Vegan advocacy and pessimism about wild animal welfare

Summary: Human meat consumption seems to seriously reduce wild animal populations. This has previously been considered an additional bad effect of meat consumption. However, some animal advocates claim that wild animal populations' aggregate welfare is so negative as to dwarf domestic animal suffering. Some of these advocates also favor spreading veganism, which on this view would seem to have the immediate effect of greatly increasing animal suffering. This tension should be addressed by advocates in cost-effectiveness estimates and research.

How immigration could make AMF more cost-effective

Summary: charities that save the lives of the global poor have more economic impact than one might think because a portion of the very poor may emigrate to other countries and enormously increase their productivity, and this portion may greatly increase if some developed countries open their borders.

Open borders in (at least) one (developed) country

Over at the Open Borders Blog Vipul Naik and co-bloggers have discussed an enormous variety of arguments for and against a system of open borders. Immigrants from poor countries earn much more when they move to rich countries, a "place premium." If this place premium is unaffected by very high levels of immigration, then open borders could greatly increase world GDP and eliminate almost all absolute poverty. Refugees would be guaranteed a place to escape bad conditions, governments would face incentives to improve their policies to keep their population from leaving.

So immigration is very much worth a look for those interested in effective altruism. This post covers a point that seems to me to have been relatively neglected among open borders advocates (although it has been discussed more by advocates of charter cities): it seems most of the expected benefits do not require a global system of open borders, just open borders in one or a few countries with the right properties, a much easier goal.

Future Filter Fatalism

Cross-posted from Overcoming Bias

One of the more colorful vignettes in philosophy is Gibbard and Harper's "Death in Damascus" case:

Consider the story of the man who met Death in Damascus. Death looked surprised, but then recovered his ghastly composure and said, ‘I am coming for you tomorrow’. The terrified man that night bought a camel and rode to Aleppo. The next day, Death knocked on the door of the room where he was hiding, and said I have come for you’.
‘But I thought you would be looking for me in Damascus’, said the man.

‘Not at all’, said Death ‘that is why I was surprised to see you yesterday. I knew that today I was to find you in Aleppo’.

That is, Death's foresight takes into account any reactions to Death's activities.

Now suppose you think that a large portion of the Great Filter lies ahead, so that almost all civilizations like ours fail to colonize the stars. This implies that civilizations almost never adopt strategies that effectively avert doom and allow colonization. Thus the mere fact that we adopt any purported Filter-avoiding strategy S is strong evidence that S won't work, just as the fact that you adopt any particular plan to escape Death indicates that it will fail.

To expect S to work we would have to be very confident that we were highly unusual in adopting S (or any strategy as good as S), in addition to thinking S very good on the merits. This burden might be met if it was only through some bizarre fluke that S became possible, and a strategy might improve our chances even though we would remain almost certain to fail, but common features, such as awareness of the Great Filter, would not suffice to avoid future filters.

Breeding happier animals: no futuristic tech required

[Cross-posted from Overcoming Bias; edited to remove tactless commentary 2017. Also, the possibility of reducing the misery in factory farming through genetic alteration discussed in this post does not and would not justify factory farming.]

I have spoken with a lot of people who are enthusiastic about the possibility that advanced genetic engineering technologies will improve animal welfare.

But would it really take radical new technologies to produce genetics reducing animal suffering? 

Modern animal breeding is able to shape almost any quantitative trait with significant heritable variation in a population. One carefully measures the trait in different animals, and selects sperm for the next generation on that basis. So far this has not been done to reduce animals' capacity for pain, or to increase their capacity for pleasure, but it has been applied to great effect elsewhere.

One could test varied behavioral measures of fear response, and physiological measures like cortisol levels, and select for them. As long as the measurements in aggregate tracked one's conception of animal welfare closely enough, breeders could generate increases in farmed animal welfare, potentially initially at low marginal cost in other traits.

