[This idea came out of an ACE research workshop. I would like to thank Zach Groff and Mark Budolfson for brainstorming this idea with me, as well as ACE for offering me the opportunity to think of it.]
Many people in the wild-animal suffering space think it would be a good idea to make a discipline of “welfare biology”– that is, the scientific study of wild animal welfare, the way that animal welfare studies scientifically studies domestic animal welfare. From my perspective, there are two big benefits to creating welfare biology. First, it would probably increase the number of research dollars that go to wild-animal welfare research, while reducing the opportunity cost: welfare biology would be competing with other fields of biology for funding, not with starving Africans and tortured pigs. Second, it would give us academic credibility. In most of the developed world, terrestrial wildlife often live on government land (for example, much of the United States’s wildlife lives on the quarter of US land owned by the government), which means changing government policies towards wildlife is a promising method of improving their welfare. Even in human-inhabited areas, changing government policies may be an effective way of improving wild-animal welfare. Governments are generally more likely to listen to tenured academics than they are to bloggers.
However, it is unclear to me how one creates an academic field. It is possible that people already know how academic fields form; I have not studied the subject in depth, and would welcome links from commenters. But if there is not already an academic body of work on the subject then it seems useful to do a small research project to explore how academic fields form. I think the best method is a series of qualitative case studies exploring how various relevant scientific fields formed.
I’m aware of two similar research projects in the effective altruist community. Luke Muehlhauser has written a report on early field growth. However, his report concentrates on the role of philanthropists and only touches on what non-philanthropists can do. It also mostly examines fields relevant to artificial intelligence risk research, which has some overlap with fields relevant to welfare biology but not entirely. Animal Charity Evaluators has done several case studies of other social movements; however, its case studies focus on social movements more broadly rather than academic fields specifically.
Histories of academic fields don’t usually have the information I’d want from them. For example, this paper— a fairly typical history of conservation biology– highlights several important milestones, but doesn’t talk about the details. There’s a lot of emphasis on particular research projects and controversies, such as whether large reserves are better than small reserves, but not a lot of nitty-gritty detail about how so many ecologists became interested in conservation and how they created common knowledge that they were all interested in them. Nevertheless, the histories do identify key events and key historical figures.
Many academic fields have formed relatively recently; it makes sense to study recently-formed fields, because academia changes over time. So most of the key historical figures involved in forming a particular academic field may still be alive. The researcher can contact these figures and set up qualitative interviews, focusing on the information that gets left out of histories. How did people get interested in the topic? How did they meet other people who were interested? What steps (journals, book publications, conferences, something else I haven’t thought of) were particularly important in getting the field to be self-sustaining? The researcher should also ask for recommendations of sources written at the time and thus supplement their interviews with archival research (to help compensate for the interviewees’ poor or self-serving memories).
Once several case studies have been conducted, the researcher can look for common themes. For example, perhaps popular attention or an activist movement galvanized academics into forming the field. Perhaps founding a journal gave people a place to submit papers that otherwise would have languished, unsuited for any currently existing journal. Perhaps an exciting book publication got everyone talking about the subject. This can inform wild animal advocates’ strategies in forming welfare biology.
No field is going to be exactly analogous to welfare biology; no one has ever attempted to scientifically study how humans can improve the well-being of wild animals before (although the study of animal emotions explores wild animals’ well-being more generally). However, there are several characteristics that might make a field more analogous. Welfare biology is value-laden: that is, instead of just collecting facts about the world, welfare biology is intended to change the world. People who think wild-animal suffering is just peachy are unlikely to be interested in welfare biology, just as people who don’t care about environmental preservation probably don’t care about conservation biology. The researcher might want to emphasize interdisciplinary fields, particularly fields that grew out of biology or that focus on animals. The researcher will probably want to avoid purely social-science or humanities fields, which may not be generalizable to natural science.
Fields it may be interesting to study include:
- Conservation biology (possibly the field most analogous to welfare biology, as a value-laden science that focuses on wild animals and plants)
- Animal welfare science (grew out of attempts to maximize productivity, thus may not be applicable)
- Environmental engineering
- Artificial intelligence risk (interesting because it is a field in the process of forming; advocates for future people, who like animals cannot self-advocate)
- Environmental ethics
- Environmental economics
- Developmental economics (focuses on people in the developing world, who have a limited ability to advocate for themselves in the developed world)
- Positive psychology
It is important to do case studies of failed attempts to start a field, as well as successful ones. Some of the apparent common ground between successful attempts might actually be common ground between all attempts, whether successful or unsuccessful. However, it is much more difficult to find a list of failed attempts than it is to find a list of successful attempts. I suggest that the researcher should ask their early interviewees for ideas, since the interviewees might have personally witnessed unsuccessful attempts to start an academic field. Luke Muehlhauser’s report on early field growth briefly discusses cryonics and molecular nanotechnology, which may be interesting fields to review.
