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Curated and popular this week
This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what’s most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That’s great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing variou...
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New Video from AI in Context: The Fall and Rise of Sam Altman
If you want to skip straight to the video, here it is!
AI in Context is excited to be back with our fourth video! For those just hearing from us, we make videos for 80,000 Hours, telling stories about transformative AI...
Glad to see this added!
I only skimmed so might have missed it but I didn't see much mention of the use of insects as feed for other factory farmed animals. If I remember correctly from some of RP's reports, this makes up a very large proportion of both current insect farming and expected growth. This seems like an important dynamic, since e.g. the efficacy of the 'ick factor' that this page highlights will presumably be much reduced in that context.
Hi Jamie! Thank you for bringing this up - we do address this in the accompanying blog post to the Fundamental where we touch on what we covered and what we didn't:
"The third issue is one that we did touch on, but that goes much deeper than we have the space for: the farming of insects for food. It’s a topic that we’ve covered in some depth in the Faunalytics Library, and many people are looking towards “insect protein” as a potential “solution” to the problem of satisfying the protein needs of a growing global population. The global insect protein market in 2022 was worth over $428 million USD, and with an annual growth rate of about 27%, it’s expected to reach over $1.3 billion in the next few years. There are many obstacles standing in the way of the widespread adoption of insect proteins, especially cultural taboos in Western nations — but considering the industry already affects an estimated 1 trillion animals, even small shifts in cultural acceptance have the potential to affect trillions more."