Month: July 2020

A video version of this post is available here.

A few days ago a Han (the main ethnic group in China) Chinese citizen, Li Wei, armed with a rifle took 14 Han’s hostage on a bus in the Xinshi District, Ürümqi, west China. Li Wei was demanding justice for the Uyghur people, a Turkic ethnic group in a region of west China that was invaded by China in around 1750 following a decade long war (and culminating in an attempted genocide of some of the regions’ ethnic groups).

Today, the Uyghurs remain an exploited minority to an extent that I’m sure most people would find horrifying, and some people might even be genuinely surprised is happening in our modern world (I certainly was a few years ago). Today, Uyghurs are being forcibly removed from their homeland and sent to east China to work in factories against their will, among other atrocities.

The hostage situation played out for 12 hours, and ended when the hostages demand was met. After a 15 minute phone call between Li Wei and Xi Jinping, the president of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping made a public and international statement that the country’s treatment of the Uyghur people was wrong. Li Wei then turned himself in to the authorities without physically harming anyone.

How do you feel about this? It remains to be seen, but Li Wei may have created some meaningful change for Uyghurs. However, they did it through the threat of violence. Should we never use violence, or should we consider it in the face of extreme oppression? I will point out that, while the 14 hostages were innocent, they were also complicit in the treatment of the Uyghur people. There are some indications that they worked at a factory where Uyghurs are exploited and that’s why they were targeted, but I can’t verify this. But supposing they were indirectly causing the suffering of the Uyghurs, would this then be acceptable?

I want you to really contemplate how you feel right now, and capture this. I’m about to make a point.

I made up some of this story. The plight of the Uyghur people is entirely real and entirely horrific. However, the hostage situation a few days ago was not in China, it was in Ukraine’s western city of Lutsk. 13 people were taken hostage at gunpoint by a man who released them and turned himself in after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy publicly urged Ukrainians to watch Earthlings, a documentary from 2005 with footage of the cruel exploitation of non-humans in the agriculture industry.

How do you feel about this now? I’m trying to make a point, but I’m also genuinely curious. Please consider sharing your thoughts. Do you feel any different about the use of violence in this situation? If so, why do you think that is?

I want to be clear that I’m not condoning the use of violence for social change. However, I have the impression that many people are supportive of violence to end human on human oppression (we’d call them freedom fighters), but not to end human on non-human oppression (we’d call them terrorists). There are possibly some valid reasons for this difference, and some non-valid reasons.

The simple fact that the victims are not human is not a valid reason. Non-human animals feel pain just as we do, and their exploitation and suffering should be seen as also tragic. Indeed, the scale of farmed animal suffering today is greater than the suffering of human-caused human suffering today. Someone might claim that they don’t care about non-humans as much as humans, just as someone might claim they don’t care about Uyghurs as much as non-Uyghurs, but is this an opinion we should value? Or should we just say they are wrong, and that their suffering is still bad?

One of several plausibly valid reasons for having a different position on the violence used for non-human and human freedom is that we are just at different stages of progress for both. Many people see human oppression as wrong, but many people see non-human exploitation as acceptable. If it is the case that, because of this difference, violence for the benefit of non-humans backfires and harms the movement/victims rather than benefits them, this is an important difference.

I honestly don’t know if this has happened here in Lutsk. I genuinely think anyone who claims they know whether this was positive or harmful for animals at this point is lying. But I absolutely accept that well-intended actions don’t always have good consequences, and that we can’t just do things ‘for the animals’ and think that’s good enough. But I do think that if it is possible for violence used against oppressors to have a net positive outcome (as some people would say), then it should be possible for violence used against oppressors to have a net positive outcome.

If you think that violence is just unacceptable for ending exploitation of non-humans as a rule, consider whether you would have held the same position regarding aggressors in Nazi Germany, or in slave-holding USA. If these don’t do it for you, it surely can’t be difficult to construct a realistic scenario where, if you are consistent in your logic, you shouldn’t support violence for ending the exploitation of humans in a place where the majority of people support the exploitation, or are at least entirely complicit. Perhaps, say, in western China.

