That’s not strictly true, a lot of animal orgs are farmer-facing and will speak to a motivation the farmer cares about (yield) while they secretly harbour another one (welfare of animals). I’ve heard that some orgs go to great lengths to hide their true intentions and sometimes even take money from their services just to appear as if they have a non-suspicious motivation.
I am actually curious why a similar approach hasn’t been tried in biodiversity—if it was just EAs yucking biodiversity (which I have seen, same as you), that’d be really disappointing.
Easier to persuade commercial entities of the merits of making more money (by incidentally doing the right thing) than persuade a reviewer of multiple competitive funding bids scoped for habitat preservation to fund a study into lab grown meat. At the end of the day, the proposals written by biodiversity enthusiasts with biodiversity rationales and very specific biodiversity metrics are just going to be more plausible,[1] even if they turn out to be ineffective.
For similar reasons, I don’t expect EA animal welfare funds to award funding to an economic think tank proposing to research how to grow the economy, even if the economic think tank insists its true goal is animal welfare and provides a lot of evidence that investment in meat alternatives and enforcement of animal welfare legislation is linked to overall economic growth.
That’s not strictly true, a lot of animal orgs are farmer-facing and will speak to a motivation the farmer cares about (yield) while they secretly harbour another one (welfare of animals). I’ve heard that some orgs go to great lengths to hide their true intentions and sometimes even take money from their services just to appear as if they have a non-suspicious motivation.
I am actually curious why a similar approach hasn’t been tried in biodiversity—if it was just EAs yucking biodiversity (which I have seen, same as you), that’d be really disappointing.
Easier to persuade commercial entities of the merits of making more money (by incidentally doing the right thing) than persuade a reviewer of multiple competitive funding bids scoped for habitat preservation to fund a study into lab grown meat. At the end of the day, the proposals written by biodiversity enthusiasts with biodiversity rationales and very specific biodiversity metrics are just going to be more plausible,[1] even if they turn out to be ineffective.
For similar reasons, I don’t expect EA animal welfare funds to award funding to an economic think tank proposing to research how to grow the economy, even if the economic think tank insists its true goal is animal welfare and provides a lot of evidence that investment in meat alternatives and enforcement of animal welfare legislation is linked to overall economic growth.
Biobanks and biodiversity charity effectiveness research might stand a chance, obviously
Somewhat surprised to hear that people can successfully pull that off.