Hi all,

Thom from FarmKind here. We at FarmKind wanted to provide a bit of context and explanation for the choices we’ve made around this campaign.

Context

• Cooperation: We let Veganuary know about our intention to launch this campaign at the very start of our planning process and have kept them informed throughout. Our campaign provides them with another opportunity to put forward the benefits of diet change. We are all on good terms and there is absolutely no infighting.
• Origin: At this time of year, due to the annual Veganuary campaign, many people and the UK press debate the pros and cons of diet change, often with very entrenched views on both sides. This creates a unique opportunity to get people who are currently unwilling to change their diet to consider donating as an alternative entry-point into helping farmed animals - something that is extremely hard to get media attention for most of the time.
• Goal: The goal of this campaign is to get the question of 'should you do Veganuary' more media attention, and shift the focus from ‘is eating animals bad’ to a focus on the question of which solution(s) to factory farming an individual will choose to participate in. In other words, we want the debate to be about whether to choose diet change or donating, rather than whether factory farming is a problem worth dealing with or not.
• Our funders: FarmKind made the decision to launch this campaign. Organisations and individuals that have provided FarmKind with funding are not endorsing the campaign and it would be a mistake to equate past funding of FarmKind with support for our approach.

Campaign

The campaign encourages people to offset their meat this January by donating to help fix factory farming. As part of this, we hired three top competitive eaters to talk about donating to offset the animal welfare impact of their diet as they undertake one of their typical eating challenges.

By working with individuals who eat meat (but who would be undertaking these meat-eating challenges anyway), we can help reduce suspicion among entrenched meat eaters that our true motive is to make them vegan. It allows us to be authentic in our message that being unwilling to change your diet doesn’t mean you can’t start helping animals. 

Our campaign aims to show that those who are unwilling to change their diet today can and should still begin their lifelong journey of helping animals by donating to charities working to change the food system.

Concerns

We know that some may have concerns about this approach and feel uncomfortable with the idea of paying competitive eaters who are eating meat, even in an effort to help farmed animals. However, to make change we have to start from where people are now. For most people, that starting point is eating and enjoying meat and being unwilling to change their diet.

Some media coverage has suggested that our campaign aims to encourage people to eat meat or that we are running a ‘meat-eating campaign’. This is untrue, and we have corrected them. Tapping into the pre-existing anti-Veganuary media narrative is a feature, not a bug, because this is why they’re running stories about effective giving for farmed animals (which they would never touch otherwise) and giving Veganuary free media coverage.

As part of our commitment to being as transparent and effective as we can, we’re happy to answer specific questions anyone has about the campaign but as this campaign is ongoing we may have to answer some questions in the future or privately via email.

I'm going to read this full article more carefully and post a more considered comment later on, but I wanted to get this in early as my contribution to the conversation which I hope this article produces (because I think its a great piece):

I think your portrayal of 'short term pragmatism' is a bit of a straw man. I don't really recognise this view amongst the animal nonprofits that I speak to.

Yes, many people spend a lot of time talking about and thinking about winning the specific campaign that they are involved in right now (naturally), but those campaigns are usually tied into a longer term theory of victory which involves the end of factory farming.

It might be that there are differences in terms of how far away from that ultimate victory we are (a few decades or 50+ years for example) and so it might be that these specific campaigns feel too timid to some, but then we should be having a conversation about how we work our which timeline is more accurate and, therefore, what the appropriate level of ambition is.

"we block all factory farm expansions -> people realize that we don't want factory farmed products in the UK at all -> public opinion shifts quickly -> multiple policy changes are now simultaneously possible"

I think this ToC is much less clean than it sounds.

1. We block all factory farm expansions - somewhat unlikely. I don't think you can't block them on welfare grounds, you have to find some other reason to block an expansion like environmental grounds so each fight is unique and the chance of winning every time is consequently lower.
   
   Note: there was a case, Animal Equality v North East Lincolnshire Council recently which Animal Equality claim sets president for animal welfare as a material consideration. They are wrong to claim this. The dispute wasn't about whether or not animal welfare is capable of being a material consideration and so remarks regarding this point are obiter. The Council did not dispute the point (they won on other grounds). This is good, but it might be that the council chose not to dispute this for tactical reasons (I don't know enough about planning law to say either way.) 
    
