Thanks for this,
Just wanted to note a misframing of the slaughterhouse ban post.  You have written
 "found ~40% supported banning slaughterhouses or said ‘don’t know / no opinion’ to questions, highlighting a large discrepancy"-which I think is taken directly from the latest "EA & LW Forums Weekly Summary"  rather than the slaughterhouse ban post.
This makes it seem like 60% opposed and then 40% combined EITHER supported or had no opinion, when in fact the 2017 Sentience Institute result was 43% supported, 11% chose don't know,  46% o... (read more)

We should also note that Norwood (one of the authors who replicated SI’s original 2017 study) this year ran a new slaughterhouse ban survey experiment  ([Britton & Norwood 2022](https://doi.org/10.1017/aae.2022.17)) and found lower support. (I only just received the data from them so I couldn’t include it in the post).

Here is my summary from just skimming the article and quickly aggregating the data.

They test a hypothesis that the question ordering in the 2017 SI study cued respondents' ideal self (like whether voting is a moral virtue) ... (read more)

Thanks for reading and engaging with our work!

• In 2019 we conducted some exploratory small-N, low-confidence studies on this topic that informed these high-quality, larger N studies. We feel comfortable presenting these recent results as we want to promote the norm of advocates choosing strategies and messages based on the best quality evidence, so would rather the community update based on the results of high-quality studies rather than low-confidence small-N studies where the wrong inferences may be drawn.
• [Update 2022-Nov-18: I added a methods section to

Thanks for engaging with the report. I'll offer a response since Tapinder's summer fellowship has ended and I was her manager during the project. I've made a general comment in response to Tristan that applies here too.

On your comment specifically, the "malthusian trap" is empirically not always supported. A population can approach or be at its carrying capacity and still have adequate resources, for instance if they simply do not reproduce as much due to less resource surplus.

Thanks for engaging with the report. I'll offer a response since Tapinder's summer fellowship has ended and I was her manager during the project.

Firstly, as a response to both you and Max.

Those are very fair concerns. I tend to think that in the very nascent WAW field tractability is such a big issue that focusing only on the most painful deaths of wild animals leaves us with few (if any?) tractable things to do. Until we gain greater knowledge of what to do, there is value in some WAW resources going towards trying out things that look more tractable. In ... (read more)

For something similar, see David Manheim's 2021 list

Net worth & Charity Pledges

Elon Musk: $205 billion - Giving Pledge (GP), 50% 
Jeff Bezos:  $200 billion - No pledge (None) 
Bernard Arnault:$159 billion -  None 
Bill Gates: $151 billion - GP, ~100% 
Mark Zuckerberg: $136 billion - Non-specific, 99% 
Larry Page: $126 billion - None 
Sergey Brin: $121 billion - None 
Steve Ballmer: $107 billion - None 
Larry Ellison: $101 billion - GP, 95% 
Warren Buffett: $101 billion- GP, 99%

Thanks Jamie! We struggled a lot with this issue when writing the post.

I'm not really sure I see a problem or a difference with the "which megaproject ideas can we think of?"/ "how rapidly will we get diminishing returns on further investment in various plausibly cost-effective project ideas?" distinction. I think if the answer to the second question is "quickly and with only a few million $" then you cut the idea from the list. It's part of the way to arrive at answers to "which megaproject ideas can we think of?". Other ideas floated seeme... (read more)

Thanks for your thoughts on the different approaches Zane, do you have an estimate of when your proposed approach would bear fruit in terms of a scalable intervention?

As Sebastian noted, in-ovo is already being done in two countries with chick culling prohibition legislation, and the Metaculus forecasting community median estimates most eggs produced in the EU will be sexed before hatching by October 2025, and most eggs produced in the USA will be sexed before hatching by 2033 (but a major U.S. supermarket chain will sell “no-kill eggs” in at least 25 sta... (read more)

How do you think this approach (make male chickens lay eggs if I understand correctly) compares to other solutions being proposed/rolled out:

• the various in-ovo sexing technologies to find the male eggs and destroy them/or process them into commerical eggs before they hatch- Respeggt eggs are already available for sale in Germany, France, and The Netherlands and Open Phil has funded the Egg-Tech prize

• change the sex of the embryo in the egg https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/jan/31/good-vibrations-sound-waves-eggs-ethical-slaughter-male-chicks

• cre

For those interested in participating  in the Metaculus tournament, I have written up an essay on my reasoning.

