ElliotTep

Karma: 1,050

ElliotTep Jul 30, 2024, 11:10 PM
1 point
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in reply to: quila’s comment on: It’s OK to kill and eat animals—but don’t get caught slapping one.
So this involves a bit of potentially tenuous evolutionary psychology, but I think part of what is going on here is that people are judging moral character based on what would have made sense to judge people on 10,000 years ago which is, is this person loyal to their friends (ie me), empathetic, helps the person in front of them without question, etc.
I think it’s important to distinguish between morality (what is right and wrong) from moral psychology (how do people think about what is right and wrong). On this account, buying animal products tells you that a person is a normal member of society, and hitting an animal tells you someone is cruel, not to be trusted, potentially psychopathic, etc.

ElliotTep Jul 30, 2024, 2:13 AM
1 point
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in reply to: quila’s comment on: It’s OK to kill and eat animals—but don’t get caught slapping one.
Hi Quila,
If I understand you correctly I think we broadly agree that people tend to use how someone acts to judge moral character. I think though this point is underappreciated in EA, as evidenced by the existence of this forum post. The question is ‘why do people get so much more upset about hitting one horse than the horrors of factory farming’, when clearly in terms of the badness of an act, factory farming is much worse. The point is that when people view a moral/immoral act, psychologically they are evaluating the moral character of the person, not the act in and of itself.

ElliotTep Jul 26, 2024, 11:08 AM
4 points
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in reply to: David_Moss’s comment on: It’s OK to kill and eat animals—but don’t get caught slapping one.
I think it was the first one. Well done for finding it!

ElliotTep Jul 25, 2024, 12:47 AM
52 points
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on: It’s OK to kill and eat animals—but don’t get caught slapping one.
I can’t recall the paper, but I remember reading a paper in moral psychology that argues that on a psychological level, we think of morality in terms of ‘is this person moral’, not ‘is this act moral’. We are trying to figure out if the person in front of us is trustworthy, loyal, kind, etc.
In the study, participants do say that a human experiencing harm is worse than an animal experiencing harm, but view a person who hits a cat as more immoral than a person who hits their spouse. I think what people are implicitly recoiling at is that the person who hits a cat is more likely to be a psychopath.
I think this maps pretty well onto the example here, and the outrage of people’s reactions. And to clarify, I think this explanation captures WHY people react the way they do in the descriptive sense. I don’t think that’s how people ought to react.

Do What You Can (A Poem)

ElliotTepJul 1, 2024, 10:53 AM

170 points

7 comments3 min readEA link

ElliotTep Jun 20, 2024, 10:28 AM
4 points
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in reply to: MarieF🔸’s comment on: Maybe let the non-EA world train you
I agree this is an important point I probably didn’t discuss enough. Value drift is real, as is getting used to a high salary.
I suspect that a strong community is one way to reduce this, but might be easier said than done depending on where someone lives.

ElliotTep Jun 17, 2024, 9:11 AM
3 points
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in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: Maybe let the non-EA world train you
Can you elaborate on why? Is it the career capital, direct impact, or something else altogether?

Maybe let the non-EA world train you

ElliotTepJun 14, 2024, 2:45 PM

410 points

30 comments8 min readEA link

ElliotTep Apr 30, 2024, 11:54 PM
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on: Who’s hiring? (Feb-May 2024)
Farmed Animal Funders (FAF) is hiring an Operations & Community Manager. We are accepting applications until Monday, May 20, 2024. The role is remote (United States), full time, and compensation is $70,000-$80,000.
In short: the Operations and Community Manager will focus mostly on building and running internal operations, support of FAF’s programs for members and prospective funders, and will play a leadership role in delivering a variety of excellent events.
Farmed Animal Funders (FAF) is a donor network whose members give $250K+ annually to charitable initiatives fighting factory farming. Our membership consists of 40+ high-net-worth individuals, foundations, and companies with diverse theories of change. As the only funders group in the farmed animal protection movement, Farmed Animal Funders plays an outsized role in leading major donors to give more, give better, and give together to end industrialized animal agriculture and build a more humane and sustainable food system.
Feel free to help spread the word about this impactful opportunity (Linkedin and Twitter posts are here). Email hiring (at)farmedanimalfunders.org with any questions.

