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.

Interesting! I believe I missed that interview, although a rep told the Times that same year that "sofritas accounts for about 3 percent of fillings." 

I recently learned that Steve Ellis (Chipotle founder) tried predominantly plant-based fast casual in 2024; apparently it didn't work out (although I'm still seeing a Yelp page?) and this winter he told Eater that  “veganism...is very polarizing, I’ve learned.”

 In a separate interview Ellis said “I think people will eat more plant-based diets and make that part of their life if there are better options,” [emphasis added], which I agree with. But I basically think that that no single effort is likely to change the game, in part because the most effective interventions are unusually challenging to scale.

(Also, Chipotle tried out free shipping on plant-based options in 2021, which is an intervention I'd love to formally evaluate! But I'd bet that appetite for that kind of thing is lower nowadays. The whole market is a long way from where it was then.)

I'm not in a position to fund this but I like your pitch a lot -- you check a lot of boxes that make me think 'this person is legit and knows what they're doing.' Good luck!

Hi there, just coming across this for the first time -- great resources and analysis, thank you! (I'm a researcher at the Humane and Sustainable Food Lab at Stanford and just wrapped up a meta-analysis on efforts to get people to reduce consumption of meat and animal products, most of which took place in the US and EU -- here's a forum summary). A few general observations:

1. In general, data collection in LMICs is a hard problem. If you look at a heat deaths per capita chart, it looks like Europe does a lot worse than Africa, which is substantially hotter and poorer. That's probably about record-keeping rather than heat adaptations. So if I read that meat consumption is unusually low in  Botswana or Nigeria, my first thought is 'data issues.'
2. I'm not sure how to think about this question for Slovakia or Thailand. Slovakia was LMIC in the 90s but not today, but if you look at the Wikipedia page on Slovakian cusines, almost everything pictured has meat in it. Thailand is middle-income today, but I lived in Thailand in 2012 and being vegetarian was a big challenge. Maybe the right way to think about this is that Thai dishes typically have a little bit of meat in them but not a lot, e.g. fish sauce in a curry and a few shrimp is just a lot more of a balanced meal than a burger or steak or whatever. But maybe the  data are just not reliable. What do you think? Big picture, do you trust the data you collect on meat consumption per capita?
3. The Animal Welfare Economics Working Group is putting together a data library that might be helpful for future investigations in this vein.

Wild sardine and anchovy fishing also results in very low bycatch.^[23] As pelagic fish that swim in dense shoals near the surface, they are caught with purse seine nets rather than bottom trawls, avoiding seabed damage and minimising the risk of plastic pollution through ghost gear.

I would say this is the crux of the issue for me and I appreciate your addressing it directly. Looking at the cited research:

This paper presents a study of the Spanish purse-seine fleet operating in the Bay of Biscay during the years 2016–2019. It considers the species selectivity and the effect of fishing activities on the pelagic community by assessing the interactions with the endangered, threatened and protected (ETP) species and estimating the discard sizes. For the purpose of this study, the metiers were defined by grouping similar catch profiles, using hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis. This definition of metier goes beyond the Data Collection Framework (DCF) concepts; it includes specific target species, thus increasing the accuracy. Sampling conducted at sea during the four years of the study demonstrated that; 1) the discards were scarce both in terms of overall values and the proportion of the catch (below 1% for almost all metiers and years); 2) The studied purse-seine fishery is one of the most selective among those harvesting the pelagic domain in the Bay of Biscay; 3) The results also showed that the fleet avoided the unwanted catches, mostly by practising slipping;4) The interaction with the ETPs was almost non-existent. Only a single case of a yellow-legged gull entanglement was recorded, and the bird was released alive. Notably, more than 7500 individuals of 16 species of seabirds and marine mammals were recorded in the vicinity of the fishing grounds. Thus, we conclude that this purse-seine fishery has only a slight impact on the main species of the pelagic ecosystem, due to the purse-seine slipping practices.

I don't know this branch of work well. Do you consider these estimates credible? Generalizable? if I buy anchovies at the grocery store where i live in Brooklyn, will they be caught the way these were, or worse?

My general thought on this is that because I'm not expert in these issues I should err on the side of abstaining. But I am persuadable. 

(My other big question for this line of thinking is, why anchovies/sardines when oysters/mussels are widely available, provide many of the same nutritional benefits, and are more clearly nonconscious.)

This was also the book that persuaded (and alerted) me to ostrovgegansim 

Nice! I replied on substack. Your suggesitons largely jive with my experience.