Pressuring people and entities to do things they would rather not do (like incurring business expenses to improve animal welfare) can be a powerful mechanism of action (MOA), both because of leverage and because certain objectives may be hard to accomplish otherwise.
But it has some important limitations as well, several of which relate to your points. The reliance on consumer, social, or political pressure limits the range of viable targets, likely requires pulling some punches to maintain the public support needed for the MOA to work, invites countermeasures by opponents who can appeal to (e.g.) a higher power like the legislature, and so on.
Thus, it doesn’t generally play well with (e.g.) an attitude of truthseeking-and-damn-the-torpedoes or something that looks like an epistemic precommitment to not caring what outsiders think. Those stances may work with bednets and conducting certain types of research where little third-party support/cooperation is needed, but I’d note how those interventions are not nearly as leveraged.
Pressuring people and entities to do things they would rather not do (like incurring business expenses to improve animal welfare) can be a powerful mechanism of action (MOA), both because of leverage and because certain objectives may be hard to accomplish otherwise.
But it has some important limitations as well, several of which relate to your points. The reliance on consumer, social, or political pressure limits the range of viable targets, likely requires pulling some punches to maintain the public support needed for the MOA to work, invites countermeasures by opponents who can appeal to (e.g.) a higher power like the legislature, and so on.
Thus, it doesn’t generally play well with (e.g.) an attitude of truthseeking-and-damn-the-torpedoes or something that looks like an epistemic precommitment to not caring what outsiders think. Those stances may work with bednets and conducting certain types of research where little third-party support/cooperation is needed, but I’d note how those interventions are not nearly as leveraged.