Sorry I’m probably missing something, but I’m not understanding why real world examples from EA would be particularly relevant given how young a movement it is. I think someone could grant that we have the ability to be justified in assigning probabilities to things that are likely to happen soon, and agree that the risk of things we’re totally unaware of happening in the next ~ 10-50 years might be (at least in some circumstances) sufficiently small to not have unawareness problems.
But once you start trying to be an impartial altruist about far future beings, that seems to me where you really can’t get away from unawareness problems. And so I guess if you wanted to convince me I was wrong about that, we should be looking at things that people thought 1000 years ago, and how things they caused today were bad even though they were trying to do good for reasons they weren’t only poorly calibrated on but in fact totally unaware of - and it just seems likely to me there would be tons of examples of that?
Maybe the development of gunpowder stands out here as something being pursued in the hopes of achieving eternal life (ostensibly an altruistic motivation) and presumably the possibility of guns was not on people’s radar. I guess it would eventually have been figured out anyway, but how much harm did having gunpowder X years earlier cause?
Maybe an objection here is that an “ideal” agent would have of course considered the possibility of any chemical work being misused, but IDK - they weren’t even trying to make something explosive. I don’t see how even a perfectly rational being could have predicted all the harms gunpowder would cause given that they were aiming to do alchemy. What probability could they have possibly been justified, given their epistemic position, in assigning to ”super bad outcomes from pursuing eternal life chemistry” given that they probably could not have imagined the scale of modern warfare?
I do get a little mixed up on this between “people are not ideal and so regularly make large mistakes that look like cluelessness” vs “even an ideal agent could not be justified in their probability assignments given what is theoretically knowable” so maybe I’m misunderstanding something.
Does P1 rely in any way on the idealized agent actually using EV specifically, as opposed to other theoretically possible aggregations of all or most of the possible consequences of A and B? It seems like no to me but I was curious since it is explicitly mentioned.
Can you explain a little more what you mean by “coarse-grained” in P3? Does that just mean “very unlikely to include all the possible outcomes, so there’s a ton of unknown unknowns we don’t know how to assign probability to” or something else?
I am not at all an expert in mosquitoes, but I think it would be hard to figure out more than the direct effects on mosquitoes, which are sex specific. A few assorted thoughts:
Scale: the Google Debug program website says when applied, they need to releases 100s of thousands to millions of mosquitoes each week, so the scale is reasonably high.
They release only male mosquitoes, but it's not possible to rear only male mosquitoes (AFAIK), so they are killing all the females. The Debug project's Nature Biotechnology article says that they sort males from females as pupae (which may involve low welfare cost, I don't know when sentience emerges in insects and especially whether it's possible to feel pain as a pupa), and again as adults (which, if insects are sentient, probably is painful for those females). They report that 95% of females are removed as pupae, so a much smaller amount are being killed as adults. About 2.5% of what make it through the first sort are females, so we can estimate that to achieve daily releases of ~ 75k males, ~2000 females are killed as adults daily. The paper does not seem to report how the females are killed for either pupae or adults, which is a big gap from a welfare perspective.
According to this, Wolbachia often shorten lifespans. But several strains also seem to enhance immune function and have other mutualisms. So in some cases it could have positive welfare effects. I asked Claude about the specific strain used in the Debug program, and it reported that most of the welfare effects land on females, who are already just being killed. Of course, we don't know that much about measuring mosquito welfare, but at least in terms of survival, ability to find a mate (which correlates to locomotor and sensory performance), etc., this strain isn't bad. And if they use something that really harms the released males they won't outcompete the local males, which would drive up costs (because you have to release more mosquitoes to compensate).
The technique will result in a reduction in number of mosquitoes. It's not clear to me how other populations would respond to that - I'm not sure what competitors there are for mosquito resources. But if you think mosquitoes have bad lives this could be a good thing (or neutral if you have person-affecting leanings). The FAQ on the Debug page claims that in urban areas, because the mosquitoes are invasive, it will just be a "return to normal" -- but that ignores the fact that many other things have changed (reductions in native insect populations, for example). If it's true that this specific species doesn't make up a meaningful part of any other animal's diet the effect is likely to be small, but that sounds like something we don't really know (well-resolved urban food webs are rare). They might mean "no animal anybody in ecology especially cares about."
For many bugs, high mortality during captive rearing is common. That doesn't seem to be the case for mosquitoes -- survival rates in the 90s are reported in many captive colonies and mass die offs are unusual (according to this, thanks Claude). But the success rates for male mosquitoes in the Debug project is around 70%. The paper is fairly detailed on the rearing approach so someone with more mosquito expertise than I might be able to say more about welfare. Broadly, I'd still expect it's much better than wild mosquitoes -- they're fed, kept at comfortable temperatures, spared from predators, etc.
