In my opinion wild animal welfare work has a high probability of achieving nothing (we have very little idea what to do) a moderate chance of doing a large amount of harm (many options risk disrupting ecosystems) and a small chance of doing some net good, likely many hundreds or thousands of years in the future. In addition, the ethics of humans intervening to reduce suffering associated with natural processes, like predation is contested. By contrast, there are cost effective options for farm animal welfare and it is definitely our business.
Organisations using Rethink Priorities’ mainline welfare ranges should consider effects on soil nematodes, mites, and springtails.
Although I’m not an expert my current belief is that the welfare of these things doesn’t matter at all because their utility = 0. Also, the article suggests that the people supporting this are fine with eliminating much of the world’s biodiversity, and I think that would be terrible.
Someone should commission new moral weights work in the next year
I strongly agree with the author’s point about the danger of relying too heavily on one study, especially given the importance of moral weights in estimating cost effectiveness. I also think that there is value in reexamining moral weights within GHD (eg health relative to income).
I found this comment (and the post by Danny) really interesting and helpful. I am new to EA and have been persuaded by its arguments to donate to the Malaria Consortium. But I am also an environmental economist and an surprised by the EA communities apparent lack of interest in biodiversity (while acknowledging that some of the other commenters' points re comparative importance and whether it is overly neglected may have some validity).
One issue that interests me is the potential to make environmental interventions (both investments and regulations) more effective. EA examples like it being 1,000s of times more effective to donate to preventing or curing blindness than donating to training guide dogs are important. I think this scale of improvement in effectiveness is possible with environmental interventions. In both areas wildly inefficient interventions can be supported because people are sometimes satisfied by things that sound good or signal their concern, with little or no thought to maximising impact.
In short, I think that:
the EA community should consider rating the importance of biodiversity more highly
EA-type thinking could be used to make biodiversity interventions much more effective .
I am not sure what would be involved in writing arguments with you about this or whether I would be suited to doing this, but I'm happy to talk .
In my opinion wild animal welfare work has a high probability of achieving nothing (we have very little idea what to do) a moderate chance of doing a large amount of harm (many options risk disrupting ecosystems) and a small chance of doing some net good, likely many hundreds or thousands of years in the future. In addition, the ethics of humans intervening to reduce suffering associated with natural processes, like predation is contested. By contrast, there are cost effective options for farm animal welfare and it is definitely our business.
In general we have no idea what the far-future effects of our actions will be and this fact weighs heavily against this proposition.
Although I’m not an expert my current belief is that the welfare of these things doesn’t matter at all because their utility = 0. Also, the article suggests that the people supporting this are fine with eliminating much of the world’s biodiversity, and I think that would be terrible.
I strongly agree with the author’s point about the danger of relying too heavily on one study, especially given the importance of moral weights in estimating cost effectiveness. I also think that there is value in reexamining moral weights within GHD (eg health relative to income).
I found this comment (and the post by Danny) really interesting and helpful. I am new to EA and have been persuaded by its arguments to donate to the Malaria Consortium. But I am also an environmental economist and an surprised by the EA communities apparent lack of interest in biodiversity (while acknowledging that some of the other commenters' points re comparative importance and whether it is overly neglected may have some validity).
One issue that interests me is the potential to make environmental interventions (both investments and regulations) more effective. EA examples like it being 1,000s of times more effective to donate to preventing or curing blindness than donating to training guide dogs are important. I think this scale of improvement in effectiveness is possible with environmental interventions. In both areas wildly inefficient interventions can be supported because people are sometimes satisfied by things that sound good or signal their concern, with little or no thought to maximising impact.
In short, I think that:
I am not sure what would be involved in writing arguments with you about this or whether I would be suited to doing this, but I'm happy to talk .