Not addressing your question, but asking to try to better understand your perspective: donât the points youâve 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 âmy cause area is wasting money but hey yours is tooâ is not an effective argument; thatâs not what Iâm trying to do. But I think if I understood why âmillions spent, no animals helped yetâ doesnât apply, in your view, to cultivated meat Iâd better understand the root of our disagreement.
Thatâs⌠a good point! Well, with cultivated meat, you can see the path to the upside clearly. WAI may have an enormous theoretical upside too, but at present the achievable welfare gain from any research programme is much harder to quantify.
The rough equivalent would be if cultivated meat didnât already exist, and we were still in the stage of âweâre spending millions building the field of researchers to perhaps develop some component of an ingredient that might be added to other speculative ingredients that might lead to the intervention of a cultivated meat product which might, at some point, displace slaughter meatâ. Then I wouldnât be too hot on cultivated meat either, but thatâs not where we are. The product exists. It has already cleared regulatory processes in several countries and reached consumers, and we can measure progress on things like cost, scale, production efficiency and commercialisation. And there are major non-animal-welfare reasons pushing in the same directionâclimate, food security, AMR, and so on.
So I think my objection isnât inherently âmillions spent, no animals helped yet.â Youâre quite right that this could also be said of cultivated meat. Itâs millions spent, while after seven years things still seem very far upstream from a specified, testable intervention and measurable animal impact. Even more bafflingly, WAI is often recommended as among the most cost-effective ways to help animals. How?
IIRC, EA began seriously funding cultivated meat in 2016-17, when it was still very woo wooâbut the intervention at least existed. I canât imagine EA putting millions into cultivated meat before there was a concrete intervention to get behind, funding researchers to explore questions in the hope that something actionable might eventually emerge at some unspecified point.
Okay cool, thatâs helpful. It seems like the root disagreement is not whether research is ever worth funding, but how clear the research â> impact path should be, and perhaps how short.
My guess from this/âreading your other comments is that ~ 2 major things underpin a difference between you and I in terms of excitement about WAW/âWAI. 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/âprice/âconvenience model, I donât have that much confidence that merely inventing cultivated meat will be enough to change diets. But even if it was, I donât 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. Iâm pretty consequentialist in my ethics, so Iâm 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 Iâm probably not ethically pure on it â 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 donât share this view at all and may even think itâs sort of dumb! Thatâs fine, but arguing about whether WAI in particular is cost-effective wonât 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, youâd 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. Iâm not a cultivated meat expert, but barring some kind of revolutionary development I would assume that weâre more than 5 years away from scaled cultivated meat deployment? If thatâs 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. Iâm 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, Iâve designed a research agenda that I believe, within ~ 3-5 years of research, maybe less, could answer to a degree of confidence Iâd be willing to act on whether bird-window collision prevention is net positive to promote. Another angle Iâm pursuing is wildlife vaccination â 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 thatâs 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 Iâm not doing this work at WAI, none of it would be possible without WAI. My work there and the field-building work theyâve done give me the tools I need to do this more intervention-focused research, and the research WAI does/âsupports is the substrate by which these ideas have been generated. If the work Iâm doing now continues to make progress, Iâll need scientists who get the basic ideas to carry it out. And once I rule in/ârule out the ideas I already have, Iâll 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 didnât 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/âless tractable, but the scale is commensurately higher.
I donât really expect you or others with values focused on shorter timelines/âdirect effects only to be convinced â I think itâs fine for EAs to differ on what they mean by âcost-effective.â Some people want âstrong evidence for immediate-ish impactâ 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 wouldnât say that I require short timelines or immediate effects. If that were the case, I wouldnât support cultivated meat. I understand the argument for funding very speculative work where I can see the causal chain from research to an intervention with enormous potential impact. My concern with WAI is that they are still trying to discover both what the relevant welfare problems are and what interventions might eventually follow from understanding them. This seems to me an absurdly vague proposition for the level of funding involved.
You seem to find value in producing knowledge in an enormous, neglected domain because unknown future interventions could be extraordinarily valuable. Whereas I want more evidence that the knowledge-production processâor any other strategyâis actually converging on interventions. Until then, the theoretical upside is too abstract for me to treat it as competitive with cultivated meat, because the latter is at least clear and in existence.
And it existed before EA got involved. I think it was around 2013 that the first cultivated meat burger was triedâit was an extremely crude, mega expensive proof of conceptâbut nevertheless a tangible starting point. Meanwhile WAI is seven years in with no concrete interventions on the table.
A quick question I have for you; at what point would you decide that WAI isnât worth funding anymore?
