david_reinstein

Karma: 4,509

I’m the Founder and Co-director of The Unjournal; We organize and fund public journal-independent feedback, rating, and evaluation of hosted papers and dynamically-presented research projects. We will focus on work that is highly relevant to global priorities (especially in economics, social science, and impact evaluation). We will encourage better research by making it easier for researchers to get feedback and credible ratings on their work.

Previously I was a Senior Economist at Rethink Priorities, and before that n Economics lecturer/professor for 15 years.

I’m working to impact EA fundraising and marketing; see https://bit.ly/eamtt

And projects bridging EA, academia, and open science.. see bit.ly/eaprojects

My previous and ongoing research focuses on determinants and motivators of charitable giving (propensity, amounts, and ‘to which cause?’), and drivers of/barriers to effective giving, as well as the impact of pro-social behavior and social preferences on market contexts.

Podcasts: “Found in the Struce” https://anchor.fm/david-reinstein

and the EA Forum podcast: https://anchor.fm/ea-forum-podcast (co-founder, regular reader)

Twitter: @givingtools

david_reinstein 15 Jun 2026 17:25 UTC
4 points
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on: Cultivating doubt: why I no longer believe cultivated meat is the answer
This connects to two of our Unjournal Pivotal Questions workstreams. One is on CM cost and viability (related to our post on this here) where we just ran a workshop on cost trajectories (summary here, more reporting to come). The other is on PBA substitution, where the cannibalization question you raise is close to the central one. (Note, we are also planning a workshop for the substitution question: see the resource page here_
On substitution, my main worry is that it’s very hard to measure even for products that already exist. From the earlier post, our forest plot of cross-price elasticities is all over the map: credible studies find PBAs to be substitutes for a given meat in some cases and complements in others, with no obvious study-level feature explaining the divergence. Moving outside of PBA/meat, Bray, Sanders and Stamatopoulos (2024) sharpen the concern. In a grocery pricing experiment they find an own-price elasticity around −0.34, versus roughly −2.0 from observational scanner data on comparable stores, and the usual IV and difference-in-differences “fixes” don’t close the gap. So I might hold the existing PBA substitution evidence fairly lightly in either direction, which makes me cautious about leaning too hard on it to assess CM.

Going further, see this AI-driven report aiming to synthesize the evidence on ‘what can we measure’ here.
For cultivated meat itself the evidence is a thin reed at best. You already flag that survey-based WTP is unreliable; I’d push that further. For a product that basically doesn’t exist at retail scale (and in a category seemingly rather sensitive to price, brand, framing) and context, I doubt we’ll learn much about who actually buys it until it’s on shelves and menus. Attitudes can move a lot: in the mid-1990s (from my experience) many/most Americans treated raw fish as absurd and repulsive. Today a large majority have tried sushi, with only about third of Americans never having tried it per one restaurant-chain survey (and about a third having eaten sushi with raw fish in the past year in a 2016 -- paywall linked, I’m relying on chatGPT there).
On cannibalization itself I’m a little less worried than you, mostly because plant-based seems to have a fairly low market-share ceiling so far, so if it gets a decent market share, cannibalization won’t matter much.
Fwiw, here’s a similarly AI-guided report (with human feedback) on the consumption of plant-based-alternatives. Its market share is still rather low (1-3% at best), but the evidence points it being purchased and consumed mainly by omnivores rather than veg*ns. That makes me a tiny bit more optimistic that if CM is made appealing it will also be consumed by omnivores.

david_reinstein 13 Jun 2026 16:43 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: David T’s comment on: Craig Green ’s Quick takes
I’d wager that after a certified point funds to lobby on an issue like this have substantially diminished near zero marginal returns. But if you are way behind the first few millions spent may have very high payoffs.

david_reinstein 13 Jun 2026 16:41 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: JoshYou’s comment on: Craig Green ’s Quick takes
Interesting but that is a rather thin reed to rely on here

david_reinstein 12 Jun 2026 18:57 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: david_reinstein’s comment on: david_reinstein’s Shortform
OK I think the revised language makes it clerer (see updated version of site … referring to ‘timing gate’ etc)

david_reinstein 12 Jun 2026 18:47 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Tobias Häberli’s comment on: david_reinstein’s Shortform
having a think about this.

