with the ultimate aim of ensuring that an engaged EA would not need to check both the Forum and Substack.

I'm a more frequent Substack poster than I am an EA forum poster and I see the two serving pretty distinct needs. I think if I were to thread this needle (in your shoes and had unlimited labor), I'd also opt for "a weekly links and discussion thread". It could be separated by subject matter or something. Then again ,the Hive newsletter already kind of does this for EA posts that are related to animal welfare. so what additional need is being met? 

But also, we’re still figuring out what these relatively new mediums are fundamentally for. My own vote: I think the EA forum should be for things aimed at other EAs by EAs. Substack is aimed at reaching a broader audience. I don't see the two as potential substitutes.

Just my 2c.

By the way, if I wanted to filter out bots, I'd probably do something like, you have to post three comments before you can write your first post or quick take, and all three comments should pass some automated check of substantiveness. But I have not thought this through at all.

Interesting! some remarks.

1. You write "The lack of salience around the small animal replacement problem is also illustrated by a recent conversation I had with a researcher who has worked on meat consumption for 5+ years and said they had never considered the animal welfare tradeoff of switching from red to white meat." Good for you for getting it on their agenda I suppose 😃 but also 😱
2. I had read the Greene et al. meta once upon a time but totally forgotten about it, thank you for re-upping it. My colleagues and I found something similar in the attitude-behavior gap for interventions intended to reduce sexual violence. (My comment on that paper when I read it to prep our own meta was '"It is almost impossible to randomly assign people to groups in the field without impacting external validity." WHAT??')
3. My big picture thought™ is that economics has solved both the incentives problem and the "real world data is not prized enough" problem simultaneously by having the people at the top of the field aim near exclusively for "top 5s" (see Publishing and Promotion in Economics: The Tyranny of the Top Five) and to get a paper there, you need a viable structural model, a really good data source, etc. If it's an experiment, it typically needs to be a field experiment, unless a survey is really what you want.
   1. Standard caveat that like all human endeavors this system is imperfect, prone to gaming, etc., but I think it's a lot better than any other extant publishing/tenure model. I'm not sure what the equivalent for us would look like but in theory I'd like to see this model in more places.

Thanks for posting! I wonder about this problem too.

👋 I will mull on this. Quick first response: 

1) I agree people should be posting when they have something to say rather than just to post. Perhaps I should have qualified that. I had in mind people who have things to say but who sit on their posts for a long time. 

2) I also agree that I don't want to see the EA forum filled with marketing-esque nonsense from other platforms.

3) I think the core problem for the EA forum is that interesting high-quality novel posts are inherently rare and likely to stay that way because writing a very good post is effortful and not compensated in any kind of first-order way. Four potential solutions:

• pay people for good posts
• encourage more low-quality posts to have more content
• have fewer posts and maybe give impression that forum is dying
• encourage people to post more quality stuff by giving them effusive praise and karma so they get a dopamine rush

Thank you, and pardon me, I had not seen your response to Jacob. I shall take a look.

Hi Bruce,

you write: 

Two questions about alternative meats recur most often on the EA Forum: Can plant-based and cultivated meat reach taste and price parity with conventional meat? And if they do, will people eat them

My view is that the focal point for EA discussion of alt meats is whether price & taste parity are the right goals in the first place. In Price-, Taste-, and Convenience-Competitive Plant-Based Meat Would Not Currently Replace Meat, @Jacob_Peacock argues:

Of course, there is no dispute that PTC are important factors in people's food choices, but research in food psychology demonstrates these are not the sole or primary factors. 

This is related to the second question you ask but not quite the same. I'd be glad to read your thoughts on the evidence Jacob adduces against the hypothesis. (And I am happy to focus the discussion on P & T rather than C.)

I actually applied for funding for something quite related which was to use VR goggles to get people who want to eat less meat to subliminally associate meat, when the goggles detect it, with negative stuff (the word 'no' or things that are gross or something). We didn't get funding for it but here's something in the same vein 

Camp, B., & Lawrence, N. S. (2019). Giving pork the chop: Response inhibition training to reduce meat intake. Appetite, 141, 104315. 

Abstract:

Meat consumption is damaging to the environment, health and animal welfare. Despite a growing interest in reducing meat intake, many people eat too much. This is partly due to the pleasure associated with eating meat. Research has used go/no-go response inhibition training (RIT) to reduce the intake and reward value (liking) of snack foods. However, RIT has not yet been applied to meat. We investigated whether an internet-delivered RIT with meat pictures would reduce meat intake and liking relative to a non-food control RIT condition. Participants (N = 81) were meat eaters with a desire to reduce their intake. They completed four 10-min training sessions in one week. Active participants inhibited responses to meat, and responded to fruits and vegetables. Meat intake was measured using food frequency questionnaires at pre- and one month post-training, and a daily meat diary for one week during training. Liking of meat and other foods was measured at pre- and one month post-training. There was a reduction in meat intake over one month in both groups, with active participants showing a significantly larger decrease than controls. Conditions did not differ in meat intake during the training week. Both groups showed a devaluation of meat, with active participants showing a significantly larger devaluation of food overall, suggesting some generalisation of devaluation effects. The reduced frequency of meat intake was associated with greater devaluation of meat in active but not control participants. These findings suggest that meat RIT helps to reduce meat intake and food liking. Future research should conduct larger randomised controlled trials with longer-term outcomes.

Not drugs and not working through the biological mechanism but indeed attempting to get there through automaticity /bypassing the need for self-control & willpower.

BTW mentioning my meta-analysis is a good way to summon me!!

I live to amuse 🫡 

Yeah, when you put it that way, I can see why this might be difficult to navigate. I suppose I'm finding this navigable because the 'diet change' work I do is inherently evaluative -- my projects help funders make decisions about what to fund, rather than asking them to fund a particular TOC. 

Re: EAG NYC: I had a few moments where I wanted the meals to be a bit more segregated, like not to have to try too hard to find the animal people. I agree that AI seems to be getting most of the energy lately. 

Hi Toby, on mobile (iphone 17e), if I'm scrolling the forum and I click 'New and upvoted,' then click one of those posts, then click back, 'New and upvoted' is still underlined, but I'm back to the 'featured' view. This is pretty clearly a bug but in the context of this conversation it sure feels like the forum is trying (unconsciously? is the forum an agent? I have totally become unmoored on the question of where 'intent' resides) to steer me back to featured.

I also wrote a post today that I think is pretty good and I don't see it now under the new and upvoted section until the very bottom of the page. I guess I'd like to see more of an emphasis on 'new' in 'new', considering many of the other posts there are from days or weeks ago.

Are EA posts getting indexed on Google Scholar now? 

The (sorted by date) citations for my paper "Meaningfully reducing consumption" include links to Vasiel Stanescu's profile and Bruce Friedrich's post EA Should Invest in Animal Liberation and Diet Change Advocacy, presumably because the paper got cited a few times there (and put into proper bibliographic format by Vasile). But that's not a citation in the traditional sense, and if EA posts get reliably indexed, it opens up a really easy way to metric-max (just keep hyperlinking to your own papers in comments). 

The indexing might be a mistake. But if it's not, I think we should discuss it, and if we do have that dicsussion, I'll weigh in to say I'm very against it.