I've just realized that I find your objections to Clifton's Option 3 much less compelling when applied to something like the following scenario I'm making up:

Four miles away from you, there's a terrorist you want dead. A sniper is locked on his position (accounting for gravity). No one has ever hit a target from this distance. The sniper will overwhelmingly likely miss the shot because of factors (other than gravity) affecting the bullet you cannot estimate from that far (the different wind layers, the Earth's rotation, etc.). You're tempted to think "well, there's no harm in trying" expect that the terrorist is holding a kid you do not want dead and they cover exactly has much surface area the way they stand. Say your utility for hitting the target is +1trillion and -1trillion for hitting the kid, and you are an EV maximizer, and you're the one who has to tell the sniper whether to take the shot or to stand down. If you thought the sniper's shot was even a tiny bit more likely to hit the target than the kid, you would tell her to take it. But you don't think that! (Something like the principle of indifference seemingly doesn't work here.) You're (complexely) clueless and therefore indifferent between shooting and not shooting. But this was before you remembered that Emily, the sniper, told you the other day that her shoulder hurts everytime she takes a shot. You care about Emily's shoulder pain much less than you care about where the bullet ends (say utility -1 if she shoots). But well, doesn't that give you a very good Option-3-like reason to tell her to stand down?

If I take your objections to Option 3 and replace some of the words to make it apply to my above scenario, I intuitively find them almost crazy. Do you have the same feeling? Is there a relevant difference with my scenario that I'm missing? (Or maybe my strong intuition for why we should tell Emily to stand down is actually not because of Option 3 being compelling but something else?)

I'm curious if you're hoping to shift people's thinking about strategy in any specific direction here, due to bringing this up?

Not really, at least not with this specific post. I just wanted to learn things by getting people's thoughts on SARP and the temporary setback view. Maybe I also very marginally made people update a bit towards "SARP might be a bigger deal than I thought" and "animal macrostrategy is complex and important", and that seems cool, but this wasn't the goal.

I like your questions. They got me thinking a lot. :)

Thanks! In this other comment, I started wondering whether the main crux (for people not worrying that much about SARP) was the temporary setback view or animal advocates just believing they don't contribute to SARP, and you're providing some more reasons to believe it's the latter.

Robin Hanson has also questioned whether farmland used to grow crops for animal feed would be ‘re-wilded’ - at least some of it will be used for development, which will actually reduce wild animal numbers. In any case, whether or not wild animals have net-negative lives is incredibly uncertain.

@JBentham Sorry for jumping in so late but where has he done that? Do you have a link? :)

Nice post! I recently wrote Sentientia, Reversomelas, and the Small Animal Replacement Problem which sort of nuances your nuance by arguing that it's far from obvious something like moral circle expansion will eventually offset the problem. :) (although I discovered your post only now, after writing mine).

I'd be curious to have your thoughts!

 

Just to clarify, I really didn't mean to argue about whether strategy X is contributing to SARP. All I'm saying is "many people i) believe what they do somewhat contributes to SARP but they ii) think it's just a temporary setback and it's fine -- and (I claim) it's not obvious they're right about (ii)". 

You seem to think they might not be right about (i), which is of course also relevant but my impression is that the crux for most people is (ii) and not (i). They generally don't seem to care about how much what they do might be contributing to SARP. As long as this improves people's values from their perspective, they generally think it offsets their (potential) contribution to SARP anyway. (See e.g. here and here.) 

EDIT: Actually, I've just spent some more time looking into every mention of SARP on the EA Forum and it is almost exclusively mentioned in discussions of meat taxes and environmental strategies. There seems to be a meme that SARP is just a reason to avoid helping animals with environmentalist strategies, as if it was obvious that other strategies -- e.g., promoting plant-based food, chicken welfare reforms, moral advocacy -- did not contribute to SARP (here and here are rare exceptions). So maybe the question of what exact strategies contribute to SARP is more cruxy than I thought. Maybe most animal advocates think they're not contributing to SARP anyway and haven't thought that much about (ii).

Thanks for the comment Jo :)

"[...] advocacy towards considering the suffering of mammals farmed for their meat, seems to be contributing to the growth of the farming of smaller animals" seems like a core claim, and yet there's no link or footnote for tentative evidence.

Interesting. I didn't expect this to be controversial. This was just an example anyway. I didn't mean to argue about what strategies do and do not contribute to SARP. That's a whole other discussion and is kinda irrelevant to the point of my post. (Although, obviously, the more we think the strategies people use contribute to SARP, the more my point matters in practice.)^[1]

While I think that the size of animals that will be farmed in the future matters a lot, I think that the factors that will determine that are neither the way current vegans talk about animals, nor the choices we make in welfare campaigns during this decade.

What do you think those factors are, then? And do you think the work of people trying to help animals (EA-inspired people in particular) do not affect these factors in any non-chaotic way? (such that there is no need to worry about contributing to SARP.)

1. ^{^}

   Fwiw, I just found this interesting video where Matt Ball somewhat suggests that promoting veganism hurts animals overall because of SARP (and he completely ignores animals smaller than chickens). (EDIT: no, I misinterpreted him. He just thinks promoting veganism doesn't work. This has nothing to do with SARP.)

Note that there are likely more comprehensive analyses [of the impact of vegetarianism on wild-animal suffering] now.

Do you happen to be aware of any?

No deadline? Can I register the day before? Or do you expect to potentially reach full capacity at some point before that?

Any sense of what portion of insects we should expect to be farmed for human consumption vs for feeding farmed fish vs for farmed chickens vs for pets vs other things? Sorry if I missed the answer to this question when I read the full report. (Thanks a lot for writing it!)