I'm working from brief conversations with the relevant experts, rather than having conducted in-depth research on this topic. My understanding is:

• the food security angle is most useful for a country which imports a significant amounts of its food; where this is true, the whole argument is premised on the idea that domestic food producers will be preserved and strengthened, so it doesn't naturally invite opposition. 
• the economy / job creation angle is again couched in terms of "increasing the size of the pie" -- i.e. adding more jobs to the domestic economy and not taking away from the existing work. Again, this doesn't seem to naturally invite opposition from incumbent food producers.

I guess in either case it's possible for the food/agriculture lobby to nonetheless recognise that alt proteins could be a threat to them and object. I don't know how common it is for this actually happen.

When advocating that governments invest more in alt proteins, the following angles are typically used:

• climate/environmental
• bioeconomy (i.e. if you invest in this, it will create more jobs in your country)
• food security

I understand the latter two are generally popular with right-wing governments; either of these two positions can be advanced without referencing climate at all (which may be preferable in some cases for the reasons Ben outlines)

I can confirm that there exists at least NGO who has this type of risk on their radar. I don't want to say too much until we have gone through the appropriate processes for publishing our notes from speaking with them. 

If any donors want to know more, feel free to reach out directly and I can tell you more.

An application I was expecting you to mention was longer term forecasts. E.g. if there was a market about, say, something in 2050, for example, the incentives for forecasters are perhaps less good, because the time until resolution is so long. But a "chained" forecast capturing something like "what will next year's forecast say" (and next year's forecast is about the following year's forecast, and so until you hit 2050, when it resolves to the ground truth).

This assumes that forecasters are less effective when it comes to markets which don't resolve for a long time.

In 2020, we at SoGive were excited about funding nuclear work for similar reasons. We thought that the departure of the MacArthur foundation might have destructive effects which could potentially be countered with an injection of fresh philanthropy.

We spoke to several relevant experts. Several of these were with (unsurprisingly) philanthropically funded organisations tackling the risks of nuclear weapons. Also unsurprisingly, they tended to agree that donors could have a great opportunity to do good by stepping in to fill gaps left by MacArthur. 

There was a minority view that this was not as good an idea as it seemed. This counterargument was MacArthur had left for (arguably) good reasons. Namely that after throwing a lot of good money after bad, they had not seen strong enough impact for the money invested. I understood these comments to be the perspectives of commentators external to MacArthur (i.e. I don't think anyone was saying that MacArthur themselves believed this, and we didn't try to work out whether MacArthur themselves believed this).

Under this line of thinking, some "creative destruction" might be a positive. On the one hand, we risk losing some valuable institutional momentum, and perhaps some talented people. On the other hand, it allows for fresh ideas and approaches. 

Thanks Larks, I definitely agree with your characterisation of Kevin Esvelt as the bio guy. An error crept into our notes but is now corrected. 

Could someone please explain how much extra value this adds given that we already have the Cambridge declaration?

If the authors of this post haven't indicated what their star signs are, how do I know if I believe what they say?

Can you say any more about what you plan to do?

At the time, the comment was "it's not obvious, more rationale needed" -- i.e. I expressed sympathies for the proposal of transparency, but erred towards not doing it. 

I think the main thing which has changed is that it's a slightly more academic question now -- we no longer have the resource to run something like this. 

If, hypothetically, we did have the resource to run this again, would we default to asking funders to be transparent (rather than our previous default choice of not making this request)? I'm not sure -- as I say, it's a rather more academic question now.