I will not personally be able to perform this research project, but I think it’s an interesting and important project for someone to take up, and I’d be happy to consult with any effective altruists who want to do it. Ideally, the researcher would have expertise in qualitative research, particularly interviewing. The final report could create knowledge useful not only for wild-animal advocates but for any effective altruists who want to create an academic field.
G Gordon Worley III said:
For a failed example you might also consider cybernetics. It was on the verge of coming together and then it imploded.
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Cerastes said:
That’s flatly incorrect. The substance of the field (dealing with how dynamic systems interact via feedback or in its absence) is extremely popular and common (at least 3 of my papers could be considered “biological cybernetics”). The name, however, has been completely abandoned, in part because of the confounding influences of sci-fi books. Now, much of the work at I know in the field falls under the label of “systems biology” or “neuromechanics” (I’m less familiar with the non-biological side), but it’s still there, and now we have the tools to do it better.
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multiarmedmindset said:
This sounds like a good project for an EA Grant.
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Aapje said:
These are not just separate goals, they are conflicting goals. If a field is set up to legitimize human interventions in wildlife, they are generally not going to accept scientific results which cast doubt on whether human intervention can work, is cost-effective, etc. If you want to avoid this, the goal of the field should be to collect facts and scientists should be discouraged from mixing advocacy with their scientific work.
Politics is not science and science is not politics. Von Clausewitz famously said that “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” However, the reverse is true as well: politics is on the same spectrum as war. When people want to get their way, but get opposed, they consciously and unconsciously start to employ propaganda, become susceptible to in/outgroup dynamics, to fabricate evidence, etc.
Science can be a weapon in politics. It’s very tempting if someone has dogma, to selectively interpret and present the science; or even (usually unconsciously) use corrupt methodology. This is especially the case when people are in a catch-22 situation where they don’t get to do interventions that may prove them correct because people have strong doubts whether they will work and fear the risks. Once people go down this path, there is a big risk that ineffective interventions get seen as effective (this effect is so strong in medicine, that placebos are some of the most effective medicine 🙂 ).
IMO, it’s crucial to have a strong norm in science that scientists should merely focus on what is true and which mechanisms exist to change reality. The political decisions of which interventions should be done to change reality requires a focus on coalition building, which is incompatible with science. The proper goal of science is the opposite of coalition building: it is to challenge all assumptions.
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Anyway, here is a paper called “New Academic Fields as Admittance-Seeking Social Movements,” which seems to be exactly what asked for, an analysis of how new fields may succeed. This paper on mobilization of research units seem especially relevant for the early stages of creating a new academic field.
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ozymandias said:
Welfare biology is not considering the question of whether animals are morally relevant; that is addressed by other fields, such as animal emotions and moral philosophy. It is assuming that animals are morally relevant and doing research that is of interest if animals are morally relevant and not of interest if they are not. Similarly, conservation biology assumes biodiversity is a good thing, development economics assumes that helping people in the developing world is a good thing, and positive psychology assumes that happiness is a good thing. No one is going to bother to research whether compact reserves are better for biodiversity out of sheer ecological interest.
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Aapje said:
My issue is that in an earlier post you said:
At that point the alarm bells started go off in my head, because any movement where habitat destruction is a common position and where even those who oppose it leave the door open to it; is extremely dangerous in my eyes. All the objections you raised in your post (which IMO still severely understate the risks and downsides) should be sufficient to conclude that it’s not an option that deserves any serious consideration at this time & that people who advocate it should be strongly opposed.
The post also showed great faith in the ability of science to measure the things that influence wild animal happiness, while we already seem to have very limited ability to measure how things influence human happiness. In fact, there doesn’t even seem to be an objective definition or way to measure human happiness. This despite human test subjects being able to talk and the researchers having first hand experience of the human experience.
Of course, we still try to improve human welfare, but we landed on making self-determination (on the individual and group-level) a core component of that. Animals are not capable of this as humans are and they cannot defend themselves as effectively as humans can. In such a situation, non-intervention seems the most sensible default (of course we already intervene as a side effect of our human activities, but nearly all pro-wildlife interventions we currently do boil down to undoing that and giving the animals a life that is closer to what it would be without human existence).
