Category Archives: effective altruism

A love letter to civilian OSINT

1 Reply

[Content warning: discussion of violence and child abuse. No graphic images in this post, but some links may contain disturbing material.]

In July 2017, a Facebook user posts a video of an execution. He is a member of the Libyan National Army, and in the video, kneeling on the ground before his brigade, are twenty people dressed in prisoner orange and wearing bags over their heads. In the description, the uploader states that these people were members of the Islamic State. The brigade proceeds to execute the prisoners, one by one, by gunshot.

The videos was uploaded along with other executions perhaps as a threat or a boast, but it also becomes evidence, as the International Criminal Court orders an arrest warrant on the brigade’s Leader, Mahmoud Mustafa Busayf Al-Werfalli, for killing without due cause or process – the first warrant they have issued based only on social media evidence. And once the video falls into the lap of international investigative journalism collective Bellingcat, the video also becomes a map leading straight to them.

The video’s uploader is aware that they’re being hunted, and very intentionally, does not disclose the site the incident took place at. The camera focuses on an almost entirely unrecognizable patch of scrubby desert – almost entirely. At seconds, bits of horizon pop into the video, showing the edge of a fence and perhaps the first floor of a few buildings.

Bellingcat reporters knew the brigade was operating in the area around Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city. The long shadows of the prisoners in the video suggest the camera was facing one of two directions, in either early morning or late afternoon.

A Twitter user suggested that the sand color resembled that in the southwest of the city moreso than in other parts. The partial buildings glimpsed in the background looked only partly constructed, and within that district of the city, a great deal of construction had stopped do to the civil war. Rebel fighters were rumored to be living in a specific set of buildings – perhaps the same brigade? Using satellite footage, the researchers worked backwards to find where the video must have been shot, such that it could see both a fence, a matching view of a building, and other details like large shrubs. They came back with GPS coordinates, accurate out to six digits, and a date and time down to the minute.

The grim confirmation came when the coordinates were checked against a more recent set of satellite imagery from the area. In the newer footage, on the sand, facing out into the buildings, fence, and large shrubs, were fifteen large bloodstains.

Bellingcat is an organization that does civilian OSINT. OSINT is “Open Source Intelligence”, a name that comes to it from the national intelligence sphere where the CIA and FBI practice it – relevant knowledge that is gathered from openly available sources rather than from spy satellites, hacking, and the like. (OSINT is also a concept in computer security, I believe that’s related but probably a somewhat different context.) Civilian OSINT is to OSINT as citizen science is to science at large – democratized, anyone can do it, albeit perhaps fewer tools than the professionals tend to have. Given that OSINT inherently runs on public material, civilian OSINT has theoretical access to the exact same information that professionals have.

Bellingcat is, of course, an organization that employs OSINT experts (making them professionals), but they also have a commitment to openness and sharing their methods, which I believe classes them in with other. Organizations that focus on this are thin on the ground. (Outside of academia, where certain research on e.g. internet communities could be said do be doing the same thing.) For instance, the Atlantic Council has the Digital Forensics Research (DFR) Lab, which analyzes social media and other internet material in relation to global events.

Other OSINT organizations are less institutional and may be volunteer-based. Europol’s “Find an Object” program crops identifying information from pictures of child abuse, so that only items in the photo are visible (a package of cleaner, a logo on a hat) and then asks the internet if can identify the items and where they are found. WarWire is a network of professionals who gather and analyze social media data from warzones. Trace Labs is a crowdsourced project that finds digital evidence on missing persons cases, the results of which it sends to law enforcement. DNA Doe is a related project where volunteers use genetic evidence to identify unidentified bodies. Less formally, there are dedicated forums like WebSleuths and the “Reddit Bureau of Investigation” (r/RBI).

More often, though, these investigations emerge spontaneously and organically: More commonly, these efforts are not practiced or planned, but form spontaneously and organically – Reddit communities have occasionally made the news for identifying decades-old John Does, stabilizing shakey cell phone footage that provided important evidence in the case of a police shooting, and identifying that a mysterious electrical component in a user’s extension cord was a secret camera.

Volunteers

Volunteer labor is an elegant fit for OSINT:

  • Much of it is digital and doable remotely
  • Many tasks require little training
  • Depending on the cause, volunteers will work
  • Causes are things people care about
  • Volunteers work at their own hours and are thus resilient to the kind of emotional burnout bellingcat has seen in its employees
  • Willing to devote their time

Let’s unpack ‘time.’ Many investigations come down, eventually, to monotonous searches: Bellingcat was eventually able to use just five photos with vague landscape features to pinpoint two geographic locations where human trafficking had taken place for the “Trace an Object” project. A remarkable task – and one that took weeks.

(Steps in the process included “exploring major cities in Southeast Asia via Google Streetview to find ones that looked most similar to photos”, and “guessing that the closest-looking city was the correct one”. This worked.)

Overall, they spent over 2,500 hours to concretely identify 12 Europol photos in the past twelve months, and to partially identify thirteen more. And identification of objects is only one step in the way to arrest – some photographs were years old, the perpetrators and victims likely moved or worse. In the Europol program’s three year history, with tens of thousands of volunteer tips, only ten children have been rescued.

Any child saved from these horrors is, of course, a success. But it suggests that paying people for this type of work isn’t going to be efficient in the standard effective altruism framework of lives-saved per dollar.

I think practical civilian OSINT, to move monotonous mountains like this one, needs to tap into a different reservoir: the kind of digital energy that has built and maintained Wikipedia, countless open-source projects, the universe of fanpages and fanfiction, etc. This sort of collaborative, enthusiastic volunteer labor is well suited to the more repetitive and time-consuming aspects of open source investigation.

(Obviously, different projects will have different payoffs – I’m sure that some will be hugely effective per paid hour, although I don’t know which ones they are.)

Sidenote: What about automating OSINT with neural nets?

I bring this up because I know my audience, and I know people are going to go “wait, image identification? You know DeepMind can do that now, right?”

Well: the neural nets for this don’t exist yet. If someone wants to make them, I could see that being beneficial for OSINT, although I’d advise such a person to take a long hard look at the ‘OSINT is a dual use technology’ section of this post below, and to think long and hard about possible government and military uses for such a technology (both your own government and others.) I suspect this capability is coming either way, either from the government or commercial AI companies, and so may be a moot issue.

Still, I’m talking specifically about what OSINT can be used for now.

OSINT is a dual-use technology

In biology and other fields, a “dual-use” technology is one that can be used for good as well as for evil. A machine that synthesizes DNA, for instance, can be used to make medical research easier, and it can be used to make bioterror easier.

Civilian OSINT is one. While Reddit has identified missing persons, its communities also famously misidentified an innocent man as the Boston Marathon Bomber. Data gathered from a bunch of untrained unvetted internet randos should probably be viewed with some skepticism.

It’s also tragically easy to misuse. A lot of OSINT tools (for e.g. identifying people across social media) could be used by stalkers, abusers, authoritarian governments, and other bad actors just as trivially as it could by investigators. Raising the profile of these methods would expose them to misuse. Improving on OSINT tools would expose them to misuse.

