Update: Peaceful activists were tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets yesterday at Ridglan Farms. No dogs were rescued.
I’m not sure yet what this says about the overall strategy—debrief should be incoming—but it was not good for those involved. (I wasn’t there)
Fantastic feedback—thank you! I’ve updated the post to not say that these celebrities haven’t been active on animal rights, because as you point out they have. Thanks!
I went to jail yesterday in Wisconsin. I helped rescue 23 beagles in a large mass open rescue against a factory farm, Ridglan Farms, near Madison. We were trying to push the police to act on documented animal cruelty at Ridglan. Instead they arrested me and 26 other activists.
I wrote a blog post about why I did it.. Excerpt:
I think some altruists suffer from lack of moral courage. Especially those of us who work on tech: we often have lots of moral conviction, but are typically wealthy and aren’t usually risking much personally, and I think that’s a gap. I want to be asking more often, “how can we be more altruistic?” One answer is to challenge ourselves to do more and more courageous things.
More info and stories from Wayne Hsiung: https://blog.simpleheart.org/p/im-in-jail-for-rescuing-dogs-its
If you’re in the DC area, I’ll be sharing more about my experience at Revolutionists’ Night, an animal welfare meetup, this Thursday. Reach out for an invite.
[Edited to add:] I believe there is a lawful basis for this action and I intend to fight any attempted prosecution in court! I’m not advocating any illegal activity, of course.
I feel a lot more optimistic about this direction than you. It’s a theory of change that you seem to think is unrealistic, when I think it is highly realistic, and thus you’re focused on the downside risks when I think the upside is potentially huge and worthwhile.
My theory goes something like: we block all factory farm expansions → people realize that we don’t want factory farmed products in the UK at all → public opinion shifts quickly → multiple policy changes are now simultaneously possible: we ban new factory farms, start working on closing/improving existing ones, and ban low welfare imports.
We know political winds can shift and change can happen quickly, like same-sex marriage. We know activism is critical to such change. We know momentum is crucial for activism, and as a result we need to see consistent wins. This strategy is actively and consistently producing wins in a cause area that really struggles to produce wins.
Sure, there are many ways it can fail. Nobody is claiming this will definitely work. But the evidence you are looking for seems either downstream (like the government policy commitment) or irrelevant to the theory of change (where or how quickly do imports replace UK products). Sure, they are relevant to the downside, and I can definitely imagine ways that downside risk can make the upside not worth it, but when I look holistically I am pretty optimistic overall even seeing the risks.
The evidence which would convince me to stop is mainly loss of momentum on the short term strategy. If blocking factory farms at the planning stage stopped working, for example, and activists spent a year trying hard to restart it but failing, then I would change my mind. I don’t think I would want to stop in most cases if it were creating backlash (because backlash triggers discussion and can be useful) but I would want to study the form of backlash carefully.
I also think that if there were other activist strategies that were working better, I would want to stop this one and move onto higher priority strategies. But to me this is one of the ones that’s working best.
Great work. This has the vibes of an instant classic. I’m probably going to be linking this for a long time.
Hmm, I don’t entirely disagree but I also don’t fully agree either:
Where I agree: I have indeed hired people on the opposite side of the world (eg Australia) for whom it was not a problem.
Where I disagree: working at weird hours is a skill, and one that is hard to test for in interviews. There is a reasonably high base rate (off the cuff: maybe 30 percent?) of candidates claiming overconfidently in interviews that they can meet a work schedule that is actually incredibly impractical for them and end up causing problems or needing firing later on. I would rather not take that collective risk—to hire you and discover 3 months in, that the schedule you signed up for is not practical for you.
One thing which may be newly possible in the last few years is getting satellite imagery of the country and using AI to count houses. With appropriate methodology, this is far more likely to be accurate than relying on bureaucratic reporting and/or projections, although there are the obvious pitfalls and probably some non-obvious ones too in backing this out to population. I believe MSF used to do something like this for their deployment areas but I haven’t heard of it attempted at a countrywide scale.
I think the 2nd place result for Carrick is quite good for a 1st-time candidate with 1st-time political action team behind. There were many mistakes obviously, but deciding to run was not one of them IMO. No political action will result in certainty, the goal is ~always to move the needle or take a bunch of swings.
Yep… this stuff is simultaneously fairly obvious and surprisingly neglected. I have been looking at TB programs in various developing countries and the best policy proposals all include these components—although the details differ in some places. Implementation is a challenge.
I’ve been paying special attention to household contacts screening for TB and preventative treatment (TPT; your policy #2). While TPT for household contacts is extraordinarily cost-effective, it is quite frustrating to make progress on this, because of the reasons the report cites: general lack of awareness of TB dangers, as well as that it is quite hard to convince people who are not visibly sick to travel with their family, possibly long distances, to hospitals to get screened and take 3-month courses (or longer!) of preventative antibiotics with sometimes-severe side effects.
