I voted for Wild Animal Initiative, followed by Shrimp Welfare Project and Arthropoda Foundation (I have COIs with WAI and Arthropoda).
All three cannot be funded by OpenPhil/GVF currently, despite WAI/SWP being heavily funded previously by them.
I think that wild animal welfare is the single most important animal welfare issue, and it remains incredibly neglected, with just WAI working on it exclusively.
Despite this challenge, WAI seems to have made a ton of progress on building the scientific knowledge needed to actually make progress on these issues.
Since founding and leaving WAI, I’ve just become increasingly optimistic about there being a not-too-long-term pathway to robust interventions to help wild animals, and to wild animal welfare going moderately mainstream within conservation biology/ecology.
Wild animal welfare is downstream from ~every other cause area. If you think it is a problem, but that we can’t do anything about it because the issue is so complicated, then the same is true of the wild animal welfare impacts of basically all other interventions EAs pursue. This seems like a huge issue for knowing the impact of our work. No one is working on this except WAI, and no other issues seem to cut across all causes the way wild animal welfare does.
SWP seems like they are implementing the most cost-effective animal welfare intervention that is remotely scalable right now.
In general, I favor funding research, because historically OpenPhil has been far more likely to fund research than other funders, and it is pretty hard for research-focused organizations to compete with intervention-focused organizations in the animal funding scene, despite lots of interventions being downstream from research. Since Arthropoda also does scientific field building / research funding, I added it to my list.
Incidentally, I work on AI alignment and strongly agree with your points here, especially “Wild animal welfare is downstream (upstream, I think you mean?) from ~every other cause area”
I also think Wild Animal Initiative R&D may eventually wind up being extremely impactful for AI alignment.
Since it’s so unbelievably neglected and potentially high impact, I view it as a fairly high EV neglected approach that could contribute enormously to AI alignment.
Additionally, and a bit more out there, but the more we invest in this today, the better it may be for us in acausal trade with future intelligences that we’d want to prioritize our wellbeing too.
Nice! And yeah, I shouldn’t have said downstream. I mean something like, (almost) every intervention has wild animal welfare considerations (because many things end up impacting wild animals), so if you buy that wild animal welfare matters, the complexity of solving WAW problems isn’t just a problem for WAI — it’s a problem for everyone.
I voted for Wild Animal Initiative, followed by Shrimp Welfare Project and Arthropoda Foundation (I have COIs with WAI and Arthropoda).
All three cannot be funded by OpenPhil/GVF currently, despite WAI/SWP being heavily funded previously by them.
I think that wild animal welfare is the single most important animal welfare issue, and it remains incredibly neglected, with just WAI working on it exclusively.
Despite this challenge, WAI seems to have made a ton of progress on building the scientific knowledge needed to actually make progress on these issues.
Since founding and leaving WAI, I’ve just become increasingly optimistic about there being a not-too-long-term pathway to robust interventions to help wild animals, and to wild animal welfare going moderately mainstream within conservation biology/ecology.
Wild animal welfare is downstream from ~every other cause area. If you think it is a problem, but that we can’t do anything about it because the issue is so complicated, then the same is true of the wild animal welfare impacts of basically all other interventions EAs pursue. This seems like a huge issue for knowing the impact of our work. No one is working on this except WAI, and no other issues seem to cut across all causes the way wild animal welfare does.
SWP seems like they are implementing the most cost-effective animal welfare intervention that is remotely scalable right now.
In general, I favor funding research, because historically OpenPhil has been far more likely to fund research than other funders, and it is pretty hard for research-focused organizations to compete with intervention-focused organizations in the animal funding scene, despite lots of interventions being downstream from research. Since Arthropoda also does scientific field building / research funding, I added it to my list.
Incidentally, I work on AI alignment and strongly agree with your points here, especially “Wild animal welfare is downstream (upstream, I think you mean?) from ~every other cause area”
I also think Wild Animal Initiative R&D may eventually wind up being extremely impactful for AI alignment.
Since it’s so unbelievably neglected and potentially high impact, I view it as a fairly high EV neglected approach that could contribute enormously to AI alignment.
Additionally, and a bit more out there, but the more we invest in this today, the better it may be for us in acausal trade with future intelligences that we’d want to prioritize our wellbeing too.
Nice! And yeah, I shouldn’t have said downstream. I mean something like, (almost) every intervention has wild animal welfare considerations (because many things end up impacting wild animals), so if you buy that wild animal welfare matters, the complexity of solving WAW problems isn’t just a problem for WAI — it’s a problem for everyone.