For what it’s worth (as someone who helped found Arthropoda but is no longer involved), I’d very much like there to be more convincing arguments against taking insects and other arthropods seriously. I feel pretty heavily incentivized to believe arguments against it as doing the animal welfare work I care more about emotionally (wild animal welfare) would be far easier. Working on animal welfare (and any other issue, if you care about second order effects) is vastly harder if you care about effects on insects, and I’d prefer the simpler world of only caring about vertebrates.  

I think it’s pretty typical for the people who work on a cause area to be convinced that cause area matters. This is of course a source of bias, but, for example, asking global health charities to hire at least some people skeptical that we should improve the lives of people in developing countries seems like…. a hard request to fulfill at a minimum?

And, I believe that I and probably other people who have worked in this space are skeptics - just not extreme ones. I personally would not bet on any insects having morally relevant experiences, and put the odds at probably <30%. Relative to many this is less skeptical, but in absolute terms it still is skepticism - it sounds like you’re just advocating for there to be extreme skeptics - e.g. people who put the odds at, say, <1%. To analogize to global health again, it already feels odd to say “global health organizations should have folks who think there is a >70% chance this isn’t good thing to do”, let alone asking them to have staff who think there is a >99% chance. 

A non-exhaustive list of things that seem like plausible candidates from a scale perspective, but are at varying points in the quality of research (and many are probably not near the certainty level we would need on the overall sign, but could be fairly easily, at least for target effects), and a rough guess at the scale of the number of animals that could be impacted by target effects:

• Adapting more humane insecticides (hundreds of trillions?)
• Indoor cats outside the US (where it's mostly successfully been done) (low billions)
• Eradicating rabies (mostly done successfully in Europe, very much not done in the US and other parts of the world) (tens of millions)
• Rodent fertility control (hundreds of millions)
• Other fertility control treatments for "pest" animals (pigeons, etc) (tens of millions)
• Bird safe glass (already required by law in many jurisdictions (e.g. New York City for new construction)) (hundreds of millions)
• More effective and humane island predator removal (millions)
• Screwworm eradication (tens of billions)

All of these seem feasible in the nearer future, but still are minor compared to the scale of the bigger problems in the space, which I think academic field building is fundamental to address. If I could choose only one, I'd choose doing further academic field building over implementing any of these (though luckily we don't have to choose between them).

(also, to be clear, WAI's views might be very different than my own - just trying to give a flavor of what kind of timelines I was thinking about when setting up WAI).

If useful for calibrating, when we launched WAI, I expected it to take 50+ years to feel excited about any large-scale interventions. That level of investment at current wild animal welfare spending levels seems very worth it given the scale of the the issues at stake — at current levels, it would cost less over 50 years than is spent on farmed animal welfare in a single year, and farmed animal welfare is a much smaller problem by many orders of magnitude. 

But my timelines for good WAW interventions are now much shorter - on the order of a few years (so I guess making a correct original prediction at more like 10-15 years). That's partially due to WAI having a lot of success in building a pipeline for research, but also due to me thinking that non-target effects are less important to understand perfectly than I used to and due to me no longer thinking other animal interventions (with a few very notable exceptions) are particularly cost-effective, such that I think the kinds of interventions on the table in the near future for wild animals look much more promising.

I also should have flagged that the IRS will expedite applications in two other unusual circumstances:

• A newly created organization providing disaster relief to victims of emergencies.
• IRS errors have caused undue delays in issuing a determination letter.

The second doesn't really help (since you've probably already been delayed by the errors), but I could imagine very impactful projects needing to be set up quickly for disaster response.

This is super interesting and not something I considered - but it seems right that you're more likely to make a mistake and move money to less impactful things accidentally is you're trying to move the money between very impactful things, then from relatively low impact to higher impact.

Yeah, I think that one of the most impactful things already impactful organizations can do is raise money from non-EA sources (because presumably the alternate use is so much worse). I do think donor advisors who work to bring new donors in provide a ton of value.

Yeah! I strongly agree with the difficulty in doing this (and that EA is a unique fundraising environment with donors with a weirdly high willingness to change their mind). But, I think one under-appreciated fact is that if charities really strongly differ in cost-effectiveness, non-cost-effectiveness-oriented donation advising for non-EA donors might accidentally be doing tons of good (e.g. by making minor shifts in how funds are used that end up having larger changes in size of effect than the difference in cost-effectiveness between EA interventions)

Nice! That's super exciting. And I feel very excited about the work ACE is doing to bring conventional animal donors / conservation donors into this work, because that seems incredibly valuable! I think where I disagree with many people's views about ACE is that I think ACE doing perfectly rigorous charity evaluation is much less important than ACE expanding the pool of donors, because I think most of ACE's impact comes via expanding the pool of donors, like you describe.

See the last sentence :) But I should have highlighted this more. It's a great piece.

I agree, I basically believe this, at least within my lifetime / timespans that seem reasonable to think strategically on, and I think I count as an animal advocate! I'd prefer this not be true obviously, but it seems pretty likely to me.

My sense is this feeling is not uncommon among very EA animal advocates — e.g. I can think of 5-10 people offhand who I would bet would agree, including people in leadership roles at animal organizations.