lincolnq

Karma: 3,020

lincolnq 16 Jun 2026 21:30 UTC
51 points
5 ∶ 1
on: lincolnq’s Shortform
Ridglan Farms, the notorious beagle-breeding facility in Wisconsin raided twice by activists this year, is officially shutting down. The pressure on them has been intense because the case has attracted quite a sizeable national attention: Glenn Greenwald, Jennifer Welch (I’ve Had It podcast), Lara Trump and Robert F. Kennedy have all commented on Ridglan decrying the horrors there. Lewis Bollard tweeted this out recently: https://x.com/Lewis_Bollard/status/2066542219134452209

Figured I’d share this since some EAs (including myself) were involved in the campaign to get it shut down. A big part of our theory of change was to get this kind of attention. The real question is how to extend to animals more broadly than just dogs, of course, but even this counts as a big win.

lincolnq 24 Apr 2026 14:44 UTC
49 points
10 ∶ 1
in reply to: MHR🔸’s comment on: MHR’s Quick takes
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.

lincolnq 19 Apr 2026 17:32 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Lessons from the Ridglan rescue: Love as growth engine
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)

lincolnq 15 Apr 2026 5:00 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: AnonymousTurtle’s comment on: Lessons from the Ridglan rescue: Love as growth engine
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!

lincolnq 17 Mar 2026 3:52 UTC
91 points
6 ∶ 8
on: lincolnq’s Shortform
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.

lincolnq 5 Nov 2025 17:11 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 4
in reply to: JamesÖz 🔸’s comment on: Are we wrong to stop factory farms?
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.

lincolnq 19 Dec 2024 16:00 UTC
7 points
2 ∶ 0
on: There is No EA Sorting Hat
Great work. This has the vibes of an instant classic. I’m probably going to be linking this for a long time.

lincolnq 16 Dec 2024 18:39 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Joseph Lemien’s comment on: Joseph Lemien’s Shortform
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.

lincolnq 22 Nov 2024 21:17 UTC
11 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Nigeria’s Missing 50 Million People
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.

lincolnq 30 May 2024 9:49 UTC
20 points
7 ∶ 4
in reply to: Davis_Kingsley’s comment on: The US Presidential Election is Tractable, Very Important, and Urgent
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.

lincolnq 29 May 2024 12:44 UTC
2 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Ending TB in India by 2025? Policy Discussion Paper for Comment
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.

lincolnq 28 May 2024 14:13 UTC
0 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ben Millwood🔸’s comment on: My Skeptical Opinion on the Repugnant Conclusion
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.

lincolnq 28 May 2024 7:30 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: My Skeptical Opinion on the Repugnant Conclusion
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.

lincolnq 31 Mar 2024 21:06 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Favourite vegan luggage?
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.

lincolnq 9 Feb 2024 15:27 UTC
27 points
9 ∶ 0
in reply to: Benevolent_Rain’s comment on: Upcoming changes to the EV US and EV UK leadership teams
(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!)

lincolnq 26 Dec 2023 20:38 UTC
16 points
5 ∶ 2
in reply to: Ian Turner’s comment on: Altruism sharpens altruism
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.

lincolnq 8 Sep 2023 17:57 UTC
62 points
16 ∶ 1
in reply to: lilly’s comment on: An Incomplete List of Things I Think EAs Probably Shouldn’t Do
While I broadly agree with Rocky’s list I want to push back a little vs. your points:

Re your (2): I’ve found that small entities are in a constant struggle for survival, and must move fast and focus on the most important problems unique to their ability to make a difference in the world. Small-seeming requirements like “new hires have to find their own housing” can easily make the difference between being able to move quickly vs. slowly on some project that makes or breaks the company. I think for new entities the risks of incurring large costs before you have ‘proven yourself’ are quite high.

My experience also disagrees with your (1): As my company has grown, we have had many forces naturally pushing in the direction of “more professional”: new hires tend to be much more worried about blame about doing things too quick-and-dirty rather than incurring costs on the business in order to do things the buttoned-up way; I’ve stepped in more often to accept a risk rather than to prevent one although I certainly do both!

(Side note: as a potential counterpoint to the above, I do note that Alameda/FTX was clearly well below professional standards at >200 employees—my assumption is that Sam/execs were constantly stepping in to keep the culture the way they wanted it. If I learned that somehow most of the 200 employees were pushing in the direction of less professionalism on their own, I would update to agree with you on (1).)

lincolnq 3 Sep 2023 13:23 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 2
on: Interest rate of giving
You might want to check out some of Phil Trammell’s reports, where he analyzes what he calls time preference (time discount rate) with respect to philanthropy: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NcfTgZsqT9k30ngeQbappYyn-UO4vltjkm64n4or5r4/edit

lincolnq 1 Sep 2023 17:46 UTC
9 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Should I patent my cultivated meat method?
Congrats on having invented something exciting!

Usually, the best way to get innovative new technology into the hands of beneficiaries quickly is to get a for-profit company to invest with a promise of making money. This can happen via licensing a patent to an existing manufacturer, or creating a whole startup company and raising venture capital, etc.

One of the things such investors want to see is a ‘moat’: something that this company can do that no other company can easily copy. A patent/exclusive license is a good way to create a moat.

There are some domains like software where simply publishing ‘open source’ ideas causes those ideas to get used, but for most domains including manufacturing, my default expectation is that new tech is not used unless someone can make money off it. Pharma is a great example—there are tons of vaccines and niche treatments that we don’t have manufacturing for, even though we know how, because nobody can make enough money doing it.

I’d be really interested to hear whether you are considering seeing this idea through yourself? It sounds like you’re doing a Ph.D; but if you would consider dropping out to work on this as a startup, then I think doing so would be one of the best ways to maximize this idea’s chances for success. (In large part because your brain probably contains tons of highly relevant info for making this product work at scale!)

You wrote: “most scientists do patent and keep everything secret within companies”—but I wonder if this indicates confusion, since usually patents don’t keep things secret, they are published. Patents just allow their owner a legal monopoly on technology for a limited time.

Can you get introduced to any food-manufacturing people (ideally folks at bigger companies, in charge of finding + investing in new food products), who you can talk to about your idea, even just to get advice? Or, founders of similar food tech companies who came up with a good idea and had to decide whether to patent it?

lincolnq 14 Aug 2023 11:22 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Quick takes
I’m a bit confused about this because “getting ambitious slowly” seems like one of those things where you might not be able to successfully fool yourself: once you can conceive that your true goal is to cure cancer, you are already “ambitious”; unless you’re really good at fooling yourself, you will immediately view smaller goals as instrumental to the big one. It doesn’t work to say I’m going to get ambitious slowly.

What does work is focusing on achievable goals though! Like, I can say I want to cure cancer but then decide to focus on understanding metabolic pathways of the cell, or whatever. I think if you are saying that you need to focus on smaller stuff, then I am 100% in agreement.