ThomNorman

• ThomNorman 11 Jul 2025 13:48 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Welfare tech should be de­vel­oped by welfare people

  Thanks for this post. I thought it was really interesting and I think you are probably right.

  My main objection—however—would be that technologies developed by welfarists would struggle to compete in the market as it stands because we’d be trying to meet the often competing demands of improving welfare and improving economic outcomes for farmers (in order to have our tech adopted in the first place).

  Companies that develop technologies that are purely delivering efficiency gains for farms are more likely to succeed in a profit focused market than these welfarist technologies and so welfarist animal tech companies might be competed out of the market.

  It might be more efficient to focus our attention on creating the kinds of market conditions that incentivise profit-making companies to develop the tech we want to see.

  What this means is focusing on what we’re already doing—corporate campaigning, lobbying etc. - to create the conditions where farms/​food companies have to care about animal welfare to some extend and then let the profit-seeking (counterfactually cheaper) money be spent on R&D to deliver the tech that meets those objectives.

• ThomNorman 17 Jun 2025 17:57 UTC

  10 points

  3 ∶ 2

  in reply to: EuanMcLean’s comment on: The Root Cause

  Thanks for responding to my points! You didn’t have to go through line by line, but its appreciated.

  Obviously a line by line response to your line by line response to my line by line response to your article would be somewhat over the top. So I’ll refrain!

  The general point I’d make though is that this almost feels like an argument for something before you’ve decided what you want to argue for. There feels like a conceptual hole in the middle of this piece (as you say, people are still trying to work out what the problem is). But then you also respond to most of (not all) my points without actually giving a counter-argument, just claiming that I’m clearly mistaken. This makes it quite hard to actually engage with what you’ve written.

  Maybe, as Alexander seems to think, I’m just a poor blinkered fool who can’t understand other people’s perspectives—but I am actually tryign to engage with what you’ve written here, not sh*t posting.

• ThomNorman 17 Jun 2025 17:35 UTC

  5 points

  3 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Alexander Herwix 🔸’s comment on: The Root Cause

  I wonder if this statement might simply reflect your ability to understand and steelman other people’s perspectives. Food for thought?!

  Now this is uncharitable

• ThomNorman 17 Jun 2025 17:34 UTC

  10 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: hbesceli’s comment on: The Root Cause

  Thanks!

  I had a bit of a negative reaction to this comment—it seems a bit uncharitable to me

  That’s fair, I might have been a bit mean there!

• ThomNorman 17 Jun 2025 12:41 UTC

  47 points

  5 ∶ 3

  on: The Root Cause

  I was interested in this because I’m broadly sympathetic to the idea that we might not give enough attention to bigger systems. But for me, this post only really strengthened my EA tendencies.

  So the core argument in favour of the metacrisis being ‘a thing’ (upon which the later arguments that we should take it seriously hang) seems to be:

  a. Technology makes us more powerfu and the world is more interconnected

  b. As a result, our capacity for self destruction has massively increased

  c. Our ‘culture, the implicit assumptions, symobls, sense-making tools and values of society’ are not ‘mature’ enough to ensure this capacity is managed in a low risk manner

  d. Therefore, some kind of existential risk is more likely

  Propositions A and B seem basically correct to me. But I think proposition C is very weak. I have two main problems with it:

  1) there is just so many different things inside of that grouping, the article only makes an argument as to why a set of implicit assumptions are a cause of the problem, then sneaks in all this other stuff in this one central paragraph. It seems highly likely to me that some things (like society’s values) are more important to how well the world goes than others (like symbols)

  2) I think C stands to be proved. While there are many problems with society and global coordination, it seems like often at the crunch global coordination pulls through (nuclear proliferation, chemical weapons and CFCs are examples). I think you can make an argument we don’t have the right tools, but I think equally you can make at least as strong an argument to say that we know exactly what the right tools are and we should be putting our efforts into strengthening global institutions of coordination.