If it helps, I think most small-scale efforts – like anything by Reddit or Trace Labs – are not really doing anything that large governments can’t do, technically speaking.* Ethical civilian OSINT projects should also be expected to go out of their way to demonstrate that they’re using volunteer labor ethically and for a specific purpose.

That leaves the threat as ‘malicious civilians’ (stalkers, etc.) and perhaps ‘resource-limited local governments’. This is a significant issue.

* (Though they can do things that large governments can’t do, time- and resource-wise. Keep reading.)

But here’s why we should use it anyway

Standard police and journalistic investigations (as two common uses of intelligence)are also very fallible. They may rely on misinformation and guesswork, poor eyewitness testimony, faulty drug tests, error-prone genetic methods, and debunked psychological methods. It’s not obvious to me that the average large-group civilian OSINT investigation will have a higher rate of false negatives than a standard investigation.

Moreover, that’s not really the issue. The relevant question is not “is crowd-sourced civilian OSINT worse than conventional investigation?” It’s “is crowd-sourced civilian OSINT worse than no investigation at all?” When Europol puts objects from images of child abuse online and asks for anyone who can identify the objects, and an answer is found and confirmed with online information, Europol workers could also have done that. It just would have taken them too high of a cost in time and human effort. When Reddit users solve cold cases, they are explicitly aiming for cases that are no longer under investigation by the police, or cases where police are under-investigating.

Open investigations like Bellingcat also structurally facilitate honesty because their work can be independently verified – all of the reasoning and evidence for a conclusion is explicitly laid out. In this way, civilian OSINT shares the ideals of science, and benefits because of it.

Where OSINT shines

It seems like cases where civilian OSINT works best have a few properties:

Not rushed. Reddit’s misidentification of the Boston Marathon Bomber happened within that hours after the attack. People were rushing to find an answer.

Results are easily verifiable. For instance, when Europol receives a possible identification of a product in an image, they can find a picture of that product and confirm.

Structure and training. An intentional, curated, organized effort is more likely to succeed than a popcorn-style spontaneous investigation a la Reddit. For instance, it’s probably better for investigations to have a leader. And a method. Many OSINT skills are readily teachable.

Learning OSINT

Despite the rather small number of public and actively-recruiting OSINT projects, there are a few repositories of OSINT techniques.

The Tactical Technology Collective, a Berlin nonprofit for journalists and activists, created Exposing the Invisible: a collection of case studies and techniques for performing digital OSINT research, especially around politics.

Bellingcat also regularly publishes tutorials on its methods, from using reverse image searches to identifying missiles to explaining your findings like a journalist.

The nonprofit OSINT Curious bills itself as a “learning catalyst” and aims to share OSINT techniques and make it approachable. They produce podcasts and videos demonstrating digital techniques. In addition, a variety of free tools intentionally or purposefully facilitate various OSINT practices, and various repositories collect these.

OSINT for effective altruism?

I don’t actively have examples where OSINT could be used for effective causes, but I suspect they exist. It’s a little hard to measure OSINT’s effectiveness since, as I described above, many OSINT tasks are a bad go from a reward-per-hour perspective. But they can use hours that wouldn’t be used otherwise, from people’s spare time or (more likely) by attracting people who wouldn’t otherwise be in the movement.

At the Minuteman Missile Site museum in South Dakota, I read about a civilian effort by peace activists during the Cold War to map missile silos in the Midwest. Then they published them and distributed the maps rurally. The idea was that if people realized that these instruments of destruction were so close to them, they might feel more strongly about them, or work to get them “out of our backyard.” (In a way, exploiting the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics.) Did this work? No idea. But it’s an OSINT-y project that touches on global catastrophic risk, and it’s certainly interesting.

I wondered if one could do a similar thing by mapping the locations of factory farms in the US, and thus maybe instill people to act locally to reform or remove them. The US Food and Water Watch had such an interactive digital map for the USA, but it seems to have gone down with no plans to bring it back. Opportunity for someone else to do so and give it some quality PR?

(In the mean time, here’s one for just North Carolina, and here’s a horrifying one for Australia.)

Again, I don’t know how effective it would be as a campaigning move, but I could imagine it being a powerful tool. The point I want to make is basically “this is an incredible tool.” Try thinking of your own use cases, and let me know if you come up with them.

A shot at – not utopia, but something decent

Here’s my last argument for civilian OSINT.

Trace Labs staff have pointed out that their teams tend to be more successful at finding evidence about people who have recently gone missing, versus people who have gone missing – say – over a decade ago. This is because people in the modern age are almost guaranteed to have extensive web presences. Not just their own social media but the social media of relatives and friends, online records, phone data, uploaded records, digitized news… There used to be no centralized place for the average person to find this info for a far-off stranger. Information was stored and shared locally. Now, teenagers half a world away can find it.

I have a lot of hope and respect for privacy and privacy activists. I think basic digital privacy should be a right. But the ship is sailing on that one. Widespread technology gives governments a long reach. China is using facial recognition AI to profile a racial minority. The technology is there already. A lot of social media identification is in public. A lot of non-public conversation is already monitored in some form or another; that which isn’t can often be made public to governments without too much effort. US federal agencies are hiding surveillance cameras in streetlights. You can encrypt your messages and avoid having your photo taken, but that won’t be enough for long. It’s already not. As long as citizens are happy to keep carrying around internet-connected recording and location-tracking devices, and uploading personal material to the web – and I think we will – governments will keep being able to surveil citizens.

Sci-fi author and futurist David Brin also thinks that this is close to inevitable. But he sees this balanced by the concept of ‘reciprocal transparency’: the idea that the tools that enable government surveillance, the cameras and connectivity and globally disseminated information, can also empower citizens to monitor the government and expose corruption and injustice.

A reciprocally transparent society could be a very healthy one to live in. Maybe not what we’d prefer – but still pretty good. Civilian OSINT seems like the best shot at that we have right now: Open, ubiquitous, and democratized.

Male dairy calves, male chicks, and relative suffering from animal foods

2 Replies

Or: Do “byproduct” animals of food animal production significantly affect estimates of comparative suffering caused by those foods? No.

[Image adapted from this image by Flickr user Sadie_Girl, under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license.]

See, relatedly: What happens to cows in the US?

Short version

There’s a shared belief in animal-welfare-oriented effective altruism that eggs and chicken meat cause a great deal more suffering than beef or dairy (1). You can make big strides towards reducing the amount of suffering caused in your diet by eating fewer eggs and chicken, even if you don’t go fully vegetarian or vegan.

Julia Galef, Brian Tomasik, and William MacAskill have made different versions of this calculation, with different metrics, and have come to the same conclusion. These three calculations include only the animal used directly for production. (Details about the calculations and my modifications are in the long version below.) But the production of several kinds of animal product require bringing into existence animals that aren’t used for that product – like male calves born to lactating dairy cows, or male chicks born when producing egg-laying hens. I wondered if including these animals would significantly change the amount of suffering in various animal foods.

It turns out that even accounting for these other animals indirectly created during production, the amount of suffering relative to other animal foods doesn’t change very much. If you buy the premises of these quantitative ethical comparisons, beef and dairy make so much product using so few animals that they’re still 1-3 orders of magnitude better than eggs or chicken. Or rather, the message of “eat less chicken” and “if you’re going to eat animal products, eat dairy and beef” still makes sense even if we account for the maximum number of other animals created incidental to production of each food animal. I’m going to call these the “direct and incidental animals” (DIA) involved in a single animal’s worth of product.

