mal_graham🔸

Karma: 1,026

mal_graham🔸 20 Aug 2026 22:47 UTC
15 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Two crazy-ish charitable global poverty project ideas
Extremely randomly, I also have had vulture conservation on my list for ~ a year for “crazy-ish wild animal welfare intervention ideas.” Basically the rough argument is they reduce disease for wildlife also, and disease is probably a big welfare cost in the wild, and since they (mostly) don’t kill other animals directly, you don’t have to balance out an increase in “landscape of fear” effects. If you think maggots have really high moral value and net positive lives you might dislike the competitive population reduction effect, but most people won’t care about that.

mal_graham🔸 20 Aug 2026 13:22 UTC
30 points
4 ∶ 0
in reply to: SiobhanBall’s comment on: WAI is starting Phase 3 of field-building for wild animal welfare science
Okay cool, that’s helpful. It seems like the root disagreement is not whether research is ever worth funding, but how clear the research —> impact path should be, and perhaps how short.

My guess from this/reading your other comments is that ~ 2 major things underpin a difference between you and I in terms of excitement about WAW/WAI. Both connect to the fact that cost-effectiveness is always a comparative claim. So on the one hand, I probably rate WAWS as more cost-effective to promote than you do, but importantly, I also rate other things as less cost-effective than you do (making the bar easier to clear).

Towards the latter point: I care a lot about indirect and unintended effects of interventions on all sentient beings. This means that, without a good understanding of ecology and WAW, the cost-effectiveness of the vast majority of potential animal welfare interventions is basically not knowable. For a variety of reasons connected to (what I view as) the failure of the taste/price/convenience model, I don’t have that much confidence that merely inventing cultivated meat will be enough to change diets. But even if it was, I don’t have any idea exactly how those diets will change (small animal replacement problems), or how the resulting land use changes will affect wild animal welfare. I’m pretty consequentialist in my ethics, so I’m not comfortable helping some farmed animals at the expense of billions to quadrillions of wild animals. As someone who hates factory farming this is a hard place for me to sit, and I’m probably not ethically pure on it — I still am vegan and support farmed animal advocacy financially. But in response to the uncertainty about how shrimp stunning, cultivated meat, vegan advocacy, etc. affects wild animals, the only thing I can see to do is research it, and my calculations of cost effectiveness of those other activities is correspondingly really really wide, making research a cost-effectiveness-competitive thing to do.

My guess is that you don’t share this view at all and may even think it’s sort of dumb! That’s fine, but arguing about whether WAI in particular is cost-effective won’t help us make progress on this disagreement (which I think is also the source of disagreement between you and the vast majority of other people who are excited about WAWS). Instead, if you wanted to change my mind that WAI was a good giving opportunity, you’d need to show me that I should not care about the effects of land use change resulting from factory farming elimination or cultivated meat production on wild animal welfare (among a variety of other things).

The second source of disagreement is how much the sort of field-building work WAI does leads into interventions, and how soon. Using cultivated meat as a benchmark: yes, we already have cultivated meat, but we have no way to produce it cost effectively at scale. I’m not a cultivated meat expert, but barring some kind of revolutionary development I would assume that we’re more than 5 years away from scaled cultivated meat deployment? If that’s right, there are definitely interventions in WAW that could realistically be available on that timeline. We already have a variety of contraceptive products that work in the lab for rodents. I’m in the middle of designing a targeted research program that (I hope) will get us to the point of a cost-effective, scalable deployment within 5-8 years. Similarly, I’ve designed a research agenda that I believe, within ~ 3-5 years of research, maybe less, could answer to a degree of confidence I’d be willing to act on whether bird-window collision prevention is net positive to promote. Another angle I’m pursuing is wildlife vaccination — it might not pan out, but if it does, I would expect to be ready to recommend an intervention within no more than 10 years. Whether that’s good enough probably depends on how quickly you think other interventions will start benefiting animals; you might think cultivated meat replacement will be here in much less time than I do.

Connecting this back to WAI: although I’m not doing this work at WAI, none of it would be possible without WAI. My work there and the field-building work they’ve done give me the tools I need to do this more intervention-focused research, and the research WAI does/supports is the substrate by which these ideas have been generated. If the work I’m doing now continues to make progress, I’ll need scientists who get the basic ideas to carry it out. And once I rule in/rule out the ideas I already have, I’ll need there to have been more research in the meantime to support more ideas and ways to help animals.

