Hmm, I’m not sure what I think about this. On the one hand the example of women dying in childbirth is a good point. On the other hand, minimum wage was raised by economic growth, and people in power would have been against raising the minimum wage if it was done without increases in productivity to go with it.
I’ve heard here and there that the anti-slavery movement took root in parts of the world and US that were less economically dependent on slavery.
Thanks for the detailed reply. I appreciate the full engagement and answer
Out of personal curiosity, this appears to be a big shift from your previous position on diet change advocacy. I’ve listened to you talk in the past and recall you were quite negative on the value of diet change. What has led to the shift? Or let me know if I’m misunderstanding.
For example this talk you gave at EAG in 2018:
Then I went to work at PETA in 1996 and I thought everybody loves animals. All we really have to do—we don’t have to win an argument with a meat eater—all we have to do is show people what’s happening and obviously people will want to align their values and their actions. Everybody’s going to go vegan. We just need to tell them, and again, it didn’t happen.
What I’ve come to understand is that the vast majority of people are not going to radically change their diet on the basis of really anything other than price, taste and convenience. Maybe health. There appears to be something in human nature. I don’t know if it’s emotion or physiology or biology or psychology. I don’t know what it is, but the vast majority of people just aren’t that interested in changing their diet, and they’re not interested in hearing from me about why they should change their diet.
Thanks for the clear post Bruce. To add to your points, it also seems that campaigning and advocacy also created the conditions by which lots of passionate young advocates built up experience and became many of the leaders of the movement today, and that this is happening less today.
One point of disagreement I do have with this framing is that if you focus specifically on the justice movements that succeeded and then ask “Did any of them succeed by only focusing on welfare improvements?” You’ve made an artifically constrained reference class to compare it with, being reforms we remember as justice movements that famously won as justice movements.
I think the better reference class is all attempts to radically improve the wellbeing of others. Using this reference class there are many successes including that focused on technological solutions to problems that could be framed as liberation or justice issues: child mortality reduction via global health innovations, famine reduction via green revolution, extreme poverty alleviation via economic development, women’s empowerment and family planning via oral contraceptives, etc.
There’s also many liberation/justice movements that failed or stalled despite decades of intense effort and focus.
FWIW I think you do outline some of the reasons why this particular effort is promising. I think that’s the most important part to flesh out. Not all liberation efforts are equal. Each needs to be argued on their merits.
In addition to the other comments which I agree with, I think substack is also playing a role. Seems in the past few years everyone went and got a substack, and now many posts just live there, and for the ones that are posted in both places, half the comments happens there.
Thanks for writing this. I enjoyed reading it and for myself I’m turning over in my head whether or not I think welfare tech is a bubble in the same way that leafleting and clean meat were. I recall the movement going all in on scaling up leafleting when the evidence didn’t support it yet. The predictions and promises made about when cultivated meat would hit stores and total market share again were overpromising on the evidence.
I guess from my point of view I feel like I haven’t seen the same claims being made about welfare tech. Perhaps you could argue that people are claiming success at a level that is not warranted by the evidence, given the complexity of these problems and the uncertainty we have about whether or not they are net positive. Is the claim here that some of these claims are premature and overstating the case or is the claim that some of these new venture studios or calls for new founders are overstating how promising or straightforward these interventions are? Or both? Either way it doesn’t seem like this is the same kind of bubble as leafleting or clean meat predictions.
I think the picture is (mostly) bleak if you look at the denominator (total animal suffering), and how little we can do to end suffering of all farmed animals. If you look at the numerator, there are millions and sometimes even billions of individuals whose lives you can help, even in expectation.
Minor feedback that I was surprised by the content of this post based on the title.
Nice. This is definitely a useful concept, and is similar to the ladder of engagement which is discussed in the context of volunteer organising. One thing the ladder adds is how reliable are they? This makes more sense for engaging volunteers specifically, where someone can be skilled aligned, and high-context, but not very reliable at doing what they agree to.
Also this is not me saying this is not a big problem. And of course there are other reasons why we should tackle this, not just for the instrumental value of lost productivity.
