I was wondering if anyone was going to mention that. There was a lot of media buzz about whether the events of the show could really happen at the time of its airing. This piece by Yale is supposed to sound reassuring, but it just… doesn’t. :/
SiobhanBall
Karma: 734
Ok, you’ve convinced me on the theoretical button-pushing. In reality those aren’t the options we’re presented with.
Good questions. R&D isn’t the only lever. Given the relatively small amount of money that would be coming from EA, I’d direct the funding towards policy advocacy, comms/educating the market, and lobbying for governments to invest more in scale up funding.
I’m not in favour of intervention plurality for its own sake. Even if cultivated meat would only displace 50%, 25%, 10% of demand for broiler chickens, that would already be hugely beneficial compared to what we spend on currently.
And you wouldn’t have to be vegan to support it, which would open the movement up to others in the way FarmKind have tried to do. Just imagine: vegans, non vegans, environmentalists, investors, and businesses all united under one common, commercially viable goal of giving consumers another choice that has almost no trade offs compared to what they eat currently. Most other interventions and meta debates seem trivial by comparison if you think that cultivated meat is inevitable… which I do.
I think the main problem from a movement dynamics point of view is that it would undermine much of what people spend their energy on now.
I think that should depend on what the bets are.
Because a large proportion of vegans revert to eating animals at some point in their lives. Moreover, it isn’t going to happen in any timeframe, unfortunately.
Most, if not all, animal advocacy funding should be directed towards bringing cultivated meat products to market ASAP.
Re: your poll, I’d say neither. Veganism and offsetting are both ‘rearranging furniture on the Titanic’. The button I’d press wouldn’t be to make everyone vegan in an instant, but to get cultivated meat on supermarket shelves at a competitive price point, in an instant.
Nothing else (bar x-risks for humans) is going to end factory farming. As you say, meat consumption is skyrocketing, yet in animal advocacy we act like there isn’t a viable alternative that is, or rather could be, on the table.
So strong is my view on this that I’d go as far as to say that the way funding is allocated in animal advocacy is extremely ineffective. It should basically all be going towards scale-up grants or policy advocacy or whatever cultivated meat businesses need.
But yeah the findings of the Pulse survey you mentioned don’t surprise me. In the end I think this campaign was a load of hot air, probably not particularly helpful nor damaging either way.
Note: This comment was copy-pasted from my recent LinkedIn post for speed. Toby kindly flagged that it read a bit out of context, so just to clarify for other readers: this is not AI slop. It’s human-authored LinkedIn slop 🙂
TLDR: I’d love to see more debates.
A good debate does something campaigns tend to avoid, but ought to do more of: it makes trade-offs explicit. Participants must define assumptions, defend priorities, and confront where values or strategies genuinely diverge.
For an audience, this can be far more informative—and 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑣𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑖𝑛𝑔 - than polished messaging.
The value of debates is diagnostic. They surface where a movement is aligned, and which questions still need answering.
Animal advocacy uniquely prompts people to align moral belief with personal behaviour. It’s not necessary to do this in order to be effective at reducing animal suffering, but if you don’t, then the incoherency is always lurking within. That creates a level of psychological friction that other cause areas don’t have—we aren’t directly contributing to malaria or x-risk in the same way most of us are implicated in factory farming. It’s plausible that this shows up as a gap between what people endorse in surveys and how resources get allocated.
I’m not sure we should expect stated preferences and real-world allocations to line up neatly. Large funders may be counterbalancing where the rest of the community drifts in its actions, and in that sense divergence isn’t obviously a bad thing.
If we do think the gap is a problem, I think fixing careers is an under-explored avenue. Animal advocacy still seems like a hard place to build a stable, respected long-term career. Retention, senior leadership depth, and longevity all seem thinner than in other cause areas. My hunch is that this cause area ends up being a ‘seasonal’ phase, with talent drifting toward better-resourced areas that can better place senior talent.
SiobhanBall’s Quick takes
I wanted to flag an upcoming Netflix limited series, The Altruists, which dramatises the collapse of FTX and centres on Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison. Filming wrapped late last year, and the series is expected to release in 2026.
Regardless of how carefully or poorly the show handles the facts, the title and premise alone are likely to renew public association between effective altruism, crypto, and the FTX collapse. Given Netflix’s reach, this will almost certainly shape first impressions for many people encountering EA-adjacent ideas for the first time.
It seems worth thinking early about what’s likely to follow. This won’t primarily be about factual accuracy. Even a relatively balanced dramatisation will compress nuance and foreground irony, because that is how narrative television works. A Netflix drama will travel faster and wider than any later attempts at nuance. Silence may be read as evasiveness, while reactive defensiveness would likely make things worse.
I don’t have a fully formed proposal for how the community should respond, but it seems worth beginning the conversation early, before others frame it for us.
I’d be interested to hear how others are thinking about this.
Male on male violence is a numerically larger problem. The fact that men commit it doesn’t negate the suffering of male victims.
For cause prioritisation, it doesn’t matter whether the source of suffering is a man or a mosquito, beyond how it affects tractability. I don’t have a strong opinion on whether reducing violence in general ought to be a cause area.The interventions you mention for IPV/femicide don’t yet have the profile of being cost effective and scaleable; or if they do, the evidence hasn’t been demonstrated at the level EA funders typically require. It could be worthwhile to look into the cost effectiveness of existing interventions more closely, but I’m doubtful.
Of course, no pressure. I hope it’s nothing permanent, and get well soon.
This is exciting! The policy focus, specific levers, and concrete interventions laid out here are exactly what the space has been missing. This fills a real gap and I’m glad to see this direction being taken.
Hi Cameron, since you’ve invited questions, I’m just flagging that I’d still be interested in your thoughts on the questions I raised when replying to your comment on my post, whenever you have time.
Thanks for laying those out. I’d agree that if even one were executed at scale it could be a major win for animals. However, WAI doesn’t appear to have a pathway for turning any of those into reality. The reason for this seems to be ‘we’re not certain enough yet’, but there isn’t a defined threshold for what ‘certain enough’ means.
Field-building has value, but it shouldn’t be the default answer indefinitely, especially when the projected timelines for impact seem to shift so dramatically (suggesting that the original thesis was off, albeit in a direction that’s good for animals). There also isn’t a clearly defined threshold for how much field building is sufficient.
At some point, the movement ought to have clarity on when possible interventions graduate from speculative ideas to actionable programs.
Let’s see where things stand in a few years.
Hi Abraham, thanks for your comment. A quick clarifying question: when you say timelines have gone from 50+ years to a few years, what interventions are you referring to?
Cameron mentioned examples such as bird-feeder design changes and rodent fertility control. Are those the interventions you had in mind when saying that the field is much closer to actionable work?
It would be helpful to understand what fits the updated timeline, and how this aligns with Cameron’s explanation.
I can barely contain myself. :)
Hi Jenny, very interesting, thank you. What was the response of CG to your report, and do you know if they are planning to invest more resources towards this potential cause area?