Suppose we invest more into researching wild animal suffering. We might become somewhat confident that an intervention is valuable and then implement it, but this intervention turns out to be extremely harmful. WAS is sufficiently muddy that interventions might often have the opposite of the desired effect. Or perhaps research leads us to conclude that we need to halt space exploration to prevent people from spreading WAS throughout the galaxy, but in fact it would be beneficial to have more wild animals, or we would terraform new planets in a way that doesn’t cause WAS. Or, more likely, the research will just accomplish nothing.
I think the value of higher quality and more information in terms of wild animal suffering will still be a net positive, meaning that funding research in WAS could be highly valuable. I say ‘could’ only because something else might still be more valuable. But if, on expected value, it seems like the best thing to do, the uncertainties shouldn’t put us off too much, if at all.
Suppose we invest more into researching wild animal suffering. We might become somewhat confident that an intervention is valuable and then implement it, but this intervention turns out to be extremely harmful. WAS is sufficiently muddy that interventions might often have the opposite of the desired effect. Or perhaps research leads us to conclude that we need to halt space exploration to prevent people from spreading WAS throughout the galaxy, but in fact it would be beneficial to have more wild animals, or we would terraform new planets in a way that doesn’t cause WAS. Or, more likely, the research will just accomplish nothing.
I think the value of higher quality and more information in terms of wild animal suffering will still be a net positive, meaning that funding research in WAS could be highly valuable. I say ‘could’ only because something else might still be more valuable. But if, on expected value, it seems like the best thing to do, the uncertainties shouldn’t put us off too much, if at all.
Yes, I agree that WAS research has a high expected value. My point was that it has a non-trivial probability (say, >10%) of being harmful.