All of Seth Ariel Green 🔸's Comments + Replies

It depends on the specifics, but I live in Brooklyn and getting deliveries from Whole Foods means they probably come to my house in an electric truck or e-cargo bike. That's pretty low-emission. (Fun fact: NYC requires most grocery stores to have parking spots.)

The key point, though, is that cases like Ocado and Albert Heijn are exceptions, not the norm. Most online supermarkets lack the resources and incentives to systematically review and continuously update tens of thousands of SKUs for vegan status.

I'd go a step further: I suspect many supermarkets are going to perceive an incentive not to do this because it raises uncomfortable questions in consmers' minds about the ethical permissibility/goodness of their other items.

I wonder if this will be more palatable to them if "vegan" is just one of several filters, ... (read more)

Thank you, that's a very kind thing to say!

Probably because life-saving interventions do not scale this well. It's perfectly plausible that some lives can be saved for $1600 in expectation, but millions of them? No. 

Peter Rossi’s Iron Law of Evaluation: the “expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero.” If there were something that did scale this well, it would be a gigantic revolution in development economics. For discussion, se Vivalt (2020), Duflo (2004), and, in a slightly different but theoretically isomorphic context, Stevenson (2023).

On the othe... (read more)

Hi Jeff, I think we're talking about the same lifespan, my friend was talking about 1 year of continuous use (he works in industrial applications). 

Earlier this year year, I sent a Works in Progress piece about Far UV to a friend who is a material science engineer and happens to work in UV applications (he once described his job as "literally watching paint dry," e.g. checking how long it takes for a UV lamp to dry a coat of paint on your car). I asked

I'm interested in the comment that there's no market for these things because there's no public health authority to confer official status on them. That doesn't really make sense to me. If you wanted to market your airplane as the most germ-free or

It's an interesting question. 

From the POV of our core contention --  that we don't currently have a validated, reliable intervention to deploy at scale -- whether this is because of absence of evidence (AoE) or evidence of absence (EoA) is hard to say. I don't have an overall answer, and ultimately both roads lead to "unsolved problem." 

We can cite good arguments for EoA (these studies are stronger than the norm in the field but show weaker effects, and that relationship should be troubling for advocates) or AoE (we're not talking about ver... (read more)

Hi David,

To be honest I'm having trouble pinning down what the central claim of the meta-analysis is.

To paraphrase Diddy's character in Get Him to the Greek, "What are you talking about, the name of the [paper] is called "[Meaningfully reducing consumption of meat and animal products is an unsolved problem]!" (😃)  That is our central claim. We're not saying nothing works; we're saying that meaningful reductions either have not been discovered yet or do not have substantial evidence in support.

However the authors hedge this in places

That's author, sin... (read more)

When pushed, I say I am "approximately vegan" or "mostly vegan," which is just typically "vegan" for short, and most people don't push. If a vegan gives me a hard time about the particulars, which essentially never happens, I stop talking to them 😃

IMHO we would benefit from a clear label for folks who aren't quite vegan but who only seek out high-welfare animal products; I think pasturism/pasturist is a possible candidate.

Love talking nitty gritty of meta-analysis 😃 

1. IMHO, the "math hard" parts of meta-analysis are figuring out what questions you want to ask, what are sensible inclusion criteria, and what statistical models are appropriate. Asking how much time this takes is the same as asking, where do ideas come from?
2. The "bodybuilding hard" part of meta-analysis is finding literature. The evaluators didn't care for our search strategy, which you could charitably call "bespoke" and uncharitably call "ad hoc and fundamentally unreplicable." But either way, I read about

David, there are two separate questions here, which is whether these analyses should be done or whether I should have done them in response to the evaluations.  If you think these analyses are worth doing, by all means, go ahead!

A final reflective note: David, I want to encourage you to think about the optics/politics of this exchange from the point of view of prospective Unjornal participants/authors. There are no incentives to participate. I did it because I thought it would be fun and I was wondering if anyone would have ideas or extensions that improved the paper. Instead, I got some rather harsh criticisms implying we should have written a totally different paper. Then I got this essay, which was unexpected/unannounced and used, again, rather harsh language to which I objecte... (read more)

For what it's worth, I thought David's characterization of the evaluations was totally fair, even a bit toned down. E.g. this is the headline finding of one of them:

major methodological issues undermine the study's validity. These include improper missing data handling, unnecessary exclusion of small studies, extensive guessing in effect size coding, lacking a serious risk-of-bias assessment, and excluding all-but-one outcome per study.

