For the kinds of reasons you give, I think it could be good to get people to care about the suffering of wild animals (and other sentient beings) in the event that we colonise the stars.
I think that the interventions that decrease the chance of future wild animal suffering are only a subset of all WAW things you could do, though. For example, figuring out ways to make wild animals suffer less in the present would come under “WAW”, but I wouldn’t expect to make any difference to the more distant future. That’s because if we care about wild animals, we’ll figure out what to do sooner or later.
So rather than talking about “wild animal welfare interventions”, I’d argue that you’re really only talking about “future-focused wild animal welfare interventions”. And I think making that distinction is important, because I don’t think your reasoning supports present-focused WAW work.
I think that the interventions that decrease the chance of future wild animal suffering are only a subset of all WAW things you could do, though. For example, figuring out ways to make wild animals suffer less in the present would come under “WAW”, but I wouldn’t expect to make any difference to the more distant future. That’s because if we care about wild animals, we’ll figure out what to do sooner or later.
I do agree that current WAW interventions have a relatively low expected impact compared with other WAW work (e.g. moral circle expansion) if only direct effects are counted.
Here are some reasons why I think current interventions/research may help the longterm future.
Doing more foundational work now means we can earlier start more important research and interventions, when the technology is available. (Probably a less important factor)
Current research gives us a better answer to how much pleasure and suffering wild animals experience, which helps inform future decisions on the spread of wildlife. (This may not be that relevant yet)
Showcasing that interventions can have a positive effect on the welfare of wildlife, could help convince more people that helping wildlife is tractable and the morally right thing to do (even if it’s unnatural). (I think this to be the most important effect)
So I think current interventions could have a significant impact on moral circle expansion. Especially because I think you have to have two beliefs to care for WAW work: believe that the welfare of wildlife is important (especially for smaller animals like insects, which likely make up the majority of suffering) and believe that interfering with nature could be positive for welfare. The latter may be difficult to achieve without proven interventions since few people think we should intervene in nature.
Whether direct moral circle expansion or indirect (via. interventions) are more impactful are unclear to me. Animal Ethics mainly work on the former and Wild Animal Initiative works mainly on the latter. I’m currently expecting to donate to both.
So rather than talking about “wild animal welfare interventions”, I’d argue that you’re really only talking about “future-focused wild animal welfare interventions”. And I think making that distinction is important, because I don’t think your reasoning supports present-focused WAW work.
I think having an organization working directly on this area could be of high importance (as I know only the Center For Reducing Suffering and the Center on Long-Term Risk work partly on this area). But how do you think it’s possible to currently work on “future-focused wild animal welfare interventions”? Other than doing research, I don’t see how else you can work specifically on “WAW future scenarios”. It’s likely just my limited imagination or me misunderstanding what you mean, but I don’t know how we can work on that now.
Thanks for your reply! I can see your perspective.
On your last point, but future-focused WAW interventions, I’m thinking of things that you mention in the tractability section of your post:
Here is a list of ways we could work on this issue (directly copied from the post by saulius[9]):
“To reduce the probability of humans spreading of wildlife in a way that causes a lot of suffering, we could:
Directly argue about caring about WAW if humans ever spread wildlife beyond Earth
Lobby to expand the application of an existing international law that tries to protect other planets from being contaminated with Earth life by spacecrafts to planets outside of our solar system.
Continue building EA and WAW communities to ensure that there will be people in the future who care about WAW.
Spread the general concern for WAW (e.g., through WAW documentaries, outreach to academia).”
That is, things aimed at improving (wild) animals’ lives in the event of space colonisation.
Relatedly, I don’t think you necessarily need to show that “interfering with nature could be positive for welfare”, because not spreading wild animals in space wouldn’t be interfering with nature. That said, it would be useful in case we do spread wild animals, then interventions to improve their welfare might look more like interfering with nature, so I agree it could be helpful.
