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This morning I was looking into Switzerland's new animal welfare labelling law. I was going through the list of abuses that are now required to be documented on labels, and one of them made me do a double-take: "Frogs: Leg removal without anaesthesia."
This confused me. Why are we talking about anaesthesia? Shouldn't the frogs be dead before having their legs removed? It turns out the answer is no; standard industry practice is to cut their legs off while they are fully conscious. They remain alive and responsive for up to 15 minutes afterward. As far as I can tell, there are zero welfare regulations in any major producing country.
The scientific evidence for frog sentience is robust - they have nociceptors, opioid receptors, demonstrate pain avoidance learning, and show cognitive abilities including spatial mapping and rule-based learning.
It's hard to find data on the scale of this issue, but estimates put the order of magnitude at billions of frogs annually. I could not find any organisations working directly on frog welfare interventions. Here are the organizations I found that come closest:
* Animal Welfare Institute has documented the issue and published reports, but their focus appears more on the ecological impact and population decline rather than welfare reforms
* PETA has conducted investigations and released footage, but their approach is typically to advocate for complete elimination of the practice rather than welfare improvements
* Pro Wildlife, Defenders of Wildlife focus on conservation and sustainability rather than welfare standards
This issue seems tractable. There is scientific research on humane euthanasia methods for amphibians, but this research is primarily for laboratory settings rather than commercial operations. The EU imports the majority of traded frog legs through just a few countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam, creating clear policy leverage points. A major retailer (Carrefour) just stopped selling frog legs after welfar
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This is a cross post written by Andy Masley, not me. I found it really interesting and wanted to see what EAs/rationalists thought of his arguments.
This post was inspired by similar posts by Tyler Cowen and Fergus McCullough. My argument is that while most drinkers are unlikely to be harmed by alcohol, alcohol is drastically harming so many people that we should denormalize alcohol and avoid funding the alcohol industry, and the best way to do that is to stop drinking.
This post is not meant to be an objective cost-benefit analysis of alcohol. I may be missing hard-to-measure benefits of alcohol for individuals and societies. My goal here is to highlight specific blindspots a lot of people have to the negative impacts of alcohol, which personally convinced me to stop drinking, but I do not want to imply that this is a fully objective analysis. It seems very hard to create a true cost-benefit analysis, so we each have to make decisions about alcohol given limited information.
I’ve never had problems with alcohol. It’s been a fun part of my life and my friends’ lives. I never expected to stop drinking or to write this post. Before I read more about it, I thought of alcohol like junk food: something fun that does not harm most people, but that a few people are moderately harmed by. I thought of alcoholism, like overeating junk food, as a problem of personal responsibility: it’s the addict’s job (along with their friends, family, and doctors) to fix it, rather than the job of everyday consumers. Now I think of alcohol more like tobacco: many people use it without harming themselves, but so many people are being drastically harmed by it (especially and disproportionately the most vulnerable people in society) that everyone has a responsibility to denormalize it.
You are not likely to be harmed by alcohol. The average drinker probably suffers few if any negative effects. My argument is about how our collective decision to drink affects other people. This post is not
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Today, Forethought and I are releasing an essay series called Better Futures, here.[1] It’s been something like eight years in the making, so I’m pretty happy it’s finally out! It asks: when looking to the future, should we focus on surviving, or on flourishing?
In practice at least, future-oriented altruists tend to focus on ensuring we survive (or are not permanently disempowered by some valueless AIs). But maybe we should focus on future flourishing, instead.
Why?
Well, even if we survive, we probably just get a future that’s a small fraction as good as it could have been. We could, instead, try to help guide society to be on track to a truly wonderful future.
That is, I think there’s more at stake when it comes to flourishing than when it comes to survival. So maybe that should be our main focus.
The whole essay series is out today. But I’ll post summaries of each essay over the course of the next couple of weeks. And the first episode of Forethought’s video podcast is on the topic, and out now, too.
The first essay is Introducing Better Futures: along with the supplement, it gives the basic case for focusing on trying to make the future wonderful, rather than just ensuring we get any ok future at all. It’s based on a simple two-factor model: that the value of the future is the product of our chance of “Surviving” and of the value of the future, if we do Survive, i.e. our “Flourishing”.
