I manage operations, research, publishing and grantwriting at Allied Scholars for Animal Protection, a startup nonprofit building a unified infrastructure for campus animal advocacy.
Philosophy and science fiction nerd.
I manage operations, research, publishing and grantwriting at Allied Scholars for Animal Protection, a startup nonprofit building a unified infrastructure for campus animal advocacy.
Philosophy and science fiction nerd.
Yeah!
Faunalytics did an RCT comparing showing people 2D factory farming footage to 3D VR. They found that both led to lower pork consumption than the control group, and that the VR was not a meaningful improvement over 2D screens.
Another Faunalytics study compared students’ self-reported willingness to reduce consumption after viewing different videos.
The Humane League did RCTs on showing people a documentary on health, environment, & animal welfare reasons for veganism and did not find a significant effect on meat consumption. Notably, in the conclusion the authors say that “Novel intervention strategies may be needed to meaningfully shift dietary consumption away from meat and animal products.”
On the other hand, THL also published a meta-analysis with encouraging implications for interventions that focus on animal welfare-related messaging.
THL lists a few other relevant studies here that I haven’t looked at. There were also the leafletting studies by ACE and Faunalytics, both of which found leafletting to be ineffective.
With a lot of these studies, reliance on self report means that there are problems like social desirability bias.
I’ve also been thinking of writing up some kind of review, feel free to DM me if you want to collaborate :)
Thanks for sharing this, I upvoted it. It’s cool to see efforts aimed at moving the overton window on nonhuman sentience. In general I feel positively about this article and have a lot of respect for your work.
One worry I have about this type of public communication is that it runs the risk of distracting people from the more glaring problem of factory farming.
Caring about pigs is already way outside the overton window. If we spill a lot of ink on really speculative claims in public-facing media, there’s a risk that people will conflate two very different phenomena:
An extreme moral catastrophe that we know is happening (factory farming)
An important but very speculative area of academic philosophy (microbe sentience etc.)
The former has a clear solution (eat plants), the latter might be completely intractable. The former involves lives that are almost certainly net-negative, the latter involves lives of unknown quality. The former is robustly terrible according to any sane worldview, the latter may hinge on population ethics and your approach to Pascal’s Mugging.
I think you could have better communicated this distinction, perhaps by having a paragraph early in the article that states in very clear terms how bad factory farming is.
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.
Strongly agree that if lock-in happens, it will be very important for those controlling the AIs to care about all sentient beings. My impression of top AGI researchers is that most take AI sentience pretty seriously as a possibility, and it seems hard for someone to think this without also believing animals can be sentient.
Obviously this is less true the further you get from AI safety/OpenAI/DeepMind/Anthropic. An important question is, if AGI happens and the control problem is solved, who ends up deciding what the AGI values?
I’m pretty uncomfortable with the idea of random computer scientists, tech moguls, or politicians having all the power. Seems like the ideal to aim for is a democratic process structured to represent the reflective interests of all sentient beings. But this would be extremely difficult to do in practice. Realistically I expect a messy power struggle between various interest groups. In that case, outreach to leaders of all the interest groups to protect nonhuman minds is crucial, as you suggest.
I wrote some related thoughts here, curious what you think.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but I think the article is referring to projections that meat production will double by 2050. He’s not claiming that climate change will be twice as bad without alt proteins. Instead, he’s saying that harms from meat production will double by 2050 without alt proteins.
1) Meat production is a significant contributor to climate change, other environmental harms (pretty much all of them), food insecurity, antibiotic resistance, and pandemic risk—causing significant and immediate harm to billions of people.
2) All of these harms are likely to double in adverse impact (or more) by 2050 unless alternative proteins succeed.
Seems accurate to me, though I see how it might be confusingly worded.
This is a common misconception!
Several plants, including soy and quinoa, are complete proteins.
Vegan protein powders contain all the amino acids in appropriate ratios – just check the label of any pea protein powder next time you’re at the store. Pea protein powder is nutritionally identical to whey for all intents and purposes.