An interesting question long term would be how this affects pesticide use in urban areas. If most pesticide applications in cities aims at reducing mosquitoes, and we start using Wolbachia to control them instead, pesticide application might go down, resulting in recoveries of other insect populations and reduced sub-lethal harms. If you think bugs have good lives, yay. If you think they have awful ones, uh oh.
I'd likely support doing this -- effects on humans are good (which to be clear I weight very highly!), male mosquitoes seem broadly fine, and females are killed mostly as pupae, I'm clueless about the welfare interpretation of population effects. That said, others might feel more concerned about population effects, which probably depends a lot on how you feel about insects generally and how much you think this could alter insecticide usage.
I spent less than an hour on this comment though, so obviously this is not the final word!
As a reference, I got to this from CCF page --> support our work --> under the "our team" section. Notably, the link is from this text:
"The Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund sits on top of work done by our Worldview Investigations Team (WIT), and Interdisciplinary Research Team, groups established specifically to tackle the hard questions that most donors don't have time to engage with: how to compare welfare across species, how to reason under deep uncertainty, how to weigh present benefits against future ones, how to aggregate competing moral views into a single allocation.
The team brings together training in philosophy, economics, statistics, cognitive science, moral psychology, and decision theory . The fund's allocations also draw on the in-house expertise of RP's Global Health and Development, Animal Welfare, AI departments, so the cross-cause model is informed by researchers working directly in each area, not just secondary literature. "
So I'm interpreting that paragraph as saying that WIT work goes into the report, but not necessarily that the WIT team did all the work (in particular, the interdisciplinary research team clearly was also involved, and the second paragraph suggests other teams contributed as well).
Nope, I just mean that on average, a bird who avoids a collision would live for a few more years based on typical lifespans. I meant "fully recovers from or avoids the collision." Of course if they have some lingering injury or issue their life expectancy will be lower.
It's definitely correct that rats do not consume their entire daily liquid needs from contrapest in field conditions. I can't quickly find evidence for the 1.8L figure - this study includes a DC trial, but might not be the same one (the citation links in the EA Forum post weren't working for me). Based on figure 9, 0 to 1200 mL of bait per month were consumed, depending on site and month. That's not a good indicator of the effective dose, since treated adult rats might still consume some of it, but it could be a reasonable indicator of how much bait you'd need to buy to treat a given alley -- although for the study I link, that's complicated by the fact that I wouldn't take their reports of reductions particularly seriously. Issues include: camera traps have to be used quite carefully to be good estimates of population abundance, and pairing them with a bait station is not good for that; it's hard to tell whether rats are adults or juveniles once they've left the burrow and especially using camera traps; there's no control sites, there were only two treatment sites, the treatment sites varied considerably in their features, etc.
Thanks for pointing out that the production mechanism might have an influence on land use. I think that's interesting and will reflect on it.
Unfortunately I think this post is otherwise not very relevant, mainly because no one uses Contrapest -- the liquid bait formulation doesn't work in any context where water is readily available because rats don't drink it, it's extremely messy and hard for people to use. If you wanted to do this comparison more seriously, I'd encourage you to focus on Evolve, which has a more similar profile production-wise (it's a solid bait, like most rodenticides) and conservationists have proven more willing to try it (whether it works outside the lab is still unclear, the company has not made its test data particularly accessible for review and no independent test runs have been published yet).
To clarify, the reason I viewed (at time of writing of the previous post) that rodenticide replacement on islands might be approximately ecologically inert is that conservationists use products until rats are entirely eradicated and then stop. This means any ecological impact differences between product 1 for eradication and product 2 for eradication are essentially transient. You have this short duration of time during the eradication, and then a long period after where conditions on the island are basically the same. On reflection, you're probably right that this is not sufficient to mean they are ecologically inert in the strict sense.[1] Overall I suppose I was imagining that people might have degrees of commitment to the ecologically inert concept, but I could have written more carefully.
A few other notes, not comprehensive:
I strongly doubt that comparing "cost to prevent one birth/cause one death" is the right comparison. The population dynamics of suppressing fertility are different than those from killing adults, so the timeline to eradication (in the island context) and the application volumes would likely be different, among other things.
