AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
Executive Summary
* Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal...
“How long have you been v*g*n?”
This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers.
But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...
Summary
Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step.
The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...
At the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya did a lot to reduce animal experimentation and thus reduce animal suffering. As far as ChatGPT can tell, this seems to be completely ignored by the Effective Altruism forum.
Marty Makary's FDA is also taking it's steps to reduce the need of animal testing for FDA approvals.
Is this simply, because Effective Altruists don't like the Trump administration so they can't take the win of MAHA bringing contrarians into control of health policy that do things like caring more about reducing animal suffering and fighting the replication crisis?
I don't think so.
Some less tribalistic hypotheses I can think of:
But tribalistic explanations could be a factor too (e.g. MAHA has anti-science vibes, and EAs like to stay on the pro-science side).
(This is probably not the most constructive feedback, but my initial reaction to this short form was that it felt like a right-wing analog of left-wing "Why don't the EAs tweet about Gaza?"-style criticisms).