The catastrophic rise of insect farming and its implications for future efforts to reduce suffering

On the 17th of August 2021, the EU authorized the use of insects as feed for farmed animals such as chickens and pigs. This was a disastrous decision for sentient beings, as it may greatly increase the number of beings who will suffer in animal agriculture. Sadly, this was just one in a series of disastrous decisions that the EU has made regarding insect farming in the last couple of years. Most recently, in February 2022, they authorized the farming of house crickets for human consumption, after having made similar decisions for the farming of mealworms and migratory locusts in 2021.

Many such catastrophic decisions probably lie ahead, seeing that the EU is currently reviewing applications for the farming of nine additional kinds of insects. This brief posts reviews some reflections and potential lessons in light of these harmful legislative decisions.

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Could we have done better?

The most relevant aspect to reflect upon in light of these legislative decisions are the strategic implications. Could we have done better? And what could we do better going forward?

I believe the short answer to the first question is a resounding “yes”. I believe that the animal movement could have made far greater efforts to prevent this development (which is not saying much, since the movement at large does not appear to have made much of an effort to prevent this disaster). I am not saying that such efforts would have prevented this development for sure, but I believe that they would have reduced the probability and expected scale of it considerably, to such an extent that it would have been worthwhile to pursue such preventive efforts.

In concrete terms, these efforts could have included:

Wealthy donors such as Open Philanthropy making significant donations toward preventing the expansion of insect farming (e.g. investing in research and campaigning work).
Animal advocates exploring and developing the many arguments for preventing such an expansion.
Animal advocates disseminating these arguments to the broader public, to fellow advocates, and to influential people and groups (e.g. politicians, and policy advisors).

Important to note is that efforts of this kind not only had the potential to change a few significant policy decisions, but they could potentially have prevented — or at least reduced — a whole cascade of harmful policy decisions. Of course, having such an impact might still be possible today, even if it is a lot more difficult at this later stage where the momentum for insect farming already appears strong and growing.

As Abraham Rowe put it, “not working on insect farming over the last decade may come to be one of the largest regrets of the EAA [Effective Animal Activist] community in the near future.”

How can we do better going forward?

When asking how we can do better, I am particularly interested in what lessons we can draw in our efforts to reduce risks of astronomical future suffering (s-risks). After all, EU’s recent decisions to allow various kinds of insect farming will not only cause enormous amounts of suffering for insects in the near future, but they arguably also increase s-risks to a non-negligible extent, such as by (somewhat) increasing the probability that insects and other small beings will be harmed on an astronomical scale in the future.

So institutional decisions like these seem relevant for our efforts to reduce s-risks, and our failure to prevent these detrimental decisions can plausibly provide relevant lessons for our priorities and strategies going forward. (An implication of these harmful developments that I will not dive into here is that they give us further reason to be pessimistic about the future.)

The following are some of the lessons that tentatively stand out to me.

Questioning our emotions

I suspect that one of the main reasons that insect farming has been neglected by animal advocates is that it fails to appeal to our emotions. A number of factors plausibly contribute to this low level of emotional appeal. For instance, certain biases may prevent proper moral consideration for insects in general, and scope insensitivity may prevent us from appreciating the large number of insects who will suffer due to insect farming. (I strongly doubt that anyone is exempt from these biases, and I suspect that even people who are aware of them might still have neglected insect farming partly as a consequence of these biases.)

Additionally, we may have a bias to focus too narrowly on the suffering that is currently taking place rather than (also) looking ahead to consider how new harmful practices and sources of suffering might emerge, potentially on far greater scales than what we currently see. Reducing the risk of such novel atrocities occurring on a vast scale might not feel as important as does the reduction of existing forms of suffering. Yet the recent rise of insect farming, and the fact that we likely could have done effective work to prevent it, suggest that such feelings are not reliable.

Seeing the connection between current institutional developments and s-risks

When thinking about s-risks, it can be easy to fall victim to excessively abstract thinking and (what I have called) “long-term nebulousness bias” — i.e. a tendency to overlook concrete data and opportunities relevant to long-term influence. In particular, the abstract nature of s-risks may lead us to tacitly believe that good opportunities to influence policy (relative to s-risk reduction) can only be found well into the future, and to perhaps even assume that there is not much of significance that we can do to reduce s-risks at the policy level today

Yet I think the case of insect farming is a counterexample to such beliefs. To be clear, I am not saying that insect farming is necessarily the most promising policy area that we can focus on with respect to s-risk reduction. But it is plausibly a significant one, and one that those trying to reduce s-risks should arguably have paid more attention to in the past. And it still appears to merit greater focus today.