The dosages are difficult to determine. Although the paper you cite reports bait consumption in ideal laboratory conditions -- "the median rat (ranked by consumption) consumed an average of 74 ml of bait per day; individual means ranged from 66 to 83 ml per day" -- all the male rats in this study gained weight. These are wild rats who have been taken into captivity and given ad libitum access to food, water, and Contrapest - these are just not realistic conditions to estimate field consumptions. Senestech itself recommends 400mL tank as a 1 month supply (for an unclear area based on my quick review of the website).
Other complications: The dosing requirements also seem to be quite different between species of rats. Published studies are almost all co-authored by Senestech staff, and therefore somewhat less confidence-inducing than independent validations would be.
If we're talking about use in settings other than islands, I want to reiterate that those are definitely not ecologically inert even to some approximation, and there are tons of things you'd have to look at besides production method if you wanted to estimate total animal effects. Age structure changes in rat populations, food web dynamics, most rodent fertility control agents appear to have reasonably strong insecticidal effects while brodifacoum doesn't affect most invertebrates we've studied, etc.
Since I'm not sure Evolve works either, it may be that any fertility control product used in the future has an entirely different formulation, making speculation here quite difficult.
I think I'm just generally more comfortable than you balancing my uncertainties with a combination of direct work on arthropods, and work on things that have (1) high non-arthropod upsides and (2) where I'm clueless about the effects on arthropods. I'm not sure I'm perfectly actioning my own values (given my moral uncertainty, I'm not sure how I could be) but I would burn out if I only worked on insects all the time; it's too depressing.
although I do wonder if the limited duration of these eradications and amount of use for island conservation relative to overall production is high enough to make a meaningful impact on land use? I don't think these things are continuous so a small enough demand shift signal might not have any impact? Just speculating...
Re: your footnote: I think this depends heavily on how severe we are talking. I don't have a strong opinion, because I really think no one has looked at it, about how much more severe things can get from disease than from something like keel bone fractures. A priori it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that the artificial conditions of factory farming enable a chicken to live in pain much longer, and therefore have higher overall suffering, than we would ever see in the wild -- but I'm not that confident in that idea, so it would be good to look at more diseases. The point being that a severe enough disease could still be worth working on in dalys/dollar terms even if it doesn't affect that many individuals, and that would also make it more ecologically inert in many cases (since changing the circumstances of very large numbers of animals seems riskier).
WAI facilitated a grant from Coefficient (then OP) years ago to look at disease severity; they came out with a few papers recently here and here. As is perhaps unsurprising, but disappointing, much of the research on disease in wildlife doesn't provide enough info to do a good job estimating the welfare burden. But the high scoring bacterial zoonoses in the first paper could be a good place to start a research project attempting to better assess the severity and numerosity compared to FAW conditions (as a cost effectiveness bar).
I've been thinking about this approach since last year, and haven't had time to prioritize it to do detailed work on a framework, but I have some initial thoughts. I think you're right that, if you're comfortable with that sort of cluelessness, this kind of thing is relatively safe to do (although as @Michael St Jules 🔸 notes, I'd also want to do some proper population modeling in a highly studied ecosystem to get some grounding for the idea).
But I think you can actually do better than focusing on only the very worst diseases depending on population parameters. For example, in populations that are top-down regulated (i.e., the population size is held under the carrying capacity of the resource by an external factor), you would not expect increases in starvation as a result of removing a disease (caveat: if that disease *is* the top down regulator, than you would have a problem - which unfortunately is the case in many CWD contexts). So then the disease doesn't need to be worse than both starvation and predation, say, but rather just worse than predation. The population size would equilibriate somewhere a bit higher, but the top-down regulation creates a buffer between population size and resource carrying capacity, and at high enough predation pressures you might reasonably expect almost no population increase.
So I think in an ideal case, you'd identify (1) a high suffering disease that (2) affects a population primarily controlled by intense predation pressure in (3) a predator that mainly eats the target population (so the increases in predator population sizes don't affect other animals, who aren't having a disease treated and for whom this would just represent an increase in suffering).
Of course, if you have a population with high predation pressure, the target population probably dies very quickly after getting the disease, so the suffering caused by the disease might not be very long in duration. But if its a really awful disease that could still be a lot of suffering.
I don't think anyone's done a scan of the literature for diseases with these properties, and I doubt you'd easily find a perfect case -- most populations are a mixture of top-down and bottom-up regulation. But I also think that probably my few hours of playing around with these ideas on the side of my other work are not likely to be the final word on the question :) so I'm optimistic someone spending a lot more time with this could identify other "ecological profiles" of diseases that make them "safer" in indirect effects terms to work on than others (I think there's some things to say about bottom-up regulated populations as well, for example -- probably there you would want a disease that is a lot worse than starvation).
