at an early age.
Only a few of them will survive.
So that's one thing.
The good thing is you have a lot of offspring,
but it's also a big investment to have a lot
of offspring because most of the children
die.
Then on the far right, you have individuals.
Humans are mostly known for this.
We are K selection species.
For us, we have only a few offspring, but
most of our children survive until reproductive
age.
And even for humans, we are pretty unique
in the world, perhaps the only species for
every adult on average there is roughly one
child and this child becomes an adult.
That's pretty unique.
That's nice.
That's very nice, actually, to have this kind
of, everyone can survive until old age.
You have everything in between.
The thing is, most animal species are tended
toward this R selection and you can ask, for
example, what would a life look like of an
average animal in the world?
Here you see on the horizontal axis when you
die, the percentage of your maximum life span
and vertical axis, that's the number of survivors.
So we are a K selection species.
We have a maximum life span, let's say 100
years.
And most of us are dying close to this maximum
life span.
So we are getting very old.
But then most of the other animals are R selection
species, so they also have a maximum life
span, but most of the animals do not even
come close to this maximum life span.
They die at a very early age.
Now you can think tonight in your beds when
you fall asleep, you can try to look at what
would this life look like if you would have
a long lifespan, but your life is very short?
Let's say one day and you can live 10 years,
but your life is one day.
How many positive experiences would you have
and how many negative experiences would you
have if you have very long life expectancy,
but you actually live one day?
When you think about it, most people who were
doing the exercise would come to the conclusion
probably that short life of one day will be
dominated mostly by negative experiences,
hunger and parasites and predation and things
like that.
That might mean that at least there is a probability,
I would say higher than 10% or so probability
that most lives on this planet are lives not
worth living.
In a sense, that's suppose you die and you
reincarnate and you have the choice between
reincarnating as an animal sentient being
or not reincarnating, like you will reach
nirvana.
What would you choose?
Probably, you would prefer not being born
again.
For example, you can say everything is nice
in nature.
When I walk in the park, I heard the birds
whistling and so on, but for every bird that
we see, we know that one bird lays more than
10 eggs during his or her life and then what
happens with 10 eggs, 10 chickens, chicklets?
How many of those baby birds are dying?
Nine out of 10 die as a baby and only one
of those birds will survive until adulthood.
So we know for every bird that we hear whistling,
what are the lives of the other birds that
could not survive?
You don't see them because they are eaten,
they are decomposed, eaten by worms, so we
don't see them.
We have a kind of when we look at nature a
survivorship bias.
We only see the survivors.
The majority of animals being born, we don't
see them.
So that's why we have a too optimistic appraisal
of the situation of nature.
Why is this a neglected topic?
This is one of my, let's say research areas.
I am an animal rights activist and even when
I raise this question in the animal rights
conferences, for example, I often hear arguments,
fallacies, illogical arguments, cognitive
biases.
So that's really amazing that even animal
rights activists neglect this problem.
Even when they claim to be anti-speciesists,
animal rights activists, when it comes to
wild animal suffering, they will become speciesists
again, for example.
Why is this so?
One of the problems that we face, the cognitive
biases, is scope neglect.
That's an example presented before.
Suppose you are on this site.
You receive a letter that you can save 2000
birds in an oil spill, how many dollars or
Euros are you willing to give?
And you receive the same letter, only difference
one 0 extra, so you can save 20,000 birds
and the same oil spill.
If you would give $80, how much are you willing
to give?
Again, I can imagine that you don't have 10
times as much, so perhaps not 800, but according
to these experiments, about the same or even
in this case, a bit less, $78.
That doesn't make any sense if you can save
more lives.
Another fallacy is this idea that natural
equilibrium maximizes well-being.
This is related to status quo bias.
A very interesting article written by Nick
Bostrom and Toby Ord, two famous effective
altruists.
You can do this kind of thought experiment.
Let's look at the dotted line level level.
That's the level of competition or the level
of predation in nature.
Let's take predation, okay?
You know predation harms animals, lions eat
zebras, okay?
And then I'm going to say, "Okay, let's decrease
the number of lions."
And then there's a lot of protests.
No the lions are harmed and so on and it causes
also suffering.
Okay, why not increase the level of predation?
