Thanks for the post! It’s a wonderful source of good reflections and references and you’ve put a lot of time and effort into making it for which I am very grateful!
These questions are big, though, and I generally want to warn for some reasoning-shortcuts. I think your article is a huge and quite unique improvement over the conversations I normally have with vegans who are sceptical of meat-substitutes more out of aesthetics rather than thinking things through, but some points are still somewhat sloppy to my liking.
For example, how can the way factory farming ends realistically set a precedent to future global developments? Do we currently make diet-decisions on a large scale based on the historical phase-out of whale oil or transatlantic slave trade? Do politicians make decisions based on these historical precedents? The concept of ‘precedent’ might sound intuitive when we treat humanity as one person or one court of law, but I doubt if that makes sense on the large scale.
On a slightly different note, I am also a bit wary that the rubber-banding graphs might be more of an exercise to let our map of reality fit our models, rather than making our models fit reality. The idea that ‘total value’ and ‘value change’ can be meaningfully mapped to a single number or derivative respectively, seems to me to be an attempt to do aesthetic, intuitive, reasoning that might distract from some essential details. I would keep in mind that these graphs are thinking tools at best (in which case, they are quite nice, so thanks), not models with any predictive power.
I really like the scope of your further research questions, but I’d advice you to make them a bit more concrete, closed and falsifiable. For example, rephrase the ‘how much does it matter...’ into something that can actually be tested, as in ‘how much effect does X have on Y’? Also, where possible, try and abstain from questions that make sense if and only if you turn moral value into a single number (because these questions risk being limited in their strategic value and predictive power) .
Also, bonus reflection: As you briefly touched upon, Leenaert’s point about how the technological and social progress might be much more intertwined than we think is very important. What even is the divide between the social and the technological, in this information age? You could say: any time people do things out of convenience or self-interest, we speak of technological change, any time people do things out of altruistic motives, we call it social change. But what if people are influenced by both? How much trust can we even put on people’s reports of their motives? Can these motives evolve over time? Also, is my ability to browse to https://​​www.gapminder.org/​​dollar-street and decide to donate to the world’s poorest people based on what I see there a social or a technological change?
Thank you for the feedback! I just wanted to let you know that while I haven’t had time to write a proper response, I’ve read your feedback and will try to take it on board in my future work.
Thanks for the post! It’s a wonderful source of good reflections and references and you’ve put a lot of time and effort into making it for which I am very grateful!
These questions are big, though, and I generally want to warn for some reasoning-shortcuts. I think your article is a huge and quite unique improvement over the conversations I normally have with vegans who are sceptical of meat-substitutes more out of aesthetics rather than thinking things through, but some points are still somewhat sloppy to my liking.
For example, how can the way factory farming ends realistically set a precedent to future global developments? Do we currently make diet-decisions on a large scale based on the historical phase-out of whale oil or transatlantic slave trade? Do politicians make decisions based on these historical precedents? The concept of ‘precedent’ might sound intuitive when we treat humanity as one person or one court of law, but I doubt if that makes sense on the large scale.
On a slightly different note, I am also a bit wary that the rubber-banding graphs might be more of an exercise to let our map of reality fit our models, rather than making our models fit reality. The idea that ‘total value’ and ‘value change’ can be meaningfully mapped to a single number or derivative respectively, seems to me to be an attempt to do aesthetic, intuitive, reasoning that might distract from some essential details. I would keep in mind that these graphs are thinking tools at best (in which case, they are quite nice, so thanks), not models with any predictive power.
I really like the scope of your further research questions, but I’d advice you to make them a bit more concrete, closed and falsifiable. For example, rephrase the ‘how much does it matter...’ into something that can actually be tested, as in ‘how much effect does X have on Y’? Also, where possible, try and abstain from questions that make sense if and only if you turn moral value into a single number (because these questions risk being limited in their strategic value and predictive power) .
Also, bonus reflection: As you briefly touched upon, Leenaert’s point about how the technological and social progress might be much more intertwined than we think is very important. What even is the divide between the social and the technological, in this information age? You could say: any time people do things out of convenience or self-interest, we speak of technological change, any time people do things out of altruistic motives, we call it social change. But what if people are influenced by both? How much trust can we even put on people’s reports of their motives? Can these motives evolve over time? Also, is my ability to browse to https://​​www.gapminder.org/​​dollar-street and decide to donate to the world’s poorest people based on what I see there a social or a technological change?
Thanks for sharing Dollar Street! I knew about Gapminder, but had not checked that project.
Thank you for the feedback! I just wanted to let you know that while I haven’t had time to write a proper response, I’ve read your feedback and will try to take it on board in my future work.