The question is complicated by the fact that “incidental” animals still go into another part of the system. Day-old male chicks are used for pet and livestock food, and male dairy calves are raised for meat.

Given that these male calves are tied to dairy production, it seems unlikely that production of dairy and meat is what it would be if they weren’t connected. For instance, if there is less demand for dairy and thus fewer male dairy calves, it seems like one of the following should happen:

  1. No change to meat calf supply, less meat will be produced (DIA estimates seem correct)
  2. Proportionally more meat calves will be raised (original estimates seem correct)
  3. Something between the above (more likely)

Reframed: It depends whether demand for dairy increases the meat supply and makes it less profitable to raise meat cows, or whether demand for meat makes it more profitable to raise dairy cows, or both. I’m not an economist and don’t go into which one of these is the case. (I tried to figure this out and didn’t make much headway.) That said, it seems likely that the actual expected number of animal lives or days of suffering is somewhere between the initial numbers and my altered values for each source.

The most significant change I find from the original findings suggest that meat cows cause a fair bit more suffering over a longer period of time than the original calculations predict, only if demand for meat is significantly propping up the dairy industry. But even if that’s true, the suffering caused by beef is a little smaller than that caused by pork, and nowhere near as much as smaller animals.

Modifications to other estimates including direct and incidental animals (DIA)

Tomasik’s original estimate DIA Tomasik’s estimate Galef’s orginal estimate DIA Galef’s estimate
Milk 0.12 equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded 0.14 equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded 0.000057 max lives per 1000 calories of milk 0.00013 max lives per 1000 calories of milk
Beef 1.9 max equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded 4.74 max equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded 0.002469 max lives per 1000 calories 0.0029 max lives per 1000 calories
Eggs 110 equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded 125 equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded 0.048485 lives per 1000 calories 0.048485 lives per 1000 calories

That’s basically it. For a little more info and how I came to these conclusions, read on.

Longer version

On the topic of effectively helping animals, one thing I’ve heard a few times is that eating dairy and beef aren’t terribly harmful, since they come from such large animals that a serving of beef or milk is a very small part of the output of the animal. On the other hand, chickens are very small – an egg is a day’s output of an animal, and a family can eat an entire chicken in one dinner. Compare that with the fact that most chickens are raised in extremely unnatural and unpleasant conditions, and you have a framework for directly comparing the suffering that goes into different animal products.

This calculation has been made by three people I’m aware of – Brian Tomasik on his website, William MacAskill in his book Doing Good Better, and Julia Galef on her blog. The organization One Step for the Animals also recommends people stop eating chickens, on these grounds, but I didn’t find a similar breakdown on their website after a few minutes of looking. It’s still worth checking out, though. (Did you know chicken consumption, in pounds/year, has surpassed beef consumption and is still climbing, but only over the last 20 years?)

Galef compares calories per life. She includes the male chicks killed for each egg-laying hen.

Tomasik looks at “days of suffering caused per kg demanded”.

Macaskill briefly examines three factors: the number of animal years and lives that go into a year of eating in the average omnivorous American diet, and also numerical “quality of life” estimates from Bailey Norwood. (He doesn’t combine these factors numerically so much as use them to establish a basis for recommending people avoid chicken. I didn’t do an in-depth analysis of his, but safe to say that like the others, adding in other animal lives doesn’t seem to change his conclusions significantly.)

With pigs and meat chickens, the case is straightforward – both sexes are raised for meat, and suppliers breed animals to sell them and retain enough to continue breeding. The aged animals are eventually slaughtered as meat as well.

But only female hens lay eggs. Meat chickens and egg chickens raised at scale in the USA are two different breeds, so when a breeder produces laying hens, they wind up with more male chicks than are needed for breeding. Similarly, dairy cows have to give birth to a calf every season they produce milk. The average dairy cow gives 2.4 calves in her lifetime, and slightly less than 1.2 of those are male. The male egg chicks and male dairy calves are used for meat.

Aged dairy cows and egg-laying chickens are also sold as meat. “Spent hens” that are no longer commercially profitable, at 72 weeks old, are sold for ‘processed chicken meat’. (Other sources claim pet food or possibly just going to landfills. Pet food sounds reasonable, but landfills seem unlikely to me, at least for large operations.) There aren’t as many of these as either cows or chickens raised directly for meat, so they’re a comparatively small fraction, but they’re clearly still feeding into the meat system.

🐔

When talking about this, we quickly run into some economic questions, like “perhaps if the demand for dairy dropped, the meat industry would start raising more calves for meat instead?”

My intuition says it ought to shake out one way or the other – either decreasing demand for dairy cows results in the price of meat going up, or decreasing demand for meat results in demand for dairy cows going down.

In the egg case, male chicks aren’t literally put in a landfill, they’re ground and sold for pet food. Without this otherwise unused source of protein, would pet food manufacturers increase demand for some other kind of meat? It seems possible that both this would happen and that the price of pet food would increase. Then, maybe less would be bought to make up for the difference, at least in the long term – cheap pet food must be somewhat inelastic, at least in the short term?

My supply and demand curves suggest that both demand should decline and price should increase. That said, we’re leaving the sphere of my knowledge and I don’t know how to advise you here. For the moment, I’m comfortable folding in both animals produced in the supply chain for a product, and animals directly killed or used for a product. But based on the economic factors above, these still don’t equate to “how many animal lives / days are expected to be reduced in the long term by avoiding consumption of a given product.”

At the most, though, dairy cows bring an extra 1.2 meat cow into existence, meat cows bring an extra .167 dairy cow,  and each egg-laying hen brings an extra 1 male chicken that is killed around the first day. These are the “direct and incidental animals” created for each animal directly used during productive.

 

Some notes on the estimates below:

I ignored things like fish and krill meal that go into production. Tomasik notes that 37% of the global fish harvest (by mass) is ground and used for animal feed for farmed fish, chickens, and pigs. But this seems to be mostly from wild forage fish, not farmed fish, and wild populations are governed by a different kind of population optimum – niches. We’d guess that each fish removed from the environment frees up resources that will be eaten by, on average, one new fish. (Of course, populations we’re fishing seem to be declining, so something is happening, but it’s certainly not one-to-one.)

I also only looked at egg-laying chickens, meat cows, and dairy cows. This is because pork and other industries aren’t sex-segregated – all babies born are raised for the same thing. A few will be kept aside and used to produce more babies, but even the breeding ones will eventually be turned into meat. The amount of days these animals live probably affect Tomasik’s calculations somewhat, but the breeding animals are still the minority.

I also didn’t include a detailed analysis because if you’re concerned about animal welfare, you probably already don’t eat veal. (I’m going to assert that if you want to eat ethically treated food, avoid a meat whose distinguishing preparation characteristic is “force-feed a baby”.) Veal is a byproduct of the dairy industry, but a minority of the calves. Foie gras does have a multiplier effect because female geese don’t fatten up as much, and are killed early, so for each goose turned into foie gras, another goose is killed young.

