I suspect this answer will not be very satisfying to you, but it is in some sense the true answer so someone should provide it:
There are a great many possible causes in the world, and EA is focused on things which are (plausibly) the most effective in the world. By their nature only a small fraction of all causes are plausible candidates for the most effective, so we should expect most causes to not be EA causes. If you had some concrete arguments for why biodiversity might meet such a stringent standard, people could consider them, but in their absence the ‘default’ is for something to not be an EA cause.
In particular, in addition to some argument as to why having many species is very important, you might want some sort of comparison to:
Existential risk work, which aims at preventing the irreversible extinction of all species.*
Wild Animal Welfare work, which regards wild animals as maybe having net negative lives, and hence their extinction might be good (if this was by reducing the total number of animals).
For the second point, I think it’s a controversial position whether wild animals have net negative lives, and I think the field overall (that is people, working on wild animal welfare) does not have a strong position on it.
I’m still not a huge fan of the way it is written—it sounds almost like a strawman description of wild animal welfare work. In particular, I don’t think adding “maybe” does enough blunt/caveat the second part of the sentence, which is not presented very delicately.
I think the first dot point deserves fleshing out. I have done a very preliminary analysis of getting prepared with resilient foods for agricultural catastrophes such as nuclear winter, and it appears that this is a very cost-effective way of saving species. This is because if many people were starving, not only would they generally not care about preventing other species from going extinct due to the climate impacts, but they would likely actively eat many species to extinction. It would not take that much more work to turn this into an actual paper, and ALLFED would be happy to do it if someone wanted to fund it specifically (~$20,000). The model also has AGI safety, so we could look at the cost-effectiveness of that work of saving species. Naïvely, one might argue that preventing human extinction from a pandemic would be bad for biodiversity. However, the only hope of biodiversity continuing beyond about a billion years when the earth would naturally get too hot would be humans controlling the climate or relocating species. So overall, I would agree that work on existential risk is likely effectively helping biodiversity in the long term.
I suspect this answer will not be very satisfying to you, but it is in some sense the true answer so someone should provide it:
There are a great many possible causes in the world, and EA is focused on things which are (plausibly) the most effective in the world. By their nature only a small fraction of all causes are plausible candidates for the most effective, so we should expect most causes to not be EA causes. If you had some concrete arguments for why biodiversity might meet such a stringent standard, people could consider them, but in their absence the ‘default’ is for something to not be an EA cause.
In particular, in addition to some argument as to why having many species is very important, you might want some sort of comparison to:
Existential risk work, which aims at preventing the irreversible extinction of all species.*
Wild Animal Welfare work, which regards wild animals as maybe having net negative lives, and hence their extinction might be good (if this was by reducing the total number of animals).
* as a first approximation
For the second point, I think it’s a controversial position whether wild animals have net negative lives, and I think the field overall (that is people, working on wild animal welfare) does not have a strong position on it.
Thanks, added a ‘maybe’.
I’m still not a huge fan of the way it is written—it sounds almost like a strawman description of wild animal welfare work. In particular, I don’t think adding “maybe” does enough blunt/caveat the second part of the sentence, which is not presented very delicately.
I think the first dot point deserves fleshing out. I have done a very preliminary analysis of getting prepared with resilient foods for agricultural catastrophes such as nuclear winter, and it appears that this is a very cost-effective way of saving species. This is because if many people were starving, not only would they generally not care about preventing other species from going extinct due to the climate impacts, but they would likely actively eat many species to extinction. It would not take that much more work to turn this into an actual paper, and ALLFED would be happy to do it if someone wanted to fund it specifically (~$20,000). The model also has AGI safety, so we could look at the cost-effectiveness of that work of saving species. Naïvely, one might argue that preventing human extinction from a pandemic would be bad for biodiversity. However, the only hope of biodiversity continuing beyond about a billion years when the earth would naturally get too hot would be humans controlling the climate or relocating species. So overall, I would agree that work on existential risk is likely effectively helping biodiversity in the long term.