Why not introduce genetic modification, create
a new predator species and release them into
the wild?
So increase the level of predation by adding
new predators in the world?
If you believe that decreasing the level of
predation would decrease well-being, then
the reverse would be...
This is called the reversal test.
The reverse would be increasing the level
of predation.
Then you could say, "No.
That's also not a good idea.
More predation means more animals being killed
and hunted.
That's also not good.
So that also decreases overall well-being
in the world."
Then that would mean that the current level
of predation, or the natural equilibrium level
of predation would be the level that maximizes
overall well-being of animals.
As we know, nature doesn't care about well-being.
Nature has no preferences, no goal direction
and especially is not concerned about well-being.
So the current level of predation is purely
by accident.
It would be a strong coincidence if this current
level of predation would be the one that maximizes
well-being.
It's like if you have a topographical map
of a mountain area and you randomly pick a
point, chances are very low that you will
pick a mountaintop.
The same with level of competition.
Competition causes suffering, so okay, let's
decrease competition and then the environmentalists
say, "No.
That's not a good idea."
Okay, let's do the reverse.
Let's increase competition.
And they say, "Oh no.
That's also not a good idea."
Okay, but why is the current level of competition
in nature the one that maximizes well-being?
If you can't explain that, you have a bias,
a status quo bias.
Another fallacy is, of course, we cannot solve
all this wild animal suffering.
The problem is too big.
That's a very weird argument because we as
effective altruists, the bigger the problem,
the better it is to work on.
But here they say, "No.
It's too big, so we shouldn't do anything
about it."
Here we have another kind of cognitive bias.
Suppose on your side you have to choose the
sides.
We have the problem of factory farming.
Let's say we can eliminate factory farming
and of course, this reduces the problem of
factory farming 100%.
You can completely eliminate the problem.
And then you have another choice.
Decrease wild animal suffering.
Let's say we have a specific intervention,
let's say one vaccine that you can give to
all animals.
A welfare intervention, but this only reduces
wild animal suffering with 10%.
Most people would prefer working on problem
A because that's a problem that you can completely
eliminate.
Whereas working on problem B might seem more
futile.
That's only a few percent decrease of this
problem.
But we as effective altruists, we have to
compare the total reduction of suffering and
so we can look at this kind of curve.
So on the horizontal axis, that's the actual
amount of suffering of these two problems
and on the vertical axis, there is kind of
the perceived badness of this suffering.
What this means is you have a convex curve.
Normally, it should be a straight line.
The more suffering, the worse it is.
Double suffering, double that.
But here, eliminating problem A. Let's say
problem A causes one unit of suffering and
you can eliminate it from 1 to 0.
And problem B, that's the wild animal suffering
thing.
It causes 100 units of suffering and you can
reduce it from 100 to 90, so it is 10% reduction.
For us rationally, effective altruists, we
would prefer working on problem B because
that's 10 units of suffering less, but people
that the perceived badness of suffering is
different and if you see on the vertical bars,
it looks like working on problem A is more
worth it.
So this is called futility thinking and it's
related to this other cognitive bias, certainty
effects, zero-risk bias and things like that.
So it's also an important cognitive bias that
we have.
Another argument that I hear a lot even by
animal rights activists is if we intervene
in nature, that violates the autonomy of animals.
Me personally, want autonomy, yeah.
That's very crucial.
Of course if the animals themselves prefer
not having this feeling of hunger, respecting
that autonomy would mean avoiding their starvation.
So I strongly value autonomy of animals, but
what the animal rights activists cannot explain
is where the autonomy is of this rat captured
by a snake.
They care about autonomy of pigs in cages
where you can't move, but in nature, this
rat cannot move in any way and then it will
die.
Where's the autonomy of this animal?
And it's not only one rat, but for one snake
there are 100s of rats losing their autonomy.
Then they say, "Yeah, okay, but this predation,
that's necessary for the predators and therefore,
if it is necessary, it is allowed.
Sometimes they say snakes and lions they have
no moral reasoning capacity so, therefore,
they are allowed to hunt.
I would say that's not fair because what if
we have smart lions or especially with dolphins,
it might become very tricky.
Probably dolphins have a kind of proto-morality.