Sorry I’m probably missing something, but I’m not understanding why real world examples from EA would be particularly relevant given how young a movement it is. I think someone could grant that we have the ability to be justified in assigning probabilities to things that are likely to happen soon, and agree that the risk of things we’re totally unaware of happening in the next ~ 10-50 years might be (at least in some circumstances) sufficiently small to not have unawareness problems.
But once you start trying to be an impartial altruist about far future beings, that seems to me where you really can’t get away from unawareness problems. And so I guess if you wanted to convince me I was wrong about that, we should be looking at things that people thought 1000 years ago, and how things they caused today were bad even though they were trying to do good for reasons they weren’t only poorly calibrated on but in fact totally unaware of - and it just seems likely to me there would be tons of examples of that?
Maybe the development of gunpowder stands out here as something being pursued in the hopes of achieving eternal life (ostensibly an altruistic motivation) and presumably the possibility of guns was not on people’s radar. I guess it would eventually have been figured out anyway, but how much harm did having gunpowder X years earlier cause?
Maybe an objection here is that an “ideal” agent would have of course considered the possibility of any chemical work being misused, but IDK - they weren’t even trying to make something explosive. I don’t see how even a perfectly rational being could have predicted all the harms gunpowder would cause given that they were aiming to do alchemy. What probability could they have possibly been justified, given their epistemic position, in assigning to ”super bad outcomes from pursuing eternal life chemistry” given that they probably could not have imagined the scale of modern warfare?
I do get a little mixed up on this between “people are not ideal and so regularly make large mistakes that look like cluelessness” vs “even an ideal agent could not be justified in their probability assignments given what is theoretically knowable” so maybe I’m misunderstanding something.
Does P1 rely in any way on the idealized agent actually using EV specifically, as opposed to other theoretically possible aggregations of all or most of the possible consequences of A and B? It seems like no to me but I was curious since it is explicitly mentioned.
Can you explain a little more what you mean by “coarse-grained” in P3? Does that just mean “very unlikely to include all the possible outcomes, so there’s a ton of unknown unknowns we don’t know how to assign probability to” or something else?
I am not at all an expert in mosquitoes, but I think it would be hard to figure out more than the direct effects on mosquitoes, which are sex specific. A few assorted thoughts:
I'd likely support doing this -- effects on humans are good (which to be clear I weight very highly!), male mosquitoes seem broadly fine, and females are killed mostly as pupae, I'm clueless about the welfare interpretation of population effects. That said, others might feel more concerned about population effects, which probably depends a lot on how you feel about insects generally and how much you think this could alter insecticide usage.
I spent less than an hour on this comment though, so obviously this is not the final word!
Hi Nick -- just regarding the team page issue, are you thinking of this page: https://rethinkpriorities.org/our-research-areas/worldview-investigations/ ? It has the people listed in your screenshot from Claude.
As a reference, I got to this from CCF page --> support our work --> under the "our team" section. Notably, the link is from this text:
"The Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund sits on top of work done by our Worldview Investigations Team (WIT), and Interdisciplinary Research Team, groups established specifically to tackle the hard questions that most donors don't have time to engage with: how to compare welfare across species, how to reason under deep uncertainty, how to weigh present benefits against future ones, how to aggregate competing moral views into a single allocation.
The team brings together training in philosophy, economics, statistics, cognitive science, moral psychology, and decision theory . The fund's allocations also draw on the in-house expertise of RP's Global Health and Development, Animal Welfare, AI departments, so the cross-cause model is informed by researchers working directly in each area, not just secondary literature. "
So I'm interpreting that paragraph as saying that WIT work goes into the report, but not necessarily that the WIT team did all the work (in particular, the interdisciplinary research team clearly was also involved, and the second paragraph suggests other teams contributed as well).
Nope, I just mean that on average, a bird who avoids a collision would live for a few more years based on typical lifespans. I meant "fully recovers from or avoids the collision." Of course if they have some lingering injury or issue their life expectancy will be lower.
It's definitely correct that rats do not consume their entire daily liquid needs from contrapest in field conditions. I can't quickly find evidence for the 1.8L figure - this study includes a DC trial, but might not be the same one (the citation links in the EA Forum post weren't working for me). Based on figure 9, 0 to 1200 mL of bait per month were consumed, depending on site and month. That's not a good indicator of the effective dose, since treated adult rats might still consume some of it, but it could be a reasonable indicator of how much bait you'd need to buy to treat a given alley -- although for the study I link, that's complicated by the fact that I wouldn't take their reports of reductions particularly seriously. Issues include: camera traps have to be used quite carefully to be good estimates of population abundance, and pairing them with a bait station is not good for that; it's hard to tell whether rats are adults or juveniles once they've left the burrow and especially using camera traps; there's no control sites, there were only two treatment sites, the treatment sites varied considerably in their features, etc.
