Giving Compass' Take:
- In this talk from Effective Altruism, Simon Liedholm of Wild Animal Initiative discusses how we can improve wild animal welfare while also maintaining the ability to reverse our actions if they turn out to be harmful.
- How could you address wild animal suffering? What is the best use of funds intended to protect animals?
- Read about how to navigate the complex web of animal protection philanthropy.
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The Talk
Bridget Williams (Moderator): Hi, everybody. I heard everybody's EAGx Virtual is going well so far. My name's Bridget and I'm the emcee for this session, “Persistence and reversibility of wild animal welfare interventions,” with Simon Eckerström Liedholm.
To start, we'll have a 10-minute talk by Simon, and then we'll move on to a live Q&A session where he'll respond to [audience members’] questions. […]
Now I'd like to introduce our speaker for this session. Simon Eckerström Liedholm is a researcher at Wild Animal Initiative. He has worked on questions of strategy and prioritization, and is currently investigating fertility control for wild animals. He finished his PhD in ethology at Stockholm University last year, and is also a board member of Effective Altruism Sweden. Here's Simon.
Simon: Hi, everyone. My name is Simon and I'm a researcher at Wild Animal Initiative. Our mission is to conduct and facilitate research on how to improve the lives of wild animals. Today, I'm going to be talking about the persistence and reversibility of wild animal welfare interventions.This talk is based on a report that we published in December 2019 on this topic.
I will start by defining what I mean by “persistence”: the expected duration of the counterfactual effects of an action. I say “expected” [because] we are interested in [an action’s] likely persistence before it has been taken, and by “counterfactual,” I mean that we are interested in effects that wouldn't have come about otherwise.
I do not classify repeated actions that sustain something as persistence. For instance, even though your room might stay clean for years on end, any individual act of cleaning will not have a persistent effect (although if you know a way to do that, please tell me).
We should care about persistence because an intervention that lasts longer, if all else is equal, is preferable to a shorter one. There's more time for beneficial effects to accumulate.
Read the full article about wild animal welfare by the team at Effective Altruism.