All of Jross's Comments + Replies

Thank you to everyone who put so much time and energy into this program as well as this summary and willingness to share something which may be deemed as not having the best outcome. Strong upvote for sure.

Very impressive and comprehensive work! Thank you for doing all of this research and the clear and well organized write-up.

The years of life affected is a great number to have, but as you note, how positive the effects are is less clear.

That said, just based on the cost effectiveness, it seems that even small welfare increases from these commitments results in a lot of reduced direct suffering.

That would be pretty convenient for those in a similar position as myself!

Thanks, I agree more centralized is probably good. (providing the search and organizational features are reliable).

Thanks for doing this survey and write up, Joey.

A question I had that was prompted by the title and use of "AR" is to what degree do the survey respondents identify with "Animal Rights" vs. animal welfare, animal advocates, etc.

Was this 'AR' position something clarified in terms of identifying the individuals to survey, and were they asked what degree they identify with that terminology? I suspect it may have implications for the WAS related questions so I am more curious about that process.

Thanks!

2
Joey
6y
I have changed the word "rights" to "advocacy" to better reflect the content of the post. The survey was not targeted at rights or welfare particularly. It was just getting a sense of the broad EA animal space.

GMO´s are being used at significantly larger scales Sub-Saharan Africa

Which crops and traits are you referring to?

I can think of Burkina Faso which cultivated bt cotton (quite successfully). South Africa has good acreages of gm crops (corn, soy, cotton).. but in Sub-Saharan Africa? I am not aware of any GE crops that are being planted commercially. (Trials of disease resistant banana.. maybe?)

Sorry for not addressing the rest of your post, but that jumped out to me as being very incorrect.

2[anonymous]6y
Thanks for pointing that out. I checked again and you are indeed correct to point out the reluctance of Sub-Saharan countries towards GMOs, hence this was an overstatement I´ll correct. Next to the countries you mentioned, GMOs are also being used in Sudan. Right now, Nigeria is advocating for increased GMO usage and it remains to be seen how that goes. Anyway, when writing this I had other countries in the global south in mind that use GMOs excessively.

Cowspiracy seemed to have caused a lot of dietary shifts in individuals, but I'm a bit worried that the environmentalist perspective might cause vegans as a group to shift even more towards ecosystem conservation, which might be bad for wild animals. Even excluding WAS, the film's environmental messaging can often lead to people cutting out/back on beef consumption and instead eating more chickens, which is probably more harmful.

Interesting. I have a similar post about this issue where I make the suggestion that vegans with cats should make a type of "factory farming offset" by donating to Animal Charity Evaluators.

My math was a bit off as I used slaughter weight for broiler chickens and not market weight, so thanks for bringing up that distinction.

0
Avi Norowitz
8y
I'm not a proponent of ethical offsets, in part because of the reasons given by Claire Zabel here: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/ry/ethical_offsetting_is_antithetical_to_ea/ Further, there's really no good evidence in support of Animal Charity Evaluator's cost effective estimates for vegan outreach. And in the case of corporate campaigns, it's not clear that the organizations effective in this area still have room for funding.