Thanks for the post. I agree that this is an important question. I do, however, have many disagreements.
Many of us value things other than pleasure and the avoidance of pain when it comes to humans. Perhaps we ought to value these things also when it comes to non-human animals. It seems difficult to defend hedonism for non-human animals while rejecting it for humans. What is the relevant difference?
The obvious alternative is to take animals out of the equation altogether with cultured meat. Lewis Bollard makes this point explicitly: “I think when people start to talk about completely re-engineering the minds of chickens so that they’re essentially brain-dead and don’t realise the environment they’re in, it just seems like a better option to only grow the meat part of the bird and not grow the mind at all.” The solutions you propose, like to “identify and surgically or chemically remove the part of the brain that is responsible for suffering” are highly speculative with current science. One of your examples is literally science fiction. It seems to me that cultured meat would be easier to achieve technologically, while being similar or superior in consumer acceptance. Marie Gibbons claims that we might “see clean meat sold commercially within a year”. Metaculus thinks the probability of a restaurant serving cultured meat by 2021 is 75%.
For a short argument with two major flaws, I found the tone unnecessarily dismissive. You had had a short conversation about your new idea at EA Global, and concluded that your idea is not being widely pushed by others who work in this area. At this point it would have been appropriate to think of some obvious counter-arguments. Instead in this post I see a lot of speculation about which impure motives and fallacies in reasoning could explain why your idea hasn’t been adopted. Some quotes: “This emphasis is quite understandable emotionally.”, “this kind of anthropomorphizing”, “”What do you mean, cut off baby chicken’s legs so it does not have leg pain later? You, monster!”″, “Because most people do not truly care about reducing animal suffering, they care about a different metric altogether, a visible human proxy for animal suffering that they find immediately relatable.”, “actual suffering”.
1 seems like an irrelevant objection. Animal welfare interventions are marketed as Effective Altruist or utilitarian interventions because of the amount of suffering we can avert by improving conditions in factory farms or reducing the amount of food produced that way. This doesn’t imply that other people don’t have other reasons to care about animals. The OP’s argument is that the specifically utilitarian, aggregativist argument for animal welfare interventions favors wireheading chickens over other interventions pushed more frequently.
Effective altruism does not imply utilitarianism. Utilitarianism (on most definitions) does not imply hedonism. I would guess less than 10% of EAs (or of animal-focused EAs) would consider themselves thoroughgoing hedonists, of the kind that would endorse e.g. injecting a substance that would numb humans to physical pain or amputating human body parts, if this reduced suffering even a little bit. So on the contrary, I think the objection is relevant.
There can be amounts of things other than suffering, though. Caring about the “number of chickens that lead meaningful lives” doesn’t mean that one isn’t a utilitarian. (For the record, I agree with the OP that the notion of “leading meaningful lives” isn’t so important for animals, but I think it’s possible to disagree with this and still be advocating an EA intervention.)
Re point 2: I agree that vat-grown meat would eventually be a viable approach, and the least controversial one. I am less optimistic about the timeframe, the taste. the acceptance rate and the costs.
Re point 1: See my reply to Ozy and others.
Re point 3: While I disagree with your assessment of “major flaws” (talk about being dismissive!), I accept the critique of the tone of the post sounding dismissive. If I were writing a formal report or a presentation at an EA event, I would take a lot more time and a lot more care to sound appropriately professional. I will endeavor to spend more time on polishing the presentation next time I write a controversial LW post.
Cultured meat doesn’t seem like a ‘science fiction intervention’ to me. It’s true that it has appeared in several works of science fiction, but it is also being actively developed by several labs and companies, with prototypes having already been made—for more detail on both halves of this sentence, see the Wikipedia page.
Regardless, it seems really weird to me that being in a science fiction novel is a critique of a new idea. If I think about intellectual work happening in the past 30 years that has the potential to be the most important work, I think about superintelligence, uploads, nanotech, the fermi paradox, making humanity interplanetary, and a bunch of other ideas who could have happily been critiqued as ‘from science fiction’ when first examined.
Could we grow animals that desire to be eaten, or perhaps don’t feel pain? I recall many years ago in Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show On Earth about wild wolves that became incredibly tame and underwent massive morphological changes in just a few generations of pure artificial selection. I’m not sure what traits you’d select on for animals in factory farms, but it’s an interesting idea.
(Edit: In case it’s not clear, I’m responding to the top-level comment’s initial criticism, not DanieFilan’s point. I probably should’ve just replied directly, it was just after reading Daniel’s comment that I thought up my comment.)
The following question seems interesting: Of the technological advances that have made a substantial difference to the world since the time when science fiction first emerged as a genre, what fraction (weighted by impact, if you like) appeared in science fiction before they became fact, and how closely did the reality resemble the fiction?
Yes. That might actually be a better question—except that the actually-relevant population is presumably something like “technologies introduced in science fiction that seemed like they might actually be possible in the not-outrageously-far future”.