None of this is that dissimilar to what GFI does for cultivated meat. If I understand correctly, the product didn’t really exist before EAs got into it, and a huge amount of EA and animal advocacy money went towards not just object level research but building university groups so there would be a talent pipeline, lobbying to make more money available, etc. And WAI is working on a harder problem at an earlier stage, so things are a little slower/less tractable, but the scale is commensurately higher.

I don’t really expect you or others with values focused on shorter timelines/direct effects only to be convinced — I think it’s fine for EAs to differ on what they mean by “cost-effective.” Some people want “strong evidence for immediate-ish impact” and others want to take a bunch of high risk, high reward bets and expect that at least a couple pan out. Both are legitimate investment strategies, and WAI is likely to be most appealing to people who (1) are very worried about indirect effects or (2) prefer the latter cost-effectiveness definition.

mal_graham🔸 20 Aug 2026 11:40 UTC
10 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: SiobhanBall’s comment on: WAI is starting Phase 3 of field-building for wild animal welfare science
(I don’t work at WAI anymore)

Not addressing your question, but asking to try to better understand your perspective: don’t the points you’ve made here roughly apply to cultivated meat as well (which many agree is a legitimate EA cause area, and also you seem to personally endorse it)?

I know saying “my cause area is wasting money but hey yours is too” is not an effective argument; that’s not what I’m trying to do. But I think if I understood why “millions spent, no animals helped yet” doesn’t apply, in your view, to cultivated meat I’d better understand the root of our disagreement.

mal_graham🔸 18 Aug 2026 12:35 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Luke Hecht’s comment on: Counting animals: Stable population size is not equivalent to priority level
Thanks Luke, yeah I think we could have been more careful about consistency in using different population size phrases to mean distinct things.

Broadly wherever in the post we say “standing population size” or “stable population size” or something we mean “that thing that people are usually talking about when they publish a paper estimating an animal population size.” But because methods vary so much in the literature, especially for invertebrates, this isn’t always just the adult population (including a sort of random assortment of ages depending on the method, sometimes the adult population at a particular time of year as opposed to averaged over the year, etc.).

If I get some time I’ll go through and clarify terms.

Counting animals: Stable population size is not equivalent to priority level

abrahamrowe12 Jul 2026 23:26 UTC

85 points

7 comments13 min readEA link

mal_graham🔸 11 Jul 2026 14:30 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Anthony DiGiovanni 🔸’s comment on: AMA: Anthony DiGiovanni, author of the ‘Challenge of Unawareness’ sequence
Sorry I’m probably missing something, but I’m not understanding why real world examples from EA would be particularly relevant given how young a movement it is. I think someone could grant that we have the ability to be justified in assigning probabilities to things that are likely to happen soon, and agree that the risk of things we’re totally unaware of happening in the next ~ 10-50 years might be (at least in some circumstances) sufficiently small to not have unawareness problems.

But once you start trying to be an impartial altruist about far future beings, that seems to me where you really can’t get away from unawareness problems. And so I guess if you wanted to convince me I was wrong about that, we should be looking at things that people thought 1000 years ago, and how things they caused today were bad even though they were trying to do good for reasons they weren’t only poorly calibrated on but in fact totally unaware of—and it just seems likely to me there would be tons of examples of that?

Maybe the development of gunpowder stands out here as something being pursued in the hopes of achieving eternal life (ostensibly an altruistic motivation) and presumably the possibility of guns was not on people’s radar. I guess it would eventually have been figured out anyway, but how much harm did having gunpowder X years earlier cause?

Maybe an objection here is that an “ideal” agent would have of course considered the possibility of any chemical work being misused, but IDK—they weren’t even trying to make something explosive. I don’t see how even a perfectly rational being could have predicted all the harms gunpowder would cause given that they were aiming to do alchemy. What probability could they have possibly been justified, given their epistemic position, in assigning to ”super bad outcomes from pursuing eternal life chemistry” given that they probably could not have imagined the scale of modern warfare?

