"I'm comfortable with pursuing protests through PauseAI US because they were a missing mood in the AI Safety discussion."

This raises and important point: if the success and impact of protests dependent on awareness of an issue / the existence of prior protests ?

We might imagine that the first protests on an issue are more impactful, and if protests reach a point where there's dozens going on regularly, that might also be uniquely effective.

Love this post, super useful!

If one publishes a research report, to what degree do we think that its a good idea to create a custom landing page for it, in addition to posting it on an org's site ? Would that help it show up in AI chats? 

I propose this because with tools like Replit, Bolt, Lovable and the like, creating attractive landing pages for just about anything is now trivial. 

What would you put on such a landing page?

"If I donate $10,000 to save two lives, I’m morally justified in taking one life because it’s convenient or enjoyable."

I see your point here, but it would more accurate to say (in the vegan offsetting case)

"If I donate $20 to save hundreds of lives, I’m morally justified in taking a dozen lives because it’s convenient or enjoyable."

Whilst the logic does change, the magnitude does, and I feel like that's important here.

"Seeing someone willingly make personal sacrifices for the sake of morality encourages others to act ethically, too."

This makes sense in theory, I am not sure it's correct in the case of veganism. Do many vegans here actually experience this? I definitely don't. I'm willing to bet most vegans experience orders of magnitude more stigma, defensiveness and abuse than moral admiration.

A nice, fun way to raise money for effective causes. Were all attendees vegan? Did you consider actively getting a few non vegans there?

I feel (but do not know) like attending warm, inviting dinner parties with great vegan food is probably an effective (though perhaps not very scalable) way to get people to go vegan.

Hi Jared and Maya, I'm Richie the (recently promoted) Director of Research for Bryant. Thank you so much for this! 

Having just read your post here but not yet read your published comment, I broadly agree with your approach, it's certainly an improvement on the original paper in my view. Great to see the analysis cleared up some puzzling results too. 

This research was conducted before I was hired. I am self-taught in non-experimental causal inference / econometrics, and see it as an essential area for behavioural scientists to incorporate in their work (economists have a great handle on it, but in psychology where I'm originally from it's woefully lacking). Going forward, I'll be looking to incorporate more of a causal approach in our research.

In general, I think there are two useful, general pieces of statistical advice here I'd want to highlight:

• Don't condition on post treatment variables
• Use the raw variables where possible. I.e. avoid change scores, be careful about making new variables by combining others. I personally have a vendetta against creating unnecessary ratio variables!

Also, for readers who are interested in learning a bit more about causal inference: The Effect by Nick Huntingdon-Klein is an excellent, free resource. So good, I paid for it when I didn't have to.

Thanks for this! I think a lot of this boils down to "the small body problem", which the animal movement still routinely ignores in it's strategising.

I am a big fan of using economic arguments for animals, and have authored 2 reports in the last year making these arguments. Caveats are that they are aimed at policymakers and are not economics papers so this forum would probably best treat them as BOTECs. I'd love to see economists take a "proper" look at some of these questions. That said, even shallow analyses can sway policymakers we have had good traction with the UK right wing media (rarely happens in animal advo) and have had conservative MPs and one Lord endorse the reports:

• Modest meat reduction could save the UK national health service a good chunk of money through reduced health costs
• Factory farming incurs hidden costs to taxpayers
   

I love the work being done here. Particularly the increasing emphasis on causal inference methods! I did a PhD in psychology and one of my biggest gripes with that side of behavioural science was the lack of interest and expertise to causal inference outside of lab experiments. As your lab's work this year has shown, they can refine findings, explain puzzling results and generally get us a bit closer to the truth.

Excited to see what you do in 2025!

Hi Josef, I love that you're wanting to strategize on how to end factory farming.

At the time of writing your post has a -11 score. In case you are confused about why, I suspect that it's because, whether this is true or not, your post comes across as not being very well researched or well thought out.

I wonder, have you talked much or worked with many activists or organisations in the farmed animal advocacy space? 

You've presented a very vague plan to solve a problem that many on this forum think is one of the biggest, most difficult problems in the world! 

For example between steps 5 and 6, you seem to just gloss over the challenge of convincing people to give up meat and go vegan, which is immensely difficult!

Additionally, the plan you've proposed is is already being done. Just this year there have been ballot initiatives and votes on banning factory farming. There are dozens of orgs, many led by health professionals, creating content on vegan diets. There are marketers and vegan influencers and all the rest.

When you say you want to start a movement, what exactly do you mean? Your plan covers a large chunk of the existing animal advocacy movement. What would your "sub movement" do differently?

I would note that if you find this analysis convincing but weight negative climate effects more than Vasco does, it really is cows that have the hugely negative climate impact; other animals have dramatically lower carbon footprints. So you might consider eating pork as a middle ground between animal welfare and climate.

That said, in many countries like the UK, most pigs have very low welfare in factory farms and most cows are always outside on pasture so probably have non-hellish lives. In the UK the trade-off between suffering and climate impact when it comes to meat choice is mostly inescapable. Organic pork I believe is raised outside but is less than 1% of the market so you may not be able to find it.

In other countries, cows are often kept indoors their whole lives. Though that is terrible, it does mean that ditching beef becomes a no brainer if you simultaniously care about climate and suffering. In those cases, the least of all evils would be pork, but know that there's still quite a bit of suffering going on.

I love these tips, definitely good advice. I am especially a big fan of walking meetings; I wouldn't be surprised if my Oura ring thinks "EAG" is some sort of long distance hike.

But as Rory Sutherland says "when it comes to our psychology, the opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea". 

So a tactic I often employ is to explicitly accept and even lean into the exhausting nature of conferences. Basically, have the mindset that this is a sprint. Just as sprinters choose a pace they cannot sustain for more than 100m, so you know that "conference you" is not a persona that you can adopt for longer than 3 days. Know you're gonna crash afterwards and plan accordingly. Book a whole day or 2 off straight after the conf and just sleep, or lie in the park, or meditate, or journal, or be alone, or watch the Simpsons or all of the above!