  I think the Diego character makes a number of other mistakes which I’m not sure are necessarily core to the argument, but certainly weaken my sense of its credibility for me:

  1. The idea that system change is intractable is just an intuition—this clearly isn’t true. If we look at successful social movements, they consistently work through breaking problems down and taking them one at a time. This ends up looking like systems change eventually because it can lead to paradigm shifts, but these shifts only come later on as an accumulation of smaller wins (some examples would be the abolition of slavery, LGBT rights, universal suffrage in the UK). We can also point to plenty of folk talking about how everything is connected and getting no where at all. So the claim ‘system change is not tractable’ may not be correct, but it is clearly based on more than mere intuiton.

  2. The idea that rivalry (caused by human nature) is a background assumption and not necessarily the case: the point here surely is that, yes of course humans can be more or less cooperative at times and given different cultural assumptions, but this kind of game theory describes dynamics that are independent of how most people behave. It only takes a small number of people to act in a rivalrous or antisocial manner for things to become bad, given we can’t rule out that someone will behave in this way, we have to respond accordingly.

  3. The argument that we ‘diefy’ technology and assume wealth is always good: this is almost straying into ‘degrowther’ territory. Technology is the primary driver of increased productivity and therefore a key part of driving growth. Growth has historically been the single biggest driver of human welbeing. While I’m in favour of redistribution, I think we have to be realistic that simply stopping growth and improving people’s lives soley through redistribution would be politically impossible. It also places a celling on possible human wellbeing and so is plausibly much much worse than a world of high, sustainable growth.

  4. The idea that the notion of the perfect/​wellfunctioning market is rarely questioned: obviously not true, this is a hugely contested idea

  5. (This is a small one): Modernity has led to the mental health crisis: I’m just not sure this empyrically stacks up. It is really hard to measure mental health over time, given that its measurement is so culturally contingent (among other things)

  6. The argument that we know eventually civilisation will collapse because all previous civilisations have collapsed: this feels like a very ‘cakeism’ style argument, you can’t have it both ways. Either it is the case that the history of all these very different societies shows the inevitability of our eventual destruction (in which case it seems that changing our culture isn’t going to help) or culture is the key to our doom (in which case all these other cultures being destroyed can’t be evidence about our own culture because the key variable is different)

  7. Tractability is surprisingly high: how can you possibly assess the tractability of this problem when—in your own words—you have no idea what the problem is? Compare this to wild animal suffering (as Diego does): in wild animal suffering we have a clearly defined problem: lots of animals suffer a lot and this is bad. We have some solutions that actually seem very good, like getting rid of screw worms. There are some empirical frameworks we can use to assess the problems and make decisions, and we can at least in some cases run experiments to gain a better understanding. This all seems like much more progress towards tractable solutions than this metacrisis thing

  8. Cultural change is actually happening very fast: Diego is using culture in two almost entirely different ways. First that its about our underlying paradigm for seeing the world to argue that culture is this deep seated root problem (for most of the article) then in this thin way about changing cultural artefacts or taste to argue that it changes very quickly. These are obviously two different propositions and one can’t be used to argue the other.

  I like the idea of doing more thinking through Socratic dialogues and there were a couple of jokes here which actually made me laugh out loud. But it has left me closer to thinking this integral/​metacrisis thing is lacking in substance. Putting this author aside, it seems like many of the folk who talk about this stuff are merely engaging in self-absorbed obscurantism.

• ThomNorman 17 Apr 2025 9:57 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Why Pro­mot­ing Pre­ci­sion Live­stock Farm­ing (PLF) is a Strate­gic Mis­take for An­i­mal Advocates

  This is an interesting piece, Sam, thanks for writing it.

  These are my almost entirely uninformed thoughts: based on a tiny bit of background knowledge of PLF and general observations of the animal movement.

  It seems quite likely to me that PLF is coming to animal ag whether we like it or not. If this is the case, the important question isn’t so much “should we promote PLF or do some other campaign?” but rather “how should we respond to PLF?”

  At the end of your piece, you say “our role (if any) must be strictly defensive and containment-focused”—I can get behind most of this sentence, apart from the “(if any)”. Surely, for many of the reasons you set out earlier in the article, to not engage with PLF at all would be borderline neglence on the part of our movement: the risks that this transforms the industry and locks in practices are just so high that we can’t afford to ignore this development.

  So then the question is what should we do about it? I think I would favour a broader approach than you suggest which places multiple bets.

  It seems plausible to me that some organisations should be trying to contain/​prevent this new technology. I think such a campaign could bring animal advocates, smaller farmers and the general public together in quite a powerful way that would be able to get decent media/​political traction at least in NA and Europe.

