Humanity, as a species, attained god-like power over the physical world and then used that power to create a massive sprawling hell.
It obviously depends on where you draw the lines, but the majority of the participants of civilization, right now, are being tortured1 in factory farms. For every currently living human, there is currently about one cow or pig living in hellish conditions, and about 3 chickens living in hellish conditions.
(This is not counting the fish or the shrimp, which massively increases the ratio of civilization-participants-in-hell-on-purpose to not. It’s also not counting the rats, raccoons, pidgons, etc, which pushes the ratio down. Leaving all of them out, the humans are only about 20% of the participants of human civilization, the other 80% are living in continuously torturous conditions.)
We did that. Human civilization built a hell for the creatures that it has power over.
If you told a fantasy story about a race of gods with massive power over the non-god races on their planet, and the gods used their power to breed the other races to massive numbers in constant conditions that are so bad that never having been born is preferable, there wouldn’t be the slightest question of whether the gods were good or evil.
Depending on the tenor of the story, you might zoom in on the evil-gods living their lives in their golden towers, and see their happy and loving relationships, or their spaceships and computers and art. You could tell whole stories that just take place just in the golden cities, and feel charmed by the evil gods.
But it would be the height of myopic bias to focus on the golden cities and call the gods, as a collective, Good.
When I think about the state of human civilization, the overwhelmingly important facts are 1) humans are rushing to build a more capable successor species without thinking very hard about that and 2) humans have constructed a hell for most of the beings that live in their civilization.(There’s also the impact on wild animal suffering “outside of” our civilization, which does complicate things.)
There other things that are important to track—like the decay of liberal norms, and the development of new institutions, and the the economic growthrate—because they are relevant for modeling the dynamics of civilization. But, if the quality of life of all the humans doubled, it wouldn’t even show up on the on the graph of total-wellbeing on planet earth.
Humans are an evil god-species.
One might rightly object to calling what’s happening in factory farms “torture”. Torture, one could claim, means taking actions specifically to make someone’s experience bad, not just incidentally making someone’s experience very bad. I think this is arguable. If a mad scientist kidnaped someone and slowly skinned them alive, not out of any ill will towards the kidnaped, but just out of a scientific interest about what would happen, I think it would be reasonable for that person to say that the mad scientist tortured them. Doing harm to someone that is so bad that you might do to someone if your goal was to specifically cause them enormous pain, can be reasonable called torture. ↩︎
I spent ~10 hours a few weeks ago doing some research to inform my donation choices for the year.1
I spend most of my time thinking about and trying to reduce x-risk (and other abstract, long term problems, influenced through long, noisy, chains of cause and effect). But in this case, the money I was allocating is my yearly cryonics-cost-matched donation, and I wanted to allocate it to doing near term good for existing (or soon to exist) beings, rather than the more speculative radically uncertain stuff that I spend most of my time and effort on.
I’d casually read some things (namely this) that suggested that animal welfare charities are much higher leverage that global poverty, so I focused on that. Specifically, I wanted to look into the impact model of the various animal welfare interventions, walk through the steps in the chain, and assess for myself if I trusted those impact models. I ended up focusing most on corporate campaigns for chickens (and a bit on campaigns for shrimp, which are somewhat different).
I really didn’t spend enough time on this to have confident conclusions. Please don’t take this post as conclusive in any way. Mostly it’s an intermediate report, consolidating my thoughts part way through an in process investigation.
Corporate campaigns
It seems like the main intervention by which you can turn money into better lives for animals, is corporate campaigns.
The impact story
Roughly, the way these work is that an animal welfare charity will, first, politely get in contact with the leadership of some major corporation that either produces animal products (Tyson for instance) or buys wholesale animal products as part of their production process (McDonalds). They’ll inform that leadership of the conditions for the animals in factory farms, and ask the leadership to stop. Apparently, this alone works quite well a lot of the them. Shockingly, the leadership of those companies often don’t know how horrendous the conditions are in the farms of their suppliers, and they’re motivated to change those conditions, either because of their own conscience, or because they see that it’s a big PR risk.
But if that alone doesn’t work, the charity will run ads informing consumers of those conditions, until the company agrees to change them. The charity is effectively committing to continue to run these adds, in perpetuity, unless the company changes it’s policy.
In the mid 2010s, there was a big push of this sort for layer hens, specifically to get the companies to commit to phase out battery cages, and switch to cage-free egg production. If this change was successful, the chickens would still live in sad warehouses, instead of living in anything like their natural habitat, but they would be free to move around in those warehouses, instead of spending their whole lives trapped, and packed tight, in cages, and unable move.
