Great idea! Let me do this when I feel inspired and opinionated! 

Wow, great example. Thanks for sharing this. Everytime I see this happening, it frustrates me, but I don't actually have a clear idea of how to talk about it. 

That's really interesting, and makes a lot of sense. Thanks for sharing! 

Absolutely. Definitely this is still better than a world where people say "it's OK to whip a horse!"

I agree fully with the sentiment, but IMHO as a logical argument it fails, as so many arguments do, not in the details but in making a flawed assumption at the start. 

You write: "Clearly, in such a case, even though it would cost significant money, you’d be obligated to jump into the pond to save the child."

But this is simply not true. 

For two reasons:

1. If we are obligated, it is by social pressure rather than ethics. If we thought people would find out about it, of course we'd feel obligated. But if not, maybe we would walk past. The proof of this is in exactly what you're trying to discourage - the fact that when faced with a similar situation without the same social pressure, most people do not feel obligated. 

2. The scenario you describe isn't realistic. None of us wear $5000 suits. For someone who wears a $5000 suit, you're probably right. But for most of us, our mental picture of "I don't want to ruin my clothes" does not translate to "I am not willing to give up $5000." I'm not sure what the equivalent realistic scenario is. But in real cases of people drowning, choking or needing to be resuscitated, many people struggle even to overcome their own timidity to act in public. We see people stabbed and murdered in public places and bystanders not intervening. I do not see compelling evidence that most strangers feel morally compelled to make major personal risks or sacrifices to save a stranger's life. To give a very tangible example, how many people feel obligated to donate a kidney while they're alive to save the life of a stranger? It is something that many of us could do, but almost nobody does. I know that is probably worth more than $5000, but it's closer in order-of-magnitude than ruining our clothes. 

   Absolutely, it would be a better world for all of us if people did feel obliged to help strangers to the tune of $5000, but we don't live in that world ... yet.

The drowning child analogy is a great way to help people to understand why they should donate to charities like AMF, why they should take the pledge. 

But if you present it as a rigorous proof, then it must meet the standards of rigorous proof in order to convince people to change their minds. 

Additionally, my sense is that presenting it as an obligation rather than a free, generous act is not helpful. You risk taking the pleasure and satisfaction out of it for many people, and replacing that with guilt. This might convince some people, but might just cause others to resist and become defensive. There is so much evidence of this, where there are immensely compelling reasons to do things that even cost us nothing (e.g. vote against Trump) and still they do not change most people's behaviour. I think we humans have developed very thick skins and do not get forced into doing things by logical reasoning if we don't want to be. 

Formidable !! 

Great work Jen and Romain !

If you're desperate enough, I'm pretty good at BOTEC, and my French, while not great, isn't as bad as some other people's in the cohort, according to Romain ... 

Let me know if I can help!
 

This is fantastic!

First, because for too long the "good guys" have been doing "activist" things without the kind of impact that law-makers bring, while the "bad guys" have basically cut to the chase and gone directly to the halls of power, with lobbying, bribes (legal, in the form of support of campaigns, but basically they are bribes), etc. It's important that the good guys start fighting where it really matters. 

Second, because your plan is solid, tangible and achievable. 

IMHO, there is a huge range of action where political action would have strong popular support. While the vast majority of people are not "animal activists", they also would oppose many of the practices of factory farming (witness the success of campaigns against caged hens) - if they knew about them. So there is scope to make changes that will not seem radical (e.g. ruling that animals must be allowed outside and have space to move and be killed humanely and really basic stuff) which would have a huge impact on animal welfare. 

You don't need the politician to say "we need to all become vegans and no more meat-eating" - because, especially in France, that will not work. But a politician could say "We love our farmers. But there is a minority of farmers who are giving others a bad name by mistreating animals, and we will not tolerate that." Then if the farming-lobby (which anyway doesn't represent the majority of small farmers) want to come out and argue that it's not a minority, let them. I think it's a minority of farmers, but the majority of farm animals who are subject to factory-farming practices. 