Old dairy cows and laying hens are used for meat, but it’s a minority of the meat production. I didn’t factor this in. See What happens to cows in the US for more on cows.

Modifications to other estimates including direct and incidental animals (DIA)

Tomasik’s original estimate DIA Tomasik’s estimate Galef’s orginal estimate DIA Galef’s estimate
Milk 0.12 equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded 0.14 equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded 0.000057 max lives per 1000 calories of milk 0.00013 max lives per 1000 calories of milk
Beef 1.9 max equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded 4.74 max equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded 0.002469 max lives per 1000 calories 0.0029 max lives per 1000 calories
Eggs 110 equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded 125 equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded 0.048485 lives per 1000 calories 0.048485 lives per 1000 calories

DIA modifications to Tomasik’s estimate

(Days of equivalent suffering / kg)

To adjust this estimate, I added the extra “equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded” for the other animals:

Egg-laying chickens
(4 suffering per day of life in egg-laying chickens * 501 days of life) + 1 * (3 suffering per days of life in meat chickens * 1 day of life) / 16 kg of edible product over life of egg-laying chicken = 125 max equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded (vs 110)

Dairy cows
(2 suffering per day of life in milk cows * 1825 days of life) + 1.2 * (1 suffering per day of life in meat cows * 395 days of life) / 30000 kg of edible product over life of dairy cow = 0.14 max equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded (vs 0.12)

Meat cows
(1 suffering per day of life in meat cows * 395 days of life) + 0.167 * (2 suffering per day of life in dairy cows * 1825 days of life) / 212 kg of edible product over life of meat cow = 4.74 max equivalent days of suffering caused per kg demanded (vs 1.9)

The meat cow number is the only very different one here.

DIA modifications to Galef’s estimate

I adjusted this by adding other lives to Galef’s estimate of lives per 1000 calories:

Egg-laying chicken
Galef included this in her calculation of 0.048485 lives per 1000 calories of eggs.

Dairy cows
[0.000057 lives per 1000 calories of milk] * 2.2 = 0.00013 max lives per 1000 calories of milk
[0.000075 lives per 1000 calories of cheese] * 2.2 = 0.00017 max lives per 1000 calories of cheese

Meat cows
[0.002469 lives per 1000 calories of beef] * 1.167 = 0.0029 max lives per 1000 calories of beef

Other economic notes

I’m hoping someone who knows more here will be able to make use of the information I found.

The number of meat cows in the US has been broadly decreasing since 1970. The number of dairy cows has also been decreasing since at least 1965, but dairy consumption is increasing, because those cows are giving far more milk.

When dairy prices drop, dairy farmers are known to kill some of their herds and sell them for meat, leading to a drop in meat prices.

We would also expect dairies and beef farms to compete with each other for some of the same resources, like land and feed.

A friend wondered whether dairy steers are much smaller than beef cows, so if shifting the same volume of meat production to these steers would mean more animal lives. It turns out that dairy steers and beef cows are about the same weight at slaughter.

(1) With fish perhaps representing much more suffering than eggs or chickens, and other large meat sources like pigs somewhere in the middle.)

 

This blog has a Patreon. If you like what you’ve read, consider giving it a look.

Diversity and team performance: What the research says

5 Replies

(Photo of group of people doing a hard thing from Wikimedia user Rizimid, CC BY-SA 3.0.)

This is an extended version (more info, more sources) version of the talk I gave at EA Global San Francisco 2017. The other talk I gave, on extinction events, is  here. Some more EA-focused pieces on diversity, which I’ve read but which were assembled by the indomitable Julia Wise, are:

Effective altruism means effective inclusion

Making EA groups more welcoming

EA Diversity: Unpacking Pandora’s Box

Keeping the EA Movement welcoming

How can we integrate diversity, equity, and inclusion into the animal welfare movement?

Pitfalls in diversity outreach

There are moral, social, etc. reasons to care about diversity, all of which are valuable. I’m only going to look at one aspect, which is performance outcomes. The information I’m drawing from here are primarily meta-studies and experiments in a business context.

Diversity here mostly means demographic diversity (culture, age, gender, race) as well as informational diversity – educational background, for instance. As you might imagine, each of these has different impacts on team performance, but if we treat them as facets of the same thing (“diversity”), some interesting things fall out.

(Types of diversity which, as far as I’m aware, these studies largely didn’t cover: class/wealth, sexual orientation, non-cis genders, disability, most personality traits, communication style, etc.)

Studies don’t show that diversity has an overall clear effect, positive or negative, on the performance of teams or groups of people. (1) (2) The same may also be true on an organizational level. (3)

If we look at this further, we can decompose it into two effects (one where diversity has a neutral or negative impact on performance, and one where it has a mostly positive impact): (4) (3)

Social categorization

This is the human tendency to have an ingroup / outgroup mindset. People like their ingroup more. It’s an “us and them” mentality and it’s often totally unconscious. When diversity interacts with this, the effects are often – though not always – negative.

Diverse teams tend to have:

  • Lower feelings of group cohesion / identification with group
  • Worse communication (3)
  • More conflict (of productive but also non-productive varieties) (also the perception of more conflict) (5)
  • Biases

A silver lining: One of these ingrouping biases is the expectation that people more similar to us will also think more like us. Diversity clues us into diversity of opinions. (6) This gets us into:

Information processing 

— 11/9/17 – I’m much less certain about my conclusions in this section after further reading. Diversity’s effects on creativity/innovation and problem-solving/decision-making have seen mixed results in the literature. See the comments section for more details. I now think the counterbalancing positive force of diversity might mostly be as a proxy for intellectual diversity. Also, I misread a study that was linked here the first time and have removed it. The study is linked in the comments. My bad! —

Creative, intellectual work. (7) Diversity’s effects here are generally positive. Diverse teams are better at:

  • Creativity (2)
  • Innovation (9)
  • Problem solving. Gender diversity is possibly more correlated than individual intelligence of group members. (Note: A similarly-sized replication failed to find the same results. Taymon Beal kindly brought this to my attention after the talk.) (10)

Diverse teams are more likely to discuss alternate ideas, look at data, and question their own beliefs.

This loosely maps onto the “explore / exploit” or “divergent / convergent” processes for projects. (2)

    1. Information processing effects benefit divergent / explore processes.
    2. Social categorization harms convergent / exploit processes.

If your group is just trying to get a job done and doesn’t have to think much about it, that’s when group cohesiveness and communication are most important, and diversity is less likely to help and may even harm performance. If your group has to solve problems, innovate, or analyze data, diversity will give you an edge.

How do we get less of the bad thing? Teams work together better when you can take away harmful effects from social categorization. Some things that help:

    1. The more balanced a team is along some axis of diversity, the less likely you are to see negative effects on performance. (12) (7) Having one woman on your ten-person research team might not do much to help and might trigger social categorization. If you have five women, you’re more likely to see benefits.
    2. Remote teams are less biased (w/r/t gender). Online teams will be less prone to gender bias.
    3. Time. Obvious diversity becomes less salient to a group’s work over time, and diverse teams end up outperforming non-diverse teams. (13) (6) Recognition of less-obvious cognitive differences (e.g. personality and educational diversity) increases over time. As we might hope, the longer a group works together, the less surface-level differences matter.

