Okay cool, thatâs helpful. It seems like the root disagreement is not whether research is ever worth funding, but how clear the research â> impact path should be, and perhaps how short.
My guess from this/âreading your other comments is that ~ 2 major things underpin a difference between you and I in terms of excitement about WAW/âWAI. 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/âprice/âconvenience model, I donât have that much confidence that merely inventing cultivated meat will be enough to change diets. But even if it was, I donât 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. Iâm pretty consequentialist in my ethics, so Iâm 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 Iâm probably not ethically pure on it â 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 donât share this view at all and may even think itâs sort of dumb! Thatâs fine, but arguing about whether WAI in particular is cost-effective wonât 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, youâd 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. Iâm not a cultivated meat expert, but barring some kind of revolutionary development I would assume that weâre more than 5 years away from scaled cultivated meat deployment? If thatâs 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. Iâm 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, Iâve designed a research agenda that I believe, within ~ 3-5 years of research, maybe less, could answer to a degree of confidence Iâd be willing to act on whether bird-window collision prevention is net positive to promote. Another angle Iâm pursuing is wildlife vaccination â 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 thatâs 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 Iâm not doing this work at WAI, none of it would be possible without WAI. My work there and the field-building work theyâve done give me the tools I need to do this more intervention-focused research, and the research WAI does/âsupports is the substrate by which these ideas have been generated. If the work Iâm doing now continues to make progress, Iâll need scientists who get the basic ideas to carry it out. And once I rule in/ârule out the ideas I already have, Iâll 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 didnât 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/âless tractable, but the scale is commensurately higher.
I donât really expect you or others with values focused on shorter timelines/âdirect effects only to be convinced â I think itâs fine for EAs to differ on what they mean by âcost-effective.â Some people want âstrong evidence for immediate-ish impactâ 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.
Extremely randomly, I also have had vulture conservation on my list for ~ a year for âcrazy-ish wild animal welfare intervention ideas.â 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) donât kill other animals directly, you donât have to balance out an increase in âlandscape of fearâ 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 wonât care about that.