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How the Jains built a culture of respect for nonhuman animals; This research was conducted for my final-year Module Animal Justice at University College London led by Professor Jane Holder, investigating how biomedical researchers make welfare and value comparisons between species. |
Metaculus Announces Winners of the Alt-Protein Forecasting Tournament; In 1944, Donald Watson founded the Vegan Society in the UK, introducing the term ""vegan"" by combining the first and last letters of ""vegetarian"" and adding a ""-gan"" suffix. This marked a significant milestone in the... |
New book: Moral Uncertainty by MacAskill, Ord & Bykvist; Metaculus's Alt-Protein Tournament has ended. Congratulations to the top three forecasters on their excellent performance! |
AMA: I've authored a new book (After Meat) about the technological limits of animals for production and why we'll do better; Very often we are uncertain about what we ought, morally, to do. We do not know how to weigh the interests of animals against humans, how strong our duties are to improve the lives of distant strangers,... |
Sentience Institute 2021 End of Year Summary; Hey EA community, |
Effective Org Planning for a Calm, Growth-Oriented and Impactful 2024; Sentience Institute is a 501(c)3 nonprofit think tank aiming to maximize positive impact through longtermist research on social and technological change, particularly moral circle expansion. This approach is detailed in our new paper in the journal Futures,... |
Presentation -- The Unjournal: Bridging the gap between EA and academia; My New Years resolution this year is to make a recurring date with myself for planning periods for my organizations growth. Ive found this to be challenging because |
Insects raised for food and feed global scale, practices, and policy; Below, a mixed AI & human summary. |
Global Food Partners: Impact Sponsorship Programme for Asian farmers to transition to cage-free egg production |
Adventist Health Study-2 supports pescetarianism more than veganism; Hi friends, |
Hedging against deep and moral uncertainty; A new study called The Effects of Exposure to Information About Animal Welfare Reforms on Animal Farming Opposition: A Randomized Experiment has been published in Anthrozos. |
New Faunalytics Study on Local Action for Animals as a Stepping Stone to State Protections; Summary: Like for quantified risk, we can sometimes hedge against deep uncertainty and moral uncertainty: we can sometimes choose a portfolio of interventions which looks good in expectation to all (or more) worldviews - empirical and ethical... |
Joining Forces: Collaborative Opportunities Between The Animal Protection And Environmental Movements; TL;DR |
(Event) Shrimp Farming: Vast in Scale, Diverse in Welfare Challenges (Rethink Priorities Webinar); Anew report from Faunalytics shows promising avenues for collaboration between animal protection organizations and environmental groups - the study interviewed environmental groups in the U.S., China, and Brazil and found that many are open to working with... |
The Case For Fruit Fly Antinatalism; Human consumption of shrimp has increased rapidly in recent decades. Yet, there are few requirements or guidelines for how farmers and fishers should treat shrimp used for food. Rethink Priorities is completing a series of reports, theShrimp... |
Highlights From Our 2023 Reddit AMA; Quickly sharing because this seems relatively well written and well-intentioned and probably worth reading for at least some forum readers. It offers an interesting introduction to the ideas of 'Ecomodernism' (a movement I hadn't heard of) and... |
Research And Data As Tools In Advocates Decision-Making; In our liveReddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) event, our Programs team answered questions about our new charity recommendations and the processes behind our selections. Below, weve rounded up some highlights from the AMA. We hope these questions... |
Research Summary: The Subjective Experience of Time; Faunalytics published a research paper that investigates exactly how research is used by animal advocacy organizations. In particular, the report discovers the research needs of advocates, like more accessible material, summaries, and reports on how to effect... |
Andre Abassi on invertebrate and insect protection legislation |
AI consciousness & moral status: What do the experts think?; Nonprofit research organizationFaunalytics has released a newstudy which dives into animal agriculture subsidies and how advocates can reduce their harmful impact. We interviewed 13 animal and environmental organizations that are working to reform farm subsidies to learn... |
Help Allied Scholars reach millions of students; My mom wants to start eating some amount of meat again but wants to only do it if she can offset the suffering. |
Is improving crop farming efficiency in HICs bad for farmed animal welfare?; TL;DR:For the first time, we atAllied Scholars for Animal Protection (ASAP) are creating a systematic and unified infrastructure for theanimal advocacy movement at universities across the US and beyond. Our mission is to unite, educate and empower... |
Fish Welfare Initiative India's Karthik Pulugurtha on fish welfare; Im interested in whether crop farming R&D in HICs would be net positive. |
Is Stirring up Anger Good for Vegan Outreach?; Karthik Pulugurtha is the Managing Director India of the Fish Welfare Initiative. He has a background in animal welfare and ethical livelihoods. He holds a masters degree in Diplomacy, Law & Business (MA DLB) from the Jindal... |
