EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)24 Apr

“A Database of Near-Term Interventions for Wild Animals” by Bob Fischer

The Animal Welfare Department (AWD) at Rethink Priorities supports high-impact strategies to help animals, especially where suffering is vast and largely neglected. Therefore, one of our focus areas is wild animal welfare (WAW), where uncertainty about tractability makes identifying cost-effective interventions particularly challenging. While much of the current WAW work rightly focuses on academic field-building (see Elmore & McAuliffe, 2024), it is worth determining whether there are viable, near-term interventions that are already available or close to implementation.

With this goal in mind, we have developed the Wild Animal Welfare Intervention Database (WAWID). This project evaluates an array of interventions that may be promising for improving WAW in the (relatively) near term, evaluating them relative to criteria of interest to funders, advocates, researchers, and potential implementers across the WAW space.

The WAWID is available here:

Wild Animal Welfare Intervention Database

The landing page includes a full list of the interventions and evaluation criteria. This report explains how we developed the WAWID, what we think you can learn from it, and suggest some future directions for this work (conditional on funding). A future report will provide some descriptive statistics.

How we developed the WAWID

We launched this project in [...]

---

Outline:

(01:34) How we developed the WAWID

(08:14) Initial observations

(13:13) Limitations

(15:20) Future Directions

(16:48) Acknowledgements

---

First published:
March 25th, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pEbiEmeu2agEHJgyu/a-database-of-near-term-interventions-for-wild-animals

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(250)

“Pivotal Research Fellowship Q1 2027 Applications Open (deadline November 1)” by Tobias Häberli, Elinor Oren

Advanced AI could go badly wrong for humanity. Pivotal exists to lower that risk. We try to find the strongest new researchers and put them to work on it with experienced mentors in our fellowship. TL...

9 Okt 5min

“Clarifying types of rogue AI activity: Breakout, breakin, exfiltration, … What’s what?” by Oliver Sourbut

In case you haven’t heard, the rogue AI agents are here. From an insider's perspective, the real news is that (rogue) AI is in the news — this is all stuff we’ve foreseen and been trying to warn peopl...

9 Okt 19min

“The Public Intellectual Is Dead. And AI Has Killed Them.” by Walter Veit

Crosspost Once upon a time, public intellectuals routinely made it into the news to discuss political, economic, medical, and scientific issues. To some extent, this is still true, but the appreciatio...

9 Okt 8min

“Epistemic security as infrastructure” by David Ritter

Hey folks -- At EA Forum next week, I'd like to engage with people who are interested in epistemic security -- the ability of a society to reliably avert threats to the processes that produce reliable...

9 Okt 1min

“Why you should run a rationality group at your university” by Carolanne Jiang, Noah Birnbaum

This post was cross posted from LessWrong TL;DR: If you enjoy LessWrong (and/or do EA/AI safety field building), you should consider starting a rationality reading group at your university. It's fun...

9 Okt 8min

“Proof of useful work for verifying AI treaties” by Ondřej_Kubů 🔸

Audio note: this post contains a lot of mathematical notation. We narrate the simpler formulas and flag the complex ones, so you may want the original text to hand. Cross-posted from my website and ...

9 Okt 41min

“Technical people: actually consider comms” by meemi

For years I had a blindspot in my thinking. I dismissed policy and advocacy work as “in another [lower-status] category” because I’m obviously a technical person! Even when I felt super pessimistic ab...

9 Okt 2min

“AI Scaling vs Human Scaling” by Toby_Ord

Audio note: this post contains a lot of mathematical notation. We narrate the simpler formulas and flag the complex ones, so you may want the original text to hand. Do AI models scale as well with m...

9 Okt 13min