I think there is a small but meaningful audience for a product like this– my guess is plausibly larger than the number of people who are vegan currently. Enough that it is, in my estimation, well worth giving it a go! Probably the hardest part is regulations around testing on humans, but there may be versions like the chewing gum idea that don't run into onerous pharmaceutical testing regimens. I'd optimize the search for things that wouldn't be regulated, at least to start with.
Agree with everything in the body of the post, and my message to folks who feel discouraged by the focus on welfare (tech) would similarly be "If you can demonstrate that you + your TOC are capable of delivering tangible goods w/r/t diet change or culture change, you will probably get funding!"
That said, I think there is some truth to the literal statement "EA has given up on diet change and animal liberation." Not necessarily permanently, and not everyone, but the bar to start/get funding for a new project in these areas is higher after decades of ~null results, and I think it's good for would-be founders to know that.
>I think you can guess my reasons and I'm wondering it it's what you meant.
On re-read this sounds passive aggressive and I didn't mean it that way, I'm just jet lagged on a train in Europe!
>EA appears to have largely walked away from the moral foundation of our work on behalf of animals.
What I think you're saying is that EA work on behalf of animals is not as rooted in morality as it was previously or as it should be. My reason for objecting is that I think this conflates using moral arguments as a means with being motivated by morality in the end. When I hear other people (e.g. abolitionist critics of EA animal advocacy) say this, I often think they think mean that EAs are motivated by something like an apathetic drive to optimize a spreadsheet rather than a burning moral conviction to help animals. I think this is an incorrect belief that interferes with constructive debates over strategy.
Yet I don't think it's likely that you would be making this argument so I wanted to ask what you thought.
As for bad faith, I linked the article to indicate that I'm using the term in the low-threshold way, which doesn't mean "malicious" but can include "saying something other than what you think is true for rhetorical reasons," which is a subconscious thing that I do quite often in my writing and invite people to call me out on more often.
I think it's helpful to split these three. I had the same "factors of production" in my latest post: people, money, strategies. They also weave back together in interesting ways. I see a lot of 2 in the liberatory approaches I've been part of or around, and it would be easy for someone to argue for 1 as well.
But the persistent appearance of 2 might ultimately point to 3. It may be that some strategies are possible but would require a larger number of extremely disciplined operatives to execute. Part of why I feel discouraged about more attempts like that is it seems really hard to me to get a large enough group of sufficiently clear-headed people on the same page to pursue it– instead, I expect the human shortcomings to keep emerging. Like, corporate campaigns are badly bottlenecked on capable talent right now; if abolitionist campaigns would require a larger pool of cracked people, then without a realistic plan to solve 2 we wind up at 3.
Project Slingshot arguably is trying to plug the 2 gap with 1, and with a ton of AI money that might work. One factor of production can make up for a deficit in another but it gets more inefficient the greater the imbalance between them.
Yeah that seems correct and I think that my post tomorrow is probably guilty of this. I'd even say I'm doing it intentionally to try to pull the best new founders into this area. I think the actual outlook for helping animals is just terribly bleak across the board and that's probably not going to inspire people to join welfare tech incubators.
Bubble in the sense of railroad bubbles successfully building railroads we still use, dot-com bubble laying fiber optic cable, etc. It could be a perfectly wise action for us to direct most of our spare energy/resources in this direction for a while.
The early research behind leafleting was low-quality in a way that should have been noticeable, and a better-calibrated version of the movement would not have spent so much time and money on it. Whereas the cage-free bubble was a necessary way of getting a massive worldwide campaign off the ground. I'd like use to have higher standards for our fads than we did for leafletting but I think the fad phenomenon is inevitable for a movement as constrained on talent and resources as we are.
I think there is a small but meaningful audience for a product like this– my guess is plausibly larger than the number of people who are vegan currently. Enough that it is, in my estimation, well worth giving it a go! Probably the hardest part is regulations around testing on humans, but there may be versions like the chewing gum idea that don't run into onerous pharmaceutical testing regimens. I'd optimize the search for things that wouldn't be regulated, at least to start with.