My personal guess is that a competent organisation that eventually advocates for humanity to care about the welfare of all sentient beings would be good to exist. It would probably have to start by doing a lot of research into people’s existing beliefs and doing testing to see what kinds of interventions get people to care. I’m sure there must be some existing research about how to get people to care about animals.
I’m not sure either way how important this would be compared with other priorities, though. I believe some existing organisations believe the best way to reduce the expected amount of future suffering is to focus on preventing the cases where the amount of future suffering is very large. I haven’t thought about it, but that could be right.
Another thing on my mind is that we should beware surprising and suspicious convergence—it would be surprising and suspicious if the same intervention (present-focused WAW work) was best for improving animals’ lives today and also happened to be best for improving animals’ lives in the distant future.
I worry about people interested in animal welfare justifying maintaining their existing work when they switch their focus to longtermism, when actually it would be better if they worked on something different.
(I hope it’s not confusing that I’m answering both your comments at once).
While I will have to consider this for longer, my preliminary thought is that I agree with most of what you said. Which means that I might not believe in some of my previous statements.
Thanks for the link to that post. I do agree and I can definitely see how some of these biases have influenced a couple of my thoughts.
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On your last point, but future-focused WAW interventions, I’m thinking of things that you mention in the tractability section of your post:...
Okay, I see. Well actually, my initial thought was that all of those four options had a similar impact on the longterm future. Which would justify focusing on short-term interventions and advocacy (which would correspond with working on point number three and four). However after further consideration, I think the first two are of higher impact when considering the far future. Which means I (at least for right now) agree with your earlier statement:
“So rather than talking about “wild animal welfare interventions”, I’d argue that you’re really only talking about “future-focused wild animal welfare interventions”. And I think making that distinction is important, because I don’t think your reasoning supports present-focused WAW work.”
While I still think the “flow through effect” is very real for WAW, I do think that it’s probably true working on s-risks more directly might be of higher impact.
--
I was curious if you have some thoughts on these conclusions (concluded based on a number of things you said and my personal values):
Since working on s-risk directly is more impactful than working on it indirectly, direct work should be done when possible.
There is no current organization working purely on animal related s-risk (as far as I know). So if that’s your main concern, your options are start-up or convincing an “s-risk mitigation organization” that you should work on this area full time.
Animal Ethics works on advocating moral circle expansion. But since this is of less direct impact to the longterm future, this has less of an effect on reducing s-risk than more direct work.
If you’re also interested in reducing other s-risks (e.g. artificial sentience), then working for an organization that directly tries to reduce the probability of a number of s-risk is your best option (e.g. Center on Long-Term Risk or Center for Reducing Suffering).
For the kinds of reasons you give, I think it could be good to get people to care about the suffering of wild animals (and other sentient beings) in the event that we colonise the stars.
I think that the interventions that decrease the chance of future wild animal suffering are only a subset of all WAW things you could do, though. For example, figuring out ways to make wild animals suffer less in the present would come under “WAW”, but I wouldn’t expect to make any difference to the more distant future. That’s because if we care about wild animals, we’ll figure out what to do sooner or later.
So rather than talking about “wild animal welfare interventions”, I’d argue that you’re really only talking about “future-focused wild animal welfare interventions”. And I think making that distinction is important, because I don’t think your reasoning supports present-focused WAW work.
I’d be curious what you think about that!
I do agree that current WAW interventions have a relatively low expected impact compared with other WAW work (e.g. moral circle expansion) if only direct effects are counted.
Here are some reasons why I think current interventions/research may help the longterm future.