It estimated a loss of roughly 6–7% of total workforce output
I think one issue with this claim is that I think stress and anxiety is downstream of something that also causes a huge amount of upside and that is people are persuaded by this being an incredibly high-impact opportunity. This is high impact because the stakes are high. Things could go catastrophically wrong. Not enough people are working on it. This causes people to make big career pivots and work hard, and also create stress and anxiety with the resulting psychological downsides.
Of course we should try to maintain motivation and interest in the cause area while reducing stress, anxiety, burnout, etc. But I think one of the reasons this is tough is that they are both downstream of a third factor.
Despite this, I do agree with most of your proposed solutions.
Curious what Grace thinks but I’ll chime in that Australia has a similar number of EAs and overall population across a landmass 186 times larger than the Netherlands. 2⁄3 live in Melbourne and Sydney, which are a 10 hour drive apart. IMO a geographic hub where it’s easy for people to congregate is one of the determinants of hub success. Not to say Australia isn’t a hub, but IMO its less of a hub than EU countries with similar number of EAs.
Thanks for raising this. I should clarify that the generalisation I’ve made largely applies outside of EA spaces, and the reverse tends to be true in EA spaces, where I find most people, vegan or otherwise, take the suffering of farmed animals pretty seriously.
I agree this is a challenge in EA, and I’m sure its gone well and poorly at different points in time. FWIW my experience over the last few years has been pretty positive where I have felt supported by friends and collaborators who are not vegan in my work as an animal advocate and personally as a vegan. Compared to other spaces I think overall we handle what is a tough dynamic fairly well.
Sorry I was imprecise when I said “ending factory farming”, I should have said “ending the consumption of all animal products/meat”, which I do think is what most orgs and org leaders would ultimately want, and would be seen as radical.
I agree that ending factory farming, if we mean to replace it with smaller very high welfare farming, is more agreeable, although again I doubt most people would support it if they knew the amount of meat they could consume and the accompanying price tag.
Well said and broadly on board.
One thing I think is worth clarifying and I’m curious what others think: while it’s good to de-emphasize each individual’s personal diet choices, I’m less sure if it’s good to de-emphasize the overall mission. There is the appeal of presenting a more accessible/less radical message
For example I know many of the leaders/organizations ultimately want to see an end to factory farming. But since this could also alienate people, instead we could talk about freeing dogs, and giving states the right to end the sale and import of cruel practices like caged hens. Those individuals might get more involved only to discover later that the end goal of the orgs they volunteer with is far more radical than initially stated.
On the plus side this means that some of the more agreeable goals have a broader coalition of supporters. On the downside this can lead to people feeling duped and perceiving the movement as lower integrity; like there was a bait and switch. What do people think about this trade-off/risk?
Broadly I agree with this, at least on the current margin. One minor wrinkle related to this topic is that in my personal experience people who care about animals and want to help them but eat animal products often show a lot of cognitive dissonance and motivated reasoning.
I find there’s a strong desire to not turn towards the cruelty of their own diet and look for solutions that don’t point towards their own moral complicity. For example if someone mostly doesn’t eat red meat or is pescatarian, they might be more likely to deny fish sentience.
Having said that, the animal advocacy movement is prone to doing the opposite: to confer maximum moral value to all farmed animals and believe and promote every argument in favor of animal advocacy and against factory farming.
Small FYI only point 6 is a header in the formatting of this post.
As someone who spent six months in Oxford and four years in London and has now moved back home to Melbourne, for me I suspect there has been a large drop in impact. Even though I go to conferences once or twice a year, I think the difference in quality of networking, deeper connections, more fruitful conversations at the watercooler, etc is quite dramatic.
Also being outside of a hub but in the same timezone and same country as a lot of EA employers is less of a hit to impact than living in a different country and a very different time zone, where it’s harder to schedule meetings and there are far fewer jobs that would be willing to hire.
I notice I now value shorter posts and comments much more than I used to.
It used to be sometimes a long post was a sign the person was rambling, and sometimes just meant the had a lot to say, or didn’t have the time to make it more concise, but it was still a valuable contribution. Now with LLM’s being so verbose, I find my eyes glazing over longer writing. Even when it doesn’t ‘sound’ like an LLM, it isn’t that hard to get AI to not sound like AI if it has a writing sample.
What do others think?