Agree with everything in the body of the post, and my message to folks who feel discouraged by the focus on welfare (tech) would similarly be "If you can demonstrate that you + your TOC are capable of delivering tangible goods w/r/t diet change or culture change, you will probably get funding!"
That said, I think there is some truth to the literal statement "EA has given up on diet change and animal liberation." Not necessarily permanently, and not everyone, but the bar to start/get funding for a new project in these areas is higher after decades of ~null results, and I think it's good for would-be founders to know that.
>I think you can guess my reasons and I'm wondering it it's what you meant.
On re-read this sounds passive aggressive and I didn't mean it that way, I'm just jet lagged on a train in Europe!
>EA appears to have largely walked away from the moral foundation of our work on behalf of animals.
What I think you're saying is that EA work on behalf of animals is not as rooted in morality as it was previously or as it should be. My reason for objecting is that I think this conflates using moral arguments as a means with being motivated by morality in the end. When I hear other people (e.g. abolitionist critics of EA animal advocacy) say this, I often think they think mean that EAs are motivated by something like an apathetic drive to optimize a spreadsheet rather than a burning moral conviction to help animals. I think this is an incorrect belief that interferes with constructive debates over strategy.
Yet I don't think it's likely that you would be making this argument so I wanted to ask what you thought.
As for bad faith, I linked the article to indicate that I'm using the term in the low-threshold way, which doesn't mean "malicious" but can include "saying something other than what you think is true for rhetorical reasons," which is a subconscious thing that I do quite often in my writing and invite people to call me out on more often.
I think this post was a good contribution to this topic and I'm excited to respond to different parts of it more in future posts.
>EA appears to have largely walked away from the moral foundation of our work on behalf of animals.
I strongly disagree with this. I think you can guess my reasons and I'm wondering it it's what you meant.
On its face, I think it's a bad faith argument for basing our strategies on what feels aesthetically satisfying to us.
Hey Mark! We should catch up.
I think it's helpful to split these three. I had the same "factors of production" in my latest post: people, money, strategies. They also weave back together in interesting ways. I see a lot of 2 in the liberatory approaches I've been part of or around, and it would be easy for someone to argue for 1 as well.
But the persistent appearance of 2 might ultimately point to 3. It may be that some strategies are possible but would require a larger number of extremely disciplined operatives to execute. Part of why I feel discouraged about more attempts like that is it seems really hard to me to get a large enough group of sufficiently clear-headed people on the same page to pursue it– instead, I expect the human shortcomings to keep emerging. Like, corporate campaigns are badly bottlenecked on capable talent right now; if abolitionist campaigns would require a larger pool of cracked people, then without a realistic plan to solve 2 we wind up at 3.
Project Slingshot arguably is trying to plug the 2 gap with 1, and with a ton of AI money that might work. One factor of production can make up for a deficit in another but it gets more inefficient the greater the imbalance between them.
If you end up reading it I'd particularly value your feedback on how I'm striking this balance.
Yeah that seems correct and I think that my post tomorrow is probably guilty of this. I'd even say I'm doing it intentionally to try to pull the best new founders into this area. I think the actual outlook for helping animals is just terribly bleak across the board and that's probably not going to inspire people to join welfare tech incubators.
lol I actually held it back a week because of some infohazard concerns and I'm kicking myself for not beating you to the punch
Bubble in the sense of railroad bubbles successfully building railroads we still use, dot-com bubble laying fiber optic cable, etc. It could be a perfectly wise action for us to direct most of our spare energy/resources in this direction for a while.
The early research behind leafleting was low-quality in a way that should have been noticeable, and a better-calibrated version of the movement would not have spent so much time and money on it. Whereas the cage-free bubble was a necessary way of getting a massive worldwide campaign off the ground. I'd like use to have higher standards for our fads than we did for leafletting but I think the fad phenomenon is inevitable for a movement as constrained on talent and resources as we are.