Hmm, yes that is a scarier headline. But I think that as long as we do it in ways that are also good from sustainability point of view, we would look really benign. Like we do a thing that many people agree is good for an unusual reason. There are definitely much more outrageous sounding scandals going around all the time.

I'm not sure if I agree. The worst-case scenario seems like an article titled, 'Organization Opposes Irrigation Subsidies Due to Insect Harm, Not Environmental Impact.' Realistically, would that provoke much anger? It might just come off as quirky or amusing rather than headline material. Often, lobbying arguments don’t fully reveal the underlying motivations. I think it's common for people and companies to lobby for policies that benefit them financially while framing them as sustainable or taxpayer-friendly.

I haven’t examined the screwworm eradication in detail. Someone told me that gene drives are politically infeasible. People working on it told me that it’s totally feasible. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, political feasibility is not something I can evaluate. The cost-effectiveness in the linked article seems a lot more conservative than my estimates.

If screwworm eradication intervention is promising, then maybe there are other promising WAW interventions. Yes, so far the experience of researchers has been that it’s more difficult to find cost-effective WAW interventions compared to farmed animal interventions. This is partly because it’s so difficult to think about the indirect effects of WAW. But someone told me “unknown unknowns cancel each other out.” In other words, maybe we don’t need to think about 3rd order effects because they might be canceled out by 4th order effects, and so on. I feel very confused about this, I’d like to think more about it at some point.

Also, perhaps if we find WAW interventions, they might have a bigger scale than typical farmed animal welfare interventions. So maybe searching for FAW interventions is easier and more immediately rewarding but it’s still just as worthwhile to search for WAW interventions.

I think that these interventions by Brian Tomasik could be promising, though I haven't examined them in detail. They’d reduce insect numbers by doing things like opposing irrigation subsidies using environmental and economical arguments. It’s unclear if insects live net negative lives to me, but this makes sense for negative utilitarians, or if you think there’s >50% chance that they live net negative lives and you’re ok with uncertainty. We discussed in these comments where we worried about PR risks because our true motivations would be different from the stated ones. But I now know multiple other organizations that do similar stuff without any problems.

Spreading the idea/meme that we should care about wild animals seems potentially very important. We could have AGI that might be able to do magic-like stuff soon. Or at least an unprecedented AI-fuelled economic growth. It seems possible that this would create a situation of abundance, where problems like poverty and climate change are fully solved. If the values of the society remain as they are, a lot of resources might be used for conservation, species preservation, and so on, without almost any care about the welfare of individual animals. Wildlife could also be spread to other planets with little or no thought given to the vast amount of suffering it would create. All of this seems a bit less likely to happen if we just try to spread the idea of wild animal welfare more. I’d be excited to see things like documentaries for mainstream audiences about WAW. Humane Hancock mentioned a plan for a WAW documentary, and I’m excited about it.

There may or may not be even more cost-effective things to do for the far future, like reducing x-risks and thinking about how to help digital minds. But that doesn’t mean that spreading the idea of WAW is not worthwhile. I don’t think that x-risk and digital mind stuff would get significantly less funding or talent if someone also worked on spreading the idea of WAW. So perhaps there’s not much point in comparing the two :)

Sure (＾-＾) I'll do it in a comments below. Note that these are a little more than shower thoughts. I'd love some discussion and back and forth on these. Perhaps I will write a post with conclusions after these discussions.

My views on WAW have changed quite a lot since I wrote this. I think there are things within WAW that could be very promising. I hope to write more about that in the future. 

Good points :) You might be interested in this sequence (see the links at the bottom of the summary)

Please don't treat cost-effectiveness estimates as such an exact science. There are so many subjective choices you make in them. For example, you could say that cage-free campaigns speed up changes by 5 years, or 50 years. Both choices are defensible but the result will be 10 times different just based on this choice alone. 

It's impossible to tell without seeing the THL's estimate, but they probably were conservative when estimating their cost-effectiveness. It's what I would do if I was doing such estimate for THL. $2.63 per hen impacted is already high enough for most people to want to donate. Maybe it's even better because it's more believable. And if they make it less conservative, someone might criticize them. In any case, THL took down the $2.63 estimate, so that's a strong reason not to treat it seriously.

Do you have to live in the U.S. (or even in a swing state) to do something useful?