Proactively searching for other important policy areas and interventions

As hinted above, the catastrophic rise of insect farming is in some sense a proof of concept that there are policy decisions in the making that plausibly have a meaningful impact on s-risks. More than that, the case of insect farming might be an example where policy decisions in our time could be fairly pivotal — whether we see a ban on insect farming versus a rapidly unfolding cascade of policy decisions that swiftly expand insect farming might make a big difference, not least because such a cascade could leave us in a position where there is more institutional, financial, and value-related momentum in favor of insect farming (e.g. if massive industries with lobby influence have already emerged around it, and if most people already consider farmed insects an important part of their diet).

This suggests a critical lesson: those working to reduce s-risks have good reason to search for similar, potentially even more influential policy decisions that are being made today or in the near future. By analogy to how animal advocates likely could have made a significant difference (in expectation) if they had campaigned against the expansion of insect farming over the last decade, we may now do well by looking decades ahead, and considering which pivotal policy decisions that we might now be in a good position to influence. The need for such a proactive search effort could be the most important takeaway in light of this recent string of disastrous decisions.

September 10, 2022

Radical uncertainty about outcomes need not imply (similarly) radical uncertainty about strategies

Our uncertainty about how the future will unfold is vast, especially on long timescales. In light of this uncertainty, it may be natural to think that our uncertainty about strategies must be equally vast and intractable. My aim in this brief post is to argue that this is not the case.

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Analogies to games, competitions, and projects

Perhaps the most intuitive way to see that vast outcome uncertainty need not imply vast strategic uncertainty is to consider games by analogy. Take chess as an example. It allows a staggering number of possible outcomes on the board, and chess players generally have great uncertainty about how a game of chess will unfold, even as they can make some informed predictions (similar to how we can make informed predictions in the real world).

Yet despite the great outcome uncertainty, there are still many strategies and rules of thumb that are robustly beneficial for increasing one’s chances of winning a game of chess. A trivially obvious one is to not lose pieces without good reason, yet seasoned chess players will know a long list of more advanced strategies and heuristics that tend to be beneficial in many different scenarios. (For an example of such a list, see e.g. here.)

Of course, chess is by no means the only example. Across a wide range of board games and video games, the same basic pattern is found: despite vast uncertainty about specific outcomes, there are clear heuristics and strategies that are robustly beneficial.

Indeed, this holds true in virtually any sphere of competition. Politicians cannot predict exactly how an election campaign will unfold, yet they can usually still identify helpful campaign strategies; athletes cannot predict how a given match will develop, yet they can still be reasonably confident about what constitutes good moves and game plans; companies cannot predict market dynamics in detail, yet they can still identify many objectives that would help them beat the competition (e.g. hire the best people and ensure high customer satisfaction).

The point also applies beyond the realm of competition. For instance, when engineers set out to build a big project, there are usually many uncertainties as to how the construction process is going to unfold and what challenges might come up. Yet they are generally still able to identify strategies that can address unforeseen challenges and get the job done. The same goes for just about any project, including cooperative projects between parties with different aims: detailed outcomes are exceedingly difficult to predict, yet it is generally (more) feasible to identify beneficial strategies.

Disanalogy in scope?

One might object that the examples above all involve rather narrow aims, and those aims differ greatly from impartial aims that relate to the interests of all sentient beings. This is a fair point, yet I do not think it undermines these analogies or the core point that they support.

Granted, when we move from narrower to broader aims and endeavors, our uncertainty about the relevant outcomes will tend to increase — e.g. when our aims involve far more beings and far greater spans of time. And when the outcome space and its associated uncertainty increases, we should also expect our strategic uncertainty to become greater. Yet it plausibly still holds true that we can identify at least some reasonably robust strategies, despite the increase in uncertainty that is associated with impartial aims. At the minimum, it seems plausible that our strategic uncertainty is still smaller than our outcome uncertainty. After all, if such a pattern of lower strategic uncertainty holds true of a wide range of endeavors on a smaller scale, it seems reasonable to expect that it will apply on larger scales too.