2. People realize that we don't want factory farmed products in the UK at all - seems like the strongest link to me. Generally people are already pretty anti-factory farming. However, they don't realise so much of their food comes from factory farms. I think it is unclear how support for factory farming changes if people had to face the real consequences of not being able to access factory farmed products
3. We ban new factory farms, start working on closing/improving existing ones - Less likely than it sounds. In this world the public don't like factory farming but they also probably don't like higher food prices (no one does), less access to meat and dairy etc. Unlike gay marriage, the voter is faced with a tradeoff whereby they have to want a ban on factory farming more than they want low prices. This is a high bar but you then also have to convince politicians that this is the case (for example, despite lots of polling saying people are prepared to pay for higher welfare products, politicians are still reluctant to implement any measure than has a meaningful impact on food prices).
4. Ban low welfare imports - Very hard/impossible. As James points out, this may be practically speaking impossible if we sign the EU CVA in its current form or close to current form (which seems very likely)

"It’s not just AIM, all of EA has been shooting its own foot since inception with its criteria for accepting people. Don’t follow their example. Find more experienced veterans. Don’t consider so highly academic backgrounds."

In general, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the claim that EA in general can be too focused on young graduates from a few Universities, but I think its pretty hard to make that charge stick on AIM.

Some people who go through the program did indeed go to Ivy League/Oxbridge Unis, but many (including me) did not and the cohorts have a diverse range of people with different life experiences.

It is my understanding that AIM does try to attract people who have a lot of experience as well as young people, but, as I'm sure you can appreciate, when the 'job' includes almost no job security, low pay and potentially needing to relocate to the other side of the world, its often more attractive to younger folk with fewer commitments.

If you are considering not applying because you don't think you have the right 'CV' (for any reason) I would strongly recommend you DO apply. I almost counted myself out for this reason and I am very glad I put in my application.

Thanks for this post. I thought it was really interesting and I think you are probably right.

My main objection - however - would be that technologies developed by welfarists would struggle to compete in the market as it stands because we'd be trying to meet the often competing demands of improving welfare and improving economic outcomes for farmers (in order to have our tech adopted in the first place).

Companies that develop technologies that are purely delivering efficiency gains for farms are more likely to succeed in a profit focused market than these welfarist technologies and so welfarist animal tech companies might be competed out of the market.

It might be more efficient to focus our attention on creating the kinds of market conditions that incentivise profit-making companies to develop the tech we want to see.

What this means is focusing on what we're already doing - corporate campaigning, lobbying etc. - to create the conditions where farms/food companies have to care about animal welfare to some extend and then let the profit-seeking (counterfactually cheaper) money be spent on R&D to deliver the tech that meets those objectives.

Thanks for responding to my points! You didn't have to go through line by line, but its appreciated.

Obviously a line by line response to your line by line response to my line by line response to your article would be somewhat over the top. So I'll refrain!

The general point I'd make though is that this almost feels like an argument for something before you've decided what you want to argue for. There feels like a conceptual hole in the middle of this piece (as you say, people are still trying to work out what the problem is). But then you also respond to most of (not all) my points without actually giving a counter-argument, just claiming that I'm clearly mistaken. This makes it quite hard to actually engage with what you've written.

Maybe, as Alexander seems to think, I'm just a poor blinkered fool who can't understand other people's perspectives - but I am actually tryign to engage with what you've written here, not sh*t posting.

I wonder if this statement might simply reflect your ability to understand and steelman other people's perspectives. Food for thought?!

Now this is uncharitable

Thanks!

I had a bit of a negative reaction to this comment - it seems a bit uncharitable to me

That's fair, I might have been a bit mean there!

I was interested in this because I’m broadly sympathetic to the idea that we might not give enough attention to bigger systems. But for me, this post only really strengthened my EA tendencies.

