Ok, you’ve convinced me on the theoretical button-pushing. In reality those aren’t the options we’re presented with. 

Good questions. R&D isn’t the only lever. Given the relatively small amount of money that would be coming from EA, I’d direct the funding towards policy advocacy, comms/educating the market, and lobbying for governments to invest more in scale up funding.

I’m not in favour of intervention plurality for its own sake. Even if cultivated meat would only displace 50%, 25%, 10% of demand for broiler chickens, that would already be hugely beneficial compared to what we spend on currently.

And you wouldn’t have to be vegan to support it, which would open the movement up to others in the way FarmKind have tried to do. Just imagine: vegans, non vegans, environmentalists, investors, and businesses all united under one common, commercially viable goal of giving consumers another choice that has almost no trade offs compared to what they eat currently. Most other interventions and meta debates seem trivial by comparison if you think that cultivated meat is inevitable… which I do.

I think the main problem from a movement dynamics point of view is that it would undermine much of what people spend their energy on now. 

I think that should depend on what the bets are. 

Because a large proportion of vegans revert to eating animals at some point in their lives. Moreover, it isn't going to happen in any timeframe, unfortunately. 

Re: your poll, I'd say neither. Veganism and offsetting are both 'rearranging furniture on the Titanic'. The button I'd press wouldn't be to make everyone vegan in an instant, but to get cultivated meat on supermarket shelves at a competitive price point, in an instant. 

Nothing else (bar x-risks for humans) is going to end factory farming. As you say, meat consumption is skyrocketing, yet in animal advocacy we act like there isn't a viable alternative that is, or rather could be, on the table. 

So strong is my view on this that I'd go as far as to say that the way funding is allocated in animal advocacy is extremely ineffective. It should basically all be going towards scale-up grants or policy advocacy or whatever cultivated meat businesses need. 

But yeah the findings of the Pulse survey you mentioned don't surprise me. In the end I think this campaign was a load of hot air, probably not particularly helpful nor damaging either way. 

 

Note: This comment was copy-pasted from my recent LinkedIn post for speed. Toby kindly flagged that it read a bit out of context, so just to clarify for other readers: this is not AI slop. It's human-authored LinkedIn slop 🙂

TLDR: I’d love to see more debates. 

A good debate does something campaigns tend to avoid, but ought to do more of: it makes trade-offs explicit. Participants must define assumptions, defend priorities, and confront where values or strategies genuinely diverge. 

For an audience, this can be far more informative - and 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑣𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑖𝑛𝑔 - than polished messaging.

The value of debates is diagnostic. They surface where a movement is aligned, and which questions still need answering.

Animal advocacy uniquely prompts people to align moral belief with personal behaviour. It’s not necessary to do this in order to be effective at reducing animal suffering, but if you don’t, then the incoherency is always lurking within. That creates a level of psychological friction that other cause areas don’t have - we aren’t directly contributing to malaria or x-risk in the same way most of us are implicated in factory farming. It’s plausible that this shows up as a gap between what people endorse in surveys and how resources get allocated.

I’m not sure we should expect stated preferences and real-world allocations to line up neatly. Large funders may be counterbalancing where the rest of the community drifts in its actions, and in that sense divergence isn’t obviously a bad thing. 

If we do think the gap is a problem, I think fixing careers is an under-explored avenue. Animal advocacy still seems like a hard place to build a stable, respected long-term career. Retention, senior leadership depth, and longevity all seem thinner than in other cause areas. My hunch is that this cause area ends up being a ‘seasonal’ phase, with talent drifting toward better-resourced areas that can better place senior talent. 

I wanted to flag an upcoming Netflix limited series, The Altruists, which dramatises the collapse of FTX and centres on Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison. Filming wrapped late last year, and the series is expected to release in 2026.

Regardless of how carefully or poorly the show handles the facts, the title and premise alone are likely to renew public association between effective altruism, crypto, and the FTX collapse. Given Netflix’s reach, this will almost certainly shape first impressions for many people encountering EA-adjacent ideas for the first time.

It seems worth thinking early about what’s likely to follow. This won’t primarily be about factual accuracy. Even a relatively balanced dramatisation will compress nuance and foreground irony, because that is how narrative television works. A Netflix drama will travel faster and wider than any later attempts at nuance. Silence may be read as evasiveness, while reactive defensiveness would likely make things worse.

I don’t have a fully formed proposal for how the community should respond, but it seems worth beginning the conversation early, before others frame it for us.

I’d be interested to hear how others are thinking about this.