I'm always excited to see people interested
in learning more about wild animal suffering.
This talk presumes a basic understanding of
the problem: I'm not really going to go into
any introductory content. What I want to do
with this talk is discuss the sorts of questions
that we might want to be asking to understand
whether we should prioritize wild animal suffering,
and also what sort of interventions we should
be pursuing. So I'll go through those in the
beginning, and then I'm going to look in a
little bit of detail at two crucial considerations
and sort of draw out the implications that
they have for the cause area.
A crucial consideration is a term that Nick
Bostrom created, and it's essentially an idea
or argument that might plausibly reveal the
need for not just some minor course adjustment
in our practical endeavors, but a major change
in direction or priority. So, we can break
this down, we can break down practical endeavors
into three components. We can look at our
primary goal, our evaluation standard, and
our focus area. So if our primary goal as
EAs is to help others as effectively as possible,
then we might define our evaluation standard
as improving the quality of life or reducing
the suffering of moral patients. And so the
simple case we might make for wild animal
suffering, is that suffering experiences in
the wild are intense and frequent, and they
affect an enormous number of beings. The majority
of animals are short-lived and they experience
many forms of prolonged chronic suffering
like hunger, injury, parasitism, disease.
And reducing the suffering experiences of
wild animals will improve the lives of a large
percentage of moral patients. So, if we have
cost-effective solutions, we should work on
resolving the problem.
Now, an example of a crucial consideration
here would be, "Well, what if wild animals
can't suffer?" In that case, our interventions
aren't adding any value and pursuing the goal
would be pointless because we're not actually
doing any good. One point before I move on
is that I think there is very strong evidence
that many wild animals can suffer, and we're
going to look into this in a little bit more
detail.
I defined the evaluation standard as improving
the quality of life and reducing the suffering
of moral patients. But what constitutes a
moral patient depends on one's worldview.
So here I'm using the categories of worldviews
that the Open Philanthropy Project uses, just
to maintain consistency in terminology. So
we have a "long-termist" worldview which assigns
very high value to the future; a "near-termist,
human-centric" worldview, which assigns value
to improving the lives of humans in a relatively
shorter time frame; and then a "near-termist,
animal-inclusive" view, which cares about
improving the lives of humans and also gives
significant moral weight to animals in a shorter
time frame.
So clearly, from a "near-termist, human-centric"
worldview, wild animals are not moral patients,
and so if you subscribe to this view you wouldn't
really prioritize wild animal suffering. Also,
from a "near-termist, animal-inclusive" worldview,
you would consider that at least some wild
animals have the capacity to suffer and might
be moral patients. And whether or not you
prioritize wild animal suffering then depends
on how cost-effective the cause area is.
So what's really interesting is the "long-termist
worldview." We usually, when we talk about
a long-termist worldview, we talk about the
enormous number of people who will exist in
the long-term future. The basic argument is
that because the number of people who could
exist in the long-term future are so large,
it dwarfs all near-term considerations, and
so we focus our altruistic efforts on putting
humans on a positive trajectory so that they
have the capacity to reach their full potential.
This view focuses largely on helping humans,
and it's silent on whether it gives moral
weight to nonhumans. It's not clear to me
whether it's implicitly included, but since
it could be a catastrophic oversight if we
didn't include nonhuman moral patients, for
those of us who subscribe to an inclusive
worldview, what we might want to do is have
this category called "long-termist, nonhuman-inclusive"
worldview. Which, very similar to the "near-termist,
animal-inclusive worldview", cares about ensuring
that humans flourish, and also cares about
ensuring that nonhumans... that we help improve
the lives of nonhumans, should they exist.
So what I'm going to do now is focus on the
"near-termist, animal-inclusive" and the "long-termist,
nonhuman-inclusive", and look at some crucial
considerations for both of these. So let's
start with the near-termist. So, the strength
of the case really for why wild animal suffering
is a priority from a near-termist view is
the scale, and we can look at the scale of
the problem using a few different measures.