(I donât work at WAI anymore)
Not addressing your question, but asking to try to better understand your perspective: donât the points youâve 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 âmy cause area is wasting money but hey yours is tooâ is not an effective argument; thatâs not what Iâm trying to do. But I think if I understood why âmillions spent, no animals helped yetâ doesnât apply, in your view, to cultivated meat Iâd better understand the root of our disagreement.
Thatâs⌠a good point! Well, with cultivated meat, you can see the path to the upside clearly. WAI may have an enormous theoretical upside too, but at present the achievable welfare gain from any research programme is much harder to quantify.
The rough equivalent would be if cultivated meat didnât already exist, and we were still in the stage of âweâre spending millions building the field of researchers to perhaps develop some component of an ingredient that might be added to other speculative ingredients that might lead to the intervention of a cultivated meat product which might, at some point, displace slaughter meatâ. Then I wouldnât be too hot on cultivated meat either, but thatâs not where we are. The product exists. It has already cleared regulatory processes in several countries and reached consumers, and we can measure progress on things like cost, scale, production efficiency and commercialisation. And there are major non-animal-welfare reasons pushing in the same directionâclimate, food security, AMR, and so on.
So I think my objection isnât inherently âmillions spent, no animals helped yet.â Youâre quite right that this could also be said of cultivated meat. Itâs millions spent, while after seven years things still seem very far upstream from a specified, testable intervention and measurable animal impact. Even more bafflingly, WAI is often recommended as among the most cost-effective ways to help animals. How?
IIRC, EA began seriously funding cultivated meat in 2016-17, when it was still very woo wooâbut the intervention at least existed. I canât imagine EA putting millions into cultivated meat before there was a concrete intervention to get behind, funding researchers to explore questions in the hope that something actionable might eventually emerge at some unspecified point.
Okay cool, thatâs helpful. It seems like the root disagreement is not whether research is ever worth funding, but how clear the research â> impact path should be, and perhaps how short.
My guess from this/âreading your other comments is that ~ 2 major things underpin a difference between you and I in terms of excitement about WAW/âWAI. 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/âprice/âconvenience model, I donât have that much confidence that merely inventing cultivated meat will be enough to change diets. But even if it was, I donât 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. Iâm pretty consequentialist in my ethics, so Iâm 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 Iâm probably not ethically pure on it â 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 donât share this view at all and may even think itâs sort of dumb! Thatâs fine, but arguing about whether WAI in particular is cost-effective wonât 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, youâd 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. Iâm not a cultivated meat expert, but barring some kind of revolutionary development I would assume that weâre more than 5 years away from scaled cultivated meat deployment? If thatâs 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. Iâm 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, Iâve designed a research agenda that I believe, within ~ 3-5 years of research, maybe less, could answer to a degree of confidence Iâd be willing to act on whether bird-window collision prevention is net positive to promote. Another angle Iâm pursuing is wildlife vaccination â 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 thatâs 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 Iâm not doing this work at WAI, none of it would be possible without WAI. My work there and the field-building work theyâve done give me the tools I need to do this more intervention-focused research, and the research WAI does/âsupports is the substrate by which these ideas have been generated. If the work Iâm doing now continues to make progress, Iâll need scientists who get the basic ideas to carry it out. And once I rule in/ârule out the ideas I already have, Iâll 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 didnât 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/âless tractable, but the scale is commensurately higher.
I donât really expect you or others with values focused on shorter timelines/âdirect effects only to be convinced â I think itâs fine for EAs to differ on what they mean by âcost-effective.â Some people want âstrong evidence for immediate-ish impactâ 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 wouldnât say that I require short timelines or immediate effects. If that were the case, I wouldnât support cultivated meat. I understand the argument for funding very speculative work where I can see the causal chain from research to an intervention with enormous potential impact. My concern with WAI is that they are still trying to discover both what the relevant welfare problems are and what interventions might eventually follow from understanding them. This seems to me an absurdly vague proposition for the level of funding involved.
You seem to find value in producing knowledge in an enormous, neglected domain because unknown future interventions could be extraordinarily valuable. Whereas I want more evidence that the knowledge-production processâor any other strategyâis actually converging on interventions. Until then, the theoretical upside is too abstract for me to treat it as competitive with cultivated meat, because the latter is at least clear and in existence.
And it existed before EA got involved. I think it was around 2013 that the first cultivated meat burger was triedâit was an extremely crude, mega expensive proof of conceptâbut nevertheless a tangible starting point. Meanwhile WAI is seven years in with no concrete interventions on the table.
A quick question I have for you; at what point would you decide that WAI isnât worth funding anymore?