So the core argument in favour of the metacrisis being ‘a thing’ (upon which the later arguments that we should take it seriously hang) seems to be:

a. Technology makes us more powerfu and the world is more interconnected

b. As a result, our capacity for self destruction has massively increased

c. Our ‘culture, the implicit assumptions, symobls, sense-making tools and values of society’ are not ‘mature’ enough to ensure this capacity is managed in a low risk manner

d. Therefore, some kind of existential risk is more likely

Propositions A and B seem basically correct to me. But I think proposition C is very weak. I have two main problems with it:

1) there is just so many different things inside of that grouping, the article only makes an argument as to why a set of implicit assumptions are a cause of the problem, then sneaks in all this other stuff in this one central paragraph. It seems highly likely to me that some things (like society's values) are more important to how well the world goes than others (like symbols)

2) I think C stands to be proved. While there are many problems with society and global coordination, it seems like often at the crunch global coordination pulls through (nuclear proliferation, chemical weapons and CFCs are examples). I think you can make an argument we don’t have the right tools, but I think equally you can make at least as strong an argument to say that we know exactly what the right tools are and we should be putting our efforts into strengthening global institutions of coordination.

I think the Diego character makes a number of other mistakes which I’m not sure are necessarily core to the argument, but certainly weaken my sense of its credibility for me:

1. The idea that system change is intractable is just an intuition - this clearly isn’t true. If we look at successful social movements, they consistently work through breaking problems down and taking them one at a time. This ends up looking like systems change eventually because it can lead to paradigm shifts, but these shifts only come later on as an accumulation of smaller wins (some examples would be the abolition of slavery, LGBT rights, universal suffrage in the UK). We can also point to plenty of folk talking about how everything is connected and getting no where at all. So the claim 'system change is not tractable' may not be correct, but it is clearly based on more than mere intuiton.
2. The idea that rivalry (caused by human nature) is a background assumption and not necessarily the case: the point here surely is that, yes of course humans can be more or less cooperative at times and given different cultural assumptions, but this kind of game theory describes dynamics that are independent of how most people behave. It only takes a small number of people to act in a rivalrous or antisocial manner for things to become bad, given we can't rule out that someone will behave in this way, we have to respond accordingly.
3. The argument that we ‘diefy’ technology and assume wealth is always good: this is almost straying into ‘degrowther’ territory. Technology is the primary driver of increased productivity and therefore a key part of driving growth. Growth has historically been the single biggest driver of human welbeing. While I’m in favour of redistribution, I think we have to be realistic that simply stopping growth and improving people’s lives soley through redistribution would be politically impossible. It also places a celling on possible human wellbeing and so is plausibly much much worse than a world of high, sustainable growth.
4. The idea that the notion of the perfect/wellfunctioning market is rarely questioned: obviously not true, this is a hugely contested idea
5. (This is a small one): Modernity has led to the mental health crisis: I’m just not sure this empyrically stacks up. It is really hard to measure mental health over time, given that its measurement is so culturally contingent (among other things)
6. The argument that we know eventually civilisation will collapse because all previous civilisations have collapsed: this feels like a very ‘cakeism’ style argument, you can’t have it both ways. Either it is the case that the history of all these very different societies shows the inevitability of our eventual destruction (in which case it seems that changing our culture isn’t going to help) or culture is the key to our doom (in which case all these other cultures being destroyed can't be evidence about our own culture because the key variable is different)
7. Tractability is surprisingly high: how can you possibly assess the tractability of this problem when - in your own words - you have no idea what the problem is? Compare this to wild animal suffering (as Diego does): in wild animal suffering we have a clearly defined problem: lots of animals suffer a lot and this is bad. We have some solutions that actually seem very good, like getting rid of screw worms. There are some empirical frameworks we can use to assess the problems and make decisions, and we can at least in some cases run experiments to gain a better understanding. This all seems like much more progress towards tractable solutions than this metacrisis thing
8. Cultural change is actually happening very fast: Diego is using culture in two almost entirely different ways. First that its about our underlying paradigm for seeing the world to argue that culture is this deep seated root problem (for most of the article) then in this thin way about changing cultural artefacts or taste to argue that it changes very quickly. These are obviously two different propositions and one can’t be used to argue the other.

I like the idea of doing more thinking through Socratic dialogues and there were a couple of jokes here which actually made me laugh out loud. But it has left me closer to thinking this integral/metacrisis thing is lacking in substance. Putting this author aside, it seems like many of the folk who talk about this stuff are merely engaging in self-absorbed obscurantism.