lincolnq's Quick takes

Ridglan Farms, the notorious beagle-breeding facility in Wisconsin raided twice by activists this year, is officially shutting down. The pressure on them has been intense because the case has attracted quite a sizeable national attention: Glenn Greenwald, Jennifer Welch (I've Had It podcast), Lara Trump and Robert F. Kennedy have all commented on Ridglan decrying the horrors there. Lewis Bollard tweeted this out recently: https://x.com/Lewis_Bollard/status/2066542219134452209

Figured I'd share this since some EAs (including myself) were involved in the campaign to get it shut down. A big part of our theory of change was to get this kind of attention. The real question is how to extend to animals more broadly than just dogs, of course, but even this counts as a big win.

I went to jail yesterday in Wisconsin. I helped rescue 23 beagles in a large mass open rescue against a factory farm, Ridglan Farms, near Madison. We were trying to push the police to act on documented animal cruelty at Ridglan. Instead they arrested me and 26 other activists.

I wrote a blog post about why I did it.. Excerpt:

I think some altruists suffer from lack of moral courage. Especially those of us who work on tech: we often have lots of moral conviction, but are typically wealthy and aren’t usually risking much personally, and I think that’s a gap. I want to be asking more often, “how can we be more altruistic?” One answer is to challenge ourselves to do more and more courageous things.

More info and stories from Wayne Hsiung: https://blog.simpleheart.org/p/im-in-jail-for-rescuing-dogs-its

If you're in the DC area, I'll be sharing more about my experience at Revolutionists' Night, an animal welfare meetup, this Thursday. Reach out for an invite.

[Edited to add:] I believe there is a lawful basis for this action and I intend to fight any attempted prosecution in court! I'm not advocating any illegal activity, of course.

I avoid reading, and don't usually respond to, comments on my posts, or replies to my own comments.

The reason is that it's emotionally intense to do so: after posting something on the EA Forum, I avoid checking the forum at all for ~24h or so (for fear of noticing replies in the 'recents' area, or changes in my karma), and after that I mainly skim for people flagging major errors or omissions that need my input to be resolved.

Lizka's You Don't Have to Respond to Every Comment talks about this a bit (and was enormously helpful for me) - I am not strongly averse to posting stuff and having people read it in the abstract - I just don't like the short term emotional swings that come with individual replies to things.

I wrote up my nutrition notes here, from my first year of being vegan: http://www.lincolnquirk.com/2023/06/02/vegan_nutrition.html

"it is unclear whether" can sometimes mean "I am skeptical that" or "I don't think". It annoys me when people use it this way. Unclear already has a good and useful meaning. We shouldn't dilute it.

The proper use of "unclear" is a sentence like this: "it's still unclear if the intervention worked". A quick heuristic: if the use of "unclear" is or could be prefixed by "still" without changing the meaning, it is probably ok :). Another way to view it -- if more information is likely to come out soon, then it's probably ok.

Some examples of usages of "unclear" I'd like to see less of:

• "How do you think the willingness of key actors such as governments to tackle bio risks will change...? It's unclear whether we will see the right levels of political competence and focused engagement..." 1
• "It's unclear how significant the extrinsic, welfare-oriented value of biodiversity even is" 2
• "it is unclear how OpenPhil are comparing different causes, rather than looking out for giving opportunities across a variety of causes" 3