(“not-Surviving”, here, means anything that locks us into a near-0 value future in the near-term: extinction from a bio-catastrophe counts but if valueless superintelligence disempowers us without causing human extinction, that counts, too. I think this is how “existential catastrophe” is often used in practice.)
The key thought is: maybe we’re closer to the “ceiling” on Survival than we are to the “ceiling” of Flourishing.
Most people (though not everyone) thinks we’re much more likely than not to Survive this century. Metaculus puts *extinction* risk at about 4
Advice
Imagine a high-dimensional space with a bunch of variables related to organizations (e.g. "move fast and break things" vs. "move slowly with high quality"; "hire quickly, fire quickly" vs. "hire slowly, rarely need to fire"; "top down" vs. "flat hierarchy").
Probably there are some variables where it's relatively clear that it's better to be on one side of the tradeoff than the other. E.g. "setting clear goals" is probably relatively clearly good.
But I think that overall there's not a clear single peak in this space: rather there are particular clusters of traits that go well together and produce success. Because of the last paragraph, these traits might be clustered on a particular side of some dimension. But there will be many dimensions where successful organizations are all over the map.
So now you're getting advice from a successful person. They built their success on a hill in the top right (on some pair of dimensions). So they tell you to move upwards.
But actually, you're on the side of a pretty nice hill in the bottom left, and moving upwards will make things worse.
You could try to move the organization all the way to the top right in one big leap, but you'll probably fail, and it may not be any better than climbing your local hill.
I think this partly explains why advice is often not that useful (if you're pretty deeply focused on a project/organization).
I suspect something similar applies to people also (where the variables are more things like "how much of my day should I spend in meetings?" or "What sort of skills should I be trying to develop?").
(Probably someone else has had this idea before - if I stole it, I forgot that I did so.)
Interesting. Could you say more why you believe that there are clusters of traits that go well together?
The main example that comes to my mind is that people have different personalities and preferences, so if your team clusters around a set of certain personality traits and preferences, that implies that some specific organizational design choices work better than others.
But I'd feel more reluctant to say things like "move fast and break things works well with hiring quickly"; I find it hard to see any obvious hills based on the variables you mentioned.
I would have said something more like: Which strategy is best will depend on the specifics of what you're trying to do (market, product, goals).
Sure, I should have given examples from the start! I also agree that some of this is about adapting to the market etc.
Also, I think that your point about personality traits /preferences covers a fair few examples: e.g. some orgs choose to have a critical feedback culture, and hire people who respond well to very critical feedback (e.g. Bridgewater).
Some other examples:
"Hire aligned people" goes well with "have relatively loose HR policies (expenses, budgets etc.)"; "Hire unaligned people and incentivise them with money" goes better with "have somewhat tighter HR policies (firing, expenses etc.)". I think there are companies that have done well with each approach.
"Pay at the very top of the market" maybe goes well with "set very high standards and fire quickly"; "pay in the middle of the market" goes well with having somewhat lower standards. My impression is that Netflix is trying particularly hard to be in the first bucket here, and then there are other tech companies that are less extremely in that bucket.
I think "Move fast and break things" goes well with "have very short iteration cycles, so that you quickly fix the things you broke" (e.g. Facebook), and "move slowly with high quality" goes better with a more waterfall-based approach to development (maybe older/more established tech companies, as well as a bunch of others). This example is clearly partly about the product you're building, but I could imagine competitors in some markets choosing different paths here.
I agree with those examples!
(Maybe I feel somewhat skeptical about 'move slowly with high quality' ever being a good choice – it seems to me that the quality/speed tradeoff is often overstated, and there's actually not that much of a tradeoff.)
Move slowly with high quality makes more sense for people whose "product" is not optional, eg monopolies or public services.
You really don't want your water provider to upgrade quickly if it increases the chance you won't have water at all for a month.
Yeah, I am also skeptical of that, so maybe that's a bad example.
I can conjure examples (e.g. shipping a physical product) where you want to move slower with very high quality, because it's hard to iterate. But I think that when you open up "move slower with high quality", it's going to normally look like rapid, messy iteration on what the product is, the production line etc.