avacyn

Karma: 242

avacyn 24 Nov 2021 18:59 UTC
42 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Announcing our 2021 charity recommendations
I’ll preface by saying that I’m not deeply informed about the activities of the various non-profits in the technology alternative space (GFI, MII, New Harvest, Cellular Agriculture Society). However, based on my direct anecdotal experience working with some of these orgs, as well as strong impressions formed through working adjacent to them at a cell ag company, their relative rankings don’t line up with my understanding of their relative impact and competence. ACE’s comprehensive write ups don’t provide much more detail either. I worry that ACE has holes in their process that cause them to be systematically wrong about charities in the animal-alternative technology space. I would welcome more explanation for what went into these rankings.
I have a lot of respect for ACE, and I think that charity evaluation here is even more difficult than it is for conventional animal advocacy. However, if I were a donor, I would place very limited weight on ACE’s rankings for these orgs in particular, absent more info.
(I have no opinions ACE’s recommendations for other charities, and would probably still mostly defer to ACE there).

avacyn 25 Jul 2022 2:38 UTC
15 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Three common mistakes when naming an org or project
I disagree with 2 and somewhat disagree with 3.
Re 2 - I think there’s a lot of value early on to describing clearly what you do via your name, and particularly how you might be different than similar organizations. A big challenge for new organizations is building a network of people (donors, employees, advisors) that are excited about what the group is doing. Making it clear to people why they might get excited to you via your name is a way to make this process much easier.
If you expand your strategy in the future you can always rebrand. Rebranding is disruptive, but it often won’t be as harmful as missing out on valuable connections early on.
Re 3 - getting lots of feedback is great, and you make a good point regarding how to get feedback. However, I think you have to be careful about how you weigh that feedback. The more people who weigh in on something like this, the more likely you’ll end up selecting for something that doesn’t have downsides, rather than something that actively has upsides (especially non-obvious ones, such as clearly describing what you do).

avacyn 6 Jan 2021 17:38 UTC
14 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Some Scattered Thoughts on Operations
I remember being surprised by the differing mindsets about operations when I transitioned to being more involved in the tech startup world after already being involved in EA. In the startup world you often hear things like “Ideas are cheap; execution is everything” which likely leads to operations feeling less low status. This is a major contrast to the EA world where many are highly intellectual, and place a high value on ideas. Given that startups tend to have more skin in the game than non-profits, perhaps EA non-profits could benefit from shifting more towards this mindset.

avacyn 24 Apr 2019 5:25 UTC
13 points
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in reply to: WilliamKiely’s comment on: Reasons to eat meat
I think that only makes sense if you’re negative leaning, which I’m not. If you think that adding pleasurable lives is good, then you’d be taking a risk of *not* creating the net-positive cattle lives when you decided to eat tofu over beef.
To be clear, I’m not necessarily arguing that we should eat beef (I’m vegan), I just thought it would be useful to describe the arguments that I thought this post was going to make before I read it :).

avacyn 21 Feb 2018 20:52 UTC
12 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Why I prioritize moral circle expansion over artificial intelligence alignment
This post is extremely valuable—thank you! You have caused me to reexamine my views about the expected value of the far future.

What do you think are the best levers for expanding the moral circle, besides donating to SI? Is there anything else outside of conventional EAA?

avacyn 28 May 2021 0:33 UTC
9 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Career Guide for Ending Factory Farming
In particular, there is a talent bottleneck for science and engineering roles.
As someone with experience hiring in the alternative protein sector, I have a few thoughts about this:
- The current talent bottlenecks in the industry may not be a great guide for a young professional’s career, at least in the alternative protein sector. Things in these industries change extremely quickly. Given that it could take 5+ years to get educated in one of these technical fields, the landscape by the time you finish your degree may look pretty different. Product improvement is a major focus now, but in the future I can see a major emphasis on policy (government funding for technical research can be a massive resource for public-good focused industries), management, operations, and marketing / PR (e.g. once the competition with conventional meat gets a bit dirtier).
- In my experience, the talent bottleneck for food science is greater than for other technical fields. Plant-based, cultivated, and fermented alt-proteins all need food scientists, and the explosion in plant-based meat (which is 10x bigger than cultivated and fermented) has put a lot of strain on that labor market. I also think it may be somewhat faster to get trained in food science than in e.g. bioengineering.
Very thorough writeup :)

avacyn 23 Apr 2019 22:59 UTC
9 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Reasons to eat meat
On a less satirical note, I think one strong argument in favor of eating meat is that beef cattle (esp. grass-fed) might have net positive lives. If this is true, then the utilitarian line is to 1) eat more beef to increase demand, 2) continue advocating for welfare reforms that will make cows’ lives even more positive.
Beef cattle are different than e.g. factory farmed chicken in that they live a long time (around 3 years on average vs 6-7 weeks for broilers), and spend much of their lives grazing on stockers where they might have natural-ish lives.
Another argument in favor of eating beef is that it tends to lead to deforestation, which decreases total wild animal habitat, which one might think are worse than beef farms.

