Deputy Director of Wild Animal Initiative
Cameron_Meyer_Shorb
Karma: 219
Most plant-based meats get their form and texture through high-moisture extrusion, in which textured vegetable protein is forced through a die like Play-Doh through a spaghetti maker (see Wikipedia for a more technical overview).
Extruders are big, expensive, and sensitive machines. Most startups can’t buy their own, so they normally contract with a manufacturer. However, there is a limited number of manufacturers that currently do high-moisture extrusion of textured vegetable protein.
I believe the authors’ concern is that because demand for extruders currently exceeds supply, their project wouldn’t necessarily add to the total amount of plant-based meat produced. Instead, it might take up space that another plant-based meat startup would otherwise use. (Scott et al., please correct me if I’m misrepresenting your view.)
I like this way of thinking. It’s important to consider whether our direct impact is actually different than the counterfactual.
But fortunately for prospective plant-based meat entrepreneurs, there are several reasons why my colleagues at The Good Food Institute think displacement may not be as big of an issue here (and I agree):
1. A new plant-based meat company creates new demand for extrusion capacity. Consistently increasing demand for extrusion capacity signals to manufacturers that they should invest in capital expenditure.
2. Alternative manufacturing processes are being developed that do not require high-moisture extrusion (e.g., sheer cell technology). A new plant-based meat company could either directly contribute to developing these technologies or indirectly contribute by demonstrating demand for the technology.
3. Extrusion capacity tends to go to the producer with the highest willingness to pay. In general, this will favor companies that are more mature, have higher sales, or have more investment. Although imperfect, these factors correlate with product quality, decreasing the likelihood that a worse product will displace a better one.
I’d also love to hear Scott’s perspective on this, but in the meantime, I wanted to point out that this is one of the ways The Good Food Institute aims to help potential founders. For starters, I’d recommend these essential resources.
Hopefully Wild Animal Initiative will have more answers for you soon! We recently assembled an Academic Advisory Panel in part to solicit feedback on our publications when they don’t go through a formal peer-review process.
We’re still growing the panel, so please let us know if you or anyone you know might be interested in joining. https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/advisory-panel
Thanks so much for writing this, Jeff! I think we talked about this the first night we met. Since then, I’ve always appreciated your thoughtful objections to veganism. The carelessness with which so many people approach the question really bothers me. It’s a real treat to talk with an objector who takes the idea seriously and has really thought through their positions.
Of course, on the facts of the matter, I strongly disagree! There are several different kinds of reasons why. I’ll post them in separate comments in the hopes of keeping the conversation focused on one idea at a time. (If that’s not kosher on the EA Forum, I hope someone will let me know, and I won’t do it in the future.)
[T]his is the main place where I think I differ from most ethical vegans: I think humans matter much more than these animals.
I agree that this is the biggest difference between you and most ethical vegans!
Let’s use this comment thread to discuss differences in estimates of the likelihood that nonhuman animals (or non-me humans) are sentient (where “sentient” means “having morally relevant subjective experiences such as the ability to feel pain”).
Here are the main reasons I find it overwhelmingly likely that mammals and birds (and very likely that fish) have morally relevant subjective experiences:
Behavior. They respond to potentially-painful things in almost all the same ways humans do (except for verbally articulating their experiences in a language I understand).
Evolution. The best evolutionary rationale I can think of for why humans have subjective experiences is that that might be a good way of motivating us to avoid experiences that tend to be bad for our reproductive fitness. (Note that this evolutionary story doesn’t suggest a strong connection between sentience and intelligence. In fact, it might suggest that less intelligent species are more reliant on strong subjective experiences to learn and motivate their behavior.) That rationale would apply to almost all mobile creatures (but much less so for mostly immobile ones like mussels or plants).
Here are the main reasons I doubt that mammals, birds, or fish have morally relevant subjective experiences:
Inaccessibility. Subjective experiences are, by their nature, personal. So I can’t directly observe these experiences in others. This applies to other humans’ sentience.
Programmability. For any given behavior, I can imagine a computer program that responds to the same stimulus in the same way without having a morally relevant subjective experience. This applies to other adult humans’ sentience somewhat, but not quite as well, because we seem to have pretty similar machinery. It applies more so to babies, children, or other humans with brains that are more different than mine.
Radical uncertainty. I really don’t have a good idea of what sentience consists of, what anatomy is needed to support it, or why it evolved. This applies to other humans’ sentience.
In the end, while there are good reasons to be uncertain about the sentience of other species, these reasons are at least somewhat applicable to other humans, too. So my uncertainty about the sentience of other vertebrate species isn’t much more than an order of magnitude higher than my uncertainty about the sentience of other humans.
