Extremely randomly, I also have had vulture conservation on my list for ~ a year for “crazy-ish wild animal welfare intervention ideas.” Basically the rough argument is they reduce disease for wildlife also, and disease is probably a big welfare cost in the wild, and since they (mostly) don’t kill other animals directly, you don’t have to balance out an increase in “landscape of fear” effects. If you think maggots have really high moral value and net positive lives you might dislike the competitive population reduction effect, but most people won’t care about that.

Okay cool, that’s helpful. It seems like the root disagreement is not whether research is ever worth funding, but how clear the research —> impact path should be, and perhaps how short.

My guess from this/reading your other comments is that ~ 2 major things underpin a difference between you and I in terms of excitement about WAW/WAI. Both connect to the fact that cost-effectiveness is always a comparative claim. So on the one hand, I probably rate WAWS as more cost-effective to promote than you do, but importantly, I also rate other things as less cost-effective than you do (making the bar easier to clear).

Towards the latter point: I care a lot about indirect and unintended effects of interventions on all sentient beings. This means that, without a good understanding of ecology and WAW, the cost-effectiveness of the vast majority of potential animal welfare interventions is basically not knowable. For a variety of reasons connected to (what I view as) the failure of the taste/price/convenience model, I don’t have that much confidence that merely inventing cultivated meat will be enough to change diets. But even if it was, I don’t have any idea exactly how those diets will change (small animal replacement problems), or how the resulting land use changes will affect wild animal welfare. I’m pretty consequentialist in my ethics, so I’m not comfortable helping some farmed animals at the expense of billions to quadrillions of wild animals. As someone who hates factory farming this is a hard place for me to sit, and I’m probably not ethically pure on it — I still am vegan and support farmed animal advocacy financially. But in response to the uncertainty about how shrimp stunning, cultivated meat, vegan advocacy, etc. affects wild animals, the only thing I can see to do is research it, and my calculations of cost effectiveness of those other activities is correspondingly really really wide, making research a cost-effectiveness-competitive thing to do.

My guess is that you don’t share this view at all and may even think it’s sort of dumb! That’s fine, but arguing about whether WAI in particular is cost-effective won’t help us make progress on this disagreement (which I think is also the source of disagreement between you and the vast majority of other people who are excited about WAWS). Instead, if you wanted to change my mind that WAI was a good giving opportunity, you’d need to show me that I should not care about the effects of land use change resulting from factory farming elimination or cultivated meat production on wild animal welfare (among a variety of other things).

The second source of disagreement is how much the sort of field-building work WAI does leads into interventions, and how soon. Using cultivated meat as a benchmark: yes, we already have cultivated meat, but we have no way to produce it cost effectively at scale. I’m not a cultivated meat expert, but barring some kind of revolutionary development I would assume that we’re more than 5 years away from scaled cultivated meat deployment? If that’s right, there are definitely interventions in WAW that could realistically be available on that timeline. We already have a variety of contraceptive products that work in the lab for rodents. I’m in the middle of designing a targeted research program that (I hope) will get us to the point of a cost-effective, scalable deployment within 5-8 years. Similarly, I’ve designed a research agenda that I believe, within ~ 3-5 years of research, maybe less, could answer to a degree of confidence I’d be willing to act on whether bird-window collision prevention is net positive to promote. Another angle I’m pursuing is wildlife vaccination — it might not pan out, but if it does, I would expect to be ready to recommend an intervention within no more than 10 years. Whether that’s good enough probably depends on how quickly you think other interventions will start benefiting animals; you might think cultivated meat replacement will be here in much less time than I do.

Connecting this back to WAI: although I’m not doing this work at WAI, none of it would be possible without WAI. My work there and the field-building work they’ve done give me the tools I need to do this more intervention-focused research, and the research WAI does/supports is the substrate by which these ideas have been generated. If the work I’m doing now continues to make progress, I’ll need scientists who get the basic ideas to carry it out. And once I rule in/rule out the ideas I already have, I’ll need there to have been more research in the meantime to support more ideas and ways to help animals.

None of this is that dissimilar to what GFI does for cultivated meat. If I understand correctly, the product didn’t really exist before EAs got into it, and a huge amount of EA and animal advocacy money went towards not just object level research but building university groups so there would be a talent pipeline, lobbying to make more money available, etc. And WAI is working on a harder problem at an earlier stage, so things are a little slower/less tractable, but the scale is commensurately higher.

