I think there’s a difference between the muddy concept of ‘cause areas’ and actual specific charities/​interventions here. At the level of cause areas, there could be overlap, because I agree that if you think the Most Important Thing is to expand the moral circle, then there are things in the animal-substitute space that might be interesting, but I’d be surprised and suspicious (not infinitely suspicious, just moderately so) if the actual bottom-line charity-you-donate-to was the exact same thing as what you got to when trying to minimise the suffering of animals in the present day. Tobias makes a virtually identical point in the post you link to, so we may not disagree, apart from perhaps thinking about the word ‘intervention’ differently.
Most animal advocacy efforts are focused on helping animals in the here and now. If we take the longtermist perspective seriously, we will likely arrive at different priorities and focus areas: it would be a remarkable coincidence if short-term-focused work were also ideal from this different perspective.5
Similarly, I could imagine a longtermist concluding that if you look back through history, attempts to e.g. prevent extinction directly or implement better governance seem like they would have been critically hamstrung by a lack of development in the relevant fields, e.g. economics, and the general difficulty of imagining the future. But attempts to grow the economy and advance science seem to have snowballed in a way that impacts the future and also incidentally benefits the present. So in that way you could end up with a longtermist-inspired focus on things like ‘speed up economic growth’ or ‘advance important research’ which arguably fall under the ‘near-term human-centric welfare’ area on some categorisations of causes. But you didn’t get there from that starting point, and again I expect your eventual specific area of focus to be quite different.
I think there’s a difference between the muddy concept of ‘cause areas’ and actual specific charities/​interventions here. At the level of cause areas, there could be overlap, because I agree that if you think the Most Important Thing is to expand the moral circle, then there are things in the animal-substitute space that might be interesting, but I’d be surprised and suspicious (not infinitely suspicious, just moderately so) if the actual bottom-line charity-you-donate-to was the exact same thing as what you got to when trying to minimise the suffering of animals in the present day. Tobias makes a virtually identical point in the post you link to, so we may not disagree, apart from perhaps thinking about the word ‘intervention’ differently.
Similarly, I could imagine a longtermist concluding that if you look back through history, attempts to e.g. prevent extinction directly or implement better governance seem like they would have been critically hamstrung by a lack of development in the relevant fields, e.g. economics, and the general difficulty of imagining the future. But attempts to grow the economy and advance science seem to have snowballed in a way that impacts the future and also incidentally benefits the present. So in that way you could end up with a longtermist-inspired focus on things like ‘speed up economic growth’ or ‘advance important research’ which arguably fall under the ‘near-term human-centric welfare’ area on some categorisations of causes. But you didn’t get there from that starting point, and again I expect your eventual specific area of focus to be quite different.