If you eat enough calories and a variety of legumes and grains as a vegan, it’s basically impossible to be deficient in any amino acid. It’s true that plant foods have amino acids in varying amounts, but they complement each other such that you easily get all of the amino acids, unless you’re on a black beans-only diet or something. For example, a peanut butter sandwich is a complete protein. I’d encourage you to check out this article for more info on vegan protein.
Nutritionfacts.org, veganhealth.org, and the vegan.com guide are all great resources, I recommend looking into it!
I’ve been vegan for three years, and I’m in good health. Years ago I would have said that being vegan sounded impossible, but it’s much easier than I would have expected. Happy to set up a call to chat about vegan nutrition if you’re ever interested.
There’s nothing magical about “animal protein.” Plants and plant-based protein powders provide the same nutrients, minus the moral atrocity.
Insect sentience is debated, but I’m not sure why we’d take the risk when we can just go vegan.
I’m highly skeptical that farmed crickets would live “undisturbed” lives, given the historical track record of how animals are treated when we optimize their lives for meat production rather than their own welfare. Generally, we should treat sentient beings as an end in themselves, not as a means to an end.
Steelmanning is typically described as responding to the “strongest” version of an argument you can think of.
Recently, I heard someone describe it a slightly different way, as responding to the argument that you “agree with the most.”
I like this framing because it signals an extra layer of epistemic humility: I am not a perfect judge of what the best possible argument is for a claim. In fact, reasonable people often disagree on what constitutes a strong argument for a given claim.
This framing also helps avoid a tone of condescension that sometimes comes with steelmanning. I’ve been in a few conversations in which someone says they are “steelmanning” some claim X, but says it in a tone of voice that communicates two things:
The speaker thinks that X is crazy.
The speaker thinks that those who believe X need help coming up with a sane justification for X, because X-believers are either stupid or crazy.
It’s probably fine to have this tone of voice if you’re talking about flat earthers or young earth creationists, and are only “steelmanning” X as a silly intellectual exercise. But if you’re in a serious discussion, framing “steelmanning” as being about the argument you “agree with the most” rather than the “strongest” argument might help signal that you take the other side seriously.
Anyone have thoughts on this? Has this been discussed before?
Just as AI, like ChatGPT, has learned to intepret human languages, it has the potential to help decode animal language, which can finally give animals their own voice to advocate for themselves.
This seems like a huge deal if it eventually works! I’m surprised there hasn’t been more discussion of it.
FWIW stimulus-response is far from the only evidence we have for insect sentience. Table 1 in Jason Schukraft’s Invertebrate Sentience overview discusses some of the other criteria. The belief that some insects are sentient is pretty respectable in the scientific community; for example, Scientific American published an article on the subject this month.
Obviously the field is pretty speculative and I’m not an expert, but IMO the fact that many experts do take insect sentience seriously means we should probably put non-negligible credence in it.
Overall though, thanks for writing this post! It’s an important point. I suspect many people, when faced with ethical arguments for veganism, decide not to care about animals at all simply because they aren’t willing (or in a rare cases unable) to go vegan. Classic example of failing with abandon.
Thanks, I like the QR code idea!
I’m not sure about exact numbers but I’d estimate ~30% seemed genuinely interested in trying dog meat
Thanks so much for writing this!
I’m healthier and drastically stronger than before I went vegan. Very happy to talk to anyone about vegan sources of protein (or any other nutrient).
Relatedly, there are a few parts of the article that try to communicate true and useful points but risk playing into misguided pro-meat tropes. Examples:
“If meat is murder, does that mean antibacterial soap is, too?”
Paragraph on plant sentience. The “plants have feelings” claim is actually an argument against eating meat, but most people don’t know this.
Discussions of the long-term future often leave me worrying that there is a tension between democratic decision-making and protecting the interests of all moral patients (e.g. animals). I imagine two possible outcomes:
Mainstream political coalitions make the decisions in their usual haphazard manner.
RISK: vast numbers of moral patients are ignored.
A small political cadre gains power and ensures that all moral patients are represented in decision-making.
RISK: the cadre lacks restraint and leaves its fingerprints on the future.
Neither of these is what we should want.
CLAIM: The most straightforward way to dissolve this tradeoff is to get the mainstream coalitions to care about all sentient beings before they make irreversible decisions.
How?
