Thanks, Tom and Henning! Strongly upvoted. 

I particularly appreciated the "Some Ramifications" section. Their implications would be pretty demanding for EA Animal Welfare. Large infrastructure investments, probably tens of millions in research investment, to assess whether an intervention can get to initial scaling. All that, on timelines with which funders are usually uncomfortable. 

An already ambitious ecosystem-level next step would be talent programs for specialist researchers to contribute to EA animal welfare research (this might not be the best way to fill the research gaps, though, and maybe more straightforward infrastructure for commissioning specialists would be more useful). It's been quite neglected historically, and I've only heard of one or two organizations recently starting to work on this.

Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

Good framing! 

A framing I had in a draft post was whether, in the ITN framework, to focus mostly on (disclaimer: very rough):

• Scale: this is the AI safety approach. "This could be really big (and is also neglected), and therefore we should see whether it's tractable - even if it has a minuscule chance of being tractable, it's worth pursuing".
• Tractability: this is more the OG-global-health approach: "We can demonstrate that our intervention makes measurable progress on the issue. Other more neglected or larger-scale problems cannot do this."
• Neglectedness: this is probably the least common proxy, but you see it in animal welfare sometimes: "No one is working on this species, therefore someone should start a project".
   

I do think rigor-reach / tractability-scale is the main axis, and that neglectedness is more minor. I think this can lead to unresolvable disagreements on what interventions should be pursued.

On AI safety harms beyond historical induction, there was a recent short post on ways current AI safety efforts could be net-negative.

Under your own views, any portfolio of interventions can easily increase or decrease animal suffering?

I agree. This is why I find myself having to "justify" a decision procedure that just considers a few select (albeit uncertain) effects rather than say "I'm maximizing expected value".

I think my decision procedure can make interventions that decrease our uncertainty very appealing. I currently work on animal welfare desk research, and am strongly considering getting into some form of primary research in the future. Caveats:

1. Sometimes, this is not an option when making a decision. E.g., when advising a friend who received two job offers in animal welfare, neither of which decrease uncertainty; or when recommending grants for a fund (where none of the grants decrease uncertainty).
2. I think moral weights and pain trade-offs might be so seriously underdetermined that I expect that most research I could do or support right now would not reduce uncertainty about them. I expect you'll have a counter in that, though, and I expect my views to evolve.
   1. In comparison, assessing 2nd-order effects of certain interventions (such as economic effects, and land use effects) is tractable, although difficult.
3. I kind of rule out "long-horizon thinking" in my decision procedure on principle. Hence, if I expected pain tradeoff ratios to become a resolvable issue after 30 years of empirical research necessiating $50M of investment per year, I don't think I'd want to seed it, because I think that the chance that this works is negligible (you'll likely object to this on decision-theoretic grounds, I assume).
4. This is more uncomfortable to admit (and I'm particularly uncertain on that point), but if I were to focus almost entirely on research that decreases uncertainty, appearing as someone who recommends no object-level actions may be costly to me in a way that could reduce the change that my research is successful in decreasing uncertainty, because it could receive less support. 

We must settle for merely establishing to our own satisfaction that we can reasonably maintain our beliefs in the face of the skeptic’s contrary arguments. 

It's nice to have access to your cluster of reasons for disagreeing with cluelessness. However, I'd have been most interested in seeing a post where you make a compelling argument for how the DiGiovanni cluelessness argument pattern-matches radical skepticism, or other arguments that philosophers find intriguing on the surface but generally flawed. 

I do think that a crux for me when reading your post here, and other writings of yours on cluelessness, is whether "common sense" and "impartial welfare" can ever go together. I'm not skilled in philosophical debate, so I'll summarize my view with one of my favorite EA Forum quotes, from @Max_Daniel: 

Impartial goodness is freaking weird.

I resonate with this but would lightly push back. As someone who oscillates between being hosted by relatives in a city with 2 other EAs in total, and big, expensive hubs, I feel like the COL difference isn't that drastic if you are enthusiastic on frugal lifestyles (not saying people who feel differently are not frugal - there may be other factors, like getting lucky in finding accommodation). 

I'm currently in San Francisco for a few months in a coworking office, and my COL difference from a non-hub place in Europe is around $1.1K per month, more than half of which comes from the office membership. I sleep in a very cheap shared flat, and live on a mix of beans, protein powder, and leftovers from the office. And the productivity benefits from the office space are quite strong (beyond any sort of networking value), though I can't confidently claim they're worth $1.1K a month.

I agree that the benefits of living in a hub can be overstated, having oscillated between both. If you have enough savings to attend a few conferences a year, and are proactive virtually, you can absolutely achieve 80/20 networking outcomes (in most cases, it might be harder when your job is very network-based).

I think "don't live in a hub" is more important advice if you want to start a family or find a stable place to live, as in those cases, it can definitely lock in cost increases that are much larger.

(On the other hand, if you could actually do your job from anywhere and don't benefit from networks much, I think people should maximize. European founder should envision the cheapest EU countries, while software engineers doing earn to give should try their best to work in Switzerland or California)

Assuming we end factory farming before 2100, which factor will have contributed the most?

Broader changes (ending agriculture altogether? finding extremely efficient ways to get nutrients that don't involve traditional "food"? transition to a non-biological humanity?), but some of these involve some form of alternative proteins (in a broad sense). I assume <20% of these worlds involve "we find a way to perfectly imitate meat", though.

I had a fairly similar experience to yours (got into Charity Entrepreneurship right at the end of college), and can confirm the accuracy for curious commenters - and that I also wasn't thinking sufficiently deeply about career fit at the time (I estimated a sub-2% chance of being accepted and wasn't taking it very seriously, though I think on reflection, I am a decent fit for that kind of path).

Going in my pantheon of favorite posts of 2026. Detailed, transparent, action-guiding, and engaginly written.

A few years ago, spending on animal welfare reforms in EA was so limited that running rigorous, informative studies to reduce the movement's uncertainty might have cost more than the movement's spending on the campaigns themselves. But as you mention, now that the funding bottleneck might be easing, such studies would inform much larger amounts of spending, and the expected value of information looks much higher. It thus seems like a very good time to raise an issue that would have been much harder to make progress on in the past (though as Lewis Bollard's comment notes, the challenge is still daunting).

I found the post well-written and balanced, and the discussion in the comments mostly helpful. Strongly upvoted.