Jacob_Peacock

• Jacob_Peacock 28 Nov 2025 6:52 UTC

  5 points

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  on: Why Psy­chi­a­tric Drug Eval­u­a­tion Misses the Real Story

  I think I agree with the central theses here, as I read them: indeed, ideally we would (1) measure what happens to people individually, rather than on average, due to taking psychiatric drugs, and (2) measure an outcome that reflects people’s aggregate preference for their experience of life with the drug versus the counterfactual experience of life without the drug.

  However, I think these problems are harder to resolve than the post suggests. Neither can be measured directly (outside circumscribed /​ assumption-laden situations) due to the fundamental problem of causal inference, which is not resolved by people’s self-reported estimates of individual causal effects. There are better approaches to consider than comparing averages, but, in my opinion, this is the default for practical causal inference reasons, rather than a failure to take phenomenology seriously.

  I agree that (2) is more tractable; however, these improvements are non-trivial to implement. Continuing your example, if we reanalyze a trial to focus on patients with high baseline akathisia, who may be most affected by either a benefit or a harm, we have far fewer patients to analyze. What was once an adequately powered trial to detect a moderate effect in the full sample is now under-powered. The same issue arises when analyzing complex interactions: precisely estimating interaction effects generally requires far larger sample sizes than estimating main effects. So a trial designed to measure a main effect of a drug is unlikely to be sufficiently powered to estimate several interaction effects.

  For either issue, the data is not already there in my view. That said, I may not be fully understanding what exactly you propose doing; are there examples of “[using] criticality and complex systems modeling tools to deal with symptom interactions” in a healthcare context that illustrate this sort of analysis?

• Jacob_Peacock 22 Nov 2025 10:04 UTC

  5 points

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  on: If wild an­i­mal welfare is in­tractable, ev­ery­thing is in­tractable.

  I think this article makes its case compellingly, and appreciate that you spell-out the sometimes subtle ways uncertainty gets handled.

  Did the question “Why should justification standards be the same?” arise in a sociological /​ EA movement context? My interpretation (from the question wording alone) would be more epistemic, along the lines of the unity of science. In my view, standards for justification have to be standardized, otherwise they wouldn’t be standards; one could just offer an arbitrary justification to any given question.

• Jacob_Peacock 19 Sep 2025 17:20 UTC

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Wyatt S.’s comment on: Price-, taste-, and con­ve­nience-com­pet­i­tive plant-based meat analogues would not cur­rently re­place the ma­jor­ity of meat con­sump­tion: A nar­ra­tive re­view [Now peer-re­viewed]

  Hi Wyatt, it’s indeed confusing, but journals often plan their issues several months in advance. So this article is published online and will appear in a January 2026 issue of Appetite, thus the future publication date.

Price-, taste-, and con­ve­nience-com­pet­i­tive plant-based meat analogues would not cur­rently re­place the ma­jor­ity of meat con­sump­tion: A nar­ra­tive re­view [Now peer-re­viewed]

• Jacob_Peacock 10 Sep 2025 18:37 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: Gabe The Ape’s comment on: Re­search re­port: adding a plant-based op­tion (or two) doesn’t change behavior

  Hi Dorsal, thank you for your kind words about the work and thoughtful questions. I agree with Seth’s reply and would add for (A), there is some evidence of this effect for plant-based foods in general, for example: Garnett 2019, Parkin 2021, and Pechey 2022. I don’t know of any studies which have tested adding animal-based meats.

Re­search re­port: adding a plant-based op­tion (or two) doesn’t change behavior

• Jacob_Peacock 20 Mar 2025 22:53 UTC

  13 points

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  on: Are al­ter­na­tive pro­teins an effec­tive in­ter­ven­tion for an­i­mals?

  Thank you for writing this thoughtful piece! I especially appreciate the transparency in reasoning and the careful attention to empirical evidence (some of which I’ve contributed to).

