Cross-posted to my website.
Like the last time I wrote something like this, my suggestions here could apply to any large foundation. But most large foundations don’t care at all about what I say, and the Open Philanthropy Project cares at least a tiny bit about what I say, so I’m going to focus on Open Phil.
The Open Philanthropy Project ought to prioritize wild animal suffering (WAS). Here’s why:
- WAS is important and neglected.
- WAS is not tractable for most actors, but it’s tractable for Open Phil.
(Previously I discussed some of my issues with the importance/neglectedness/tractability framework, but I believe it works reasonably well for our purposes here.)
Why wild animal suffering matters
The problem of wild animal suffering has enormous scale. There exist far more sentient wild animals than there do humans or factory-farmed animals. Wild animal suffering dwarfs all other problems that currently exist. Some other problems (such as existential risk) may matter more, but WAS is certainly the biggest problem that’s happening right now.
Additionally, wild animal suffering is neglected: hardly anyone cares about this problem, and of the people who care, hardly any of them are trying to do anything about it. Animal Ethics is the only organization spending non-trivial time on the problem of wild animal suffering, and it’s a small organization with limited staff time and narrow focus–I see room for much, much more work on reducing suffering in the wild than what Animal Ethics does currently.
Why Open Phil should prioritize wild animal suffering
For people who care about animals, their biggest objection to reducing wild animal suffering is that it’s intractable. But this is mistaken: we can do lots of things right now to work toward reducing wild animal suffering. (If you doubt that we can do anything about wild animal suffering, please, please read my essay on this subject, and if you disagree, leave a comment explaining why.)
Even given the sad state of WAS research, we already have some concrete proposals for how to reduce wild animal suffering without risking big negative side effects. For example, Brian Tomasik has suggested paying farmers to use humane insecticides. Calculations suggest that this could prevent 250,000 painful deaths per dollar. This intervention alone looks much more cost-effective than GiveDirectly even if we heavily discount insects’ capacity for suffering. And this is just an initial idea; surely there exist much more effective interventions than this, and we could find them if we spent more time looking.
Reducing suffering in the wild is probably much more tractable than most people tend to think. That said, if you want to work on wild animal suffering, you either need specific relevant skills (which are rare and hard to develop) or you need to fund an organization doing relevant work; and right now Animal Ethics is the only such organization. We have something of a coordination problem here where people won’t work on wild animal suffering because they can’t get funding, and people don’t want to fund it because so few people are working on it.
What we need is a large, committed source of funding to jump-start the cause. If the Open Philanthropy Project began funding work on wild animal suffering, it could stimulate new research efforts or small-scale interventions by offering grants. Specifically, Open Phil should probably create a new focus area for wild animal suffering and possibly hire dedicated staff. This problem has such large scale, and so many possible interventions, that it absolutely deserves to be a dedicated focus area. Open Phil might consider lumping WAS under its farm animal welfare program, but this would excessively constrain its budget and limit the amount of staff time that it could receive. Wild animal suffering is a massive problem, and easily deserves as much attention as most of Open Phil’s other focus areas.
Hmm. I do believe I discount vertebrates much less than I discount insects, however I also think there's a huge difference between say chickens and chimpanzees or chimpanzees and humans. Even among humans (who have quite similar brains to one another compared to inter-comparisons), I think that the top 10% of Americans probably live lives that I value inherently (by which I mean ignoring the effects that they have on other things and only counting the quality of their conscious life experience) at least one order of magnitude (if not several) more than the bottom 10% of Americans. I believe this is an unpopular view also, but one consideration I might be able to give in support of it is if you reflect on how much you value your own conscious experience during some parts of your life compared to others you may find as I do that some moments or short periods seem to be of much greater value than others of equal duration.
An exercise I tried recently was making a plot of "value realized / time" vs "time" for my own conscious life experience (so again: not including the effects of my actions, which is the vast majority of what I value) and found that there were some years I valued multiple times more than other years and some moments I valued many times more than all years on net. The graph was also all positive value and trending upwards. Sleeping much less than awake. (I don't think I have very vivid dreams relative to others, but even if I did, I would probably still tend to value waking moments much more than sleeping ones.) Also, remembering or reflecting on great moments fondly can be of high value too in my evaluation. There's also the problem of not knowing now what certain experiences were like in the past to actually experience them since I'm relying on my memory of what they were like, which for all I know could be faulty. I think in general I choose to value experiences based on how I remember them being rather than how I think they were when I lived them (if there is a discrepancy between the two).
Also note that I'm a moral anti-realist and so I don't think there are correct answers, so to a certain extent how much I value some periods of my conscious life experience relative to others is a choice, since I don't believe that there are completely defined definite values that are mine that I can discover either.
A general thing I'd be really interested in seeing is peoples' estimates of how much they value (whether positively or negatively) the total life experiences of say, mosquitoes, X, Y, Z, chickens, cows, humans (and what that distribution looks like), oneself over time, a typical human over time, etc. And also "What would a graph of (value realized per unit time) vs (time) look like for Earth's history?" which would answer the question "How much value has been realized since life began on Earth?" (note: I'd ignore estimates of value realized elsewhere in the universe, which may actually be quite significant, for the sake of the question). If you'd like to indulge me on your own views on an of this I would be very interested, but of course no need if you don't want to. I'll estimate and write my own answers up sometime.