Makes sense. Made a few edits along those lines.
Genuinely appreciate suggestions on how to make our summaries more useful to readers, so thanks again. 

(Note that I've replaced that exact sentence with a new paragraph about plant-based and conventional meat production volumes in response to a comment from Stefan.)

Thanks!

The production volumes were not chosen as a comparison to plant-based meat. It was more that we started with an upper target we thought would be meaningful (arriving at the >50M metric tons in 2051) and then wanted to add an intermediate time prediction. >1M metric tons we thought could indicate cultured meat was "on track" since it would have exceeded mere startup volume, and then t... (read more)

Thanks for the suggestion. I've added a few production numbers of plant-based and conventional meat after the first table in the results section to provide this context.

One reason we didn't ask questions about "what % of meat production will be cultured meat in 20XX" was that it would require forecasters to also produce models of total meat production (including plant-based and funghi-based meat). This seemed overly taxing and could introduce a lot of unclear underlying assumptions. We did ask  "What will total global conventional meat and seafood pro... (read more)

Another example for "V. Factory farming might spread to space - Some proponents of space colonization include factory farming in their plans"

"North Carolina State University is now taking applicants for its Nuggets on Mars program [ . . .] The multi–step, year–long program will involve teachers learning STEM principles behind poultry production and the unique challenges of raising chickens on Mars [. . .] At the end of the program, the participants will be tasked with putting together a unit for their class focused on developing ideas on way... (read more)

1. DG Connect proposed the AI Act. Rauh's (2019) study of 2,200 proposals for regulations and directives that the Commission tabled between 1994 and 2016 suggests DG Connect proposals have a 40-55% chance that the adopted law equals what the Commission has originally proposed.
   Does your team have any internal estimates of how likely the final law will equal the original proposal? Or perhaps more importantly, how likely the sections of the original proposal that you like will remain intact?
2. Given the importance of the Council and qualified majority voting do you

Commissioner for Health and Food Safety, Stella Kyriakides said "this has reached today a record of over 40,000 contributions. I think you will all agree with me, dear members, that this clearly shows how much animal welfare matters to our citizens."
H/T Jan Sorgenfrei again

More than 10,000 EU citizens have completed the EU animal welfare survey in the last week alone. Good work!
H/T Jan Sorgenfrei for informing me about the response number update. 

Thanks for adding that Anima link Peter. Following the video guide on that page is what I would suggest anyone filling in this survey do for the most impact, unless they have strong reasons to answer the questions differently. 

I'd also add that in the last section "14. Is there any other comment you would like to add?", which the video doesn't cover, one may want to use that space to address other issues such as requesting bans on octopus farming and fur farming (though I personally am a little sceptical the EU can/will outright ban an entire sector)

Just want to flag that animal advocacy organizations in the Open Wing Alliance (OWA) and Eurogroup for Animals (EfA) networks have been trying to coordinate the responses to this survey to ensure a consistent ask is made.

I'd encourage anyone interested in filling out this survey to make contact with the OWA or EfA groups (or other effective animal advocacy organizations not in these associations) in your country for advice (the links above show who the member organizations in your country are). 

Eurogroup for Animals (a European Union lobby group representing other animal advocacy organizations) has encouraged EU citizens to submit feedback in the EU's animal welfare legislative review  - though it is better to make a submission on behalf of an organization rather than as an individual citizen.

In addition to answering the multiple choice/tick-box format questionnaire prepared by the European Commission (which addresses cage-free hens and fish welfare among other issues), one can add in a request to ban/restrict such cephalopod farming under t... (read more)

Thanks for this breakdown. I'd be curious if other parents here have radically different experiences, especially for kids of different ages.
Also, just to flag that stay at home dads do extremely important work too!

Thanks Misha. Can you share who the author of that document is? Looks like it might be Paul Christiano but I want to be sure.

I would break this down into a) the methods for getting research in front of government orgs and b) the types of research that gets put in front of them.