Call for Papers: The Economics of Animal Welfare, Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics 2022; At Allied Scholars, weve experimented with different vegan outreach tactics on college campuses. One of the most effective and entertaining! strategies weve tried has been giving out samples of dog meat. |
(Link post) AI could fuel factory farmingor end it; Stanford Economics is proud to host its annualStanford Institute for Theoretical Economics (SITE) Conferencethis summer 2022. Despite its name, SITE sponsors sessions that encompass both economic theory and empirical work and cover a broad range of topics.... |
Farmers in the animalist coalition; Current AI systems display severe speciesist biases and the industries that harm animals are already decades ahead of the animal rights movement, both in utilising existing AI tools and in developing their own. |
Plant-based proteins and food security in French-speaking West Africa; A recentpost in the EA Forum describes (quite fatalistically) how animalistic legislation is held back by the farming lobbies. While this seems quite likely, the interests of (moderate) animalists and farmers are aligned. |
AMA: Lewis Bollard, Open Philanthropy; Poverty and animal welfare are at the root of much suffering worldwide. The Effective Altruism movement takes these... |
Animal Advocacy Digest #3: Dec 2nd - Dec 23rd; Hi everyone, |
New Faunalytics Economic Analysis of the Chicken, Egg, and Fish Industries in USA, China, and Brazil; Welcome to this edition of the Animal Advocacy Bi-Weekly Digest, where we aim to help people in the animal welfare community quickly keep up with the most important information in the space. As a reminder, you can... |
Is improving the welfare of arthropods and nematodes underrated?; In ourreport released today, Faunalytics covers the historical consolidation of the chicken, egg, and fish industries, risks for these companies, and what factors determine the price of animal products. The report is helpful to journalists looking to... |
Part 1/4: A Case for Abolition; I wonder whether improving the welfare of arthropods (e.g. insects and crustaceans)and nematodes(1)(roundworms)is sufficiently important and neglected to greatly outweigh the low tractability, thus being underrated. |
What vegan food resources have you found useful?; In this piece, I present a short, pragmatic, and EA-targeted case for complete abolition of animal exploitation, and for using abolitionist approaches to achieve this. I show that (1) a longtermist perspective leads one to aim for... |
Overview of Shrimp Farming and Questions Surrounding it; My vegan nutrition project has focused on supplements, but there have been several requests for resources on how to eat better. I'm not well equipped to answer this- I'm not vegan, and my stomach only got even... |
EA needs more humor; I think there's a vibe out there in many cultures (including American) that being vegetarian/vegan or certain kinds of sympathy towards animals is unmanly and just kind of lame. This is probably more true in the right-wing... |
An EA Fairy Tale; In the wake of the FTX collapse, much ink has been spilled on EA reform by people smarter and more experienced in this space than I am. However, as someone who has been engaging with EA over... |
35-150 billion fish are raised in captivity to be released into the wild every year; Peter was the head of a small but high quality non-profit that nobody had ever heard of, and was the first human to discover that time travel was possible. It wasnt that hed discovered it himself. He... |
Announcing Suffering For Good |
New Faunalytics Study on Animal Agriculture in Climate Change Media Coverage; TL;DR: We are excited to announce the new animal welfare organization Suffering For Good, a new factory farming charity aimed at vegans, where we use our excess profits to buy suffering offsets--in particular, an enormous number of... |
Ten Big Wins for Farm Animals in 2021; Nonprofit research organizationFaunalytics has released a new study in partnership with Sentient Media:Animal Agriculture Is The Missing Piece In Climate Change Media Coverage. We analyzed recent climate articles from top U.S. media outlets to determine how often... |
New podcast episode with Matti Wilks: On the Psychology of Moral Motivations and Effective Altruism | Walter Veit Podcast; Looking for something to celebrate these holidays? Advocates achieved a record year of wins for farm animals and alternative proteins. Here are the highlights |
Interview: SK Aditya on grassroots animal activism and wild animal advocacy! (Repost from Karthik Logic Blog); Potentially interesting to members of the forum! Also happy to hear suggestions for future guests :) |
New A Happier World video on sentientism and moral circle expansion; Check out the blog where this interview is posted: https://karthiklogic.substack.com/p/my-interview-with-sk-aditya-on-animal |
George Stiffman on promoting tofu in the West; After months of waiting theres finally a new A Happier World video! This one took a really long time to make.... |
Fixing the vegetarian plate: A new guide aims to correct misconceptions and educate the health-care community about the vegetarian diet; We discuss the path to popularizing tofu in the United States, the challenges that are in the way, whether it is better for the movement to take an additive approach with veganism or a subtractive approach, and... |
Has anyone tried to roughly quantify how many animal lives can be saved per dollar donated?; Hello EAs, first time writing on the forum, so pardon my English. |
