Steven Rouk

Three tricky bi­ases: hu­man bias, ex­is­tence bias, and happy bias

• Steven Rouk 1 Feb 2024 14:39 UTC

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  on: AMA: Emma Slaw­in­ski, the RSPCA’s Direc­tor of Policy, Preven­tion and Cam­paigns.

  Do you think about fish or insects at all, or are you choosing to remain focused on chickens for now?

• Steven Rouk 1 Feb 2024 14:37 UTC

  1 point

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  on: AMA: Emma Slaw­in­ski, the RSPCA’s Direc­tor of Policy, Preven­tion and Cam­paigns.

  Thanks for doing this AMA, Emma!

  I’m curious as to how you think about prioritizing different types of interventions that might reduce the suffering of farmed animals in very different ways, for example:

  1. Working on reducing suffering through welfare reforms.

  2. Working on reducing numbers of animals through diet change policies (e.g. plant-based default food policies) or behavior change messaging (e.g. pro-veg messages).

  3. Working on reducing numbers of animals through increased alternative protein availability and consumption (e.g. plant-based meats, etc.).

  Since each of these is a plausible way to help farmed animals, yet they’re very different strategic approaches, how do you all think about allocating your time and energy?

Ad­ding Nuance to the Small An­i­mal Re­place­ment Prob­lem: Mo­ral Cir­cle Expansion

[Cause Ex­plo­ra­tion Prizes] Con­nec­tion can ac­cel­er­ate the end of fac­tory farming

• Steven Rouk 2 Mar 2022 19:14 UTC

  8 points

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  in reply to: Charles Dillon ’s comment on: EAA is over­in­vest­ing in cor­po­rate welfare reforms

  I’m late to the discussion, but I might add that I have a hypothesis that we have heavily underinvested in finding, connecting, and supporting existing supporters of farmed animal welfare. One symptom of this would be a seeming lack of diversity in the funding opportunities. Another symptom might be difficulty finding these opportunities, even if they do exist, due to lack of social network connectivity (i.e. there are no easy ways to find opportunities outside of our well-connected local social networks). Thus, perhaps one of the first things we should invest more heavily in is building up this connective infrastructure for the movement.

  Lastly, I think the definition of “good opportunity” varies wildly, and a more holistic understanding of risk and uncertainty would nudge us in the direction of valuing strategic and tactical diversity as an inherent good, above and beyond any kind of impact evaluation or estimation. Thus, at an extreme, if you had 100% of funding invested in CWRs, then nearly any non-CWR opportunity would be seen as a good opportunity due to increasing the diversity of approaches.

  Of course, we don’t have that extreme case of 100% investment in CWRs, but I think Kato’s point is that a more pluralistic movement (i.e. a more diversified one than we currently have) does probably lead to higher impact, which would expand our definition of good opportunities to include things we might otherwise pass on.

  I believe Harish Sethu gave an excellent talk at the AR Conference a few years back using an apples and oranges market analogy to demonstrate this same kind of idea.