Hi Andrew, welcome to the forum! We should consider ourselves lucky that you are chiming in! I hope you share your thoughts here, and may you inspire future generations of EA to start big, bold projects in health, poverty reduction and education!
Martijn Klop đ¸
Karma: 334
âAre there such opportunities? So far, I canât break this down to anything tangible. âIf we donât do anything, the systems will become entrenched and determine animal outcomes for decades to comeâ - what systems? What outcomes? Who, where? Can someone give me a few clear examples of tractable situations?
⌠Agricultural AI platforms from John Deere and Bayer are being deployed. But how is any of this tractableâwhat are you hoping orgs/âgrantees/âEA people can do about those things?â
⌠If thatâs so, then can someone tell me, in plain English, what that looks like? I.e â[lab] is currently planning [this development]. If we do [this action], we can change it to [this outcome], which will mean [x number] of animals experience [less suffering, presumably].â
I just want to express that these are really sound questions and I hope you keep asking them. I believe they are, as of yet, unanswered. Iâd love to see AIxAnimals field/âthought leaders work out their theories of change more clearly and concretely.I think you correctly point out that there are gaps, and some of the framings Iâve seen seem to suggest that poultry farmers will just sit idly by as their animal-friendly AI COOâs will make commercially suboptimal farm-management and procurement decisions.
But, this is still a nacent field and I think questions like these will help it along!
Itâs one of the main factors going into the decisions from most of the funders in the circle :)
However, CEAâs are rather shallow and most grants are quite experimental or exploratory in nature sometimes with the intent to allow orgs to scale and find ways to cost-effectively use funds at a larger scale in the future, either by themselves or by others.
Thanks Sofia! You should mainly thank Joey and James, who typed most and set the norm for transparency.
I definitely second that thereâs room for a guide that helps people seeking funding in the AW space with understanding where and when to apply, based on the scope, size and maturity of their organisation. This might be something the AIM grantmaking team could help with at a point in the future and I know Joeyâs quite keen on this, but Hive might be in an even better position to work on sth similar :)
Thanks for the reply :) the number you cite for other insects is yearly turnover, not how many are alive at any moment, right? So the number might not be as far off?
But yeah, without looking at any data, other major farmed insects numbers are probably increasing at a faster rate than honeybees.
Holy **** this was one of those things that changed my mind just by looking at the title because I realised I was holding a belief that was clearly mistaken if you think about it logically for a second, but no one actually ever really challenged me on it. Why did I never realise that honeybees are obviously the most farmed animal on earth?
I always told people that farmed honey is terrible, but terrible in the same way as that dairy is terrible. I would have put the order of âplz stop eating this for the love of godâ ateggs & white meat
red meat,
dairy and honey
I will bump honey up the list (50% vibes based list by the way, not calibrated on exact SAD/âportion).
PS: Would have been easier if you listed â#days of farmingâ per âper capita consumptionâ rather than per kilo. 1kg is roughly the yearly consumption per person in Europe I believe (surprisingly high?), vs 20kg for chicken. Also, the link to the 97% thing didnât work, so I couldnât really check that stat. (It seems oddly specific given uncertainty)
Thanks BjĂśrn! Really interested in the diet change interventions. Veganuary has probably also had quite a nice spillover effect through corporate engagement with the challenge (wether solicited by veganuary or not). During the month of January, supermarkets and brands tend to allocate more resources on marketing, product development and deals for plant based products.
To me, this write-up would have been a lot more useful if it ended with a rough cost-effectiveness analysis and any takes on what funders should be excited to fund.
Some other thoughts: Iâm sceptical that every 6 extra sign ups to a challenge will get someone from an average diet to an almost plant based diet for a duration of more than 2 years. Is that what the 15% suggests? How were the RCTâs performed? Were random people selected and given an incentive to participate?
AFAIK, the fact that SMA takes a different stance on âdistancingâ or differentiating itself from the EA community compared to, say, Ambitious Impact, is because the reputation of EA is just really very different in the US than in Europe. A lot more toxic, that is.
If they only had plans to launch in NL, Germany and other European countries, I think they would have been a bit less careful to set up their own separate brand /â community and maintain some distance.Nevertheless, theyâve generally expressed the desire to not be branded an âea-organisationâ by people in or outside the community (stressing they take inspiration from other groups and schools of thougt too*) so I think people should respect that :)
*Including the Naderâs Raiders which I guess is also not the most uncontroversial in the US but old enough that people donât get upset about it lol
Could nets be made such that their mesh size increases when they get soaking wet?
PS: Are the insecticides also a problem? Are there biodegradable insecticides?
Can the reading times be updated for linkposts? Our previous fellowship participants said this would have helped them schedule and anticipate reading preparation.
Couldnât make it this time, but will join next time! Thanks for the article and hosting this event!!
Go ahead!
If you want we can write it together here
We can collaborate on a review here
Nice! Feel free to share the request to collab on a review elsewhere around! Btw, thanks for contributing to the forum :)
I just downloaded the e-book. Itâs quite lengthy and consists of separate papers. Perhaps the people who are interested to review it are interested in collaborating on a google-doc where, according to some good epistemic norms, we identify the best critiques, correct or improve the worst ones and provide context and factual information where it is necessary? It seems unlikely that one person can do this all, since the book goes into GH&D, Animal Welfare, Longtermism, Moral Philosophy etc. Perhaps someone can then write a good book review based on that Doc.
