I’m really glad that this new book can focus on the last ~50 years of sociological changes since the last one; detailed research the phenomena of large numbers of people being slow to update their thinking on easily-provable moral matters is broadly applicable to global health and existential risk as well.
This is an excellent point. Not that this statement necessarily implies ignorance of other recent developments in animal welfare research originating in effective altruism, though sociology is far from the only field from which dramatic transformations in animal welfare should be appreciated.
It has often been hard to categorize much of the animal welfare research out of the EA community because it is always interdisciplinary, often abstract and yet, at the same time, narrowly applied. Yet some of the most significant developments in research analysis relevant to animal welfare in fields from economics to neurobiology have originated from within EA. I’ll highlight Rethink Priorities as a leading research organization in that domain.
I’ve done a lot of reading about Soft Power, how elites around the world are attracted to things that are actually good, like freedom of speech and science[...]meanwhile, hard power like military force and economic influence systematically repels elites.
The best historical example of this I’m aware of is how scientists from ethnically Jewish backgrounds fled Germany in the 1930s for the United States in the face of persecution for propagating “Jewish science.” The proof of the importance of prioritizing the pursuit of soft power as much as the pursuit of hard power is how because of that the US went on to gain more hard power than every other country anyway, never mind just Germany. The world shouldn’t be such that the fruitful pursuit of knowledge is driven by the pursuit of power by one country to gain advantages over others. For as long as the world is stuck that way, it’s better for the rest of us when countries are incentivized to advance knowledge for more humane ends.
I just wish there was a way to scale it up more effectively e.g. at university EA groups doing outreach.
The last few months have been relatively misfortunate for the entire effective altruism community, though they’ve been especially unfortunate for the intersection of animal welfare and EA. A decade’s worth of work on animal welfare out of EA is finally coming to fruition, as evidenced through Singer writing this new book, at the same time the EA community as a whole is trying to recover from the worst crises in the history of its own movement. This has resulted in a responsible slowdown in EA community-building to ensure the fidelity of future efforts to grow the movement, though animal advocates are tragically unable to rely on that infrastructure at the time we’d look to it most. The question of how effective animal advocacy as a field ought to reorient in light of all that is still being answered, though it’s appreciated you’re acknowledging that as a solvable challenge we face.
This is an excellent point. Not that this statement necessarily implies ignorance of other recent developments in animal welfare research originating in effective altruism, though sociology is far from the only field from which dramatic transformations in animal welfare should be appreciated.
It has often been hard to categorize much of the animal welfare research out of the EA community because it is always interdisciplinary, often abstract and yet, at the same time, narrowly applied. Yet some of the most significant developments in research analysis relevant to animal welfare in fields from economics to neurobiology have originated from within EA. I’ll highlight Rethink Priorities as a leading research organization in that domain.
The best historical example of this I’m aware of is how scientists from ethnically Jewish backgrounds fled Germany in the 1930s for the United States in the face of persecution for propagating “Jewish science.” The proof of the importance of prioritizing the pursuit of soft power as much as the pursuit of hard power is how because of that the US went on to gain more hard power than every other country anyway, never mind just Germany. The world shouldn’t be such that the fruitful pursuit of knowledge is driven by the pursuit of power by one country to gain advantages over others. For as long as the world is stuck that way, it’s better for the rest of us when countries are incentivized to advance knowledge for more humane ends.
The last few months have been relatively misfortunate for the entire effective altruism community, though they’ve been especially unfortunate for the intersection of animal welfare and EA. A decade’s worth of work on animal welfare out of EA is finally coming to fruition, as evidenced through Singer writing this new book, at the same time the EA community as a whole is trying to recover from the worst crises in the history of its own movement. This has resulted in a responsible slowdown in EA community-building to ensure the fidelity of future efforts to grow the movement, though animal advocates are tragically unable to rely on that infrastructure at the time we’d look to it most. The question of how effective animal advocacy as a field ought to reorient in light of all that is still being answered, though it’s appreciated you’re acknowledging that as a solvable challenge we face.