All of jasonk's Comments + Replies

Thank you for sharing so many thoughts. I encourage you to push further, and I'm intersted in talking or collaborating as well. I have been involved in different types of direct advocacy in the past and have been most active in recent years as a donor - primarily to groups I believe may move animal product alternatives forward and which are being overlooked by other donors.

One thing I've been curious about is whether doing explicit moral education is useful and in what mode. Animal Ethics is the group that comes to mind that seems to be doing the most of t... (read more)

"My contributions in this section are to point out that as morally driven (and charity funded) advocates, our comparative advantage is to emphasise the moral arguments, and this could be more effective anyway."

I think this is spot-on, and I agree that moral advocacy is very much neglected.

My suggestion would be to have no process other than general social  sanctions. I don't think it makes sense to make any person or entity an authority over "effective altruism" any more than it would make sense to name a particular person or entity an authority over the appropriate use of "Christian" or "utilitarian".

I believe you're introducing a new kind of connection when you talk about usage of the heart-in-lightbulb image. I couldn't tell you who originally produced that image, but I assume it was connected to CEA. I agree that using an image wit... (read more)

Even if you think you have a good reason to use EA in your marketing, you should still get CEA's permission first.

I strongly disagree with the idea that CEA (or any person or entity) should have that kind of ownership over "effective altruism". It's not a brand, but a concept whose boundaries are negotiated by a wide variety of actors.

"I lead the Israeli community of Women in Data Science" and videos in Hebrew.  :-)

I'm not sure if you live in Israel - just seeing signs suggesting it on your website - but have you contacted The Modern Agriculture Foundation (https://www.modern-agriculture.org/)? I know they're in touch with many companies locally and may have ideas about funding locally as well.

If there were cost-efficient leverage points, it might be worth investing some amount of money and effort in.

A non-exhaustive list of semi-conjoint reasons:

• One believes abortion is a grave moral wrong and a lot occur each year.
• One doesn't believe abortion is a grave moral wrong, but assigns some weight to the view's correctness. Even assigning a 10% chance to the view's correctness still means a lot is potentially at stake.
• There might be relatively easy ways to make a difference and have other positive, follow-on effects. For example, male contraceptives m

> Another possibility is that the industry is simply run into the ground through costly welfare reforms and competition through alternatives. Maybe this wouldn't remove all animal exploitation, and some animal products would still be demanded as a luxury good, but it would seem pretty significant if the reform path way could bring us that far, would you agree?

I agree that would be significant. I suppose I remain skeptical that costly welfare reforms are realistic and will go very far.

Thanks for explaining your points further. I appreciate the exch... (read more)

Thank you for encouraging me to go back and re-read. I had missed several of your points when skimming yesterday.

I recall Erik Marcus making the case for what I believe he called "dismantlement theory" in his book "Meat Market" (2005). He essentially says that animal protectionists should engage in welfare campaigns that incrementally make animal use more expensive until it's discontinued.

To restate your description of the reform pathway, I believe you're saying that welfare campaigning could continue up to a point and then transition to asking for outrigh... (read more)

In terms of pathways to ending animal use, I believe the strongest abolitionist argument against animal protectionism is that welfare campaigning doesn't in theory or practice seem to lead to non-use. Rather, at best, welfare campaigning leads to use that involves less suffering per animal, while potentially having negative, unintended impacts (the kind pointed at by Francione). I don't believe the article addresses this argument.

I applaud the discussion of this important topic.

I corresponded with the author while he wrote it. He's a very interesting, kind, funny, and motivated person.

Maybe interesting to you: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/r2Sw6fFYNy8PPRiAH/evaluating-communal-violence-from-an-effective-altruist

If you don't feel financially secure, it's likely going to affect your productivity a lot. Financial issues affect one's mental health, relationships, children, etc.

In my own experience, as I've gotten older, I've come to appreciate the importance of financial security much more than when I was young, in particular to being able to make a sustainable impact and a bigger impact in the future.

Hi George,

These are interesting ideas generated from your first-hand experience.

Have you already tried contacting The Good Food Institute (https://gfi.org/contact/)? They have a lot of resources and advice to offer entrepreneurs in the alternative protein space.

Does The Pledge include not eating or "having drinks" at non-vegan establishments?

I'm interested, because I'm wondering if The Pledge is concerned with (a) normalizing patronage of non-vegan restaurants and/or (b) paying money to restaurants whose business model is premised on the exploitation of animals.

I think what you're saying is basically right, and it's an important topic to discuss further.

This is more of a technical point, but I don't you need to worry about whether a miscarriage or abortion kills a human. Rather, you the relevant question is whether the being killed matters. (My own intuition isn't very strong that beings very early in development matter morally a lot, but I recognize that many people have the opposite intuition and I'm a bit moved by arguments based on potential (like from Don Marquis), and I'm willing to assign a probability to ... (read more)

This is interesting and I look forward to reading more.

