Ren Ryba
she/her or they/them
My work focuses on animal advocacy. I have been deeply involved in numerous fish welfare projects in particular. I worked at Animal Ask from 2021 to 2025, and I’m now an independent contractor. I like researching things, planning things, and organising things. I’m the proud parent of two special-needs rescue dogs.
I have experience in ecology, fisheries science, and statistics from my time in academia and government. I enjoy thinking about politics and social justice. I like soccer!
- Proudly transgender and neurodivergent
- Kaurna land (South Australia)
- “Ryba” is pronounced “REE-ber” and it means “fish” in Slovak
- Years lived: 37 %
My work
- Academic publications @ Google Scholar
- Animal advocacy research @ Animal Ask
- Additional hot takes @ Effective Altruism Forum
- Data on the European fish farming industry @ Finsight
- Data on the global cage-free egg market @ Cagefr.ee
My books
Shrimp and Prawn Welfare in the Wild-Caught Fishing Industry: A Global Review and Recommendations for Research and Policy
An academic book with Shannon M Davis, Tse Yip Fai, and Peter Singer; order from Routledge hereTrash Fish: Navigating the Shoals of Gender, Species, and Meaning in an Oppressive World
A book of autobiographical essays, free to read and download here
An academic book with Shannon M Davis, Tse Yip Fai, and Peter Singer; order from Routledge hereTrash Fish: Navigating the Shoals of Gender, Species, and Meaning in an Oppressive World
A book of autobiographical essays, free to read and download here
Blog
These posts are hot takes and tidbits on topics that I find interesting, not systematic or rigorous examinations. “Notes on” posts summarise key academic sources on a given topic, rather than involving my own reasoning or views. I do not use generative AI to write.
filter academic-life ai animals autism code effective-altruism history life-ops mental-health philosophy plaintext politics queer reading-lists religion research satire self-improvement soccer social-challenges tattoos | show all
- Ethical minimalism
- Notes on artificial turf, with a focus on invertebrate animals
- Notes on sport imagery and sexualisation
- Applying 'Inbox Zero' to text messages (and other notes on tinkering with your phone)
- Simple grace - You are always enough
- Tucking underwear for trans women: My rankings!
- Essential Euphoria: Getting the most gender euphoria and queer joy for the smallest investment of time and money
- Notes on generative AI in academic research
- The Dread Reservation approach to (avoiding) advanced technology
- Legislative-physiological systems: Changing laws to influence biology
- Five hundred weeks: Why you might have less time than you think
- The Azbantium wall from Doctor Who and the central mission of animal advocacy
- Finding a free and effective academic database/search engine
- The Sudoku scale for measuring task difficulty
- Tattoos as asserting control over one's body
- Compelling fiction gives you questions, not answers
- Notes on autism and suicidal ideation
- The economics of taking the ball to the corner flag in soccer
- Tattoo traditions and empires that want to control people's bodies
- Tattoo highs and endorphins
- Notes on second-hand cannabis exposure and the philosophy of drug-driving laws
- Tattoos are expensive, and this fact is interesting
- Notes on the ethics of digital piracy for personal use
- Violent activities (when done with skill and consent) involve showing more care to ourselves and others
- What are we doing when we play (and watch) sport?
- Notes on bias against face tattoos
- Notes on vitamin B6 toxicity
- Analysis of goals conceded by Westminster in the first five matches
- Home field advantage in the A-League Women
- Tattoos, embodiment, and neoliberal 'professionalism' ideology
- When success breeds problems
- Tattoos that you need to earn
- Ancient Slavic and European tattoos
- Notes on separation anxiety and autism
- In casual sports, the optimal win rate is not 100%
- Resources: Intersectional animal advocacy
- Notes on the ethics of interacting with the dead
- Quotes on being patient as an activist
- The Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, and cultural appropriation
- The history of Aotearoa New Zealand in Australian federation
- Resources: Buddhism and meditation
- Reserving judgment by reversing judgment
- Brief thoughts on the tension between animal ethics and environmental ethics
- Billboards and forests are governed by similar processes
- The relationship between internal comfort levels and external signs of stress (or, masking to survive)
- Soccer, the offside rule, and generational amnesia
- 'Healthy fear' mindset
- Athletes and mental health challenges
- Empathy, panic, and witnessing everyday trauma (plus, resources on overcoming compassion fatigue)
- Resources: Connecting with your inner child as therapy and practice
- What percentage of books can you read?
- Unique soccer matches from history
- The Increasing Difficulty of Communication
- Laws regulating annual paid leave are suboptimal and irrational
- How many people actually work 9 to 5?
- Cause and meaning can be different
- I think ChatGPT's Deep Research will transform the process of doing secondary research
- Animal advocacy across borders
- U.S. egg prices and indirect benefits for animal welfare
- Trump's first four weeks
- Notes on the good pain!
- Controlling what you cannot control
- Comfort in the inner lives of historical figures
- Gender transformation in the early Christian community
- Do not mistake a metaphor for a strategy
- Do not confuse deliberation with persuasion
- Avoiding the physical world means faster feedback loops!