Glad to see more people working on this.
Hmm, I’ll take another stab at this point, which has some mathematical basis but in the end is a fairly intuitive point:
Consider the per-person utility of society X which has a generous margin of slack for each person. Compare it to the per-person utility of society Z which has no margin of slack for each person.
My claim is something like, the per-person utility curves (of actual societies, that could exist, given reasonable assumptions about resources) most likely look like a steep drop from “quite positive” to “quite negative” between X and Z, because of what Zvi describes in the slack post I linked—as you take up slack, this first results in lack of individual potential, and then in the extreme, great suffering due to lack of choice. Let’s call society Y the point where per-person utility hits zero.
Society Y has a total utility of zero (and adding more people beyond that is negative!) so the utility-maximizing optimal population lands somewhere between X and Y. Where exactly depends on how many people you can “fit” into the per-person slack, before it binds too severely.
My claim is that the (total-utilitarian) optimal population is closer to X than Y, still leaving a fairly generous margin for each person.
One of the things that seems intuitively repugnant is the idea of “lives barely worth living”. The word barely is doing a lot of work in driving my intuition of repugnancy, since a life “barely” worth living seems to imply some level of fragility—“if something goes even slightly wrong, then that life is no longer worth living”.
I think this may simply be a marketing problem though. Could we use some variation of “middle class”? This is essentially the standard of living that developed-world politics accepts as both sustainable and achievable, and sounds a lot nicer than “lives barely worth living”. In reality, even lives “barely worth living” will build in a margin of individual slack to avoid the problem of individual fragility which has huge negative societal consequences, so it will probably seem much closer to middle-class than our current impression of poverty anyway.
There are so many different bags and brands available that you should specify more constraints if you want more personalized recommendations. Vegan is not too hard to satisfy—most luggage that’s vegan won’t necessarily mention it, you just have to look in the description for animal products to avoid (leather / suede mostly).
For me personally, my main carry is a Tom Bihn Techonaut 30 - it’s big enough to carry 5+ days of clothing and my laptop and other gear without needing another bag, but lightweight enough that when I need more space, I am happy to carry it as just a small backpack alongside my Travelpro Maxlite 5.
I also like the /r/onebag subreddit.
(My personal opinion, not EV’s:)
EV is winding down and being on this board is quite a lot of work. This makes it very hard to recruit for! The positive flip side though of the fact of the wind-down means that the cultural leadership we are doing is a bit less impactful than it was say a year or two ago.
When we faced the decision of whether to keep searching or accept the candidates in front of us, I considered many factors but eventually agreed that it was ok to prioritize allowing the existing board members to leave (which they couldn’t do until we found replacements), even if the new folks were not ideal in every conceivable way. I wished we had a better gender balance too, but ultimately since projects are spinning out, it’s going to be much more on those individual projects and less on EV central to figure that out!
(I’m very excited about our new trustees despite this!)
I would like to point out that this is one of those things where n=1 is enough to improve people’s lives (e.g., the placebo effect works in your favor), in the same way that I can improve my life by taking a weird supplement that isn’t scientifically known to work but helps me when I take it.
For what it’s worth, my life did seem to start going better (I started to feel more in touch with my emotional side) after becoming vegan.
Great points. Thank you for writing this up. I think it’s a strong and fair critique of the strategy of actions like this, and would love to see more discussion at this high level of context and analysis.
(I expect you understand the legal arguments at play, but I do want to reemphasize for other readers that I stand behind the ultimate legality of all actions I took at the first Ridglan rescue in March, using a basic necessity defense argument: “you’d break a window to save a dog stuck in locked car on a hot day”, e.g., sometimes property damage is legal to avoid a foreseeable imminent harm. We can argue whether the harms at Ridglan are foreseeable or imminent, but I believe they were and that’s the basis for why I chose to do what I did. I wasn’t there for the one last weekend in April and don’t have a settled opinion about it yet.)
To respond to part of your very good post, I feel that we should be able to discuss and analyze nonviolent direct action and other forms of civil disobedience in EA spaces. I engaged in this action in part because I think EA folks don’t think about this kind of thing enough and I want to raise the salience of civil disobedience, at least as at least a secondary or tertiary sort of thing that EA should have as levers. I don’t think it is ever likely to be primary and I don’t want it to be, but I also don’t want it to be ignored and I think it largely has been around here.
A chunk of your argument boils down to what’s good for the overall EA brand. I strongly agree that there are bright lines I would not want the community to cross (e.g. endorsing or promoting violence). I think nonviolent direct action falls on the “OK” side of the line for me, but I agree there is probably a useful discussion to be had here, and am open to more arguments on this.