I finally got around to listening to Sam Harris’ interview with Lucas Perry on the Future of Life Institute podcast. Overall I thought it was pretty good. I didn’t personally update on or learn much, but I enjoy listening to conversations about reducing suffering, the far future and existential/catastrophic risk.

Conversations they touched on include global priorities, existential risk, wild and farmed animal suffering, global poverty, artificial general intelligence risk and AI alignment and ethics/moral realism.

I agreed with most of what Sam said, so I won’t touch on that. I also felt like this particular instance of Sam explaining his version of moral realism to be the most clear explanation I’ve heard from him, so it’s worth catching the last 20 odd minutes for that. There were a few things however that I disagreed with Sam on, and want to briefly share why.

First is the intuition he has that there is an asymmetry between suffering and pleasure. He’s not talking about the asymmetry of the asymmetry argument put forth by David Benatar, but rather that the worst possible suffering that we could experience seems worse than the best possible pleasure we could experience could be good. To put it another way, Sam says that if you could choose to get an hour of the most blissful possible experience, followed by an hour of the most painful possible experience, most people, following their intuition, would say ‘no thanks’.

But this is just an intuition, and our intuitions aren’t always right, even when they are about our preferences. I might think that I would prefer some experience over another, but I could very well be wrong about which would actually bring me the most joy. I think it’s possible that the worst suffering could be more bad than the best pleasure is good, but I don’t take it for granted. It could be the opposite.

We can’t yet imagine just how good the best possible pleasure could be. We might be biased towards thinking suffering is worse because nature tends to make us more suffering focused through evolution (see the wild-animal suffering argument), but it needn’t be that way forever. We could hack our minds or biology as David Pearce suggests to experience less suffering and more pleasure.

Also, when ones’ life is pretty good, one might think that the 1 hour of pain followed by 1 hour of pleasure is not a trade off worth making, and maybe even for good reason – if your life is already net positive, this would be a net bad trade off. Someone experiencing unimaginable chronic pain through some disease might feel differently.

The second thing I disagreed with Sam on was his position on veganism. In particular, his position on children being vegan. He said that it was effectively a longitudinal experiment on their health that we don’t yet know the outcome of. To the extent that nutrition is by its nature a difficult science, and that we can never be completely sure of the effect of various changes to our diet on long term health, I agree.

However, we don’t completely understand the long term health outcomes of consuming animal products either. This has certainly been the status quo in western culture, but it’s not inherently obvious that the status quo is good. The unknown could be bad, or it could be good. You can have an unhealthy vegan diet, and you can have an unhealthy non-vegan diet. The pressures that parents have to not harm their children through nutrition remain the same. We hear about malnourished vegan children in the media more because of the sensationalist media bias and confirmation bias – we don’t pay attention to the hundreds of malnourished non-vegan kids because they’re either not reported or their ‘veganness’ doesn’t come in to the reporting.

Finally, some words to Sam himself. Sam you’re not a child, and yet you’re not vegan. You admit to all of the moral shortcomings of animal agriculture, and yet you partake in it. Surely if there is a peak in the moral landscape we are working our way towards, you eating animal products is not helping us get there, indeed it might be moving us away. You have even more of a responsibility to be vegan given your follower-base. You being vegan could encourage thousands of others to follow suit.

In many ways, atheism and veganism are similar. They are both about rejecting traditions that don’t make sense, valuing the truth and being ethical.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on a video with Pat Bateman (That Vegan Lawyer) on the links and similarities between veganism and atheism. We talked about the overlap between the demographics, and why both are fundamentally about valuing what is true and what is ethically right.

I drew pretty heavily on Kim Socha’s book Animal Liberation and Atheism which I highly recommend for anyone interested in learning more about the overlap.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Tcz6sRWSKg

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Tcz6sRWSKg]

Last night, Burnside Council voted on a motion to ban the sales of fur at events on council land. I gave a speech to council in support of this motion. The council voted against this motion 10 votes to 2. This is truly disappointing. In this video, I read the speech I gave to council, and voice some concerns I have with the content of the council debate.

This set back to the campaign had me frustrated, but I won’t let it slow me down, and I will never stop fighting for animals (humans and non-humans alike).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQcFIwmXTns]

This post was submitted to the Sydney Morning Herald as an opinion piece, but was not accepted.