This article has some ideas on minimizing problems from language fluency, and also for making globally dispersed teams work together better.

How do we get more of the good thing? Diversity is a resource – more information and cognitive tendencies. Having diversity is a first step. How do we get more out of it?

    1. At least for age and educational diversity, high need for cognition. This is the drive of individual members to find information and think about things. (It’s not the same as, or especially correlated to, either IQ or openness to experience (1)).

Harvard Business Review suggests that diversity triggers people to stop and explain their thinking more. We’re biased towards liking and not analyzing things we feel more comfortable with – the “fluency heuristic.” (14) This is uncomfortable work, but if people enjoy doing it, they’re more likely to do it, and get more out of diversity.

But need for cognition is also linked with doing less social categorization at all, so maybe diverse groups with high levels of this just get along better or are more pleasant for all parties. Either way, a group of people who really enjoy analyzing and solving problems are likely to get more out of diversity.

2) A positive diversity mindset. This means that team members have an accurate understanding of potential positive effects from diversity in the context of their work. (4) If you’re working in a charity, you might think that the group you might assign to brainstorming new ways to reach donors might benefit from diversity more than the group assigned to fix your website. That’s probably true. But that’s especially true if they understand how diversity will help them in particular. You could perhaps have your team brainstorm ideas, or look up how diversity affects your particular task. (I was able to find results quickly for diversity in fundraising, diversity in research, diversity in volunteer outreach… so there are resources out there.)

Again, note that diversity’s effect size isn’t huge. It’s smaller than the effect size of support for innovation, external and internal communication, vision, task orientation, and cohesion – all these things you might correctly expect correlate with performance more than diversity (8). That said, I think a lot of people [at EA Global] want to do these creative, innovative, problem-solving things – convince other people to change lives, change the world, stop robots from destroying the earth. All of these are really important and really hard, and we need any advantage we can get.

  1. Work Group Diversity
  2. Understanding the effects of cultural diversity in teams: A meta-analysis of research on multicultural work groups
  3. The effects of diversity on business performance: Report of the diversity research network
  4. Diversity mindsets and the performance of diverse teams
  5. The biases that punish racially diverse teams
  6. Time, Teams, and Task Performance
  7. Role of gender in team collaboration and performance
  8. Team-level predictors of innovation at work: A comprehensive meta-analysis spanning three decades of research
  9. Why diverse teams are smarter
  10. Evidence of a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups
  11. When and how diversity benefits teams: The importance of team members’ need for cognition
  12. Diverse backgrounds and personalities can strengthen groups
  13. The influence of ethnic diversity on leadership, group process, and performance: an examination of learning teams
  14. Diverse teams feel less comfortable – and that’s why they perform better

Beespotting on I-5 and the animal welfare approach to honey

8 Replies

The drive from Seattle to San Francisco along I-5 is a 720-mile panorama of changing biomes. Forest, farmland, and the occasional big city get very gradually drier, sparser, flatter. You pass a sign for the 45th parallel, marking equidistance between the equator and the North Pole. Then the road clogs with semis chugging their way up big craggy hills, up and up, and then you switch your foot from the gas to the brake and drop down the hills into more swathes of farmland, and more intense desert, with only the very occasional tiny town to get gas and bottles of cold water. Eventually, amid the dry hills, you see the first alien tower of a palm tree, and you know the desert is going to break soon.

Of course, I like the narrative arc on the drive back even better. Leaving Berkeley in the morning, you hit the desert in its element – bright and dry – without being too hot. That comes later, amid the rows and rows of fruit and nut trees, which turns into the mountains again, and into the land on the side of the mountains, now dominated by lower bushy produce crops and acres of flat grain land. You pass a sign for Lynn County, the Grass Seed Capital of the US. Finally, well into dusk, you hit the Washington border, and the first rain you’ve seen on the entire trip starts falling right on cue. Then you meet some friends in your old college town for a quick sandwich and tomato soup at 11:30 PM, and everything is set right with the world, letting you arrive back home by an exhausted but satisfied 1:30 AM.

I like this drive for giving a city kid a slice of agriculture. I’ve written about the temporal scale of developments in agriculture, but the spatial scale is just as incredible. About 50% of land in the US is agricultural. Growing the calorie-dense organisms that end up on my plate, or fueling someone’s car, or exported onto someone else’s plate, or someone else’s feedbag, is the result of an extraordinary amount of work and effort.

I talked about the plants – there’s trees for fruit and nuts, vines, grain, corn, a million kinds of produce. I only assume this gets more impressive when you go south from San Francisco. (In recent memory, I’ve only visited as far south as Palo Alto, and was shocked to discover a lemon tree. With lemons on it! In December! Who knew? Probably a lot of you.)

There’s also animals – aside from a half dozen alpacas and a few dozen horses, you spot many sheep and many, many cows from the highway. The cattle ranches were quite pretty and spacious – I wonder if this is luck, or if there’s some kind of effort to put the most attractive ranches close to the highway. Apparently there are actual feedlots along I-5 if you keep going south. I certainly didn’t notice any happy chicken farms along the way.

And then there are the bees.

I.

Bees are humanity’s most numerous domesticated animal. You don’t see them, per se, since they are, well, bees. What you can see are the hives – stacks of white boxes like lost dresser drawers congregating in fields. Each box contains the life’s work of a colony of about 19,200 bees.

800px-osman_bey_ve_arc4b1larc4b1

I forgot to start taking photos until it was already dark out, so here are some Wikimedia photos instead. If you want me to take more photos, feel free to ask for my paypal to fund me making the drive again. 😛 | Photo by Fahih Sahiner, CC BY-SA 4.0

The boxes look like this. The bees look like this.

Bees are enormously complicated and fascinating insects. They live in the densely packed hives described above, receiving chemical instructions by one breeding queen, and eusocially supporting her eggs that become the next generation of the hive. In the morning, individual bees leave the hive, fly around, and search for pollen sources, which they shove into pouches on their legs. Returning, if they’ve located a juicy pollen source, they describe it to other bees using an intricate physical code known as the waggle dance.

waggle_diagram

Waggle dance patterns performed by the worker bees. | North Carolina State Extension publications.

What images of this don’t clearly show is that in normal circumstances, this is done inside the hive, under complete darkness, surrounded by other bees who follow it with their antennae.

The gathered pollen is used to sustain the existing bees, and, of course, create honey – the sugar-rich substance that feeds the young bee larvae and the hive through winter. Each “drawer” of the modern Langstroth beehive – seen above – contains ten wooden frames, each filled in by the bees with a wax comb dripping with honey. At harvesting time, each frame is removed from the hive, the carefully placed wax caps covering each honey-filled comb are broken off, and the honey is extracted via centrifuge. (More on the harvesting practice.)

Each beehive makes about 25 pounds of harvestable honey in a season, and each pound of honey represents 55,000 miles flown by bees. Given the immense amount of animal labor put into this food, I want to investigate the claim that purchasing honey is a good thing from an animal welfare perspective.

