For compassionate and thoughtful interventions against the horrors of suffering in the near and distant future

Interventions against Suffering

by Ruth Seleo

Interventions against Suffering

"The best way to predict the future is to create it."
~ Abraham Lincoln 

(Click here to see the mind map in full)

Introduction

The intervention mind map is for people looking for ways to contribute to the cause. It gives a wide range of ideas for engagement suited to those who are:

  • rather new to Suffering Focused Ethics and want to explore more, 
  • in a career exploration phase, or
  • looking for Effective Giving opportunities
  • coming with a professional background and looking to contribute their expertise.

Interventions are not clustered by specific causes of suffering, as in the map before, but by fields of expertise, interest, and personal fit of potential contributors. These interventions are necessarily more diverse, as there are far more ways to contribute to the mission than there are causes of suffering.

Note that it is crucial to assess and prioritise personal fit when choosing an initiative for one’s own engagement: 

I'd advise anyone to try out as much as possible to learn about one's skills and weaknesses and how to utilise them, as well as what increases / decreases one’s motivation and wellbeing.

 

Finding your niche of engagement - 
From first steps to career forming

To help aspiring contributors find their niche of engagement, initiatives are grouped into five categories.

Advocacy / Raising awareness / Education / Publicity

In the following, it will be discussed how to increase public and policy-maker concern for sentient beings and their welfare. Ambitious and long-term future oriented ideas are often experienced by the public as concerning, despite their potential to increase health and wellbeing (see also status quo bias). Education and exposure (normalisation) can significantly increase acceptance of new welfare approaches for all sentient beings. And openly acknowledging dangers and risks, together with strategies to mitigate them, is just as important for building public trust.

There are many ways to increase awareness of suffering and motivate a more compassionate future:

Events and meetups

  • Participating in or organising meetups helps to exchange ideas and deepen understanding of and concern for the topics discussed. 
    • For meetups and events, prepare talks or workshops to raise awareness of the philosophy and moral importance of reducing suffering for all sentient beings.
    • Talks can be as simple as a summary of already existing content.
    • To increase outreach, record more advanced meetups and events and share them via YouTube.
    • Accountability/ co-working groups, to motivate joint work on high impact interventions or respective career planning. 
    • Organise or participate in Giving Games — structured group exercises in which participants collectively contribute with (small) donations and allocate the budget, fostering practical engagement with cause prioritisation and effective giving; potentially including Giving What We Can pledge ceremonies as well. 
    • Groups and meetups to join can be about politics, effective altruism, animal rights and veganism, (trans-)humanism, anti-natalism and related topics.
    • Tabling / information stalls at public events, markets and university campuses

Online activism

  • Encourage more vegan options through (google) ratings and commenting on restaurants, catered events, workplaces and hospitals (never harshly), and praise them if they already have them. 

Resource sharing

  • Share resources on online platforms, or via flyers that raise awareness on suffering, encourage moral circle expansion and educate on interventions. 
    • 'Liking' respective material throughout social media increases traction and motivates the authors. Cross-post resources where there might be a relevant audience, such as other activist groups or organisations (e.g. political parties, NGOs and educational and youth groups).
    • Remember to avoid being spammy and always maintain an attitude of service, not demand or judgement.
  • Contribute to Wikipedia — writing, expanding, or improving articles on relevant concepts, organisations, and research. Wikipedia is a primary training source for AI systems and a default reference for the general public, making accurate and comprehensive coverage of welfare-relevant topics for all sentient beings has disproportionately high-reach
  • Starting or participating in newsletters, with updates on projects in the community and with related news and opportunities.
  • Translate relevant resources / literature / articles. 

Art & Media

  • People into art and media can use their abilities to raise awareness and influence cultural change. 
    • Media can include: illustrations, memes, fictional and personal stories, blogs, video clips, (short) films, music, podcasts 
      • Example: Helping people become open minded about abolishing predation: Make / share compilations of (wild) carnivores befriended with their prey (see e.g. The Dodo’s series “Odd Couples”). Incorporate them in your presentations / campaigns.
    • Starting or contributing to (online) magazines via articles, news, opinion pieces and content from the community.
    • Development and promotion of high quality pedagogical / educational art and media fostering the development of compassion, self-reflexion, communication, critical and rational thinking. 

Influencing policy making 

Policies shape society, through norm setting, regulations and budget allocation. Even policies that are not immediately welfare oriented, can greatly influence potential for (future) projects. In the subsections below promising policy and lobbying ideas are listed.

Systemic foundations

Before specific welfare policies can take hold, the underlying political and institutional environment needs to support them sustainably. We therefore need

  • Improving institutional decision-making and strengthening democracies — drawing on insights from evolutionary anthropology to understand how human cooperative and political behaviour evolved, and applying these insights to the design of more effective, resilient and compassionate political systems and institutions. See 
  • Maintaining the rule of law — requiring that all individuals and government entities are accountable to clear, transparent, and fairly applied laws, with equal and non-beneficiary access to legal representation. This includes preventing elected officials from escaping legal accountability and protecting democratic institutions from dismantlement.
  • Improving education — Pedagogical interventions and educational strategies for children and young adults shape behaviour of the next generation and are thereby high-impact. High-quality education can significantly benefit physical and mental health, decision-making, career performance, and social impact. We therefore need moral pedagogy, mindfulness, reflection skills, analytical and methodical thinking as well as life skills in educational curricula 
Cause-specific policy ambitions
    • 'Dangerous species' e.g. parasites, carnivores, disease transmitting species
  • Removing dependency on animal products
    Implementing & promoting usage of animal-free alternative products (including through the foot-in-the-door approach like promoting acknowledgement of animal sentience and the problem of animal suffering)
    • Making cellular agriculture research and production independent of bovine calf serum
    • Lobbying for healthy vegan dishes in kindergartens / schools / public institutions and events; ensuring regulations that enable public facilities to become vegan in the first place. Schools and kindergarten are particularly important institutions, as they strongly influence the next generation's habits.
  • Lobbying for animal rights
    • Anti-speciesist approach to rights: what matters is not ‘humanness’, nor intelligence, but the ability to suffer
    • Acknowledgement of sentient entities requiring rights protected by law, with the long-term goal of a sentience welfare system.
    • Right to have interests represented by independent qualified allies
  • Genetic welfare for sentient beings
    Lobbying for pre-implantation diagnostics and embryonic stem cell research is important to enable research for a future genetic welfare program. We need to promote laws that regulate applications of genetic enhancement of sentient beings and ensure access to genetic welfare. In laws and regulations on genetic welfare applications, benefits and risks to the society, communities and the individual (no matter what species) need to be considered. 
  • Public funding, prizes and research incentives to help accelerate research that may contribute to preventing suffering and improving welfare long-term. 