  I wanted to share a few notes on the displacement section—specifically, some important papers that weren’t mentioned and a few potential misinterpretations of others:

  1. Carlsson 2022 presents a hypothetical discrete choice experiment on lower prices for plant-based meat, finding that 30% of consumers in Sweden would not choose plant-based meat even if it were free. This highlights a key limitation of many other discrete choice experiments: they may not be testing sufficiently low prices and could be subject to floor effects. In other words, consumers’ willingness to pay for plant-based meat may be even lower than some studies estimate.

  2. Lusk 2022 is strictly a modeling paper (as you note) and effectively assumes a cross-price elasticity between plant- and animal-based meats. The specific quantities used are derived from hypothetical discrete choice experiments, but Lusk 2022 itself does not adduce new empirical evidence of displacement to my knowledge. (However, it does provide a useful review of cross-price elasticities.)

  3. Mendez 2023 reviews cross-price elasticities between butter and margarine. It’s important to note that cross-price elasticities do not directly measure displacement—they measure (in theory) how a price change in one product affects demand for another. While price displacement is one possible mechanism, other mechanisms could also be at play.

  4. Grundy 2022 finds evidence supporting some interventions using mycoprotein-based meat alternatives. However, if I recall correctly, these are intensive, multi-component interventions that go beyond simply making mycoprotein-based meat alternatives available. As a result, it’s unclear whether the meat alternative itself was the causal factor in the outcomes observed.

  5. Malan 2022 is, in my opinion, one of the strongest studies on this topic. It finds either null or very small effects under reasonable analyses (see Peacock 2024).

  6. Several observational studies use grocery store scanner data to measure behavioral displacement between plant- and animal-based meat. Neuhofer 2024 is one such study, cited for its findings on the proportion of consumers purchasing both plant- and animal-based meat. It also provides an observational estimate suggesting that displacement is either small or nonexistent. Additional studies in this vein include Cuffey 2022, Gordon 2023, and Meyer 2024, some of which explore potential sources of exogeneity. To my recollection, each finds either null or very small displacement effects. However, since some of these papers rely on the same data sources, they shouldn’t necessarily be treated as independent pieces of evidence.

  Overall, I think this section may place too much emphasis on self-reported surveys that may tend toward finding effects, rather than studies that measure behavioral outcomes.

• Jacob_Peacock 13 Feb 2025 23:20 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: Michael St Jules 🔸’s comment on: EAA is over­in­vest­ing in cor­po­rate welfare reforms

  Thank you, that’s all helpful!

• Jacob_Peacock 13 Feb 2025 22:12 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Michael St Jules 🔸’s comment on: EAA is over­in­vest­ing in cor­po­rate welfare reforms

  I’m thinking more about this interpretation, but I’m not sure it is correct because WFP’s calculations are designed to be conservative in estimating the welfare improvements and exclude various welfare harms. For example, it looks like the broiler estimates exclude welfare harms from transport to slaughter. When these hours of suffering are added back in, the ratio between the two scenarios can go down.

  As a hypothetical example, suppose BCC chickens are currently estimated to suffer 50 hours, while non-BCC chickens suffer 100 hours. If we add in 10 hours of suffering from transport for non-BCC chickens and only 2 hours for BCC chickens (as they are believed to be more heat tolerant), this ratio then increases to 53%. So while excluding harms from transport to slaughter is fine for keeping the absolute difference in hours suffered conservative (50=100-50 < 58 = 110-52), it does not necessarily keep the ratio conservative (50% vs 47% suffering reduction).

  I think this is fine when comparing between different welfare levels for species, but I suspect it means they can not be used to compare directly to non-existence?

  [Tagging @saulius as well since this seems relevant to the extent of whether cage-free is ‘still pretty bad’.]

• Jacob_Peacock 7 Nov 2024 6:36 UTC

  5 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: Bad omens for US farmed an­i­mal policy work?

  Thank you for writing this! It was very helpful learn how these initiatives went and I found my self agreeing with much of what you wrote.

  I am curious to learn more of what costly signals you had in mind when you write:

  politicians wanting to make extremely costly signals to show how much they support animal agriculture — two states have already preemptively banned the sale of cultivated meat.

