"Host organizations" would precisely be a bottleneck, since so few organizations currently have the in-house expertise to oversee specialist animal welfare research. This is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem, because even without talent programs, that adds friction to bringing specialist talent in (that could acquire the capacity to oversee animal welfare research in the future).

Definitely S-risk flavored stuff, but I hadn't looked very deeply into options at the time (the non-clueless "value is fragile" case for AI x-risk was not compelling to me at the time). I'd have considered AI sentience/welfare too.

Engaging with the problem of cluelessness has changed my cause prioritisation

Started engaging with the problem around April 2025, but reading the sequence in June was quite electrifying. Without having read it, I think I'd have been significantly likelier to work on AI safety.

The main reason I don't put a higher percentage is that I'm working on animal welfare, a cause that was already salient to me before I engaged with cluelessness. Though I'd potentially be doing other flavors of animal welfare if I hadn't engaged with cluelessness (not sure what exactly though).

There are a few Forum-relevant things I could have posted in the last 3 months which I chose to keep to the form of google docs that I share with the main people who'd want to read it, because I worry about the irreversibility of putting things on the open internet. 

"It's probably time to stop using a public forum to discuss things" is a refrain I've heard 3+ times (and personally relayed, to be fair) at EA event since July. I think recent Op-eds, a growing proportion of orgs hiding EA affiliations, and the rise of LLMs making it very easy for anyone to check the wackiest things you've said online if you don't have a pseudonym, have had a chilling effect (perhaps justified, imo) on EA Forum posting. Irrelevant as it may be, seeing my account on Data Republican didn't help.

It's a painful tradeoff. I think the Forum is good for the commons, but on a personal level, being a top 1% reader of the Forum has strongly shaped my cause prioritization, and it's probably been a major indirect contributor to getting hired for all the jobs I've had in EA. But I am definitely more worried about preserving the norm of constantly putting ourselves out there while public scrutiny is increasing.

For a nitpick: as of late 2025, I had a pretty clear impression that many professional EAs, at least in animal welfare, read the Forum, at least every other month or so. And even for 2026, I find that many professional EAs in animal welfare are familiar with the 3-4 most discussed posts of the year.

Thanks, Tom and Henning! Strongly upvoted. 

I particularly appreciated the "Some Ramifications" section. Their implications would be pretty demanding for EA Animal Welfare. Large infrastructure investments, probably tens of millions in research investment, to assess whether an intervention can get to initial scaling. All that, on timelines with which funders are usually uncomfortable. 

An already ambitious ecosystem-level next step would be talent programs for specialist researchers to contribute to EA animal welfare research (this might not be the best way to fill the research gaps, though, and maybe more straightforward infrastructure for commissioning specialists would be more useful). It's been quite neglected historically, and I've only heard of one or two organizations recently starting to work on this.

Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

Good framing! 

A framing I had in a draft post was whether, in the ITN framework, to focus mostly on (disclaimer: very rough):

• Scale: this is the AI safety approach. "This could be really big (and is also neglected), and therefore we should see whether it's tractable - even if it has a minuscule chance of being tractable, it's worth pursuing".
• Tractability: this is more the OG-global-health approach: "We can demonstrate that our intervention makes measurable progress on the issue. Other more neglected or larger-scale problems cannot do this."
• Neglectedness: this is probably the least common proxy, but you see it in animal welfare sometimes: "No one is working on this species, therefore someone should start a project".
   

I do think rigor-reach / tractability-scale is the main axis, and that neglectedness is more minor. I think this can lead to unresolvable disagreements on what interventions should be pursued.

On AI safety harms beyond historical induction, there was a recent short post on ways current AI safety efforts could be net-negative.

Under your own views, any portfolio of interventions can easily increase or decrease animal suffering?

I agree. This is why I find myself having to "justify" a decision procedure that just considers a few select (albeit uncertain) effects rather than say "I'm maximizing expected value".

I think my decision procedure can make interventions that decrease our uncertainty very appealing. I currently work on animal welfare desk research, and am strongly considering getting into some form of primary research in the future. Caveats:

1. Sometimes, this is not an option when making a decision. E.g., when advising a friend who received two job offers in animal welfare, neither of which decrease uncertainty; or when recommending grants for a fund (where none of the grants decrease uncertainty).
2. I think moral weights and pain trade-offs might be so seriously underdetermined that I expect that most research I could do or support right now would not reduce uncertainty about them. I expect you'll have a counter in that, though, and I expect my views to evolve.
   1. In comparison, assessing 2nd-order effects of certain interventions (such as economic effects, and land use effects) is tractable, although difficult.
3. I kind of rule out "long-horizon thinking" in my decision procedure on principle. Hence, if I expected pain tradeoff ratios to become a resolvable issue after 30 years of empirical research necessiating $50M of investment per year, I don't think I'd want to seed it, because I think that the chance that this works is negligible (you'll likely object to this on decision-theoretic grounds, I assume).
4. This is more uncomfortable to admit (and I'm particularly uncertain on that point), but if I were to focus almost entirely on research that decreases uncertainty, appearing as someone who recommends no object-level actions may be costly to me in a way that could reduce the change that my research is successful in decreasing uncertainty, because it could receive less support. 

We must settle for merely establishing to our own satisfaction that we can reasonably maintain our beliefs in the face of the skeptic’s contrary arguments. 

It's nice to have access to your cluster of reasons for disagreeing with cluelessness. However, I'd have been most interested in seeing a post where you make a compelling argument for how the DiGiovanni cluelessness argument pattern-matches radical skepticism, or other arguments that philosophers find intriguing on the surface but generally flawed. 

I do think that a crux for me when reading your post here, and other writings of yours on cluelessness, is whether "common sense" and "impartial welfare" can ever go together. I'm not skilled in philosophical debate, so I'll summarize my view with one of my favorite EA Forum quotes, from @Max_Daniel: 

Impartial goodness is freaking weird.

I resonate with this but would lightly push back. As someone who oscillates between being hosted by relatives in a city with 2 other EAs in total, and big, expensive hubs, I feel like the COL difference isn't that drastic if you are enthusiastic on frugal lifestyles (not saying people who feel differently are not frugal - there may be other factors, like getting lucky in finding accommodation). 

I'm currently in San Francisco for a few months in a coworking office, and my COL difference from a non-hub place in Europe is around $1.1K per month, more than half of which comes from the office membership. I sleep in a very cheap shared flat, and live on a mix of beans, protein powder, and leftovers from the office. And the productivity benefits from the office space are quite strong (beyond any sort of networking value), though I can't confidently claim they're worth $1.1K a month.

I agree that the benefits of living in a hub can be overstated, having oscillated between both. If you have enough savings to attend a few conferences a year, and are proactive virtually, you can absolutely achieve 80/20 networking outcomes (in most cases, it might be harder when your job is very network-based).

I think "don't live in a hub" is more important advice if you want to start a family or find a stable place to live, as in those cases, it can definitely lock in cost increases that are much larger.

(On the other hand, if you could actually do your job from anywhere and don't benefit from networks much, I think people should maximize. European founder should envision the cheapest EU countries, while software engineers doing earn to give should try their best to work in Switzerland or California)