All of Stijn's Comments + Replies

I have some concerns about animal-welfare labelled meat, that it could be counterproductive. See this study: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21606544.2024.2330552

Most non-vegans don't take vegan B12 supplements. That means this vegan product is excluded from the non-vegan's diet. The reason why non-vegans exclude it (whether they don't like it, consider it as immoral...), is not important because reasons are not health related. Whether or not someone who doesn't take the B12 supplement categorically refuses to take it, has no impact on that person's health.

I was pointing at a non-vegan bias in the way how you framed your argument: that a vegan diet is restrictive. But non-vegans also eat a restrictive diet, as they don't eat (and often refuse to eat) vegan foods. Vegans don't eat non-vegan sources of B12, and non-vegans don't eat vegan sources of B12. 

Your bias is comparable to a native English speaker who has an English bias and claims that French is a difficult language because the French people don't use those simple words like "door" and "table". So when you want to speak French, you first have to l... (read more)

I agree with your two sentences, but the first one is very ambiguous. You mention someone with a B12 deficiency. The way I see it, both vegans and omnivores remove sources of B12 from their diet: the vegan doesn't eat animal products that contain B12, the omnivore doesn't eat B12 supplements (or B12-enriched products that are suitable for vegans). Many omnivores even refuse to eat those vegan B12 supplements, just like vegans refuse to eat meat. Now you have someone who doesn't eat either of those B12 sources: no meat and no vegan supplement. You can call ... (read more)

I'd say a healthy vegan diet is roughly as difficult as a healthy omnivorous diet, and a convenient vegan diet is roughly as easy as a convenient omnivorous diet.

Someone who is highly productive in reducing X-risks, is first highly intelligent, which means intelligent enough to know how to eat a healthy vegan diet, and second, most likely living in a wealthy environment with good access of healthy vegan food, which means able to follow the knowledge about healthy vegan diets. So that means if a person still has adverse health effects from the vegan diet, while following all knowledge about healthy vegan diets, it must be because of unknown reasons. And that seems very unlikely to me. We know so much about healthy food...

It seems that you make nothing but a very trivial claim, that if you are used to A, a change from A to B is difficult. But then you frame it like B being difficult. But it is the transition which is difficult, not B itself. As an analogy, let's discuss whether Chinese is difficult. You would say yes, because it is not your native language. It will take some effort for you to learn Chinese. But a Chinese person thinks Chinese is easy, and English is difficult. Who is right? In the end, once you have learned to speak Chinese, it is as easy as most other lang... (read more)

My major concern is that this article is too one-sided: it mentions the difficulties/trade-offs of vegan diets, without mentioning difficulties/trade-offs of non-vegan diets. Eating a non-vegan diet is also not easy. Some examples of what you have to tell to people who want to eat animal products:

• Don’t eat too much meat, that is unhealthy. You can look on some websites how much gram per day is too much, according to your age and bodily needs.
• Fry the meat well enough, because (almost all) meat can contain harmful bacteria. Also wash well enough all the cutl

"But it’s hard to shake the feeling that farming cognitively disabled humans would be even worse than farming pigs." > I think this feeling is a moral illusion, comparable to an optical illusion where it is hard to shake the feeling that one line is longer than another. I wrote some articles about this: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11406-020-00282-7

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10790-015-9507-8 

And an infographic

https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2022/11/08/moral-illusions-infographic/ 

"in pr... (read more)

I think happy animal farming (breeding, killing and eating animals who had net-positive lives) is not permissible (except if the animal would be extremely happy). See population ethical arguments against happy animal farming: https://www.pdcnet.org/enviroethics/content/enviroethics_2022_0999_10_26_45

https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2016/11/05/can-we-eat-happy-meat/

As I'm further analyzing the survey results and writing a paper about this research, the conclusions become a bit more nuanced. I think a major recommendation for animal advocates becomes: focus on reducing meat consumption by promoting animal-free meat substitutes, and introduce animal welfare certified meat only after a sufficient majority of the population switched to mostly animal-free food. The remaining minority of persistent meat eaters, who will never switch to vegetarianism or veganism, can then choose the animal welfare certified meat. If you int... (read more)

fully agree, one of the many limitations of using a survey to test the stepping stone model.

one difficult to avoid cause of farm animal suffering are diseases that are caused by burdens of extreme growth. Meat animals grow too rapidly, which is unhealthy. So let's say those animals have 50% less suffering from mutilations, diseases,...

yes, good point

Thanks for the comments. Some quick replies

You can consider total instead of per capita CO2 emissions, but then I could also consider total instead of per capita welfare (life-satisfaction or well-being). Perhaps per capita life satisfaction doesn’t grow with income (Easterlin’s paradox), but total life satisfaction increases with population size (just like total emissions increase with population size in a decoupled economy with constant per capita emissions).