I’m not about to say that people who care about animal welfare should be fine eating honey because bees don’t have moral worth, because I suspect that’s not true. I suspect that bees can and do suffer, and at the very least, that we should consider that they might. The capacity to suffer is evolutionary – it’s an incentive to flee from danger, learn from mistakes, and keep yourself safe when damaged. Bees have a large capacity to learn, remember, and exhibit altered behavior when distressed.

Like other social insects, however, bees also do a few things that contraindicate suffering in most senses, like voluntarily stinging invaders in a way that tears out some internal organs and leaves them at high risk of death. In addition, insects possibly don’t feel pain at the site of an injury (though I’m not sure how well studied this is over all insects) (more details). They may feel some kind of negative affect distinct from typical human pain. In any case, it seems like bee welfare is possibly important, and since there are 344,000,000,000,000 of them under our direct care, I’m inclined to err on the side of “being nice to them” lest we ignore an ongoing moral catastrophe just because we didn’t think we had incontrovertible proof at the time.

This is harder than it sounds, because of the almonds.

II.

The beehives I saw on on I-5 don’t live there full-time. They’re there because of migratory beekeepers, who load hives into trucks and drive them all over the country to different fields of different crops. As we were all told in 3rd grade, bees are important pollinators, and while the fields of old were pollinated with a mix of wild insects and individually-managed hives, like other animal agriculture, the bees of today are managed on an industrial scale.

(We passed at least one truck that was mostly covered with a tarp, but had distinctive white boxes visible in the corners. I’m pretty sure that truck was full of bees.)

60-75% of the US’s commercial hives congregate around Valentine’s Day in the middle of California to pollinate almonds. When we say bees are important pollinators, one instance of this is that almonds are entirely dependent on bees – every single almond is the result of an almond tree flower pollinated by a bee. California grows 82% of the world’s almonds.

According to this Cornell University report, honeybees in the US provide:

  • 100% of almond pollination.
  • 90% of apple, avocado, blueberry, cranberry, asparagus, broccoli, carrot, cauliflower, onion, vegetable seed, legume seed, rapeseed, and sunflower pollination.
  • 80%+ of  cherry, kiwifruit, macadamia nut, celery, and cucumber pollination
  • 70%+ of grapefruit, cantaloupe, and honeydew pollination.
  • 60%+ of pear, plum, apricot, watermelon, and alfalfa seed and hay (a major food source for cattle) pollination.
  • 40%+ of tangerine, nectarine, and peach pollination.
  • 5-40% of pollination for quite a few other crops.

Our agricultural system, and by extension, the food you eat is, in huge part, powered by those 344 trillion bees. Much of this bee power is provided by migratory beekeepers. In total, beekeepers in the US make about 30% of their money from honey, and 70% from renting out their bees for pollination.

Sidenote: All of the honey bees kept in the US are one species. (There are also 3000 wild bee species, as well as wild honey bees.) So we’re putting all of our faith in them. If you haven’t been living under a rock for the last decade, you may have heard of colony collapse disorder, which I’d wager is the kind of thing that becomes both more likely and more catastrophic when your system is built on an overburdened monoculture.

III.

Does this mean you actively should eat honey? I really don’t know enough about economics to say that or not. If you’re averse to using animal products, I don’t believe you’re obligated to eat honey – there are many delicious products that do what honey does, from plain sugar to maple syrup to agave to vegan honey.

But if you don’t eat honey and tell other people not to eat honey, I imagine you’re doing that because of a belief that this will lead to fewer bees being brought into existence and used by humans. And if you have this belief that it’s better to have fewer bees used by humans, I’m very curious what you think they’ll be replaced with.

What if you want to reduce the amount of suffering comprised by honeybees in your diet, or in agriculture in general?

One thing people have thought of is encouraging pollination by wild bees and other insects. When thinking about the volume of honeybees you’d need to replace, though, you start to encounter real ethical questions about the welfare of those wild bees. Living in the wild as an insect is plausibly pretty nasty. (I don’t have the evidence either way on whether honey bees or wild bees have better lives – but that if you care about honey bees anyway, it bears considering that this would require humans replacing the huge number of honey bees with other life forms, and that the fact that they’d be living on their own in hedges next to a field, rather than in a wooden hive, doesn’t automatically mean they’ll be happier.)

In addition, scaling up wild pollinators to the scale that would be needed by commercial agriculture would be difficult. Possible, but a very hard problem.

You could eat crops that aren’t mostly pollinated by honeybees. This page lists some – a lot of vegetables make the list. Grains, cereals, and grasses also tend be wind-pollinated.

Beekeeping seems like it might be better than increasing the number of wild pollinators, but migratory beekeeping as a practice reduces bee lifespans, and increases stress markers and parasites compared to stationary hives. Reducing the amount of travel modern hives do might be helpful. Maybe we could just stop growing almonds?

(Although that still leaves us with the problem of apple, asparagus, avocado, blueberry, broccoli, carrot, cauliflower, cranberry, carrot, onions, rapeseed, sunflowers, vegetable seeds, legume seeds, rapeseed, sunflowers…)

It also seems completely possible to raise beehives that are only used for pollination and not honey. This still requires animal labor and more individual bees, but the bees would have less stressful lives.

Or look into robot pollinators.

None of these ideas feel satisfactory, though. I feel like we’ve made our nest of bees and now we have to sleep in it. Any ideas?

beehives_on_the_road

Truck full of beehives. | Photo by Wendy Seltzer. CC BY 2.0.

(Note: I’m aware that this piece is very US-centric. I’m not sure what the bee situation is other countries is like.)

Throw a prediction party with your EA/rationality group

2 Replies

TL;DR: Prediction & calibration parties are an exciting way for your EA/rationality group to practice rationality skills and celebrate the new year.

On December 30th, Seattle Rationality had a prediction party. Around 15 people showed up, brought snacks, brewed coffee, and spent several hours making predictions for 2017, and generating confidence levels for those predictions.

This was heavily inspired by Scott Alexander’s yearly predictions. (2014 results, 2015 results, 2016 predictions.) Our move was to turn this into a communal activity, with a few alterations to meet our needs and make it work better in a group.

Procedure:

  • Each person individually writes a bunch of predictions for the upcoming year. They can be about global events, people’s personal lives, etc.
    • If you use Scott Alexander’s system, create 5+ predictions for fixed confidence levels (50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%, 95%, etc.)
    • If you want to generate Brier scores or logarithmic scores, just do 30+ predictions at whatever confidence levels you believe.
  • Write down confidence levels for each prediction.
  • Save your predictions and put it aside for 12 months.
  • Open up your predictions and see how everyone did.

To make this work in a group, we recommend the following:

  • Don’t share your confidence intervals. Avoid anchoring by just not naming how likely or unlikely you think any prediction is.
  • Do share predictions. Generating 30+ predictions is difficult, and sharing ideas (without confidence levels) makes it way easier to come up with a bunch. We made a shared google doc, and everyone pasted some of their predictions into it.
  • Make predictions that, in a year, will verifiably have happened or not. (IE, not “the academic year will go well”, which is debatable, but “I will finish the year with a 3.5 GPA or above”.)
  • It’s convenient to assume that unless stated otherwise predictions that end by the next year (IE, “I will go to the Bay Area” means “I will go to the Bay Area at least once in 2017.”) It’s also fine to make predictions that have other end dates (“I will go to EA Global this summer.”)
  • Make a bunch of predictions first without thinking too hard about how likely they are, then assign confidence levels. This post details why. You could also generate a group list of predictions, and everyone individually lists their own confidence levels.

