I love the work being done here. Particularly the increasing emphasis on causal inference methods! I did a PhD in psychology and one of my biggest gripes with that side of behavioural science was the lack of interest and expertise to causal inference outside of lab experiments. As your lab’s work this year has shown, they can refine findings, explain puzzling results and generally get us a bit closer to the truth.
Excited to see what you do in 2025!
Hi Josef, I love that you’re wanting to strategize on how to end factory farming.
At the time of writing your post has a −11 score. In case you are confused about why, I suspect that it’s because, whether this is true or not, your post comes across as not being very well researched or well thought out.
I wonder, have you talked much or worked with many activists or organisations in the farmed animal advocacy space?
You’ve presented a very vague plan to solve a problem that many on this forum think is one of the biggest, most difficult problems in the world!
For example between steps 5 and 6, you seem to just gloss over the challenge of convincing people to give up meat and go vegan, which is immensely difficult!
Additionally, the plan you’ve proposed is is already being done. Just this year there have been ballot initiatives and votes on banning factory farming. There are dozens of orgs, many led by health professionals, creating content on vegan diets. There are marketers and vegan influencers and all the rest.
When you say you want to start a movement, what exactly do you mean? Your plan covers a large chunk of the existing animal advocacy movement. What would your “sub movement” do differently?
I would note that if you find this analysis convincing but weight negative climate effects more than Vasco does, it really is cows that have the hugely negative climate impact; other animals have dramatically lower carbon footprints. So you might consider eating pork as a middle ground between animal welfare and climate.
That said, in many countries like the UK, most pigs have very low welfare in factory farms and most cows are always outside on pasture so probably have non-hellish lives. In the UK the trade-off between suffering and climate impact when it comes to meat choice is mostly inescapable. Organic pork I believe is raised outside but is less than 1% of the market so you may not be able to find it.
In other countries, cows are often kept indoors their whole lives. Though that is terrible, it does mean that ditching beef becomes a no brainer if you simultaniously care about climate and suffering. In those cases, the least of all evils would be pork, but know that there’s still quite a bit of suffering going on.
I love these tips, definitely good advice. I am especially a big fan of walking meetings; I wouldn’t be surprised if my Oura ring thinks “EAG” is some sort of long distance hike.
But as Rory Sutherland says “when it comes to our psychology, the opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea”.
So a tactic I often employ is to explicitly accept and even lean into the exhausting nature of conferences. Basically, have the mindset that this is a sprint. Just as sprinters choose a pace they cannot sustain for more than 100m, so you know that “conference you” is not a persona that you can adopt for longer than 3 days. Know you’re gonna crash afterwards and plan accordingly. Book a whole day or 2 off straight after the conf and just sleep, or lie in the park, or meditate, or journal, or be alone, or watch the Simpsons or all of the above!
I don’t want to be pessimistic, but I am not currently convinced these campaigns were good uses of activist time and donor money, given how badly they were defeated.
I see the point that “we were vastly outspent” can go somewhere to explain why campaigns failed, but surely this was known before hand? If so, then it would have been an argument against doing them in the first place.
Can you elaborate a bit more on any tangible advantages you see beyond “raising awareness/starting conversations”?
Also, how do we actually know that this has been a significantly beneficial step re: “raising awareness/starting conversations” ?
My own experience is that all non vegans I mentioned this said something that can be summarised as “what a ridiculous thing to do, there was no way that would work, don’t these crazy activists have something better to do with their time?”. Which is very weak evidence that this may have spawned many negative conversations for animals.
I see the potential for this argument. I particularly like the emphasis on celebrating counterfactual wins, that some people may not immediately see as wins.
However I’d like to see more elaboration on how it actually results in different tactics and framing.
So I like the definition of “helping as much animals as posible” but when exactly does this lead to different tactics to ending factory farming?
Given that most people define factory farming as a system that uses practices that are known to cause suffering (stocking densities way too high, lack of natural light and ability to express natural behaviours, frankenchicken genetics), I think both your framings lead to more or less the same policies.
For example, I’d argue that many animal advocates consider cage free campaigns to be a goal on the way to eliminating factory farming, because confining animals is a key feature of factory farms. In fact, in the US factory farms are formally called “confined animal feeding operations” (emphasis mine)
It’s also not clear to me why “ending factory farming” is less defined than “preventing animal suffering”.
I agree that the key bottlneck in alt proteins and next gen materials is “doers in the lab”, and that is a key goal of the GFI and was a key goal of MII. I also agree that a key factor is whether consumers can buy a great product. But surely you agree that getting a product to market and in the hands of consumers is about far more than simply making a great product?
People won’t go into a field if they don’t think anyone will care about their research. They won’t found companies and recruit those lab scientists if don’t think there is consumer demand. Governments won’t fund it if they don’t think consumers (aka voters) care.
Finish all bursts of work with a Placeholder.
A placeholder is note, even a sentence, that allows you to more easily ‘get back in the flow’ of a task after leaving it for some time.
A major drain of the productivity of modern knowledge workers is that we engage in too much context switching i.e. switching from task to task. When I move from doing emails to getting down to writing, it takes some time to ‘get into the swing’ of writing. If I then have to take a call, I have to restart the process of getting into the headspace to write. Often the previous task ‘drags’ on our attention. This is often called attention residue.
Many people try to solve this by reducing the amount of context switching they have to do (see deep work). But many eventually realise that it’s just not possible to reduce the amount of context switching to an optimal level.
Another angle to tackle the problem is to have systems that allow you to quickly change between tasks. If we can minimise the time taken to ‘get into it’ then we decrease the cost of context switching. Placeholders are just such a system.
Examples of placeholders:
TODO’s in code. Make them specific: “TODO: add type hints to this function”
Stopping writing mid-sentence. “There are numerous benefits of intermittent fasting, including....” or “One promising method might be mechanistic interpretability. Smith et al define this as....”
When problem-solving: describe the context and thought process. e.g. say I’m trying to decide how to solve a programming issue but have a meeting in 5. I might write: “this function needs to get all the files for a given fiscal week but they only have dates in the filenames, you think there might be a function to convert date to FW in Jacks’ utils package but haven’t asked him, he might be off today?”. This basically allows you to jump back into your thought process.
At the end of a few hours of online research, create a short summary of the best websites you found, and why you found them valuable
While I don’t think Trello / Jira/ Notion have significant overhead, +1 for this tip because I think it illustrated something we often forget with productivity/ project management/organising : the best system is one that you can feasible use.
Thanks for this! I think a lot of this boils down to “the small body problem”, which the animal movement still routinely ignores in it’s strategising.
I am a big fan of using economic arguments for animals, and have authored 2 reports in the last year making these arguments. Caveats are that they are aimed at policymakers and are not economics papers so this forum would probably best treat them as BOTECs. I’d love to see economists take a “proper” look at some of these questions. That said, even shallow analyses can sway policymakers we have had good traction with the UK right wing media (rarely happens in animal advo) and have had conservative MPs and one Lord endorse the reports:
Modest meat reduction could save the UK national health service a good chunk of money through reduced health costs
Factory farming incurs hidden costs to taxpayers