Currently: ?
Previously: Biosecurity at Telis and Alvea, Cellular Agriculture at Tufts and Mission Barns, Global Health at Medical Teams International
Currently: ?
Previously: Biosecurity at Telis and Alvea, Cellular Agriculture at Tufts and Mission Barns, Global Health at Medical Teams International
I strongly object to the (Edit: previous) statement that my post “concludes that human extinction would be a very good thing”. I do not endorse this claim and think it’s a grave misconstrual of my analysis. My findings are highly uncertain, and, as Peter mentions, there are many potential reasons for believing human extinction would be bad even if my conclusions in the post were much more robust (e.g. lock-in effects, to name a particularly salient one).
As a former cultured meat scientist, I think these predictions have been off in large part because the core technical problems are way harder than most people know (or would care to admit). However, I also suspect that forecasts for many other deep tech sectors, even ones that have been quite successful (e.g. space), have not fared any better. I’d be curious to see how cultured meat predictions have done relative to plant-based meat, algal biofuels, rocketry, and maybe others.
What is your process for identifying and prioritizing new research questions? And what percentage of your work is going toward internal top priorities vs. commissioned projects?
Wow, I’m thrilled about this! I’ve been wondering recently why EA “Campus Centres” aren’t more of a thing, and am delighted to see a big push in that direction. Thank you for an excellent plan and write-up!
Could you elaborate on your definition of “high impact professionals” as your target audience? I’m not sure I understand who exactly you’re hoping to reach. Some examples (real or fictitious) of the types of people you have in mind would be helpful!
This is huge, congrats on the launch! I’m so excited for this fund to exist. How did you decide on the growth targets for the different phases? And will the balance be visible publicly (á la EA Funds) or disclosed some other way?
The sign of the conclusion would be the same (though significantly weaker) even if you ignore shrimp entirely, provided all other assumptions are held constant. That said, the final numbers are indeed quite sensitive to the moral weights, particularly those of chickens, shrimp, and fish as the most abundant nonhumans.
I agree re: the value of both a function-based version that would allow folks to put in their own weights/assumptions, and a version that explicitly considers uncertainty. I don’t have plans to build these out myself, but might reconsider if there’s sufficient interest, and in any case would be happy to support someone else in doing so.
The core of our disagreement seems to be here:
This estimate assumes that all biological functions in an organism can be replicated with technologies, and that these technologies can reach the same efficiency as the biological functions that reached high efficiency due to evolution and natural selection.
I don’t think this is realistic. Perhaps in isolation you could build systems that efficiently accomplish some of these functions, but in the case of cultured meat they all have to be compatible with/support the growth of animal cells and tissues. This is an enormous handicap. All of the technologies you cite as analogous (solar panels vs plants, cars vs horses, planes vs birds, recombinant vs porcine insulin) represent new approaches that are completely free from the limitations of the biological systems they’ve replaced. I don’t think any of them should be counted as precedents for the type of innovation cultured meat would require.
I’m concerned about that dynamic too and think it’s important to keep in mind, especially in the general case of researchers’ intuitions tending to bias their work, even when attempting objectivity. However, I’m also concerned about the dismissal of results like RP’s welfare ranges on the basis of speculation about the researchers’ priors and/or the counterintuitive conclusions, rather than on the merits of the analyses themselves.
I don’t think cars, solar panels, and recombinant insulin are analogous technologies here. Cars and solar panels won out because they are completely new approaches to transportation and solar energy capture that are not constrained by the biology of the systems they’re replacing. Cultured meat seems severely handicapped by its reliance on the growth of animal cells and tissues.
Recombinant insulin is still manufactured in biological systems (bacteria and yeast), but they are much simpler than mammalian cells and can efficiently express a protein that is only present in tiny amounts in the pig pancreases it used to be purified from.
I’m skeptical of anchoring on people’s initial intuitions about cross-species tradeoffs as a default for moral weights, as there are strong reasons to expect that those intuitions are inappropriately biased. The weights I use are far from perfect and are not robust enough to allow confident conclusions to be drawn, but I do think they’re the best ones available for this kind of analysis by a decent margin.