I’ve thought about WAW much less than you, but my take is:
At the moment, the only WAW-related work we can do involves researching the topic. A lot. Probably for a long time.
That’s because any real-world-implementation work on WAW would be phenomenally complex, and the sign will be very hard to know most (all?) of the time.
But the scale is big enough that it’s worth it (except, perhaps, from a longtermist perspective)
As far as I can tell, there’s nothing in your post to update away from this opinion? (I read it quickly, so sorry if I missed something)
Thanks Sanjay, that’s a great question! Here are my thoughts:
Scale of WAW is big because it encompasses millions of sub-problems. But unless you are looking into destroying nature (which is politically infeasible and I don’t want to do it), you are looking at things like a particular pigeon disease, or how noise from ships affects haddocks. And then the scale doesn’t look that big. Ambiguity about what constitutes a cause is one of the reasons why I now rarely think in terms of scale-neglectedness-tractability. And I’m skeptical of these sub-questions eventually leading to some grand conclusions because nature is so complicated and messy and things from one ecosystem often don’t generalize to another.
In the best-case scenario, there would be as much research done on WAW as there is research on ecology. But that still probably wouldn’t be nearly enough. An ecologist once told me that it’s still very difficult to predict how population sizes of animals will change given an intervention, despite there being relatively a lot of research on this. Predicting how overall welfare will change is likely to be many times more difficult. See more on this here. Maybe an advanced AI could solve these complexities, but if we’re going to have an AI that powerful soon, then WAW is not what I’d focus on.
Even if we figured out all the consequences, there might still be no agreement on what to do. Conclusions of an intervention might look like this: “if we do this, it will be worse for human economy, better for climate change, increase intense fox suffering during death by 30%, decrease chronic lower intensity fox suffering by 40%, increase rabbit population by 20%, decrease ant population by 10%...” And we might not know what to do with that. How to weigh these different things against each other depends on moral intuitions and people seem to disagree on these a lot (though I haven’t seen surveys on it, maybe I’m wrong). See more on this here.
Whenever I research something, I have an intuition about how useful what I’m researching is. When researching WAW interventions, my intuition was that it was less useful per hour spent than my research on farmed animals. Part of it was that I have no expertise in ecology or other fields related to WAW. But I felt that there was more to it. Research by others also felt a bit much less useful though I wasn’t exposed to it that much. It’s just very unclear what is the right thing to do in WAW so things we research and do seem somewhat random and I don’t know what impact on WAW they will ultimately have. So I’d rather try to improve farmed animal welfare.
I strong-upvoted this comment. I found the beginning of the comment particularly helpful:
Scale of WAW is big because it encompasses millions of sub-problems. But unless you are looking into destroying nature (which is politically infeasible and I don’t want to do it), you are looking at things like a particular pigeon disease, or how noise from ships affects haddocks. And then the scale doesn’t look that big.
Great to get your takes Saulius, appreciate it.
I’ve thought about WAW much less than you, but my take is:
At the moment, the only WAW-related work we can do involves researching the topic. A lot. Probably for a long time.
That’s because any real-world-implementation work on WAW would be phenomenally complex, and the sign will be very hard to know most (all?) of the time.
But the scale is big enough that it’s worth it (except, perhaps, from a longtermist perspective)
As far as I can tell, there’s nothing in your post to update away from this opinion? (I read it quickly, so sorry if I missed something)
Thanks Sanjay, that’s a great question! Here are my thoughts:
Scale of WAW is big because it encompasses millions of sub-problems. But unless you are looking into destroying nature (which is politically infeasible and I don’t want to do it), you are looking at things like a particular pigeon disease, or how noise from ships affects haddocks. And then the scale doesn’t look that big. Ambiguity about what constitutes a cause is one of the reasons why I now rarely think in terms of scale-neglectedness-tractability. And I’m skeptical of these sub-questions eventually leading to some grand conclusions because nature is so complicated and messy and things from one ecosystem often don’t generalize to another.
In the best-case scenario, there would be as much research done on WAW as there is research on ecology. But that still probably wouldn’t be nearly enough. An ecologist once told me that it’s still very difficult to predict how population sizes of animals will change given an intervention, despite there being relatively a lot of research on this. Predicting how overall welfare will change is likely to be many times more difficult. See more on this here. Maybe an advanced AI could solve these complexities, but if we’re going to have an AI that powerful soon, then WAW is not what I’d focus on.
Even if we figured out all the consequences, there might still be no agreement on what to do. Conclusions of an intervention might look like this: “if we do this, it will be worse for human economy, better for climate change, increase intense fox suffering during death by 30%, decrease chronic lower intensity fox suffering by 40%, increase rabbit population by 20%, decrease ant population by 10%...” And we might not know what to do with that. How to weigh these different things against each other depends on moral intuitions and people seem to disagree on these a lot (though I haven’t seen surveys on it, maybe I’m wrong). See more on this here.
Whenever I research something, I have an intuition about how useful what I’m researching is. When researching WAW interventions, my intuition was that it was less useful per hour spent than my research on farmed animals. Part of it was that I have no expertise in ecology or other fields related to WAW. But I felt that there was more to it. Research by others also felt a bit much less useful though I wasn’t exposed to it that much. It’s just very unclear what is the right thing to do in WAW so things we research and do seem somewhat random and I don’t know what impact on WAW they will ultimately have. So I’d rather try to improve farmed animal welfare.
I strong-upvoted this comment. I found the beginning of the comment particularly helpful: