“WAI does not appear to be unbeatable and therefore other charities in this space might be better uses of funding”
I was basing my comment on you asserting WAI was several orders of magnitude less cost-effective then other charities in the space. I absolutely agree that WAI might be less cost-effective than other groups, but this claim is a lot less extreme than the first one you made. I’d still love to see your estimate if you have it, because I’d appreciate a more critical lens on WAI’s theory of change than I’ve seen before.
Regarding other charities based on scientific research, you can largely tell that they’re working within a year or two of them launching. The evaluation doesn’t require academics. It doesn’t depend on anyone taking published research seriously; the interventions help regardless of whether or not anyone takes the evaluation seriously.
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I didn’t claim there was anything wrong with the scientific method. I claimed there was something wrong with academia. Apologies if I am misinterpreting you, but you seem to imply that other charities are around equally as dependent on academia. I think that’s clearly false.
I think this is interesting but probably incorrect — while other charities don’t have interventions that involve academia, any kind of claim about their effectiveness, and any ability they have to develop interventions is heavily reliant on it. We can’t tell at all if they are working without academics. Basically everything EA affiliated groups have done to help animals (cage-free campaigns, alternative proteins, welfare reforms, etc) have relied incredibly heavily on academia—they just happen to work on the other side of the academic research than WAI.
Taking Shrimp Welfare Project as an example (primarily because I suspect from a neartermist lens, SWP is far and away the most cost-effective animal charity, likely more cost-effective than WAI, and a great opportunity for donors right now too), they exclusively do welfare interventions. We literally would have no idea if they are helping animals without animal welfare science (like the science WAI funds). We might know that their interventions impacted a lot of animals, but we wouldn’t know the sign or degree of it at all. The only reason we have any idea that SWP, for example, is so impactful, is because of academic research. And SWP was only able to make determinations on what interventions to do based on that science. If you’re uncertain that science can be trusted as you express in your initial point, you’d have to throw this out all. The issues in science you point to are very very real. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make progress on animal issues based on scientific research, and that doing science well to support future interventions isn’t important.
Final comment—I’ve edited by initial comment to better reflect what I wanted to convey, but left the original text so the context of your reply remains for later readers.
I was basing my comment on you asserting WAI was several orders of magnitude less cost-effective then other charities in the space. I absolutely agree that WAI might be less cost-effective than other groups, but this claim is a lot less extreme than the first one you made. I’d still love to see your estimate if you have it, because I’d appreciate a more critical lens on WAI’s theory of change than I’ve seen before.
I think this is interesting but probably incorrect — while other charities don’t have interventions that involve academia, any kind of claim about their effectiveness, and any ability they have to develop interventions is heavily reliant on it. We can’t tell at all if they are working without academics. Basically everything EA affiliated groups have done to help animals (cage-free campaigns, alternative proteins, welfare reforms, etc) have relied incredibly heavily on academia—they just happen to work on the other side of the academic research than WAI.
Taking Shrimp Welfare Project as an example (primarily because I suspect from a neartermist lens, SWP is far and away the most cost-effective animal charity, likely more cost-effective than WAI, and a great opportunity for donors right now too), they exclusively do welfare interventions. We literally would have no idea if they are helping animals without animal welfare science (like the science WAI funds). We might know that their interventions impacted a lot of animals, but we wouldn’t know the sign or degree of it at all. The only reason we have any idea that SWP, for example, is so impactful, is because of academic research. And SWP was only able to make determinations on what interventions to do based on that science. If you’re uncertain that science can be trusted as you express in your initial point, you’d have to throw this out all. The issues in science you point to are very very real. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make progress on animal issues based on scientific research, and that doing science well to support future interventions isn’t important.
Final comment—I’ve edited by initial comment to better reflect what I wanted to convey, but left the original text so the context of your reply remains for later readers.