David characterizes these as "constructive and actionable insights and suggestions". I would say they are tantamount to as... (read more)

@geoffrey We'd love to run a megastudy! My lab put in a grant proposal with collaborators at a different Stanford lab to do just that but we ultimately went a different direction. Today, however, I generally believe that we don't even know what is the right question to be asking -- though if I had to choose one it would be, what ballot intiative does the most for animal welfare while also getting the highest levels of public support, e.g. is there some other low-hanging fruit equivalent to "cage free" like "no mutilation" that would be equally popular. But... (read more)

That's interesting, but not what I'm suggesting. I'm suggesting something that would, e.g., explain why you tell people to "ignore the signs of my estimates for the total welfare" when you share posts with them. That is a particular style and it says something about whether one should take your work in a literal spirit or not, which falls under the meta category of why you write the way you write; and to my earlier point, you're sharing this suggestion here with me in a comment rather than in the post itself 😃 Finally, the fact that there's a lot of uncer... (read more)

By all means, show us the way by doing it better 😃 I'd be happy to read more about where you are coming from, I think your work is interesting and if you are right, it has huge implications for all of us. 

Observations:

1. Echoing Richard's comment, EA is a community with communal norms, and a different forum might be a better fit for your style. Substack, for instance, is more likely to reward a confrontational approach. There is no moral valence to this observation, and likewise there is no moral valence to the EA community implicitly shunning you for not following its norms. We're talking about fit.
2. Pointing out "the irony of debating “AI rights” when basic human rights are still contested" is contrary to EA communal norms in several ways, e.g. it's not intend

(Vasco asked me to take a look at this post and I am responding here.) 

Hi Vasco,

I've been taking a minute to reflect on what I want to say about this kind of project. A few different thoughts, at a few different levels of abstraction.

1. In the realm of politics, I'm glad the ACLU and FIRE exist, even if I don't agree with them on everything, because I think they're useful poles in the ecosystem. I feel similarly about your work. I think this kind of detailed cost-benefit work on non-standard issues, or on standard issues but that leads to non-standard co

I am amenable to this argument and generally skeptical of longtermism on practical grounds. (I have a lot of trouble thinking of someone 300-500 years ago plausibly doing anything with my interests in mind that actually makes a difference. Possible exceptions include folks associated with the Glorious Revolution.)

I think the best counterargument is that it’s easier to set things on a good course than to course correct. Analogy: easier to found Google, capitalizing on advertisers’ complacency, than to fix advertising from within; easier to create Zoom than ... (read more)

I bought the 3M mask on your recc 😃 

Hi Ben, I agree that there are a lot of intermediate weird outcomes that I don't consider, in large part because I see them as less likely than (I think) you do. I basically think society is going to keep chugging along as it is, in the same way that life with the internet is certainly different than life without it but we basically all still get up, go to work, seek love and community, etc.

However I don't think I'm underestimating how transformative AI would be in the section on why my work continues to make sense to me if we assume AI is going to kill us... (read more)

I'd like to see a serious re-examination of the evidence underpinning GiveWell's core recommendations, focusing on

• how recent is the evidence?
• what are the core results on the primary outcomes of interest?
• How much is GiveWell doing add-on analysis/theorizing to boost those results into something amenable, or do the results speak for themselves?
• How reproducible/open-science-y/pre-registered/etc. are the papers under discussion?
• Are there any working papers/in-progress things worth adding to the evidence base?

I did this for one intervention in GiveWell should f... (read more)

something along these lines, though not exactly

I wonder what the optimal protein intake is for trying to increase power to mass ratio, which is the core thing the sports I do (running, climbing, and hiking) ask for. I do not think that gaining mass is the average health/fitness goal, nor obviously the right thing for most people. I'd bet that most Americans would put losing weight and aerobic capacity a fair bit higher.

Hi James, neat visualizations, and very validating that you were able to extend our work like this! We worked hard to make our materials legible but you don't really know how well that went until someone actually tries to use them 😃 So this is great to see.   

1. Yes, a switch away from chicken meat towards beef could be good under some circumstances/assumptions. But the goal of our experiment was to come up with an effect size large enough to take to Chipotle, and we don't think we found one. My guess is that the interspecies tradeoffs also would n

Totally, I did not mean to suggest that protein and fiber are fungible. Rather I wonder if plant-based options might do better to play to their strengths, one of which is fiber. 

