I’m an attorney trying to end factory farming!
Taj Uppal
Karma: 129
Great post! I’ve had similar thoughts about my city in Phoenix.
My main takeaway from your post is that our organizing is bad. We need to become better organizers, which means creating better experiences for those who participate. We can draw from the centuries old tradition of community organizing to do so.
One cool thing we have going in Phoenix is the “Vegan Social.” Basically, a bunch of vegans get together to eat vegan food from vegan vendors. Food is a powerful way to bring our community together, since that’s the main thing setting us apart from society at large.
Another thing I want to do better is create in-person // online virtuous cycles. I observed and read about this for Zohran’s NYC mayoral campaign. Zohran would do cool stuff in-person, then create cool Instagram content to capture the moment, then a bunch of people would see that Zohran was doing cool stuff, then more people would show up to Zohran’s next event, making the whole campaign even cooler.
Facts!
I like the table describing Causes of Suffering. It’s useful to imagine what the utopian and dystopian states look like for each cause.
Also, if TAI is just 2-3 years away as you predict, I agree that we should be focused more on policy interventions, less on research. That made me think of Bernie Sanders recent proposal to instate a moratorium on AI data centers. Perhaps more EAs should be pressing for policies of the sort?