  However, it still seems like there is a big risk that such a campaign would overall fail. This might be because, for example, the lure of big profits from allowing such practices outweighs any political pushback, or even simply because other countries (e.g. China) do adopt these practices and are then simply able to provide imports much more cheaply, effectively ‘offshoring’ the cruelty by displacing domestic production.

  For this reason, I would favour some organisations also taking a much more ‘good cop’ role, working behind the scenes with PLF developers and regulators in a much more cooperative way in addition to campaigns opposing PLF. If PLF does become widespread, there are potentially very large wellbeing gains to be had by influencing the development of the technology at an early stage and maybe even locking in some welfare considerations.

  I don’t think it is completely naive to think this is possible: For example:

  1. the food industry doesn’t just compete on price alone, so including welfare could be a product differentiator for PLF creators and/​or users;

  2. the combination of some outside public pressure might convince PLF creators to introduce some welfare considerations voluntarily in an effort to head off the risk of more onerous regulations if they were seen as making no welfare concessions.

  So, while I’d agree that we should be pretty suspicious about PLF and not welcome it with open arms. I think that we could be making a serious strategic error by either ignoring it (this seems the worst possible option) or providing only implacable opposition across the board.

What should we ask Rut­ger Breg­man and Peter Singer about how they changed their minds?

Far­mKind: Us­ing a diet offset calcu­la­tor to en­courage effec­tive giv­ing for farmed animals

Far­mKind’s new tool to en­courage effec­tive dona­tions from your non-EA circle

• ThomNorman 6 Aug 2024 16:59 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: matthes’s comment on: an­i­mal welfare out­side of EA—num­bers and thoughts on UFAW 2024

  Even amongst academic conferences, this seems quite outside of my personal experience. I’ve been to a small number of academic animal law conferences and—while there is plenty to complain about from an EA perspective—most people were there because they cared about animals and the food was all vegan.

• ThomNorman 5 Aug 2024 13:01 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Far­mKind (a new an­i­mal fundrais­ing plat­form) is live – Please DON’T DONATE

  Thanks—should be fixed now

• ThomNorman 5 Aug 2024 12:59 UTC

  15 points

  4 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Ben Millwood🔸’s comment on: Far­mKind (a new an­i­mal fundrais­ing plat­form) is live – Please DON’T DONATE

  Hi Ben, thanks for responding. I think you raise some valid points, we hope that we are avoiding being dishonest as we agree with you that we shouldn’t be.

  What the standard donor gets is to control where the bonus fund goes. What the bonus donor gets is to help encourage more donations. We do explain this on our site.

  One broader point I’d make is that there is a real tension between being very precise and transparent and being concise enough that we won’t switch most people off with too much information too soon. We’re trying to tread that line, but we welcome critical feedback where we might not be getting the right balance.

• ThomNorman 5 Aug 2024 12:03 UTC

  4 points

  4 ∶ 4

  in reply to: Jeff Kaufman 🔸’s comment on: Far­mKind (a new an­i­mal fundrais­ing plat­form) is live – Please DON’T DONATE

  Hi Jeff—thanks very much for taking the time to comment. In the case of FarmKind, however, I think this specific critique is a little wide of the mark. We address this specific concern on our page about the matching fund (just click ‘More detail on how it works’ for a drop down with a detailed review). Link here.

  In short, donating with us determines where the money in the bonus fund goes, including which favourite charity they choose, which super-effective charity they choose, and how much to allocate to each.

  More broadly, we’ve tried to be as transparent as possible about how things work with our entire system. In an ideal world, we’d have loads of information right up front with plenty of footnotes, but we have to recognise that this is going to put off the majority of donors. So, we’ve had to strike a balance: all the info is there if for those who want to look for it.

  But, we’re always listening and happy to take on board critiques :)

Far­mKind (a new an­i­mal fundrais­ing plat­form) is live – Please DON’T DONATE

• ThomNorman 2 Aug 2024 11:01 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: In­tro­duc­ing Mieux Don­ner: A new effec­tive giv­ing ini­ti­a­tive in France

  Congrats on the launch! Especially on getting up and at it so quickly :) The website looks great!