I would also say that I've never noticed if the Sofritas portion is smaller than the equivalent animal-based portion but if that were true on average across Chipotles, it would suggest some interesting follow-ups: 

1. do servers implicitly believe that folks who order plant-based are more "health-conscious", whatever that means, and thus want smaller portions?
2. does Chipotle ha

It is possible that this will have transformative effects! Two pieces of counter-evidence worth considering:

1. The plant-based meat market grew rapidly in the 2010s -- beyond meat was introduced in 2009, Imposisble in 2016 -- and more or less peaked around 2021 and has been declining since. Meat is back on the menu, culturally and politically; Beyond Meat might go through bankruptcy in the next few years; and the percentage of vegetarians and vegans has remained constant over time at about 4-5% of the population. So to me, the story here is that plant-based m

Hi Chris, a few thoughts about this:

1. On the macro front, I sometimes wonder if the PMA companies shouldn't amp up the fiber content in their products and try to emphasize that as an under appreciated macro. (Personally I pay very little attention to my net macros so long as I'm generally eating healthy, real foods. When I'm thru-hiking it's a different story -- I tally my daily protein intake -- but also in that context I eat way, way more sugar.)
2. Upcharge was addressed by our study design because prices were kept constant (re: zero) but it's possible some f

If this subject is of interest, you might enjoy Matthew Scully's "Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy." His article a Brief for the Pigs gives a sense of his style & arguments:

> In the early 1980s, standing in the very place where Saint Francis lived, Pope John Paul II said of him: “His solicitous care, not only towards men, but also towards animals, is a faithful echo of the love with which God in the beginning pronounced his ‘fiat’ which brought them into existence. We too are called to a similar attitude. .... (read more)

Hi Dorsal, good questions:

1. In general, as an economist friend put it, "Changing options is a very strong intervention, like mechanically there should be an effect." So I would expect a new meat option -- BBQ chicken or whatever -- to attract customers. But you are right, we don't know that. On the other hand, our question was whether adding a chicken analogue would attract customers away from meat-based options, so whether a meat option would have also attracted customers is not really apropos of our estimand. It might help put our results in context, but i

Yes, I think there is something to this. We might have suboptimal talent distributions from a social POV if EAs are naturally attracted to certain kinds of work in a way that unconsciously/consciously influences career calculuses.

A general question about this advice, and other pieces in the same vein: What areas should fewer EAs work in? We've got to come from somewhere. 

More broadly, EA thinking places a high value on cost-benefit analysis. When talking about career stuff, that means opportunity costs. A version of that claim here would sound something like, "[some cause area] is oversaturated and could probably lose half of its current human capital without meaningful loss, which I believe for [reasons] and if those people moved into government and did [some stuff] then [good things] would happen..."

Without such a comparison, I'm afraid this case is not expressed in terms that EAs are likely to find persuasive.

Interesting! I believe I missed that interview, although a rep told the Times that same year that "sofritas accounts for about 3 percent of fillings." 

I recently learned that Steve Ellis (Chipotle founder) tried predominantly plant-based fast casual in 2024; apparently it didn't work out (although I'm still seeing a Yelp page?) and this winter he told Eater that  “veganism...is very polarizing, I’ve learned.”

 In a separate interview Ellis said “I think people will eat more plant-based diets and make that part of their life if there are bette... (read more)

I'm not in a position to fund this but I like your pitch a lot -- you check a lot of boxes that make me think 'this person is legit and knows what they're doing.' Good luck!

Hi there, just coming across this for the first time -- great resources and analysis, thank you! (I'm a researcher at the Humane and Sustainable Food Lab at Stanford and just wrapped up a meta-analysis on efforts to get people to reduce consumption of meat and animal products, most of which took place in the US and EU -- here's a forum summary). A few general observations:

1. In general, data collection in LMICs is a hard problem. If you look at a heat deaths per capita chart, it looks like Europe does a lot worse than Africa, which is substantially hotter and

Wild sardine and anchovy fishing also results in very low bycatch.^[23] As pelagic fish that swim in dense shoals near the surface, they are caught with purse seine nets rather than bottom trawls, avoiding seabed damage and minimising the risk of plastic pollution through ghost gear.

I would say this is the crux of the issue for me and I appreciate your addressing it directly. Looking at the cited research:

This paper presents a study of the Spanish purse-seine fleet operating in the Bay of Biscay during the years 2016–2019. It considers the species

This was also the book that persuaded (and alerted) me to ostrovgegansim 

Nice! I replied on substack. Your suggesitons largely jive with my experience.

