Just wanted to express that I really appreciate your newsletter as a source of thought leadership. Often I find myself wondering about one aspect of the animal advocacy movement or another, and then a few months later you provide a thoughtful summary of the state of play and next steps.
ElliotTep
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Thanks! I think that was actually Matt Reardon’s line. The man has dropped in golden paragraphs into 2 of my posts now.
Glad to hear. The goal was very much to write the kind of post people want to reference when chatting to friends who are making this mistake.
Yeah absolutely. There’s so much noise and chaos and uncertainty in the world, I sometimes like the (arguably depressing) frame that the EA project is trying to increase your chance of doing good from 51% to 52%, and that this is totally worth fighting for, but also, just being clear on how hard it is to know the long term effects of any action.
There is No EA Sorting Hat
Hmm I’m not sure if I have a very considered answer to this question, except for the main argument that I think it’s much harder for people to see animals as having rights/moral value since they look different, are different species, and often act in foreign ways that make us more likely to discount their capacity to feel and think (e.g. fish don’t talk, scream, or visibly emote).
On some level I think the answer is always the same, regardless of the headwinds or tailwinds: you do what you can with your limited resources to improve the world as much as you can. In some sense I think slowing the growth of factory farming in a world where it was growing is the same as a world where it is stagnant and we reduce the number of animals raised. In both worlds there’s a reduction in suffering. I wrote a creative piece on this exact topic here if that is at all appealing.
I also think on the front of factory farming we focus too much on the entire problem, and not enough on how good the wins are in and of themselves.
Thanks for the comment Alene. I think I agree with all of it and that it does a great job of articulating things I didn’t get to or think of.
Hi Sam, I’m finding it hard to respond to your request because IMO the scenarios are too vague. To use your basketball metaphor, a specific player is something that I can integrate meaningfully into a prediction, but executing the strategy flawlessly is much more nebulous. Do you have specific ideas in mind of what scenario 3 might look like? How much increased funding is there? I think to make a good conditional prediction it would need to be something we could clearly decide whether or not we achieved it? Raised an extra $50m for the movement has a clear yes/no, whereas “achieve maximum coordination and efficiency” seems very subjective to me.
Thanks for the answers. Sounds like a big crux for us is that I am sadly much more cynical about (a) how much optimism can shift probabilities. I think it can make a difference, but I don’t think it can change probabilities from 10% to 70%. And (b) I am just much more cynical on our chances of ending factory farming by 2060. I’d probably put the number at around 1-5%.
Edit: Just re-read this and realised the tone seemed off and more brisk than I meant it. Apologies, don’t comment much and was trying to get out a comment quickly.
Thanks for the response, and for the detailed answer. Sorry, I don’t want to be a stickler here, but can you give me your best guess probability? The reason I ask is because to me it seems like if one of these scenarios is much more likely than the other then this is relevant, no? Like if we think there’s a less than 99% vs 1% chance that we continue with current strategies, this seems relevant no?
On a different point, I agree that we need a certain amount of optimism and drive, but I think the moment our optimism clouds our thinking, it can lead to sub-optimal choices. For example I think people trained up in cultivated meat research on unfounded promises that it was inevitable. I think Julia Galef in Scout Mindset does an excellent job of selling the path to clear thinking while incorporating optimism and ambition.
Finally, I have to ask were your comments written by an LLM? The general structure, length, tone, and some of the specific lines in it (“probability of success skyrockets towards 100%”) struck me as LLM sounding. If so, how come? Genuinely curious if this is the case.
Hi Sam, I’m wondering how much of our difference in optimism is in our beliefs about the likelihood of ending factory farming in our lifetimes vs what is the best framing. You say in your blog post that there’s “a realistic chance of ending this system within our lifetimes”. Do you care to define a version of ‘ending this system’, pick a year and put a percentage number on ‘realistic chance’? If you pick a year and definition of ending factory farming, I can put a percentage chance on it too and see where the difference lies.
These numbers can be very rough of course, not asking for a super well calibrated prediction, more of just putting a number on an intuition.
Yeah I agree with this and wish I was clearer from the get go.
I think for the folks in the ‘ending factory farming’ camp that (IMO) are not being realistic, this can lead to adopting specific theories about how all of society will change their minds. This could include claims about meat being financially unviable if we just got the meat industry to internalise their externalities (the word just is doing a lot of lifting here), or theories about tipping points where once 25% of people believe something everyone else will follow, so we need to focus on consciousness-raising (I’ve butchered this argument, sorry to the folks who understand it better).
Good point. I feel weird admitting it but it does seem like some cows probably have net-positive lives right now
Hi Matthew,
I think my analogy isn’t claiming that we shouldn’t try to end malaria because it will always be with us, but rather that we shouldn’t view ending malaria as making a small dent in the real fight of ending preventable deaths, but that rather we should view it as a big win on its own merits. In fact I think ending cages for hens in at least Europe and the US is a realistic goal.
I think we might never eradicate factory farming. I think it’s plausible that we end factory farming with some combination of cultivated meat, moral circle expansion, new generations having more progressive views, and who knows what AGI might bring to the table. I just don’t think that it’s inevitable. I do agree that on the timescale of centuries things get very hard to predict. My post is more aimed at discussions that focus on ending factory farming in our lifetime.
Hi Lucas, I like your point about being careful about celebrating small wins too much. To me the big difference between going from −100 to −90 and going from −90 to 0 is I see the expected value calculation as very different because the first one (going cage free) is clearly quite tractable, whereas the second one (reducing egg consumption?) I see as being really hard and unclear how to pursue it.
I definitely think there should be some effort that goes towards ‘ending factory farming’ type work. But I’m also quite skeptical of many proposed solutions. Or at least I think the people putting forward the proposals are too optimistic. This is maybe too big a question to ask in a forum comments section, but what’s the path to ending factory farming in 50 or 100 years? What probability do you think we’ll get there in that time frame?
Good question, I wasn’t sure how much to err on the side of brevity vs thoroughness.
To phrase it differently I think sometimes advocates start their strategy with the final line ‘and then we end factory farming’, and then try to develop a strategy about how do we get there. I don’t think it is reasonable to assume this is going to happen, and I think this leads to overly optimistic theories of change. From time to time I see a claim about how meat consumption will be drastically reduced in the next few decades based on a theory that is far too optimistic and/or speculative.
For example, I’ve seen work claim that when plant-based meat reaches taste and price parity, people will choose plant-based over conventional meat, so if we raise the price of meat via regulation, and lower the cost of plant-based, there will be high adoption of plant-based, and meat reduction will be 30% lower by 2040 (those numbers are made up, but ball-park correct). I think these claims just aren’t super well founded and some research showed that when a university cafeteria offered impossible and regular burgers, adoption was still quite low (anyone know the citation?).
One thing that strikes me as interesting when I think about my own experience and my impression of the people around me is that it can be hard to tell what my own reasons are when I might distance myself from EA. I might describe myself as EA adjacent and this could be some combination of:
Seeing the ‘typical’ EA as someone who is much more hardcore and believes in all of it.
Some part of my brain is always unconsciously tracking status.
I am worried about the impact it will have on my ability to get jobs in the future.
I might be more persuasive or likeable to the person in front of me if I distance myself from EA.
And as humans often do, I might just tell myself a story that is more flattering than what is actually happening. I might tell myself that this is a very strategic choice to persuade this person to care about AI Safety, or for my long-term career prospects, or to protect my organisation from future scandals, and EA being a low(ish) status in some circles right now might be doing the heavy lifting.