I think the patterns you point which pressure towards “just doing things” are all reasonable, but I’ll push back on your link on your “poor epistemics of the animal welfare movement” claim.
The linked post by Elizabeth argues that EA vegan advocacy has bad epistemics. Magnus Vinding’s comment on that post is the closest to my view. Briefly, I was confused by Elizabeth’s focus on a topic I consider pretty tangential and not load-bearing on any of the arguments for vegan advocacy (and even less so for AW at large). Is vegan advocacy really less truthseeking than the general public’s views on meat consumption? How do the human health effects trade off against animal effects? Seems like an isolated demand for rigor.
The epistemics of vegan advocacy also seem quite distinct from arguments for the importance of animal welfare, or prioritization between animal welfare charities, which seem to have convinced many EAs who are not vegan. So there’d be much more work to do to make the claim that EA AW at large has poor epistemics.
I came away from Elizabeth’s post agreeing that some vegan advocates should message better about health tradeoffs, but not seeing why that should update me on the load-bearing arguments for veganism (animal effects), or certainly on EA AW’s epistemics at large.
I also recommend reading Natalia’s answers to Elizabeth’s posts, both here and on LessWrong (you need to scroll down a bit there) instead of just reading the post uncritically.[1]
I didn’t get the sense that Natalia’s epistemics were poorer than commenters in other cause areas, but I did get the sense that the evidence base available is weaker.
Regarding this post, as a non-expert I wouldn’t be shocked if shrimp stunning and slaughter interventions turned out to be less valuable than we currently think, as it’s such a new field and shrimp seem hard to study. But for cage-free campaigns there’s been a lof of research, analysis, and debate in EA for more than 5 years. My sense is that people studying these things have many reasons to believe that these interventions are very likely to be net positive (and are deeply aware of the significant downsides of cage-free systems, they just have compelling arguments for why the upsides compensate for those)[2]
I also don’t think there’s much pressure by donors/volunteers/employees to invest in cage free campaigns compared to things like vegan advocacy, or promotion of plant-based defaults in schools/hospitals/workplaces. If anything I’d guess the opposite, and that senior people pushing for cage-free interventions really do it because of the data (and of course tractability)
But I do think most EAs should get their ferritin levels tested: low iron impacts productivity, EAs are uniquely likely to be lacto-vegetarian, which according to Gemini is “one of the most difficult dietary patterns for maintaining adequate iron levels”, and 80mg equivalent iron tablets are very cheap
I think the patterns you point which pressure towards “just doing things” are all reasonable, but I’ll push back on your link on your “poor epistemics of the animal welfare movement” claim.
The linked post by Elizabeth argues that EA vegan advocacy has bad epistemics. Magnus Vinding’s comment on that post is the closest to my view. Briefly, I was confused by Elizabeth’s focus on a topic I consider pretty tangential and not load-bearing on any of the arguments for vegan advocacy (and even less so for AW at large). Is vegan advocacy really less truthseeking than the general public’s views on meat consumption? How do the human health effects trade off against animal effects? Seems like an isolated demand for rigor.
The epistemics of vegan advocacy also seem quite distinct from arguments for the importance of animal welfare, or prioritization between animal welfare charities, which seem to have convinced many EAs who are not vegan. So there’d be much more work to do to make the claim that EA AW at large has poor epistemics.
I came away from Elizabeth’s post agreeing that some vegan advocates should message better about health tradeoffs, but not seeing why that should update me on the load-bearing arguments for veganism (animal effects), or certainly on EA AW’s epistemics at large.
I also recommend reading Natalia’s answers to Elizabeth’s posts, both here and on LessWrong (you need to scroll down a bit there) instead of just reading the post uncritically.[1]
I didn’t get the sense that Natalia’s epistemics were poorer than commenters in other cause areas, but I did get the sense that the evidence base available is weaker.
Regarding this post, as a non-expert I wouldn’t be shocked if shrimp stunning and slaughter interventions turned out to be less valuable than we currently think, as it’s such a new field and shrimp seem hard to study.
But for cage-free campaigns there’s been a lof of research, analysis, and debate in EA for more than 5 years. My sense is that people studying these things have many reasons to believe that these interventions are very likely to be net positive (and are deeply aware of the significant downsides of cage-free systems, they just have compelling arguments for why the upsides compensate for those)[2]
I also don’t think there’s much pressure by donors/volunteers/employees to invest in cage free campaigns compared to things like vegan advocacy, or promotion of plant-based defaults in schools/hospitals/workplaces. If anything I’d guess the opposite, and that senior people pushing for cage-free interventions really do it because of the data (and of course tractability)
But I do think most EAs should get their ferritin levels tested: low iron impacts productivity, EAs are uniquely likely to be lacto-vegetarian, which according to Gemini is “one of the most difficult dietary patterns for maintaining adequate iron levels”, and 80mg equivalent iron tablets are very cheap
But it does seem that the actual estimated marginal cost-effectiveness numbers could be very different from what’s often claimed