I don’t really expect you or others with values focused on shorter timelines/direct effects only to be convinced — I think it’s fine for EAs to differ on what they mean by “cost-effective.” Some people want “strong evidence for immediate-ish impact” and others want to take a bunch of high risk, high reward bets and expect that at least a couple pan out. Both are legitimate investment strategies, and WAI is likely to be most appealing to people who (1) are very worried about indirect effects or (2) prefer the latter cost-effectiveness definition.

(I don’t work at WAI anymore)

Not addressing your question, but asking to try to better understand your perspective: don’t the points you’ve made here roughly apply to cultivated meat as well (which many agree is a legitimate EA cause area, and also you seem to personally endorse it)?

I know saying “my cause area is wasting money but hey yours is too” is not an effective argument; that’s not what I’m trying to do. But I think if I understood why “millions spent, no animals helped yet” doesn’t apply, in your view, to cultivated meat I’d better understand the root of our disagreement.

Thanks Luke, yeah I think we could have been more careful about consistency in using different population size phrases to mean distinct things.

Broadly wherever in the post we say "standing population size" or "stable population size" or something we mean "that thing that people are usually talking about when they publish a paper estimating an animal population size." But because methods vary so much in the literature, especially for invertebrates, this isn't always just the adult population (including a sort of random assortment of ages depending on the method, sometimes the adult population at a particular time of year as opposed to averaged over the year, etc.).

If I get some time I'll go through and clarify terms.

Sorry I’m probably missing something, but I’m not understanding why real world examples from EA would be particularly relevant given how young a movement it is. I think someone could grant that we have the ability to be justified in assigning probabilities to things that are likely to happen soon, and agree that the risk of things we’re totally unaware of happening in the next ~ 10-50 years might be (at least in some circumstances) sufficiently small to not have unawareness problems.

But once you start trying to be an impartial altruist about far future beings, that seems to me where you really can’t get away from unawareness problems. And so I guess if you wanted to convince me I was wrong about that, we should be looking at things that people thought 1000 years ago, and how things they caused today were bad even though they were trying to do good for reasons they weren’t only poorly calibrated on but in fact totally unaware of - and it just seems likely to me there would be tons of examples of that?

Maybe the development of gunpowder stands out here as something being pursued in the hopes of achieving eternal life (ostensibly an altruistic motivation) and presumably the possibility of guns was not on people’s radar. I guess it would eventually have been figured out anyway, but how much harm did having gunpowder X years earlier cause?

Maybe an objection here is that an “ideal” agent would have of course considered the possibility of any chemical work being misused, but IDK - they weren’t even trying to make something explosive. I don’t see how even a perfectly rational being could have predicted all the harms gunpowder would cause given that they were aiming to do alchemy. What probability could they have possibly been justified, given their epistemic position, in assigning to ”super bad outcomes from pursuing eternal life chemistry” given that they probably could not have imagined the scale of modern warfare?

I do get a little mixed up on this between “people are not ideal and so regularly make large mistakes that look like cluelessness” vs “even an ideal agent could not be justified in their probability assignments given what is theoretically knowable” so maybe I’m misunderstanding something.

Does P1 rely in any way on the idealized agent actually using EV specifically, as opposed to other theoretically possible aggregations of all or most of the possible consequences of A and B? It seems like no to me but I was curious since it is explicitly mentioned.

Can you explain a little more what you mean by “coarse-grained” in P3? Does that just mean “very unlikely to include all the possible outcomes, so there’s a ton of unknown unknowns we don’t know how to assign probability to” or something else?