Any field where it is very hard to measure whether interventions actually succeed in achieving the goal and where the subjects of intervention can’t protect themselves from excesses by interventionists, is ripe for abuse by people with silly beliefs. From what you write, my assessment is that many of the anti-wild-animal-suffering advocates have silly beliefs.
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Anyway, in general my observation is that many people who think they are strongly driven by empathy, are actually in large part driven by disgust. This confusion is very dangerous, because empathy involves the desires/needs of the other, while disgust centers around the desires/needs of the self. So when people mistake the latter for the former, they can very easily mistake their own desires for the desires of the other.
A certain Austrian gentleman seemed to have had extremely strong disgust sensitivity and his interventions lacked empathy and sympathy.
I’m wondering if anti-wild-animal-suffering advocacy is particularly attractive to people with high disgust*…
* Of course, I’m not claiming that they then let disgust override empathy and sympathy to such an extent as our Austrian gentleman, but even much milder cases can result in (very) bad outcomes.
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ozymandias said:
Don’t compare people to Hitler. Especially don’t compare me, the person who runs this blog and thus can do something about how irritated they are about being compared to Hitler, to Hitler.
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Aapje said:
I explicitly said I didn’t. I was just explaining that a strong disgust sensitivity can be very dangerous and that there are risks to creating environments/cultures that are very attractive to people with that trait.
Of course, risk factors don’t necessarily result in the outcome that they make (a bit) more likely. Not everyone with increased risk of breast cancer gets that disease. However, it is still wise to be aware of the increased risk and do (self) screening or whatever.
I am opposed to exceptionalizing evil people, because I think that what made them what they are is to some extent in all of us. We should be aware of our weaknesses to contain them, in the same way that someone who builds a nuclear plant should examine the Chernobyl disaster to see what can go wrong.
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ozymandias said:
I don’t care. This is my blog, I make the rules, and one of them is “no comparing people you’re talking to to Hitler.”
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Aapje said:
Fair enough.
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Windlestre said:
“Animals are not capable of this as humans are and they cannot defend themselves as effectively as humans can. In such a situation, non-intervention seems the most sensible default”
Self-determination even in humans is mostly a smokescreen as political forces will attack it wantonly as soon as they have some partisan, e.g. religious motivation.
Also non-intervention makes no sense as a default, since we have external incentives to intervene: We want to use the resources, and the animals are in the way. That’s why we already intervened to the point where we wiped out large parts of wild-animal biomass and in fact domesticated some of them to become mass-industrial inputs, with suffering and all.
Now, if it were really true that we have no information whatsoever to make any moral argument about animal welfare, and no way to ever improve our information, the only sensible default would be to optimize the other things we want from nature, e.g. the economic output. But this is clearly incompatible with your advocacy and the moral stance of conservationists, which is obviously not neutral on the issue of wildlife ethics.
Furthermore, I don’t see why I can’t make moral judgments of my own. It feels to me like I totally can. I for one am completely fine with the disgust dimension as a motivator. Spiders are disgusting and I don’t want them to exist. Full stop. No apologies. There is also clearly large amounts of victimization in nature, if you consider individual animals moral entities at all, and such victimization is an intrinsic moral negative. The fact that sentient entities are being eaten alive and raped without wanting to be eaten alive and raped is an overwhelming argument against nature. I don’t even see animal happiness as a good excuse to perpetuate it, as happiness is morally irrelevant compared to the nonconsensual victimization of innocents.
Leaving animals alone is not an option anyway because they don’t leave each other alone. Sure they cannot defend themselves against humans, but they cannot defend themselves against each other, either. This is where the double standard lies. Once we ditch that hypocrisy, there’s a simple truth left: According to nature’s own laws, we are the apex predator and therefore we get to do whatever we want with these resources.
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Aapje said:
I’ll fisk your comment a bit, each paragraph is a separate point/reply:
You can ask humans what they want and allow them to participate in democracy so they participate in law making. Animals fundamentally lack that ability.
Animals sometimes get in the way and sometimes are very important for us. Having all animals disappear tomorrow would be very bad for us.
Your assertion that domestication resulted in suffering is a one-sided narrative. Human well-being improved when we moved to (heated) houses and there are indications that livestock likes human-provided housing as well (although there are also indications that we can improve them to make them more animal-friendly). However, a lot of criticisms involve criticizing large-scale ‘industrial/factory’ farming, which seems little more than a Luddite, emotional argument to me. Large-scale industry has made human life much more pleasant and portraying industry as automatically bad thus seems counter-factual.