Invertebrate Sentience Table; Similar to how Givewell (with caveats) says that a donation of around $5000 can save a human life. Has anyone done this with any animal? |
What's the Theory of Change/Theory of Victory for Farmed Animal Welfare?; Excerpt from Impact Report 2022-2023 |
Video: A Few Exciting Giving Opportunities for Animal Welfare in Asia; Similar to Mark Xus concerns about Meta-EA, and Lizkas on IIDM, I see lots of work in farmed animal welfare, with no clear explicated path/Theory of Victory. |
The Role of Individual Consumption Decisions in Animal Welfare and Climate are Analogous; For those of you who are familiar with farmed animal advocacy(1), the small animal replacement problem(2), and moral circle expansion(3), you can probably get 80-90% of the value of this post by only reading the Summary. The... |
Humanitys vast future and its implications for cause prioritization; Summary: There is a growing trend among governments and investors to invest in not just civilizational progress, to increase wealth and wellbeing, but also in civilizational resilience, to stabilize them against economic or environmental shocks. This trend... |
Can a Vegan Diet Be Healthy? A Literature Review |
Are you optimistic about the commercialization of alt proteins in 2023 and beyond?; Addendum 2023-07-02: Although this post concludes -- rightly, I think -- that a vegan diet can likely be healthy if you make sure to get all the nutrients that you need, I want to emphasise up front... |
What's an excellent animal ethics and welfare science syllabus/reading list?; (sort of a repost because my last post about this got no response) |
Healthier Hens' Lukas Jasi?nas on improving hen welfare worldwide; I'm hoping to learn more about (a) various ethical arguments animal welfare, and (b) the empirical evidence/counter-evidence of animal welfare. Ideally, it should be information dense and easy to read. |
Why we want to start a shrimp welfare charity (founders needed); We discuss the work Healthier Hens does in Africa and around the world by delving deep into how feed fortification can aid in the transition to cage-free farming, whether their work is cost-effective, and what their theory... |
Diagnosing EA Research- Are stakeholder-engaged methods the solution?; TL;DR: An estimated ~250 billion shrimp are farmed worldwide. Their welfare is overlooked, yet there are tractable ways to improve it. Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) proposes to address this issue, by launching a new nonprofit that would collaborate... |
What is the impact of animal agriculture on wild animal suffering? |
Fauna Connections - a free remote symposium for animal advocates; The meat-eater problem wonders whether making poor humans richer could have significant negative consequences for non-human animals because of increased meat consumption as people become richer. With some sets of parameter values (for inter-species comparisons, market elasticity,... |
CRISPR for Happier Farm Animals?; On September 14th Faunalytics will hostFauna Connections, a free, remote research symposium for animal advocates! Academics and scientists from the social and behavioral sciences and related disciplines will present original research that discusses the real-life implications and... |
Kim McCoy on animal law in Hong Kong and New Zealand; I am wondering if there is work being done on changing the brains of farm animals to increase their welfare levels without changing their environments. From what I know about the state of gene editing, it is... |
A potential EA Aligned candidate for congress; Kim J. McCoy is a practicing barrister in Hong Kong and New Zealand. In addition, he founded the Hong Kong Animal Law and Protection Organisation (HKALPO; www.hkalpo.com), a group for professionals with a love of animals that... |
Wild Animal Fellowship: $60k/yr + $25k in expenses; Introduction |
I recently... |
Can we actually confirm that a vegan diet is compatible with high intellectual output? |
The paradoxical complementarity of baby steps and animal rights; I've found lots of examples of outstanding physical performance under a vegan diet, but I've been unable to find examples of bold theoretical breakthroughs being made under a vegan diet (the closest example I could find was... |
Summary of Ethics into Action, a biography of Henry Spira; Should vegans advocate baby steps? Recently, I have read a lot of opinions of vegans about this very question. It's pretty obvious that the vegan community is split. Most are in favor, but a vocal strong willed... |
Practical Plant-Based Meal Planning for Groups; Peter SingersEthics Into Action is a biography of Henry Spira, an animal advocate who campaigned successfully against a variety of issues, starting with animal testing. An inspiring account, the book would be of particular of interest to... |
Independent Office of Animal Protection; So far it has been quite easy and practical for me to eat mostly plant-based food in my life. When I go to restaurants I choose restaurants that have good veg options. |
Effective Animal Charity recommendations?; Regulatory capture occurs when regulation is co-opted to serve the interests of an industry or another specific group, rather than the public. When it comes to animal welfare, regulatory capture occurs when the interests of the animal... |
Part 4/4: Under-explored Abolitionist Approaches; I vaguely remember that Charity Entrepreneurship was skeptical of ACE's methodologies but can't find the relevant thread. In absence of that, is there something like a consensus on which charities are most effective when it comes to helping animals? |
