[The thoughts expressed below are tentative and reveal lingering confusion in my own brain. I hope they are somewhat insightful anyways.]
This seems on-point and super sensible as a rough heuristic (not a strict proof) when looking at impact through a counterfactual analysis that focuses mostly on direct effects. But I don’t know if and how it translates to different perspectives of assessing impact. If there never were high impact opportunities in the first place, because impact is dispersed across the many actions needed to bring about desired consequences, then it doesn’t matter whether a lot or only a few people try to grab these opportunities from the table—because there would be nothing to grab in the first place.
Maybe the example helps to explain my thinking here (?): If we believe that shrimp/insect welfare can be improved significantly by targeted interventions that a small set of people push for and implement, then I think your case for it being a high impact opportunity is much more reasonable than if we believe that actual improvements in this area will require a large-scale effort by millions of people (researchers, advocates, implementers, etc). I think most desirable change in the world is closer to the latter category.*
*Kind of undermining myself: I do recognise that this depends on what we “take for granted” and I tentatively accept that there are many concrete decision situations where it makes sense to take more for granted than I am inclined to do (the infrastructure we use for basically everything, many of the implementing and supporting actions needed for an intervention to actually have positive effects, etc), in which case it might be possible to consider more possible positive changes in the world to fall closer to the former category (the former category ~ changes in the world that can be brought about by a small group of individuals).
Yes, I think this issue of how many people you need to get on board with the vision/goals to make some change happen is key (and perhaps a crux). I agree the number of people needed to implement a change might be huge (all the farm workers making changes for various animal welfare things) but think we probably don’t need to get all of them to care a lot more about nonhumans to get the job done. So in my view often a small-ish set of people advocate for/research/fund/plan some big change, and then lots of people implement it because they are told to/paid to.
[The thoughts expressed below are tentative and reveal lingering confusion in my own brain. I hope they are somewhat insightful anyways.]
This seems on-point and super sensible as a rough heuristic (not a strict proof) when looking at impact through a counterfactual analysis that focuses mostly on direct effects. But I don’t know if and how it translates to different perspectives of assessing impact. If there never were high impact opportunities in the first place, because impact is dispersed across the many actions needed to bring about desired consequences, then it doesn’t matter whether a lot or only a few people try to grab these opportunities from the table—because there would be nothing to grab in the first place.
Maybe the example helps to explain my thinking here (?): If we believe that shrimp/insect welfare can be improved significantly by targeted interventions that a small set of people push for and implement, then I think your case for it being a high impact opportunity is much more reasonable than if we believe that actual improvements in this area will require a large-scale effort by millions of people (researchers, advocates, implementers, etc). I think most desirable change in the world is closer to the latter category.*
*Kind of undermining myself: I do recognise that this depends on what we “take for granted” and I tentatively accept that there are many concrete decision situations where it makes sense to take more for granted than I am inclined to do (the infrastructure we use for basically everything, many of the implementing and supporting actions needed for an intervention to actually have positive effects, etc), in which case it might be possible to consider more possible positive changes in the world to fall closer to the former category (the former category ~ changes in the world that can be brought about by a small group of individuals).
Yes, I think this issue of how many people you need to get on board with the vision/goals to make some change happen is key (and perhaps a crux). I agree the number of people needed to implement a change might be huge (all the farm workers making changes for various animal welfare things) but think we probably don’t need to get all of them to care a lot more about nonhumans to get the job done. So in my view often a small-ish set of people advocate for/research/fund/plan some big change, and then lots of people implement it because they are told to/paid to.