- When ethics gives way to self-indugence
- How to ruin any horror movie
- Words that don't mean anything
- Notes on ACL injuries in women
- Notes on incest
- Notes on the rainbow flag, neocolonialism, and capitalism
- Notes on eating disorders, body composition, and soccer
- Notes on AI and authorship
- Notes on the ethics of Uber
- Relationship between my book ratings and Goodreads book ratings
- Notes on brain zaps
- If you invite somebody to a video call, give them an out
- Notes on effects of conventional vs vegan diets for dogs
- Overcoming the violence inherent in competitive games
- Right now, there is no AI that can outperform humans at performing meaningful research and analysis
- Animals and unconditional acceptance
- Notes on the (surprisingly poor) empirical evidence for health effects of body weight and body fat
- Notes on open-access mega journals (Frontiers, MDPI, etc)
- Science is getting faster, but not that much faster
- In defence of moral licensing
- Current trends in space do not point towards successful colonisation
- Tips for excellent visual science communication
- Success grammar
- Who knows the thing that you need to know?
- The amazing, high-quality work by internet hobbyists
- You can socialise without having to socialise
- Happy gay wallpapers
- Notes on artificial light perception in dogs
- Top-down work days vs bottom-up work days
- Flexible productivity systems and the Ship of Theseus
- Animal grief falls through the cracks
- 'Tomorrow Will Be Different' wallpaper
- All roads lead to 'Love your neighbour as yourself'
- Allowing ideas to expand to fill the space
- Trump's second term and variable mortgage rates in Australia
- Random unexpected effects of hormone replacement therapy
- Better ways to search for movies and TV series
- Nuke the whales
- Some notes on scraping Goodreads
- Automating searches for audiobooks
- Notes on welfare of the goldfish (Carassius auratus)
- Are meditation retreats designed for neurotypical people?
- Notes on tattoos and melanoma
- In-and-out searches vs exhaustive searches
- Meditation means simply living your life
- Against kindness
- Self-sufficiency and the fractal nature of one's surroundings
- Noise-sensitive dogs and quiet computer keyboards
- Age and quality writing
- The great leveller: a counterargument to the dizzying pace of science
- Joy of missing out
- Constructive vs productive
- Making your high-value leisure time easier
- Never do any work
- A better way to give and receive feedback on written documents
- The uncelebrated Welsh woman who might have saved your life
- A quantitative measure of sky brightness intensity
- Adapting to Sturgeon's law
- Message undeliverable (or, in defence of recluses!)
- Workflow for converting from PDF to audiobook using command-line tools
- Gatekeeping attention
- The dizzying rate of skill advancement and its existential implications
- Staying sane in the dizzying new reality
- Three types of productivity
- Hyperefficient (Dr Mithu Storoni)
- Making systematic literature searches slightly more automated
- The dizzying rate of science and its existential implications
- Heaven
- One hundred years of Port Noarlunga and the reef
- Notes on nuclear war and Australian defence
- Notes on deep uncertainty and cluelessness
- Relative vs absolute measures of scale (or, why moving a low-scale ask to China doesn't rescue it)
- Thirteen essential ingredients for doing good
- Voice pitch training using R and the command line
- Three pieces of language I wish I had growing up
- Taking a beating
- Workflow for taking notes from scientific papers
- Some poems by Buddhist nuns of Late Imperial China
- Some bangers from Essentialism
- Are most statements wrong?
- Hesitate, but make it snappy
- Nobody has any idea whether wild-caught fishing is good or bad
- Do everything in plain text
- Measuring human history
- Some data on respiratory infections in Australia
- Some quotes on suffering-focused ethics
- On welfare vs abolitionism in animal advocacy
- A modest view of doing good
- Convert open-source classical texts to plaintext audiobooks
- Double dividends
- Abundance and scarcity
- Some notes on face masks
- Random ways to improve focus
- Is the United States likely to collapse? Should social justice advocates respond?
- Seclusion and public servce
- Some thoughts on AI
- You know what you need to do!
- Japanese death poems
- Contemplative Prayer by Thomas Merton
- Some types of monastic life that I find exciting
- Some bangers from Bashō
- Some bangers from Bodhidharma
- Religion as counterculture
- Forming a lotus bud
- Some excerpts from poems by Buddhist masters
- The four levels of accepting others
- Three ingredients for sustaining an impactful career
- The best and worst things people have said about me
- Nerds with laptops
- Integrating practice and work
- Some definitions on personal development and transcendence
- Resources: Trans and queer soccer
- Holding space
- Resources: Slow productivity
- Practicing when your world is torn apart
- I know nothing
- Why pigeons are the greatest
- Underappreciated classic: The Caigentan by Hong Zicheng (1590)
- The four layers of reality
- The four ingredients of a thought or feeling
- Resources: Trans and queer spirituality
- Resources: Political history of the Czech Republic
- Are they called shrimp or prawns?
- Resources: Psychology of self-actualisation
- Some quotes on Jesus from some contemporary New Testament scholars
- Some quotes on the mystical nature of the Divine
- Passages on renunciation
- Resources: The modern hermit life
- Some thoughts on lineage in Buddhism
- Even great masters have bad days
- Be compassionate, but not a pushover