The decrease in emissions is not quick enough, but the question is what is the most effective way... (read more)

See also this study (of mine): Bruers, S. (2022). The animal welfare cost of meat: evidence from a survey of hypothetical scenarios among Belgian consumers. Journal of Environmental Economics and Policy, 1-18.

And here: https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2022/11/29/the-deathprint-of-replacing-beef-by-chicken-and-insect-meat/
 

Neither DICE nor calculations by Nordhaus were used in that study. Here I was not talking about the impact on GDP, but on the expected deaths from undernourishment, fluvial flooding,... (supplementary material figure 3) (These deaths were then used to calculate loss of economic welfare in monetary terms using the value of  a statistical life, but that contestable step is not important here.)

According to this study, the excess deaths from temperature are much larger than the deaths from climate change related famines, floods,...  I'm not sure if deaths from wars have to be included, because I would say the aggressor who starts the war is responsible for those deaths.

Just read the article by Parncutt about the 1000 tonne rule. Apparently, it is 1 death per 1000 tonnes of carbon, i.e. 1 death per 3700 tonnes of CO2, close to Bressler's estimate

Thanks for referring to that study.  That 1 death per 1000 tons is in the same order of magnitude of the 1 death per 4000 tons that I used based on Daniel Bressler's study. So I think the main takeaways are still valid.  But yes, there is a possibility that deaths from climate induced famines, wars,... are some orders of magnitude larger than deaths from temperature change

Not much is known about the impact of climate change on wild animals, so therefore I excluded it. It is very complicated. First, it could still be the case that at the expected level of warming,  the decrease in cold deaths of wild animals could be larger than the increase in heat deaths. Less freezing days, but more heat waves and forest fires... Second, it might be the case that most wild animals have a net negative welfare and that climate change decreases population sizes, which means fewer animals with net negative welfare will be born, and that ... (read more)

Hi Neil,

my meat-to-animal conversions were not based on Saja, but simply on the weight of edible meat produced by an animal. For chickens, I used the slightly more conservative value of 1.5 kg edible meat per broiler chicken, instead of Saja's 2 kg. That means 1/1.5=0.66 animals/kg. Perhaps broiler chickens in the US grow heavier and are closer to Saja's 2 kg per chicken?

Haven't thought about using those other sources like Faunalitics. Thanks for mentioning it.

1: But how do you know when there is an acute blood shortage, when it is time for you to donate with high impact? You only know it when a blood bank actively communicates about it in order to increase donations, but then other potential donors will also be informed and become motivated to donate blood. Cfr blood shortage in New York after 9/11,  donors were recruited by mass advertisement, and quickly there was an oversupply of blood. It is like on the stock market: if you don't buy a share, someone else will, and it is difficult to know the good time... (read more)

one point of criticism if this cost-effectiveness estimate: in high-income countries there is no substantial shortage of blood. In case of acute shortage, blood banks can easily recruit donors. So if you don't donate and that results in a blood shortage of one unit, another donor is likely to step in. If you donate blood, you simply replace the donation: the other donor who would have donated in your place, will not be recruited. Your donation will not be an extra donation. Or in other words: blood donation has low additivity and blood supply is inelastic.... (read more)

Hi David,

sure, I've published an easier version, with more concrete examples and without jargon at my website: https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2022/08/23/mild-welfarism-avoiding-the-demandingness-of-totalitarian-welfarism/

I called the theory mild welfarism, hopefully that is not too much jargon? ;-)

“As you mention, increases in efficiency tend to be followed by equal increases in consumption in society absent other incentives and policies. So it's understandable that some people might think we need some limits on resource extraction.”>I think it is better to have limits on environmental impact. Price mechanisms such as a carbon tax can be used to counter rebound effects on environmental impacts.