In general I think we (me for sure) haven’t been optimising for this enough to even know the barriers (unknown unknowns). I think historically we’ve been mostly focused on foundations and direct work groups, and less on government and academia. This is changing so I expect us to learn a lot more going forward.

As for known unknowns in the methods, I still don’t know who to actually send my research to in va... (read more)

It has been said before elsewhere by Peter, but worth stating again:read and practice Reasoning Transparency . Michael Aird compiled some great resources recently here.

I'd also refer people to Michael and Saulius' replies to arushigupta's similar subquestion in last year's RP AMA.

+1 to reporting numbers of animals instead of tonnage or biomass. The OWID meat and dairy production page does have a "numbers of animals slaughtered" section, so it would be great for that to be expanded both to other large numbers of animals (like various fish species, crustaceans, invertebrates) and beyond slaughter (such as alive at any one time).

Here are some articles with sources of such data. I haven't really looked into how hard they would be to maintain and update. It is biased towards data collected by Rethink Priorities staff because it was the ... (read more)

Fwiw, we tasked a couple of people in Singapore to try get the GOOD Meat cultured chicken nuggets from the 1880 member's club restaurant and they were unable to do so. The restaurant does not serve them directly anymore. It's only possible to order takeout, and they claim to only have 10 portions/week on Thursday lunches. Our volunteer was unsuccessful on two attempts to order them for delivery. We also heard claims that a specific Marriott Hotel serves the nuggets in person but we were unable to find information online and our other volunteer was unable to get it in person.

For those interested, here are the paragraphs that added new information on the CE Delft TEA that I hadn't considered or seen in other TEAs or reviews.

Cell growth

"For bacteria, one may generally subculture in the range of 1:10 to 1:100, depending on the bacterium. For stem cells, which are more fastidious, the highest subculture ratio (i.e. the amount of an old culture one uses to seed or start a new culture) is typically 1:5. This is significantly less than the 1:200 cell ratio that is proposed in the TEA. Experience dictates that if stem cells are sub-cu... (read more)

Fwiw, the Good Food Institute have produced a "Statement addressing techno-economic analyses" and a "Preliminary review of technical assumptions within the Humbird analysis"

Thanks for sharing your perspective.

The prediction "it is only a matter of time" has an effect on how to allocate EA resources depending on how long that matter of time is, even with additional resources going towards it, so I'd be curious what time period you'd assign for this and how you came to think that.

Even without having to construct brains, eyes, ears, tails, feathers, Humbird thinks it will still be very expensive at the moment since creating the immune system is so hard to create- so you need pharma grade standards with are expensive (one can dis... (read more)

I don't think it's reasonably likely this particular prediction was delayed by COVID-19, given they made this prediction in early 2019 about a product being on offer *in 2019*. I don't think there is much to suggest any impediments to a  product roll-out in 2019  from the pandemic since it only started having major impacts/reactions in 2020. 

For other predictions in this dataset made by companies, research institutes, and reported in the media it seems likely the pandemic threw up an unexpected obstacle and delay. However, that would presuma... (read more)

My colleague Linch asked me “to include a random sample of 9 predictions that resolved negatively.” I numbered the incorrect market/supermarket predictions and then randomised the list of numbers, and used an online random number generator to select nine numbers.
 

• March 2019 "JUST, the San Francisco-based company racing to be the first to bring cell-based meat to market, announced in a CBS San Francisco interview last month that they would debut their first product — a cultured chicken nugget — in Asia sometime this year"
• February 2018 "Tetrick claims h

I don't think Anders Sandberg uses the EA Forum, so I'll just repost what Anders wrote in reaction to this on Twitter:

"I suspect we have a "publication bias" of tech predictions where the pessimists don't make predictions (think the tech impossible or irrelevant, hence don't respond to queries, or find their long timescales so uncertain they are loath to state them).

In this case it is fairly clear that progress is being made but it is slower than hoped for: predictions as a whole made a rate mistake, but perhaps not an eventual outcome mistake (we will see... (read more)

See some updates in Lewis Bollard's latest Farmed Animal Welfare newsletter https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WF3Dxes2GJ6QhESfW/an-end-to-cages-in-europe

As some examples, Open Wing Alliance, Compassion in World Farming, Humane Society International/Europe (HSI), and Animal Protection Denmark (Dyrenes Beskyttelse) have already submitted comments to this feedback period.

