I love this post so much. I agree with all 40 points. A few thoughts:

Re: # 1, "even people who care deeply about it seldom bring it up": I've long wondered whether there's room for a group that elevates what thinkers like Darwin, Dawkins, Harari, Jane Goodall, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Lawrence Tribe, Alice Walker, et al., have said about animals and factory farming and that works with thinkers (the way PETA works with celebrities) to elevate their thinking. e.g., social media targeting (with thought pieces) to people who follow them, direct outreach to journalists who interview or quote them (or even more basic: to journalists and other influencers who simply ignore the science of animal sentience in their work), etc.

In law school, I wrote 6 law review articles on farm animal cruelty and animal rights, and I quoted top legal scholars right at the top each time for exactly this reason. These were one-offs and likely did little if any good, but I'll bet there would be ways to do this kind of thing methodically, so that the ideas could penetrate. 

3) The fact that the meat industry largely consists of people just trying to make ends meet, alongside my personal interactions with people like John Randal Tyson and top execs at other big food and meat companies, gives me a lot of hope that alternative meats could simply replace industrial animal meat if we can get taste and price right. 

More here, in the animal protection section: “For people who love meat and care about animals, i.e., almost everyone,” which discusses Dawkins, Krauthammer, and Sam Harris, each of whom has compared our generation’s acceptance of factory farming to earlier generations’ acceptance of slavery.

21) I love seeing this; it’s a big part of why I think EA should be funding more diet change and animal liberation advocacy. Imagine what we might accomplish if we brought what we’ve learned over the past decade, as well as our current thinking about things like applying the lessons of Roe to our work, to diet change and animal liberation advocacy.

26. Agreed that "too many EAs act as if the search is over because they found the answer." I wonder if the same kind of hubris has led us to write off some promising options just because they haven't worked yet. 

28 & 30) While I agree in principle, I think these recommendations are easier said than done and could also go quite wrong, especially given that we want leaders and board members to have an EA mindset, and most people do not. It would be very good to see resources developed to help put these recommendations into practice without leading to very bad outcomes.

34) Here again, I’d like to see us reconsider our decision to largely walk away from animal rights and diet change advocacy. We’ve learned so much, and our farm animal advocacy is so much more effective than it was 10 years ago. I think we should actively encourage EAs who care about animals to explore creative ways to apply all that learning to diet change and animal rights work.

Hi Tom - in case of interest, I just posted in this on the Forum: 

The Case for Optimism About Consumer Adoption of Plant-Based and Cultivated Meat

It builds on a longer but less EA-focused essay on my new Meat Matters substack: 

Will anyone eat plant-based and cultivated meat?

If you read either of them, I'll be curious for your thoughts. 

Hi Tom - in case of interest, I just posted in this on the Forum: 

The Case for Optimism About Consumer Adoption of Plant-Based and Cultivated Meat

It builds on a longer but less EA-focused essay on my new Meat Matters substack: 

Will anyone eat plant-based and cultivated meat?

If you read either of them, I'll be curious for your thoughts. 

Hi Samuel - in case of interest, I just posted in this on the Forum: 

The Case for Optimism About Consumer Adoption of Plant-Based and Cultivated Meat

It builds on a longer but less EA-focused essay on my new Meat Matters substack: 

Will anyone eat plant-based and cultivated meat?

If you read either of them, I'll be curious for your thoughts. 

Hi Amanda, 

In case of interest, I just posted in this on the Forum: 

The Case for Optimism About Consumer Adoption of Plant-Based and Cultivated Meat

It builds on a longer but less EA-focused essay on my new Meat Matters substack: 

Will anyone eat plant-based and cultivated meat?

If you read either of them, I'll be curious for your thoughts. 

Not annoying at all - thank you so much for engaging! 

Let me start with your points a) and b) 
- Accelerating the remaining R&D needed for scalable solutions.
- Developing a product that's genuinely competitive on taste

That sounds easy, but it’s actually incredibly difficult. 

Two of GFI’s first six employees were scientists (the other four: policy, communications, development, operations), and their first mandate was to figure out exactly what needed to happen for plant-based and cultivated meat to reach price and taste parity, i.e., what are the things we need to solve, and what’s the TRL for each of those things? 

It turned out that there was just way too much that we didn't know. It was surprising to me to realize that there was a lot more in that category on the plant-based side than on the cultivated side. But for both technologies, there were just too many known unknowns (and also unknown unknowns) for us to even speculate.

While we are now (fairly) confident that taste- and price-competitive plant-based and cultivated meat are possible, there are still some really big question marks, especially with regard to the technology that will be required to scale. 

For example, on the plant-based meat side, there are some ingredients that are essential to taste (etc. - the full organoleptic experience) parity but that it may be impossible to scale up in a cost-effective manner. e.g., coconut oil and synthetic heme - there are quite literally not enough coconuts on the planet for the scale we'd need. We need alternatives, but we don't know what it's going to cost to make those alternatives, and there aren't nearly enough scientists working on these problems.