“The 40 hour work week was once unthinkable. So were child labor laws. So was a ban on CFCs.”> Economic growth made these policies much ... (read more)

I didn't particularkly steelman degrowth, because I thought the arguments in favor of degrowth are pretty obvious: you can decrease environmental impact by reducing economic activity and resource throughput. I tried to find reasons why such reductions would be most feasible and most effective, but couldn't find them.

"I don't think reducing population is a universal, or even dominant, objective amongst people who support degrowth."> That's why I called it the population degrowth approach, to be distinguished from the resource degrowth aproach. The common... (read more)

Thanks for the question, had to think a while. About infeasibility of cultivated meat, best counterevidence for me would be seeing a massive disinvestment in cultivated meat R&D, a consensus among researchers openly saying that it is too difficult to make progress.

Another crucial thing that would change my mind, is evidence about the feasibility of plant-based meat, that substitution towards plant-based is faster than I would expect (faster than cultivated meat innovation). This would mean seeing a fast increase in the number of vegans, and especially conservative male meat identifiers switching to plant-based meats.

The more I think about it, the more I start to believe that cultivated meat is feasible, and that your examples offer some evidence.

So consider the function of flying. You may say that the function of flying with wings cannot be fulfilled with technology, that  imitating nature does not work . But your examples refer to humans flying with technologies that use wings. But humans are much heavier than birds. With airplanes, we can fly faster, over longer distances and carry heavier weights, things that biological organisms were never capable of doi... (read more)

One more addition to the cultivated meat feasibility discussion: https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2021/10/07/the-crux-of-the-cultivated-meat-feasibility-debate/

I argue why we have to make a distinction between the functions (e.g. taste, nutrition,...), the products (e.g. muscle-based meat, plant-based meat) and the production processes (e.g. animal-based meat, cell-based meat).  I expect that cell-based meat is feasible (can reach price parity with animal-based meat), but that we are uncertain about the time frames for innovation (of cell-based meat)... (read more)

I wrote a comment in a previous discussion about why I think cultivated meat can be expected to become at least as efficient/cheap as animal-based meat: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/y8jHKDkhPXApHp2gb/cultured-meat-a-comparison-of-techno-economic-analyses?commentId=MJtLFZya2WqdNADSy

The basic idea is that animals were not evolved to maximize meat production. Just like horses were not evolved to maximize transport efficiency and hence were replaced by cars, plants were not evolved to maximize turning solar energy into electricity and are replaced... (read more)

Concerning "it is a matter of time": the only worry that I see, is that it would take so long to develop cultivated meat that in the meantime we would have already abolished animal farming (or decreased it to such a degree that cultivated meat has little additional value) because of e.g. plant-based and fermentation-based protein. But I consider that unlikely (lower than 10% likelihood). Oh, and even if humans would be all plant-based vegans by then, then we still have the many carnivorous animals (pets,...) who may benefit from cultivated meat. Hence, I t... (read more)

Please sure do! That would be very interesting.

I would expect that cultivated meat can reach price parity with animal-based meat, based on 'first principles'. Assume that all biological functions in an organism can be replicated with technologies, and that these technologies can reach the same efficiency as the biological functions that reached high efficiency due to evolution and natural selection. That is a realistic assumption, because no laws of nature have to be violated. To grow muscle tissue, we need oxygenation, so we invent a technology, call it 'lungs'. We need nutrients (amino-acids, sugars,... (read more)

What is the packing density of muscle cells in muscle tissue (meat)? Why not use that packing density as an estimate for the maximum possible packing density of muscle cells in a bioreactor?

