Wirehead your Chickens

Thanks for the post. I agree that this is an important question. I do, however, have many disagreements.

1. Many of us value things other than pleasure and the avoidance of pain when it comes to humans. Perhaps we ought to value these things also when it comes to non-human animals. It seems difficult to defend hedonism for non-human animals while rejecting it for humans. What is the relevant difference?
2. The obvious alternative is to take animals out of the equation altogether with cultured meat. Lewis Bollard makes this point explicitly: "I think when people start to talk about completely re-engineering the minds of chickens so that they’re essentially brain-dead and don’t realise the environment they’re in, it just seems like a better option to only grow the meat part of the bird and not grow the mind at all." The solutions you propose, like to "identify and surgically or chemically remove the part of the brain that is responsible for suffering" are highly speculative with current science. One of your examples is literally science fiction. It seems to me that cultured meat would be easier to achieve technologically, while being similar or superior in consumer acceptance. Marie Gibbons claims that we might "see clean meat sold commercially within a year". Metaculus thinks the probability of a restaurant serving cultured meat by 2021 is 75%.
3. For a short argument with two major flaws, I found the tone unnecessarily dismissive. You had had a short conversation about your new idea at EA Global, and concluded that your idea is not being widely pushed by others who work in this area. At this point it would have been appropriate to think of some obvious counter-arguments. Instead in this post I see a lot of speculation about which impure motives and fallacies in reasoning could explain why your idea hasn't been adopted. Some quotes: "This emphasis is quite understandable emotionally.", "this kind of anthropomorphizing", ""What do you mean, cut off baby chicken's legs so it does not have leg pain later? You, monster!"", "Because most people do not truly care about reducing animal suffering, they care about a different metric altogether, a visible human proxy for animal suffering that they find immediately relatable.", "actual suffering".

I've seen this discussed before by Rob Wiblin and Lewis Bollard on the 80,000 Hours podcast (edit: tomsittler [LW · GW] actually beat me to the punch in mentioning this).

Robert Wiblin: Could we take that even further and ultimately make animals that have just amazing lives that are just constantly ecstatic like they’re on heroin or some other drug that makes people feel very good all the time whenever they are in the farm and they say, “Well, the problem has basically been solved because the animals are living great lives”?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, so I think this is a really interesting ethical question for people about whether that would, in people’s minds, solve the problem. I think from a pure utilitarian perspective it would. A lot of people would fine that kind of perverse having, for instance, particularly I think if you’re talking about animals that might psychologically feel good even in terrible conditions. I think the reason why it’s probably going to remain a thought experiment, though, is that it ultimately relies on the chicken genetics companies and the chicken producers to be on board...

I encourage anyone interested to listen to this part of the podcast or read it in the transcript, but it seems clear to me right now that it will be far easier to develop clean meat which is widely adopted than to create wireheaded chickens whose meat is widely adopted.

In particular, I think that implementing these strategies from the OP will be at least as difficult as creating clean meat:

• breed animals who enjoy pain, not suffer from it
• breed animals that want to be eaten, like the Ameglian Major Cow from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I think that getting these strategies widely adopted is at least as difficult as getting enough welfare improvements widely adopted to make non-wireheaded chicken lives net-positive

• identify and surgically or chemically remove the part of the brain that is responsible for suffering
• at birth, amputate the non-essential body parts that would give the animals discomfort later in life

I think that breeding for smaller brains is not worthwhile because smaller brain size does not guarentee reduced suffering capacity and getting it widely adopted by chicken breeders is not obviously easier than getting many welfare improvements widely adopted.

I'm not as confident that injecting chickens with opioids would be a bad strategy, but getting this widely adopted by chicken farms is not obviously easier to me than getting many other welfare improvements widely adopted. I would be curious to see the details of the study romeostevensit [LW · GW] mentioned, but my intuition is that outrage at that practice would far exceed outrage at current factory farm practices because of "unnaturalness", which would make adoption difficult even if the cost of opioids is low.

IIRC an analysis was done of the cost to administer opioids to livestock at scale and it winds up at pennies a pound. The only reason we don't is negative consumer perception (appreciable quantities do not wind up in the consumed meat), similar to irradiation vs additives for food preservation. Animal charities have been reluctant to pursue further research because of fear of pushing a narrative that makes it okay/gives people an ethical out since opioids don't actually eliminate all the suffering just alleviate some fraction. There is similar contention around 'improved' living standard for the livestock.

I thought I had mentioned "farm animals" enough times to make this unambiguous...

I think you have failed to address the issue of why these solutions are acceptable for chickens and not for humans. The obvious explanation for why people disagree with you on this point is not that they don't care about animal suffering, any more than people who don't want to amputate the non-essential body parts that might give humans discomfort later in life don't care about human suffering. It is that they think those actions are unethical for animals, just like they are for humans.

I think you raised a very important question and i very much agree that one should be honest with oneself what one truly cares about.

When it comes to the interventions you proposed i am nor really sure about the practicality. (2) sounds doable but i'd guess that the side effects of losing the ability to strong pain are severe and would lead to self-hurting behaviour and maybe increased fighting among the animals. But if it was possible to find a drug that could be administered to animals to reduce their suffering (maybe just in certain situations) without major side-effects, that could in fact be an effective intervention and may be worth looking into, mainly for the reason that it maybe wouldn't come with big costs to the corporations doing the farming. It may, however, help to sustain factory farming past the point it could be abolished otherwise, which would probably cause more net suffering.

