Did you see the presentation Lewis Bollard gave at the Sentience Conference? He mentions that wild animal suffering, insect suffering, and many other exciting cause areas are totally on the table at Open Phil (though under the auspices of the farm animal welfare department).
The Sentience Politics of the EA Foundation is also launching a research program on WAS led by Brian, so EAF is another great donation target for pushing WAS activism in addition to Animal Ethics.
The main reason why I think research on WAS is very tractable is the one described in The Attribution Moloch. We tend to think of research as the necessary drudgery that may uncover a highly effective intervention and whose value is measured by the effectiveness of that potential intervention times the probability of discovering it.
But J-PAL, for example, had to conduct a whole phalanx of experiments at all levels of scale and formality until they discovered that deworming was a great way of boosting school attendance. Each of those experiments that showed an intervention to have limited impact was not a failure but was highly valuable in that it informed the future research that led to the discovery of the effect of deworming.
Therefore I assign the same value to any research on WAS that produces results activists can update on that I would eventually assign to the implementation of the highly effective interventions that’ll be discovered. (If they are discovered – but WAS is sufficiently vast and neglected that I’m optimistic here.)
Did you see the presentation Lewis Bollard gave at the Sentience Conference? He mentions that wild animal suffering, insect suffering, and many other exciting cause areas are totally on the table at Open Phil (though under the auspices of the farm animal welfare department).
The Sentience Politics of the EA Foundation is also launching a research program on WAS led by Brian, so EAF is another great donation target for pushing WAS activism in addition to Animal Ethics.
The main reason why I think research on WAS is very tractable is the one described in The Attribution Moloch. We tend to think of research as the necessary drudgery that may uncover a highly effective intervention and whose value is measured by the effectiveness of that potential intervention times the probability of discovering it.
But J-PAL, for example, had to conduct a whole phalanx of experiments at all levels of scale and formality until they discovered that deworming was a great way of boosting school attendance. Each of those experiments that showed an intervention to have limited impact was not a failure but was highly valuable in that it informed the future research that led to the discovery of the effect of deworming.
Therefore I assign the same value to any research on WAS that produces results activists can update on that I would eventually assign to the implementation of the highly effective interventions that’ll be discovered. (If they are discovered – but WAS is sufficiently vast and neglected that I’m optimistic here.)