I do get a little mixed up on this between “people are not ideal and so regularly make large mistakes that look like cluelessness” vs “even an ideal agent could not be justified in their probability assignments given what is theoretically knowable” so maybe I’m misunderstanding something.

mal_graham🔸 11 Jul 2026 14:15 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: AMA: Anthony DiGiovanni, author of the ‘Challenge of Unawareness’ sequence
Does P1 rely in any way on the idealized agent actually using EV specifically, as opposed to other theoretically possible aggregations of all or most of the possible consequences of A and B? It seems like no to me but I was curious since it is explicitly mentioned.

mal_graham🔸 11 Jul 2026 14:11 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: AMA: Anthony DiGiovanni, author of the ‘Challenge of Unawareness’ sequence
Can you explain a little more what you mean by “coarse-grained” in P3? Does that just mean “very unlikely to include all the possible outcomes, so there’s a ton of unknown unknowns we don’t know how to assign probability to” or something else?

mal_graham🔸 1 Jun 2026 22:15 UTC
48 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Marcus Abramovitch 🔸’s comment on: A chance to speak up for mosquito eradication in the USA (by June 5)
I am not at all an expert in mosquitoes, but I think it would be hard to figure out more than the direct effects on mosquitoes, which are sex specific. A few assorted thoughts:
- Scale: the Google Debug program website says when applied, they need to releases 100s of thousands to millions of mosquitoes each week, so the scale is reasonably high.
- They release only male mosquitoes, but it’s not possible to rear only male mosquitoes (AFAIK), so they are killing all the females. The Debug project’s Nature Biotechnology article says that they sort males from females as pupae (which may involve low welfare cost, I don’t know when sentience emerges in insects and especially whether it’s possible to feel pain as a pupa), and again as adults (which, if insects are sentient, probably is painful for those females). They report that 95% of females are removed as pupae, so a much smaller amount are being killed as adults. About 2.5% of what make it through the first sort are females, so we can estimate that to achieve daily releases of ~ 75k males, ~2000 females are killed as adults daily. The paper does not seem to report how the females are killed for either pupae or adults, which is a big gap from a welfare perspective.
- According to this, Wolbachia often shorten lifespans. But several strains also seem to enhance immune function and have other mutualisms. So in some cases it could have positive welfare effects. I asked Claude about the specific strain used in the Debug program, and it reported that most of the welfare effects land on females, who are already just being killed. Of course, we don’t know that much about measuring mosquito welfare, but at least in terms of survival, ability to find a mate (which correlates to locomotor and sensory performance), etc., this strain isn’t bad. And if they use something that really harms the released males they won’t outcompete the local males, which would drive up costs (because you have to release more mosquitoes to compensate).
- The technique will result in a reduction in number of mosquitoes. It’s not clear to me how other populations would respond to that—I’m not sure what competitors there are for mosquito resources. But if you think mosquitoes have bad lives this could be a good thing (or neutral if you have person-affecting leanings). The FAQ on the Debug page claims that in urban areas, because the mosquitoes are invasive, it will just be a “return to normal”—but that ignores the fact that many other things have changed (reductions in native insect populations, for example). If it’s true that this specific species doesn’t make up a meaningful part of any other animal’s diet the effect is likely to be small, but that sounds like something we don’t really know (well-resolved urban food webs are rare). They might mean “no animal anybody in ecology especially cares about.”
- For many bugs, high mortality during captive rearing is common. That doesn’t seem to be the case for mosquitoes—survival rates in the 90s are reported in many captive colonies and mass die offs are unusual (according to this, thanks Claude). But the success rates for male mosquitoes in the Debug project is around 70%. The paper is fairly detailed on the rearing approach so someone with more mosquito expertise than I might be able to say more about welfare. Broadly, I’d still expect it’s much better than wild mosquitoes—they’re fed, kept at comfortable temperatures, spared from predators, etc.
- An interesting question long term would be how this affects pesticide use in urban areas. If most pesticide applications in cities aims at reducing mosquitoes, and we start using Wolbachia to control them instead, pesticide application might go down, resulting in recoveries of other insect populations and reduced sub-lethal harms. If you think bugs have good lives, yay. If you think they have awful ones, uh oh.
I’d likely support doing this—effects on humans are good (which to be clear I weight very highly!), male mosquitoes seem broadly fine, and females are killed mostly as pupae, I’m clueless about the welfare interpretation of population effects. That said, others might feel more concerned about population effects, which probably depends a lot on how you feel about insects generally and how much you think this could alter insecticide usage.