I don't know how much time breeding animals that are radically different from ours takes and I'm generally a bit more sceptical whether it's worth persuing that.

In general the main problem with this way of fighting animal suffering is that most people concerened about animals wouldn't support it and they probably also would have no problem admitting that they care about more than just reducing suffering. I think that it's probably better to persue strategies for animal suffering reduction that most people in the movement could get behind.

So i think their could be some value of researching this approach but I am sceptical overall.

I think a huge problem is that we don't have a good metric for suffering of arbitrary mammals. If you want to breed chickens that enjoy pain you need a way to measure enjoy that doesn't Goodhard in ways that negate the project.

Most non-rationalists think that whether doing Y on target X is good depends on whether X would prefer Y in a base state where X is unaltered by Y and is aware of the possibility of Y, even if having Y would change his perception or is completely concealed from his perception.

If you're going to create animals who want to be eaten (or who enjoy actions that would otherwise cause suffering), you need to assess whether this is good or bad based on whether a base state animal with unaltered desires would want to be eaten or would want to be subject to those actions. If you're going to amputate animals' body parts, you need to consider whether a base state animal with those parts would want them amputated.

The proposals above all fail this standard.

The prevalence of irrelevant objections in the comments here seems like substantial evidence that animal welfare is often being advocated for as an EA cause in ways that diverge substantially from advocates' true reasoning.

I think that extrapolating this post is part of what makes lab-grown meat so appealing. Can't have animal suffering in the quest for animal meat if there is no animal in the middle. I'd wager we're closer to that than to convincing vast swaths of people to stop anthropomorphizing what animals would want for themselves!

I don't have an opinion on this, but I want to voice my approval for bringing up something this controversial without sugarcoating your points. And I want to point out that the title doesn't really reveal the subject, I'd have read it sooner if I had known it was about animal suffering.

I agree with the point that we should be investing more into research on direct reduction of suffering(as a phenomenon that happens in brains), rather than reducing the proxies for it.

This is true for humans as well as for animals: e.g. investing into discovering direct stimulation/surgery approaches to reducing or even turning off pain (or just the painfullness of pain, see pain asymbolia) might have greater impact on life satisfaction than it's opportunity cost for say cancer research.

I am not at all knowledgeble on the subject (and would love to be corrected), but I suspect that ever since lobotomy was declared unethical no interventions for pain other than chemical ones have been seriously investigated.

I think even if we believe that plant-based and clean meat as well as change in attitudes can get us to a world free of, at least, factory farming, it may be worth looking into the strategies as plans for what we might call worst case scenarios, like it it turns out that clean meat will remain too expensive, plant-based alternatives fail to catch on and a signicicant part of the population fails to be convinced by the ethical arguments.

I also think that those ideas may be more important in countries that are only just building factory farms compared to western countries.

If you're interested in this idea, you may want to join the "Reducing pain in farm animals" Facebook group. (It's currently very small.)

If you are an effective altruist who is concerned with farm animal welfare, what is stopping you from working on finding ways to apply what works but is not ethical for humans to what works and reduces actual suffering in animals?

The fact that, as you said yourself, these solutions aren't ethically acceptable.

> identify and surgically or chemically remove the part of the brain that is responsible for suffering,

There is no part of the brain responsible for consciousness. Consciousness is a process and it involves the entire system from the inputs to your brain (like me telling you that you're ignorant) to the peripheral nerves to the complex sub-sectors of the brain.

> breed animals who enjoy pain, not suffer from it

You cannot enjoy pain. That's quite literally a contradiction.

> Many of these are probably way easier and more practical than shaming people into giving up tasty steak

None of the ideas you have posited are easy, practical, or make any sense whatsoever. Shaming people into giving up tasty steak is a weird way to frame the problem. Shaming people for placing a momentary experience given to them by steak on their taste buds as worth torturing cows to death for is a viable and important strategy, because it is fundamentally sound.

> Because most people do not truly care about reducing animal suffering, they care about a different metric altogether, a visible human proxy for animal suffering that they find immediately relatable.

The best way of reducing animal suffering would be to reduce the number of animals currently in existence and reduce the number brought into existence. Ending factory farming is a very effective way of doing this, considering that an extremely large proportion of the most sentient creatures on the planet (mainly mammals with very complex brains) are brought into existence by the direct action of humans, for meat consumption.

One of your ideas, shrinking or even removing the brain, is already being developed. We are making meat without the animal, which means without the brain. We are using technology to do so. This is cultured meat. We are also replicating most of the properties of meat and making plant based meat (see Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat). Both of these approaches are effective and practical.

Is it practical to wirehead tens of billions of chickens every year? No, it's not. It's impossible with current technology. We could surgically implant carfentanil secreting devices in the spinal cords of every chicken, but the process of doing this would drive chicken meat costs up so high that the world would just go vegan instead of paying for them.

I urge you to think more clearly about this issue, instead of trying to find ways to justify your current lifestyle.