EA has not given up on diet change or animal liberation

Context: WelfareTech

There has been some concern lately about effective altruism's supposed turn away from diet change, systemic shift, animal liberation, etc. As far as I can tell, this is due to 1) a widely reshared Substack article which got some praise from EA-aligned folks, including folks at @Coefficient Giving; 2) the fact that Innovate Animal Ag is setting up an "accelerator farm," which, per Robert Yaman, will be "a commercial broiler facility that sells chickens into the market, but it will also be a place where startups can test technologies and where we can combine interventions;" and 3) the emergence of Spring Innovation Fund, which launched this summer as "a not-for-profit venture philanthropy studio and fund built specifically for Welfare Tech: technology that improves animal welfare in ways that make commercial sense for producers to adopt."

I don't buy it

I just got back from two EA events (the Communicators Retreat and EAG NYC) where I talked to a few dozen people at length. Almost everyone wanted to talk about diet change and animal liberation. I think this supposed turn away from these topics has been greatly exaggerated. The EA rank and file want to see animals liberated from human oppression and/or living in nature. 

This impression is probably colored by who I am and therefore who wants to talk to me. On the other hand, the people who write publicly about this and/or start funds to promote Welfare Tech are also clearly not a random sample either.

Maybe the elites are doing an about-face and the rest of us will follow their marching orders once the money comes in?

Insofar as effective animal advocacy has an inner cabal, I talk to them pretty regularly. I don't think they've given up on diet change. @LewisBollard writes that EA "deprioritized it based on evidence it wasn't working." Deprioritized is not giving up. If something promising (re: novel) and/or evidence-backed came up, I think people would be into it. For what it's worth, I received (directly or indirectly) four instances of solidly EA-flavored funding to do diet change research in 2026. But we’re not going to leap to support leaflets or digital advocacy or whatever. Not without reasonable evidence that it'll work better than it did in the past. 

Why did this consensus emerge?

My going theory is that too few effective animal advocates write about what they're thinking and doing for the public. @Aidan Kankyoku's post reverberated in part because he's one of the few of us doing this.^[1] Outliers are taken as representative because normies are silent.

Solution: more of us should write more and more hastily

Posting in public is fun, it might be good for your career, and it has the nice property of also giving external audiences a more accurate read on EA thinking. Effective Altruism is good. Let's tell people about it, and not let a few loudmouths (me included) speak for the community. 

Moreover, animal people should generally write more slapdashedly. I talked to several people at EAG who were like "oh I have a big backlog of posts I've been meaning to publish" or "I sat on that post for a year because I wasn't sure people wanted to read it." Folks, stop it! Just post, record a 1 minute video on your phone and post it on LinkedIn. Hit the go button. Say "it's 9:55 right now, when the clock strikes 10:30, I'm going to post this no matter what." This is not school, C work that gets published regularly is better than A work that you sit on.

Some tactical remarks

1. Unless your audience is specifically EAs, as is true for this post, you should not write primarily for the EA forum. Twitter or Substack or Bluesky or podcasts or whatever is where you at least have a chance of achieving escape velocity.
2. Several people at the Communicators Retreat emphasized that authenticity sells, and when you workshop something to death, you risk losing it. I think this is right. Corollary: don't have AI write your stuff. Authentic and messy is way more appealing.
3. Posting more could be very good for your career, as it was for mine.

1. ^{^}

   There are lots of posts arguing that why veganism is good, people who eat meat are bad, etc. I view this work as very likely pointless and likely bad for the cause on net. The vegan echo chamber is a real problem.