I spent less than an hour on this comment though, so obviously this is not the final word!

mal_graham🔸 23 May 2026 0:38 UTC
10 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Announcing the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund
Hi Nick—just regarding the team page issue, are you thinking of this page: https://rethinkpriorities.org/our-research-areas/worldview-investigations/ ? It has the people listed in your screenshot from Claude.

As a reference, I got to this from CCF page --> support our work --> under the “our team” section. Notably, the link is from this text:

“The Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund sits on top of work done by our Worldview Investigations Team (WIT), and Interdisciplinary Research Team, groups established specifically to tackle the hard questions that most donors don’t have time to engage with: how to compare welfare across species, how to reason under deep uncertainty, how to weigh present benefits against future ones, how to aggregate competing moral views into a single allocation.

The team brings together training in philosophy, economics, statistics, cognitive science, moral psychology, and decision theory . The fund’s allocations also draw on the in-house expertise of RP’s Global Health and Development, Animal Welfare, AI departments, so the cross-cause model is informed by researchers working directly in each area, not just secondary literature. ”

So I’m interpreting that paragraph as saying that WIT work goes into the report, but not necessarily that the WIT team did all the work (in particular, the interdisciplinary research team clearly was also involved, and the second paragraph suggests other teams contributed as well).

mal_graham🔸 1 Apr 2026 15:18 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: If wild animal welfare is intractable, everything is intractable.
Nope, I just mean that on average, a bird who avoids a collision would live for a few more years based on typical lifespans. I meant “fully recovers from or avoids the collision.” Of course if they have some lingering injury or issue their life expectancy will be lower.

mal_graham🔸 28 Mar 2026 13:48 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Lorenzo Buonanno🔸’s comment on: Controlling the fertility of rodents may impact soil ants and termites much more than rodents?
It’s definitely correct that rats do not consume their entire daily liquid needs from contrapest in field conditions. I can’t quickly find evidence for the 1.8L figure—this study includes a DC trial, but might not be the same one (the citation links in the EA Forum post weren’t working for me). Based on figure 9, 0 to 1200 mL of bait per month were consumed, depending on site and month. That’s not a good indicator of the effective dose, since treated adult rats might still consume some of it, but it could be a reasonable indicator of how much bait you’d need to buy to treat a given alley—although for the study I link, that’s complicated by the fact that I wouldn’t take their reports of reductions particularly seriously. Issues include: camera traps have to be used quite carefully to be good estimates of population abundance, and pairing them with a bait station is not good for that; it’s hard to tell whether rats are adults or juveniles once they’ve left the burrow and especially using camera traps; there’s no control sites, there were only two treatment sites, the treatment sites varied considerably in their features, etc.

mal_graham🔸 28 Mar 2026 13:09 UTC
18 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Controlling the fertility of rodents may impact soil ants and termites much more than rodents?
Thanks for pointing out that the production mechanism might have an influence on land use. I think that’s interesting and will reflect on it.
Unfortunately I think this post is otherwise not very relevant, mainly because no one uses Contrapest—the liquid bait formulation doesn’t work in any context where water is readily available because rats don’t drink it, it’s extremely messy and hard for people to use. If you wanted to do this comparison more seriously, I’d encourage you to focus on Evolve, which has a more similar profile production-wise (it’s a solid bait, like most rodenticides) and conservationists have proven more willing to try it (whether it works outside the lab is still unclear, the company has not made its test data particularly accessible for review and no independent test runs have been published yet).
To clarify, the reason I viewed (at time of writing of the previous post) that rodenticide replacement on islands might be approximately ecologically inert is that conservationists use products until rats are entirely eradicated and then stop. This means any ecological impact differences between product 1 for eradication and product 2 for eradication are essentially transient. You have this short duration of time during the eradication, and then a long period after where conditions on the island are basically the same. On reflection, you’re probably right that this is not sufficient to mean they are ecologically inert in the strict sense.^[1] Overall I suppose I was imagining that people might have degrees of commitment to the ecologically inert concept, but I could have written more carefully.
A few other notes, not comprehensive:
- I strongly doubt that comparing “cost to prevent one birth/cause one death” is the right comparison. The population dynamics of suppressing fertility are different than those from killing adults, so the timeline to eradication (in the island context) and the application volumes would likely be different, among other things.
- The dosages are difficult to determine. Although the paper you cite reports bait consumption in ideal laboratory conditions—“the median rat (ranked by consumption) consumed an average of 74 ml of bait per day; individual means ranged from 66 to 83 ml per day”—all the male rats in this study gained weight. These are wild rats who have been taken into captivity and given ad libitum access to food, water, and Contrapest—these are just not realistic conditions to estimate field consumptions. Senestech itself recommends 400mL tank as a 1 month supply (for an unclear area based on my quick review of the website).
- Other complications: The dosing requirements also seem to be quite different between species of rats. Published studies are almost all co-authored by Senestech staff, and therefore somewhat less confidence-inducing than independent validations would be.
- If we’re talking about use in settings other than islands, I want to reiterate that those are definitely not ecologically inert even to some approximation, and there are tons of things you’d have to look at besides production method if you wanted to estimate total animal effects. Age structure changes in rat populations, food web dynamics, most rodent fertility control agents appear to have reasonably strong insecticidal effects while brodifacoum doesn’t affect most invertebrates we’ve studied, etc.
- Since I’m not sure Evolve works either, it may be that any fertility control product used in the future has an entirely different formulation, making speculation here quite difficult.
- I think I’m just generally more comfortable than you balancing my uncertainties with a combination of direct work on arthropods, and work on things that have (1) high non-arthropod upsides and (2) where I’m clueless about the effects on arthropods. I’m not sure I’m perfectly actioning my own values (given my moral uncertainty, I’m not sure how I could be) but I would burn out if I only worked on insects all the time; it’s too depressing.
1. ^
  although I do wonder if the limited duration of these eradications and amount of use for island conservation relative to overall production is high enough to make a meaningful impact on land use? I don’t think these things are continuous so a small enough demand shift signal might not have any impact? Just speculating...

mal_graham🔸 17 Jan 2026 14:57 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Michael St Jules 🔸’s comment on: Improving wild animal welfare reliably
Re: your footnote: I think this depends heavily on how severe we are talking. I don’t have a strong opinion, because I really think no one has looked at it, about how much more severe things can get from disease than from something like keel bone fractures. A priori it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that the artificial conditions of factory farming enable a chicken to live in pain much longer, and therefore have higher overall suffering, than we would ever see in the wild—but I’m not that confident in that idea, so it would be good to look at more diseases. The point being that a severe enough disease could still be worth working on in dalys/dollar terms even if it doesn’t affect that many individuals, and that would also make it more ecologically inert in many cases (since changing the circumstances of very large numbers of animals seems riskier).

WAI facilitated a grant from Coefficient (then OP) years ago to look at disease severity; they came out with a few papers recently here and here. As is perhaps unsurprising, but disappointing, much of the research on disease in wildlife doesn’t provide enough info to do a good job estimating the welfare burden. But the high scoring bacterial zoonoses in the first paper could be a good place to start a research project attempting to better assess the severity and numerosity compared to FAW conditions (as a cost effectiveness bar).

mal_graham🔸 17 Jan 2026 14:47 UTC
16 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Tristan Katz’s comment on: Improving wild animal welfare reliably
I’ve been thinking about this approach since last year, and haven’t had time to prioritize it to do detailed work on a framework, but I have some initial thoughts. I think you’re right that, if you’re comfortable with that sort of cluelessness, this kind of thing is relatively safe to do (although as @Michael St Jules 🔸 notes, I’d also want to do some proper population modeling in a highly studied ecosystem to get some grounding for the idea).