  My initial thinking was that these were pretty low costs for these politicians: cultivated meat isn’t salient to the constituency, there are no sales in the state, and the industry is very small, so no one is really bothered to inflict a cost, but I’m curious what else I should consider.

• Jacob_Peacock 31 Oct 2024 18:34 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: ElliotTep’s comment on: The goal isn’t ‘end fac­tory farm­ing’, but re­duce as much suffer­ing as possible

  Hi Elliot, I cite a couple of studies similar to that in my review Price-, Taste-, and Convenience-Competitive Plant-Based Meat Would Not Currently Replace Meat; I suspect you’re thinking of Malan 2022.

An­i­mal ad­vo­cacy re­search fund­ing op­por­tu­nity: Food Sys­tems Re­search Fund

• Jacob_Peacock 30 May 2024 19:15 UTC

  15 points

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  in reply to: bruce’s comment on: Ben Steven­son’s Quick takes

  Hi Bruce, thank you for your questions. I’m leading this project and made the decision to recruit volunteers, so thought I’d be best positioned to respond. (And Ben’s busy protesting for shrimp welfare today anyway!)

  1. Did the team consider a paid/​minimum wage position instead of an unpaid one? How did it decide on the unpaid positions?

  Yes, we would prefer to offer additional paid positions. However, given the budget for this project, we were not able to offer such positions. We regularly receive unsolicited inquiries from people interested in volunteering for our research. There is not always a good fit, but since this project is highly modular allowing people to meaningfully contribute with just a few hours of time, we decided to provide a formal volunteer opportunity.

  1. Is the theory of change for impact here mainly an “upskill students/​early career researchers” thing, or for the benefits to RP’s research outputs?

  The primary theory of change is to improve the evidence-base for interventions to reduce animal product usage, thus allowing more and better interventions to be implemented and reducing the numbers of animals harmed by factory farming. RP’s research outputs are a mediator in this theory of change. The volunteer opportunity itself also represents an opportunity to upskill, but ultimately the goal for all involved is to benefit non-human animals.

  1. What is RP’s current policy on volunteers?

  RP occasionally considers and engages with volunteers for some projects, especially where relatively small time-limited contributions are possible.

  1. Does RP expect to continue recruiting volunteers for research projects in the future?

  In practice, this will depend on the project and whether there are other opportunities that would be an appropriate fit.

• Jacob_Peacock 7 Nov 2023 17:48 UTC

  5 points

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  on: Price-, Taste-, and Con­ve­nience-Com­pet­i­tive Plant-Based Meat Would Not Cur­rently Re­place Meat

  I’ve made some updates and corrections to this paper—(2) and (3) are most important in my opinion and make the Malan 2022 field experiment a somewhat weaker test of the PTC hypothesis. Thanks to all who commented!

  Changes are noted below (which I’ve also added to the post):

  1. Correction to Figure 1 to indicate Ikea 2019 data represent all stores globally, rather than just the United States.

  Corrections and updates in the “Malan 2022 field experiment” section:

  1. Replace “On Thursdays, students had the option of receiving prepared burritos with either Impossible ground beef, animal-based steak, or veggies, while the build-your-own entree line offered Impossible ground beef every day alongside animal-based ground beef.” with “On Thursdays, students had the option of receiving prepared burritos with either Impossible ground beef, animal-based cubed steak, or veggies, while the build-your-own entree line offered Impossible ground beef every day alongside animal-based cubed steak, shredded beef and other animal products.”

