I think there’s another category before 9

Edited the post to add this.

I think most cuts should be something that we could replicate without significant price difference.

Sorry, I was a little fuzzy in my wording. My claim is (a) meat eaters have preferences + variety seeking even at the level of differences between cuts, (b) meat replacements will likely get very close to animal meat but not as close as some of these differences, and so (c) humans without a moral objection to eating animals will still eat some animal meat for variety.

For example, people still eat rutabaga, even though for any given rutabaga use other options (usually potato) are tastier and cheaper. People still eat red delicious and other kinds of apples that I think are basically obsolete. Iceberg lettuce is still widely eaten even though there are multiple options with simultaneously better flavor and nutrition. And I don't think there's much of a case for lima beans. There are some obsolete vegetables that we've stopped eating, but they basically need to be significantly worse, either in the "not worth eating" sense or "too expensive for what you get sense". In my model a food keeps some market as it still wins on some axis: cost, convenience, storage, flavor, texture, maybe tradition. And to disappear it needs to be beaten on every axis at once (or close enough that it's not worth the extra cost).

Also probably cultivated gives you more freedom to explore conventionally infeasible options.

I think that's right, but I think that doesn't get factory farming to zero: it gives people more options, but a drive for variety keeps all the options in play.

I think it goes well beyond species: meat eaters have strong preferences over specific portions ("cuts"). They have very different tastes and textures that I think will be very challenging to replicate. Instead, my expectation is that we'll get something more similar to the introduction of vegetable shortening: products that replace many animal uses, but not all.

Assuming we end factory farming before 2100, which factor will have contributed the most?

I expect these will not be exact substitutes, and so absent moral changes people would eat factory farmed meat for variety,

A bunch of objections!

• My largest is that I don't think we should rely heavily on the outside view. The whole EA project is trying to figure out where we can have the largest impact, and this involves thinking carefully about the effects of actions. What happened when people tried things in the past is some evidence, but there are also important differences between what we're trying and what people have done before (we can learn!), and between previous and current situations (the world changes).

• I don't think this analogy fits: I'm donating to people in both US parties who look like they'd do good work to reduce risk from AI and bio. I don't really see a way describing these folks as "my Group" makes sense.

• It also doesn't look to me like this cuts cleanly even if we do accept the analogy: there's also historical precedent for "try to help poor people effectively" going poorly.

I initially thought you were saying this was hard in the sense of it being hard for an evaluator, but then I noticed that your comparison was to "following GiveWell recommendations" and not "being a GiveWell evaluator". How much are you thinking about each?

If it's recommendations, what I do personally is follow the ones from @Eric Neyman 's working group.

If it's evaluation, I agree it's hard, though I also think a GiveWell evaluator has a hard job.  In fact, I think hardness is just the norm here.  For example, consider my decision whether to continue working at SecureBio. How likely is it that someone might engineer a pathogen? How much earlier in expectation is one flagged due to our efforts? How much harm is averted via earlier notification? What is my marginal contribution to our efforts? How much is people thinking SB owns this problem crowding out other work in the field?

(I am very happy with my role and not considering leaving; this is just for illustration!)

My impression of how to make progress with identifying the right places to make political donations is similar to what you'd do when assessing other donation opportunities: have people give it their full attention. My impression is they talk to existing people in the space to understand what has worked in past campaigns and how this is changing, look at the research to the extent it's any good, and talk to candidates and evaluate their public statements.

Expanded this and my earlier comment into a post: https://www.jefftk.com/p/high-dynamic-range-diy-air-testing

Measuring air from in a positive pressure respirator or clean room that is more than three logs cleaner than the room air is doable if you're thoughtful about experimental setup. Fundamentally, each sensor gives you about three logs of range, you don't have to use the sensor raw. Here's an example with four sensors:

1. You have your outer room, where you're going to have a very high particle concentration, and you put a sensor here. This sensor will read out of range (too high) for most of the experiment.
2. In your outer room, you put a fan with a MERV-16 filter, blowing air into a bax (plenum) at very very slight positive pressure, where you put another sensor. This will read within range for your whole experiment if you're lucky, or perhaps just a second 2/3 of the experiment.
3. Do the same as (2) with a HEPA filter. This will read within range for your whole experiment if you're lucky, or perhaps just the first 2/3 of the experiment.
4. The final sensor goes in the place you're trying to measure. It will read out of range (too low) at the end of the experiment.

Also put a small air purifier in your outer room, so that the particle count will decrease over time in a smooth way.

Before starting, calibrate your sensors by putting them all the same room and seeing how they handle the same input.

To begin the experiment, you put a huge amount of particles into the air of the outer room, perhaps dried salt. You continuously monitor your four sensors to do math on afterwards. You're going to want to do it on count bins, not mass, because that should be more stable over time and the experiment isn't able to measure everything simultaneously.

You should be able to calculate ratios between all of these sensors, either directly or by chaining. What you want to know is the ratio between your initial room (1) and your clean room (4), which you can get chained from (2) and (3).

If you use salt for your particles, the most you can get in the air is probably 100-500 mg/m3 and the sensors can do ~1-1000 ug/m3, this gives us 5-6 logs of dynamic range.

You can also get additional sensitivity by running longer, but I think sensitivity increases with the square root of time, so 10x sensitivity means 100x longer, which is pretty annoying.  [EDIT: actually I think it's linear, so this is a good way to extend your range.]

On alt proteins, if we ever substantially beat price parity (say by 50%), it’s just hard for me to see how we wouldn’t get mass consumer adoption.

For an exact substitute like precision fermented egg whites I think I agree. But alt proteins are usually more like the difference between eating different animals (turkey bacon instead of pig bacon) and people often pay >>2x for preferred animals. Even if this gets down to only as different as cuts of meat within a given animal people often pay >>2x for specific cuts. And then people really love variety, so while I see a path to replacing say 2/3 of a typical person's meat consumption the remaining portion is far harder.

It seems to me very unlikely to be that these big, thoughtful orgs are directionally wrong

That doesn't seem so unlikely to me. There are many patterns that push towards doing things over research: donors prefer it, volunteers prefer it, hard to justify research when that means doing nothing about atrocity today, things that looked good on BOTEC often don't get more investigation as reliance increase, etc. Add on top of this the poor epidemics of the animal welfare movement and I really wouldn't be surprised at all.