Large scale interventions we can be confident in aren’t that far away.
The intervention space is so large and impacting animals’ lives generally is so easy that the likelihood of finding really cost-effective things seems high.
These interventions will often not involve nearly as much “changing hearts and minds” or public advocacy as other animal welfare work, so could easily be a lot more tractable.
I would love to hear you talk more about this :) What makes you hopeful that scalable interventions are coming, and can you say more about anything you’re particularly excited about here? Also curious what “aren’t that far away” caches out into in terms of your beliefs—in 1 year? 3?
I wonder if your opinions are related to the following, which I’d also be excited to hear more about!
I think that my research has generally caused the EA space to focus too much on farmed insects, and less on insecticides. I am somewhat inclined toward thinking that insecticide-caused suffering is both more tractable and larger in scale. I’m now working on a insecticide project though, so trying to correct this.
(Thanks for sharing this post Abraham, I enjoyed reading it :) )
What makes you hopeful that scalable interventions are coming, and can you say more about anything you’re particularly excited about here?
The ones that seem most likely in the near future are:
Insecticide interventions like alternative crop insect management approaches, including genetic ones
Less painful insecticides
Fertility control for urban wildlife
Probably a lot more no one has considered
Things that make me think this is on the table:
I think there aren’t great alternative animal welfare interventions, but animal interventions have really good returns if you get them right because you can impact so many animals.
We’ve made some cool progress on validating welfare measures that might be cheap to measure, which could be useful for assessing the sign of interventions.
It seems generally like the academic field building project is going well, so we should expect this to accelerate.
In terms of timelines — I think this is more like 10-15 years. But part of the reason I think that’s exciting is that I used to think it would be more like 2050+ before anything like this was on the table. I think I’ve also just generally decreased my confidence that the problems as are as difficult as I thought before (though I definitely think they are still tricky).
For insecticides, I think my view remains that we are something like 2-5 years of specific lab/field research away from plausibly having a great intervention, so it is sad that progress hasn’t been made on it, and given that this also seemed like the case a few years ago, funding the research should have been a priority earlier.
I would love to hear you talk more about this :) What makes you hopeful that scalable interventions are coming, and can you say more about anything you’re particularly excited about here? Also curious what “aren’t that far away” caches out into in terms of your beliefs—in 1 year? 3?
I wonder if your opinions are related to the following, which I’d also be excited to hear more about!
(Thanks for sharing this post Abraham, I enjoyed reading it :) )
Thanks for the questions!!
The ones that seem most likely in the near future are:
Insecticide interventions like alternative crop insect management approaches, including genetic ones
Less painful insecticides
Fertility control for urban wildlife
Probably a lot more no one has considered
Things that make me think this is on the table:
I think there aren’t great alternative animal welfare interventions, but animal interventions have really good returns if you get them right because you can impact so many animals.
We’ve made some cool progress on validating welfare measures that might be cheap to measure, which could be useful for assessing the sign of interventions.
It seems generally like the academic field building project is going well, so we should expect this to accelerate.
In terms of timelines — I think this is more like 10-15 years. But part of the reason I think that’s exciting is that I used to think it would be more like 2050+ before anything like this was on the table. I think I’ve also just generally decreased my confidence that the problems as are as difficult as I thought before (though I definitely think they are still tricky).
For insecticides, I think my view remains that we are something like 2-5 years of specific lab/field research away from plausibly having a great intervention, so it is sad that progress hasn’t been made on it, and given that this also seemed like the case a few years ago, funding the research should have been a priority earlier.