You are correct that we need/want to use animals for our benefit. When I objected to interventions, I specifically meant the interventions that are not to our benefit, but meant to help wild animals, who otherwise would mostly be left alone. In general, my position is that we should use animals for our benefit in a way that harms them minimally. When we can afford to, we should leave animals to live in their natural habitats. As you said, we have already causes lots of extinctions and I want to minimize our interventions, because I think that the more interventions we do, the more we destabilize the interdependent systems in nature.
Spiders are awesome. They are beautiful engineers, who keep the number of insects in check. If we didn’t have spiders, we’d have to use far more pesticides. So even if you are a vegan/vegetarian, you benefit from their work and the farmers that produce our food have to kill fewer insects thanks to them. Pesticides are far less targeted than spiders and pollute the water supply, which spiders do not.
You may not like predators on principle, but there currently is no viable way to keep many (herbivore) animals from becoming pests without them. Furthermore, predators often target hurt animals, so they frequently end suffering. We currently have no viable way to implement euthanasia for animals on a large scale. One-sidedly blaming nature for the harm that happens, without crediting it for the good that happens as well, is unfair and one-sided.
Now, I agree with you that nature can be cruel (although I think you put far too much weight on fairly brief moments of suffering), but that is not a justification for intervention. The only justification is that you can create a less cruel system. Communism was not justified by the problems that capitalism has. Only a better system than capitalism should be adopted, not one that is worse. Similarly, replacing nature requires very strong evidence that you have a better system, not wishful thinking.
Finally, the idea that we are the apex predator or mandated by nature’s own laws is nonsense. Nature just is. It has no laws, but physics. It has no hierarchy of who gets dominion over whom. A bacteria doesn’t care that it is supposedly low on the hierarchy that you assume exists and can kill humans. Humans are quite powerful, but also quite limited compared to (the hypothetical) God. As such, we should act accordance to our abilities and limitations, not based on hubris.
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Windlestre said:
A very good response overall. I’ll address two points only:
Democracy is certainly better than dictatorships in how they treat individual liberty of citizens, however that’s still a far cry from actual self-determination. For example, majorities can outvote minorities to destroy their liberty. Another downside is that democracies are not true democracies in practice. All political systems are corrupt, and some key supporters have disproportionately more power over the populace than others. This is why “draining the swamp” is a perpetual fiction and why crucial, sometimes existential liberties can be illegal even when majorities of voters are for their legality. This is systemic and can be explained by the rules for rulers, as cgp grey does in this video: (youtube link Rules for Rulers)
As for factory farming, you are right that the industrial setting is not intrisically what’s bad. What’s bad is the large scope which implies a large total number of victims, as well as the practical reality within these systems, such as routine mutilations. This may or may not be worse than nature, but it’s worse than nonexistence of conscious brains in my opinion.
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Aapje said:
I believe that well-functioning democracy requires much more than just having the vote. Having a culture & institutions that supports minority rights is crucial for democracy to work. In countries without such a culture or good institutions, introducing democracy often results in oppression. IMHO, that is not an argument against democracy, but against equating democracy with voting (which is a common mistake, unfortunately).
Since mankind is highly imperfect, no political system run by people can be perfect. However, some are far less imperfect than others. Specifically, it is important to have a system where the leaders are fearful of the populace and can corrected/tossed out if they go too far. Western democracy mostly has this (although some Western countries more than others*) and they thus have a limit on how much more the leaders get appease the elite over the populace, which is what The Dictator’s Handbook argues that dictators have to do to stay in power (Rules for Rulers is based on that book).
As for the nonexistence of conscious brains being worse than factory farming, I don’t think that is currently the choice anymore than that we currently have the choice between drug use and no drug use. With increasing worldwide wealth, I expect demand for meat to increase, rather than decreasing. Furthermore, we can’t control farms in China or elsewhere. So I think that the more realistic choice is to develop and push alternatives (with similar texture and taste), gradually seek to make animal farms more animal friendly (worldwide, not just in the West), etc. Making a relatively small part of the human population give up on animal products or switch to low productive farming methods, while the rest of the world doesn’t change, doesn’t seem like a solution to me.
* The US is not the best, IMHO, so if you are American, it is understandable that you are less pleased with your democratic system.
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meltedcheesefondue said:
>molecular nanotechnology
From my understanding, the nanotech money was gobbled up by traditional material science researchers rebranding themselves.
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Aapje said:
Yeah, people were smart enough to argue: “Our thing has molecules. Gimme the money.”
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