I haven’t examined the screwworm eradication in detail. Someone told me that gene drives are politically infeasible. People working on it told me that it’s totally feasible. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, political feasibility is not something I can evaluate. The cost-effectiveness in the linked article seems a lot more conservative than my estimates.
If screwworm eradication intervention is promising, then maybe there are other promising WAW interventions. Yes, so far the experience of researchers has been that it’s more difficult to find cost-effective WAW interventions compared to farmed animal interventions. This is partly because it’s so difficult to think about the indirect effects of WAW. But someone told me “unknown unknowns cancel each other out.” In other words, maybe we don’t need to think about 3rd order effects because they might be canceled out by 4th order effects, and so on. I feel very confused about this, I’d like to think more about it at some point.
Also, perhaps if we find WAW interventions, they might have a bigger scale than typical farmed animal welfare interventions. So maybe searching for FAW interventions is easier and more immediately rewarding but it’s still just as worthwhile to search for WAW interventions.
I haven’t examined the screwworm eradication in detail. Someone told me that gene drives are politically infeasible. People working on it told me that it’s totally feasible. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, political feasibility is not something I can evaluate. The cost-effectiveness in the linked article seems a lot more conservative than my estimates.
If screwworm eradication intervention is promising, then maybe there are other promising WAW interventions. Yes, so far the experience of researchers has been that it’s more difficult to find cost-effective WAW interventions compared to farmed animal interventions. This is partly because it’s so difficult to think about the indirect effects of WAW. But someone told me “unknown unknowns cancel each other out.” In other words, maybe we don’t need to think about 3rd order effects because they might be canceled out by 4th order effects, and so on. I feel very confused about this, I’d like to think more about it at some point.
Also, perhaps if we find WAW interventions, they might have a bigger scale than typical farmed animal welfare interventions. So maybe searching for FAW interventions is easier and more immediately rewarding but it’s still just as worthwhile to search for WAW interventions.
I would not want to ignore higher-order effects, and would rather try to bound their expected values, do sensitivity analysis and consider what we do at the level of portfolios of interventions instead of just interventions in isolation, and hedging.