Cultivated meat: It seems likely that we are ready now on the private sector side, as I discussed in my first “Meat Matters” substack. That’s great, and I hope those companies will get the investment (or loans) they need to scale. Or that Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google DeepMind will work with them to make it happen.

We may also be there on the open access side, but I doubt it. 

Our science team is working on a technical roadmap that will either answer or point toward answers w/r/t both plant-based and cultivated meat (it's called the "technical roadmap," and it'll be out soon). After a bit more than 10 years of working on the issues, we think we have enough information that it's worth sharing what we know and having it pressure-tested and built upon by the broader community of people working on science and engineering around alternative meats. 

This is part of why I noted in my piece that if someone from Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google DeepMind wants to work to make this happen, they should get in touch. I have some other ideas, too, and generally think that AI could seriously accelerate the answers to your questions. 

*** 

Regarding your point c) Securing a mass-market deal in one country, e.g., getting the product into a major supermarket chain at price parity with meat (with funders subsidizing the difference to test the hypothesis), plus the marketing to support it.

Zak Weston from Food System Innovations is working on a project that’s similar (not identical, but same basic concept) to what you describe, and he is talking with funders. 

Since he’s working with the companies in question, the information is proprietary. 

This is another area where Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google DeepMind could be incredibly valuable - working with the closest alt meat companies to get over the taste and price finish line. 

I have some other ideas, too, and generally think that AI could seriously accelerate the answers to your questions. 

***

This has historically been outside GFI’s remit, mostly b/c we try to focus on things for which there’s not a strong private sector incentive. Thinking in terms of the counterfactual, it’s felt to us like there’s sufficient incentive for the startups in the space to do this on their own, so with limited resources, we have not focused on it. 

That said, we’ve been rethinking that POV in the face of evidence that the startups don’t have the bandwidth for this either, and they’re not in the best position to ask for philanthropic (or similar) capital; that’s better done out of an NGO. 

So there are some projects at GFI that point in the same direction, and it’s something more and more people across GFI’s offices are looking at.

Thanks for engaging - I appreciate it! 

Hi Robert, I don't think there's anyone in EA-world who has a vested interest in perpetuating the use of animals for food. I think they don't support diet advocacy and animal liberation b/c they don't think it will do much good, resources are limited, and animal welfare advocacy makes real and positive changes for animals. i.e., basic cost-benefit analysis. I would like to see that thinking updated on the basis of new information and a new reality, but I also think it's totally genuine. And I don't see any mixed incentives. 

Thanks so much, Lewis — I appreciate you responding in such depth; I know you're busy and don't take that for granted. 

Prefatory comment: 
My post captured some of what I've been wondering about in recent weeks, based on the Substacks from Nan, Itsi, and you. 

And then the thing that prompted me to move those thoughts from my brain to the Forum was Aidan’s dismissal of even trying to come up with something new, b/c it’s all been tried (quoted in my piece). It seems to me that we won’t come up with something new if we’re not trying to come up with something new… 

While I’m delighted to offer some thoughts, I’m sure there are many EAs who would have better ideas than I do, and I’d really love to see lots of smart EAs who care about animals challenging one another to come up with new ideas (or twists on old ideas) that are focused on animal liberation and diet change. 

If our messaging is laser focused on mitigating the myriad ways animals suffer, that’s what people will spend time on. I wonder if we might see some creative and high-impact proposals focused on diet change and animal liberation, if we actively challenged the community to come up with some. 

Okay, from there: 

My first four points were asking whether there might be reasons other than direct behavior change that we should be considering, and then my final point asks whether a changed reality for our movement (e.g., AI and more resources as the two obvious examples) might warrant a rethink about what's possible. 

With regard to AI: Just like everyone else on the planet is trying to figure out how to use AI to come up with new and better ways to do things and to solve previously unsolvable problems, that’s what I’m wondering about here. 

I don’t claim to have answers; this feels like the kind of challenge that warrants lots more people thinking about it (inspired by Itsi’s line, “the projects that step up to the plate will happen.”) 

That said, here are some thoughts.

Could AI: 

1) help us hone animal liberation and diet change strategies for greater impact? What have we been missing? Why have our strategies so far failed? What might we do to make them more successful?

2) help us analyze what worked with you, me, and everyone else who did change our diets and sign onto Animal Liberation philosophy and then why that workeed and what it might look like to scale up based on that information?

3) help us figure out how to do much, much more with less, via agents for example, opening up impact opportunities that were constrained by bandwidth previously? 

4) help us target the people most likely to be open to changing their diets or adopting animal liberation philosophy for the kind of repeat interactions that might work? 

5) come up with ideas that no one else has thought of yet?

Those are a few ideas/questions; I would love to see what others might come up with, if prompted to do so. 

