Most Robust Interventions?
What do you think the most robustly good charitable interventions are?
I don’t mind if the intervention has a good chance of not being effective after all, but I am worried underestimated consequences might turn the EV of charities negative.
Background: I think many attempts to do good have a considerable risk of being net-negative, including things popular in EA.
For example, 80k motivating EAs to work at AI companies might have been a mistake. Saving human lives might increase meat consumption. Informing governments about AGI might motivate them to race.
I am not claiming these backfire effects are real or that they outweigh the upsides, but I am not comfortable ruling it out either.
I currently tend to think humane slaughter initiatives like the Shrimp Welfare Project are rather unlikely to backfire, because they don’t change the number of individuals, and the affected individuals don’t majorly affect the world after the intervention, because they die anyway. It might backfire if the stunning mechanism or similar malfunctions, making it worse than default slaughter, but this becomes less likely the more suffering the default slaughter involves already, like drawn-out slow suffocation.
One action / sub-cause area I tend to conceive as more robustly good than many others is preventing the continued development of insect farming (Insect Institute, Observatoire National de l’Elevage d’Insectes). Since farmed insects are so small (and that the implications of insect farming on the rest of the world don’t seem outsized), it seems intuitively unlikely that harms from preventing it could lead to more suffering than the counterfactual (as opposed to farming of bigger animals, where “environmental” effects may dominate the welfare impact). Meanwhile, I have difficulty seeing how the amount of insect farms in the world could significantly impact other aspects of the long-term future (in the way, say, getting rid of animal farming altogether might), which reduces my worries about long-term cluelessness, increasing S-risks, etc.
Nonetheless, even this carries significant risk of being net-negative, the crux-being how significant insect suffering is. If it turns out mealworms aren’t sentient, for example, less mealworm farming would probably mean more fish suffering (for fishmeal), and perhaps more factory farming of land vertebrates for pet food. Not to mention, obviously, the opportunity cost associated with “helping” non-sentient animals.
Like you, I do also think that the Shrimp Welfare Project is an example of a very robust cause: in fact, this is the non-insect-farming org to which I currently donate the most.
Also, small nitpick: an “ineffective” intervention will generally have a negative EV (see Tomasik), though of course, not necessarily an “extremely negative” EV as I think was you concern in the post.
Hi JoA,
thank you for the thoughtful reply! I think what you say about insect farming makes sense, I also like this cause area a lot. Although it looks like I am more worried than you about the indirect effects on other farming practices, like fish farming or factory farming of land animals.
And thank you for the link to the Tomasik post, he makes good points! Do you think I should change the original wording?
I think it’s unlikely that limiting insect farming increases fish farming or factory farming very significantly, since it’s mostly meant to be feed for animals in these situations. I’d be more worried if insect meal marketed itself as a substitute for human-consumed animals or fishes. And even in the case of pet food, since it’s much more expensive for now than other pet food ingredients (to my understanding), it’s not clear that letting insect farming spread would significantly reduce the number of factory farmed animals.
You could update the wording in the post if you like, though if you find it time-consuming, you don’t have to spend time on that. Most readers probably find the distinction as you frame it quite intuitive.
Thank you, those are good points! I am now more optimistic about reducing insect farming and might even donate to that cause :)