Aidan Kankyoku

Karma: 246

Aidan Kankyoku 15 Jan 2026 14:33 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Alistair Stewart’s comment on: Should animal advocates treat veganism as a supererogatory commitment or a moral baseline?
They are clearly different but Ben’s point is interesting because historically, the movement for political lesbianism treated sexual orientation like meat craving.

Aidan Kankyoku 14 Jan 2026 17:41 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: Should animal advocates treat veganism as a supererogatory commitment or a moral baseline?
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.

Aidan Kankyoku 14 Jan 2026 17:40 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: emre kaplan🔸’s comment on: Should animal advocates treat veganism as a supererogatory commitment or a moral baseline?
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.

Aidan Kankyoku 14 Jan 2026 17:38 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: emre kaplan🔸’s comment on: Should animal advocates treat veganism as a supererogatory commitment or a moral baseline?
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!

Aidan Kankyoku 19 Dec 2025 22:17 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Ozzie Gooen’s comment on: Announcing RoastMyPost: LLMs Eval Blog Posts and More
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.

Aidan Kankyoku 19 Dec 2025 21:13 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Ozzie Gooen’s comment on: Announcing RoastMyPost: LLMs Eval Blog Posts and More
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

Aidan Kankyoku 19 Dec 2025 17:59 UTC
7 points
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on: Announcing RoastMyPost: LLMs Eval Blog Posts and More
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

Aidan Kankyoku 15 Nov 2025 21:59 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Cutecumber’s comment on: A new framing to replace “Welfarism vs. Abolitionism”
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.
1. 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.
2. 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!
3. 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.)
4. 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.

Aidan Kankyoku 14 Apr 2025 21:41 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: JoA🔸’s comment on: A new framing to replace “Welfarism vs. Abolitionism”
I’m so glad to hear it’s still useful!

Aidan Kankyoku 7 May 2024 23:40 UTC
13 points
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on: AMA: Lewis Bollard, Program Director of Farm Animal Welfare at OpenPhil
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?

Aidan Kankyoku 30 Jan 2023 22:32 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Jeroen Willems🔸’s comment on: A new framing to replace “Welfarism vs. Abolitionism”
I have often heard this worry that confrontational/attention-grabbing tactics might be counter-productive at an early stage in the movement. Interestingly, in the wake of Just Stop Oil’s soup-throwing, @James Ozden shared with me a twitter thread from a leading academic of social movement strategies arguing basically the opposite: that controversy is most productive in a movement’s early stage, when it needs to raise awareness, compared to a later stage when it needs to win over skeptical late adopters.
I don’t think this is necessarily a question of inside vs. outside, but rather that outside game strategies look different at different points in the movement. And indeed the most controversy-oriented tactics might fit best at the beginning, though I’m not necessarily arguing that.

Aidan Kankyoku 30 Jan 2023 22:25 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Zoe Williams’s comment on: New research findings on narrative in U.S. animal advocacy
Looks great! And to be nitpicky here’s an alternative third paragraph:

Based on this, they suggest reframing messaging to focus on how we as a society / species are always evolving and progressive forwards, and that evolving beyond animal farming is something we can do, should do, and already are doing. They also suggest refocusing strategy around this—eg. focusing on advocacy for pro-animal policies, as opposed to asking consumers to make individual changes to their food choices.

Aidan Kankyoku 27 Jan 2023 18:58 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Bella’s comment on: A new framing to replace “Welfarism vs. Abolitionism”
Thanks, Bella, I hope it helps!

Aidan Kankyoku 27 Jan 2023 18:29 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: emre kaplan🔸’s comment on: A new framing to replace “Welfarism vs. Abolitionism”
That’s a good point about tactics vs. demands. It’s interesting because in theory, we might think that radical tactics could be effectively paired with moderate demands and vice versa. That is, if you’re asking for something most people agree with, more people would support using radical tactics to win it, whereas if you’re asking for a fringe goal, you’d want to avoid alienating people further. Yet this is the opposite of what has happened in (at least) the U.S. animal and environmental movements in the last couple decades. Groups like XR and DxE pair radical demands with radical tactics, while HSUS/THL and the Sierra Club are more moderate on both fronts. But I suppose I’m conflating outside with radical and inside with moderate which isn’t actually what I was trying to say in the post. I’ll need to think about your point a bit more!

Aidan Kankyoku 27 Jan 2023 18:21 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: A new framing to replace “Welfarism vs. Abolitionism”
Thanks, Nick!

Aidan Kankyoku 29 Oct 2022 15:27 UTC
3 points
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on: Adding Nuance to the Small Animal Replacement Problem: Moral Circle Expansion
Great piece! You’ve put words to an idea that I imagine a lot of us (but at least myself) have had vaguely bouncing around in our heads for a while, namely that a strategic emphasis on the animals killed most numerously in the food system doesn’t take human psychology into account. I’d love to see more research on the cow-chicken-fish elimination process (or see research that already exists) but like you, I’ve heard lots of anecdotal evidence suggesting this is true.
There’s a real possibility the best way to help future farmed shrimp and insects is to try to expand society’s moral circle to cows as fast as possible, on the way to further expansion to chickens and eventually shrimp and insects.
Another question I’d have for further research would be how quickly we can introduce concern for invertebrates once an individual or social group has opened up to concern for cows. A hunch would be that the process of moral circle expansion is subject to the basic principles of momentum: that once we overcome inertia on cows, each subsequent expansion gets easier and easier as long as we sustain momentum.