Same. I’ll reiterate what I said above: EAs may be at risk of seriously underestimating the friction that exists between animal work within and outside of EA. My worry is that if even the mention of the idea is enough to get this sort of reaction, I suspect things could get even more heated if EAs, in large numbers, were to enthusiastically support an open alliance with an industry that has a mediocre reputation. Not to mention the ways this may plausibly undermine EA’s credibility with environmentalists.
Another point (although something else that I need to sit with more) is that I’m not sure EA has anything interesting to offer the beef industry. That is, they don’t need EA to accomplish their goals, and we don’t have any leverage whatsoever from their perspective.
My sense is that before we putting even a little political capital into some kind of proposal like this, we need to determine if cancel culture is actually something worth worrying about to this extent.
Like, I 100% agree that in principle it’s objectionable to “cancel” someone, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is manifesting to a degree worth caring about, or that it ever will. My intuition is that many people say and do bad things all the time and only a very, very small number of them are canceled.
This doesn’t mean that it couldn’t become an issue, but I wonder how much of this is something that EA should keep talking about as a serious issue, or if it’s just a “Very Online” kind of thing. I often have heard otherwise brilliant people comparing cancel culture to, like, the cultural revolution under Mao, and needless to say, that’s a pretty big overreaction.
Also, my gut tells me that if cancel culture is becoming a thing, which perhaps it is, then nothing that anyone has proposed so far appears, on the face of it, to have done anything to curb the phenomena. And I have doubts that this proposal would either, for reasons people already have stated. If anything, at least in the United States, there is now a completely asinine culture war over cancellation, which then distracts from more important issues like foreign aid and refugee policy.
I guess maybe I think that EA doesn’t have the tools to “solve” or “fix” cancel culture, it’s probably out of our abilities, so maybe let’s focus on things we can have an impact on.