avacyn 6 Jul 2020 17:55 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Animal Advocacy Careers advice
I’m a big fan of what you’re trying to do! It could be very impactful.
However, I notice that your advice seems to be greatly skewed towards non-profits. For example, in your M&L overview, you don’t spend much time on food tech as a potential application of M&L skills. You also don’t give any information on the skill gaps currently facing plant-based / cultivated meat. I think this is a missed opportunity, as the gaps in those industry are important, and could be well suited for people who aren’t a good fit for management, fundraising, or advocacy.
Is this a purposeful decision? Are you planning to augment this later?
Thanks for all of your work :)

avacyn 12 Dec 2017 18:27 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Dawn Drescher’s comment on: Four Organizations EAs Should Fully Fund for 2018

I think it’s valuable to research how we can improve the well-being of humans who suffer – perhaps even to the point of having net negative lives, but not necessarily

I agree with this. Just to expand a bit—wild elephants might generally have net positive lives, but there still might be worthwhile interventions, e.g. to ensures some number that would have been killed by predators instead die in their sleep. The most relevant question is not whether wild animals have net positive lives, but how much their welfare could be improved per dollar.

avacyn 6 Oct 2021 2:53 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 0
on: New intuitions for cultured meat
I think this is a bit of a straw-person. It may be true that some commentators overstate the immediate relevance of this consideration, as well as how close companies are to reaping the benefits of this efficiency. However, a more charitable interpretation of the argument is that at scale, support systems will be amortized over a much larger amount of desired output. To give two examples:
- Animals expend a substantial amount of calories thinking with their brain. This processing will be centralized, and paired down in scope in the computers that run the bioreactors.
- Animals spend a lot of energy regulating body temperature. Given that bioreactors will be much bigger than animals, they will have a much lower surface area for heat transfer.
(To be clear, I don’t think this category of argument is a major consideration in favor nor against the feasibility of cultured meat. There are arguments pointed in both direction. One disadvantage of bioreactors is that they have to be designed to last decades, have modular components that can be swapped out, etc.)

avacyn 1 Feb 2019 21:31 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: KevinWatkinson’s comment on: Will companies meet their animal welfare commitments?
I’m not sure if you’re claiming that shaming based approaches haven’t been used in the past for corporate welfare campaigns, but if you are, I don’t thing this is accurate.
My impression is that advocacy groups pursue both “carrot” and “stick” strategies to pressure companies into adopting better welfare policies. I think CIWF falls more on the carrot side, but then if that doesn’t work THL comes in with the stick. For example, THL’s current campaign against McDonald’s seems mostly shame based—imnotlovinit.com.
Given that carrot+stick approaches have worked to get initial commitments, it seems reasonable that similar approaches would work to enforce those commitments.

avacyn 6 Jan 2021 22:15 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Max_Daniel’s comment on: Some Scattered Thoughts on Operations
Agree!
Another possible difference between the startup world and the EA world is that startups have access to much stronger direct feedback loops than non-profits, i.e. trying to sell to customers and seeing what happens. This means that startups don’t have to think through everything super carefully before executing.

avacyn 3 Jan 2021 3:22 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Conflicted Omnivore
Thank you for bringing attention to this phenomenon! I’ve seen a number of polls like this now, which makes me confident that this isn’t a fluke, and actually points to something extremely important for the movement. Another cool study from Psychology Today shows animal rights was the least controversial of six causes considered, including sustainability.
It’s a shame that in my experience, many activist are convinced that broader society doesn’t care about animals at all. I think this is a major sort of disillusionment and burnout in the movement. According to polls like this, there’s an important way in which this mindset is misguided.
I’ve also thought a bit about why we haven’t already abolished factory farms given polls like these. Adding on to the points you’ve already brought up:
- Cass Sunstein has done some awesome work on how “societal beliefs” can be slow to change in response to changes in the beliefs of the individual in that society (I like this 80K podcast episode on it). This is a reason for optimism that we may see abrupt change in favor of animal rights in the future.
- I think many people don’t actually have “beliefs” about whether animals have rights / feel pain / are conscious, etc . Beliefs are an abstraction over ways they might act in various scenarios (the map is not the territory). People can answer polls like this yet still not have the ascribed belief, because in reality their answer is a different type of behavior (e.g. an emotional response, signaling of group identity, etc). For me, this makes it less paradoxical how people can answer polls like this, yet still eat meat.

