I write about meat reduction research at https://āāregressiontothemeat.substack.com/āā and my date me doc is here š
Here is an overview of the lab I work at
Seth Ariel Green šø
Karma: 1,604
I think itās ok in most cases to ask someone to be nice on the internet. To quote Juana Molina, āNo seas antipĆ”tica. No seas antipĆ”tica con tu mamĆ”. La la la.ā Words to live by.
I seriously doubt this is going to be the example they focus on when they send the trains
The first person I lightly flambĆ©ed also said āsorry I was used to less nice parts of the internetā so I guess that went down well
When someone says ābe niceā and it gets more upvotes than the post itself that provides a more meaningful signal of how a post went astray than just downvoting the original post
So I am not persuaded and will keep doing my chastise-y hall monitor thing š¤š¤š¤
Dean Ballās commentary on this refamed the issue for me https://āāwww.hyperdimensional.co/āāp/āāclawed
The big difference, however, is that Anthropic is essentially using the contractual vehicle to impose what feel less like technical constraints and more like policy constraints on the military. Think of the difference between āthis fighter jet is not certified for flight above such-and-such an altitude, and if you fly above that altitude, youāve breached your warranty,ā and āyou may not fly this jet above such-and-such an altitudeā). It is probably the case that the military should not agree to terms like this, and private firms should not try to set them.
But the Biden Administration did agree to those terms, and so did the Trump Administration, until it changed its mind. That alone should make one thing clear: terms like this are not some ridiculous violation of the norms of defense contracting...
The contract was not illegal, just perhaps unwise, and even that probably only in retrospect. Note that this is true even if you agree with the underlying substance of the limitations. You can support restrictions on mass domestic surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons, but disagree that a defense contract is the optimal vehicle to achieve that policy outcome. The way you achieve new policy outcomes, under the usual rules of our republic, is to pass a law...
I agree that thereās something iffy/ānon-democratic in theory about putting that kind of constraint around the Pentagon, and that it would have been prudent for them to decline it in the first place. An analogy I read on Substack: if an epidural manufacturer told a government hospital āyouāre welcome to use our drug so long as you donāt use it in any abortions,ā it would probably be prudent to decline that contract (too much overhead).
Anyway this reframing put one sentence in particular by Dario into a new light: āTo the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, this is only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI.ā In other words, because we know what the law should be and what itās probably going to be, we should implement that policy today. I think many of us can think of examples where weād be uncomfortable with a billionaire tech CEO saying that.
I am glad that you think this issue is tractable and Iāve been following your work with great interest since I saw your RECAP talk in July (Side note to anyone following thisāthe RECAP talks are great!). I am not sure what my own threshold for ātractableā is but I appreciate that you are cracking on it and I would be glad to be proven wrong. Tractability is inherently based on unknowns and Iām glad weāre a big tent where people can prove something possible by doing it.
Thank you, Iāve now hyperlinked to the piece in both of my prior comments where I use the word ānormsā (in part so that I remember it next time š)
Well, you know me, always playing nice ššš
I do want to say, in Andrewās defense, that the comments on @Alistair Stewart ās original post are not exactly the very model of civility that EA might hope to show the world. I can understand why youād read them and come away with the sense that people donāt really get what youāre trying to do.
However, the point that calling something a āleading cause areaā requires cross-cause comparison is well-taken.
Personally, I donāt think āmostly or entirely plant-based diet for dogsā sounds nutty. I think most people understand that dogs can subsist on literal garbage. Might not be optimal but I think we can make the case that if you feel really strongly about supplementing a healthy plant-based diet with animal protein, it should come from bivalves.
The case for cats is much less intuitive, I think.
By the way, Ben
Knight claims that there are other economically productive uses for byproducts; if thatās true, then a reduction in demand for animal-derived pet food would change the marginal use case for byproducts but not reduce their production
I donāt think ānot reduce their productionā follows from your reasoning. If the next available use cases pay less money, we should, in espectation, see fewer animals raised, no?