This ask was chosen because aversion studies suggest that chicken welfare is much higher when the birds are free to move about the warehouse instead of trapped in the battery cages. And this switch was low cost for the companies in question: it only costs a few cents per egg. The hope was that by applying PR pressure to this particularly high leverage opportunity, we could spend money to improve chicken welfare by a lot.
On the face of it, this worked surprisingly well. Basically, the the whole US egg industry committed to stop using battery cages. The typical cost estimate given is that $1 spent on these campaigns would free 9 to 120 hens, on average, from battery cages. That’s 12 to 160 life-years spent free to roam around, instead of in a painful cage. Which does seem like a lot of leverage for a dollar!
Since then the frontier has moved forward, to pushing for similar reforms in other countries, and pushing for other reforms for other animals.
Checking a bit closer
But there are a number of ways this analysis might turn out to not be as rosey as it seems.
Follow through
The first thing to keep in mind is that these campaigns secured commitments from the relevant companies, commitments that they were expected to follow through on over the intervening years. If they don’t follow through you might need to do more campaigns (this time advertising the fact that they made a commitment, but didn’t act on that commitment, unlike others in their industry). It might turn out that the $1 to 120 hens estimate is inflated because it’s not taking those additional follow up campaigns into account.
But, according to this graph, it looks like mostly companies have been following through. The fraction of US egg-laying hens that are cage-free has increased from 15% in Jan 2018 to 38% in July 2023.
Some companies will probably drag their feet, and some additional follow up campaigns will be necessary. But we can expect those to be more effective now that the whole industry has committed to this new standard. Now you can say, “X company promised to switch to cage free, which is the industry standard. Other companies are following through on their commitment, but not company X.”
(Also note that the lay rate for cage free chickens has risen to parity with the industry average (probably as workers get used to the new cage-free setups), which is important, because if you need more chickens to make up for the fact that they’re not in cages, there might not be a net gain in chicken welfare.)
Counterfactuals
This raises the question of counterfactual history: did these campaigns have a causal role in the continuing switch to cage free egg production?
It seems possible, I suppose, that there were exogenous reasons to switch to cage free practices, and the campaigns didn’t have anything to do with it. Maybe this is a long running trend? I’d love to see a graph that extended further back into the 2000s and early 2010s.
But as a first pass, I’m inclined to take for granted the simple story that this shift is downstream of commitments the companies made, and they made those commitments in large part do to activist pressure.
Still work?
There seems to be wide agreement that the lowest hanging fruit has been picked and the cost effectiveness of current campaigns is not as cost effective as they used to be, though still pretty good.
Apparently, 64% of eggs are produced in Asia, including 37% in China (source), and I think we don’t know if these kinds of corporate campaigns work as well there. It seems totally plausible that cultural differences could make this strategy totally ineffective in China.
Some extremely provisional first pass conclusions and more questions.
The flagship animal welfare intervention seems to me, on first pass, to hold up. It’s not certain, by any means. But it looks like, given some reasonable assumptions, it works for reducing animal suffering at high efficiency.
I opted not to donate to any particular charity, opting instead to donate to an animal welfare fund. So long as I’ve verified that at least some of the impact models check out, I expect a profesional animal welfare grantmaker to be better positioned than me to allocate marginal dollars to the next highest leverage opportunity.
Importantly, there don’t seem to be animal welfare analogues to GiveDirectly or AMF which turn dollars into straightforward benefits at the margin. There’s nothing where I can pay money, and reliably, improve the life of some number of beings. It’s more like, I can pour resources into a big machine which, if everything goes as planned, will help a bunch of animals, but if our assumptions are mistaken, will do nothing. The interventions on offer seem like good bets, but they’re still bets.
Given that all that there are only speculative options on the table, I would rather be investing in the development of clean meats which can end this horror entirely, in the long run, instead of moving some animals from torturous conditions to substantially better, but still inhumane conditions.
(My main reservation about spending my neartermist charity budget on pushing for clean meat is short AI timelines. It’s not worth investing in plans to reduce the horror, if they take 30 years to reach fruition.)
I would love to read about projections for the scaling up and commercialization of clean meat, including estimates for the date of cost and taste parity, and estimates (including extremely wide error bar estimates) of how much marginal investment can pull that date forward in time. Looking into opportunities to invest in clean meat is probably my next priority here.
This is downstream of writing a twitter thread accusing most EAs of being too trusting of “EA” and insufficiently reflective about the investment of their efforts. As often happens, I made the critique, and then felt an obligation/desire to meet it myself. ↩︎
musings and rough drafts 