Great post!
As comments by Max and Vasco hint at, I think it might still be the case that considering effects on wild animals is essential when evaluating any short-termist intervention (including those for farmed animals and human welfare). For example, I remain uncertain whether vegetarianism increases or decreases total suffering because of wild-animal side effects, mainly because beef may (or may not!) reduce a lot of suffering even if all other meat types increase it. (I still hope people avoid eating chicken and other small farmed animals.)
In my opinion, the most important type of WAW research is getting more clarity on big questions, like what the net impact is of cattle grazing, climate change, and crop cultivation on total invertebrate populations. These are some of the biggest impacts that humanity has on wild animals, and the answers would inform analysis of the side effects of various other interventions like meat reduction or family planning.
I haven’t followed a lot of the recent WAW work, but my experience is that many other people working on WAW are less focused on these questions about how humans change total population sizes. Researchers more often think about ways to improve welfare while keeping population size constant. Those latter interventions may have more public support and are more accommodating to non-suffering-focused utilitarians who don’t want to reduce the amount of happiness in nature. But as you mention, those interventions also seem more subject to cluelessness (is vaccination net good or bad considering side effects? it’s super unclear) and often target big animals rather than invertebrates. From this perspective, I think efforts to improve the welfare of farmed chickens and fish may be more cost-effective (though it’s still worth exploring wild-animal interventions too, as you say). Research and advocacy of less painful killing of wild-caught fish also seems extremely important, and it’s unclear whether to count this as a farmed-animal or wild-animal intervention.
Apart from less painful killing of wild animals (fish, rodents, insect on crop fields), or maybe some other large-scale interventions like reducing aquatic noise, I think the cost-effectiveness of work on wild animals would come from trying to reduce (or avoid increasing) population sizes, via reducing plant productivity. Reducing the amount of plant growth in an ecosystem helps invertebrates (including mites, springtails, and nematodes, which are extremely numerous but also hard to help in ways other than preventing their existence) and is somewhat less subject to cluelessness problems because you don’t have to model internal ecosystem dynamics as much—you just have to reduce the productivity of the first trophic level. But I haven’t found a lot of people who are interested in working on population-reduction interventions. This apparent lack of interest in reducing populations is one reason I’ve done less thinking about WAW in recent years. Another reason is that I respect the efforts of WAW organizations to put a more mainstream face on the WAW movement, and I wonder if my continuing to harp on why we should actually be focusing on reducing populations would seem to them as counterproductive.
I compiled a list of possible interventions to reduce total invertebrate populations that could possibly be lobbied for at the government level in some fashion. Some of them don’t seem super cost-effective, but some might be, such as trying to reduce irrigation subsidies, which is an intervention that could be argued for on other grounds as well. Taxing fertilizer and/or water use on crop fields, pastures, and/or lawns might be pretty valuable if it could be achieved. (Some local regions do have subsidies for people who reduce their lawn’s water use.) If geoengineering to fertilize oceans ever happens, opposing it would be extremely important, though doing a campaign about that now might be net harmful via increasing the salience of the idea.
Bostrom was essentially still a kid (age ~23) when he wrote the 1996 email. What effect does it have on kids’ psychology to think that any dumb thing they’ve ever said online can and will be used against them in the court of public opinion for the rest of their lives? Given that Bostrom wasn’t currently spreading racist views or trying to harm minorities, it’s not as though it was important to stop him from doing ongoing harm. So the main justification for socially punishing him would be to create a chilling effect against people daring to spout off flippantly worded opinions going forward. There are some benefits to intimidating people away from saying dumb things, but there are also serious costs, which I think are probably underestimated by those expressing strong outrage.
Of course, there are also potentially huge costs to flippant and crass discussion of minorities. My point is that the stakes are high in both directions, and it’s very non-obvious where the right balance to strike is. Personally I suspect the pendulum is quite a bit too far in the direction of trying to ruin people’s lives for idiotic stuff they said as kids, but other smart people seem to disagree.
As some others have noted, probably the best approach we can take to the question of a genetic racial IQ gap is to voluntarily avoid mentioning the idea or at least to portray the question as relatively uninteresting (as Bostrom said in his apology), especially since the policy implications of such a gap wouldn’t be that big anyway. However, trying to suppress inquiries by others into the topic seems to me like it may cause more harm than good, via the Streisand effect. If it looks like there’s secret knowledge that the scientific community has informally conspired to suppress, the topic suddenly becomes way more interesting. There was also a genuine conspiracy (both in terms of meetings among scientists and tacit peer pressure) to suppress discussion of the lab-leak theory of COVID-19 in 2020, and that fact made the question much juicier.
I admire that Bostrom’s apology didn’t take the easy way out by lying to pretend he thinks there’s no possibility of a genetic IQ gap. I see that as a positive sign about his intellectual honesty. (Actually, it’s obvious that between any two groups of humans, there will be some difference in the distribution of genes and therefore some nonzero genetically caused difference in the average of almost any trait you wish to measure. The real question is whether those differences are big or negligible. And even if the differences are non-negligible, I suspect it’s usually bad to highlight them anyway, such as due to stereotype threat and the possibility of encouraging violence toward and persecution of outgroups. In medical contexts, such as when people with African ancestry are genetically more at risk from certain diseases than other groups, highlighting these differences seems useful.)