Out of curiosity, are you able to share why you’re leaving?
Jacob_Peacock
Karma: 1,030
Exciting results! Is the RCT written up in more detail anywhere? I’m confused by the current reporting because it seems to compare pre-post intervention results, rather than treatments and controls. Also, how was the control group set up? (Eg, no intervention, active control, waitlist control etc)
I agree this would be an implication of such a bar and that it seems demanding, to say the least! I’ll reiterate I have a great deal on this and related topics. That said, I do think the answer is potentially yes, or that those lives were possibly mostly instrumental in getting to a world where some lives were worth creating.
I think it’s also notably “convenient” that the bar was crossed so recently; perhaps the bar is even higher and we have largely not yet reached it. Of course, this seems like a very counter-intuitive conclusion, although I think most conclusions on the topic will be.
This is a great video, congratulations to all involved! It seems like it could be valuable in getting the word out and increasing engagement on the issue. I also thought the production value was high and the story compelling.
Who is the intended audience? I think it may be too technical for a general audience, and might not be effective in conveying it’s message to such an audience. Was there any audience testing involved in the script writing and production process? I would be interested to see work akin to what I’ve worked on re:factory farming documentaries.
Thanks, Vera, appreciate your responses here! I’ll have to learn more about Frick’s work at some point.
I think my key uncertainty remains what sorts of lives are acceptable to create? My intuition is that the sorts of lives cage-free layer hens live are still far from worth creating. For example, to my mind, lives of sufficient quality probably have meaningful availability of individual moderate-to-high-quality health care—so that an individual would not die due to infection of a minor wound or a condition requiring surgical intervention. I think this bar makes it quite unlikely that lives on CAFOs would ~ever be worth creating. But, perhaps that’s too high a bar, especially if chickens don’t experience, say, anxiety about uncertain health care availability as a human might, even if that health care is never needed.
Perhaps somewhat beyond the scope of your paper, although it does seem like a crux of the argument, do you have a sense for the sorts of lives you think are acceptable to create?
Yup, I posted a longer top-level comment.
Ah, that reasoning makes sense! From my perspective, the difference is (by definition) small, but (again, by definition) very meaningful since it differentiates lives worth creating and those that are not.
If only because I read this whole comment chain, I’ll add: I agree, Vera, this sentence is logically correct, but I agree with Clara that it seems like a significant risk of misinterpretation, especially since we should expect far more people will read the abstract than the article itself.
Hi Vera, kind of you to thank me in the acknowledgements and I appreciate your thinking on this problem. I’ll flag for readers that I’m on the board of Animal Charity Evaluators, which is discussed in the article, but I’m not speaking for the organization.
As you know, I’m no professional philosopher, but I thought I’d share a few thoughts:
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Your central argument feels structurally very close to the logic of the larder—the classic position that we do animals a favor by bringing them into existence for consumption, provided their lives have net positive welfare. Do you distinguish between your position and this logic of the larder?
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The discussion of the Cumulative Pain Framework is valuable, but whether a cage-free hen’s life clears the threshold of “net positive welfare” is generally a normative judgment, not an empirical finding. Even hedonic welfare theories still have to make a normative call on how to balance pleasures and pains. Similarly, calling the threshold “a very low bar” is itself a normative stance. I’m sympathetic to Tännsjö and others who argue the conclusion isn’t actually repugnant once you think carefully about what “barely worth living” means: if a life is by definition net positive, it’s worth having.
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I’m not familiar with Frick (2022), but my sense is it still proposes an axiology? To the extent that it does, it still needs to face Arrhenius’s impossibility results, so it’s not clear to me this actually provides an escape from the RC, unless it gives up some other desiderata.
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Negative utilitarianism is dismissed because the surest way to minimize suffering would be to eliminate all sentient life—you call this “not an option I can take seriously,” which is fair. But Frick’s Procreation Asymmetry holds that there is no moral reason to create a life just because it would be net positive. Taken strictly, wouldn’t this imply a world with no sentient beings is not axiologically worse than a world full of flourishing ones, ~the conclusion you aimed to avoid? (I know Frick responds to this elsewhere, but I’m curious if that coincides with your view.)
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I fear there’s some conflation between the philosophical sense of welfarism (“what is good for someone or what makes a life worth living, is the only thing that has intrinsic value”) and the sense in animal advocacy of “favoring tactics and strategies that lead to on-farm improvements in the welfare of animals.” It seems possible to accept many of your arguments against philosophical welfarism, while still endorsing animal advocacy welfarism. In the same vein, I think the reccommendation of turning to reducetarianism/abolitionism similarly relies on empirical facts that aren’t covered: what are these (cost-)effective reducetarian/abolitionist interventions?
Thanks for the opportunity to spend some time thinking about these issues.
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Pete Hegseth declares Anthropic a supply-chain risk
I’m curious to circle back here if you have a chance.
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?
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.
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]
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
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:
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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).
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.
Thank you, that’s all helpful!
Wow, congrats!