For the subsequent public consultation process I would again highlight that Alice DiConcetto, of Animal Law Europe recently published a short manual on how to submit feedback to an EU Public Consultation that I think will be valuable for advocates. IMO, feedback will be more impactful if it sends a consistent message but avoids sending dupl... (read more)

I'm no expert, and appreciate the honest epistemic status, but I quickly asked an IBS R.D. who said:

"like irritable bowel disease, which is much worse"
->It’s inflammatory bowel disease not irritable. There’s irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease. There’s is no irritable bowel disease.

"there’s not that much you can do to diagnose it"
->IBS is diagnosed based off the Rome IV diagnostic criteria
 

Did you consider advocacy, as mentioned in a recent Future Perfect piece (talking about vaccine supply generally, not specific to India): https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22440986/covax-challenges-covid-19-vaccines-global-inequity

" Arguably, donors could have a bigger impact by donating to an advocacy group than by donating to Go Give One, though this field is so new that it’s hard to know for sure.

For donors who prefer to invest in advocacy, Dodson and Glassman both recommended three groups: Global Citizen, the ONE Campaign, and the Pandemic Action Netw... (read more)

Just noticed that the Animal Pain and Suffering section on the Wikipedia page on Denialism that you mention was deleted 29 November 2019 after discussion about what constitutes denialism.

Hi, I wrote the cause area EA Survey 2019 post for Rethink Priorities so thought I should just weigh in here on this minor point.

Fwiw, I think it's more accurate to say 22% of respondents thought Global Poverty should be at least one of the top priorities, if not the only top priority, but when forced to only pick only one of five traditional cause areas to be the top priority, 32% chose Global Poverty.

The data shows 476 of the 2164 respondents (22%) who gave any top priority cause rating in that question selected Global Poverty and "this should be the to... (read more)

Thanks for this!
I see you referenced Matthews et al. (2018), which I haven't read, and wondered if you had also seen the Authoritarian Ruling Elites Database, compiled by  Matthews (2019): “a collection of biographical and professional information on the individuals who constitute the top elite of authoritarian regimes.” Each of the project’s 18 datasets focuses on a particular regime, such as the military dictatorship that ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990. The biographical data-points include gender, occupation, dates of birth and death, tenure among th

+1 that the footnotes issue is quite an inconvenience. 

GWWC membership here refers to anyone who provided a year in response to the question in the EA Survey "If you have taken the Giving What We Can pledge, please note the year:"

Glad to hear that it is a useful resource!

I have updated the summary to include links to all the posts in the series so far (a pingbacks list will also appear at the bottom of the post if one opts into the experimental features on the Forum). The entire list of articles in the EA Survey 2019 Series (plus our other publications) can also be found on our website.

Good point! Thanks. I have added FHI to the text.

Since you mentioned it in your footnote, the EA Survey 2019 post on geographic distribution of EAs is out. We don't have information on party identification, but we can see that 2.23% of EAs living in the USA are politically affiliated with the Center Right and 1.19% with the Right (12.76% with Libertarianism & 76.56% with the Left or Center Left). Keeping in mind the caveat that our data only shows where an EA currently lives so an EA reporting both living in the USA and being on the Right-hand side of the political spectrum does not necessarily mean

Hi, thanks.

I agree that "If I have observed a p < .05, what is the probability that the null hypothesis is true?" is a different question than "If the null hypothesis is true, what is the probability of observing this (or more extreme) data”. Only the latter question is answered by a p-value (the former needing some bayesian-style subjective prior). I haven't yet seen a clear consensus on how to report this in a way that is easy for the lay reader.

The phrases I employed (highlighted in your comment) were suggested in writing by Daniel Lakens, although I

Hi,

On your first point, yes you are correct. Among those who prioritized Global Poverty OR Animal Welfare AND changed causes, pluralities of them changed to AI.

On your second point, I've now added a column in the group membership and demographics tables that shows the average for the sample as a whole. I hope this helps.

Hi, thanks! We will explore cause prioritization and the geographic distribution of EAs in a forthcoming post. We tried to keep a narrower focus in this post, on involvement in EA and just a few demographics, as we did in last year's post.