Yes, my theory favours B, assuming that those 100 billion additional people have on expectation a welfare higher than the threshold, that the higher X-risk in world A does not on expectation decrease the welfare of existing people, and that  the negative welfare in absolute terms of having a miserable life is less than ten times higher than the positive welfare of currently existing people in world A. In that case, the added welfare of those additional people is higher than  the loss of welfare of the current people. In other words: if there are ... (read more)

Hi Kevin,

thanks for the comment.  My theory mostly violates that neutrality principle: all else equal, adding a person to the world who has a  negative welfare is bad, adding a person who has a welfare higher than treshold T is good, and in its lexical extension, adding a person with welfare between 0 and threshold T, is good (the lexical extension says that if two states are equally good when it comes to the total welfare excluding the welfare of possible people between 0 and T, then the state that has the highest total welfare, including that o... (read more)

My theory would be like critical level utilitarianism, where necessary people, possible people with negative welfare and possible people with high positive welfare have zero critical levels, and possible people with low positive welfare have a critical level equal to their own welfare. So people can have different critical levels, and the critical level might depend on the welfare of the person. 

The problem of identity could become difficult, when we consider identity as something fluid or vague. If for example copying a person (a kind of teleportatio... (read more)

That's a good summary, except that the threshold is chosen democratically by those who definitely exist. If these people choose not to ignore those people who don't definitely exist and have welfare between 0 and T, then it reduces to total utilitarianism

Yep, in my new EA Fellowship group, one participant also mentioned that podcast as basic inspiration to join EA. Proof by anecdote.

I think the beatpath method to avoid intransitivity still results in a sadistic repugnant conclusion. Consider three situations. In situation 1, one person exist with high welfare 100. In situation 2, that person gets welfare 400, and 1000 additional people are added with welfare 0. In situation 3, those thousand people will have welfare 1, i.e. small but positive (lives barely worth living), and the first person now gets a negative welfare of -100. Total utilitarianism says that situation 3 is best, with total welfare 900. But comparing situations 1 and 3... (read more)

I wrote some counter-arguments, why we could prefer human lives from an impartial (antispeciesist) perspective: https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2020/02/25/arguments-for-an-impartial-preference-for-human-lives/

Good points, but I'm a little tiny bit skeptical. So those people who join the group under the name of PISE but would not have joined the group when it was called Effective Altruism Erasmus, I wonder if that is due to the reasons that were mentioned (that the -ism suffix reminds of something religious, makes the name too unfamiliar, too difficult, associated with elitism...). If that would be the case, I would be surprised if those people are potentially high impact effective altruists. To put it overly simplistic: suppose someone would not join because of... (read more)

About split brain; those studies are about cognition (having beliefs about what is being seen). Does anyone know if the same happens with affection (valenced experience)? For example: left brain sees a horrible picture, right brain sees picture of the most joyfull vacation memory. Now ask left and right brains how they feel. I imagine such experiments are already being done? My expectation is that asking the brain hemisphere who sees the picture of the vacation memory, that hemisphere will respond that the picture strangely enough gives the subject a weird, unexplainable, kind of horrible feeling instead of pure joy. As if feelings are still unified. Anyone knows about such studies?

That anti-proportionality arguments seems tricky to me. It sounds comparable to the following example. You see a grey picture, composed of small black and white pixels. (The white pixles correspond to neuron firings in your example) The greyness depends on the proportion of white pixels. Now, what happens when you remove the black pixels? That is undefined. It could be that only white pixels are left and you now see 100% whiteness. Or the absent black pixels are still being seen as black, which means the same greyness as before. Or removing the black pixels correspond with making them transparent, and then who knows what you'll see? 

Thanks, this is exactly what I needed. Now I also need a list of researchers who are interested in collaboration on one of these research topics :-)

Thanks

about the 10.000 years assumption: that is only used to calculate a high estimate of clean meat R&D. I'm not so worried if that is an overstimate.

My calculation assumes indeed no diminishing returns for clean meat R&D. I don't expect diminishing returns in the short run, when so much need to be researched. In my model, the decreasing neglectedness accounts for diminishing returns. When funding and investments by others increses to 1 billion dollars, the cost-effectiveness decreases with a factor 10. Anyway, the point is that clean m... (read more)

Sorry, I'm not following. The gain is independent of C, and hence (at given U and F) independent of the expected time period. Assume x is such that cell-based meat enters the market 1 year sooner (i.e. x=F). Accelerating cell-based meat with one year is equally good (spares U=0,1.10^11 animals), whether it is a reduction from 10 to 9 years or 100 to 99 years. Only if C/F would be smaller than a year, accelerating with 1 year would not work.