EK

emre kaplan🔸

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Forecasting

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148

Here's my understanding of the current state of evidence, keep in mind that I am not a researcher or grantmaker:

  1. To my knowledge there is no scientifically rigorous experiment showing that some intervention has a statistically significant effect on the number of vegans.
  2. Vegan education organisations also don't tend to report the number of counterfactual vegans they create, to some extent because of measurement difficulties.
  3. My guess is that most effective ways(having conversations about veganism with people who trust you) of spreading veganism can't be funded to scale up.
  4. Probably education initiatives produce small effects but we don't have sufficiently powered studies to catch these effects. So we have very little data to compare vegan education initiatives to each other.

Brigitte Gothière, Sébastian Arsac and Marek Voršilka

ChatGPT seems to have taken it from the training data, without much change. I will replace the translation with this one.

Do you currently think non-human animals are replaceable in a way humans aren't? Can a hedonist argue for that claim consistently?

What keeps you going when you are at your lowest?

In your previous writing on Animal Liberation, you state:

"With the benefit of hindsight, I regret that I did allow the concept of a right to intrude into my work so unnecessarily at this point; it would have avoided misunderstanding if I had not made this concession to popular moral rhetoric."

What do you currently think about using rights and justice jargon when advocating for animals? John Stuart Mill is currently regarded as an early proponent of several movements for rights without much controversy. He often made use of the terms "right" and "liberty" in his writings. On the other hand the word "right" is very loaded in animal advocacy world, with some insisting on a very specific, strictly deontological interpretation of the word. Should people who care about animal welfare dispense with the term "rights" or should they push for a more generic understanding of the term(e.g. fundamental interests that should be protected by the state) and keep using it? 

In your interviews, you tend to offer bullet-biting, pure utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas. What do you think about the concept of moral uncertainty, and how does it affect your decision-making? Do you sometimes consider providing answers that give credence to other moral theories in your responses?

You are both an academic philosopher and a public advocate for several causes. How do you balance the requirements of these two roles? Academic philosophy requires one to follow the arguments to their conclusions, no matter how controversial they are. This must affect advocacy work to some extent. What are the rules of thumb you follow?

You should be familiar with this from activism, people use "like"s and mass comments in social media to make bystanders more likely to believe in an idea or have certain attitudes just through social proof effect. I feel a similar vibe with discussions under heated posts.

I find it emotionally draining when heated topics become battlegrounds for social proofing through mass use of agreement vote/karma. It makes me feel like people are trying to manipulate me by illegitimate means and I'm a target of aggression. I don't have any good solutions here but I wanted to offer feedback on my experience.

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