Most animals are wild animals, so the answer to this question should focus on them.
I can imagine a future where most animals are farmed animals. I’m not saying it’s particularly likely, but if humans spread to other planets, I think we’re more likely to take factory farming with us than take nature with us. Farmed animals should be part of this convo.
From @Tristan Katz :
Does WAW dwarf FAW in expectation? Or is FAW still important to consider in this discussion?
I can imagine a future where most animals are farmed animals. I’m not saying it’s particularly likely, but if humans spread to other planets, I think we’re more likely to take factory farming with us than take nature with us. Farmed animals should be part of this convo imo.
How am I supposed to predict whether the solution will be good for animals if I have no idea what that solution will look like?
That about sums it up haha.
I find this compelling, if discouraging.
I’m curious about this choice:
I will assume that “going well” for animals means something like “the ratio of positive experiences to negative experiences among animals is both meaningfully higher than it is today, and is above 1 (i.e. net positive)”.
I agree that animal experience is below 1 right now. I don’t actually think that a continuation of the status quo is possible; for reasons explained by Ian Morris, I think we either see massive growth or some form of collapse.
That aside, though, crossing 1 seems like a slightly unfair threshold. If the current ratio is massively negative, would you stand by reducing it to something close to but below 1 not being “AGI went well for animals”?
This post is persuasive overall and caused me to update negatively on the debate motion.
I don’t think this is load-bearing but this sentence:
However, it is not the number of animals that matters here, but the scale of humans’ impact on them.
I’m not certain about this distinction. Humans increasing or decreasing the number might be the largest impact, and at the same time, this seems to me to imply a greater concern for anthropogenic harm than non-anthropogenic harm. Is that what you meant?
Very cool to see this modelled!
They’re animal activists from across the spectrum from EA-aligned to EA-skeptical.
I think it 70% likely will go well for animals, but that’s not enough to obviate the need for animal-specific alignment efforts. Full take: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/skdp9uB4AoyN2fnuu/animal-welfare-is-just-part-of-ai-alignment-now-and-both
They are clearly different but Ben’s point is interesting because historically, the movement for political lesbianism treated sexual orientation like meat craving.
Would you say your skepticism is mainly tied into the specific framing of “offsetting” as opposed to just donating? How would your answer change if the offset framing was dropped and it was just a plain donation ask?
I was surprised (and I assume Farmkind was too) that the Rethink survey found specifically contrasting donations against diet change didn’t have any positive effect. If that pans out in the real world and the Veganuary offsetting campaign doesn’t have better results than Farmkind’s normal donation asks, I wonder how different it would seem to folks to just have an identity around donating as “membership” in the movement, similar to the NRA, Sierra Club, and other mass membership movement organizations.
Oh, also, the idea that a 10% threshold for vegetarianism might be enough to shift to stigmatizing meat is super intriguing! I could see that backfiring without much obvious (to me) benefit and I’d love to hear more about your reasoning there.
I agree with all your points, except the one about abandoning veganism as an identity. I used to agree with this point, too. What moved me is the fact that veganism as an identity is a massive, organic phenomenon that isn’t going away– at 2% of the US, we should expect around 7 million vegans who don’t care a spec whether the formal/organized part of the movement decide to jettison veganism.
I argue that this organic spread of veganism is the only part of animal advocacy that deserves to be called a “movement,” and that we should think hard about how to make the most of that phenomenon, which is clearly tapping into something about how people work– very few cultural movements come close to 2% of the population, especially those that require as much sacrifice as veganism!
That makes sense, I don’t want to be overly fussy if it was getting most things right. I guess the thing is, it’s not helpful if it mostly recognizes true facts as true but mistakes some true facts as false, if it does not accurately flag a significant number of incorrect facts, which in clicking through a bunch of flags I didn’t see almost any I thought necessitated an edit.
It looks like maybe 60% fallacy check and 40% fact check. For instance, fact check:
claims there are more farmed chickens than shrimps (!)
Claims ICAW does not use aggressive tactics, apparently basing that on vague copy on their website
I love this idea! I just took it for a spin and the quality of the feedback isn’t at a point I would find it very useful yet. My sense is that it’s limited by the quality of the agents rather than anything about the design of the app, though maybe changes in the scaffold could help.
Most of the critiques were myopic, such as:
It labeled one sentence in my intro as a “hasty generalization/unsupported claim” when I spend most of the post supporting that statement.
In one sentence, it raised a flag for “missing context” about a study I reference, with a different flag affirming that the link embedded in the sentence provides the context
I make a claim about how the majority of people view an issue, providing support for the claim, then discussing the problems with the view. It raised a flag on the claim I’m critiquing, calling it unscientific– even from the sentences immediately before and after, it should be clear that was exactly my point!
I could list several more examples, most of the flags I clicked on were misunderstandings in similar ways. Article is here if you want to take a look: https://www.roastmypost.org/docs/jr1MShmVhsK6Igp0yJCL2/reader
Regarding all your points and my responses, my views have definitely shifted since this post. I’m more strongly in favor of cage free and feel downright embarrassed that it took me so long to accept the immediate suffering of replacing caged hens with cage-free hens.
Per the preface, I think a reasonable person should accept the welfare improvement of cage free. But I don’t think it’s the same kind of slam dunk as the world being round or obesity being unhealthy. These are purely empirical, while there is a coherent set of first principles that rejects the quantification of cage-free suffering reduction. In hindsight, I was contorting myself to hold those principles in order to soldier for the conclusion I wanted.) Mostly, though, I agree it’s a social problem and I am publishing new writing at https://sandcastlesblog.substack.com aimed at abolitionist-type advocates to try to mitigate it. I think it will be difficult to make progress on.
I agree with this point, and I’ve mostly stopped using the term “ecology” for this reason. This is a helpful reminder to me to continue not using it, especially since I’m starting to write more again!
I mostly agree with this. However, I think it is reasonable and necessary to sometimes set side disagreements that are as deeply dug-in as this. (Maybe this point is more in response to 1, sorry for being sloppy.)
I wish I was a cute cucumber.
Something I think wasn’t even as clear to me when I wrote this is that the intended audience was abolitionist activists who are unfamiliar with the discursive norms of this forum. I come from that world and while I mostly feel horrified at what an epistemic mess I was, I still feel that community has something to offer. My new writing is more self-consciously aimed at that audience and for that reason, I’m not crossposting it here. I’m trying to pick my battles and I feel kind of OK with the balance that this essay ended up striking.
I’m so glad to hear it’s still useful!
Looking at major changes societies have adopted in the past, the path to these changes has often been nonlinear. A frequently-discussed example is the U.S. civil rights movement, where the extent of violent opposition reached a near zenith just before the movement’s largest victories in the 1950s and 60s. Gay marriage in the U.S. was another example: in a 15-year period ending three years before marriage equality was decided by SCOTUS, advocates watched a wave of anti-gay marriage state constitutional amendments succeed at the ballot 30-1. Women’s suffrage, the New Deal, and (most extremely) the abolition of slavery were all immediately preceded by enormous levels of opposition and social strife.
How, if at all, does OP account for the frequent nonlinearity of major societal changes when deciding what interventions to support on behalf of farmed animals?
Fair, the semantics of “going well” ultimately don’t matter so I think this is clear.