Lizka comments on Why I No Longer Prioritize Wild Animal Welfare

Lizka 16 Feb 2023 15:04 UTC
10 points
3 ∶ 0
Thanks so much for sharing this; I’m curating it.
I’d also encourage people to read the comments and this exchange (and also look at “The correct response to uncertainty is *not* half-speed”).
Some particularly good qualities of this post:
- +1 to “I always appreciate ‘why I updated against what I was working on posts’” from Larks
- The info and opinions expressed in the post were useful
- This was easy to follow for people with little experience in wild animal welfare
- This was carefully caveated
This isn’t a summary, but in case people are looking for the overall opinion, I found the following a helpful excerpt (bold mine):
After looking into these topics, I now tentatively think that WAW is not a very promising EA cause because:
- In the short-term (the next ten years), WAW interventions we could pursue to help wild animals now seem less cost-effective than farmed animal interventions.
- In the medium-term (10-300 years), trying to influence governments to do WAW work seems similarly speculative to other longtermist work but far less important.
- In the long-term, WAW seems important but not nearly as important as preventing x-risks and perhaps some other work.
[...]
My subjective probability that the WAW movement will take off with $8 million per year of funding is not that much higher than the probability that it will take off with $2 million per year of funding, as the movement’s success probably mostly depends on factors other than funding. But with $2 million, the probability would be much higher than with $0 (I’m using somewhat random numbers here to make the point). And ideally, the money that we do spend on WAW would be used to fund people with different visions about WAW to try multiple different approaches so that we could see which approaches work best. I see some of this happening now, so I mostly support the status quo. Of course, my opinion on how much funding WAW should receive might change upon seeing concrete funding proposals.