Or maybe the area is unexplored and there are big potential benefits from spending some effort figuring out if there are high-impact interventions?
I think that’s pretty much it. Right now, there aren’t many known concrete promising interventions to my knowledge, but the value of information in this area seems extremely high.
Using the standard method of rating cause areas by scale, neglectedness and tractability, it seems wild animal suffering scores a lot higher on scale, much higher on neglectedness (although farm animals are already pretty neglected), and seemingly much lower on tractability. There’s quite a bit of uncertainty regarding the scale, but still it seems very clear it’s orders of magnitude beyond farm animals. Neglectedness is apparent and not uncertain at all. The one point that would count against investing in wild animal suffering, tractability, on the other hand is highly uncertain (i.e. has “low resilience”, see https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/the-moral-value-of-information-amanda-askell/ ), so there’s a chance that even little research could yield highly effective interventions, making it a highly promising cause area in that regard.
I would feel a lot more hesitant about large-scale interventions on wild animals, since they are part of complex ecosystems where I’ve been led to believe we don’t have a good enough understanding to anticipate long-term consequences accurately
You’re right about this one, and we probably all agree on things being a bit tricky. So either research on our long term impact on ecosystems could be very helpful, or we could try focusing on interventions that have a very high likelihood of having predictable consequences.
(That all being said, there may be many reasons to still put a lot of our attention on farm animal suffering; e.g. going too public with the whole wild animal suffering topic before there’s a more solid fundamental understanding of what the situation is and what, in principle, we could do to solve it while avoiding unforeseen negative effects, seems like a bad idea. Also finding ways to stop factory farming might be necessary for humanity’s “moral circle” to expand far enough to even consider wild animals in the first place, thus making a solution to factory farming a precondition to successful large scale work on wild animal suffering. But I’m rambling now, and don’t actually know enough about the whole topic to justify the amount of text I’ve just produced)
I guess this very much depends on how individual activities are executed. We had our 2.5 day retreat in Dortmund, Germany about a month ago, and while I didn’t see the evaluation results, I got a strong impression that most people agreed on these points (still, take this with a grain of salt):
career discussion in small groups (~3-5) was quite useful; we had about 1 hour per group, and more would probably have been better.
double crux (I guess similar to productive disagreement?) was a cool concept, but a bit difficult to execute under the given circumstances (although it worked great for me), for similar reasons as mentioned by you
discussion about where to donate—this was, to some degree, what this weekend was primarily about for us, as we raised money on the first evening and then had to figure out where to send it. And while it started very slowly, we ended up spending many hours on Sunday on this (very open) discussion, and it was tremendously valuable. I really didn’t expect this, but ultimately, judging from how engaged everybody was, how interesting our conversations were in the end, and how often each of us changed their mind over the course of the discussion, this was a great way to spend our time