Besides, it appears that at least some of the examples mentioned in the previous section would still stand even if we greatly increased their scale. For example, in the case of many video games, it seems that we could increase the scale of the game by an arbitrary amount without meaningfully changing the most promising strategies — e.g. accumulate resources, gain more insights, strengthen your position. And similar strategies are plausibly quite robust relative to many goals in the real world as well, on virtually any scale.

Three robust strategies for reducing suffering

If we grant that we can identify some strategies that are robustly beneficial from an impartial perspective, this naturally raises the question as to what these strategies might be. The following are three examples of strategies for reducing suffering that seem especially robust and promising to me. (This is by no means an exhaustive list.)

Movement and capacity building: Expand the movement of people who strive to reduce suffering, and build a healthy and sustainable culture around this movement. Capacity building also includes efforts to increase the insights and resources available to the movement.
Promote concern for suffering: Increase the level of priority that people devote to the prevention of suffering, and increase the amount of resources that society devotes to its alleviation.
Promote cooperation: Increase society’s ability and willingness to engage in cooperative dialogues and positive-sum compromises that can help steer us away from bad outcomes.

The golden middle way: Avoiding overconfidence and passivity

To be clear, I do not mean to invite complacency about the risk that some apparently promising strategies could prove harmful. But I think it is worth keeping in mind that, just as there are costs associated with overconfidence, there are also costs associated with being too uncertain and too hesitant to act on the strategies that seem most promising. All in all, I think we have good reasons to pursue strategies such as those listed above, while still keeping in mind that we do face great strategic uncertainty.

September 7, 2022

Suffering-focused ethics and the importance of happiness

It seems intuitive to think that suffering-focused moral views imply that it is unimportant whether people live fulfilling lives. Yet the truth, I will argue, is in many ways the opposite — especially for those who are trying to reduce suffering effectively with their limited resources.

Personal sustainability and productivity

One reason in favor of living fulfilling lives is that we cannot work to reduce suffering in sustainable ways otherwise. Indeed, not only is a reasonably satisfied mind a precondition for sustainable productivity in the long run, but also for our productivity on a day-to-day basis, which is often aided by a strong passion and excitement about our work projects. Suffering-focused ethics by no means entails that excitement and passion should be muted.

Beyond aiding our productivity in work-related contexts, a strong sense of well-being also helps us be more resilient in the face of life’s challenges — things that break, unexpected expenses, unfriendly antagonists, etc. Cultivating a sense of fulfillment and a sound mental health can help us better handle these obstacles as well.

Signaling value

This reason pertains to the social rather than the individual level. If we are trying to create change in the world, it generally does not help if we ourselves are miserable. People often decide whether they want to associate with (or distance themselves from) a group of people based on perceptions of the overall wellness and mental health of its adherents. And this is not entirely unreasonable, as these factors arguably do constitute some indication of the practical consequences of associating with the group in question.

If failing to prioritize our own well-being has bad consequences in the bigger picture, such as scaring people away from joining our efforts to create a better future, then this failure is not recommended by consequentialist suffering-focused views.

To be clear, my point here is not that suffering-focused agents should be deceptive and try to display a fake and inflated sense of well-being (such deception would likely have many bad consequences). Rather, the point is that we have good reasons to cultivate genuine physical and mental health, both for the sake of our personal productivity and our ability to inspire others.

A needless hurdle to the adoption of suffering-focused views

A closely related point has to do with people’s evaluations of suffering-focused views more directly (as opposed to the evaluations of suffering-focused communities and individuals). People are likely to judge the acceptability of a moral view based in part on the expected psychological consequences of its adoption — will it enable me to pursue the lifestyle I want, to maintain my social relationships, and to seem like a good and likeable person?

Indeed, modern moral and political psychology suggests that these social and psychological factors are strong determinants of our moral and political views, and that we usually underestimate just how much these “non-rationalist” factors influence our views (see e.g. Haidt, 2012, part III; Tuschman, 2013, ch. 22; Simler, 2016; Tooby, 2017).

This is then another good reason to seek to both emphasize and exemplify the compatibility of suffering-focused views and a healthy and fulfilling life. Again, if failing in this regard tends to prevent people from prioritizing the reduction of suffering, then a true extrapolation of suffering-focused views will militate against such a failure, and instead recommend a focus on cultivating an invitingly healthful state of mind.

In sum, there is no inherent tension between living a healthy and fulfilling life and at the same time being committed to reducing the most intense forms of suffering.

January 12, 2021