Hi Bruce, I think this addresses part of my comment. Your substack post makes the point that prices are falling and cultivated meat could be cost-competitive soon if it receives greater funding, which it will need to scale manufacturing. I would suggest adding that into this article, as it seems like an important explanation for your optimism.

But with scaling the contamination problem becomes greater. And from a quick search... experts seem split about the environmental impact. It seems that in terms of energy & climate impact, cultivated meat might not be better than animal-meat. These two problems seem important, so if you are optimistic they can be overcome, I'd love to hear your reasons.

One explanation that I don't think has been mentioned - and is more of just an impression or hypothesis - is that as EA has become bigger and more professionalized, there may be more posts being made either in order to get a job (a way of advertising oneself), or as a means for orgs to  promote themselves/their message. I think this leads to more posts with simple, less original messages, and fewer posts with really thoughtful messages. But happy to hear if others share this impression or not.

I read this as a call to action, and I appreciate that motivation is probably needed. But I think I need more convincing that this nut can really be cracked.

Renewables is a fair comparison to aspire to, but there are also many technologies that show the opposite trend; they appear promising at first, there's some hype, and then they fail to scale. For example, cellulosic ethanol appeared super promising at first, was successfully produced, received significant investment, yet still failed to scale. GM crops are an example of a tech that's actually scalable, yet has just been banned in Europe - for reasons that are pretty likely to transfer over to cultivated meat. 

I haven't read into cultivated meat for a while, but my understanding was that there are several genuinely difficult barriers to scale - contamination risk, environmental impacts, getting the structure of the meat right, and getting the price down. I'd love a post that addressed these and explained why we should still be optimistic, rather than  why we need to be.

I just want to say I think you're raising fair points, and it's frustrating that people are downvoting, not just disagree-voting.

I’ve just left Switzerland after five and a half years, and I want to say a big THANK YOU to the EA Switzerland team: Marcel Steimke, @Erik Jentzen, @mariuswenk and @Andre Santos 🔸.

Over this time I’ve been there they’ve:

• Run fun biannual retreats
• Run an ‘impact cohort’ that helps extra-motivated EAs to tackle their career challenges or other impactful endeavours. This included ongoing life-coaching, which I found incredibly valuable.
• Grown the PEAKS coworking space in Zurich (now 6? 7 offices?)
• Spun off Zurich AI Safety
• And certainly many other things that also deserve to be mentioned! 

I'm really grateful I could be part of this community and firmly believe that this community building work has a super-high counterfactual impact (although I acknowledge this is biased, vibesy, anecdotal evidence 🙃).

Ok, I take your point to be that in any area where reasonable EAs may disagree, we should make sure to flag that (which is probably most topics tbh)!

I would agree with that, and maybe the risks you're flagging just don't seem that serious to me because the groups I've been part of always have made that diversity clear 🤔

This seems like maybe a good idea, but could you spell out your reasons? Are you just worried about anyone joining thinking that the group is about any particular thing?

(My own experience is that most people in EA view purchasing vegan food ass a good thing, and I never felt the need to explain this, or never felt that anyone was turned off by it) 

I'm quite a visual thinker, so I wanted to say *that the pictures on the featured page really help to draw me in!

Hey Ronan, I agree completely.

One small thing: I wonder whether it makes sense for urban animals to have a global nonprofit? If it is research-focused, then that makes sense. But urban animals always exist locally, and I could imagine it being advantageous for an org to adopt a local branding, e.g. "New York wildlife protection" or something like that. So maybe the solutions is actually many urban animal advocacy orgs, with some coordination and one international research organization to support them?

If anyone wants to actually make this argument, I'm willing to hear it. But let's be clear: the pretend-argument in the post is very disconnected from the reality of how welfare improvements actually happen (which is fine, given that it's a parody!). To give just one example, it's not the case that welfare studies happen 'in the lab' - they do happen on farms, but they are not typically conducted by the farmers. And if they were conducted by the farmers, people probably wouldn't trust the studies.