I’ve been contacting UNSW Sydney, where I am a PhD student, to try and stop them from killing a fox who has been living on campus. They seem to have ‘moved in’ because of the reduced numbers of staff and students on site. Thankfully, it looks like they won’t be going through with it. But the university’s responses have me irked.

They make the point that we need to be protecting native species. I don’t deny that the fox may kill native animals, but what I do disagree with is the prevalent idea that we should put the lives of native animals above and beyond the lives of introduced animals. I want to reduce the suffering of all animals, not just native animals.

Foxes and other introduced species didn’t ask to be introduced. They were brought to Australia by humans. Why should the foxes have to suffer for this error of human judgement? Surely we bear some responsibility for introduced species. It shouldn’t just be the introduced animals themselves that have to suffer for this.

Currently, it’s illegal in NSW to move a fox once it has been captured, even to a rescue shelter. Legally speaking, they must be killed. This limits our options. We can leave the fox alone and hope it will move away when staff and students return to campus, or we can use other non-harmful means of moving them away, like removing their food sources and installing fox lights.

Rather than jump to killing as the solution, we should be considering other things, like immunocontraceptives to make some of the animals infertile. This is a more long-term solution than culling attempts, since after culling the population will typically rise again to fill the gap. Immunocontraceptives and trap, neuter and release (for those animals where we are legally allowed to do so) will mean we don’t have to perform a slaughter every few years.

Given that we kill kangaroos, a native animal, en masse, I’m suspicious as to whether the true motivation is for the benefit of the animals. Is it just for us? We kill kangaroos because they are competing for the food that farmed animals, such as cows and sheep, who both introduced animals, are eating – grass.

Further, if we really cared about native animals, maybe we’d stop cutting down forests to make way for farms and housing development. From 2015-16, the NSW Government allowed the clearing of over 7,000 hectares of native vegetation. It is unknown how much of this was to clear land for grazing, however from 1988 to 2009, 93% of land clearance in Queensland was to make room for livestock grazing.

NSW land clearing laws introduced in 2017 expose 99% of identified koala habitat on private land to clearing. 92% of land degradation in Australia is caused by animal agriculture. Globally, animal agriculture is the leading cause of species loss.

So I hope you will forgive me if I’m suspicious as to whether the laws we have in place around wild animal management are actually in place for the benefit of the animals themselves. If they’re solely for the benefit of humans, we really ought to reconsider our laws. Humans and non-humans are all animals, and we can all suffer. Perhaps it’s time we learned how to share this planet with our fellow earthlings.

By way of introduction, I wrote a long response to some questions on my recent Youtube video which I thought might be of interest. I’ll just throw up the original comment and my response.

They were arguing that an individual being vegan doesn’t do anything (at all) for animal suffering, and were arguing in favour of advocating for systemic change (replacing capitalism with socialism was the example they gave previously).

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Commentor

“Also i dont think that its possible to be perfectly moral.

Does your being “vegan” contribute something to reducing animal suffering?

Probably not. You as an individual, your choice to be vegan has zero effects on the industry.

So your individual choice to abstain from eating meat and consuming animal products. Isnt really rational in that sense, just like it is not with voting. I mean your vote alone doesnt decide elections.

So if you want really signifact changes you should advocate for a total system change. Just being an individual vegan only strokes ones ego and thats it.”

My response

“It depends on what you mean by moral of course. To take the utilitarian view, being perfectly moral might be something like doing the optimum thing for reducing suffering and increasing wellbeing at all stages of your life. Sure, probably impossible, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for as much as possible.

“Does your being “vegan” contribute something to reducing animal suffering? Probably not. You as an individual, your choice to be vegan has zero effects on the industry.”

What makes you say it has zero effect? Supply elasticity shows that 1 fewer product purchased will lead to somewhere between 0 and 1 fewer products produced. The true number depends on the product and context, but usually it’s around 0.5. See the below quote from a paper I coauthored (here).

