The original was 454 words. The edited version is ~40% shorter at 288 words. I have no writing experience, and I had to take the time to understand your post. It’s likely you could have done this in a mere fraction of the time. “Weeks or months” is a gross exaggeration.
Edited Version (all caveats kept in)
Context and conclusions
I’ve spent months trying to find a wild animal welfare (WAW) intervention that is:
Tractable (can in principle be funded >$100K/yr starting in 2023 even if we choose not to do so),
Non-controversial (>40% support and <30% oppose in a US poll), and
Reducing aquatic noise seemed most viable. It’s probably less than 10% as cost-effective as chicken welfare reforms, but there’s a small chance the best interventions trump corporate chicken welfare campaigns. I’ve arguably set the bar too high; some of the last EA-funded animal welfare interventions (arguably) don’t meet it
I think Aquatic noise is most promising of all WAW interventions available right now, but it might be better to wait for something better. Experts told me that testing how noise impacts the most populous species would likely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and might have inconclusive results. Academic research in aquatic noise (if no-one else is doing this already) and general WAW outreach seem more promising at present.
This exercise was a little mean but made a useful point so was pretty interesting.
Rather than proving “editing for style and readability is quick and easy for everyone,” this made me think “wow there’s a huge opportunity here for more people to start using editors”!
The fact that you could clearly rewrite this comment presumably without subject matter expertise makes me think there should be more people asking you to edit their work for a small fee …
More than “a little mean” in my view – seems like showing off what Eliezer calls “writing privilege.” But I agree otherwise, and yes, it does seem useful.
It is currently 7:07 AM for me. To test your claim that it would take weeks to write more concisely and for a general audience, I’m going to edit the first 5 paragraphs of the report and see how long it takes.
The point I’m trying to make is that there’s something insensitive about assuming that because you can do something in 40 minutes, other EAs must be able to do it in that time as well. I’ve repeatedly had people tell me that some task should be easy for me (in writing contexts, specifically), but I ended up taking >3x the amount of time they said it should take me.
I started writing this comment at 7:31.
The original was 454 words. The edited version is ~40% shorter at 288 words. I have no writing experience, and I had to take the time to understand your post. It’s likely you could have done this in a mere fraction of the time. “Weeks or months” is a gross exaggeration.
Edited Version (all caveats kept in)
Context and conclusions
I’ve spent months trying to find a wild animal welfare (WAW) intervention that is:
Tractable (can in principle be funded >$100K/yr starting in 2023 even if we choose not to do so),
Non-controversial (>40% support and <30% oppose in a US poll), and
Directly cost-effective (10%+ as cost-effective in expectation as chicken welfare corporate campaigns).
Reducing aquatic noise seemed most viable. It’s probably less than 10% as cost-effective as chicken welfare reforms, but there’s a small chance the best interventions trump corporate chicken welfare campaigns. I’ve arguably set the bar too high; some of the last EA-funded animal welfare interventions (arguably) don’t meet it
I think Aquatic noise is most promising of all WAW interventions available right now, but it might be better to wait for something better. Experts told me that testing how noise impacts the most populous species would likely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and might have inconclusive results. Academic research in aquatic noise (if no-one else is doing this already) and general WAW outreach seem more promising at present.
Why aquatic noise seemed promising
The main sources of aquatic noise are:
Ships and boats
Seismic surveys (usually to find oil and gas)
Sonar
Pile driving and other offshore construction
Wind farms
Acoustic deterrent devices used by fish farms
Dynamite fishing
Note: Deep-sea mining may become an important noise source in the future. More speculatively, so might underwater GPS (Ghaffarivardavagh et al. (2020).
This list is in the order of importance that many articles seem to give to each source (e.g., Duarte et al. (2021), Širović et al. (2021), Hildebrand (2004), Williams et al. (2018)), often implicitly. I haven’t yet seen any analysis of the relative importance of each.
This exercise was a little mean but made a useful point so was pretty interesting.
Rather than proving “editing for style and readability is quick and easy for everyone,” this made me think “wow there’s a huge opportunity here for more people to start using editors”!
The fact that you could clearly rewrite this comment presumably without subject matter expertise makes me think there should be more people asking you to edit their work for a small fee …
More than “a little mean” in my view – seems like showing off what Eliezer calls “writing privilege.” But I agree otherwise, and yes, it does seem useful.
Step 3 masterfully executed
The point I’m trying to make is that there’s something insensitive about assuming that because you can do something in 40 minutes, other EAs must be able to do it in that time as well. I’ve repeatedly had people tell me that some task should be easy for me (in writing contexts, specifically), but I ended up taking >3x the amount of time they said it should take me.