I guess if someone were sufficiently risk averse then it might be rational for them to avoid GMOs, as well as consistently extending this avoidance to many other technologies which have been deemed safe by health authorities but haven't been around for 80+ years for us to fully be sure of the long term health affects, things like new vaccines, new types of drugs, wifi, 5g, MRI scans, etc

Thanks for your comments!

GM in Cultivated Meat

That's cool you looked into the different companies that have been approved, I didn't know which were using GMOs and which weren't. The fact that (probably) 2/5 of them are using GM doesn't update me from the 1/2 reference class though. My guess is that the nuance that only some cultivated meat companies use GM will be lost fairly quickly once it starts getting debated. Presumambly the non-GM companies are going to be emphasising that they don't use GM, while the other companies will be saying GM is nothing to worry about, so it will be a confusing message for consumers.

And good point that the regions which are most anti-GMOs (e.g. Europe) will presumably be served by companies not using GM cultivated meat which lessens the badness of the GM thing.

I don't know how much of a benefit the GM is for cultivated meat (I would guess a decent amount as otherwise they probably wouldn't use it), so I'm not sure how disadvantaged the non-GM cultivated meat companies will be in the race. If it's a big deal for scaling the technology then I guess the first products in supermarkets will be GMOs which would be a bad first impression.

Trump Approving Cultivated Meat

I don't know what to make of the fact that this admin's FDA is approving more than the previous admin, might just be that the technology is more developed now, or maybe this FDA is approving things faster generally. I guess cultivated meat still has a decent way to go before it will be in supermarkets, so even if this admin stopped approving new versions I'm not sure how much that would matter. I am more concerned by the general trend of the right-wing politicians spurning cultivated meat.

Other

I'd be interested in your thoughts on "some of the same reasons people dislike GMOs will mean they like cultivated meat". In my mind they share a similar aesthetic of "unnatural, messing with nature, playing God, etc"

And good point that 2 of the 7 bans are not permanent, I missed that.

 

When you survey meat consumers, the majority of them say that they buy their meat from humane farms, when in fact of course ~95% of them are buying from massive factory farms (as that's where ~95% of meat production comes from). So in people's minds, they're not switching from factory farms to cultivated meat, they're switching from small independent farmers with great conditions to lab grown meat, which is a much less appealing jump.

I'm expecting massive food multinationals to be the ones bringing cultivated meat to market, e.g. Nestle, Unilever. And I think low-trust people will be put-off by this. I think people will want to side with the "small independent farmers" they think they are buying from.

Once headlines like these start appearing: New Nestle Lab-Meat Facility Opens, Expected to Cause Mass Unemployment For Small Farmers and Huge Profits for Corporate Multinational, I think more people still will be pushed away. Combine that with complicated and spurious health concerns, and people will stick with the default meat.

Politicians are desperate to pick up voters in rural areas, so I expect being anti-cultivated meat to become an increasingly popular political position. People who like the idea of cultivated meat won't care enough to make it an issue they vote on, and farmers who are threatened by the technology will make it their number 1 voting issue.

I think your 10-15 year prediction is very plausible, but the year at which it arrives in supermarkets is more a technological question. I guess the question about consumer adoption is, once they arrive on supermarket shelves, what share of the entire meat industry will cultivated meat make up after 10, 20, 30, 50 years?

Do you expect most consumers to switch very quickly, within a few years to a decade, or do you think it will be a generational thing? I used to imagine people switching over incredibly quickly, but now I think generational change is much more likely.

I share your sense that people's default attitude is to give cultivated meat a chance and many would happily try it (especially younger people, with about 1/2 of Gen Z saying they'd eat it). However, I anticipate a massive media effort by the meat lobby to convince people that cultivated meat is unsafe and gross, and I think people will be sensitive to that and quickly turn their backs.

For reference, before commercialisation GMOs had decent acceptance scores (50-70% of people said they'd eat it), but it didn't take long before people were against it. 

As cultivated meat is such a risk to the meat industry, I expect the meat lobby to put an incredible amount of effort behind their campaigns, using the framings I pointed to above (unnatural, unsafe, etc). And yes, the pro-cultivated-meat groups will use the framings you're thinking of (anti-factory farming, good for climate), but I expect these "public-good" benefits will be weak compared to health concerns for the consumers.

Growing GMOs is completely banned in the two most populous countries, China and India, along with Russia, and many more countries. In the EU there's only one variety which is allowed to be grown (maize), and Spain is the country with the highest amount (20% of their maize production).

(Random fun fact, in Hungary they even introduced a clause in their constituition against growing GMOs for some reason)

To me it's clear that something went badly wrong with the introdcution of the technology when so many countries have actively banned it.

(I'm talking about banning the growing of it, not the importing of it for animal feed, which many of these countries do)

Thanks for commenting! Here's some quick thoughts:

You're right, 13% of farmland isn't terrible! But it is also much less than they had the potential to be by now. Hopefully their growth will continue and in a few decades from now will be totally normalised. It took pastuerisation 60 years to get to 50% in the UK, and GMOs are at 13% after 30 years, so there's time yet.

I shouldn't have said "GMOs are a failure" but "the rollout of GMOs was a failure", or "public acceptance of GMOs has been a failure".

The fact that roughly half of all people think that GMOs are unsafe, and only 13% think they are safe, is a big part of what makes me think the GMO introduction was a failure.

The biggest failure has probably been in Africa, where there was lots of optimism that GM crops would enable small farmers to escape subsistance and accelerate the decline of poverty in the region, but except for South Africa, they're barely grown on the continent today.

Also, I think the report you read includes GM cotton which is big in countries which ban GM food (e.g. India), as the concerns about health effects isn't an issue there as they're not eaten. I tried to exclude cotton in this post as I was focusing on GM food. I didn't even try to untangle the GM crops that are used for animal feed, but I probably should have, as that's also not very relevant for the GM acceptance of the public. I haven't found a good number on it, but it seems like something like 2/3s of GM food we grow is fed to farm animals. As the post was using GM foods to understand "how does the public react to a new food technology?" for the purpose of thinking about cultivated meat, cotton and animal feed aren't relevant.

Personally, I know I'd rather make the decision of donating once, and forget about it, rather than having to decide every day. I know if I had a daily notification asking me to make a decision I would quickly get rid of it, as I find those sorts of things exhausting after a while. But maybe there's a personality of people who like these sorts of prompts and appreciate micro-decisions.

On the other hand, maybe some people are overwhelmed by the idea of donating $1500/year, but $5/day seems fine, so they'd be into this.

For people who like the sound of $5/day but would soon mute the notification, there could be a way of toggling a switch to automate the process of donating the 5 bucks, but maybe that's missing the point of your idea?

You'd probably need a way of getting around credit card fees, as I think these have a fixed price so making lots of small transactions isn't very effective?

This seems like a very valuable bit of info to have!

I haven't thought about this for long, but I'm not actually sure which way a system like this would go.

I know that when a bunch of random variables are added together then that will result in a normal distribution, and when a a bunch of random variables are multiplied together it'll give a log-normal distribution, but I don't know which of these is a better model for different pain intensities in a given pain event

I love seeing this stuff written up! Thanks for taking the time to write it. This way other orgs can build-on and modify this kind of system for their own needs, rather than everyone having to start from scratch

I felt the Sam Harris interview was disappointingly soft and superficial. To be fair to MacAskill, Harris did an unusually bad job of pushing back and taking a harder line, and so MacAskill wasn't forced to get deeper into it.

And basically nothing about how to avoid a similar situation happening again? Except for a few lines about decentralisation. Quite uninspiring.