I manage operations, research, publishing and grantwriting at Allied Scholars for Animal Protection.
Benny Smith
Karma: 714
Great point!
In addition to not doing anything, we should also stop thinking.
Very true. Nit-picking and deference to authority are highly neglected cause areas in themselves. Imposter syndrome is underrated
That’s a great point, thanks Manuel!
Against Doing Things
@Jamie_Harris thanks for sharing! I will put this on my reading list. :)
I think that would make a great cross-post!
Yeah that was interesting! He was raised vegetarian, ate meat for a while and then went back to it.
Also, re social movements and animals—James Ozden has some useful research.
Yeah he talks about vegetarianism a lot actually! Here’s one paragraph about his efforts to promote vegetarianism as a young man in England:
What he describes is one of the problems we want to solve at Allied Scholars for Animal Protection – clubs die when student leaders graduate because there’s no larger infrastructure to support recruitment.
Thanks for sharing this on the forum!
Thinking about how past social movements succeeded at large-scale attitude and behavior change seems important, and I’m not sure why there isn’t more attention to that kind of thing in EA discussions around animal advocacy.
I recently read Gandhi’s autobiography and found some useful stuff there.
Meaningfully reducing meat consumption is an unsolved problem: meta-analysis
Field Building for Animal Rights—Fall 2024 Updates
Report: The Broken State of Animal Advocacy in Universities
I just preordered Yuval Noah Harari’s new book
Yeah I think this is a good point! Donor-advised funds seem like a good way to benefit from compound interest (and tax deductions) while avoiding the risk of value drift.
Thanks Vasco!
Another finding I’ve seen is that widespread adoption of a plant-based diet would save ~3.3% of global GDP per year due to healthcare savings. That study also suggest a 6-10% reduction in global mortality, though I think these types of findings are necessarily pretty speculative and contingent on assumptions.
Environmental & health appeals are the most effective vegan outreach strategies
Animal Charity Evaluators estimates that a plant-based diet spares 105 vertebrates per year. So if you’re vegan for 50 years, that comes out to 5,250 animals saved. If you put even 10% credence in the ACE number, where the counterfactual is zero impact, you’d still be helping over 500 animals in expectation.
I’m donating 10% this year, probably all towards nonhuman animal welfare via the ACE Recommended Charity Fund.
Animal issues seem much more neglected than global health & poverty.
X-risk seems much less funding-constrained than animal stuff.
If there were an obvious way to support longermist animal stuff, I’d probably allocate something towards that. In particular, I think someone should be lobbying AI companies to take animal welfare more seriously and to get their models to not tacitly support factory farming. I also think digital sentience seems important and neglected, but I basically trust OpenPhil to do a good job funding that type of research.
Bioavailability stuff is pretty technical and I’m not an expert, but here’s the upshot according to me:
Bioavailability is sometimes slightly lower in plants but not enough to matter. For example, a recent review stated:
There is very little evidence at present regarding a marked difference in protein digestibility in humans. The more precise data collected so far in humans, assessing real (specific) oro-ileal nitrogen digestibility, has shown that the differences in the digestibility between plant and animal protein sources are only a few percent, contrary to historical findings in rats or determinations using less precise methods in humans. For soy protein isolate, pea protein flour or isolate, wheat flour and lupine flour, the figures were 89–92%, similar to those found for eggs (91%) or meat (90–94%), and slightly lower than those reported for milk protein (95%).
Additionally, combining multiple plant sources in one meal (e.g. soy and potato) often achieves bioavailability competitive with meat (I think this is one reason why many vegan protein powders combine multiple ingredients, e.g. rice & pea protein). So the generic vegan advice of “eat a variety of foods and supplement B12” has this covered.
In the rich world, we get way more protein than we need, so vegans are very unlikely to end up protein deficient due to bioavailability issues.
And if you’re an athlete or trying to bulk up, I think it’s generally advisable to err on the side of overshooting your protein intake targets, even if you’re eating meat. Slightly overshooting your protein target should more than compensate for any bioavailability gap.
We can also measure protein synthesis and muscle strength and mass directly instead of using bioavailability as a proxy, and such studies don’t find downsides to plant protein. Germany’s strongest man can confirm.
Thanks for writing this up, Sam. “Fixing” factory farms through PLF seems cynical and defeatist, and I wonder if automating factory farms could make it a lot harder to do undercover investigations.