Browsing “The Good It Promises, the Harm it Does”, there’s mention in the introduction that EA is prominent in animal advocacy. I’m curious about how true that is.
Where should I be looking to find out? Should I read this critical book to learn more?
I think the book does a great job at explaining how people feel about EA in the animal advocacy movement but not the aggregate effect. I think a lot of times it makes wrong assumptions about counterfactuals when it accuses EA of outcompeting for talent and funding. A lot of the counterfactuals of non-EA involvement is something like imagining EA funding to causes that existed pre-EA cause prioritisation e.g. ACE moved X amount of money that money would have gone to us instead (vegan food banks, animal sanctuaries etc.) that I don’t think are true for obvious reasons.
I recommend probably chapters 2, 3, and 11 if your goal is to understand flashpoints of EA meeting traditional advocacy.
Thank you for the chapter pointers.
You mention obvious reasons. The reasons are not obvious to me, because I am ignorant about this topic. Do you mean that these critics are being self-serving and that some animal advocacy orgs lost funding for other reasons than EA competition or influence?
The book’s introduction proposes:
sanctuary X lost funding because of EA competition and other EA influence.
legal cases to free animals lose some impetus because without a sanctuary for a freed animal, an abused animal could suffer a worse fate than their current abuse.
me: legal cases create precedents that work at a larger scale later on, successful cases build a movement toward better treatment of animals, and sanctuaries contribute indirectly to that result.
EA competition results in lost legal cases and reduced precedents for animal legal rights and positive treatment standards.
Premise 1 is what you think is false, if I understand you correctly, and substitution of another premise, such as:
Sanctuary X lost funding because of poor fund-raising approaches or a drop in animal advocacy funding overall.
could be an alternative.
A plausible claim in the book could be that EA has a very strong reputation in animal advocacy, and is changing how animal advocacy is done by affecting how pre-EA orgs do their work (for example, their metrics). Is that something happening behind the scenes?
I’m not intending to find out whether EA is bad or not, more just how strong of a trend is the EA mode of thought (efficacy, metrics, large-scale impact), whatever it is currently, in deciding what’s good for animals broadly. There’ll always be some negative effects of any change in thinking, and some unintended consequences. However, I suspect that you, and other EA’s, think that EA does not have a strong influence in the animal advocacy field overall, despite what these authors in the book claim. Am I right about that?
Disclaimer: I follow animal welfare news as a hobby and out of curiosity so I definitely am getting things wrong on the object level. Please feel free to push back.
A lot the analysis relies on empirically unproven claims as to the counterfactual. A few examples:
In arguments against alt-proteins the authors argue that a theoretical problem with impossible meats is that they drive more meat consumption because people who would have become vegans become flexitarians (which I guess is a transitive consumption jump I don’t buy) or that a family with a vegan teenager is more likely to go to burger king because impossible burgers mean the teenager won’t throw up a fuss about going. I think I just think the substitution effect doesn’t work like that because I can’t imagine the conditions to be:
no. of vegan consumers success rate of moving family > no. of reducetarians * consumption reduction by substitution of meal
On the institution level it’s something like sanctuaries lose funding and the value of cows roaming is a value that can’t be measured in QUALYs compared to chickens. The EA memeplex around animal welfarism means young would be activists go towards EA rather than animal sanctuaries. But my thinking is that EA brought in new people and didn’t counterfactually reduce the number of people there.
On the funding level a lot of it is anecdotes about being put off that EAs won’t fund people they meet at conferences. For instance a lot of the sanctuary arguments follow the logic ACE brought in 3.5 million and therefore the counterfactual is that if ACE took in sanctuaries ranked my sanctuary highly then I would be rolling in it. But I think the mistake lies in the fact that ACE isn’t causing people to move by designation signalling alone but moving donors by showing the research and the donors already held EA type priors on welfare and therefore donate.
The legal case stuff I found the most confusing counterfactually:
A lot of the arguments about legal precedence make this argument that EA led corporate campaigns get bamboozled and have some sort of complicity which I guess should be empirically testable. I think my intuitions about the counterfactual here is that if OP didn’t put in the money in this place the counterfactual would be no lawsuits.