*** 

On Resources: 

I agree with you (of course) that “what matters is … whether [animal liberation and diet change advocacy] will make those interventions relatively more impactful than the other interventions we could deploy AI and those resources toward.” 

It seems like we’ve written off the idea that interventions focused on animal liberation and diet change should even be considered. I’d like to see them in the mix, with creative people really thinking about what might work. 

FWIW, I could imagine a big difference in impact between two similar interventions based on the concept of going deep v going broad. Maybe not, but it feels like it might be worth exploring. 

Also FWIW, I don’t think the animal liberation movement and diet change advocacy have tried the ideas laid out in The End of Roe — are there lessons there for animal liberation and diet change advocacy, not just for farm animal welfare advocacy? I don’t know, but it seems to me like it would be worth thinking about. 

Re: the diet change section on the EA Forum: I was referring to where we’re putting money and what we’re encouraging people to think about right now w/a potential huge influx of resources; everything I’ve seen that speculates on uses of a potential significant influx of funds has focused on animal welfare and alt proteins, both of which I am (of course) incredibly enthusiastic about! 

I’d be interested in seeing more people also thinking about diet change and changing the ethics zeitgeist. 

***

Very good points w/r/t whether animal liberation activism made welfare improvements possible. Ugh. That said, I still wonder whether a complementary focus on animal liberation and diet advocacy might, directed effectively, prove helpful to welfare campaigns. Could there be a symbiosis there? I don’t know, but it feels to me like it might be worthy of exploration. 

I appreciate your comments w/r/t the liberation struggle question. I agree with Elliot’s points and yours. Just one thing: Things like AI safety and global health have humans at the center, so it feels like maybe the liberation concept (these beings matter) is a given?

*** 

Conclusion: 

My post is a call to bring the creativity and analytical minds of the EA community to questions around animal liberation and diet change. EA is constantly asking “How do we do this better? How do we make this work? What’s most effective?” 

As you rightly note, a bit more than 10 years ago, we looked at the evidence w/r/t diet change and liberation advocacy, saw that nothing was working, and largely moved on. That may have made sense then, and it’s certainly paid dividends in the form of decreased suffering for an unfathomable number of animals (and the prospects for even more, of course). 

My point is: In the light of where were are now (e.g., with advanced AI and the potential for a lot more resources, and perhaps there are other new variables), might an overt focus on animal liberation and diet change advocacy lead to some new and transformative interventions that could work? 

Maybe not, of course, but I also think maybe so. It definitely feels to me like it would be worth putting the challenge out there. 

Thank you again for engaging—and, of course, for your world-transforming work. 

Thanks Aidan. 

You say: “My reason for objecting is that I think this conflates using moral arguments as a means with being motivated by morality in the end…”

Response: Aha, that’s a helpful clarification, though I’m not sure I agree. 

On the one hand, yes: I think most of the EA farm animal welfare community is motivated by a burning moral conviction to help animals—true. 

On the other hand, if 99%+ of our advocacy resources are focused on the welfare work that we think the vast majority of people agree with, then I think my statement holds up. 

Our internal motivation is important, but if we’re not doing much to bring others on board with those understandings, I think it’s fair to say that we’ve “walked away from the moral foundation of our work.” 

I’m also, as discussed, concerned that this decision may be counter even to our welfare goals, since:

How likely are we going to be to build a powerful movement? 

How likely are we to move the Overton Window? 

Are we doomed to have a cause that people care about, but only after the myriad things that impact them personally? Where will those single-issue voters come from? 

And are we going to have the talent problem you described in your most recent Sandcastles reflection? 

I understand your definition of bad faith ("saying something other than what you think is true for rhetorical reasons”) and understand that it can happen unintentionally. I know I do that sometimes and, like you, I appreciate having it pointed out. Here, though, I don’t think I did that. 

I appreciate you explaining your disagree vote, Michael - thank you. I thought it would be really funny if folks just flooded my comment with disagree votes, with no explanation, LOL.

That said, it seems to me that the value of an anonymous disagree vote is negligible (or perhaps even negative), unless there's an explanation. What do you see as the value of "cheap anonymous signals"? 

Here's why I think they're not valuable (and likely counter-productive): 

For a lengthy post (i.e., this one) where someone clicks "disagree," I guess it's just with the top-line message? I don't know if that assumption is correct. And even if it is, I don't know why they disagree. Does this add to understanding in some way? Or is there some other value I'm not seeing? 

If someone simply wrote "No" as their comment (the practical effect of a disagree vote, I think), is that a useful contribution? I think that would run afoul of the forum's posting guidance in multiple ways. How is an anonymous disagree vote different from that? 

There are forum principles around respectful disagreement and general EA principles around transparency. Anonymous disagree votes feel to me like they violate both of those. 

What principles do anonymous disagree votes uphold? 

This is for anyone, of course, not just Michael!