  2. Replace the second paragraph in this section. Briefly, this updates and corrects the text to indicate that a negligible portion of participants did pay for meals; an animal-based ground beef equivalent to the Impossible ground beef was not served; and dining hall staff served all food. Furthermore, it adds information on a survey of participants’ perception of the taste of Impossible ground beef. The paragraph previously read:

     In this study, price is entirely equivalent since students pay for dining hall access for the entire semester, not individual meals. With regards to taste, Impossible ground beef specifically has not been subjected to any public taste tests. However, as reviewed above, the Impossible Burger, which is made of similar ingredients, has been found to taste equivalent in some studies. The study does not describe exactly the form of the beef in the steak burrito, making its taste equivalence less certain but probably still a reasonable inference. For the ground beef served on the build-your-own entree line, taste equivalence seems very likely. We can further surmise that the Impossible ground beef meals in the study were at least desirable: a follow-up survey found that 71% of purchasers were repeat purchasers (Malan, 2020, p. 189). Convenience is likely equivalent as well since the burritos are prepared for students by dining hall staff, and the build-your-own entree line is self-serve for both animal- and plant-based ground beef.

     It now reads:

     In this study, price is almost always equivalent since students pay for dining hall access for the entire semester, not individual meals; a negligible proportion of meals were purchased with other means of payment. With regards to taste, Impossible ground beef is not directly comparable to either the cubed steak or shredded beef served in the study, nor has it been subjected to any public taste tests comparing it with ground beef. However, as reviewed above, the Impossible Burger, which is made of similar ingredients, has been found to taste equivalent to ground beef burgers in some studies. Furthermore, Malan (2020) includes a survey on taste perceptions of 215 participants at the intervention site, although some of the question phrasing might evoke slight agreement or social desirability bias, and the survey may be affected by selection bias. Of the 96 surveyed participants who self-selected to try the Impossible ground beef, 86% agreed or somewhat agreed it was delicious; 85% that Impossible ground beef “is a satisfying alternative to animal meat” (Malan, 2020, Table 20); and 71% choose to eat it more than once (Malan, 2020, p. 189). Of the 89 open-ended responses describing what was liked about the Impossible ground beef, 52% mentioned the flavor, feel or texture and 30% its similarity to animal-based meat (Malan, 2020, Table 27). Conversely, of the 49 open-ended responses on what was disliked, 29% mentioned the flavor or feel and 24% the texture (Malan, 2020, Table 28). Given these results it may be reasonable to conclude the Impossible ground beef was fairly well-liked among those participants who consumed it, although it is not equivalent to the other beef products offered. Finally, convenience is likely equivalent since all meals are prepared for students by dining hall staff.

  3. Replace “Dining halls were not randomized to intervention and control status, and participants were free to cross over between dining halls during the study, both factors that could bias effects in either direction. Control dining hall A was adjacent to the intervention dining hall, so intervention materials were potentially visible, while control dining hall B was isolated from the intervention.” with “Dining halls were not randomized to intervention and control status, and participants were known to cross over between dining halls (Malan et al., 2022, p. 226), both factors that could bias effects in either direction. Control dining hall A was adjacent to the intervention dining hall, and some intervention materials were thus visible (Malan, 2020, p. 119), while control dining hall B was isolated from the intervention.”

  Clarifications and a correction in the “Conclusions & recommendations” section:

  1. Clarify “The underlying premise of PTC as the key determinants of food choice is not supported by evidence from cross-sectional surveys on consumers’ self-reported determinants.”

  2. Correct “Finally, a controlled experiment introducing high-quality plant-based meat to a dining hall—at almost always equal price and convenience to animal-based meat—shows that most participants did not choose plant-based meat.”

  3. Correction to replace “six” with “five” in “Across five lines of evidence, it is clear that the empirical evidence opposes the PTC hypothesis.”

• Jacob_Peacock 19 Oct 2023 2:16 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: T_W’s comment on: How meat-free meal se­lec­tion varies with menu op­tions: an exploration

  This source suggests the rate of self-identified veganism in Germany is about 3% in 2022. (We did not do any data collection ourselves; this report is a re-analysis of existing data collected by Brachem et al.)

• Jacob_Peacock 28 Sep 2023 19:44 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: BruceF’s comment on: Price-, Taste-, and Con­ve­nience-Com­pet­i­tive Plant-Based Meat Would Not Cur­rently Re­place Meat

  they don’t discuss (let alone defend) “strong form PTC” theory.

  I suppose we simply disagree here. The first quote I cite states “the products need to taste the same or better and cost the same or less.” The next sentence strongly implies that “the market can kick in and take it from there, just shoot us up the S-curve,” with “necessary but not sufficient” relegated to a “quibble.” In conjunction with the Q&A, I think reasonable audience member would infer that your statements mean roughly “if price and taste parity were met, a majority of consumers would soon switch.” Conversely, it’s hard to imagine audience members construing “up the S-curve”, “huge, huge dent” and “change the massive trajectory” to mean, for example, 20% of people switch over two decades.

  And in the second case, since we’re at 1% plant-based meat right now and 0% cultivated meat, my statements that “we can have many times the penetration that we have right now if we can get to price and taste parity” and “if you can get to price and taste parity, you can make a huge, huge dent”: 1) don’t mean that nothing else is required; and also 2) don’t mean that we magically reach 50%+.

  Can you clarify roughly what number you did intend “many times the penetration” and “huge, huge dent” to refer to here?

  It feels curious to me that you continue to claim I believe something that I am telling you explicitly that I don’t believe; you are essentially saying “you believe this and you’re wrong,” and I’m saying “I agree that’s wrong, and I don’t believe it.”

  I don’t think you believe this given you’re clearly saying you do not. Instead, as I wrote, “I’d contend that you (and GFI) have prominently promoted and supported the strong PTC hypothesis. Or, at the very least, made statements that reasonable people interpret to support the strong PTC hypothesis.” The situation to me begins to resemble a motte-and-bailey fallacy, with the strong PTC hypothesis as the bailey and the weak as the motte.

  With regard to your four specific critiques: I think the overwhelming evidence of the importance of taste and price (including in the three sections from your paper) are a strong response to specific critiques about specific studies. i.e., the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence indicates the importance of taste and price to food choice.

  You’re simply reasserting your disagreement and declining to engage the critiques, despite being asked multiple times now (1, 2). In fact, none of the studies you cited address all four of the issues, and studies simply repeating the issues do not make for overwhelming evidence. I don’t follow your argument against “specific critiques about specific studies?” Presumably vague critiques of unspecified studies would be unhelpful. A third time I’d ask, are you able to address these critiques, especially in those studies that predate 2015, when you started claiming price and taste as the most important factors in food choice?

  In the end, I think we need a both/​and approach, but I think that alt proteins are the only approach that has a shot at slashing the global consumption of industrial animal meat.

  This seems self-contradictory: why would you support another solution, if you think alternative proteins are “the only approach that has a shot”? By assumption, that other solution would not have a shot.

  I look forward to your comments on my forthcoming work on other strategies to reduce meat usage. I’ll let you have the last word here.

• Jacob_Peacock 20 Sep 2023 14:56 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: katriel’s comment on: Price-, Taste-, and Con­ve­nience-Com­pet­i­tive Plant-Based Meat Would Not Cur­rently Re­place Meat

  Sorry I missed this—mostly (2), sometimes discussing (1).

• Jacob_Peacock 20 Sep 2023 14:55 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jack_S🔸’s comment on: Price-, Taste-, and Con­ve­nience-Com­pet­i­tive Plant-Based Meat Would Not Cur­rently Re­place Meat

  Thanks! My subsequent reply to Bruce might be helpful here—while Bruce doesn’t defend the claim here, I do think he says things that strongly resemble it elsewhere.

• Jacob_Peacock 19 Sep 2023 16:36 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Paul_Christiano’s comment on: Price-, Taste-, and Con­ve­nience-Com­pet­i­tive Plant-Based Meat Would Not Cur­rently Re­place Meat

  Are you referring to the blind taste test?

  Yes. The Sogari blind taste test is indeed affected by saltiness; it also includes an informed taste test similarly effected (but again finding Impossible and animal-based meat tied for first). There is a second blind taste test cited immediately thereafter (Chicken and Burger Alternatives, 2018), although salt levels were not reported.

  Have you compared these foods yourself?

  No, I haven’t.

  It seems really hard to draw conclusions about taste competitiveness of a meat substitute from this kind of n=1 study, beyond saying that you are in the same vague zone.