I am not at all an expert in mosquitoes, but I think it would be hard to figure out more than the direct effects on mosquitoes, which are sex specific. A few assorted thoughts:

• Scale: the Google Debug program website says when applied, they need to releases 100s of thousands to millions of mosquitoes each week, so the scale is reasonably high.
• They release only male mosquitoes, but it's not possible to rear only male mosquitoes (AFAIK), so they are killing all the females. The Debug project's Nature Biotechnology article says that they sort males from females as pupae (which may involve low welfare cost, I don't know when sentience emerges in insects and especially whether it's possible to feel pain as a pupa), and again as adults (which, if insects are sentient, probably is painful for those females). They report that 95% of females are removed as pupae, so a much smaller amount are being killed as adults. About 2.5% of what make it through the first sort are females, so we can estimate that to achieve daily releases of ~ 75k males, ~2000 females are killed as adults daily. The paper does not seem to report how the females are killed for either pupae or adults, which is a big gap from a welfare perspective.
• According to this, Wolbachia often shorten lifespans. But several strains also seem to enhance immune function and have other mutualisms. So in some cases it could have positive welfare effects. I asked Claude about the specific strain used in the Debug program, and it reported that most of the welfare effects land on females, who are already just being killed. Of course, we don't know that much about measuring mosquito welfare, but at least in terms of survival, ability to find a mate (which correlates to locomotor and sensory performance), etc., this strain isn't bad. And if they use something that really harms the released males they won't outcompete the local males, which would drive up costs (because you have to release more mosquitoes to compensate).
• The technique will result in a reduction in number of mosquitoes. It's not clear to me how other populations would respond to that - I'm not sure what competitors there are for mosquito resources. But if you think mosquitoes have bad lives this could be a good thing (or neutral if you have person-affecting leanings). The FAQ on the Debug page claims that in urban areas, because the mosquitoes are invasive, it will just be a "return to normal" -- but that ignores the fact that many other things have changed (reductions in native insect populations, for example). If it's true that this specific species doesn't make up a meaningful part of any other animal's diet the effect is likely to be small, but that sounds like something we don't really know (well-resolved urban food webs are rare). They might mean "no animal anybody in ecology especially cares about."
• For many bugs, high mortality during captive rearing is common. That doesn't seem to be the case for mosquitoes -- survival rates in the 90s are reported in many captive colonies and mass die offs are unusual (according to this, thanks Claude). But the success rates for male mosquitoes in the Debug project is around 70%. The paper is fairly detailed on the rearing approach so someone with more mosquito expertise than I might be able to say more about welfare. Broadly, I'd still expect it's much better than wild mosquitoes -- they're fed, kept at comfortable temperatures, spared from predators, etc.
• An interesting question long term would be how this affects pesticide use in urban areas. If most pesticide applications in cities aims at reducing mosquitoes, and we start using Wolbachia to control them instead, pesticide application might go down, resulting in recoveries of other insect populations and reduced sub-lethal harms. If you think bugs have good lives, yay. If you think they have awful ones, uh oh. 

I'd likely support doing this -- effects on humans are good (which to be clear I weight very highly!), male mosquitoes seem broadly fine, and females are killed mostly as pupae, I'm clueless about the welfare interpretation of population effects. That said, others might feel more concerned about population effects, which probably depends a lot on how you feel about insects generally and how much you think this could alter insecticide usage. 

I spent less than an hour on this comment though, so obviously this is not the final word!

Hi Nick -- just regarding the team page issue, are you thinking of this page: https://rethinkpriorities.org/our-research-areas/worldview-investigations/ ? It has the people listed in your screenshot from Claude.

As a reference, I got to this from CCF page --> support our work --> under the "our team" section. Notably, the link is from this text:

"The Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund sits on top of work done by our Worldview Investigations Team (WIT), and Interdisciplinary Research Team, groups established specifically to tackle the hard questions that most donors don't have time to engage with: how to compare welfare across species, how to reason under deep uncertainty, how to weigh present benefits against future ones, how to aggregate competing moral views into a single allocation.

The team brings together training in philosophy, economics, statistics, cognitive science, moral psychology, and decision theory . The fund's allocations also draw on the in-house expertise of RP's Global Health and Development, Animal Welfare, AI departments, so the cross-cause model is informed by researchers working directly in each area, not just secondary literature. "

So I'm interpreting that paragraph as saying that WIT work goes into the report, but not necessarily that the WIT team did all the work (in particular, the interdisciplinary research team clearly was also involved, and the second paragraph suggests other teams contributed as well).

Nope, I just mean that on average, a bird who avoids a collision would live for a few more years based on typical lifespans. I meant "fully recovers from or avoids the collision." Of course if they have some lingering injury or issue their life expectancy will be lower.