david_reinstein 12 Jun 2026 17:44 UTC
2 points
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on: Searchable explorer of EA Forum & LessWrong posts with explicit cruxes or “change my mind” content
Update. I’ve put in some more work into this and I think it’s getting better. Please have a look and let me know your thoughts. If it seems valuable, we could go for some more systematic RLHF etc.

david_reinstein 12 Jun 2026 12:03 UTC
2 points
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on: Curating and evaluating high-impact legal research (Unjournal progress, resources)
We’ve now updated the page so that you can give quick feedback on the potential impact and ‘evaluation relevance’ of the suggested research. If you have some familiarity with the research in this area, this could be very helpful for us in tuning and improving this resource.

david_reinstein 12 Jun 2026 11:57 UTC
9 points
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on: david_reinstein’s Shortform
NB—this is almost entirely AI generated, with some back and forth prompts and corrections
I’m sharing a steelman against a live assumption in Bay/EA/AIS circles: that large AI-lab-adjacent philanthropy is likely to arrive soon enough, and in a sufficiently usable form, that organizations should plan around it.
https://uj-ai-wealth-philanthropy-steelman.netlify.app/
The stronger skeptical case is that IPOs, valuations, pledges, DAFs, and foundation stakes are several gates away from fast, flexible, AIS/EA-directed grants.
The interactive model lets readers vary assumptions about Anthropic valuation, founder ownership, pledge follow-through, employee giving, OpenAI Foundation allocation, lockups, deployment rates, and grantmaker capacity.
Original motivating thread/comment: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dtF6wBjH7yBD4kqLz/noah-birnbaum-s-quick-takes?commentId=sGRyGF5wjaaoMFmfK
@Noah Birnbaum

david_reinstein 12 Jun 2026 11:08 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Noah Birnbaum’s comment on: Noah Birnbaum’s Quick takes
As a first pass, I asked GPT Pro to consider and model this, and Codex to host it, with interactive BOTEC tools etc.

https://uj-ai-wealth-philanthropy-steelman.netlify.app/

I’m just looking through it now (I’ll respond/adapt to hypothes.is comments). Let me know if this sort of thing is useful or annoying.

david_reinstein 9 Jun 2026 19:00 UTC
14 points
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on: animal welfare has an evidence problem
One statistical/methodological point I’d add (something I always harp on). I don’t think “not statistically significant” should directly cited as evidence for a lack of a difference. If the question is whether mortality differences are small enough to be decision-irrelevant, we’d want something closer to an equivalence test or Bayesian posterior over the mortality difference, plus a welfare model translating mortality causes, morbidity, behavioral deprivation, fear/stress, and transition dynamics into aggregate welfare burden.
A forest plot or explicit meta-analytic summary could also make the cage-free evidence easier to interpret than the table of pairwise significance checks.
Related: I wouldn’t always treat small sample sizes or mixed statistical significance as automatically implying “no useful inference.” Small-N studies can be informative if underlying measurement noise is low. For example if I ask 4 people to taste a drink and they all wince deeply in pain and disgust, I’m going to be highly confident it tastes bad. If all 4 smile and praise it, I’ll be fairly confident that it’s at least tolerable.

McElreath’s globe-tossing example illustrates how much we can sometimes learn from small samples.

(Still, in the shrimp case, it does seem like there is some substantial underlying variation unrelated to the different slaughter methods.)

