I started out as a animal advocate in 2001 at the age of 12. Nearly a decade later, I discovered effective altruism and decided to start down an earning to give career path as a physician. Currently, I own a health services business and donate my time and money to direct work in animal advocacy. You usually can find me at the Hive (formerly known as Impactful Animal Advocacy) slack community.
Constance Li
Karma: 1,463
Introducing Hive: A rebrand for Impactful Animal Advocacy
Hi Toby, thank you so much for writing a comprehensive review for this time sensitive opportunity.
For anyone interested in a different version of the suggested answers that Ben and Haven made that is more aimed at encouraging the adoption of on-farm monitoring systems in order to lay the groundwork for AI analysis for welfare metrics, please see this guide that I just wrote.
AI, Animals, and Digital Minds Conference 2024: Accepting applications and speaker proposals
Fish welfare would be a big factor in my model about the net utility of free malaria nets. However, it seems really hard to calculate because we don’t know the average net qualia of fish in these regions. If it is negative, then overfishing may be a positive thing for their welfare.
Yeah.. I think I agree. We have thought and re-thought enough about shrimps and it is now the time to ACT! Will change it in the post.
Thank you for your devotion to the maximum utils!
Had to google Naming What We Can first… love it!
You are absolutely right. I’ve adjusted the numbers in the post.
Thanks for catching that. I also saw there are a few (billion) more farmed shrimp to add in to those numbers. We have accordingly adjusted the post to convert estimates of [hours worked/human career] to [shrimps lost/year].
Announcement: We are rebranding to Shrimpactful Animal Advocacy
This seems like a doozy of a question to try to answer. Have you done your market research? Make sure no one else has written something about this in a similar way to what you intend first.
I’d be interested in reading an analysis about the murder comparison. There seems to be some elements of direct vs. indirect harm, partial vs. full responsibility for death, and different societal values. I’m not sure if I can truly parse it out.
It’s really sad to hear about Steven Wise passing away. His work was a game-changer in how we see animals and their rights. Founding the Nonhuman Rights Project was a huge step forward, especially with those groundbreaking cases for chimps and elephants. Even though Happy the elephant’s case didn’t turn out as hoped, it sparked a massive conversation and got people thinking about animals in a way they hadn’t before.
Wise’s story is super inspiring. It’s a big loss, but what he started isn’t stopping anytime soon.
@Nicholas Kruus this is what the author, Chris Bryant, had to say:
You are quite right that there has been a tough couple of years for plant-based products recently. I think this is definitely an issue which warrants exploring, but I decided not to go into it here because I was pretty space-limited so I wanted to stick to the main question whether Veganuary has been impactful.
There are some graphs, like sales of vegetarian foods, where I didn’t have more recent data, so they stop in 2020-ish. There’s also a couple of places where I trimmed the graphs, because some data, while interesting, was not relevant to the point I wanted to make and made the graph much less clear.
For example, if you extend the ‘Google searches about veganism’ graph beyond 2020, you’ll see that it starts to go down slightly after 2021, but it still peaks in January. Since my point there is that it peaks in January (and it’s not relevant whether Jan 23 < Jan 22) I decided to go with a graph that would make the point most clearly in the limited space!
That said, there are a few things I discovered when researching this piece that didn’t make it into the publication, but are definitely worth looking at further!There does seem to be a peak in interest around 2020⁄21, and subsequent years have been more challenging
There may have been a surge in anti-vegan media since around the same time (the media stories per month graph breaks down massively after 2020, and shows so many stories in non-January months that it makes the rest of the graph impossible to read)
On Maya’s point about displacement, I’d recommend this piece that we wrote about the evidence for displacement: https://bryantresearch.co.uk/insight-items/alternative-meats-demand/
In terms of disentangling Veganuary vs. new years resolutions, I would say that the apparent uptick in vegan activity when Veganuary started around 2014 is some evidence that the campaign itself had an impact.I haven’t done this, but it would also be interesting to compare between countries! As you mentioned, Veganuary has been mostly UK-focused, so it would be interesting to compare interest/increase in veganism in January in the UK vs. the US, for example!Here is the link to the full Slack thread. If you are not a part of the Impactful Animal Advocacy Slack, you can join here.
Yeah I’m surprised this evidence was easily available, but not included in the article. Very interesting. I have tagged the author in a thread about this article on the Impactful Animal Advocacy Slack so I will report back anything he has to say on the matter.
FWIW I do have a lot of respect for the author and this is the first time I’ve found myself puzzled about his output.
@Karthik Tadepalli see my comment below:
UK vegan product sales (where Veganuary is most active) went down overall in 2023. This article from Nov 2023 highlights this fact and attempts to reconcile them in the context of outside economic forces.
However, we do have to consider that meat consumption is increasing and plant-based product sales are decreasing in most countries. So it is still very possible that Veganuary guarded against even worse outcomes in the UK.
Hey thanks for sharing this. This is quite impressive results from Veganuary.
My only criticism is that the article, despite being published in 2024, seems to leave out important context. For example, UK vegan product sales (where Veganuary is most active) went down overall in 2023. This article from Nov 2023 highlights this fact and attempts to reconcile them in the context of outside economic forces. The article also doesn’t mention that per capita meat consumption has been rising in the UK. Is there a reason why these details were left out of the article? They seem like important context to include.
This is a really great new initiative! I have one question and one plug.
Question: What does this mean for the animal charity meta-fundraising intervention (#5 on this list) that was supposed to be on the table for CE’s flagship nonprofit incubation program?
Plug: For folks that are already making grants (from their foundation/DAF/other), please check out CE’s effective grantmaking program. It is best suited for people who are newer to grantmaking and have a lot of initial applications to evaluate. If you don’t have the time to apply and go through the program, just get a copy of their book, How to Launch a High-Impact Foundation.
I would just like to second that AVA is a very welcoming conference that invites open discussion of different tactics and strategies. Impactful Animal Advocacy hosted a meetup at AVA in July 2023 where attendees respectfully shared their criticisms of EA.
An EA meetup was also held at AVA 2022 and was the most well attended meetup that wasn’t on the formal program. So if you come to AVA, you will both have plenty of like-minded folks to talk with and may benefit from learning about other perspectives.Edit 12-6-23: Corrected the post link
This seems like a good place to plug Dr. Michael Greger’s new book, How Not to Age. It has >13k citations and talks about what people can do to slow down aging. Pre-orders are quite important for determining the marketing and ranking of book and this particular book comes out Dec 5 so there are just a couple more days to contribute to pre-order numbers. I’m told his books are quite popular in China, which could be hugely meaningful in combating the rise of animal product consumption in that country. Additionally, in the spirit of ETG, 100% of book sales go to charity!
I really like your suggested post-EAG debate statement, Toby!
Other suggested debate topics:
1. Digital Minds will possess sentience or moral status
2. It is a moral obligation to develop protections for digital minds