I worry that the pro-AI/slow-AI/stop-AI has the salient characteristics of a tribal dividing line that could tear EA apart:

• "I want to accelerate AI" vs "I want to decelerate AI" is a big, clear line in the sand that allows for a lot clearer signaling of one's tribal identity than something more universally agreeable like "malaria is bad"
• Up to the point where AI either kills us or doesn't, there's basically in principle no way to verify that one side or the other is "right", which means everyone can keep arguing about it forever
• The discourse around it is mo

I think if I end up writing something that's particularly EA-aligned, e.g. a cost-benefit analysis of some intervention, I'd do that. as is I'm happy to err on the side of not annoying people when promoting my stuff 😃 

Hi Sarah, 

In general I'm grateful that you've put a lot of thought into this, I think it shows in a high-quality forum experience. A few observations:

1. I agree that changing the default Karma settings is fine, in part because it's easy for users to revert.^[1]
2. As to churned forum users who forget the forum exists -- EA is not for everyone. It's ultimately some pretty serious questions and it attracts serious people. I know it's your job to worry about this, but for my money, I do not think that such folks were likely to have generated the kind of content

I was just writing an email to a colleague about the difference between one-offs and repeated exposure. Just speculating here, but documentaries kind of are one-offs -- who in the world is going to watch Dominion a second time -- but op-eds, EA forum posts, etc. are more a a "repeated, spaced exposure" model of behavioral change. And that's going to mean a very different evaluation strategy.

As to personal connection to the material, you might enjoy 

👋 I have joined the modern world and am writing a Substack about research on ending factory farming 😃

Here's a post on a strong study about the effects of watching an especially upsetting documentary.

👋 thanks for all you do!

Regarding “There are various ways that the EA Forum falls short of other sites that better engage users, like Substack, Reddit, and Twitter” — I for one much prefer the forum to any of those platforms, and when you say “engage,” I hear “try to elicit compulsive behavior from.” I know that’s not what you mean, but for twitter and Reddit in particular, engagement looks like addiction for a lot of folks, as well as a profit model driven by outrage & slop. I would not like to see the forum imitate them.

Put differently, a lot of pla... (read more)

I see this issue as:

1. you're trying to gain traction among EAs
2. EAs have a norm of reaching out to groups for comment before publishing criticism of them
3. By not following that norm, you are alienating yourself from the community you're trying to woo

As to whether this norm is good or not, that ultimately boils down to the assumption of good faith. EAs tend to make that assumption about people who talk the talk, sometimes to our discredit.  I'd be interested in more discussion of this assumption, which I think is part of the "implicit curriculum" of joining ... (read more)

I think for the purposes of this comparison, non-profit and charity are probably not interchangeable, in the sense that a marginal donor with 5K to spend is almost certainly not going to donate that to Kaiser Permanente (although $1M does get you naming rights at a smaller chain!). So I guess whatever we're defining the average charity as, the distribution should probably exclude these big institutions that are nonprofit for a bunch of tax code reasons but in reality are just providing goods and services to clients in exchange for money. 

(colleges are an edge case here)

What is the average charity? I don't have a good intuition for what it looks like, is, how big it is, what it works on etc.^[1] I think pinning this down will help make the comparison clearer. Will, how do you think about this? 

1. ^{^}

   Sidenote: At least in the US, I would be open to the argument that the average charity -- defined as being the midpoint of some multidimensional array of size, cause area, staffing, location, etc. -- produces literally zero charitable benefit on net, and might even be doing harm. You might not share this intuition, b

Anyone else get a pig butchering scam attempt lately via DM on the forun? 

I just got the following message 

> Happy day to you, I am [X] i saw your profile today and i like it very much,which makes me to write to you to let you know that i am interested in you,therefore i will like you to write me back so that i will tell you further about myself and send you also my picture for you to know me physically. 

[EMAIL]

I reported the user on their profile and opened a support request but just FYI

I think that's a good idea -- or just post as yourself (?)

(Ofc I think I and others understand that things are in flux and this is all NBD)

👋 Looks interesting! What do you think about having the title reflect its origins, e.g. "linkpost: Climate Change Is Worse Than Factory Farming", or "suggested reading: [X]" or something like that?

At a glance right now, the UX here looks like the EA Forum Team is itself endorsing this pretty radical position. (FWIW I appreciate the drive to cross-post interesting material/the broader drive to improve the forum experience, I have been thinking about your other post a bit lately and hope to respond soon)