I am amenable to this argument and generally skeptical of longtermism on practical grounds. (I have a lot of trouble thinking of someone 300-500 years ago plausibly doing anything with my interests in mind that actually makes a difference. Possible exceptions include folks associated with the Gloriois Revolution.)

I think the best counterargument is that it’s easier to set things on a good course than to course correct. Analogy: easier to found Google, capitalizing on advertisers’ complacency, than to fix advertising from within; easier to create Zoom than to get Microsoft to make Skype good. 

Im not saying this is right but I think that is how I would try to motivate working on longtermism if I did (work on longtermism).

I bought the 3M mask on your recc 😃 

Hi Ben, I agree that there are a lot of intermediate weird outcomes that I don't consider, in large part because I see them as less likely than (I think) you do. I basically think society is going to keep chugging along as it is, in the same way that life with the internet is certainly different than life without it but we basically all still get up, go to work, seek love and community, etc.

However I don't think I'm underestimating how transformative AI would be in the section on why my work continues to make sense to me if we assume AI is going to kill us all or usher in utopia, which I think could be fairly described as transformative scenarios ;) 

If McDonalds becomes human-labor-free, I am not sure what effect that would have on advocating for cage-free campaigns. I could see it going many ways, or no ways. I still think persuading people that animals matter, and they should give cruelty-free options a chance, is going to matter under basically every scenario I could think of, including that one.

I'd like to see a serious re-examination of the evidence underpinning GiveWell's core recommendations, focusing on

• how recent is the evidence?
• what are the core results on the primary outcomes of interest?
• How much is GiveWell doing add-on analysis/theorizing to boost those results into something amenable, or do the results speak for themselves?
• How reproducible/open-science-y/pre-registered/etc. are the papers under discussion?
• Are there any working papers/in-progress things worth adding to the evidence base?

I did this for one intervention in GiveWell should fund an SMC replication  & @Holden Karnofsky did a version of it in Minimal-trust investigations, but I think these investigations are worth doing multiple times over the years from multiple parties. It's a lot of work though, so I see why it doesn't get done too often.

something along these lines, though not exactly

I wonder what the optimal protein intake is for trying to increase power to mass ratio, which is the core thing the sports I do (running, climbing, and hiking) ask for. I do not think that gaining mass is the average health/fitness goal, nor obviously the right thing for most people. I'd bet that most Americans would put losing weight and aerobic capacity a fair bit higher.

Hi James, neat visualizations, and very validating that you were able to extend our work like this! We worked hard to make our materials legible but you don't really know how well that went until someone actually tries to use them 😃 So this is great to see.   

1. Yes, a switch away from chicken meat towards beef could be good under some circumstances/assumptions. But the goal of our experiment was to come up with an effect size large enough to take to Chipotle, and we don't think we found one. My guess is that the interspecies tradeoffs also would not be very persuasive to a fast casual chain relative to beef's larger climate impact.
2. I'm not sure. Sofritas are more or less an analogue to ground beef, but I'm not sure people make that connection. Our thinking for this experiment was that chicken typically has the fewest analogues widely available, so we should try to focus on that. But I am no longer sure that I have a good sense of how introducing PMAs would impact meat consumption. Yes, we find some evidence that chickn'itas absorbs demand from chicken specifically, but it's not a slam dunk by any means. Maybe another PMA or two would have larger effects. I doubt it.
3. I agree that proto-vegetarians might be more actiely exploring alternatives...but how many people are in this category? I'd venture less than 1% of people are seriously considering it. Probably a much larger category are looking to "cut back" in some sense, but that might mean many things to them.
4. I think our experiment has high ecological validity for the thing we are testing, which is the introduction of  PMAs to an online, Chipotle-like menu. That's a real environment in which people encounter PMAs, and because it's online, IMHO it may lack promotion, buzz, etc. Perhaps a more elaborate test of a more fleshed out, multi-component theory would find different effects. On the other hand, our intervention is easily scaled up.
   1. For tests of "hearsay about how X or Y tastes really good, has to be tried etc" see, Sparkman et al. (2020, e.g. figure 2) and Piester et al. (2020). We review some of those studies here. I think broadly speaking you are talking about norms-based approaches, see here for a general review and here for a review specific to eating meat.

Totally, I did not mean to suggest that protein and fiber are fungible. Rather I wonder if plant-based options might do better to play to their strengths, one of which is fiber. 

I would also say that I've never noticed if the Sofritas portion is smaller than the equivalent animal-based portion but if that were true on average across Chipotles, it would suggest some interesting follow-ups: 

1. do servers implicitly believe that folks who order plant-based are more "health-conscious", whatever that means, and thus want smaller portions?
2. does Chipotle have some official guidance on different portion sizes? 

As a side note, it seems that many people I talk to IRL have somewhat extreme beliefs about how much protein they need & don't have a good sense of how much protein is in grains and legumes, but that is a post for another time. (Update: a little research suggests, indeed, some  confusions around this topic, but also generally low enthusiasm for PBAs)

It is very possible that this will have transformative effects! Two pieces of counter-evidence worth contending with though:

1. The plant-based meat market grew rapidly in the 2010s -- beyond meat was introduced in 2009, Imposisble in 2016 -- and more or less peaked around 2021 and has been declining since. Meat is back on the menu, culturally and politically; Beyond Meat might go through bankruptcy in the next few years; and the percentage of vegetarians and vegans has remained constant over time at about 4-5% of the population. So to me, the story here is that plant-based meats hit a wall of market adoption, at least at their current point of price/taste/convenience. Basically they were starting to appear in more places but eventually demand didn't continue to grow.
2. Some evidence that some people say they won't try lab-grown meats under any circumstances. Maybe they'll get used to it, maybe they won't. Maybe the issue gets polarized and some people love it and other people say it threatens core values. 

P.S. on the subject of meat-heavy celebrations, I am going to a pig roast tomorrow and expecting to be able to eat nothing, so I'll just bring my own food or eat beforehand...but I'm used to this dance 😃 

Hi Chris, a few thoughts about this:

1. On the macro front, I sometimes wonder if the PMA companies shouldn't amp up the fiber content in their products and try to emphasize that as an under appreciated macro. (Personally I pay very little attention to my net macros so long as I'm generally eating healthy, real foods. When I'm thru-hiking it's a different story -- I tally my daily protein intake -- but also in that context I eat way, way more sugar.)
2. Upcharge was addressed by our study design because prices were kept constant (re: zero) but it's possible some folks held that assumption . This, as I've said elsewhere, is an element of experimental realism because some people will also believe that if ordering to Chipotle for real.
3. Regarding nutrition parity, what if PMAs were more nutritious? I am guessing that this is a hard problem and also that we don't have clear, agreed-on metrics for healthy. But I'm also reminded of a friend saying like 15 years ago that legalization of weed would usher in a whole new era of genentically modified superstrains that could have all sorts of add-on effects, and that never materialized. It's easy to fantasize about the amazing potential of material sciences for those of us who don't actually work in it 😃
4. I agree with you about restaurants vs supermarkets -- much easier to find animal welfare certifications on a tin than a restaurant's website, for instance. Which is why it's a bit of a downer that so many  conscientious reducetarians/flexitarians eat meat much more often out than at home. I think what's happening there is that convenience trumps abstract ethical reasoning when the two come into conflict. Byran Caplan would not find this surprising.