That is....a giant picture of my head haha But thanks for featuring me!

Genuinely curious: who here would class themselves as an EA animal advocate would agree that "the political will for a phase-out will never materialise, and that we’ll be forever optimising suffering within a system we’ll never dismantle." ?

Like, it might be my experience, but I cannot ever hearing an EA animal advocate express this idea. But I could be wrong? 

I agree that we know very little about nutrition, but I don't see why that should bias us against veganism. 

I can't really think of a single thing that we eat in our modern diet that remotely resembles what our ancestors ate. We didn't eat chickens. We ate fruit, but none of the fruits resembled what we have now. Literally everything in our food system has been radically transformed in the last few hundred years. 

So sure, we don't know for sure that veganism is a good diet for us, but doesn't your argument lead to the conclusions that we don't know if any particular food is good for us? If so, this argument shouldn't bias us towards or against any particular diet.

"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!