ElliotTep Apr 9, 2024, 1:22 AM
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in reply to: ezrah’s comment on: ezrah’s Quick takes
+1 as the person who writes the EA Australia newsletter

ElliotTep Jul 24, 2023, 12:48 AM
12 points
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on: What we learned from training EA community members in facilitation skills
As one of the people who attended the course I can say it was really really good! It (hopefully) shouldn’t come as a surprise that a course on how to facilitate better was very well facilitated. The sessions were practical, engaging, and I learned a lot.

This is my way of saying if you have the opportunity to attend the course, or have Mike and Zan run it, I highly recommend you do!

ElliotTep Jun 23, 2023, 1:44 AM
5 points
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in reply to: OllieBase’s comment on: Is there a central place for EA orgs to share lessons learned about operations?
To add to this, the few times I’ve needed ops help I asked a question on the ops slack, and was then linked to a previous thread that discussed said issue at length, and found it very helpful.

ElliotTep Jun 14, 2023, 8:11 AM
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in reply to: EdoArad’s comment on: Cause area report: Antimicrobial Resistance
I worked on the topic of AMR and animal agriculture for a few years at an ESG org, and my impression is that animal agriculture plays a fairly small role in human AMR, maybe 1-10%. The evidence is pretty unclear, but when I pinned down experts their best guess was that it was a low factor, both based on the understanding of how AMR spreads from animals to humans, and also empirically (variance in human AMR based on variance in how many antibotics are given to farmed animals in that area).
My sense is tha a lot of animal advocacy organisations play up the role of factory farming in causing AMR to try and get other stakeholders to care. The argument goes that animals can be in much worse conditions if they are given antibiotics routinely, and so if we ban antibiotics the animals need more space and other better conditions. Unfortunately, I think this is both disingenuous (although I think many of the people promoting the topic don’t realise this), and I’ve heard from some animal advocates that when the routine use of antibiotics are banned in one region, conditions didn’t get better, mortality rates just went up.
I would appreciate if anyone with expertise on this topic would weigh in as I expect some of this to be wrong.

ElliotTep May 27, 2022, 12:43 PM
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on: Who’s hiring? (May-September 2022)
Hi all, I am hiring for a UK Policy Officer focusing on Alternative Proteins at the Jeremy Coller Foundation. The position is full-time, London based.
The Jeremy Coller Foundation is a strategic grant-making organisation and the philanthropic vehicle that seeks to address animal welfare, environmental and human health issues caused by factory farming through grant-making, the FAIRR Initiative and numerous other initiatives. Recent initiatives include a newly formed policy team, the launch of the Coller Animal Law Forum (CALF) and the podcast series Ctrl-Alt-Meat.
This is a newly created role to focus on the policy ecosystem related to alternative protein industry in the United Kingdom, and over time, globally. The initial focus of the role will be supporting the UK policy work, engaging policymakers and government stakeholders.
Rolling applications, you can apply here. Right to work in the UK required.

ElliotTep Aug 14, 2019, 5:17 PM
4 points
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on: Cognitive Dissonance and Veg*nism
I think an important piece of the puzzle that I didn’t see mentioned here is that most people, most of the time resolve their cognitive dissonance towards eating animals by not experiencing it. We put slaughterhouses in the countryside, remove any heads or hooves or skin from our butchers, hang out with friends who do the same, and often make it illegal to film how animals are treated.
Bastian and Loughnan talk about this as passive dissonance avoidance in “resolving the meat paradox” which is a summary of the literature you can read here: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57d2f8668419c276f91f3b04/t/5846ac15579fb36bace325ee/1481026582391/resolving-the-meat-paradox.pdf

To anyone interested in this topic, the other great review (in my opinion) is “Toward a Psychology of Human-Animal Relations” https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57d2f8668419c276f91f3b04/t/5846af5f9f74567368763722/1481027424005/toward-a-psychology-of-human-animal-relations.pdf

ElliotTep Dec 11, 2018, 12:04 PM
4 points
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on: Notes on “The Art of Gathering”
I read this book, and one chapter in I thought it was too slow and anecdote heavy, and put it down. I persisted because of a friend and found about a third of the way in the quality of the advice and pace really picked up.
If anyone decides to read it, persevere!