It's important that we do use a few different
measures, because no single measure is perfectly
accurate. So we can look at abundance – and
here I'm using farmed vertebrates as our reference
point, it's sort of our anchor. This chart
is on a log scale, so each unit is one order
of magnitude greater than the one before it.
At any one point in time, we might have approximately
123 billion farmed vertebrates, and that includes
fish. We have approximately 1 quadrillion
wild vertebrates and approximately 1 sextillion
invertebrates.
If we look at biomass, unfortunately the data
here is less... we don't have as much data
as we did for abundance, and so what we might
see here is that the data that we have for
farmed vertebrates includes fish, so we have
0.1 gigatons of carbon, compared to 0.7 gigatons
of carbon for wild vertebrates, and 1.72 gigatons
of carbon for invertebrates. One thing to
point out with this measure is that the wild
vertebrate estimate includes fish, and the
farmed vertebrate estimate doesn't include
fish, and it's very likely that if we had
a biomass estimate for farmed fish, the ratio
would be much smaller between farmed vertebrates
and wild vertebrates.
The next one we might wanna look at is neurons.
And for this one, we have even less information.
The information that we have for farmed vertebrates
only covers chickens and cows, and we end
up with 0.009 sextillion neurons combined.
For wild vertebrates, we have 44 sextillion,
and for invertebrates we have 217. Another
interesting point here is that the number
of neurons for wild vertebrates is dominated
by fish. So the absence of fish in our farmed
vertebrate estimate also contributes to there
being such a large ratio between farmed vertebrates
and wild vertebrates.
So the conclusion we might draw from these
measures of scale is that when we talk about
the problem, invertebrates dominate according
to every measure. But there are a few caveats
that we wanna keep in mind. Firstly, the abundance
comparisons between farmed vertebrates and
wild vertebrates make an assumption that the
lives of farmed vertebrates are equal to those
of wild vertebrates. However, they don't take
into account the comparison of the disutility
between farmed lives and wild lives. Abundance
measures also equate vertebrate lives with
invertebrate lives, and that's very likely
to be inaccurate. I'll discuss how we might
want to work with the value of invertebrate
lives a little bit further into the talk.
So because we have such a simplistic model
when we think about the scale, we want to
think about, what sort of considerations might
have a drastic effect on the expected value
of our efforts? And we can break this down
into two different categories: We can look
at the number of moral patients affected,
and the severity of their experiences. And
so we need to ask questions like, are invertebrates
moral patients? Are fetuses moral patients,
what about larvae? How do we decide on the
moral weight between different kinds of moral
patients? And that includes not just deciding
between the moral weight of an ant versus
a cow, but also an ant versus a nematode.
And then the severity of experiences. So how
bad are different ways of dying? How prevalent
is chronic pain in the wild? And, are there
degrees in the capacity to feel pain? So I'm
not going to try and answer any of these in
this talk; these are each a talk in and of
themselves. Instead what I'm going to do is
choose the first one, “Are invertebrates
moral patients”, and look at it in a little
more detail.
So if the answer to are invertebrates moral
patients, no, then the scale of the problem
is significantly reduced. So you can see that
in the bottom row, when we exclude invertebrates
we see abundance drop from ten orders of magnitude
to three, we see biomass drop from 17 times
to 7 times larger, and neuron count drops
from five to four orders of magnitude. When
we combine this with how uncertain the tractability
of wild animal suffering is, then it might
then be plausible that wild animal suffering
is not the right focus area from a near-term,
animal-inclusive perspective, that it's not
a good candidate for our prioritization. But
I think it's pretty unlikely that we can confidently
say that invertebrates are not moral patients.
And that's because... well, there are a few
reasons.
The first reason is that we don't have a clearly
defined measure of moral patienthood. What
we tend to do when we try and understand who
constitutes a moral patient, is we look at
features of humans, we use humans as a baseline,
we consider ourselves moral patients, and
then we sort of extrapolate those to see whether
animals possess or have the capacity to demonstrate
these features. So we might look at subjective
experiences: does an animal recognize itself
in a mirror? We might look at cognitive complexity:
do animals use tools, or do they have a complex
language? Or we might look at an animal's
ability to demonstrate pain-avoidance or pleasure-seeking
behavior, and then try to understand, is that
mechanical or is that deliberate? And are
there elements of learning involved?
The second reason why we can't really confidently
say that invertebrates are not moral patients,
is that experts reasonably disagree on whether
invertebrates even fulfill that criterion.
So there are some studies that demonstrate
invertebrates expressing pain-avoidance behavior,
and then there are others where invertebrates
don't express that behavior. And so with this
uncertainty, it's both very potentially dangerous
to just ignore the potential moral patienthood
of invertebrates, but we also can't confidently
conclude that they are moral patients. So
what can we do?
The first thing we can do is think about the
precautionary principle. So this is basically
an ethical principle that just assumes invertebrates
are moral patients, and then we take their
interests into account in our actions. This
makes sense in instances where we unnecessarily
inflict potential suffering on invertebrates,
for example we could stop wearing silk because
the process of silk production involves boiling
silk worms alive. Or we could advocate against
the development of insect farms as an alternate
source of animal-based protein. And that's
not to say that we should support the existing
farms, but that we might want to support plant-based
protein, or clean meat. However, as a universal
principle, it doesn't really work for a few
reasons. It doesn't really give us any guidance
on how to weigh invertebrates relative to
other moral patients. It doesn't give us guidance
on how to weigh classes of invertebrates.
And, it's not likely to always be cost-effective.
And that means we could be wasting resources
that are better applied elsewhere.
Another approach we might wanna think about
is expected value, and this should be very
well understood by EAs; we use this all the
time. And so the way it works is, if we assume
P is the probability of invertebrates being
moral patients, and P multiplied by the number
of invertebrates is greater than or equal
to the number of known moral patients, and
if invertebrates are moral patients, they
matter equally per individual as vertebrates,
then when we think only about invertebrates,
wild animal suffering is on a greater scale
than other focus areas in a "near-termist,
animal-inclusive" worldview. So for example,
we could assume that all humans and vertebrates
are known moral patients. That would give
us approximately ten trillion known moral
patients. And so, if we give a probability
of one in a million to invertebrates being
moral patients, then the expected utility
of helping invertebrates outweighs that of
all other moral patients. But, there are obviously...
there are two very clear followup questions
here. The first is, how do you determine probability
P, and the second is, if we don't think invertebrates
matter equally per individual, how much do
they matter?
Again, there are a few measures experts might
use to try and understand how to even go about
answering those questions. So we might look
at things like absolute brain size, brain
to body mass ratio, total neuron count, or
cerebral cortex to total neuron count. So
when we look at brain size, the reason we
might think, "Well, the size of a brain determines
intelligence or cognitive complexity," is
because the larger a brain size, the more
cells they have, and the more energy is involved
to develop more complex activities or more
complex computations. But what we see here
is this very unintuitive result where, well,
intuitive in terms of size that an elephant
has four times, roughly a four times larger
brain than humans. But unintuitive in the
sense that we don't often consider elephants
smarter than humans.
And so what we might want to do then is look
at the ratio of brain to body mass. And that
tells us that, because the size of an elephant
is so much larger than a human, a large percentage
of neurons in a brain are used on basic functions,
on just keeping an elephant functioning, as
opposed to more complex cognitive processes.
Whereas for a human, we see a much smaller
ratio of brain to body mass. Maybe unintuitively,
we have the mouse and the ant, which have
a smaller ratio of brain to body mass than
a human. This is actually a principle that
the smaller animals have a smaller brain to
body mass ratio than much larger animals.
So we might also want to look at total number
of neurons, but again we see that when we
look at the absolute value of... when we just
look at absolute size, it doesn't really give
us a lot of guidance. So again, elephants
have an absolute greater number of neurons
than humans, and so it seems as though if
they did have more neurons then they should
perhaps be able to demonstrate more cognitive
complexity. One reason why they might not
is to do with the structure and function of
the brain. And so the reason we care about
this is because in mammals for example, most
of our cognitively complex tasks are located
in the cerebral cortex. And the cerebellum
contains the neurons that focus on just keeping
bodies functioning.
And so what we want to do is compare the number
of neurons in the cerebral cortex to the rest
of the brain. And then again, we have this
much more intuitive result, where an elephant
has a ratio of one to fifty and a human has
a ratio of one to five. Interestingly, we
don't have results for an ant, because non-mammals
don't have the same brain structure. And so
one problem we have with these measures is
that they're not applicable across all species
and across all taxa. So this is basically
what we have at hand to try and answer these
questions. They're by no means perfect, and
we lack a lot of data that we need to work
on building before we have a very concrete
way of answering this problem.
So now we might look at the "long-termist,
nonhuman-inclusive" view. So here what we're
interested in is whether our focus area increases
the expected value of the future of humanity,
and also the value of nonhumans that exist.
And this matters to us because space colonization
may mean that future humans export and multiply
wild animal suffering into the universe, and
therefore increase the scale of the problem.
A related but maybe more obscure problem is
that advancements in artificial intelligence
might lead to digital simulations of nature,
and if those simulations contain moral patients,
then that might also increase the problem.
This is very difficult to measure, and what
I've done here is taken the 80,000 hours quantitative
framework, and extrapolated what I might score
wild animal welfare. But this is very tentative
and I don't encourage anyone to take this
at face value. So I'm using positively shaping
AI as our reference point, and that gets a
15 out of 16, and again this is on a log scale
where every two units equal an order of magnitude.
Farm animal welfare scores a 13, and the reason
is that more humane attitudes can increase
the expected value of the future by between
0.1 and 1 percent. I think the same sort of
reasoning applies to wild animal welfare.
If efforts to reduce wild animal welfare will
also increase humane attitudes, and that might
increase the expected value of the future.
The reason I've given it 1 point less is because
the farm animal welfare assessment is prefaced
with 10 to 90 percent of the problem being
solved through intense efforts. And it's not
obvious to me that I can make an equally confident
claim that we have the capacity through intense
efforts to solve 10 to 90 percent of wild
animal suffering. And so I chose the lower
bound for the scale.
So what sort of crucial considerations are
there? Is there more disvalue than value in
nature? Do we expect future populations to
care about nonhumans without our efforts?
Or, relatedly, do we expect them to expand
their moral circle without our efforts? Could
space colonization spread wild animal suffering?
Could advancements in artificial intelligence
create digital moral patients? What population
ethics do we subscribe to? And how durable
are value systems? These are all massive questions.
So let's have a look at the first one. Is
there more disvalue than value in nature?
So this one is really interesting to answer,
because if there is more disvalue than value
and flipping the sign is impossible or intractable,
then we have two obligations. We want to prevent
nature spreading beyond Earth, and we want
to prevent artificial simulations of nature
being created. But trying to answer this question
is extremely difficult, and even when we try
and break it down into sub-components, what
we realize is that the sub-components are
in and of themselves crucial considerations.
These are our related crucial considerations.
And you've already seen many of these. So
which nonhumans are moral patients? When we
try and understand disvalue to value in nature,
we're thinking who should we be including
in our calculation? Again, how do we weigh
different moral patients? How bad are negative
experiences versus how good are positive experiences?
And then, is it appropriate to use an expected
value calculation to just aggregate across
species? So, if longer-lived mammals have
net positive lives and shorter-lived, smaller
mammals have net negative lives, even if we
include a moral weighting, is it appropriate
to just aggregate across all of them and say,
"well, we think there is disvalue or value
in nature?"
Nick Bostrom in his talk also covers a similar
concern, the difficulty in trying to break
down high level crucial considerations. And
in that he uses signposts, which are kind
of like a concrete way to understand the direction
we might want to be moving in. And so for
us, the signposts, I mean again, they're pretty
straightforward. I don't think there's a lot
of objection to this. We want to increase
research because we want to improve the information,
the knowledge that we have. We want more humane
attitudes because that makes it more likely
that in the future humans will consider nonhumans,
and then we might want to hold off on terraforming,
space colonization, and nonhuman simulations
and emulations, if they are irreversible.
So if we create them, and we end up being
unable to reverse it, and we're uncertain
what the sign of that is, we could have potentially
created an enormous amount of suffering unnecessarily.
Another approach we could take is the moral
value of information. And this is based on
a talk that Amanda Askell gave at EA Global
last year. And the basic argument behind this,
is that our belief in the effectiveness of
interventions with very little evidence has
low resilience. And so where that's the case,
assuming all else is equal, the value of information
is much higher. In our case, our belief in
the net value or disvalue in nature is based
on a very weak set of evidence, and so the
resilience in this belief is low. If the resilience
is low, then the expected value of actions
that we take is not robust. We can't be confident
in what the signs of our actions are. And
so what this means, is it means we should
invest in interventions that have a really
high information value, conditional on them
being relatively low cost to acquire. And
comfortingly, I think this leads us to very
similar conclusions as the one we had in the
signpost, that we want to focus more on research,
and that with more research we can increase
humane attitudes.
So unfortunately I have not left you with
any answers in this talk, but if you found
this really interesting and you're curious
to learn more, or you're curious to figure
out how you can contribute, the best advice
I can give is to just learn, learn, and keep
learning. And so these are some texts that
I found really, really useful. These are just
a jumping off point though, so if you want
more guidance, or you want to learn more and
you've read all these, feel free to email
me. Feel free to find me on Facebook or come
up and say hi, any time during the weekend.
Thanks.
Have a seat. Let's take a few questions, we've
got a few minutes. As always, submit your
questions via the Bizzabo app, or at sf.eaglobal.org/polls.
So, I'll just dive right in. Feel free to
pass if there are any that you'd like to pass
on. One, I thought, kind of interesting question
is on the crucial considerations that might
separate wild from farmed animals. So the
questioner is basically saying, "Look, I know
I care about animals broadly, but how do I
think about the distinction between wild and
farmed?"
I think the most important thing you'd wanna
think about is the severity of experience
and the quality of lives. So if you're trying
to understand whether you might want to prioritize
farm animal welfare over wild animal welfare,
for me the most important consideration is,
well, how severe... how much suffering is
there in farmed animal welfare. And there's
plausibly, throughout the duration of the
life of a farm animal, more suffering than
in the wild. The difference then, comes in
the scale, which is that the number of wild
animals is so much greater that maybe that
outweighs farm animal welfare. But it's definitely
not very clear. And another important thing
to keep in mind is tractability. It's much
more tractable to work on farm animal welfare
than it is on wild animal suffering.
That's not to say that we shouldn't be working
on wild animal suffering, but if you're interested
in working on actionable interventions now,
then farm animal welfare seems like the way
to go. If you're interested in investing in
learning more about this potential other focus
area, that could be one of the biggest near-term
focus areas for us, then wild animal suffering
seems like something that you'd be interested
in supporting. But I would also encourage
people to support both regardless. Because
the main goal is to improve the welfare of
all animals. And these are just two different
problems that we've encountered.
Someone asks, "why is biomass morally relevant?"
Your answer may be, it's not really, it's
just a proxy, but I mean, is it just a dearth
of metrics, and...