I’m aware that there are labs that claim to have produced prototype lab meat, at enormous expense. This is some evidence that lab meat is feasible at scale, but mass-produced lab meat is still something in the future, not the present, and therefore to some extent inherently speculative.
Cold fusion enjoys similar status, as did until recently the EmDrive. Some such ventures work out; others don’t.
I would agree that cultured meat is “to some extent inherently speculative”. What I’m reacting to is your assertion that it’s science fiction in the same way that the Ameglian Major Cow is science fiction. I think that it is both significantly less speculative than the prospect of making an Ameglian Major Cow, and also not “science fiction” as most people would understand the term.
I agree that there’s a difference in degree. But, the difference between a more and less highly speculative technology is not really the distinction “literally science fiction” implies, and it’s important to call out things like that even if there is some other, more valid argument the person could or should have made. I agree that some of the examples, especially the Ameglian Major Cow, were much more speculative than lab-grown meat. On the other hand, administering opioids to factory farmed animals may be substantially less speculative.
First, I agree that administering opioids to farmed animals is less speculative than cheap mass-produced cultured meat, i.e. lab meat, but I don’t think that that’s relevant to the conversation, since it wasn’t what tommsittler was referring to by “literally science fiction”.
I think you’re saying something like <<Because lab meat doesn’t yet exist, it’s highly speculative technology, and therefore you shouldn’t distinguish it from the Ameglian Major Cow by calling the Amegilan Major Cow “literally science fiction”, even though the Ameglian Major Cow is much more speculative than lab meat—if the Ameglian Major Cow is “science fiction”, then so is lab meat, which is why it makes sense to say “2 objects to the OP using an example from science fiction, and immediately goes on to propose a science fiction intervention”>>. I’m not sure this is right, so please correct me if it’s wrong.
My response is that the degree in how speculative the technologies are is in fact relevant: there exists a prototype for one and not the other, it’s easier to see how you would make one than the other, and one seems to be higher esteemed than domain experts (this last factor maybe isn’t crucial, but does seem relevant especially for those of us like me who don’t have domain expertise), and these differences make one a relevantly safer bet than the other. These differences are evidenced by the fact that one has mostly been developed in a soft science fiction series, and one is the subject of active research and development. As such, it makes sense to call the Ameglian Major Cow “literally science fiction” and it does not make sense to call lab meat “science fiction”.
Thanks for the post. I agree that this is an important question. I do, however, have many disagreements.
Many of us value things other than pleasure and the avoidance of pain when it comes to humans. Perhaps we ought to value these things also when it comes to non-human animals. It seems difficult to defend hedonism for non-human animals while rejecting it for humans. What is the relevant difference?
The obvious alternative is to take animals out of the equation altogether with cultured meat. Lewis Bollard makes this point explicitly: “I think when people start to talk about completely re-engineering the minds of chickens so that they’re essentially brain-dead and don’t realise the environment they’re in, it just seems like a better option to only grow the meat part of the bird and not grow the mind at all.” The solutions you propose, like to “identify and surgically or chemically remove the part of the brain that is responsible for suffering” are highly speculative with current science. One of your examples is literally science fiction. It seems to me that cultured meat would be easier to achieve technologically, while being similar or superior in consumer acceptance. Marie Gibbons claims that we might “see clean meat sold commercially within a year”. Metaculus thinks the probability of a restaurant serving cultured meat by 2021 is 75%.
For a short argument with two major flaws, I found the tone unnecessarily dismissive. You had had a short conversation about your new idea at EA Global, and concluded that your idea is not being widely pushed by others who work in this area. At this point it would have been appropriate to think of some obvious counter-arguments. Instead in this post I see a lot of speculation about which impure motives and fallacies in reasoning could explain why your idea hasn’t been adopted. Some quotes: “This emphasis is quite understandable emotionally.”, “this kind of anthropomorphizing”, “”What do you mean, cut off baby chicken’s legs so it does not have leg pain later? You, monster!”″, “Because most people do not truly care about reducing animal suffering, they care about a different metric altogether, a visible human proxy for animal suffering that they find immediately relatable.”, “actual suffering”.
1 seems like an irrelevant objection. Animal welfare interventions are marketed as Effective Altruist or utilitarian interventions because of the amount of suffering we can avert by improving conditions in factory farms or reducing the amount of food produced that way. This doesn’t imply that other people don’t have other reasons to care about animals. The OP’s argument is that the specifically utilitarian, aggregativist argument for animal welfare interventions favors wireheading chickens over other interventions pushed more frequently.
Effective altruism does not imply utilitarianism. Utilitarianism (on most definitions) does not imply hedonism. I would guess less than 10% of EAs (or of animal-focused EAs) would consider themselves thoroughgoing hedonists, of the kind that would endorse e.g. injecting a substance that would numb humans to physical pain or amputating human body parts, if this reduced suffering even a little bit. So on the contrary, I think the objection is relevant.
