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The Unjournal (bot)

Communications and quick links for the Unjournal. @ The Unjournal
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I made this tool to track and map cruxes raised on the EA Forum and Lesswrong. Your input ('quick rate' upvotes/downvotes, hypothesis comments, etc.) could help improve the tool. (Or let me know if it should be reshaped). 

https://uj-prioritization-prototype.netlify.app/cruxes/ 

 

The Animal Futures Tournament on Metaculus includes a question closely related to this post: Will Nueva Pescanova's octopus farm gain regulatory approval in the Canary Islands before June 2027?

It may be a useful place for readers here to make their forecasts explicit and compare with the community prediction: https://info.unjournal.org/forecasting-tournament/

Semi-automated comment from The Unjournal.

The Animal Futures Tournament on Metaculus includes a question closely related to this post: What will be the average performance on ANIMA for AI models released between June 2026 and June 2027?

It may be a useful place for readers here to make their forecasts explicit and compare with the community prediction: https://info.unjournal.org/forecasting-tournament/

Semi-automated comment from The Unjournal.

The Animal Futures Tournament on Metaculus includes a question closely related to this post: How many of the top 2026 AI labs will reference animal welfare in their models' guidelines at the end of 2034?

It may be a useful place for readers here to make their forecasts explicit and compare with the community prediction: https://info.unjournal.org/forecasting-tournament/

Semi-automated comment from The Unjournal.

The Animal Futures Tournament on Metaculus includes a question closely related to this post: How many of Europe's top 20 grocery retailers will have public shrimp welfare commitments before July 2027?

It may be a useful place for readers here to make their forecasts explicit and compare with the community prediction: https://info.unjournal.org/forecasting-tournament/

Semi-automated comment from The Unjournal.

The Animal Futures Tournament on Metaculus includes a question closely related to this post: What percentage of the US hen flock will be sexed with in-ovo sexing technology in Q1 2027? The tournament also includes the analogous EU hen-flock question.

It may be a useful place for readers here to make their forecasts explicit and compare with the community prediction: https://info.unjournal.org/forecasting-tournament/

Semi-automated comment from The Unjournal.

The Animal Futures Tournament on Metaculus includes a question closely related to this post: How many additional US states will enact bans on cultivated meat before July 2027?

It may be a useful place for readers here to make their forecasts explicit and compare with the community prediction: https://info.unjournal.org/forecasting-tournament/

Semi-automated comment from The Unjournal.

More coming, comments and replies like the images below. Please let me know if useful or annoying/inaccurate. 

We asked GPT 5.5-extra in Codex to do an evidence audit and discussion, because this seems to be  a high value post relevant to Unjournal's work on evidence quality and animal welfare-relevant economics. It reports

We also added several public Hypothes.is annotations directly on the post text, tagged `gpt` and `evidence-audit`. Public annotations are visible here: Hypothes.is search for this post. You can also see them in context by installing the Hypothes.is browser extension.

My [GPT's] main takeaways from checking the cited and related sources:

  1. Shrimp stunning: The evidence seems best read as parameter-sensitive rather than as a blanket case for or against electrical stunning. The recent Somerville et al. preprint and SWP review suggest electrical stunning may have more potential than chilling, but species-specific settings and industrial validation remain central uncertainties.
  2. Cage-free reforms: The post seems strongest when framed as a critique of mortality-based inference and transition management. Mortality evidence is mixed and confounded, but that is not the same as saying the overall welfare evidence is equally mixed. Schuck-Paim et al. 2021, WFI’s laying-hen model, and Cynthia Schuck-Paim’s comments in this thread all seem relevant here.
  3. Alternative proteins: I would frame this less as “we have evidence that substitution is weak” and more as “we have limited and hard-to-interpret evidence, plus serious measurement challenges.” The available evidence seems more directly about current plant-based meat and meat-reduction interventions; it does not settle future cultivated meat, precision fermentation, or genuinely cheaper/tastier/more convenient substitutes. 
     

Sources checked included Weineck et al. 2018, Somerville et al. 2026, SWP’s stunning review, Schuck-Paim et al. 2021, WFI’s laying-hen work, Peacock’s RP report, and Green/Smith/Mathur’s 2025 meta-analysis.

 

David Reinstein: I added further comments manyally in hypothes.is and I'm working on a general response comment synthesizing that, also bringing in resources from our PQ/workshop on plant-based substitution. Let me know if the above is misleading or distracting. 

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