Managed Honey Bee Welfare: Problems and Potential Interventions; In this piece, I discuss promising ideas which are more often found in/associated with abolitionist circles. Intuitively, these ideas do not suffer from aforementioned limitations and weaknesses, however I dont prove this, or that they work. I... |
Moderate Versus Radical NGOs; At any given time there are more than a trillion managed(1) honey bees. Globally, the number of managed colonies has risen steadily over the last twenty years and this growth will almost certainly persist, at... |
AMA with the Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit on April 3rd @ 10AM PT!; I'm passionate about animal welfare and want to make a difference, but I'm not sure where to begin. What are some easy ways for me to get involved and help animals in need. Whether it's volunteering at a local shelter, donating to a rescue organization, or advocating for animal rights, I'm open to suggestions. |
New EA Fish Orgs: Collaboration between Fish Welfare Initiative and Aquatic Life Institute; Hi EA Forum! We're the organizers of The Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit, and we are excited about the AVA Summit DC this May 16-19, 2024. |
Cause Exploration Prizes submission: bivalve aquaculture; I created a 5-15 min quiz on three of humanity's biggest problems |
Vegans as an Interest Group |
Leadership Skills Program for Executive Leaders; This a linkpost from my personal blog; posting it during draft amnesty week largely because it ended up making recommendations that I don't have the experience to evaluate well. |
How has the effective animal advocacy (EAA) movement responded to the decline of plant-based meat sales in 2022?; Are you an executive leader at an organization dedicated to helping animals? Starting on April 30th at 7pm - 9pm ET (May 1st at 8:00 - 10:00 UTC+8), Scarlet Spark is launching Cohort 2 of People Skills... |
Jeronimo and Ririko from VegeProject on promoting plant-based food in Japan!; Sales of plant-based meats declined significantly in 2022, likely due to inflation and health concerns. Alternative proteins cost 43% more on average than real meat,(1)and many consumers view them as a luxury good. However, they could become cheaper over the coming decades if technology improves. What impact has this had on the EAA movement's strategy? |
Dr. Andrew Crump on scientific research into insect sentience; VegeProject is a non-profit based in Japan that works to increase vegan, vegetarian, and plant-based options. We talk with Jeronimo and Ririko both of whom work at VegeProject about the strategy behind the work it does in convincing corporations to add more plant-based options, the uniqueness of animal advocacy in Japan, as well as some innovative projects that have been started like VegeMap and the impact that it has. |
(Linkpost) The global biomass of wild mammals; Dr. Andrew Crump is a part-time lecturer in Animal Cognition and Animal Welfare at the Royal Veterinary College in the UK. He specializes in intvertebrate welfare and animal sentience and also works at the London School of... |
Marginal Reducetarianism; The following infographics are excerpted from the paper |
The suffering scale of human diseases vs factory farming; Hello! This is my first full post. My epistemic status is, uh, pretty uncertain. I think my reasoning is pretty basic and I really do not understand the relationship between price and demand and the possibility of... |
Introducing the World-Wide Digital Wild Worm Welfare Initiative: A New Frontier for Effective Altruism; Global health and factory farming are two main cause areas in EA. However, as a person who supports animal rights, is the scale of factory farming problem MUCH more serious than global health? I'm very unsure on... |
What might decorticate rats tell us about the distribution of consciousness?; We are proud to announce a new and pioneering a new charity that has emerged from rigorous discussions and years of prioritisation research within our community - the World-Wide Digital Wild Worm Welfare Initiative (or for short:... |
Moral Spillover in Human-AI Interaction; Summary: The cortex is generally thought to be the seat of consciousness in human beings. A body of literature indicates that the cortex is not integral to many intuitively conscious behaviors in rats. This suggests that either rats dont rely... |
Part 2/4: Limitations with Current EA Animal Advocacy; Moral spillover is the transfer... |
Super additivity of consciousness; In this piece, I argue that the current major strands of EA Animal Advocacy have the limitations summarised below, and so are jointly insufficient as a means to end farmed animal suffering. |
Rodents farmed for pet snake food; In Freedom under naturalistic dualism I have carefully argued that consciousness is radically noumenal, that is, it is the most real (perhaps the only real) thing in the Universe, but also totally impossible to be observed by... |
Animal Welfare: UK Government roles recruiting |
Yes/No debate #2: Is it OK to eat meat? (German); Eating smaller animals is ""better"" for the environment but causes more suffering and death. Faunalytics' Animal Product Impact Scales update explores this dynamic and how advocates can tackle it effectively. |
Animal welfare: A unique African Perspective.; The second Yes/No debate is the first one in German: We discussed whether eating meat is (morally) OK. |
Ways EU law might matter for farmed animals; