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All of Bryan Hanlon's Comments + Replies

Announcing a new animal advocacy podcast: How I Learned to Love Shrimp
Bryan Hanlon1y1
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Awesome! The 80,000 Hours podcasts on animal welfare were very important for my understanding of this issue, so I think this is an exciting addition to the movement. I can’t wait to listen soon!

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The Case for Rare Chinese Tofus
Bryan Hanlon2y7
0
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Great post, George. I enjoyed reading it and the accompanying Medium post. Your knowledge and passion are really exciting!

I’ve noticed that while many another areas of EA have embraced a hits based approach to accomplishing goals, farmed animal welfare seems more conservative. We may be overly focused on the trinity of welfare, moral suasion and plant-based/cultivated meats, and not willing enough to take risks. I suspect your proposal is a high-risk, medium-reward project, but as you point out, even a medium-reward intervention for farmed animals could re... (read more)

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George Stiffman
2y
This is a great point, Bryan!  I wonder how a "support vegetarians" angle would compare to a "help meat eaters reduce" branding. More broadly, it seems like it might hinge on how helpful it is (to the long or short-term success of the movement) to grow the # of vegetarians vs flexitarian allies. I'd expect those goals to have more overlap than difference, but it seems worthwhile to at least think about. My hunch would be to focus first on high-end flexitarian chefs, to establish that the ingredients aren't "just for vegans," then try to expand within the veg community. But I could be wrong. I'm actually not so sure about this. From a flavor perspective, rare tofus taste pretty different from one another and have different use cases, so liking one type wouldn't necessarily be strongly correlated with liking another. That said, there might be greater willingness to try?
Sleep: effective ways to improve it
Bryan Hanlon2y1
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Thanks for this post, and for the links to SSC and Gwern. I just ordered some 1 mg Melatonin and plan to cut it in half to start.

I’m a pretty poor sleeper, both with falling asleep and staying asleep. I suspect I’ll also benefit from establishing a similar routine for both weekdays and weekends, which tend to pretty distinct right now.

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Sleep: effective ways to improve it
Bryan Hanlon2y2
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I agree on the Waking Up app. I have tried Headspace, Calm and Waking Up and found Waking Up to be the best choice for me. Specifically, the Theory section has been helpful to me as a beginner trying to learn about meditation. I also appreciate that it lacks some feature that I find corny in other apps, such as celebrity cameos. However, it may not be best people who don’t care for Sam Harris due to his various political positions, or those who do like him, but associate his voice with his podcast.

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Analysis of EA funding within Animal Welfare from 2019-2021
Bryan Hanlon3y1
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This is really great. Thank you! Are you able elaborate on international spending on movement building?

  • There is a growing amount of movement building in neglected countries (Asia, South America, Eastern Europe).
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James Özden
3y
Good question - I considered doing a separate advocacy category for this but decided against it for some reason. I re-did some of the analysis with this new category (see new spreadsheet here) and the results look as below. As you can see on the far right hand side, there's a relatively steadily increasing number of funds going towards international movement building, specifically in neglected countries. That matches well with the request for proposals by the EA Animal Welfare Fund.