    Animal free biotechnological / biomedical research and testing need more public promotion:

Research

To increase wellbeing for all sentient beings and minimise risks of future suffering, research is needed across a broad range of domains to develop a broad range of new interventions and welfare oriented technologies. 

To find more high impact research opportunities join the Effective Thesis Fellowship program. 

And to increase the impact of your research e.g. by involving decision-makers check out the research guide by Charity Entrepreneurship. 

  • Animal Welfare Science for farmed and wild animals
  • Assessing the quality of life of various species in various environmental settings to find  the greatest threats to animal wellbeing and investigate high-impact welfare interventions.
  • See Animal Ethics & Wild Animal Initiative

3.1.1 Fertility control (See also: Influencing Policy): Compassionate population control means non-invasive, easily scalable, persistent and reversible strategies to replace  lethal or other aggressive population control strategies.

Research is discovering scalable, non-invasive fertility control strategies for:

 

 

  • Wildlife

Important work has been done by the Wild Animal Initiative and the Botstiber Institute for Wildlife Fertility Control. BIWFC is collaborating with educational institutions and organizations to increase the knowledge base of current and future practitioners and researchers, promoting the application by engaging with practitioners, non-government organizations, and government agencies and advances the wildlife fertility control field through strategic investments. 

 

Focus is on overpopulating species such as deer, wild boar, rabbits, pigeons and neobiota (‘invasive’ species)












  • Insects / 'Dangerous species' e.g. parasites, disease transmitting species, and carnivores




3.1.2 

AI for Animals

AI tools may significantly expand animal welfare monitoring and care through automated processing of video, audio, and movement-tracking data, in both farmed and wild animals.

AI tools are being developed to quantify animal welfare states and inform effective welfare interventions. 

 

See:



3.2. AI Alignment & Safety

Many researchers expect that AI might eventually surpass human capability across all domains. It already assists in a broad range of areas, and highly influences people's learning, understanding and decision-making.

Work is needed to ensure AI systems act with regard for the welfare of all sentient beings and avoid worst-case outcomes. The same systems that influence learning today are the substrate from which more capable systems will emerge. Relevant organisations working on suffering concerned AI research:

  • CaML: shaping how advanced AI treats sentient beings.
  • Center on Long-Term Risk: addressing worst-case risks from advanced AI, with current focus on conflict scenarios and the technical and philosophical foundations of cooperation.
  • Sentient Futures: capacity building & fellowship programs



3.3 Evolutionary anthropology & prosocial systems design

Research on how to develop and establish robustly prosocial cultures and social systems that reduce and prevent suffering for all sentient beings

 

3.4 Compassionate Genomics & Genomic Welfare

Gene therapy already has many healthcare applications. Heritable genome interventions could offer much larger welfare gains but also carry significantly higher risks, and decades of further research across multiple biomedical fields remain necessary before such interventions can be responsibly considered.



3.5 Cellular Agriculture 

Replacing animal-derived products with biosynthetic and cell-cultivated alternatives, eliminating the production chains that depend on animal exploitation.

  • [https://gfi.org/ The Good Food Institute]



3.6 Ageing and Health-Span Expansion Research

Ageing involves progressive biological deterioration, of body and mind, with significant welfare costs, alongside the loss of accumulated wisdom, knowledge, and experience. Preventing or slowing its progression would have major welfare and economic benefits.

 

Healthspan Action Coalition (HSAC) 

XPRIZE Healthspan 



3.7. Sentience Research

Foundational questions about the levels and nature of sentience and consciousness remain to be solved.

Organisations:

Further reading:

 

3.8. Physics

3.8.1 Environmental design and atmospheric engineering

Atmospheric and environmental engineering research could decouple human welfare from the suffering-laden dynamics of wild ecosystems, with the goal to allow biospheres to be managed with welfare concerns over utility priorities. 

3.8.2 Understanding the long-term future of the universe, incl. prevalence and expiration of inhabited planets, and respective s-risk and welfare concerns. 

3.9. Starting A Compassionate Impact Oriented Academic Journal

The journal should focus on cross-causal welfare of all sentient beings and would 

  • help evaluate biotechnological and other research for its potential contribution to suffering prevention, 
  • disseminate findings and application opportunities across disciplines, 
  • and promote the research itself. 

Research assessment criteria should include whether the research approach meets relevant ethical and quality standards, and could include whether work specifically targets scalable, long-term suffering prevention with a likely net-positive impact.

The research directions above share a common bottleneck: political engagement to translate findings into policies; the communities, institutions, and networks capable of acting on their findings are still underdeveloped relative to the scale of the problem. Building that capacity is the subject of the next section.