david_reinstein 9 Jun 2026 18:57 UTC
13 points
1 ∶ 0
on: animal welfare has an evidence problem
On alternative proteins, I’d adjust the claims. I agree we don’t currently have strong, clean evidence that today’s plant-based products robustly displace animal products at the scale we’d want. But I’d describe the evidence as “limited, mixed, and hard to interpret” rather than “evidence that the substitution effect is weak, at best.”
Evidence in this domain is very hard to come by, and there are substantial doubts about the extent to which we can even reliably measure these things. See Unjournal’s evaluation of Bray et al.; tldr, a large-scale grocery pricing experiments found that own-price elasticity estimates much smaller than standard/cutting-edge demand-estimation methods generated on parallel data. (But other critiques also suggest doubts about the relevance of the experimental estimate.s)
Also see this AI curated evidence/discussion on the lack of validation evidence in this domain as well as our earlier post showing plant-vs-animal estimates all over the map,and not clearly linked to methodology.
Challenges include:
- The (limited) evidence is mostly about current plant-based products and current meat-reduction interventions, not about genuinely price/taste/convenience-competitive products, cultivated meat, precision fermentation, etc.
- Measurement issues … Scanner data misses food-away-from-home, substitution across animal products, longer-run habit formation, product introductions, and general equilibrium effects. And of course, price endogeneity.
And (as others mentioned) I’d separate the consideration of current plant-based products from future alternative proteins.
My prior is that if something becomes a close enough substitute and is cheaper / tastier / more convenient, it should substantially displace some animal consumption, though the magnitude and species mix are very uncertain.
But there’s a chicken/egg problem in gathering evidence and funding: we probably won’t get decisive (“revealed-preference”) evidence until (e.g.) cultured meat products are actually on shelves and menus at scale, but getting them there requires investment under uncertainty. There’s a potentially high upside here which we’d sacrifice if we’re not willing to invest under uncertainty.

david_reinstein 9 Jun 2026 18:39 UTC
6 points
1 ∶ 0
on: animal welfare has an evidence problem
I’d frame the solution a bit differently from “the EA animal welfare community should take ownership of every stage of the evidence pipeline.”

I don’t think EA/AW people necessarily need to personally design every study, collect the data, or do all the econometrics/biology. But I do think the community needs to take responsibility for setting the agenda, creating the incentives, providing funding, clearly communicating the goals, priorities, and need for rigor to researchers, and enabling coordination.
And it would indeed help if the researchers intrinsically cared about animal welfare and thus about producing useful and accurate results. This makes the incentive alignment easier. But I think it can still work even if much of the work is done by people who aren’t intrinsically interested in animal welfare or don’t think about effectiveness in the same way—as long as they can understand and embody the priorities in their work.
I think entire organisations could and should be founded for this. Until now, this was simply not possible. Research is expensive and slow, especially at universities. But we’re about to have the luxury to aim higher.
I agree that academic incentives and institutions on their own are not enough to ensure high-quality, credible work focused on animal welfare implications (although AW funders can leverage them to some extent). These are not well aligned with producing the kind of evidence funders want, and (e.g.) much existing agricultural/economic research is naturally oriented toward industry questions.
(Warning: self-promo) we’re trying to do some of this bring together academic researchers, practitioners, and funders to help them understand their mutual priorities, abilities and needs at The Unjournal. See our “Pivotal questions”: an Unjournal trial initiative e.g., this one on cultured meat, and this potential upcoming one on animal/plant product substitution.
We also try to aim this at the value of information focusing on identifying “what specific operationalized questions (and what evidence) would productively change funding or implementation decisions”, sourcing and evaluating the best evidence, fostering high-value discussion/debate, and eliciting and synthesizing beliefs and uncertainty.

I’d be excited to coordinate with others working in this direction.
(This overlaps with Jo’s comment somewhat, but I wanted to emphasize the institutional-design angle.)

david_reinstein 9 Jun 2026 18:17 UTC
4 points
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on: animal welfare has an evidence problem
Thanks again for this post. I left a bunch of Hypothes.is margin notes while reading: see here or install plugin. (I’ll post some of these as regular forum comments now.)

I strongly agree with the central diagnosis: animal welfare seems under-supplied with decision-relevant evidence, especially compared to global health. ACE, Rethink, WFI, CG, SWP, etc. are doing serious work, but the AW still lacks something analogous to the dense ecosystem around GiveWell-style global health evidence: funders, implementers, independent evaluators, academic researchers, field-data pipelines (and research evaluation institutions) all pulling in the same direction.

I don’t think academia/journals in the current state provides the right incentives or platforms. We end up with many small-scale projects papers, often not aimed at the key animal welfare outcomes, and a lack of follow-up. We need something more coordinated, directly aimed at effective animal welfare, collaborative, larger scale and longer term.

david_reinstein 9 Jun 2026 17:14 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: LewisBollard’s comment on: animal welfare has an evidence problem

There have been 50+ studies and large-scale data collection efforts on relative mortality in caged vs. cage-free housing systems and we still don’t have a clear answer on it.

