Matt is the author, co-author, secondary-author, ghost-author, and non-author of articles, speeches, book chapters, and even entire books! The most recent is his blockbuster* The Accidental Activist (which Amazon claims is by his wife Anne Green. So it goes.). Currently, he is President of One Step for Animals; previously, he was shitcanned from more nonprofits than there is room to list here. (Although there’s still time for more!) Before Matt’s unfortunate encounter with activism, he was an aerospace engineer who wanted to work for NASA (to impress Carl Sagan).
His hobbies include photography, almost dying, and XXXXXX (Hey! This is a family-friendly website! -ed). He lives in Tucson with Anne, along with no dogs, no cats, and no African tortoises, although he cares for all of these via friends and family.
*JK
MattBall
Thanks for the reply, Thomas. Two things:
Regarding Having Kids: The main idea is to change the conversation from parents or women thinking in isolation, but instead having the rights of the future child and the interests of society be a part of any decision to have a kid. This should lead to smaller families.
I am curious as to why you think male contraceptions are a better means of preventing unwanted pregnancy, compared to empowering women and providing them with better contraception. My admitedly limited experience is such that men in general care much less about preventing pregnancy, and are even inclined to want a woman to get pregnant. As the economists would say, women are the ones who have incentive here.
I am all for the work of The Good Food Institute and Hampton Creek! But I think that there will have to be demand for those products. As that One Step page points out, even with all our efforts and the advances in food technology, per-capita consumption of animals is at an all-time high. That’s why I think there is a need for a re-thought demand-side campaign
Thanks again. Down with patent trolls!
In addition to the difficulty in measuring small effect sizes, one of the significant problems with trying to evaluate advocacy is the necessary longitudinal nature of any meaningful study. Plenty of studies have shown that ~80% of people who go veg goes back to eating animals. What this doesn’t capture is that all those millions of former vegetarians are actively working against others making compassionate choices, telling everyone they found it impossible to be vegetarian, how fanatical vegans are, etc. (Also, we would need to capture the full impact of our argument / advocacy, since most everything we put out there argues strongly for replacing red meat with chickens; http://bit.ly/2jrYBEB) IMHO, it is better to simply ask, “Don’t eat chickens.” Don’t say “eat beef” or “eat vegan alternatives”—just leave the ask as simple and straightforward as possible. More: http://www.mattball.org/2016/06/can-our-choices-make-difference.html Thanks for the conversation!
PS: in blog form http://www.mattball.org/2017/01/the-difficulty-of-evaluating-impact-of.html Thanks again!
Mr Mather, Sorry for the delay in replying. I’m not sure what UPC does to get a reasonable, actionable message to the general public. One Step for Animals ( http://www.onestepforanimals.org/ ) has a psychologically sound message that they get in front of loads of people. For example, in the past 30 days, they have gotten their ads and videos in front of 1.8 million people on a budget of less than $10,000. Yes, I do think that replacing chicken (with plant or clean meat) is much more important than beef.
Thanks Mr Mather. As noted here http://www.mattball.org/2017/01/the-difficulty-of-evaluating-impact-of.html it is tough. But at least the message should minimize the number of people switching from red meat to chickens. You might also like: http://www.onestepforanimals.org/blog/experiment-evaluate-repeat http://www.onestepforanimals.org/blog/good-news-believe-it-or-not :-)
This is great. I haven’t done a deep dive into the lit, but from what little I do know, this seems like a great course of action!
Thanks so very much for this Michael. I think it would be great if you had the Summary on a page by itself, with links to the three parts. Then it wouldn’t be so intimidating.
Thanks for the link, Halstead. A very good article, but it doesn’t totally cure my unease with aggregating across individuals. But I don’t expect to ever find anything that is fully in line with intuitions, as I think intuitions are contradictory. :-)
This is a super interesting article, but...
I worry that FRI’s work leans on the intuition that suffering is real and we can speak coherently about it, to a degree greater than its metaphysics formally allow.
To me, it reads like it was written by someone who has never really encountered suffering.
http://www.mattball.org/2014/11/excerpts-from-letter-to-young-matt.html
>In theory, any harm can be outweighed by something that benefits a large enough number of persons, even if it benefits them in a minor way.
Holden, do you know of any discussion that doesn’t rest on that assumption? It is where I get off the train:
https://www.mattball.org/2021/09/why-i-am-not-utilitarian-repost-from.html
Thanks for this. I think we underestimate how much good GMOs can do in the future.
Totally agree. Yes, the production was good, but Sgt. Pepper’s took it to the next level but also with brilliant songs.
Regarding engineering, you might find this interesting:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000OVLIQU/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1I didn’t think I would, but it was fascinating (I listened to the audio version)
Thanks Kenny!
I think it is the main bias in EAs—we so easily add up things in our minds (e.g., summing happiness across individuals) that we don’t stop to realize that there is no “cosmic” place where all that happiness is occurring. There are just individual minds.
Michael, this is kinda what I’m looking for. What does “limited aggregation” mean / do in your case.
Thanks for this, Kenny. I’ve always thought Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance can do a lot of heavy lifting.
https://www.mattball.org/2017/03/a-theory-of-ethics.html
Leave it to EAs to spend endless words rationalizing something they want / rationalizing away something that is “inconvenient.”
Thanks for these thoughts.
Having worked on both the demand and supply side for three decades, and being friends with many people across the board, this is my niche:
https://www.onestepforanimals.org/about.html
I don’t necessarily disagree with your conclusion, but I don’t know how you can feel sure about weighing a chicken’s suffering vs a person.
But I definitely disagree with the initial conclusion, and I think it is because you don’t fear extreme suffering enough. If everyone behind the veil of ignorance knew what the worst suffering was, they would fear it more than they would value time at the beach.
Re: longtermism, I find the argument in Pinker’s latest book to be pretty compelling:
The optimal rate at which the discount the future is a problem that we face not just as individuals but as societies, as we decide how much public wealth we should spend benefit our older selves and future generations. Discount it we must. It’s not only that a current sacrifice would be in vain if an asteroid sends us the way of the dinosaurs. It’s also that our ignorance of what the future will bring, including advances in technology, grows exponentially the farther out we plan. It would have made little sense for our ancestors a century ago to have scrimped for our benefit—say, diverting money from schools and roads to a stockpile of iron lungs to prepare for a polio epidemic—given that we’re six times richer and have solved some of their problems while facing new ones they could not have dreamed of.
The hardest part of this, IMO, is that it seems like many, if not most, sources are biased. Even if not to an explicit ideology, then to the writer’s personality. (And then there is the need for academics et al to constantly find something “new” to say.)
Thanks for this post.
Thomas, super interesting list, although I don’t quite get the Patent stuff in terms of EA. I’d love to talk to you more about Having Kids. But first, I’d be interested in your thoughts on this: http://www.onestepforanimals.org/why-one-step.html Thanks, Matt