Probably we can learn to speak with dolphins
like if they are children, age of 6 years
or so.
Probably they could understand the notion
of well-being and they hunt fish.
So imagine if we have smart dolphins, are
they allowed to hunt or not?
That's very tricky.
But still then, for dolphins, eating fish
is necessary to survive.
One predator eats hundreds of prey animals
so that is permissible according to many animal
rights activists.
What is not permissible is a kind of reverse,
the organ transplantation dilemma.
Suppose you have five patients in the hospital
and you can sacrifice one innocent person
and with five organs, you can save the lives
of... okay?
What's happening is basically the same.
For example, a mother lion kills a prey animal
and feeds the body tissue of the prey to her
cubs.
Here the surgeon kills an innocent individual
and uses the body parts, feeds the body parts
into the bodies of the patients, the five
cubs, the five patients.
Here, it's basically in reverse.
One person can save five people, but one lion
is allowed to kill hundreds.
That doesn't make any sense.
That's really illogical.
Another argument is an argument that I had
before and I consider this as my worst moral
mistake.
I did a PhD in moral philosophy about animal
rights and I defended the predation problem,
that this was still allowed because this is
natural behavior, it contributes to biodiversity
and biodiversity is valuable in the intrinsic
value of natural processes and things like
that.
So we speak about natural integrity, biodiversity,
naturalness.
I gave intrinsic value to nature, but now
I realize that, okay, we have an ecosystem
with lions and animals and so on.
I can give intrinsic value to biodiversity
of this ecosystem, so I value biodiversity.
And on the other end, I can also give intrinsic
value, for example, to your well-being.
I care about your well-being.
Lucky for you, but for you, as well.
I care about your well-being.
The thing, of course, is that nature itself
doesn't care at all about biodiversity.
It doesn't experience biodiversity loss, for
example.
On the other hand, if I don't value your well-being,
at least someone else, namely you, yourself,
you value your own well-being and as an altruist,
I want to do what the others really want.
I want to do what nature wants, but okay,
nature does not have brains and no consciousness
so doing what nature wants is kind of trivial.
Doing what sentient beings want who have preferences,
feelings, well-being.
You want well-being?
Okay, improving well-being is good.
That is kind of... two minutes left?
Okay.
Okay.
Thanks.
This burning museum dilemma.
I prefer aesthetic value of paintings and
then there's Mona Lisa burning and there's
a child in the museum who I am going to save,
save the child or save the Mona Lisa?
The Mona Lisa itself doesn't care about being
burned by the flames and doesn't care about
aesthetic value and things like that.
The child cares about not being burned by
the flames, cares about well-being.
So when I would save the Mona Lisa, I would
say that my preference for aesthetic value
dominates the preference of the child's for
well-being.
The same with biodiversity.
If I would say the lion are allowed to hunt
and can do whatever they want for biodiversity
reasons, then I would impose my own preference
for biodiversity above the preferences of
all wild animals.
Other fallacies, that we do not have a responsibility,
no duty because we do not cause this problem
with wild animal suffering.
For animal rights activists, it doesn't make
any sense because they do not eat meat, but
still they want to do something against factory
farming, although vegans are not responsible
for factory farming.
Other fallacies, there is a difference between
suffering caused by humans and non-humans.
This is literally said by anti-speciesist
animal rights activists.
We have to make a difference between suffering
caused by humans and suffering caused by non-humans.
Now if you have a moral rule that explicitly
refers to humans and they cannot justify this
rule via its explicitly referring to humans,
then it's itself a kind of speciesist rule.
It's very ironic that here they claim to be
anti-speciesists, but here, they make the
same mistakes again.
Then we have the whole list of fallacies.
These are arguments given by animal rights
activists, but I translated them like "the
lion are allowed to hunt the zebra" and I
simply changed the word zebra into child.
Then see if anti-speciesists would be indifferent
between changing the different species.
So whether it's a human prey animal or a zebra
prey animal, it doesn't make a difference.
Animal rights activists say, "Yeah, but zebras
have to die of something."
That's what they literally said.
But if you translate like humans have to die
of something, the they disagree again.
So it's very amazing that we are so vulnerable
to all these kinds of fallacies.
Yeah.
That's it.