Yeah, exactly. So there's very little information
on brain size and neurons in animals, but
body mass and brain size are positively correlated
in that the larger a body, the larger the
brain, and so when we don't have information
on the brain size or the number of neurons,
we might use biomass basically as a proxy
for that. But in and of itself it doesn't
really have moral value. So just, the weight
of the being doesn't have moral value, it's
just that the larger a being, the larger – the
more likely it is – the larger the brain.
And therefore, potentially, depending on how
we weigh brain size in terms of moral patienthood,
that could be morally relevant.
A lot of questions, actually are coming in.
We will not have time for them all. Are you
gonna be available for office hours today?
Yeah, sure.
Do you know the time of that?
Now?
Immediately afterward?
Yeah.
Okay, great. How about for... I think, one
that seems high priority is, for those who
are interested in doing direct work or active
research now in this subject matter, what
advice would you give them?
So I guess it depends on your background.
If you have a background in biology or ecology
or neurobiology or any sort of domain expertise,
then I would definitely encourage you to get
in touch. We're hoping to create more opportunities
for people with domain expertise to do some
relevant research. I would also say, if you're
based in academia, get to know supervisors
within those departments and maybe try and
sense how receptive they might be to different
issues. In a lot of cases, even if they're
not receptive specifically to wild animal
welfare, they are just curious about answering
these questions. And that might be sufficient
to get more empirical information.
If you don't have domain expertise, then I
would encourage maybe volunteering and learning
more about the sort of outreach that we might
want to do. Or perhaps the sort of advocacy
that might be really useful on a broader scale,
like anti-speciesism advocacy. That might
be really useful, both for wild animal welfare
and farm animal welfare.
Kind of a related question on specific areas
that people might investigate for high information
value purposes. In terms of getting more information,
maybe you could kind of specify a few more
thoughts of where people could go look and
focus.
There's a lot of different places that I think
are really useful. I mean, the first one,
I think if we... based on this talk is better
understanding the physiology of invertebrates.
Better understanding the structure of their
brains, and better understanding the experiences
that they have. That's really important to
us, because the more information we have,
the better... the more guidance we have in
terms of figuring out whether they are moral
patients and how we should be acting towards
them. I would also say, sort of large scale,
environmental and ecosystem changes, assessing
that and the effect that that has on large
populations. So looking at population composition,
population dynamics. So for example, one academic
I'm talking to is looking at why ticks, 80%
of ticks congregate on 20% of a population.
And that's really interesting, because if
there are things that attract ticks or things
that deter ticks, then maybe we can use that
and genetically edit that into other species
and minimize the prevalence of parasitism.
So that's a really interesting form of research
as well. Or looking at things like the effects
of climate change on population composition.
So which populations survive and adapt really
well, which are really resilient, which aren't,
what might be the reason behind that?
You got close to what'll have to be our last
question with your comment on ticks. Not good
for the ticks, obviously. Anything that at
this point feels actionable, or is this all
purely still in the research phase?
So there's a lot of things that are currently
actionable. We currently do large scale wildlife
contraception on over-abundant populations.
That's already happening and it's already
being trialed in a number of different cities.
So that's something that is definitely actionable.
We've run large-scale vaccination programs
in the past, not to benefit wild animals,
to benefit humans, but it's also something
that was successful and it's demonstrated
that we can do it. We also do a lot of harm
to animals, or potential harm to invertebrates
through the use of insecticides. We do the
same thing with population control for overabundant
vertebrate species, and there are ways we
can try to minimize that. For example, we
can use gene drives to reduce the populations
of over-abundant species, rather than kill
them through population control measures.
We could look for humane alternatives to...
or humane insecticides, or humane alternatives
to existing insecticides for insects in agriculture.
So there's a lot of things that are really
actionable on a large scale, and even on a
small scale, things like just being careful
when, paying attention to invertebrates that
are in your sphere of existence and making
sure you're not causing them undue harm.
It's been a fascinating 30 minutes. For more,
you'll have to find her at office hours. How
about another round of applause for Persis Eskander?
Thank you.