A more negative reading of this information would suggest that the issue may not be lack of fundraising skill within the organizations but rather that many of the interviewed ACE selected charities don't get the funding they want because most people, or the donors the charities care about, don't agree with ACE's or the CEOs' self-assessments that the charities are worth funding. That is, these folks may not donate for reasons having to do with the organizations not because of lack o... (read more)

I don't know but I sent their info@ email a message to ask. I'm curious as well. If I get a response, I'll post it.

And Giridharadas does argue that the wealthy have undue influence on policy and further that the kinds of philanthropy the wealthy engage in doesn't actually affect the unfair systems that helped make them wealthy to begin with and that perpetuate inequality.

On the subject of recognizing the moral worth of animals, Subhuman: The Moral Psychology of Human Attitudes to Animals by TJ Kasperbauer offers a good summary of issues. In particular, he argues that there are psychological processes at work that humans frequently use to distance themselves from animals that are different than what they apply to humans, though there are cases of overlap too.

Fwiw, I didn't find anything particularly actionable in the book. But I do think he argues well that different approaches to motivating people to morally care abou... (read more)

Thanks for the link.

Did they have any suggestions for possible interventions based on these findings? Do you have any?

I'm not in a position to evaluate the strength of the argument of the paper you make versus any other scholarly work on the topic, but there is a book out there that makes the case that moral arguments have played a role in slavery abolition, though perhaps more so in other countries.

See 'Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention' by Neta Crawford.

Brian Tomasik.

This advertisement for a Faculty Ethics Bowl on investment in the far future made me think of the anti-debate type concept. It's not exactly that, but they say: "But this won’t be your ordinary run-of-the-mill debate. Ethics Bowl is very different from traditional debate formats. The teams are docked for using rhetoric, spin, aggression, and clever rationalization. Instead, each team is judged on the basis of active listening, flexibility, collaboration, and analytical rigor—essential ingredients for a meaningful discussion on difficult topics."

See https://news.ucsc.edu/2019/05/faculty-ethics-bowl.html

Since I just listened to it I can't help but see parallels to Mauricio Miller describing the certain visions the poor need to latch onto in order to be lifted from poverty: http://www.econtalk.org/mauricio-miller-on-poverty-social-work-and-the-alternative/

I doubt there's a good way of manipulating EA culture to present the variety of visions people would need to jump on board. I suspect it will take a decent amount of time for EA to mature and develop before there are the multiplicity of alive paths that will attract a greater number of people.

Thanks, Michael. When you talked to GFI or researched them did you find anything indicating they would be able to meaningfully spend $2.6 million? Or are you taking it on faith given your positive interactions with you had with them and their strong evidence mindedness?

I ask because I'm similarly interested in donating to spur the development of animal product alternatives. To date, it's seemed like GFI has had no issue raising money.

New Harvest has also done pretty well in raising money, and one thing I've liked about them is that they continually find ne... (read more)

In contemporary ethics, Derek Parfit has tried to find convergence in his 'On What Matters' books.

This is a nice article. Thanks for writing it.

Regarding: "Consideration of the far future is the strongest factor in favor of prioritizing animal advocacy for many long-time EAs, including myself."

How do you see animal advocacy as a cause area stacking up against work on existential risks?

Please accept my apologies!

I learned the application was made using a different email address than I sent the invite to. Not the best customer experience but it makes sense why it happened.

It seems kind of obnoxious that this message was sent to people who were already explicitly rejected.

Hey NAME, quick update for folks that aren't going to be able to attend EA Global this year.

For the next few days, if you nominate five people who you think might want to go to EA Global we'll send each of them a free copy of Doing Good Better for applying and we'll give you a free EA t-shirt. We'll stop giving away tickets when we run out. Sound fair?

Did some mailing lists get mixed up?

This is a very nice post. I very much agree with these statements:

1. "This means that the relative value of donations to cellular agriculture research and animal activism at any given point will largely be constrained by how promising cellular agriculture appears at the time, and its need for funding."

2. "This does not mean the mix of strategies which constitutes animal activism at present is optimal. For instance, the non-negligible possibility of cost-competitive cellular agriculture may imply the need for a greater balance of liberationist

"So welfarism did not prevent European countries from eventually adopting rights-like reforms."

What do you have in mind when you mention rights-like reforms?

I'm also increasingly skeptical about persuasion on its own, so I'm interested in this line of thinking.

Can you say more about what you mean by "institutional change" in the context of animal rights? What are some examples of what would qualify?

"Given the extremely high recidivism rate, we reasoned that most of the people who had “liked” a vegetarian Facebook page in the past would have gone back to eating meat."

What reason do we have to believe that people don't curate their profiles? That is, is there evidence that people don't update their profiles as their beliefs and behaviors change?

"The average cost of getting a person in the former-vegetarian community to pledge to go veg (again) and order an MFA Vegetarian Starter Guide was about 2-3 times less ($2.65) than for the general... (read more)

This is a thought-provoking post.

It makes me wonder how much Homo erectus or even early agriculturalists would find our values and projects desirable and worthy. Or have we already diverged too much for them?

There must be a literature on this at least. Maybe as it relates to moral progress?

I'm curious under what circumstances we can judge thinking to be better or worse but can't make such judgments of "metamoral reasoning".