My model of legal precedence is that EA shifted towards more welfarism and the existing counterfactual of legal cases advocated in the book (more abolitionist towards factory farms) were more likely to fail by induction (they were riskier, more unpopular, and less funded). Again I think the undercurrent of a lot of pieces is that EA should have funded my charity.
On the book’s ability to reason about EA’s effect on the field of animal advocacy:
The book is super confusing on the aggregation of EA’s effect but it’s temporarily split (some parts are about early EA involvement in animal welfare and some are about later effects but don’t distinguish).
A lot of the information is about specific charities and how the founders and executive felt about EA’s effect rather than actual data (I still think this is valuable but not for your purposes?). A lot of it seemed to be more interpersonal dramas within animal advocacy with culture war elements (e.g. a lot of the GFI hate).
Personally, I do think EA probably had a strong effect but not in changing the allocation of funding but in the amount? But I could be motivated reasoning here.
Well, thank you for the helpful follow-up. I went ahead and bought the book, and will read it. I have browsed three articles and read two through.
The first article was “Animal advocacy’s Stockholm Syndrome”, written by several authors. The tone of that article is positive toward EA, starting off with “It’s time for Effective Altruists in the farmed animal protection movement to expand their strategic imagination, their imagination of what is possible, and their imagination of what counts as effective. … Effective Altruist support has brought new respect and tractability to the neglected plight of farmed animals, and we … are grateful. We write this essay as allies.”
And then they write about difficulties in getting metrics thinking to apply to systemic change efforts in animal advocacy, and yes they do mention EA homogeneity as reason to expand diversity within EA and so develop new perspectives within it. I expect the calls for inclusiveness and diversity are a theme throughout the book.
The second article that I read was “How ‘alternative proteins’ create a private solution to a public problem” by Michele Simon, a veteran of the vegan food and animal rights movement.
Simon suggests that increasing investment in vegetarian meat replacements results in increasing profits for big food companies but not changes in the consumption behavior of existing meat eaters. Instead, the vegetarian meat replacements attract vegetarians to brands or restaurant chains. The article mentions that vegetarian options on a restaurant menu handle the “veto vote”, that one person in a group who can’t eat meat. Simon claims that offering a vegetarian option can result in more meat consumption at a restaurant like McDonalds as opposed to somewhere else serving pasta or salad or another option with less meat. However, I suspect that anyone willing to eat at McDonalds will eat a comparable meat meal at another restaurant (for example, Burger King) if a veto vote counts. Bringing vegetarians into their chains lets the chains sell more food overall.
Simon makes the point that alternative meats are being trialed, and if their sales drop, companies stop selling them. She lists a few examples from fast food chains to prove the point. Alternative proteins are not very popular when trialed, and initial enthusiasm and sales drop.
I interpret Simon to think that big food is interested in keeping up meat sales along with adding other products, and that there is no replacement of meat with non-meat taking place. Instead, food corporations are trying to appeal to vegetarians with foods that provide similar taste experiences but without the meat ingredients. That would explain why Simon thinks that lauding these companies for their inclusion of non-meat items really misses what the companies are trying to do. Basically, all the meat replacements do is give vegetarians a seat at the same table. The meat-eaters stick with the meat versions.
If Simon is right, then a switch to meat alternatives has to happen through consumer interest, from vegetarians or from meat eaters. It has to be driven by new demand, rather than new supply.
The article discusses GFI, cultured meat, and how the food industry subverts the food systems perspective, “where food comes from and how it is grown matters.” Simon hints that there’s an ontology useful for understanding food systems that the GFI marketing literature doesn’t use.
Both the articles I read put out this “EA’s are white guys” thing. I’m not offended, because I’m not an EA, and even if I were, maybe I should just agree? I am a white guy. There’s some argument for increasing diversity in your community, the ConcernedEA’s make a strong case in their recent sequence.
Where I think both of the articles I read are right is in claiming that EA does not offer a political or economic or regulatory perspective that puts its activism in opposition to larger business interests in food or animal farming.
I haven’t explored the whole issue of legal precedents that the book addresses yet.
Thank you for your insights in all these areas, if you have more to add, please do. I appreciate the insider conversation.