I feel less confident in this specific approach — I think downstream effects are just often very contingent. It's easy to imagine scenarios like: eliminate very bad disease 1, population goes up, now very bad disease 2 emerges or is transmitted from some other population because contact occurs, etc.

I suppose this could be less of an issue for the very worst diseases/issues, etc., but I suspect those by their nature are less common (e.g. could be self-limiting, etc), and it seems like the method would only work insofar as changing population levels, etc. doesn't increase the risk of novel worse things, which seems only possible for the very worst things.

That being said I am very sympathetic to just trying more things, at least for some animals, especially vaccinations.

Yep, I agree that the case is complicated by total welfare potentially being dominated by invertebrates. That being said, I think many people in the community who might not be motivated by helping insects or nematodes or mites might still care about shrimp, and humans still kill 25 trillion wild shrimp (!) annually.

Yep, I think farmed animal advocates sometimes miss that even if you only care about human-impacted animals (and not naturogenic suffering), the vast majority are wild animals, not farmed animals. The classic ACE graph could be replicated again with wild animals as the large boxes, and farmed animals as the small ones, and that's putting aside climate change (which impacts way more wild animals).

FWIW:

• Cooperation: We let Veganuary know about our intention to launch this campaign at the very start of our planning process and have kept them informed throughout. Our campaign provides them with another opportunity to put forward the benefits of diet change. We are all on good terms and there is absolutely no infighting.

I think it would be more useful to clarify if Veganuary supported you doing this campaign. If the answer is yes, that seems great! If the answer is no, this seems explicitly not cooperative, and in that case, it would be misleading to frame this as a cooperative effort (independent of if this was good or bad to do). I don't think whether or not Veganuary was informed was what folks were looking for, but if they endorsed the idea or did not endorse it / anti-endorsed it.

I think this just seems like a clarification worth making here given how negative the reaction has been to the campaign (from within the movement - hopefully it had a positive reaction externally!)

I think that the good opportunities in the farmed (vertebrate) animal welfare space are:

• Smaller in scale than Coefficient's budget (I think that EAs have been overestimating the cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns for at least a few years, and the good opportunities are actually pretty limited).
• Pretty likely to be funded by non-EAs / people who will give to farmed animal welfare no matter what.

I think that there are likely a couple exceptions to this (shrimp welfare, insect farming, and some other things that Coefficient cannot fund currently), but they are fairly small in scale, and have decent routes to funding.

I think the opportunity for impact for wild animal welfare is way bigger, and it's much more "normal" (e.g. it seems like there are more viable interventions that are acceptable in the mainstream, don't require significant lifestyle changes of people, etc, WAI has gotten some traction within conservation), and generally is more neglected.

I noticed the checkbox for confirming awareness of the CC-BY license disappeared on new posts. I'm curious why the decision was made to drop it? It was useful for me personally to remind me when publishing things.

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.