Context: WelfareTech
There has been some concern lately about effective altruism's supposed turn away from diet change, systemic shift, animal liberation, etc. As far as I can tell, this is due to 1) a widely reshared Substack article which got some praise from EA-aligned folks, including folks at @Coefficient Giving; 2) the fact that Innovate Animal Ag is setting up an "accelerator farm," which, per Robert Yaman, will be "a commercial broiler facility that sells chickens into the market, but it will also be a place where startups can test technologies and where we can combine interventions;" and 3) the emergence of Spring Innovation Fund, which launched this summer as "a not-for-profit venture philanthropy studio and fund built specifically for Welfare Tech: technology that improves animal welfare in ways that make commercial sense for producers to adopt."
I don't buy it
I just got back from two EA events (the Communicators Retreat and EAG NYC) where I talked to a few dozen people at length. Almost everyone wanted to talk about diet change and animal liberation. I think this supposed turn away from these topics has been greatly exaggerated. The EA rank and file want to see animals liberated from human oppression and/or living in nature.
This impression is probably colored by who I am and therefore who wants to talk to me. On the other hand, the people who write publicly about this and/or start funds to promote Welfare Tech are also clearly not a random sample either.
Maybe the elites are doing an about-face and the rest of us will follow their marching orders once the money comes in?
Insofar as effective animal advocacy has an inner cabal, I talk to them pretty regularly. I don't think they've given up on diet change. @LewisBollard writes that EA "deprioritized it based on evidence it wasn't working." Deprioritized is not giving up. If something promising (re: novel) and/or evidence-backed came up, I think people would be into it. For what it's worth, I received (directly or indirectly) four instances of solidly EA-flavored funding to do diet change research in 2026. But we’re not going to leap to support leaflets or digital advocacy or whatever. Not without reasonable evidence that it'll work better than it did in the past.
Why did this consensus emerge?
My going theory is that too few effective animal advocates write about what they're thinking and doing for the public. @Aidan Kankyoku's post reverberated in part because he's one of the few of us doing this. Outliers are taken as representative because normies are silent.
Solution: more of us should write more and more hastily
Posting in public is fun, it might be good for your career, and it has the nice property of also giving external audiences a more accurate read on EA thinking. Effective Altruism is good. Let's tell people about it, and not let a few loudmouths (me included) speak for the community.
Moreover, animal people should generally write more slapdashedly. I talked to several people at EAG who were like "oh I have a big backlog of posts I've been meaning to publish" or "I sat on that post for a year because I wasn't sure people wanted to read it." Folks, stop it! Just post, record a 1 minute video on your phone and post it on LinkedIn. Hit the go button. Say "it's 9:55 right now, when the clock strikes 10:30, I'm going to post this no matter what." This is not school, C work that gets published regularly is better than A work that you sit on.
- Unless your audience is specifically EAs, as is true for this post, you should not write primarily for the EA forum. Twitter or Substack or Bluesky or podcasts or whatever is where you at least have a chance of achieving escape velocity.
- Several people at the Communicators Retreat emphasized that authenticity sells, and when you workshop something to death, you risk losing it. I think this is right. Corollary: don't have AI write your stuff. Authentic and messy is way more appealing.
- Posting more could be very good for your career, as it was for mine.
For those working on diet-change, this is a wonderful example. Perspective on this is that Belgium is not like California.
There is not a strong vegan movement like in India - this is just a cool city with a strong beer and party culture and a great university.
But this one city has made some amazing progress on diet-change that we could all learn from.
What I find interesting about this: This was all achieved without any pressure or guilt. Nobody is being asked to become vegan. There are no vegans looking disapprovingly at anyone eating meat.
People are just being shown the positives, in a positive way "Look at all the amazing, tasty vegan food out there, I bet you didn't know it was that good!" Then they get the feel-good factor of knowing they're also helping improve the world, lower climate impact, less animal suffering - and it's cool and it's all a positive experience.
Schoolchildren are being exposed to vegan dishes, but not in a political, activist way - nothing that will get parents rebelling. it's all positive. It results in lots of places having vegan options they didn't have before - no pressure to choose them, but many people do. And eventually, many of these people may become vegans. And even if they don't, they will probably consume a lot less meat.
I am obviously not aware of what's happening elsewhere, but this feels like a real win/win approach that could work in any city. Because it's fun, it's exciting, it's novel, it's different. And, as a bonus, it also helps reduce animal suffering.
Veggie Thursdays and vegan surprises! How Ghent became a plant-based paradise | Food | The Guardian