“But the purchase of one fewer animal product does not necessarily result in the production of one fewer product. Estimates on effects that changes in consumer behaviour have on the number of animals raised (or killed, in the case of wild-caught marine animal consumption) for food must account for the sensitivity of the market to changes in the quantity of animal products demanded and supplied (i.e. the price elasticities of demand and supply). Using elasticity estimates, ACE estimates that one person consuming 30 fewer land animals will result in 1.8 – 21 fewer animals being farmed, and one person consuming 232 fewer marine animals results in 35 – 144 fewer being killed (ACE n.d.d).”

If you extrapolate your view that it has zero effect, it implies that the same number of animals would be farmed regardless of how many humans are born, which doesn’t make sense. This is an economic effect that is quite well studied. I wouldn’t expect it to suddenly not work for specifically animal products.

I also disagree that voting has no effect. See the below from here.

In short, you have a small chance of making a huge difference. Elections are decided by 1 vote from time to time.

“The estimate of the value of voting being $5,200 USD as calculated by MacAskill is briefly described here.

Political analyst Nate Silver, Professor Andrew Gelman (Statistics) and Professor Aaron Edlin (Law) calculated that the odds of an individual changing the outcome of the 2008 USA presidential election was, on average, around 1 in 60 million, which is a low probability, but we have to also look at the potential impact.

Estimating simplistically that the benefit per person of the $3.5 trillion annual US budget being spent 2.5% more effectively ($1,000 per person per 4 year election term), the benefit that you would expect to receive personally over an election term based on your vote is 0.0016 cents. However, looking at the benefit received by all Americans ($1,000 multiplied by 314 million), the expected value of voting is $5,200 ($314 billion of value multiplied by a 1 in 60 million chance of swaying the outcome).

This is further simplified by the fact that the policies of parties aren’t always opposite, and there is significant overlap, however it does demonstrate that the value of one person voting, when spread over the population of a country, can be big.”

You said: “So if you want really signifact changes you should advocate for a total system change. Just being an individual vegan only strokes ones ego and thats it.”

Couldn’t you apply your same reasoning to systemic change as well? It’s unlikely for one person advocating for systemic change to have an effect? Why would this be any different? Couldn’t you argue that just being an individual socialist advocate only strokes ones ego and that’s it? I wouldn’t argue that, but it feels like you might, if you were consistent.”

I worked for oil and gas exploration company Santos for 18 months between my undergraduate degree and my PhD. Why did I do this, even though I was (and am) a vegan environmentalist who is concerned about climate change?

This week’s video was going to be a critical review of environmental documentary Planet of the Humans, but it’s not finished yet. I’ve needed to do a lot of research for that one, so I’ll have it out next week.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsE8kmYvlTY]

World of Warcraft and Hearthstone streamer Byron ‘Reckful’ Bernstein died by suicide today. WHO estimates that around 800,000 people die by suicide each year, but hearing about this death just now hit me a little harder. Maybe because I’m feeling down myself lately, or maybe because Reckful was a giant in the videogame community which I consider myself a part of. I only recently watched a video of Reckful talking about depression with psychiatrist Dr. Alok Kanojia.

Looking at his recent tweets, there were warning signs. Hindsight can be strong, but I wonder how many people saw those and really thought about what they might mean, and acted on that? Think about your own sphere. Are there people who you think, just maybe, might be experiencing depression or suicidal thoughts? Don’t ignore it, don’t assume someone else will talk to them, don’t play it off. You can do something.

This is a callout to people in both the gaming and social media community. I *very* often see people in videogames tell other gamers to kill themselves. And for what? Because your team mate played bad and you lost? So what? Maybe it’s a joke, maybe it’s not. This doesn’t matter – what matters is how someone else might perceive and react to that.

I’m not perfect, and I can think of many examples where I’ve done or said something in a videogame or social media that I’m ashamed of. What if I said something to someone who was already feeling vulnerable? I need to do better, and I need to call it out when I see it.

It’s not just videogames. I see people literally wishing death or some other atrocity on others on social media for disagreeing about facts or ethics. The world is complex and we probably all think things that aren’t true. Do you deserve death wished upon you for that?

I see some people in the vegan community wishing death on animal farmers, and I see animal farmers and non-vegans wishing death on vegans. One atrocity doesn’t justify another. Cut that shit out. Don’t celebrate when a hunter is killed by an animal they were hunting. I hate what they do, but we shouldn’t wish death or suffering on anyone.