Big thumbs up to MichaelB for steelmanning. We should do as much as that as possible! Although it must be said, I just read some pages and I feel very frustrated now for constantly being called out for my whiteness, being called a supporter of fascist structures, being naĂŻve, glorifying whiteness, disrespecting social movements in the past etc. Itâs going to take a lot of goodwill to review this pretty hostile book in the best way possible, but we should be able to conjure up that goodwill together :)
Here you can access request access to the Google Doc! Youâll have to request access, because the book can be accessed through there (I bought it) and I donât want to be accused of piracy.
Thanks for the post! Itâs a wonderful source of good reflections and references and youâve put a lot of time and effort into making it for which I am very grateful!
These questions are big, though, and I generally want to warn for some reasoning-shortcuts. I think your article is a huge and quite unique improvement over the conversations I normally have with vegans who are sceptical of meat-substitutes more out of aesthetics rather than thinking things through, but some points are still somewhat sloppy to my liking.
For example, how can the way factory farming ends realistically set a precedent to future global developments? Do we currently make diet-decisions on a large scale based on the historical phase-out of whale oil or transatlantic slave trade? Do politicians make decisions based on these historical precedents? The concept of âprecedentâ might sound intuitive when we treat humanity as one person or one court of law, but I doubt if that makes sense on the large scale.
On a slightly different note, I am also a bit wary that the rubber-banding graphs might be more of an exercise to let our map of reality fit our models, rather than making our models fit reality. The idea that âtotal valueâ and âvalue changeâ can be meaningfully mapped to a single number or derivative respectively, seems to me to be an attempt to do aesthetic, intuitive, reasoning that might distract from some essential details. I would keep in mind that these graphs are thinking tools at best (in which case, they are quite nice, so thanks), not models with any predictive power.
I really like the scope of your further research questions, but Iâd advice you to make them a bit more concrete, closed and falsifiable. For example, rephrase the âhow much does it matter...â into something that can actually be tested, as in âhow much effect does X have on Yâ? Also, where possible, try and abstain from questions that make sense if and only if you turn moral value into a single number (because these questions risk being limited in their strategic value and predictive power) .
Also, bonus reflection: As you briefly touched upon, Leenaertâs point about how the technological and social progress might be much more intertwined than we think is very important. What even is the divide between the social and the technological, in this information age? You could say: any time people do things out of convenience or self-interest, we speak of technological change, any time people do things out of altruistic motives, we call it social change. But what if people are influenced by both? How much trust can we even put on peopleâs reports of their motives? Can these motives evolve over time? Also, is my ability to browse to https://ââwww.gapminder.org/ââdollar-street and decide to donate to the worldâs poorest people based on what I see there a social or a technological change?
Hey Gideon,
Iâm sad that I missed your talk in Rotterdam. I want to briefly flag a concern I have with advocating âsystems thinkingâ or âa complex systems approachâ. While the promise is always nice, I think you need to deliver on the promise right away, since otherwise you risk just making a point that is unfalsifiable or somewhat of an applause light (no one will exclaim âwe donât need complexity to describe complex phenomena!â) .
- Use a model from complexity science and show that it explains something otherwise left unexplained or show that it outperforms some other model on a relevant feature.
-Youâll probably want to make use of (1) Agent Based Modelling, (2) Network Models, (3) Statistical Physics and common models like Ising, Hard Spheres, Lennard Jones potentials etc, (4) Dynamical System Analysis (5) Bifurcation Analysis or (6) Cellular Automata.
-You can find a good introduction to most of these here https://ââwww.dbooks.org/ââintroduction-to-the-modeling-and-analysis-of-complex-systems-1942341091/ââ
-Using these methods also demystifies the whole concept of âcomplexityâ a little bit, and makes it more mundane (though you can never get enough of the Ising Model :D)
So yeah, endorse your message, but please make it testable and quantitative soon!
Quick rambly comment from my side (because I didnât expect this to be spread outside of the publication and wasnât aware of timelines :))
Most of the writing is done by Dirk-Jan. I gave input and part of this followed from a conversation we had on stage during EAGxAmsterdam.
I think Dirk-Jan is a rare example of an experienced professional from the ODE field who is willing to engage critically with EA ideas in good faith, and I am very happy we started this discussion :) As a community, I think we should cherish encounters with constructive outside experts
My quick take if you need to take one thing away from this thought-piece: we need to make sure that, as a community, we incentivize careful analysis of unintended consequences, and then update accordingly! The incentive is to write away unintended effects qualitatively, or handwave a modest discount (or bonus, for positive effects)
When you start a project/âorganisation, it makes sense to put most effort into making your theory of change very rigorous and de-risk it as much as possible. Once you scale that project/âorganisation, you should probably put the same effort on analyzing whether the causal links in your ToC could break-down at scale, and pay attention to the causal effects that fall outside your ToC all together!
The best version of this, as always, employs a good mix of qualitative and quantitative thinking. If anything, I personally think discussions on unintended effects and âbackfire risksâ are often too qualitative, and miss a serious attempt at sizing.
Lastly, a prompt everyone can use:
What incentives are you creating with this project, especially at scale/âmaturity?
How will insiders and outsiders perceive your work when you scale it?
And the memeable: âis there anyone you forgot to ask?!â or âwhoâs left out of this project, but will still experience consequencesâ
Are you crowding anyone out?
Are there (indirect) costs you are incurring on people?