This makes a good activity for rationality/EA groups for the following reasons:

  • Practicing rationality skills:
    • Making accurate predictions
    • Using confidence intervals
  • Accessibility
    • It’s open to many different knowledge levels. Even if you don’t know a thing about geopolitics, you can still give predictions and confidence intervals about media, sports, or your own life.
    • More free-form and less intimidating than using a prediction market. You do not have to know about the details of forecasting to try this.
  • Natural time and recurring activity
    • You could do this at any point during the year, but doing it at the start of the year seems appropriate for ringing in the new year.
    • In twelve months, you have an automatic new activity, which is coming back together and checking everybody’s predictions from last year. Then you make a new set of predictions for next year. (If this falls through for some reason, everyone can, of course, still check their predictions on their own.)
  • Fostering a friendly sense of competitiveness
    • Everyone wants to have the best calibration, or the lowest Brier score. Everyone wants to have the most accurate predictions!

Some examples of the predictions people used:

  • Any open challenges from the Good Judgment Project.
  • I will switch jobs.
  • I will make more than $1000 money in a way that is different from my primary job or stock.
  • I will exercise 3 or more times per week in October, November, December.
  • I’ll get another tattoo.
  • Gay marriage will continue to be legal in Washington state.
  • Gay marriage will continue to be legal in all 50 states.
  • I will try Focusing at least once.
  • I will go to another continent.
  • CRISPR clinical trials will happen on humans in the US.
  • A country that didn’t previously have nuclear weapons will acquire them.
  • I will read Thinking Fast and Slow.
  • I will go on at least 3 dates.

Also relevant:

  • 16 types of useful predictions
  • Brier values and graphs of ‘perfect’ vs. actual scores will give you different information. Alexander writes about the differences between these. Several of us did predictions last year using the Scott Alexander method (bins at fixed probabilities), although this year, everybody seems to have used continuous probabilities. The exact method by which we’ll determine how well-calibrated we were will be left to Seattle Rationality of 2018, but will probably include Brier values AND something to determine calibration.

(Crossposted from LessWrong.)

So You’re Not Ready To Go Vegetarian

2 Replies

[Content warning: Moralizing about what food you should eat, descriptions of bad things happening to animals, eating bugs. Also, lots of people can’t go vegetarian or significantly alter their diet at all due to health, cost, time, sensory issues, strong preferences, lack of options, inability to pick your own diet, etc. Most of the ‘alternatives’ posed here take money, time, or majorly changing your habits. If reading this post is likely to make you feel guilty or bad in an unproductive way, feel free to skip it.]

This is a rather utilitarian list of approaches to improving the lives of animals even if you still eat meat. I’ll start with some general strategies, ranked roughly in order from “least  to most weird”. See what works with your diet, resources, and preferences.

 Basic ideas:

  • Eat less meat in general.
  • Eat less chicken, eggs, beef, and farmed fish.
  • For other animal products, eat Animal Welfare Approved, Certified Humane, or 100% Grass-Fed meat, or buy from a source where you know how the animals are treated.
  • Eat species that suffer less, either in farms or at all.
  • Pay other people to go vegan for you.
  • Support animal welfare by donating money effectively.

I suspect that some people will object to the notion that it’s ever alright to kill or use an animal, and that encouraging people to do this in a “less bad” way is just making compromises with the devil. (As opposed to veganism, which is merely selling your soul to Seitan.) If you’re one of these people, you’re probably already a vegan and this essay isn’t for you.

Not that I entirely disagree- many more people should be vegetarian. That’s not the point, though. Many people are Vegetarian Sympathizers, as I once was. As a young person, for instance, I knew that I had moral issues with the idea of eating animals- that a cow’s brain wasn’t very different from a cat’s, which also wasn’t very different from a human’s. I also knew that meat had unfortunate impacts on the environment and that global warming was a serious problem. But my developmental environment had lots of meat. And also, I had a very strong objection- cheeseburgers.

dicks

Pictured: The Seattle restaurant that was the source of my conflict. The mind is willing, but the flesh is weak. | By Jmabel (CC BY-SA)

This wasn’t a rational objection. But we’re not rational creatures, and the Cheeseburger Objection was the actual thing standing in between me and vegetarianism. And if I’m going to eat cheeseburgers anyways, why not eat steak, chicken, fish, etc.?

Honestly, the Cheeseburger Objection is a pretty good one. One cow makes a lot of cheeseburgers. One cheeseburger might make you very happy. Acknowledging that isn’t a reason to stop caring about animal welfare entirely. And Cheeseburger Objectionists can still make extremely meaningful contributions to animal welfare without depriving themselves of that cheesey goodness.

1. Only go vegetarian sometimes.

Meatless Mondays are a thing- don’t eat meat just one day a week. That’s 1/7 fewer animals you’re eating, and gaining valuable practice in cooking and eating vegetarian. If that’s too easy, up it to two days a week. Repeat.

Some other strategies that have worked for people: eat vegan before 5 o’clock (IE, meals before dinner), only eat meat outside the house, only eat meat inside the house.

Or, if you’re inclined towards vegetarianism- except for cheeseburgers- (or orange chicken, shrimp, your uncle’s venison, baseball stadium hotdogs, etc.-) consider just being a Cheeseburger Vegetarian. I think there’s this tendency to think that if you’re not doing something 100% all the way and identify as that, any tendency you have towards it doesn’t count at all. But that’s completely untrue. Given that we live in a world where most people do eat meat, conspicuously eating less meat both saves animals, and is a talking point that puts vegetarianism on people’s radars.

(Of course, if you’re being a Cheeseburger Vegetarian and hoping to talk to other people about it, people might take you less seriously. This might be a problem. You could either keep your cheeseburger habit private and secretive, hoarding McDonald’s in the dark like the world’s most gluttonous dragon – or you could acknowledge that if someone’s going think that plant-based diets are a joke and not important, they can already find whatever reason they want to do that.)

If you don’t know how to cook food or eat meals without meat, maybe the problem is educational. Look for recipes that contain tofu, beans, lentils, TVP, or vegetables. If you only know one kind of cuisine, broaden your horizons- Indian, Ethiopian, Mexican, Chinese, etcetera, all have lots of opportunities for low meat dishes.

We live in a golden age of easily available recipes. PETA, Vegetarian Times, and Leanne Brown’s free cookbooks are a few good resources. Google it. Also, if you want to make a favorite Food X vegan or vegetarian, look up “Vegan Food X” and you will instantly get 4,000 hits including step-by-step photographs and people’s life stories as told through salad dressing recipes. The internet is a magical place.

2. Eat humanely sourced meat.

This is way harder than it sounds. The good news is that meat is given labels which reflect how it was raised. The bad news is that some of these labels are regulated, and some aren’t, and it’s difficult to determine which labels actually correspond to good living environments and which are symbolic or easily falsified.

