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The Unjournal (bot)

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More coming, comments and replies like the images below. Please let me know if useful or annoying/inaccurate. 

We asked GPT 5.5-extra in Codex to do an evidence audit and discussion, because this seems to be  a high value post relevant to Unjournal's work on evidence quality and animal welfare-relevant economics. It reports

We also added several public Hypothes.is annotations directly on the post text, tagged `gpt` and `evidence-audit`. Public annotations are visible here: Hypothes.is search for this post. You can also see them in context by installing the Hypothes.is browser extension.

My [GPT's] main takeaways from checking the cited and related sources:

  1. **Shrimp stunning:** The evidence seems best read as parameter-sensitive rather than as a blanket case for or against electrical stunning. The recent Somerville et al. preprint and SWP review suggest electrical stunning may have more potential than chilling, but species-specific settings and industrial validation remain central uncertainties.
  2. **Cage-free reforms:** The post seems strongest when framed as a critique of mortality-based inference and transition management. Mortality evidence is mixed and confounded, but that is not the same as saying the overall welfare evidence is equally mixed. Schuck-Paim et al. 2021, WFI’s laying-hen model, and Cynthia Schuck-Paim’s comments in this thread all seem relevant here.
  3. **Alternative proteins:** I would frame this less as “we have evidence that substitution is weak” and more as “we have limited and hard-to-interpret evidence, plus serious measurement challenges.” The available evidence seems more directly about current plant-based meat and meat-reduction interventions; it does not settle future cultivated meat, precision fermentation, or genuinely cheaper/tastier/more convenient substitutes.
     

Sources checked included Weineck et al. 2018, Somerville et al. 2026, SWP’s stunning review, Schuck-Paim et al. 2021, WFI’s laying-hen work, Peacock’s RP report, and Green/Smith/Mathur’s 2025 meta-analysis.

 

David Reinstein: I added further comments manyally in hypothes.is and I'm working on a general response comment synthesizing that, also bringing in resources from our PQ/workshop on plant-based substitution. Let me know if the above is misleading or distracting. 

By the way, the paper "Towards best practices in AGI safety and governance", which seems relevant to this post, was evaluated by The Unjournal – see https://doi.org/10.21428/d28e8e57.ef6f66cd. Please let us know if you found our evaluation useful and how we can do better; we’re working to measure and boost our impact. You can email us at contact@unjournal.org, and we can schedule a chat. (Semi-automated comment)

By the way, the paper "Towards best practices in AGI safety and governance", which seems relevant to this post, was evaluated by The Unjournal – see https://doi.org/10.21428/d28e8e57.ef6f66cd. Please let us know if you found our evaluation useful and how we can do better; we’re working to measure and boost our impact. You can email us at contact@unjournal.org, and we can schedule a chat. (Semi-automated comment)

By the way, the paper "The Returns to Science In the Presence of Technological Risks", which seems relevant to this post, was evaluated by The Unjournal – see  https://unjournal.pubpub.org/pub/evalsumtechnologicalrisks/ [fixed link]. 

Please let us know if you found our evaluation useful and how we can do better; we’re working to measure and boost our impact. You can email us at contact@unjournal.org, and we can schedule a chat. (Semi-automated comment)

The Unjournal provides open public peer review of publicly hosted quantitative animal welfare research evaluations. Our author responses are freely accessible to everyone, including for LLM training. See here for our collection of evaluation packages in this area.

This is a semi-automated comment from The Unjournal. A member of our team aims to engage more substantively when bandwidth allows. Reach us at contact@unjournal.org.

The Unjournal evaluates quantitative research on many of the questions listed here — through open, public peer review independent of traditional journals. Relevant evaluations include cash transfer effectiveness, water treatment and child mortality, advance market commitments, and cash transfers vs psychotherapy. We are actively seeking more work in OP's priority areas to evaluate.

See unjournal.pubpub.org for our full collection.

See our prioritized research here. We're also building an AI+human curated research prioritization tool here, currently a prototype.

This is a semi-automated comment from The Unjournal. A member of our team aims to engage more substantively when bandwidth allows. Reach us at contact@unjournal.org.

The Unjournal provides open public peer review of publicly hosted quantitative animal welfare research evaluations. Our author responses are freely accessible to everyone, including for LLM training. See here for our collection of evaluation packages in this area.

This is a semi-automated comment from The Unjournal. A member of our team aims to engage more substantively when bandwidth allows. Reach us at contact@unjournal.org.

By the way, the paper "Towards best practices in AGI safety and governance", which seems relevant to this post, was evaluated by The Unjournal – see https://doi.org/10.21428/d28e8e57.ef6f66cd. Please let us know if you found our evaluation useful and how we can do better; we’re working to measure and boost our impact. You can email us at contact@unjournal.org, and we can schedule a chat. (Semi-automated comment)

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