Thanks for writing this!
Of course an effort like this will inevitably miss some orgs and people, but to your point 6: upskilling animal advocates in using AI, the main org doing this is Vegan Hacktivists (transparency, I lead the AI services team), where animal orgs can apply for pro-bono (phil-funded) generative AI consulting. We also run Amplify, which are online cohort courses on AI (again, free).
Mods, sorry if this violates self promotion rules
Looks interesting, but I am actually not fully sure what this is? A hackathon? A conference with presentations of the projects?
Cross posting my comments on your blog:
Thanks so much Sofia for building on my post! So good to see a movement leader weighing in. Great observations. To build on yours in turn:
- Love the idea of “context-absorption infrastructure”. Interestingly this is something I recommend that organisations do for the opposite reason as well. I think that organisations should be trying to document as much of their context as possible because giving that context to AI allows AI to do better work. I like that this could also have the side benefit of creating a very good set of learning materials to allow new hires to rapidly come up to speed.
- I also think it’s an excellent point that the movement might collapse to a smaller number of very experienced people. Something that AI can’t really replicate is the tacit experience that comes from having done something every day. That kind of thing is also quite hard to teach. There are just so many things that you build up unconsciously day after day of doing something.
- When it comes to mentoring and management being more important. Mentoring: yes, management: maybe not! Truly great employees need a lot less managing by definition, and so we may just shift to prioritising autonomy and need for less management in our hiring. However coming back to your comment about professionals from outside the movement needing to rapidly get context, I do think the mentoring aspect does become very important.
- I think your point about “Engagement without employment may become core infrastructure” Might be the most important point. I don’t think it’s inherently bad that we shift towards this. However we must set expectations of the people doing these engagements. For example, hackathons in Tech are a great way of doing this: everyone gets together for a day, a weekend, form teams and attempt to solve a problem. After the hackathon there is no expectation that they will do a part II, or get a job working with any of the organisations they help. It’s just seen as a one-off project. On the other hand, I could easily imagine that many people start fellowships and cohorts with the main priority of using it as a stepping stone to get a job in the movement. We should be very clear if our engagements are not going to help people get jobs in the movement, otherwise we might end up with lots of people becoming disillusioned.
- On your tradeoff: “Explicitly weighing internal training against external recruitment”: I strongly external recruitment in all but one case. Internal training costs money we don’t have, so we should be very careful about doing it. I think the essential thing to bring it back to is the idea that the tacit knowledge built up over years is the valuable thing we want. External hiring is in effect paying money for the crystallisation of someone’s life experience. The only time when I think internal training makes sense is when you have activists with very deep context and experience and you train to upskill them in AI tooling. I don’t think the movement should be devoting time or resources to training people who don’t have useful experience and context either inside the movement or outside.
I think that your points 2 (Separating learning roles from output roles.) and 3 (Treating coordination and mentorship as core infrastructure) are important, and we’ve kind of beeing doing this in EA for a while as there are many orgs dedicated to fellowships and cohorts. However coming back to my point about setting expectations: many of these organisations do emphasise the job prospects of doing their cohorts. These organisations should probably be thinking about whether continuing to communicate this is a good idea or not.
Interesting point!
Your online shopping delivery is batched with other houses’ deliveries which means that the petrol required to get groceries from the supermarket to your house is lower. Also online shopping encourages shopping in bulk which means fewer trips to the supermarket.
Ah cool, thanks for that context!
That is....a giant picture of my head haha But thanks for featuring me!
Genuinely curious: who here would class themselves as an EA animal advocate would agree that “the political will for a phase-out will never materialise, and that we’ll be forever optimising suffering within a system we’ll never dismantle.” ?
Like, it might be my experience, but I cannot ever hearing an EA animal advocate express this idea. But I could be wrong?
I agree that we know very little about nutrition, but I don’t see why that should bias us against veganism.
I can’t really think of a single thing that we eat in our modern diet that remotely resembles what our ancestors ate. We didn’t eat chickens. We ate fruit, but none of the fruits resembled what we have now. Literally everything in our food system has been radically transformed in the last few hundred years.
So sure, we don’t know for sure that veganism is a good diet for us, but doesn’t your argument lead to the conclusions that we don’t know if any particular food is good for us? If so, this argument shouldn’t bias us towards or against any particular diet.
“I’m comfortable with pursuing protests through PauseAI US because they were a missing mood in the AI Safety discussion.”
This raises and important point: if the success and impact of protests dependent on awareness of an issue / the existence of prior protests ?
We might imagine that the first protests on an issue are more impactful, and if protests reach a point where there’s dozens going on regularly, that might also be uniquely effective.
Love this post, super useful!
If one publishes a research report, to what degree do we think that its a good idea to create a custom landing page for it, in addition to posting it on an org’s site ? Would that help it show up in AI chats?
I propose this because with tools like Replit, Bolt, Lovable and the like, creating attractive landing pages for just about anything is now trivial.
What would you put on such a landing page?
“If I donate $10,000 to save two lives, I’m morally justified in taking one life because it’s convenient or enjoyable.”
I see your point here, but it would more accurate to say (in the vegan offsetting case)
“If I donate $20 to save hundreds of lives, I’m morally justified in taking a dozen lives because it’s convenient or enjoyable.”
Whilst the logic does change, the magnitude does, and I feel like that’s important here.
“Seeing someone willingly make personal sacrifices for the sake of morality encourages others to act ethically, too.”
This makes sense in theory, I am not sure it’s correct in the case of veganism. Do many vegans here actually experience this? I definitely don’t. I’m willing to bet most vegans experience orders of magnitude more stigma, defensiveness and abuse than moral admiration.
A nice, fun way to raise money for effective causes. Were all attendees vegan? Did you consider actively getting a few non vegans there?
I feel (but do not know) like attending warm, inviting dinner parties with great vegan food is probably an effective (though perhaps not very scalable) way to get people to go vegan.
Hi Jared and Maya, I’m Richie the (recently promoted) Director of Research for Bryant. Thank you so much for this!
Having just read your post here but not yet read your published comment, I broadly agree with your approach, it’s certainly an improvement on the original paper in my view. Great to see the analysis cleared up some puzzling results too.
This research was conducted before I was hired. I am self-taught in non-experimental causal inference / econometrics, and see it as an essential area for behavioural scientists to incorporate in their work (economists have a great handle on it, but in psychology where I’m originally from it’s woefully lacking). Going forward, I’ll be looking to incorporate more of a causal approach in our research.
In general, I think there are two useful, general pieces of statistical advice here I’d want to highlight:
Don’t condition on post treatment variables
Use the raw variables where possible. I.e. avoid change scores, be careful about making new variables by combining others. I personally have a vendetta against creating unnecessary ratio variables!
Also, for readers who are interested in learning a bit more about causal inference: The Effect by Nick Huntingdon-Klein is an excellent, free resource. So good, I paid for it when I didn’t have to.
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
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.
Interesting idea, but I’d advise you to map it out more. This post seems fairly low effort, and you may get more engagement if you fleshed it out a bit.