Do you think this is a case of too many studies with small amounts of funding and limited researcher ability/willingness to follow up, and limitations to doing meta-analysis on these? Do you think that larger-scale, more systematic, multi-year larger team collaborative studies and projects could be more effective at generating reliable evidence?

david_reinstein 9 Jun 2026 17:11 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Forumite’s comment on: animal welfare has an evidence problem
I don’t have particular expertise in this, but your comment suggests to me that there may indeed be animal welfare interventions with more obviously robust positive impacts. On the one hand, the post did consider some of the most prominent interventions, but perhaps it did ignore some of the more clear wins (based on evidence or just fairly obvious intuition ).

david_reinstein 9 Jun 2026 17:09 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Henry Stanley 🔸’s comment on: animal welfare has an evidence problem
I agree with you that “showing that the availability of equivalent substitutes does not lead to major changes in meat consumption” is stated too strongly.

There’s a profound lack of evidence, and it’s also very difficult to gain reliable evidence in this domain.

david_reinstein 9 Jun 2026 17:08 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Mjreard’s comment on: animal welfare has an evidence problem
I agree that this framing is very strong, but I also think that criticism on the forum is often very strong and constructive.

david_reinstein 8 Jun 2026 22:05 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Linch’s Shortform
I’ve been saying this would happen for years and I’ve maybe been wrong for years but maybe we are finally there

david_reinstein 5 Jun 2026 16:21 UTC
2 points
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on: Legal scholarship: Is it high-impact? Should Unjournal evaluate it? Call for participation/scoping
Reconsidering/revisiting this. See the live (working) page here (partially AI created, but with extensive iterative feedback). Looking for your input.

See Curating and evaluating high-impact legal research (Unjournal progress, resources) and also the AI prioritization prototype here

david_reinstein 4 Jun 2026 15:46 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Seth Ariel Green 🔸’s comment on: Research report: adding a plant-based option (or two) doesn’t change behavior
It’s true that we aren’t powered to detect very small changes on any test. We did a fair bit of background work to target 5 pp. as our SESOI based on our understanding of what we could plausibly take to restaurants as an argument that they should add a chicken-based PMA to their menus.
5 pp on the direct effect on total sales or some such? That does seem reasonable to me? That said, a Bayesian approach to decisionmaking and power analysis seems perhaps more relevant for taking to Chipotle etc. If you can tell them “given a range of reasonable priors, the posterior this has an 75% chance of increasing your revenue by 5%” that seems potentially likely to be convincing? @Jamie E probably has something to say on this.

> However, taste parity is an open problem.
Paywalled link, but ChatGPT excerpts say

> “plant-based meat and dairy are finally getting close to animal products on taste in some categories, but taste alone probably won’t make most Americans switch” … ” the real missing ingredient is culture”
> The author says meat and dairy have deep cultural meanings in the U.S.—masculinity, tradition, family rituals, comfort, identity
> Nectar found only about 16% of 122 plant-based meat products tested in 2025 and about 25% of 98 dairy-free products tested in 2026 cleared the “same as or better than animal product”

To me the 16% actually seems pretty good (we reported on the same thing here) the best of these products will command an overwhelming share, and the products are only getting better. My personal, unevidence take is that “the culture of meat thing” might fade away, or at least only be relevant to say half the population .

> My personal belief—out of scope of the data—is that we can think of consumers as extrapolating, when they see an item like “chickn’itas,” that it’ll basically be the category average, or on par with the other PMAs currently available at Chipotle, and making a choice based on that belief.

That seems reasonable to me.

> Unfortunately, PMAs account for a small fraction of all sales (3% per this out-of-date article but I couldn’t find anything more up to date and official. However, based on 1-on-1 conversations, I think this number is still approximately right). Chipotle has tried many times to introduce more plant-based options. If a more popular and appealing option existed at the kind of margins that Chipotle looks for, we can assume they would have already made it available.
My guess is that it’s substantially higher than 3% as it’s taking up a pretty large portion of their counter space, so why would they do that for 3%? (Unless the directors of Chipotle themselves have an altruistic motive.) Based on products we’ve all eaten, I guess it’s safe to say that they could come up with something plant-based that’s tastier than the sofritas (which are OK), but it may not be profitable.