Thanks for pointing out that the production mechanism might have an influence on land use. I think that's interesting and will reflect on it.
Unfortunately I think this post is otherwise not very relevant, mainly because no one uses Contrapest -- the liquid bait formulation doesn't work in any context where water is readily available because rats don't drink it, it's extremely messy and hard for people to use. If you wanted to do this comparison more seriously, I'd encourage you to focus on Evolve, which has a more similar profile production-wise (it's a solid bait, like most rodenticides) and conservationists have proven more willing to try it (whether it works outside the lab is still unclear, the company has not made its test data particularly accessible for review and no independent test runs have been published yet).
To clarify, the reason I viewed (at time of writing of the previous post) that rodenticide replacement on islands might be approximately ecologically inert is that conservationists use products until rats are entirely eradicated and then stop. This means any ecological impact differences between product 1 for eradication and product 2 for eradication are essentially transient. You have this short duration of time during the eradication, and then a long period after where conditions on the island are basically the same. On reflection, you're probably right that this is not sufficient to mean they are ecologically inert in the strict sense.[1] Overall I suppose I was imagining that people might have degrees of commitment to the ecologically inert concept, but I could have written more carefully.
A few other notes, not comprehensive:
although I do wonder if the limited duration of these eradications and amount of use for island conservation relative to overall production is high enough to make a meaningful impact on land use? I don't think these things are continuous so a small enough demand shift signal might not have any impact? Just speculating...
Re: your footnote: I think this depends heavily on how severe we are talking. I don't have a strong opinion, because I really think no one has looked at it, about how much more severe things can get from disease than from something like keel bone fractures. A priori it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that the artificial conditions of factory farming enable a chicken to live in pain much longer, and therefore have higher overall suffering, than we would ever see in the wild -- but I'm not that confident in that idea, so it would be good to look at more diseases. The point being that a severe enough disease could still be worth working on in dalys/dollar terms even if it doesn't affect that many individuals, and that would also make it more ecologically inert in many cases (since changing the circumstances of very large numbers of animals seems riskier).
WAI facilitated a grant from Coefficient (then OP) years ago to look at disease severity; they came out with a few papers recently here and here. As is perhaps unsurprising, but disappointing, much of the research on disease in wildlife doesn't provide enough info to do a good job estimating the welfare burden. But the high scoring bacterial zoonoses in the first paper could be a good place to start a research project attempting to better assess the severity and numerosity compared to FAW conditions (as a cost effectiveness bar).
I've been thinking about this approach since last year, and haven't had time to prioritize it to do detailed work on a framework, but I have some initial thoughts. I think you're right that, if you're comfortable with that sort of cluelessness, this kind of thing is relatively safe to do (although as @Michael St Jules 🔸 notes, I'd also want to do some proper population modeling in a highly studied ecosystem to get some grounding for the idea).
But I think you can actually do better than focusing on only the very worst diseases depending on population parameters. For example, in populations that are top-down regulated (i.e., the population size is held under the carrying capacity of the resource by an external factor), you would not expect increases in starvation as a result of removing a disease (caveat: if that disease *is* the top down regulator, than you would have a problem - which unfortunately is the case in many CWD contexts). So then the disease doesn't need to be worse than both starvation and predation, say, but rather just worse than predation. The population size would equilibriate somewhere a bit higher, but the top-down regulation creates a buffer between population size and resource carrying capacity, and at high enough predation pressures you might reasonably expect almost no population increase.
So I think in an ideal case, you'd identify (1) a high suffering disease that (2) affects a population primarily controlled by intense predation pressure in (3) a predator that mainly eats the target population (so the increases in predator population sizes don't affect other animals, who aren't having a disease treated and for whom this would just represent an increase in suffering).
Of course, if you have a population with high predation pressure, the target population probably dies very quickly after getting the disease, so the suffering caused by the disease might not be very long in duration. But if its a really awful disease that could still be a lot of suffering.
I don't think anyone's done a scan of the literature for diseases with these properties, and I doubt you'd easily find a perfect case -- most populations are a mixture of top-down and bottom-up regulation. But I also think that probably my few hours of playing around with these ideas on the side of my other work are not likely to be the final word on the question :) so I'm optimistic someone spending a lot more time with this could identify other "ecological profiles" of diseases that make them "safer" in indirect effects terms to work on than others (I think there's some things to say about bottom-up regulated populations as well, for example -- probably there you would want a disease that is a lot worse than starvation).