Just how powerful are ordinary animal breeding techniques? Consider cattle:

In 1942, when my father was born, the average dairy cow produced less than 5,000 pounds of milk in its lifetime. Now, the average cow produces over 21,000 pounds of milk. At the same time, the number of dairy cows has decreased from a high of 25 million around the end of World War II to fewer than nine million today. This is an indisputable environmental win as fewer cows create less methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and require less land.

 Wired has an impressive chart of turkey weight over time:

Anderson, who has bred the birds for 26 years, said the key technical advance was artificial insemination, which came into widespread use in the 1960s, right around the time that turkey size starts to skyrocket...
This process, compounded over dozens of generations, has yielded turkeys with genes that make them very big. In one study in the journal Poultry Science, turkeys genetically representative of old birds from 1966 and modern turkeys were each fed the exact same old-school diet. The 2003 birds grew to 39 pounds while the legacy birds only made it to 21 pounds. Other researchers have estimated that 90 percent of the changes in turkey size are genetic.

Moreover, breeders are able to improve complex weighted mixtures of diverse traits:

Nuclear winter and human extinction: Q&A with Luke Oman

Cross-posted from Overcoming Bias

In Reasons and Persons, philosopher Derek Parfit wrote:

I believe that if we destroy mankind, as we now can, this outcome will be much worse than most people think. Compare three outcomes: 

1. Peace
2. A nuclear war that kills 99% of the world's existing population.
3. A nuclear war that kills 100% 

2 would be worse than 1, and 3 would be worse than 2. Which is the greater of these two differences? Most people believe that the greater difference is between 1 and 2. I believe that the difference between 2 and 3 is very much greater... If we do not destroy mankind, these thousand years may be only a tiny fraction of the whole of civilized human history.

The ethical questions raised by the example have been much discussed, but almost nothing has been written on the empirical question: given nuclear war, how likely is scenario 3?

The most obvious path from nuclear war to human extinction is nuclear winter: past posts on Overcoming Bias have bemoaned neglect of nuclear winter, and high-lighted recent research. Particularly important is a 2007 paper by Alan Robock, Luke Oman, and Georgiy Stenchikov:  "Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences." Their model shows severe falls in temperature and insolation that would devastate agriculture and humanity's food supply, with the potential for billions of deaths from famine in addition to the direct damage.

So I asked Luke Oman for his estimate of the risk that nuclear winter would cause human extinction, in addition to its other terrible effects. He gave the following estimate:

The probability I would estimate for the global human population of zero resulting from the 150 Tg of black carbon scenario in our 2007 paper would be in the range of 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100,000.
I tried to base this estimate on the closest rapid climate change impact analog that I know of, the Toba supervolcanic eruption approximately 70,000 years ago.  There is some suggestion that around the time of Toba there was a population bottleneck in which the global population was severely reduced.  Climate anomalies could be similar in magnitude and duration.  Biggest population impacts would likely be Northern Hemisphere interior continental regions with relatively smaller impacts possible over Southern Hemisphere island nations like New Zealand.

Luke also graciously gave a short Q & A to clarify his reasoning, below the fold:

Spreading happiness to the stars seems little harder than just spreading

Imagine there are two advanced interstellar civilizations near one another who begin outward colonization around the same time, in an otherwise uninhabited accessible universe. One civilization likes to create convert star systems into lots of people leading rich, happy lives full of interest and reward. Call them the Eudaimonians. The other is solely interested in expanding its sphere of colonization as quickly as possible, and produces much less or negative welfare. Call them the Locusts. How much of a competitive advantage do the Locusts have over the Eudaimonians? How much of the cosmic commons, as Robin Hanson calls it, would wind up transformed into worthwhile lives, rather than burned to slightly accelerate colonization efforts? If the Locusts will inevitably capture almost all resources, then little could be done to avert astronomical waste, but an even waste-free split of the accessible universe could be half as good as a Eudaimonic monopoly.

I would argue that in our universe the Eudaimonians will be almost exactly as competitive as the Locusts in rapidly colonizing the stars. The reason is that the Eudaimonians can also adopt a strategy of near-maximum colonization speed until they reach the most distant accessible galaxies, and only then divert resources to producing welfare. More below the fold.