Constance Li
Bio
Participation2
I started out as a animal advocate in 2001 at the age of 12. Nearly a decade later, I discovered effective altruism and decided to start down an earning to give career path as a physician. Currently, I own a health services business and donate my time and money to direct work in animal advocacy. You usually can find me at the Impactful Animal Advocacy slack community.
How others can help me
If you are a funder, researcher, or MEL specialist interested in helping out more in the animal advocacy space, your talents are sorely needed! Please join the slack and send me a DM so I can get you plugged in to the best channels to collaborate with others in these neglected fields within the movement.
Posts 7
Comments86
Yeah.. I think I agree. We have thought and re-thought enough about shrimps and it is now the time to ACT! Will change it in the post.
Thank you for your devotion to the maximum utils!
Had to google Naming What We Can first... love it!
Thanks for catching that. I also saw there are a few (billion) more farmed shrimp to add in to those numbers. We have accordingly adjusted the post to convert estimates of [hours worked/human career] to [shrimps lost/year].
This seems like a doozy of a question to try to answer. Have you done your market research? Make sure no one else has written something about this in a similar way to what you intend first.
I’d be interested in reading an analysis about the murder comparison. There seems to be some elements of direct vs. indirect harm, partial vs. full responsibility for death, and different societal values. I’m not sure if I can truly parse it out.
It's really sad to hear about Steven Wise passing away. His work was a game-changer in how we see animals and their rights. Founding the Nonhuman Rights Project was a huge step forward, especially with those groundbreaking cases for chimps and elephants. Even though Happy the elephant's case didn't turn out as hoped, it sparked a massive conversation and got people thinking about animals in a way they hadn't before.
Wise's story is super inspiring. It's a big loss, but what he started isn't stopping anytime soon.
@Nicholas Kruus this is what the author, Chris Bryant, had to say:
You are quite right that there has been a tough couple of years for plant-based products recently. I think this is definitely an issue which warrants exploring, but I decided not to go into it here because I was pretty space-limited so I wanted to stick to the main question whether Veganuary has been impactful.
There are some graphs, like sales of vegetarian foods, where I didn't have more recent data, so they stop in 2020-ish. There's also a couple of places where I trimmed the graphs, because some data, while interesting, was not relevant to the point I wanted to make and made the graph much less clear.
For example, if you extend the 'Google searches about veganism' graph beyond 2020, you'll see that it starts to go down slightly after 2021, but it still peaks in January. Since my point there is that it peaks in January (and it's not relevant whether Jan 23 < Jan 22) I decided to go with a graph that would make the point most clearly in the limited space!
That said, there are a few things I discovered when researching this piece that didn't make it into the publication, but are definitely worth looking at further!
- There does seem to be a peak in interest around 2020/21, and subsequent years have been more challenging
- There may have been a surge in anti-vegan media since around the same time (the media stories per month graph breaks down massively after 2020, and shows so many stories in non-January months that it makes the rest of the graph impossible to read)
On Maya's point about displacement, I'd recommend this piece that we wrote about the evidence for displacement: https://bryantresearch.co.uk/insight-items/alternative-meats-demand/
In terms of disentangling Veganuary vs. new years resolutions, I would say that the apparent uptick in vegan activity when Veganuary started around 2014 is some evidence that the campaign itself had an impact.I haven't done this, but it would also be interesting to compare between countries! As you mentioned, Veganuary has been mostly UK-focused, so it would be interesting to compare interest/increase in veganism in January in the UK vs. the US, for example!
Here is the link to the full Slack thread. If you are not a part of the Impactful Animal Advocacy Slack, you can join here.
Yeah I'm surprised this evidence was easily available, but not included in the article. Very interesting. I have tagged the author in a thread about this article on the Impactful Animal Advocacy Slack so I will report back anything he has to say on the matter.
FWIW I do have a lot of respect for the author and this is the first time I've found myself puzzled about his output.
Fish welfare would be a big factor in my model about the net utility of free malaria nets. However, it seems really hard to calculate because we don't know the average net qualia of fish in these regions. If it is negative, then overfishing may be a positive thing for their welfare.