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.

If this subject is of interest, you might enjoy Matthew Scully's "Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy." His article a Brief for the Pigs gives a sense of his style & arguments:

> In the early 1980s, standing in the very place where Saint Francis lived, Pope John Paul II said of him: “His solicitous care, not only towards men, but also towards animals, is a faithful echo of the love with which God in the beginning pronounced his ‘fiat’ which brought them into existence. We too are called to a similar attitude. . . . It is necessary and urgent that with the example of the little poor man of Assisi, one decides to abandon unadvisable forms of domination, the locking up of all creatures.” Pope Benedict XVI, too, cautioned against “the industrial use of animals” and “the degrading of living creatures to a commodity,” as his successor, Francis, has spoken about the “disordered use” of animals in factory farms, the “wretchedness that leads us to mistreat an animal,” and the truth that, where cruelly made products are on offer, “purchasing is always a moral — and not simply economic — act.”

Hi Dorsal, good questions:

1. In general, as an economist friend put it, "Changing options is a very strong intervention, like mechanically there should be an effect." So I would expect a new meat option -- BBQ chicken or whatever -- to attract customers. But you are right, we don't know that. On the other hand, our question was whether adding a chicken analogue would attract customers away from meat-based options, so whether a meat option would have also attracted customers is not really apropos of our estimand. It might help put our results in context, but it's not the theoretical quantity we're after. And there's a lot to be said for keeping a study focused. Another thing manipulated means either a smaller sample per treatment arm or a more expensive experiment. Always we are triaging.
2. That would have been a fine thing to check, but in the online ordering context we were trying to simulate, you also view the options without necessarily "taking the time to read the small grey on white text," so if they miss the new option, that's arguably an element of experimental realism. Also, as Lewis points out, we have reason to think our numbers are broadly in line with what people are actually ordering, which is some evidence that people were actually reading. However it might be interesting to do a follow-up where someone actively promotes the new PMA, which restaurants sometimes do. That would be a fine paper, but also a different experiment aimed at a different estimand. 

Yes, I think there is something to this. We might have suboptimal talent distributions from a social POV if EAs are naturally attracted to certain kinds of work in a way that unconsciously/consciously influences career calculuses.

A general question about this advice, and other pieces in the same vein: What areas should fewer EAs work in? We've got to come from somewhere. 

More broadly, EA thinking places a high value on cost-benefit analysis. When talking about career stuff, that means opportunity costs. A version of that claim here would sound something like, "[some cause area] is oversaturated and could probably lose half of its current human capital without meaningful loss, which I believe for [reasons] and if those people moved into government and did [some stuff] then [good things] would happen..."

Without such a comparison, I'm afraid this case is not expressed in terms that EAs are likely to find persuasive.