Huge fan of the work your team has done, so thank you all for everything! A couple questions :)
1. For potential donors who are particularly interested in wild animal welfare research, how would you describe any key differentiating factors between the approaches of Rethink Priorities and Wild Animal Initiative?
2. For donors who might want to earmark donations to go specifically towards wild animal welfare research within your organization, would this in turn affect the allocation of priority-agnostic donations otherwise made to Rethink? Or is there a way in which such earmarked donations indeed counterfactually support this specific area as opposed to the general areas you cover? (This question applies to most multi-focused orgs.)
3. With respect to invertebrate research, and specifically āinvertebrate sentienceā, it seems that the sheer number of invertebrates existing would be the driving factor in calculating any expected benefit of pursuing interventions. Are there āsentience probabilitiesā low enough to put such an expected value of intervention in question? (I have not thoroughly looked through your publicly available work, so feel free to point to relevant resources if this question has been addressed!)
Thanks for your questions. Iāll let Marcus and Peter answer the first two, but I feel qualified to answer the third.
Certainly, the large number of invertebrate animals is an important factor in why we think invertebrate welfare is an area that deserves attention. But I would advise against relying too heavily on numbers alone when assessing the value of promoting invertebrate welfare. There are at least two important considerations worth bearing in mind:
(1) First, among sentient animals, there may be significant differences in capacity for welfare or moral status. If these differences are large enough, they might matter more than the differences in the numbers of different types of animals.
On (1), we see our work in WAW as currently doing three things: (1) foundational research (e.g., understanding moral value and sentience, understanding well-being at various stages of life), (2) investigating plausible tractable interventions (i.e., feasible interventions currently happening or doable within 5 years), and (3) field building and understanding (e.g., currently we are running polls to see how āweirdā the public finds WAW interventions).
We generally defer to WAI on matters of direct outreach (both academic and general public) and do not prioritize that area as much as WAI and Animal Ethics do. Itās hard to say more on how our vision differs from WAI without them commenting, but we collaborate with them a lot and we are next scheduled to sync on plans and vision in early January.
On (2), itās hard to predict exactly what additional restrict donations do, but in general, we expect them to increase in the long run how much we spend in a cause by an amount similar to how much is donated. Reasons for this include: we budget on a fairly long-term basis, so we generally try to predict what we will spend in a space, and then raise that much funding. If we donāt raise as much as weād like, we likely consider allocating our expenses differently; and if we raise more than we expected, weād scale up our work in a cause area. Because our ability to work in spaces is influenced by how much we raise, generally raising more restricted funding in a space ought to lead to us doing more work in that space.
Huge fan of the work your team has done, so thank you all for everything! A couple questions :)
1. For potential donors who are particularly interested in wild animal welfare research, how would you describe any key differentiating factors between the approaches of Rethink Priorities and Wild Animal Initiative?
2. For donors who might want to earmark donations to go specifically towards wild animal welfare research within your organization, would this in turn affect the allocation of priority-agnostic donations otherwise made to Rethink? Or is there a way in which such earmarked donations indeed counterfactually support this specific area as opposed to the general areas you cover? (This question applies to most multi-focused orgs.)
3. With respect to invertebrate research, and specifically āinvertebrate sentienceā, it seems that the sheer number of invertebrates existing would be the driving factor in calculating any expected benefit of pursuing interventions. Are there āsentience probabilitiesā low enough to put such an expected value of intervention in question? (I have not thoroughly looked through your publicly available work, so feel free to point to relevant resources if this question has been addressed!)
Thanks in advance for all your thoughts!
Hi Dan,
Thanks for your questions. Iāll let Marcus and Peter answer the first two, but I feel qualified to answer the third.
Certainly, the large number of invertebrate animals is an important factor in why we think invertebrate welfare is an area that deserves attention. But I would advise against relying too heavily on numbers alone when assessing the value of promoting invertebrate welfare. There are at least two important considerations worth bearing in mind:
(1) First, among sentient animals, there may be significant differences in capacity for welfare or moral status. If these differences are large enough, they might matter more than the differences in the numbers of different types of animals.
(2) Second, at some point, Pascalās Mugging will rear its ugly head. There may be some point below which we are rationally required to ignore probabilities. Itās not clear to me where that point lies. (And itās also not clear that this is the best way to address Pascalās Mugging.) There are about 440 quintillion nematodes alive at any given time, which sounds like a pretty good reason to work on nematode welfare, even if oneās credence in their sentience is really low. But nematodes are nothing compared to bacteria. There are something like 5 million trillion trillion bacteria alive at any given time. At some point, it seems as if expected value calculations cease to be appropriately action-guiding, but, again, itās very uncertain where to draw the line.
Thanks for the questions!
On (1), we see our work in WAW as currently doing three things: (1) foundational research (e.g., understanding moral value and sentience, understanding well-being at various stages of life), (2) investigating plausible tractable interventions (i.e., feasible interventions currently happening or doable within 5 years), and (3) field building and understanding (e.g., currently we are running polls to see how āweirdā the public finds WAW interventions).
We generally defer to WAI on matters of direct outreach (both academic and general public) and do not prioritize that area as much as WAI and Animal Ethics do. Itās hard to say more on how our vision differs from WAI without them commenting, but we collaborate with them a lot and we are next scheduled to sync on plans and vision in early January.
On (2), itās hard to predict exactly what additional restrict donations do, but in general, we expect them to increase in the long run how much we spend in a cause by an amount similar to how much is donated. Reasons for this include: we budget on a fairly long-term basis, so we generally try to predict what we will spend in a space, and then raise that much funding. If we donāt raise as much as weād like, we likely consider allocating our expenses differently; and if we raise more than we expected, weād scale up our work in a cause area. Because our ability to work in spaces is influenced by how much we raise, generally raising more restricted funding in a space ought to lead to us doing more work in that space.