I think veganism doesn’t represent a very good tradeoff, and I think we should put our altruistic efforts elsewhere.
For the sake of this comment thread, let’s assume that veganism is a substantially worse tradeoff than other altruistic efforts.
Personally, I think that’s likely to be true. For people (like me) who place a high likelihood on the sentience of farmed animals, it’s worth considering how the costs and benefits of going vegan compare to the costs and benefits of donating to a nonprofit that is attempting to end animal farming through systematic/institutional change (meat alternatives, corporate campaigns, legislative campaigns, etc.). Seems like those nonprofits are probably a lot more efficient at doing good for animals than I am.
However, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we shouldn’t both go vegan and donate to highly cost-effective charities. Let’s use this comment thread to discuss why that might be.
One kind of reason to do both: It’s not a true tradeoff.
It’s easy to spend a lot of money on top-of-the-line vegan cheeses and meats. But it’s also quite feasible to meet most people’s dietary requirements with vegan foods that cost just as much as, or even less than, animal-based foods. (Shout out to my boi rice-and-beans.)
In that case, we’re not trading off dollars for dollars. We’re trading off time, effort, and comfort for dollars.
At some point, if you spend enough time on something, it might cut into your earning potential. But many of us have jobs that only allow us to work a certain number of hours per week anyway, or minds that only allow us to be focused and productive for a certain number of hours per week. For these people, it’s possible to spend additional time and effort without cutting into earning potential.
So the question is not “Can I do more good than veganism with my money?” but rather “Can I do more good than veganism with my time?” Not a lot of other volunteer opportunities give you the chance to spare multiple individuals from torture every year, so I think it’s likely still a good use of time.
(Though this obviously intersects with the other question of “Just how morally valuable is it to spare animals from factory farming?”)
Another kind of reason to do both: There is epistemic value to going vegan.
It’s legitimately hard to understand the experiences and needs of individuals that are different from us. Most of the time, it’s even harder than it needs to be, because we approach them with unfounded prejudices.
Going vegan might be a psychologically necessary step to considering animals’ experiences and needs in at least a somewhat objective manner.
(I’m hoping to elaborate on this later, and apologies for the doc-dump, but the elegantly argued and eminently readable John & Sebo 2019 does a great job elaborating on this point: https://jeffsebodotnet.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/consequentialism-and-nonhuman-animals-penultimate.pdf .)
Hi Abraham! Thanks for pointing out that it would be helpful to clarify what is meant by the tradeoff values.
I differ on this point:
if you’re just saying, with little basis, that a pig has 1⁄100 human moral worth, I don’t know how to evaluate it. It isn’t an argument. It’s just an arbitrary discount to make your actions feel justified from a utilitarian standpoint.
I think we should give Jeff the benefit of the doubt here. I don’t think his estimates are arbitrary. I think they are honest reflections of the conclusions he has come to given his experience and his understanding of the evidence.
It would be nice to hear more about Jeff’s rationale. But in terms of community norms, I’d like to keep space open for people who want to present novel arguments without having to exhaustively justify every premise.
Another argument against this position is its effect on your moral attitudes as Jeff Sebo argued in his talk at EA global in 2019. You could dismiss this if you are certain it will not effect the relative value you place on other being and by not advertising your position as to not effect others.
(FYI, this is the argument I was referring to as the “epistemic” argument in my other comment. Thanks for linking to that talk, George!)
Great point, Eze Paez! I’m glad you added it.
1. For what it’s worth, I don’t think Jane was trying to say you have to be a utilitarian to support wild animal welfare. I interpreted her comment as mostly referring to the intellectual history of the wild animal welfare movement, which does seem to have its roots primarily in utilitarianism.
2. One of my favorite illustrations of a non-consequentialist/non-welfarist rationale for improving wild animal welfare (backing up your points b and c) is “Legal Personhood and the Positive Rights of Wild Animals” (Jay Shooster 2017). Well worth checking out if you haven’t already!
Anecdatum: This is consistent with my recent experience measuring my own happiness!
I recently started using UpLift (a cognitive behavioral therapy app developed by our friend Spencer Greenberg of ClearerThinking.org) to manage some mood changes that might be mild depression. The app prompts you to rate and reflect on your happiness several times each day.
Each time I tried to rate my mood, I thought:
“Huh, I don’t feel that great. But I do feel better than before. So I have to say a higher number this time. Dammit, I can’t even measure my mood accurately. This damn app is confounding everything by making me slightly happier! …Oh.”
Agreed! I appreciate the correction.
Thanks for sharing Catia’s dissertation! I hadn’t seen that before and I’m looking forward to reading it.
(That said I do think “deeply understand” doesn’t quite do the job.)
