David Goodman
Posts 2
Comments9
Fermentation or leaf protein concentrate are other excellent ideas. The main reason I think lab-grown beef is the thing to focus in is simply because beef is the main issue. The elephant in the biodiversity room is primarily cattle-ranching. Any successful intervention, purely from a biodiversity perspective (the perspective of this pot of money) would have to address beef. I understand there are probably multiple avenues towards that goal, however, and would be very open to being persuaded that other methods could achieve it.
There could totally be truth to both of these points. I would add a third that the EA community is insular, and attracts a particular kind of person that tends to be frustrated / turned off by things like bureaucracy and process. I suspect there's a cultural bias (which I share! to be clear) against ideas like going as a diplomat to huge frustrating conventions every year full of irrational people parroting doublespeak, even if those conventions represent opportunity to do good. Much more appealing to go work in an AI lab, make a bunch of money, and have friends who also grew up reading LessWrong.
I totally agree that there are some "out there" interventions that, in a perfect world, we would be funding much more. In particular biobanking (recording the DNA of species about to go extinct) should be considered much more, I totally agree. Unfortunately, the world is full of techno-pessimists, deontologists, post-structuralists, diplomats who don't know what any of the preceding words even mean, etc. This seems insane, but MANY conservationists are against de-extinction for (in my view) fairly straightforward technophobic reasons. Convincing THOSE people, who ALREADY have LOTs of money, that actually they should invest that money in changing the opinions of Sam Altman, will just simply never work. I DO think, however, you could get them to invest in lab grown meat. So while I agree with you in the abstract about some of that, I think that if we're being pragmatic (our duty as EAs), then lab-grown meat is probably the best bet in terms of plausible arguments.
Also, just purely philosophically, I think that putting a lot of stock in the sign of habitat preservation can lead to some strange places. What if we decide that the Amazon rainforest has a negative WAW sign? Would you be in favor of completely replacing it with a parking lot, if doing so could be done without undue suffering of the animals that already exist there? Maybe you are, which would be consistent, but that's an extremely unintuitive ethical claim that I have yet to read anyone defend seriously or persuasively. Would be very interested in someone trying though!
I agree with some of the comments below -- I think most EAs support things like lab-grown meat for animal welfare reasons. If there's a strong argument (which I think there is) for lab-grown meat ALSO being the best possible thing you could do for biodiversity, and making that argument to the right people could literally 10x the amount of money going to lab-grown meat R&D per year, then I think we should making that argument. If you're consequentialist about it, the motives of the GBF are irrelevant. What matters is that they could massively fund lab-grown meat, and nobody is argueing to them that it's their interest to do so.
And about huw's point below (ie. many lobbyists make arguments that don't align with their true motivations), I think that's how lobbying usually works. It's pretty easy to imagine EAs going to a COP and making the 100% true and good faith argument that lab-grown meat would be more effective for protecting biodiversity than, say, "protecting" on paper a random, 150-square km patch of water in the South Pacific. Those EAs might not care about biodiversity themselves, but if they succeeded in getting 0.1% of the budget dedicated to lab grown meat R&D, and thus DOUBLING annual investment in the sector, that would also be awesome for animal welfare.
Hey JM,
I think its right that this reminds you of Vavilov! There are a handful of biobanking initiatives that gesture at this kind of reasoning, but I've never seen someone apply a longtermist framework to it.
Do you mean dimishing returns in terms of $ per species saved (i.e. it would end up being more expensive once you'd recorded all the low-hanging fruit), or in terms of utility per species saved (i.e. there's only so many moth genomes you can record before the value of each starts getting diluted).
To answer the first question, I think it would functionally never be an issue. There are so many species that haven't been described all over the world. Especially very small and uncharismatic species. The fact that we don't know most of the species on Earth is actually one of the central obstacles in conservation, usually referred to as the Linnean shortfall. This is particularly true when you consider that the evolutionary biologists have come to the conclusion that new species are arising much faster than we expected, especially as climate change causes lots of pressure on species to adapt. So by the time that a biobanking initiative finished cataloging even just all the beetles on earth (beetles account for 25% of animal species!), there would be new beetles to document that didn't exist when they started.
To answer the second question, there are two possible answers. One is to say that there might be utility in having a large corpus of data itself. Think of todays LLMs -- a crucial barrier to training them is the lack of human-produced text, as they've essentially already imbibed everything that has ever been written. If you were thinking of a machine learning context in the future (perhaps an AI trying to understand evolution) that needed lots of genetic data (perhaps more than was available on earth at any one time), then large historical genetic databases could be very useful. The second answer to this question would just be the classic longtermist appeal to Very Large Numbers. If you take seriously that 10^28 humans will eventually exist, there is essentially no amount of information you could produce that would start actually saturating that demand. So I don't think that diminishing returns on this front would really be an issue.
Hopefully that makes sense!
Hello Nitin,
Thank you for your long and thoughtful reply! I have just looked through your website and the website of Conversation X Labs. What you are doing seems extremely cool! Amazing that you guys seem to have a report, award, or grant available for practically every major driver of biodiversity loss and climate change. Textiles, alternative proteins, fire, artisanal mining. I'll definitely be emailing you to learn more. I'm super happy that CXL exists.
About your responses:
1) I totally agree that conservationists are aware of the importance of alternative proteins in the abstract, but I don't think they think about it very often in practice. I am currently getting a masters in biodiversity conservation at Oxford, and though I spend lots of time in both the Biology and the Geography / Environment departments talking and learning about conservation, I am the only one who will ever bring up alternative proteins. I would describe the range of opinions at Oxford as falling between 1) developing alt proteins is important but that's not our job, to 2) new technology likely to be controlled by billionaires and thus not to be trusted. I am partially empathetic to both of these positions, but ultimately I think they limit many conservationists imaginations about how to best combat the biodiversity crisis.
2) It is true that much of the $121B described in the KMGBF is already earmarked for particular projects, many of them parks popular with the middle class, international ecotourists, etc. But not all of it. Much of that money could be spent in a variety of ways. It is true that there are political, cultural, and logistical barriers to that money being funneled towards alt proteins. But that is true of all policy, especially all international policy. If influencing policy money were essay, lobbyists wouldn't exist. That's why we need some lobbyists in our corner.
3) You say "I (and CXL) believe conservationists are not really trained to think about technology and major transformations as a force for good." I simply could not agree with this more. I think there are multiple reasons for this, many of which go beyond the scope of this reply to a reply of an EA Forum post. However, one that I think doesn't get mentioned enough, (and is very relevant for the EA Forum) is this: most conservationists chose to become conservationists because they love being in the field and working with animals. IF it is true that, per unit effort, the most impact you can have on the biodiversity crisis is developing solar energy to fight climate change, or developing alternative proteins to undermine demand for beef ranching in the Amazon, etc., then that has very uncomfortable implications for people who want to save animals by actually BEING AROUND them. If you love the Amazon rainforest and want to save it, feels bad to be told that perhaps the best thing you could do would be to move to London and fundraise for cultivated beef.
I'm not suggesting that all field biologists become cultivated meat fundraisers. I am a field biologist myself, and am happiest in the field. I believe it is important work. I'm just saying some EA-coded arguments in favor of developing alt proteins can threaten some conservationists' visions of what it means to sacrifice to protect the rainforest.