Look for the following words on packages:

Certified Organic animals may still be subject to a variety of inhumane conditions. The label means that hormones, antibiotics, and some other treatments are not allowed, and that the animal must be allowed to “exhibit natural behaviors.” I suspect that organic animals are somewhat harder to mistreat, because farmers are incentivized to raise animals in low-disease environments, so organic may be better than conventional if those are your only two options. *

Animal Welfare Approved is an independently-verified certification that has very high welfare standards, including for slaughter. Certified Humane is a less strong but similar certification. There are probably other good ones- look for what they require and how they’ve verified.

Hoofed animals: Look for 100% Grass-Fed, a legally-defined term in which all animals must be raised entirely on pasture (grass, etc) and not fed harvested grain. It seems much harder to mistreat a cow raised this way, since it can’t be confined. This is different from grass-finished, pastured, or normal grass-fed, since all cows eat some grass before they arrive at feedlots.

3. Be careful with chicken.

Chickens are extremely common and live extremely bad lives in factory farms, probably moreso than any other animal.

Cage-free or free-range eggs are better than alternatives, but I don’t think they’re humane. A cage-free chicken may have a somewhat better and more natural life than a non-caged chicken, though they’re newly at risk of fighting with other chickens, which caged chickens aren’t. They may still be subject to having their beaks cut off, slaughter of male chicks (half of all egg-laying chickens are killed shortly after hatching), bird flu, crowded environments, being raised in darkness, starvation-based forced molting, etc.

A couple examples:

  • Free-range – the amount of time or space required for “outdoor access” isn’t legally defined, and varies from facility to facility.
  • A cage-free chicken is still raised in barns or warehouses. They may have no outdoor access, or have their beaks cut or burned off without anesthesia.
  • Organic eggs still aren’t treated with antibiotics but can still be raised in factory farms.
  • More info on labels.

eggs

Putting a picture of happy chickens here seemed disingenuous, so here’s some eggs, I guess. | The Home Front In Britain, 1935-1945.

Any given egg source may well not do some or all of these- for instance, I’ve heard that there are some egg producers that don’t slaughter male chicks, and the cost of raising them is passed to the consumer as a higher price. The key here is to do your research. If you buy based on label X or Y without further investigation, even at a “nice” natural foods store or co-op, your chicken will probably have been raised in painful, inhumane conditions.

I think your best chance at getting humanely raised chickens or eggs is to buy from a home farmer or very small permaculture farm, ideally where you can see the chickens. These are likely to be significantly more expensive than other options. Farms may still slaughter male chicks.

4. Eat species that suffer less.

Quantification of animal suffering is a new field, and practices for calculating it are general estimates. That said, its numbers come from easily understandable ideas- that it’s worse to be a factory-farmed chicken than a feedlot cow, for instance. Some other ideas include that being killed is painful, so an animal that produces more food over a long period means less suffering per food unit (assuming said animal’s day-to-day existence isn’t terrible.) Also, that having a more complex brain probably means you can suffer more. It’s not an exact science, but it’s what we’ve got.

Brian Tomasik, who has studied animal suffering extensively, suggests using this metric that by eliminating chicken, chicken products, and farmed fish from your diet, you reduce the suffering you inflict on animals by an enormous amount.

Clams and mussels have very simple nervous systems and probably do not feel much pain, while full of nutrients comparable to other animal foods. Ozymandias at Thing of Things suggests that eating bivalves and dairy, and otherwise being vegan, can be a good trade-off between health, enjoyment, and helping animals. Also, you still get to eat clam chowder (if it doesn’t have bacon.)

The jury is still out on whether insects experience suffering. On one hand, insects are pretty simple critters; on the other hand, to produce any significant amount of food, you need a lot of insects, so however much moral weight they do have gets multiplied by a lot. On the third hand, about a quintillion die every year, so your own contribution is pretty marginal. (That number is extrapolation- I suspect most insects live less than a year, so the number is probably higher.)

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Chingrit thot by Takeaway (CC BY-SA)

What is known is that insects are nutritious and environmentally friendly. Sourcing insects is difficult and pricey, so try raising your own.

Exotic meats. I suspect that exotic meats (deer/venison, buffalo, ostrich, etc.) are more likely to be raised in more ethical environments, because as species they’re less domesticated, and therefore harder to mistreat as in a factory farm. However, I have no evidence for this.

5. Eat environmentally sound meat.

Most of this list comes from a moral argument, but the negative environmental impacts of standard meat is so well-established that it’s worth discussing. 30% of the world’s non-frozen dry land is currently devoted to feeding or raising animals, and 18% of human-produced greenhouse gases came from agriculture. Lamb and beef have disproportionately high greenhouse gas emissions. You’ll note that chicken is rather low on this ranking, but as in the above section, there are other reasons to avoid it.

“Don’t non-animal-product foods also have carbon emissions?” Not that much.

Fish is extremely nutritious, but many species are overfished. Eat conscientiously to avoid making the problem worse- the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch has detailed recommendations for the consumer based on your location, sorted into handy “okay to eat” and “avoid this” categories. Bycatch ratios are another thing to beware: shrimp fisheries are the worst, trawling up an average 6 times more non-shrimp than shrimp.

6. Convince someone else to go vegan.

A review (again by Tomasik) of organizations that run ads promoting vegetarianism suggest that the cost of converting a someone to be vegan for a year is, conservatively, about $100. Do you have the money to spare, and think there should be more vegans, but eating meat is worth more than a hundred dollars to you?

Utilitarianism: it works.

cool skeleton

Utilitarianism: It’s this cool. And the ends justify the memes.

This approach won’t work forever, of course – if everybody decided that they individually would eat meat but convince others not to, the cost of getting anyone to go vegan would skyrocket. But not everybody is, and for the time, it’s still low-hanging fruit.

7. Donate to effective charities.

Can we do even better? The average vegetarian saves ~25 land animals per year (and perhaps 371-582 animals per year including fish and shellfish) according to the blog Counting Animals.

The Effective Altruism movement, which is near and dear to my heart, has produced several lovely projects, including Animal Charity Evaluators– a highly evidence-based group that researches which animal welfare organizations have the most bang for your buck. (Sort of the Givewell of the greater biosphere.) An $100 donation to any of their top three charities is estimated to indirectly save or spare the lives of 7,597 animals. (Via outreach, undercover video filming, corporate outreach, and more.)

ace_horizontal

A final note: People sometimes get annoyed at vegetarians or vegans because they think they’re being smug or morally uppity. This always seemed to me like a strange criticism – the problem is that they’re doing something good? – but if you think it has merit, imagine how smug you can feel in the knowledge that every year, you donate $100 to a certain charity, and that has the same effects as going vegetarian for thirteen years, every year.**

Updated 4/14/2017.

Further reading:

* Michael Pollen says in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemna that it’s difficult to get Organic certification, which has many requirements and regulatory steps, so some small and comparatively extremely humane farms may not (despite meeting many or all criteria for the certificate.)

**Note that you’re not allowed to use this to smugly dismiss vegetarianism unless you have actually made a substantial donation to ACE charities. If you don’t, and proceed to use the fact that that someone could make such a donation to be a dick to vegans, you’re doing negative good and the Utilitarianism Skeleton will get you.