This makes important points about strategy in a field where a lot is yet to be mapped and defined, and this is potentially useful in order to do that. I appreciate your concision, too.

The most important asymmetry for animal advocates seems to be the truth asymmetry, especially moral alignment to consumers. One of the only reasons I can find to feel hopeful about farmed animal advocacy is that animal advocates are likely to be much more aligned with the general preferences of individual consumers than those who wish to encourage factory farming. Optimistic scenarios of AGI development allowing for better decision-making could increase the chances that these consumer preferences can be leveraged (though I'm not sure how hopeful I am about this for now). 

An asymmetry that seems more doubtful to me is the motivational asymmetry: I don't get the impression that the majority of animal advocates are strongly motivated by reducing animal suffering, and there might be a sufficient number of stakeholders (in a broad sense) in animal agriculture who are likely to be as motivated as the minority of "highly motivated" animal advocates.

This will probably be helpful for my own strategic thinking on this question, so thank you for posting this!

I found this post excellent and original. SARP is an immense problem and still seems crucially neglected within EA animal advocacy, perhaps because it's still difficult to find good theories of change aimed at preventing it. This also might be the first piece I encounter that treats SARP as more than a short-termist concern.

While I superficially agree with the overall point, I do have a few cruxes. "[...] advocacy towards considering the suffering of mammals farmed for their meat, seems to be contributing to the growth of the farming of smaller animals" seems like a core claim, and yet there's no link or footnote for tentative evidence^[1]. Yes, vegan advocacy and SARP have both grown in the past ten years, but does correlation imply causation?

My second crux ends up being kind of the same as the first one. I find both Sentientia and Reversomelas implausible, because I find it unlikely that the values of a tiny minority of present-day humans (animal advocates) will have a strong effect on the values of society in the future. 

Overall, while I found the post enriching, I find myself disagreeing with the premise somewhat. Your description of the present, as well as those of both futures, seem to give too much weight to moral adovcacy, compared to other factors. While I think that the size of animals that will be farmed in the future matters a lot, I think that the factors that will determine that are neither the way current vegans talk about animals, nor the choices we make in welfare campaigns during this decade.

1. ^{^}

   Since veganism / antispeciesism opposes the farming of small animals, by contrast with environmentalists who are likelier to be favorable to insect farming for pet feed or honey production while being critical of the farming of large animals, there is a strong "superficial" case for thinking that the vegan / sentientist meme is likelier to attenuate SARP than to worsen it. Another point would be the (very minor) waves that shrimp welfare campaigns have made recently.

   There are obvious counterpoints to my position though: cow-focused environmental / leaning vegan material like Cowspiracy has probably worsened SARP on the margin.

I thought of insect farming, but this is definitely one too!

To be precise, I didn't say the post committed any norm violation (and Henry Stanley didn't either), I made the vaguer claim that it doesn't fit the standards of discussion that are often seen on the EA Forum (a "generous" approach, scout mindset).

I appreciate some of the concerns raised here, and share some of them myself (I think focusing on "rights", especially in the way Francione and Charlton usually frame them, has been unhelpful in animal ethics, especially when it comes to the discipline's public image).

However, while I don't want to be holding linkposts to unreasonable standards (and the post would probably have been more nuanced if it had been planned as an EA Forum linkpost), I did find the article quite uncharitable to the two things it critiques: the calling into attention of the harms that can come to domestic animals, and minimalist axiologies. 

Regarding the former: in the comments, you mention second-order effects that could come from "humane farming" in the future, but in the post itself, you don't link the strays whose lives you acknowledge to be bad to the breeding of pets themselves. Currently, domestic animals are often bred in operations with poor welfare standards, and many are mistreated and abandoned by their owners. I do think Francione and Charlton are not doing the cause a favor by pointing to "rights" instead of the tangible, terrible experiences that millions of domestic animals face every year, but I don't think it can be said that there's "no trade-off" with another's interests here: if we focus on domestic animals that will live long, good lives, and think it's important that more exist and thus think that the pet industry should continue existing as it currently does, this will cause more strays (not to mention all the short and miserable lives that end at the puppy mills itself), and more domestic animals who might end up in homes where they are mistreated. 

So to me, this example isn't a spotless application of the idea you wish to defend: but I'm also not sure there are any good applications of this idea that can be as broad as "the existence of pets", as there are generally significant trade-offs with other's interests when creating good lives, as our resources could be allocated elsewhere (as has been pointed out by Magnus Vinding).

Regarding the latter: calling a philosophical position "a pathology" with no further justification is not the sort of thing I usually expect to find on the forum, though it's still common when it comes to minimalist axiologies and related views.

I realize I didn't choose a clear position on this in my description, and I'm actually not sure. I'd call a complete, seemingly irreversible collapse of civilization, even with humans remaining on earth (what the outcome of a nuclear war could be, for example), an X-risk even if it's not full-on extinction, but when it comes to lock-in and disempowerment, since humans (and presumably other animals) remain numerous and living, it doesn't feel like it should be part of the same question. I'd say my question is about X-risks involving death and destruction (or even mass sterilization), rather than a change in who controls the outcome.

I read this on the morning of a sunny national holiday that I spent indoors, typing away as usual, and I came back to it three times, it really resonates. I might even translate it in French, crediting you (if that's alright) and share it with acquaintances (or simply paraphrase it) next time they seem confused or worried by me choosing to make work my main focus in life. I really like the last sentence in particular.

We should promote AI safety ideas more than other EA ideas

AI Safety work is likely to be extremely important, but "other EA ideas" is too broad for me to agree. It would mean, for example, that it's more important than the "three radical ideas" and I have trouble agreeing with that.

We should focus more on building particular fields (AI safety, effective global health, etc.) than building EA

I don't have very specific arguments. EA community-building seems valuable, but I do think that work on specific causes can be interesting and scalable (for example, Hive, AI for Animals, of the Estivales de la question animale in France, all concretely seems like good ways to draw new individuals into the EA/EA-adjacent community).

Most AI safety outreach should be done without presenting EA ideas or assuming EA frameworks

Agree "on principle", clueless (and concerned) on consequences.

From my superficial understanding of the current psychological research on EA (by Caviola and Althaus), a lot of core EA ideas are unlikely to really resonate with the majority of individuals, while the case for building safer AI seems to have broader appeal. Nonetheless, I do worry that AI Safety with a lack of EA ideas involved is more likely to favor an ethics of survival rather than a welfarist ethic, is unlikely to take S-risks / digital sentience into account, so it also seems possible that scaling in that way could have very negative outcomes.