There can be amounts of things other than suffering, though. Caring about the “number of chickens that lead meaningful lives” doesn’t mean that one isn’t a utilitarian. (For the record, I agree with the OP that the notion of “leading meaningful lives” isn’t so important for animals, but I think it’s possible to disagree with this and still be advocating an EA intervention.)
There can, but in practice the amount of suffering is usually the stated reason to care.
Ah sorry, I seem to have misread your comment. Makes sense now, thanks!
Re point 2: I agree that vat-grown meat would eventually be a viable approach, and the least controversial one. I am less optimistic about the timeframe, the taste. the acceptance rate and the costs.
Re point 1: See my reply to Ozy and others.
Re point 3: While I disagree with your assessment of “major flaws” (talk about being dismissive!), I accept the critique of the tone of the post sounding dismissive. If I were writing a formal report or a presentation at an EA event, I would take a lot more time and a lot more care to sound appropriately professional. I will endeavor to spend more time on polishing the presentation next time I write a controversial LW post.
Normal upvote for showing openness. (I strongly downvoted the OP because of the tone.)
2 objects to the OP using an example from science fiction, and immediately goes on to propose a science fiction intervention.
Cultured meat doesn’t seem like a ‘science fiction intervention’ to me. It’s true that it has appeared in several works of science fiction, but it is also being actively developed by several labs and companies, with prototypes having already been made—for more detail on both halves of this sentence, see the Wikipedia page.
Regardless, it seems really weird to me that being in a science fiction novel is a critique of a new idea. If I think about intellectual work happening in the past 30 years that has the potential to be the most important work, I think about superintelligence, uploads, nanotech, the fermi paradox, making humanity interplanetary, and a bunch of other ideas who could have happily been critiqued as ‘from science fiction’ when first examined.
Could we grow animals that desire to be eaten, or perhaps don’t feel pain? I recall many years ago in Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show On Earth about wild wolves that became incredibly tame and underwent massive morphological changes in just a few generations of pure artificial selection. I’m not sure what traits you’d select on for animals in factory farms, but it’s an interesting idea.
(Edit: In case it’s not clear, I’m responding to the top-level comment’s initial criticism, not DanieFilan’s point. I probably should’ve just replied directly, it was just after reading Daniel’s comment that I thought up my comment.)
The following question seems interesting: Of the technological advances that have made a substantial difference to the world since the time when science fiction first emerged as a genre, what fraction (weighted by impact, if you like) appeared in science fiction before they became fact, and how closely did the reality resemble the fiction?
Of course, it’s also important to consider the fraction of technologies introduced in science fiction that then came into existence.
Yes. That might actually be a better question—except that the actually-relevant population is presumably something like “technologies introduced in science fiction that seemed like they might actually be possible in the not-outrageously-far future”.
I’m aware that there are labs that claim to have produced prototype lab meat, at enormous expense. This is some evidence that lab meat is feasible at scale, but mass-produced lab meat is still something in the future, not the present, and therefore to some extent inherently speculative.
Cold fusion enjoys similar status, as did until recently the EmDrive. Some such ventures work out; others don’t.
I would agree that cultured meat is “to some extent inherently speculative”. What I’m reacting to is your assertion that it’s science fiction in the same way that the Ameglian Major Cow is science fiction. I think that it is both significantly less speculative than the prospect of making an Ameglian Major Cow, and also not “science fiction” as most people would understand the term.
I agree that there’s a difference in degree. But, the difference between a more and less highly speculative technology is not really the distinction “literally science fiction” implies, and it’s important to call out things like that even if there is some other, more valid argument the person could or should have made. I agree that some of the examples, especially the Ameglian Major Cow, were much more speculative than lab-grown meat. On the other hand, administering opioids to factory farmed animals may be substantially less speculative.
First, I agree that administering opioids to farmed animals is less speculative than cheap mass-produced cultured meat, i.e. lab meat, but I don’t think that that’s relevant to the conversation, since it wasn’t what tommsittler was referring to by “literally science fiction”.
I think you’re saying something like <<Because lab meat doesn’t yet exist, it’s highly speculative technology, and therefore you shouldn’t distinguish it from the Ameglian Major Cow by calling the Amegilan Major Cow “literally science fiction”, even though the Ameglian Major Cow is much more speculative than lab meat—if the Ameglian Major Cow is “science fiction”, then so is lab meat, which is why it makes sense to say “2 objects to the OP using an example from science fiction, and immediately goes on to propose a science fiction intervention”>>. I’m not sure this is right, so please correct me if it’s wrong.
My response is that the degree in how speculative the technologies are is in fact relevant: there exists a prototype for one and not the other, it’s easier to see how you would make one than the other, and one seems to be higher esteemed than domain experts (this last factor maybe isn’t crucial, but does seem relevant especially for those of us like me who don’t have domain expertise), and these differences make one a relevantly safer bet than the other. These differences are evidenced by the fact that one has mostly been developed in a soft science fiction series, and one is the subject of active research and development. As such, it makes sense to call the Ameglian Major Cow “literally science fiction” and it does not make sense to call lab meat “science fiction”.