But I think you can actually do better than focusing on only the very worst diseases depending on population parameters. For example, in populations that are top-down regulated (i.e., the population size is held under the carrying capacity of the resource by an external factor), you would not expect increases in starvation as a result of removing a disease (caveat: if that disease *is* the top down regulator, than you would have a problem—which unfortunately is the case in many CWD contexts). So then the disease doesn’t need to be worse than both starvation and predation, say, but rather just worse than predation. The population size would equilibriate somewhere a bit higher, but the top-down regulation creates a buffer between population size and resource carrying capacity, and at high enough predation pressures you might reasonably expect almost no population increase.
So I think in an ideal case, you’d identify (1) a high suffering disease that (2) affects a population primarily controlled by intense predation pressure in (3) a predator that mainly eats the target population (so the increases in predator population sizes don’t affect other animals, who aren’t having a disease treated and for whom this would just represent an increase in suffering).

Of course, if you have a population with high predation pressure, the target population probably dies very quickly after getting the disease, so the suffering caused by the disease might not be very long in duration. But if its a really awful disease that could still be a lot of suffering.

I don’t think anyone’s done a scan of the literature for diseases with these properties, and I doubt you’d easily find a perfect case—most populations are a mixture of top-down and bottom-up regulation. But I also think that probably my few hours of playing around with these ideas on the side of my other work are not likely to be the final word on the question :) so I’m optimistic someone spending a lot more time with this could identify other “ecological profiles” of diseases that make them “safer” in indirect effects terms to work on than others (I think there’s some things to say about bottom-up regulated populations as well, for example—probably there you would want a disease that is a lot worse than starvation).

mal_graham🔸 25 Nov 2025 19:00 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Eli Rose🔸’s comment on: If wild animal welfare is intractable, everything is intractable.
@Eli Rose🔸 I think Anthony is referring to a call he and I had :)

@Anthony DiGiovanni I think I meant more like there was a justification of the basic intuition bracketing is trying to capture as being similar to how someone might make decisions in their life, where we may also be clueless about many of the effects of moving home or taking a new job, but still move forward. But I could be misremembering! Just read your comment more carefully and I think you’re right that this conversation is what I was thinking of.

mal_graham🔸 24 Nov 2025 22:25 UTC
13 points
3 ∶ 1
in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Donation Election Discussion Thread
This is not an unreasonable take, but just in the interest of having an accurate public record, I’m actually the strategy director for WAI (although I was the executive director previously). Also, none of us at Arthropoda are technically animal welfare scientists. Our training is all in different things (for example, my PhD is in engineering mechanics and Bob’s a philosopher who published a lot of skeptical pieces on insects).

Basically, I think we came to Arthropoda because the work we did before that changed our minds. More importantly, I don’t think the majority of Arthropoda’s work will be about checking for sentience? Rather, we’re taking a precautionary framework about insects being sentient and asking how to improve their welfare if they are. In this context our views on sentience seem less likely to cause a COI—although I also expect all our research to be publicly available for people to red-team as needed :)

Finally, fully agree on the extreme personnel overlap. I would love to not be co-running a bug granting charity as a volunteer in addition to my two other jobs! But the resource constraints and unusualness of this space are unfortunately not particularly conducive to finding a ton of people willing to take on leadership roles.

mal_graham🔸 23 Nov 2025 23:56 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Eli Rose🔸’s comment on: If wild animal welfare is intractable, everything is intractable.
All very interesting, and yes let’s talk more later!

One quick thing: Sorry my comment was unclear—when I said “precise probabilities” I meant the overall approach, which amounts to trying to quantify everything about an intervention when deciding its cost effectiveness (perhaps the post was also unclear).
I think most people in EA/AW spaces use the general term “precise probabilities” the same way you’re describing, but perhaps there is on average a tendency toward the more scientific style of needing more specific evidence for those numbers. That wasn’t necessarily true of early actors in the WAW space and I think it had some mildly unfortunate consequences.

But this makes me realize I should not have named the approach that way in the original post, and should have called it something like the “quantify as much as possible” approach. I think that approach requires using precise probabilities—since if you allow imprecise ones you end up with a lot of things being indeterminate—but there’s more to it than just endorsing precise probabilities over imprecise ones (at least as I’ve seen it appear in WAW).

mal_graham🔸 23 Nov 2025 17:18 UTC
12 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Eli Rose🔸’s comment on: If wild animal welfare is intractable, everything is intractable.
Thanks Eli!

