Richie
Participation4
- Attended an EAGx conference
- Completed the In-Depth EA Virtual Program
- Attended more than three meetings with a local EA group
- Received career coaching from 80,000 Hours
Comments5
I see the potential for this argument. I particularly like the emphasis on celebrating counterfactual wins, that some people may not immediately see as wins.
However I'd like to see more elaboration on how it actually results in different tactics and framing.
So I like the definition of "helping as much animals as posible" but when exactly does this lead to different tactics to ending factory farming?
Given that most people define factory farming as a system that uses practices that are known to cause suffering (stocking densities way too high, lack of natural light and ability to express natural behaviours, frankenchicken genetics), I think both your framings lead to more or less the same policies.
For example, I'd argue that many animal advocates consider cage free campaigns to be a goal on the way to eliminating factory farming, because confining animals is a key feature of factory farms. In fact, in the US factory farms are formally called "confined animal feeding operations" (emphasis mine)
It's also not clear to me why "ending factory farming" is less defined than "preventing animal suffering".
I agree that the key bottlneck in alt proteins and next gen materials is "doers in the lab", and that is a key goal of the GFI and was a key goal of MII. I also agree that a key factor is whether consumers can buy a great product. But surely you agree that getting a product to market and in the hands of consumers is about far more than simply making a great product?
People won't go into a field if they don't think anyone will care about their research. They won't found companies and recruit those lab scientists if don't think there is consumer demand. Governments won't fund it if they don't think consumers (aka voters) care.
Finish all bursts of work with a Placeholder.
A placeholder is note, even a sentence, that allows you to more easily 'get back in the flow' of a task after leaving it for some time.
A major drain of the productivity of modern knowledge workers is that we engage in too much context switching i.e. switching from task to task. When I move from doing emails to getting down to writing, it takes some time to 'get into the swing' of writing. If I then have to take a call, I have to restart the process of getting into the headspace to write. Often the previous task 'drags' on our attention. This is often called attention residue.
Many people try to solve this by reducing the amount of context switching they have to do (see deep work). But many eventually realise that it's just not possible to reduce the amount of context switching to an optimal level.
Another angle to tackle the problem is to have systems that allow you to quickly change between tasks. If we can minimise the time taken to 'get into it' then we decrease the cost of context switching. Placeholders are just such a system.
Examples of placeholders:
- TODO's in code. Make them specific: "TODO: add type hints to this function"
- Stopping writing mid-sentence. "There are numerous benefits of intermittent fasting, including...." or "One promising method might be mechanistic interpretability. Smith et al define this as...."
- When problem-solving: describe the context and thought process. e.g. say I'm trying to decide how to solve a programming issue but have a meeting in 5. I might write: "this function needs to get all the files for a given fiscal week but they only have dates in the filenames, you think there might be a function to convert date to FW in Jacks' utils package but haven't asked him, he might be off today?". This basically allows you to jump back into your thought process.
- At the end of a few hours of online research, create a short summary of the best websites you found, and why you found them valuable
I don't want to be pessimistic, but I am not currently convinced these campaigns were good uses of activist time and donor money, given how badly they were defeated.
I see the point that "we were vastly outspent" can go somewhere to explain why campaigns failed, but surely this was known before hand? If so, then it would have been an argument against doing them in the first place.
Can you elaborate a bit more on any tangible advantages you see beyond "raising awareness/starting conversations"?
Also, how do we actually know that this has been a significantly beneficial step re: "raising awareness/starting conversations" ?
My own experience is that all non vegans I mentioned this said something that can be summarised as "what a ridiculous thing to do, there was no way that would work, don't these crazy activists have something better to do with their time?". Which is very weak evidence that this may have spawned many negative conversations for animals.