Quick takes

In Bruce Friedrich's new book, he writes, "Sometimes when I talk about cultivated meat someone will bring up the handful of states that have banned it. I'm mostly unconcerned. Cultivated meat companies won't be able to supply all 50 US states anytime soon anyway. Once there are multiple companies selling their products in...the majority of cities all across the country, the states that banned will-- I predict-- quietly repeal their laws" (p. 191). It's hard to know how literally to interpret this apparently sanguine attitude, as the book is designed to generate enthusiasm for alternative proteins. But, still it seems raise an important question about the cost-effectiveness of repealing existing bans or preventing further ones. Initial thoughts:   * My guess is that he'd still view preventing additional bans as important, at least in key regions expected to be first-adopters. Maybe Florida and Texas would be laggards in adoption even if cultivated meat were legal. * It'd be interesting to do an outside view analysis to see how quickly bans on other novel products have been undone once they've achieved a certain level of popularity elsewhere. * He's writing as if the industry can definitely succeed in spite of the bans. But, even if the bans spread no further, they already apply to >140M potential consumers across the US and Europe. That, combined with uncertainty about the prospect of additional bans, may chill the sort of public and private investment necessary for industry success.  

Ridglan Farms, the notorious beagle-breeding facility in Wisconsin raided twice by activists this year, is officially shutting down. The pressure on them has been intense because the case has attracted quite a sizeable national attention: Glenn Greenwald, Jennifer Welch (I've Had It podcast), Lara Trump and Robert F. Kennedy have all commented on Ridglan decrying the horrors there. Lewis Bollard tweeted this out recently: https://x.com/Lewis_Bollard/status/2066542219134452209 Figured I'd share this since some EAs (including myself) were involved in the campaign to get it shut down. A big part of our theory of change was to get this kind of attention. The real question is how to extend to animals more broadly than just dogs, of course, but even this counts as a big win.

Mox Movie Nights watched Slumdog Millionaire today and it reminded me of the why behind the work. We're not here to EV-max, to gain impact points, to count utils. We're here because the world is unfair, suffering is prolific, and need to find a way through it. 

Book Review: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro TLDR:  (spoilers follow, you can also read here) This book is the equivalent of seeing someone wear a lovely, thick, warm, knit sweater on a sunny beach. The sweater plot is so nice, but I keep thinking it would really be more at home in a different location genre. bffr This book makes no sense as a sci-fi(-ish) novel. For context, it is about a group of clones, created so they can eventually become organ donors. Unfortunately, this premise falls apart if you think about it for even a minute. How were these children born? There are only two options here: they were grown in vats or they were born to human mothers. If they were grown in vats, then this world has technology advanced enough to gestate embryos. In which case, wouldn’t it be easier to use this wonderful technology to simply grow organs in vats? Surely growing a single organ has to be easier than growing a whole baby. If they were born to human mothers, then where are the mothers? Do they have mixed feelings about this whole setup? Are they trying to rescue their kids? The closest analog to them in our world would be surrogates who carry pregnancies for others, and surrogates don’t disappear once kids are born. Some of them like to keep in touch with ‘their’ kids or at least know of them. Some of them follow up on ‘their’ kids to make sure they’re safe; this is how some scandals about baby factories have come out. Are the mothers in this timeline okay with the kids they birthed being treated like this? How do the clones not realize what’s coming? For almost their entire childhood, clones only realize what’s going to happen to them at the most abstract level. They know, but they don’t truly get it. In the book, this is explained away by the schoolteachers being really careful about how they disclose information about the clones’ fates; they do it in a way that is truthful but muted. Except there is no way a school could maintain the level of infose

Hi Community, here's a quick take I have been thinking for a while: Animal Sentience The question of whether animals are sentient or conscious remains controversial, largely because it is an epistemological challenge: we cannot directly access the subjective experiences of other beings. The term consciousness is particularly loaded, carrying strong anthropocentric assumptions that often limit meaningful discussion outside the human context. In contrast, sentience provides a more useful and flexible framework, as it allows for different forms and degrees of subjective experience across a diversity of living beings rather than measuring all minds against a human standard, as in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Minds:_The_Octopus,_the_Sea,_and_the_Deep_Origins_of_Consciousness Recent advances in artificial intelligence, particularly large language models and other machine learning techniques, offer new opportunities to extract meaning from animal communication. Birdsong, whale vocalizations, body movements, chemical signaling, and other forms of animal expression contain rich statistical structures that can now be analyzed at unprecedented scales. By combining behavioral data, signal processing, and modern AI methods, researchers may be able to identify patterns that reveal aspects of animal cognition, intention, and subjective experience. A long-term goal is to develop robust systems for interspecies communication—effectively, animal translators—that enable meaningful peer-to-peer exchanges both within and across species. Such technologies could help provide empirical evidence for sentience by demonstrating complex communication between animals themselves, as well as between animals and humans. Beyond advancing scientific understanding, this work could fundamentally reshape our ethical relationship with non-human life.

If you ever need a classic rap song to communicate your desire to be more influential in animal philanthropy, just say: I wish I was a little bit taller I wish I was a Bollard

Does anyone know whether there's a way to buy cultivated (lab-grown) meat now? I've always wanted to host a cultivated meat barbecue and invite my omnivorous friends, but I have not been able to find any cultivated meat that's currently commercially available.

The Straw and the Camel's back I recently had a colleague complain that oat milk was a 'luxury' that the work coffee machines didn't need. And this tiny little comment kind of broke me. I feel like I am so careful not to judge or lecture everyone around me for their insanely massive moral failings around animal welfare, or donating - yet apparently people can't even just let me have my suffering-free milk in peace.  Which prompted me to re-evaluate something I hadn't really thought about in a long time - being EA (or EA-adjacent or however people wanna identify) is just really hard sometimes. I used to be more actively advocatey about things, but it can be exhausting, and at some point I just kinda stopped. But now I feel very motivated to figure out how to start being a lil more vocal again, because it turns out that pretending like I don't have strong opinions on these things is also exhausting! Which is all to get to the point of: there are a lot of posts on here about EA being hard, and how to talk about EA, and reading those posts helps get a feeling of support but knowing this doesn't magically make it all easier. I am just really grateful for this awesome community, and want to just normalise a bit more to share when it gets hard because thats ok. We are doing a hard thing.  (Note: while this one colleague clearly pushed my buttons, further reflection got me very happy that clearly a bunch of other people had been advocating to get the oat milk at LUMC and I'm very happy they exist and that they succeeded)