I sort of wonder if some people in the AI community—any maybe you, from what you’ve said here? -- are using precise probabilities to get to the conclusion that you want to work primarily on AI stuff, and then spotlighting to that cause area when you’re analyzing at the level of interventions.

I think someone using precise probabilities all the way down is building a lot more explicit models every time they consider a specific intervention. Like if you’re contemplating running a fellowship program for AI interested people, and you have animals in your moral circle, you’re going to have to build this botec that includes the probability an X% of the people you bring into the fellowship are not going to care about animals and likely, if they get a policy role, to pass policies that are really bad for them. And all sorts of things like that. So your output would be a bunch of hypotheses about exactly how these fellows are going to benefit AI policy, and some precise probabilities about how those policy benefits are going to help people, and possibly animals to what degree, etc.
I sort of suspect that only a handful of people are trying to do this, and I get why! I made a reasonably straightforward botec for calculating the benefits to birds of bird-safe glass, that accounted for backfire to birds, and it took a lot of research effort. If you asked me how bird-safe glass policy is going to affect AI risk after all that, I might throw my computer at you. But I think the precise probabilities approach would imply that I should.

Re:
It might be interesting to move out of high-level reason zone entirely and just look at the interventions, e.g. directly compare the robustness of installing bird-safe glass in a building vs. something like developing new technical techniques to help us avoid losing control of AIs.

I’m definitely interested in robustness comparisons but not always sure how they would work, especially given uncertainty about what robustness means. I suspect some of these things will hinge on how optimistic you are about the value of life. I think the animal community attracts a lot more folks who are skeptical about humans being good stewards of the world, and so are less convinced that a rogue AI would be worse in expectation (and even folks who are skeptical that extinction would be bad). So I worry AI folks would view “preserving the value of the future” as extremely obviously positive by default, and that (at least some) animal folks wouldn’t, and that would end up being the crux about whether these interventions are in fact robust. But perhaps you could still have interesting discussions among folks who are aligned on certain premises.
Re:
What would the justification standards in wild animal welfare say about uncertainty-laden decisions that involve neither AI nor animals: e.g. as a government, deciding which policies to enact, or as a US citizen, deciding who to vote for President?
Yeah, I think this is a feeling that the folks working on bracketing are trying to capture: that in quotidian decision-making contexts, we generally use the factors we aren’t clueless about (@Anthony DiGiovanni—I think I recall a bracketing piece explicitly making a comparison to day-to-day decision making, but now can’t find it… so correct me if I’m wrong!). So I’m interested to see how that progresses.
I suspect though, that people generally just don’t think about justification that much. In the case of WAW-tractability-skeptics, I’d guess some large percentage are likely more driven by the (not unreasonable at first glance) intuition that messing around in nature is risky. The problem of course is that all of life is just messing around in nature, so there’s no avoiding it.

mal_graham🔸 23 Nov 2025 15:46 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Jacob_Peacock’s comment on: If wild animal welfare is intractable, everything is intractable.
Yeah, I could have made that more clear—I am more focused on the sociology of justification. I supposed if you’re talking pure epistemics, it depends whether you’re constructivist about epistemological truth. If you are, then you’d probably have a similar position—that different communities can reasonably end up with justification standards, and no one community have more claim to truth than the other.
I suspect, though, that most EAs are not constructivists about epistemology, and so vaguely think that some communities have better justification standards than others. If that’s right, then the point is more sociological: that some communities are more rigorous about this stuff than others, or even that they might use the same justification standards but differ in some other way (like not caring about animals) that means the process looks a little different. So the critic I’m modeling in the post is saying something like: “sure, some people do justification better than others, but these are different communities so it makes sense that some communities care more about getting this right than others do.”

I guess another angle could be from meta-epistemic uncertainty. Like if we think there is a truth about what kinds of justification practices are better than others, but we’re deeply uncertain about what it is, it may then still seem quite reasonable that different groups are trying different things, especially if they aren’t trying to participate in the same justificatory community.

Not entirely sure I’ve gotten all the philosophical terms technically right here, but hopefully the point I’m trying to make is clear enough!

mal_graham🔸

Count­ing an­i­mals: Stable pop­u­la­tion size is not equiv­a­lent to pri­or­ity level

Counting animals: Stable population size is not equivalent to priority level