avacyn 29 Jun 2019 21:56 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Brian_Tomasik’s comment on: How Much Do Wild Animals Suffer? A Foundational Result on the Question is Wrong.
I’m thankful for this discussion. Previously, I was under the impression that most people who looked deeply into WAS concluded that there was definitely net suffering. However, now it’s clear to me this isn’t the case.
Brian—I’m wondering if you’ve explained elsewhere exactly what you mean by “extreme, unbearable suffering can’t be outweighed by other organism-moments experiencing pleasure.” Is this an expression of negative utilitarianism, or just the empirical claim that current organisms have greater suffering capacity than pleasure capacity?
I am a total hedonic utilitarian, and not negative leaning at all, so I’m wondering what conclusion this philosophical position would lead to, given all the empirical considerations.

avacyn 11 Oct 2021 1:52 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Early career EA’s should consider joining fast-growing startups in emerging technologies
Completely agree! I’ll also point out that there’s tons of promising fast growing startups in the alternative protein space.

avacyn 11 Aug 2018 18:17 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Fish used as live bait by recreational fishermen
I would upvote this twice if I could! I follow EAA stuff pretty closely and I haven’t heard this discussed before. However, it seems like a highly important, neglected, and tractable cause area. The most exciting part in my mind is that progress has already started in some countries and states, meaning that it could be very tractable.

I’d love to see a more detailed analysis of the counterfactuals. For example, what percentage of bait fish will be replaced by artificial baits vs animals? If you used worms or other animals as bait, would you have to use more bait, or would it be a 1-1 replacement?

I’d also love to see some analysis about how existing laws came to exist. Who lobbied for these policies? Were they easy to pass, or were they controversial?

This is a great example of the utility of the EA forum—well researched and actionable. I’ll do what I can to make sure this is on the radar of others in EAA.

avacyn 10 Mar 2018 18:28 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Why not to rush to translate effective altruism into other languages
I found this article useful and convincing. Thanks for writing, Ben!

However, I was surprised to see that this has become one of the most upvoted posts of all time on the EA forum. I would expect an insightful and convincing post like this to get between 20 and 30 upvotes. I’m worried that I’m missing a more important takeaway. Can someone explain why this has been so positively received?

avacyn 20 Feb 2018 15:54 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: What is Animal Farming in Rural Zambia Like? A Site Visit
Really interesting and worthwhile project!

People sometimes discuss whether poverty alleviation interventions are bad for animals because richer people eat more meat. Do you think your findings affect this discussion?

avacyn 5 Feb 2018 23:00 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Would it be a good idea to create a ‘GiveWell’ for U.S. charities?
Nice! I think it could be really valuable to create “GiveWell-style” charity evaluators for other areas. ACE started this off with animal charities, but I think some of the areas you listed could be good fits, as well as others e.g. biorisk/AI charities.

You mention this in the 5th benefit, but a major upside in my mind is incentivizing the space to place greater value in effectiveness and transparency. These effects could be far reaching and hard to quantify. You might see if ACE thinks this happened with animal advocacy because of their work.

There are potentially major benefits even if you fail:
- You could gain valuable insights around starting such a venture, and around the focus area. This could be valuable both to you, and to the broader movement if you can distill it into a postmortem.
- Starting an ambitious venture and failing can still be valuable career capital if you can show you hit certain milestones or can take away major lessons.
In general, I think you are overweighing the possible effects on EA / GiveWell. As the project grows you can decide how much explicit association you have with EA and GiveWell.

The biggest cost seems in my mind is the opportunity cost. Differences in cause areas can be pretty huge, so if you are working on a suboptimal cause, you might have a much lower impact.

avacyn 28 Jan 2018 20:03 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The almighty Hive will
Nice! I really like the idea of EAs getting ahead by coordinating in unconventional ways.

The ideas in “Building and EA social safety net” could be indirectly encouraged by just making EA a tighter community with more close friendships. I’m pretty happy giving an EA friend a 0-interest loan, but I’d be hesitant to do that for a random EA. By e.g. organizing social events where close friendships could form, more stuff like that would happen naturally. Letting these things happen naturally also makes them harder to exploit.