Doing more foundational work now means we can earlier start more important research and interventions, when the technology is available. (Probably a less important factor)
Current research gives us a better answer to how much pleasure and suffering wild animals experience, which helps inform future decisions on the spread of wildlife. (This may not be that relevant yet)
Showcasing that interventions can have a positive effect on the welfare of wildlife, could help convince more people that helping wildlife is tractable and the morally right thing to do (even if it’s unnatural). (I think this to be the most important effect)
So I think current interventions could have a significant impact on moral circle expansion. Especially because I think you have to have two beliefs to care for WAW work: believe that the welfare of wildlife is important (especially for smaller animals like insects, which likely make up the majority of suffering) and believe that interfering with nature could be positive for welfare. The latter may be difficult to achieve without proven interventions since few people think we should intervene in nature.
Whether direct moral circle expansion or indirect (via. interventions) are more impactful are unclear to me. Animal Ethics mainly work on the former and Wild Animal Initiative works mainly on the latter. I’m currently expecting to donate to both.
I think having an organization working directly on this area could be of high importance (as I know only the Center For Reducing Suffering and the Center on Long-Term Risk work partly on this area). But how do you think it’s possible to currently work on “future-focused wild animal welfare interventions”? Other than doing research, I don’t see how else you can work specifically on “WAW future scenarios”. It’s likely just my limited imagination or me misunderstanding what you mean, but I don’t know how we can work on that now.
Thanks for your reply! I can see your perspective.
On your last point, but future-focused WAW interventions, I’m thinking of things that you mention in the tractability section of your post:
That is, things aimed at improving (wild) animals’ lives in the event of space colonisation.
Relatedly, I don’t think you necessarily need to show that “interfering with nature could be positive for welfare”, because not spreading wild animals in space wouldn’t be interfering with nature. That said, it would be useful in case we do spread wild animals, then interventions to improve their welfare might look more like interfering with nature, so I agree it could be helpful.
My personal guess is that a competent organisation that eventually advocates for humanity to care about the welfare of all sentient beings would be good to exist. It would probably have to start by doing a lot of research into people’s existing beliefs and doing testing to see what kinds of interventions get people to care. I’m sure there must be some existing research about how to get people to care about animals.
I’m not sure either way how important this would be compared with other priorities, though. I believe some existing organisations believe the best way to reduce the expected amount of future suffering is to focus on preventing the cases where the amount of future suffering is very large. I haven’t thought about it, but that could be right.
Another thing on my mind is that we should beware surprising and suspicious convergence—it would be surprising and suspicious if the same intervention (present-focused WAW work) was best for improving animals’ lives today and also happened to be best for improving animals’ lives in the distant future.
I worry about people interested in animal welfare justifying maintaining their existing work when they switch their focus to longtermism, when actually it would be better if they worked on something different.
(I hope it’s not confusing that I’m answering both your comments at once).
While I will have to consider this for longer, my preliminary thought is that I agree with most of what you said. Which means that I might not believe in some of my previous statements.
Thanks for the link to that post. I do agree and I can definitely see how some of these biases have influenced a couple of my thoughts.
--
Okay, I see. Well actually, my initial thought was that all of those four options had a similar impact on the longterm future. Which would justify focusing on short-term interventions and advocacy (which would correspond with working on point number three and four). However after further consideration, I think the first two are of higher impact when considering the far future. Which means I (at least for right now) agree with your earlier statement:
While I still think the “flow through effect” is very real for WAW, I do think that it’s probably true working on s-risks more directly might be of higher impact.
--
I was curious if you have some thoughts on these conclusions (concluded based on a number of things you said and my personal values):
Since working on s-risk directly is more impactful than working on it indirectly, direct work should be done when possible.
There is no current organization working purely on animal related s-risk (as far as I know). So if that’s your main concern, your options are start-up or convincing an “s-risk mitigation organization” that you should work on this area full time.
Animal Ethics works on advocating moral circle expansion. But since this is of less direct impact to the longterm future, this has less of an effect on reducing s-risk than more direct work.
If you’re also interested in reducing other s-risks (e.g. artificial sentience), then working for an organization that directly tries to reduce the probability of a number of s-risk is your best option (e.g. Center on Long-Term Risk or Center for Reducing Suffering).