I have twice recently āgently counseledā people on EA forum norms when they come in, in my opinion, a little too hot for this rather cool medium š is there something official/āCEA-endorsed on this subject? If not, should I/āsomeone write it? I could point them to Scout Mindset but thatās kind of a high barrier to entry.
Hi Andrew, welcome to the forum! I am keenly interested in this subjectāI am one of the commentators you mentioned and have written on the subject previously (Towards non-meat diets for domesticated dogs).
Without getting to much into the specifics here, I wish to gently counsel you on EA forum norms in a way that might help the message go down better for readers.
We generally assume good intent. It is true that I am not persuaded by some elements of your analysis, which is why I stated a preference for the Alexander et al. estimation methods, but I would not describe that disagreement as āseeking to undermine [your] studies.ā My disagreement is not coming from a place of malice.
We generally do not use maximalist language to describe each otherās perceived mistakes, e.g. āprofoundly misrepresents,ā ādramatically incorrect,ā etc. Instead it is more in line with how we talk to say āThis is mistakenā or āthis is not what I intended.ā
We tend to address each other by name/āusername and use tagsāby all means please call me Seth rather than āa commentatorā š
Anyway, looking forward to more engagement,
Thank you Vasco! Iāll be curious to hear folksā responses, if any.
Hi there, thank for engaging with our results. On a preliminary note, I wish to gently counsel you that the tone of this response is not in keeping with the norms of this community, which tend towards being collegial/āassuming good intent/āetc. Instead of noting that our methods ādonāt bear any useful relationship to the real world,ā you might try something like āIām afraid the methods used here donāt answer the questions that I think are most important to the movement.ā
Yes, a hypothetical survey has important limitations. I think we are upfront about them. If we had found larger effects here, we likely would have pursued funding to take this design out to a restaurant or setting with consumption outcomes. When we didnāt, we went a different direction. Always we are triaging.
I agree that flexitarians/āmeat-reducers/āwould-be-reducers are probably the best target audience for PMAs. We are testing a different estimand, which is demand for the product in a silmulalcrum in the world at large. This quantity is important from the POV of, e.g., the viability of marketing and deploying PMAs at popular restaurants like Chipotle.
Ah my favorite subject/ābeloved nemesis, plant-based defaults!
I am a bit of a skeptic, as I laid out in Scaled up, I expect defaults to reduce meat consumption by ~1-2 pp. My basic point is that we donāt have a good sense of the effect of these interventions on dietary change rather than meal change, and that some theoretical considerations might give us pause.
Regarding this essay specifically:
You write āThe default effect was popularized by Johnson and Goldstein in 2003, demonstrating how countries with similar cultures and religions show dramatic differences in organ donation after death, all because of choice architectureā. Alas, when comparing countries that have opt-in vs opt-out policies, Arshad et al. (2019) find that āno significant difference was observed in rates of kidney (35.2 versus 42.3 respectively), non-renal (28.7 versus 20.9, respectively), or total solid organ transplantation (63.6 versus 61.7, respectively).ā
The NYC hospital data is not an RCT and doesnāt offer much of an identification strategy so Iām never sure what to make of those numbers. That being said, Iām ready to accept in principle that hospitals are a particularly promising environment for defaults and for people rethinking their diets generally.
The Ginn & Sparkman numbers are interesting but the decline in overall sales on plant-based default days is going to be a bit of a challenge for selling the strategy to institutions. On the other hand, Sodexo is apparently happy to scale them up so who knows.
I am working on a plant-based default evaluation that I hope to share with the forum soon š
How much of a post are you comfortable for AI to write?
AI sucks at writing and doesnāt get my style at all. If it did, Iād let it write the whole thing. (Yudkowsky predicts we have about 2 more years until AI learns to write.)
I agree, Ben, that tractability is low. I am also a bit skeptical of anything saying cats can be vegan without a lot of qualifications.
