Thanks for the detailed clarification, Mo.

Hi. Have you considered analysing not only adult humans, but also human fetuses and infants? For example, fetuses with 3 and 6 months, newborns, and infants with 3, 6, 9, and 12 months. The evidence for consciousness in animals and AI systems can be dismissed on the basis that there is stronger for adult humans. However, I think the evidence for consciousness in sufficiently early stages of human development may be weaker than for some adult animals and AI systems.

Hi Kelsey. Thank you for the great post. It made me think about research on soil animals and microorganisms as fringe ideas worth exploring.

Hi Soem.

What exactly do you mean by "reducing global biodiversity loss"? Decreasing the number of species going extinct? If so, are you overwhelmingly focussing on invertebrates and plants, which account for the vast majority of species?

Have you considered incorporating some considerations related to increasing welfare in your research on reducing biodiversity loss?

Thanks for the post, Mikko.

Wild Ambition: The Growing Movement Behind Wild Animal Welfare

I wonder whether @jeffsebo would be interested in this, or know who would.

Thanks for clarifying, Ben. That makes sense.

Thanks for the post, Dave. I agree.

Thanks for the interesting post, Moritz. As a partial solution, people from high income countries could fund regranting initiatives in LMICs.

Thanks for the relevant post, Chiawen.

This is a portfolio problem, not an intervention problem, and many major producing countries are trending towards further fragmentation.

I would say it is an intervention problem in the sense greater fragmentation limits the scale of the benefits for a given spending (or, equivalently, increases the spending for a given scale of benefits), thus decreasing the cost-effectiveness of interventions.

Interesting. I think there's something to this analogy, though ofc the social pressure to put your seatbelt on is far higher than that to prioritize chickens over shrimp. 

I think social pressure mostly comes from people who are close to us. So I believe there can be significant social pressure to prioritise some animal welfare interventions even if society at large cares little about them. For example, people who have worked on helping dogs and cats for 10 years will make friends and professional connection working on the same area, and this in turns makes it harder to change to other areas.

People rarely update just based on noticing or being reminded of a bias they may have.

People funding or working on animal welfare interventions are often in a tiny minority who were persuaded to eat mostly plant-based to be consistent with their views about non-farmed animals, particularly pets. So those people may be significantly more likely than random people to prioritise animals with a lower probability of sentience if they notice they are happy to support other activities like voting which have a super low chance of positively influencing outcomes.