So I can see CAP having a massive impact. Good luck!


PS did you intentionally choose CAP as a name (which, at least in anglophone countries, brings to mind the EU's Common Agricultural Policy - which may be one of the key things you'd want to change in the long term)? 

I love that you wrote this. 

I am so sick of seeing countries praised for having "enlightened" immigration policies when what they actually do is accept the migrants they need for their economy and reject the rest. 

They always justify this on the basis of the rights of individual migrants, but the net outcome is that some rich country has avoided the cost of educating and training a person with valuable skills, while some poor country has been deprived of the services of someone whom they paid to educate and train - but also, potentially, of one of the people who would have added a lot of value to their country. 

It's difficult to see this in most typical jobs (doctors, engineers, nurses, ...), but anyone who follows football (i.e. soccer) will understand how this works. The best soccer players from Africa and South America play in Europe. If we focus on their individual rights, then it feels unfair to deny them the chance to emigrate. But if we focus on the rights of people in their home countries, this is daylight robbery - countries which produce some of the best players in the world have mediocre leagues, while rich countries have high quality leagues, often mostly with foreign players. 

Obviously, in the case of football, it's not such a big deal. And, with football, at least they can still watch on tv, and the players will still (mostly) be available for the national team. 

With other jobs, the person is just lost to the country, and the result will be an inferior quality of life for those who remain. 

If we accept that the individual's rights to emigrate trump those of their country of origin, at minimum we need some form of compensation which is appropriate to the scale of the problem. 

I don't have a solution - but sometimes I worry that we're very quick to jump to the conclusion that the individual's freedom is more important than everything else, especially when it's convenient. The countries who use this argument don't hesitate to deny the same freedom to immigrate to people who do not have useful skills, and they don't seem to lose too much sleep over it. 

It will be very difficult for cultivated meat to scale in a world where 99% of people and 99.99% of politicians just stick their heads in the sand and pretend the current systems - with massive animal suffering, climate damage, antibiotic use and increasing land-use - is sustainable. 

Once we stop thinking of this as "can we make it work?" but as "we have to make this work!" we'll discover solutions. 

For example, regarding contamination (comments below), maybe the right approach is not to look for 0% risk of contamination, but to find the right sweet-spot, even if that means some batches need to be discarded. Remember that the correct comparison for this is not pharma, but rather factory farming, with animals often living in their own excrement and being pumped full of antibiotics to keep them "healthy", with terrible consequences not just for the animals but also for antibiotic resistance, which is now a major cause of human deaths. 

Yet, there are countries in the EU seeking to ban cultivated meat, or to stop it from being labelled "meat," as politicians bow to the power of the powerful agriculture sector. 

I don't have a solution (I wish!), but with elections coming up in so many countries, I wonder if there's an opportunity for many of us to ask politicians why they are not aggressively supporting and funding what is possibly the most important technological challenge the world is facing. 

I don't necessarily agree that the community is either complacent or complicit, but I do agree that this is potentially a massive reputational hazard. It's not about anyone proving that EA's are racist, it's just about people starting to subconsciously associate "racism" and "EA", even a tiny bit. It could really hurt the movement. 

Again, as per my comment above, I think there is great value in a firm rebuttal from a credible voice in the UK EA community. 

It's just absurd that one email from nearly 30 years ago, taken out of context, is being used to tar an entire global community. 

We also need to remember that back in 1996, when the email was written, the world was not in the state it's in now where people believe that any phrase, even if uttered provocatively or in jest, can be taken literally and assumed to represent a person's true beliefs, even if there are 10000 examples of them saying the exact opposite. I remember when I was in college it was quite normal to write or say shocking things just to get a reaction or a laugh, we didn't yet have the mentality that you shouldn't write or say anything that you wouldn't be happy to see on the front page of the Times.