However I did a bit of research into the āhow many animals are actually killed for dog foodā in 2023 and I got to about 3 billion/āyear using a bunch of approximations (Towards non-meat diets for domesticated dogs). So thatās not 6 billion but itās still a lot. And Iām also just talking about dogs.
I also think that ABPs, if they didnāt go into dog food, would just go into something else. I think it is a mistake to think that demand for ABPs does not drive demand for meat. The ābyproductā designation is convenient when distinguishing animal parts of different value, but at the end of the day, if youāre paying someone for animal parts, youāre paying them to slaughter animals. Hereās a little bit I wrote about this for an op-ed I never published:
Dog food is responsible for a large amount of environmental harms ā tens of millions of annual tons of CO2 in the U.S. alone ā because dogs are numerous, relatively large animals who eat a lot of animals, and animal agriculture is a major contributor to climate change. This is true even if theyāre eating mostly animal byproducts (ABPs).
Still, ABPs may drive less animal agriculture, and therefore less environmental damage, than meat itself. The more we pay people to farm animals, the more theyāll do it. ABPs are worth less than meat. Shifting from byproducts to meat increases demand for slaughtered animals.
A 2020 paper by Peter Alexander and colleagues provides a framework for measuring this increase. The authors find that typical dry dog food is composed of roughly 32% ABPs, 16.3% animal products, and 47.9% crop products. They calculate environmental harms based on an āeconomic value allocation method, where the environmental impact[s] of producing an animal are allocated in the same proportion as the value of the products.ā ABPs, they conclude, produce about 12-18% of greenhouse gas emissions associated with dry dog food, despite being about a third of such products by weight.The Alexander et al. (2020) paper was about the best thing I could find on the subject in general.
I have had the pleasure of working with many NRI fellows and have found them super interesting and impressive ā the kind of people who make you think āthe kids are all right/ānot totally cooked š ā Highly recommended!
https://āāwww.heyparkday.com/āā has a vegan filter
It depends on the specifics, but I live in Brooklyn and getting deliveries from Whole Foods means they probably come to my house in an electric truck or e-cargo bike. Thatās pretty low-emission. (Fun fact: NYC requires most grocery stores to have parking spots.)
The key point, though, is that cases like Ocado and Albert Heijn are exceptions, not the norm. Most online supermarkets lack the resources and incentives to systematically review and continuously update tens of thousands of SKUs for vegan status.
Iād go a step further: I suspect many supermarkets are going to perceive an incentive not to do this because it raises uncomfortable questions in consmersā minds about the ethical permissibility/āgoodness of their other items.
I wonder if this will be more palatable to them if āveganā is just one of several filters, along with (e.g.) keto, paleo, halal, kosher. Right now the Whole Foods website has the following filters availableāwould it be such a stretch to have some identitarian ones?
I really donāt know.
I looked into this a bit when i was thinking about how hard it is to get high-welfare animal products at grocery stores (https://āāregressiontothemeat.substack.com/āāp/āāpasturism) and I made contact with a sustainability person at a prominent multinational grocery store and asked if theyād like to meet up during Earth Week to discuss such a filter. They did not write back. I relayed a version of this conversation to someone involved in grocery store pressure campaigns at a high-level, and that second person said, basically anything that implies that some of their food is better/āāmore ethical than other options is going to be a nonstarter.
On the other hand, youāve had some initial successes and it seems some grocery stores are already doing this! So I really hope itās plausible. If youāre interested, Iām happy to flesh out the details of these prior interactions privately.
Thank you, thatās a very kind thing to say!
I have not read this paperāI will put it on my reading listābut for folks interested in the subject, I recommend Norwood and Lusksās book Compassion, by the Pound: The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare, specifically chapter 5, which covers different rearing systems. They argue, and I agree, that cage-free systems are better overall for chicken welfare but note that many farmers and specialists feel that caged systems are actually better for overall flock health. For instance, mortality is higher in cage-free systems due to diseases, pecking etc. (Here is some contrary evidence.)