A major push to change public opinion on animal welfare. Conventional wisdom in EA is to prioritize corporate campaigns over veg outreach for cost effectiveness reasons. The tradeoff I’ve described here is a point in favor of large-scale outreach.
I don’t just mean 10x of your grandpa’s vegan leafletting. A megaproject-scale campaign would be an entirely different phenomenon.
A Long Reflection. Give society time to come to its senses on nonhuman sentience.
Of course, the importance of changing public opinion depends a lot on how hingey you think the future is, and tractability depends on how close you think we are to the hinge. But in general, I think this is an underrated point for moral circle expansion.
Interestingly enough, C.S. Lewis (sort of) agrees:
Carnivorousness, with all that it entails, is older than humanity. Now it is impossible at this point not to remember...that man was not the first creature to rebel against the Creator, but that some older and mightier being long since became apostate and is now the emperor of darkness and (significantly) the Lord of this world...
...It seems to me, therefore, a reasonable supposition, that some mighty created power had already been at work for ill on the material universe...The intrinsic evil of the animal world lies in the fact that animals, or some animals, live by destroying each other...
....It is, of course, true that the immense mortality occasioned by the fact that many beasts live on beasts is balanced, in nature, by an immense birthrate, and it might seem, that if all animals had been herbivorous and healthy, they would mostly starve as a result of their own multiplication. But I take the fecundity and the death rate to be correlative phenomena. There was, perhaps, no necessity for such an excess of the sexual impulse: the Lord of this world thought of it as a response to carnivorousness – a double scheme for securing the maximum amount of torture...
...It may have been one of man’s functions to restore peace to the animal world, and if he had not joined the enemy he might have succeeded in doing so to an extent now hardly imaginable.
- The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis, Chapter 9 on “Animal Pain”
Lewis’ animal ethics are pretty silly in some ways, but when I read this chapter, I was shocked by how many of Brian Tomasik’s points were recognized by a Christian writing in the 1940s.
This is a really cool resource! Thanks so much for doing this.
I would guess that more people will check out the website if you mention it in the first paragraph/sentence of the post, and rephrase the title to communicate that you have created a new resource aggregating EA-relevant volunteer opportunities.
I don’t think people who spoke to us were significantly turned off; the outreach volunteers weren’t overly aggressive or pushy.
People who walked past without engaging may have thought it was weird, but it’s hard to know what someone thinks if they don’t stop to talk.
Unfortunately, the paucity of social science research on vegan outreach makes it hard to know what works and what doesn’t. I imagine there’s research on outreach for other causes that could be relevant, but I haven’t looked into this.
By default I expect more engagement with pro-vegan arguments to be a good thing, and the dog meat stand got a lot more engagement than other outreach tactics I’ve tried.
Nice! I definitely agree with you on the precautionary principle.
Rethink Priorities has also done a lot of cool work on animal sentience, e.g. their welfare range and invertebrate sentience reports, and this one on philosophical difficulties.
Agreed, it’s a pretty bizarre take. I’d be curious whether his views have changed since he wrote that FB post
Thanks for writing this, these are important critiques. I think it can be healthy to disengage from EA in order to sort through some of the weird ideas for yourself, without all the social pressures.
A few comments:
I actually don’t think it’s that weird to pay organizers. I know PETA has a student program that pays organizers, and The Humane League once did this too. I’d imagine you can find similar programs in other movements, though I don’t know for sure.
I suspect the amount that EA pays organizers is unusual though, and I strongly agree with you that paying a lot for university organizing introduces weird and epistemically corrosive incentives. The PETA program pays students $60 per event they run, so at most ~$600 per semester. Idk exactly how much EA group leaders are paid, but I think it’s a lot more than that.
I definitely share your sense that EA’s message of “think critically about how to do the most good” can sometimes feel like code for “figure out that we’re right about longtermism so you can work on AI risk.” The free money, retreats etc. can wind up feeling more like bribery than support, even if the intentions are good. I do expect the post-FTX funding crash to help solve some of these problems though.
FWIW I did not care about animals before engaging with EA, and I work on animal welfare now. I take AI risk pretty seriously but have a lot of uncertainty around it.