I agree with Amandaās basic thesis, but I donāt think āmore research is absolutely essentialā necessarily means āmore research is the only thing that should get marginal funding.ā Building an effective organization is very slow, expensive, and difficult, so even if an organization is carrying out plausibly net negative interventions now, it might be worth sustaining so thereās a vehicle ready to act on new evidence when it becomes available.
This doesnāt mean every animal org is too special to fail, just that functional, value-aligned orgs should be considered a valuable resource, and donors should consider the potential second-order effects of decreasing their support.
How much research is needed and what it takes to sustain an organization are hugely context-dependent, so I donāt mean my 50% vote very literally. Rather, Iām proposing it as prior that should be updated with context-specific information.
For what itās worth, this is somewhat similar to how I think about whether to donate to farmed animal welfare vs. wild animal welfare.
There are vastly more wild animals than farmed and any land-use change affects wild animals, so itās plausible that the impact of reducing factory farming is mostly a question of how it affects wild animals. I think the evidence supports something close to cluelessness about the net value of the average wild animal life, so until we do wayyy more research on wild animal welfare, we wonāt know whether the second-order effects of reducing factory farming are good or bad.
But I donāt think that means we should pause the farmed animal advocacy movement until weāve solved wild animal welfare science. Thereās tremendous value to pushing society toward giving animals their due moral consideration, and the ideal world almost certainly doesnāt include factory farming. (Even if it does turn out to be the case that factory farming is actually good for the world on net because of its land use impacts, then surely thereās a way to achieve those effects without also torturing hundreds of billions of animals in the process.)
So I think we should be investing a lot in reducing our uncertainty (i.e., funding wild animal welfare research) while simultaneously building pro-animal power (i.e., funding farmed animal advocacy) even if weāre uncertain about the value of the interventions the animal movement is currently organizing around.
I agree with Amandaās basic thesis, but I donāt think āmore research is absolutely essentialā necessarily means āmore research is the only thing that should get marginal funding.ā Building an effective organization is very slow, expensive, and difficult, so even if an organization is carrying out plausibly net negative interventions now, it might be worth sustaining so thereās a vehicle ready to act on new evidence when it becomes available.
This doesnāt mean every animal org is too special to fail, just that functional, value-aligned orgs should be considered a valuable resource, and donors should consider the potential second-order effects of decreasing their support.
How much research is needed and what it takes to sustain an organization are hugely context-dependent, so I donāt mean my 50% vote very literally. Rather, Iām proposing it as prior that should be updated with context-specific information.
For what itās worth, this is somewhat similar to how I think about whether to donate to farmed animal welfare vs. wild animal welfare.
There are vastly more wild animals than farmed and any land-use change affects wild animals, so itās plausible that the impact of reducing factory farming is mostly a question of how it affects wild animals. I think the evidence supports something close to cluelessness about the net value of the average wild animal life, so until we do wayyy more research on wild animal welfare, we wonāt know whether the second-order effects of reducing factory farming are good or bad.
But I donāt think that means we should pause the farmed animal advocacy movement until weāve solved wild animal welfare science. Thereās tremendous value to pushing society toward giving animals their due moral consideration, and the ideal world almost certainly doesnāt include factory farming. (Even if it does turn out to be the case that factory farming is actually good for the world on net because of its land use impacts, then surely thereās a way to achieve those effects without also torturing hundreds of billions of animals in the process.)
So I think we should be investing a lot in reducing our uncertainty (i.e., funding wild animal welfare research) while simultaneously building pro-animal power (i.e., funding farmed animal advocacy) even if weāre uncertain about the value of the interventions the animal movement is currently organizing around.