I feel the same way, even though I’m relatively strongly opposed to EA jargon, and even though I don’t know the specific connotations from Stranger in a Strange Land.
Here’s the compromise I’ve settled on: “to grok” → “to grok, to really deeply understand.”
That is, I’ll use the jargon and immediately follow it with the translation. It’s inelegant, and I’ve only used it in conversation so far. Not sure I’d be comfortable with so many redundant words in text. But I like that this compromise:
Conveys as much of the point as possible to someone unfamiliar with the term “grok.”
Adds the marginal value of “grok” for anyone who is familiar with the term.
Maybe even adds some of the marginal value of “grok” for someone unfamiliar with the term. The fact that I’m using a foreign word to describes this idea suggests that it’s a different/harder-to-capture idea than simply “really deeply understand.” So from context, you could conclude that “grok” means “like really deeply understand, but in a different or harder-to-capture way,” which is most of what I mean by “grok” anyway.
In the time since Abraham wrote this comment, Animal Charity Evaluators recommended one of the orgs he started as a Top Charity! So ACE definitely counts now, and Abe needs to update his resume.
I also think Abe was right to count ACE as working in wild animal welfare before, because their early explorations directly contributed to the formation of the field. For example, the intern that carried out their 2016 survey on attitudes toward wild animal welfare is now a researcher at Wild Animal Initiative. (You can see some of Luke Hecht’s recent work here.)
This was such an interesting discussion! Jordan, I was particularly impressed by (and grateful for) the way you continued to clarify the nature of your concerns while simultaneously remaining open to the new evidence and arguments others shared.
And for what it’s worth, I think “Other people are doing this thing wrong!” is a great reason to do that thing yourself. I hope anyone with concerns about wild animal welfare will join the movement and make it better—or at least voice those concerns as productively as you did.
In some cases, I am wary of us funging Open Phil or OWA or some other funder. E.g., potentially at times with some corporate chicken campaigns in a neglected region, or even with larger promising groups based in Europe or the US.
Because Lewis Bollard is both a manager of the EA AWF and a program officer at Open Philanthropy, does his involvement reduce the likelihood of funging with Open Phil?
[Adding some unoriginal thoughts on risky donations]
As Mikaela said, which fund you donate to depends in large part on how safe/risky you want your donations to be:
In contrast, the EA Animal Welfare Fund tends to donate to more numerous, often earlier-stage projects that are higher-risk and, arguably, higher-reward.
When I first got involved in EA, I thought “high-impact donations” obviously had to be “safe donations.”
Over the past several years, I’ve changed my mind. I now think EAs should generally lean toward riskier donations than the average donor, for three reasons:
Preferring safety too strongly can be irrational. As this article on risk aversion concludes, “it may be best for altruists to be approximately risk-neutral overall.”
Neglected causes are both especially likely to be high-impact and especially likely to be relatively risky to work in. In order to pick low-hanging karmic fruit, you may have to start a new charity or try a new method. They might not be the safest bets, but they can still be good bets.
Non-EA donors tend to be risk-averse. That means those relatively risky projects in neglected cause areas are likely to stay neglected until risk-neutral donors support them. In other words, EAs have a comparative advantage in making relatively risky donations.
I think all that makes the EA Animal Welfare Fund an incredibly exciting place to donate to. So much karma to pluck, and so few plucking it!
Great points, Trammell! Thank you for this post.
Your example comparing the peaceful-psychology hypothesis and the violent-psychology hypothesis is effective, and it stands on its own. However, I don’t think it’s the best way to represent Steven Pinker’s argument, and I think representing that argument more accurately leads in some interesting new directions.
As I understand him, Pinker does not argue humans have a peaceful psychology. Rather, he acknowledges that there are many aspects of our psychology that predispose us to violence, and he attributes the historical decline in violence primarily to social developments, e.g., establishing trade networks, accumulating social norms, elevating women’s power in society, etc. These changes in society have built stronger and stronger defenses against our violent instincts, which have remained relatively unchanged over the course of human history.
Stating the hypothesis this way raises the question of how far we expect this trend to continue. We would be much more interested in saving a world (“World 1”) where society continues to grow increasingly less violent and more compassionate, and substantially less interested in saving a world (“World 2″) where that trend stops, or where it doesn’t go far enough fast enough to prevent huge new sources of suffering.
Moral circle expansion is a strategy to make our world more like the first one and less like the second one. Unlike the strategies discussed in this post, it doesn’t deal with affecting the likelihood of extinction scenarios. Rather, it tries to directly influence the speed and direction of the trends that determine the expected value of the long-term future (a.k.a. it tries to shift us to a world more worth saving). For what it’s worth, I think Sentience Institute is doing some really valuable research on this topic.