I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety in 2012. I don’t think I’ve been at the point of wanting to kill myself, but I can understand how hopeless things can seem, and how someone can get to that point. While suicide affects everyone around the individual, I don’t think it’s fair to characterise it as just selfish. People who take their lives may feel like a burden to others, or they may realise how it will affect others, but their suffering is just too great, and they want a way out.

That doesn’t mean we should accept it. Mental health is a neglected issue, and we need to be doing more, as a society and as individuals, to alleviate that suffering.

Please look out for each other. We can all do better.

I want to say for anyone who might be worried after reading this, while I feel very sad lately, I’m not feeling suicidal.

A few miscellaneous thoughts on animal rights

When people find out I’m vegan, occasionally they ask whether I’m an animal lover, or they just assume it. I’m not. I don’t love all animals any more than I love all humans. However, just like I don’t want humans to suffer for my pleasure even though I don’t love them all, I don’t want non-human animals to suffer for my pleasure.

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Health comes up a lot in vegan outreach. People have concerns about health, and that’s reasonable. Many think you need to eat animal products to be healthy, and that’s definitely not the case. Some think you need animal products to be optimally healthy, and this is likely not the case, but I’m necessarily less sure about this than the first claim.

Nutrition is a hard science by its nature, and there may well be one animal product which when consumed in a certain quantity alongside a vegan diet will lead to a slightly better health outcome than a vegan diet. This is not a thing that is impossible, even though I don’t have evidence for it right now. Of course, I’m not arguing that we should act like this is the case until we see evidence for such a thing, but the question remains – what if this was optimal for health?

I’d say – so what? Even if consuming a non-vegan product* was optimal for health, I still wouldn’t do it. I’m not trying to be a purist, in fact I see this as pragmatic. If we really think non-humans matter, their flesh or secretions being a little bit healthier still shouldn’t justify us causing suffering to them. This is for the same reason I wouldn’t eat humans if it turned out to be a little healthier to include humans in my diet.

How much healthier would eating animal products have to be for me to do it? There is probably some amount of increased health outcome that would make me include some animal products in my diet, somewhere between ‘a little bit sick all the time’ and ‘dead’. But I’m quite confident that if there is some reduced health outcome from being a purist vegan, then it’s so small that it’s worth it.

Someone might say that this line of thought isn’t very utilitarian of me, but I disagree. I’m being utilitarian, I’m just not being human- or me-centric. I fail to see how the slightly increased health outcome (reduced suffering) could outweigh the significant increase in suffering experienced by the animals now being farmed because of me. Intrinsically speaking, being a little bit sick for a year straight shouldn’t outweigh even a single animal suffering for a whole year.

What about flow on effects? Me being a little sick for a whole year will probably mean I advocate for animals a little less good. What if I could be a little sharper of mind by eating animal flesh once a year? Well, I’d factor this in to the utilitarian calculation. And I still don’t think it’s worth it, even if eating the occasional non-vegan product makes you a little healthier (and to be clear, I don’t think it does). Does the world we want really look like us eating others to be a little bit sharper of mind?

I recall a conversation with a friend who was almost entirely vegan at the time but said they would eat a non-vegan meal on a flight if the airline forgot to get a vegan meal. I wouldn’t. The meal has already been made, sure, but refusing it still affects supply, and therefore animal suffering. They should be less likely to make that extra non-vegan meal in the future, and more likely to get the vegan meal right (I hope…). And in any case, it’s just one meal, being a little hungry isn’t that big a deal. If it was a week long flight, I’d eat the non-vegan meals so as to not die, but gosh would I lay in to the company about it.

To conclude, I want to clarify that I do think a well-managed vegan diet is optimal for health, that I feel perfectly healthy, and that my annual blood tests continue to be perfect. But I did want to cover this, since I think advocates and non-vegans alike care a bit too much about nutrition.

*Note that I’m not talking about medicine or vaccines here. I’m appalled that these involve animal products or testing, and will fight until they don’t, but we need vaccines and so I won’t stop taking them.