  I agree, food is varied and such comparisons are hard—that’s part of why I argue we should do more taste tests! Can you clarify what you mean by an N of 1 study, as usually this refers to a study with a single participants, but Sogari indeed had many participants. If you’re suggesting comparison against multiple burgers, this gets a bit tricky since one has to decide which burger you actually want to be equivalent to, if that’s your goal.

  I disagree. Right now I think that plant-based meat substitutes have a reputation as tasting worse than meat largely because they actually taste worse.

  Can you clarify what specifically you disagree with here? I don’t think I especially disagree with anything you wrote that follows from here. Instead, I think it’s indeed perception of taste that matters for the impact of PBM and we can likely best measure that perception with informed, rather than blind, taste tests. Overall, as I write, I think actually operationalizing a taste test to identify whether “taste competitiveness” is obtained is non-trivial. The literature so far neglects such operationalizations. What do you have in mind as an ideal experiment to conduct to measure taste competitiveness?

• Jacob_Peacock 14 Sep 2023 6:56 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Paul_Christiano’s comment on: Price-, Taste-, and Con­ve­nience-Com­pet­i­tive Plant-Based Meat Would Not Cur­rently Re­place Meat

  Hi Paul, thanks for checking the analysis so closely! (And apologies for the slow reply; I’ve been gathering some more information.)

  But wouldn’t Impossible be a comparison for ground beef, not for steak? Am I misunderstanding something here?

  This is a good point and I’ve now confirmed with the authors that the steak was cubed, rather than minced or ground, so indeed not likely directly comparable to Impossible ground beef. I’ll be making some updates to the paper accordingly. Thank you!

  The build-your-own-entree bar offers shredded beef, which while also not the same, might be a more similar comparison. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get more granular data at this time to test whether that was more readily displaced. Overall, despite these caveats on taste, lots of plant-based meat was still sold, so it was “good enough” in some sense, but there was still potentially little resulting displacement of beef (although maybe somewhat more of chicken).

  I don’t think it’s really equivalent on taste

  Yes, I’m not entirely certain Impossible meat is equivalent in taste to animal-based ground beef. However, I do find the evidence I cite in the second paragraph of this section somewhat compelling.

  If I’m understanding you correctly then 22% of the people previously eating steak burritos switched to Impossible burritos

  I’m not sure where you’re getting this exact figure, but I don’t put much credence in it. Instead, I’d refer to estimates in Fig 3, which range from 0.3 to 4.0 percentage points of beef displacement, after accounting for behavior at the control sites and/​or spillover effects. That is compared to an 5.0 or 11.4 pp increase in Impossible meal sales, respectively.

  Furthermore, it’s important to keep in mind “the study employed several co-interventions designed to reduce meat consumption (Malan, 2020). These included environmental education, low carbon footprint labels on menus, and an advertising campaign to promote the new product, all of which have some evidence demonstrating their effectiveness.” So the effect is likely not entirely attributable to the Impossible meat.

  even if you did have taste equivalence here I wouldn’t expect people’s decisions to be perfectly informed by that fact

  I agree and discuss this issue some in the Taste section. In short, this is part of why I think informed taste tests would be more relevant than blind: in naturalistic settings, it is possible that people would report not liking the taste of PBM even though it passes a blind taste test. So I think this accurately reflects what we should expect in practice.

  in your first deployment

  In this case, ~32% of (surveyed) participants answered yes to “Have you tried the Impossible™ burger, Beyond Meat™, or similar products anywhere other than [the intervention site]?” (Table 19) Note the study was conducted in the Fall of 2019, right after the summer Impossible launched in Burger King. Furthermore, the study covers 10 weeks and 71% of participants who ever selected the Impossible product at the intervention site went on to select it again. So I wouldn’t think of this as a first deployment: many students were familiar with these sorts of products already and took multiple opportunities to try the product over two and a half months. (These figures are based on a (small) survey of 200 participants, 96 of whom self-reported ever selecting Impossible products at the intervention site.)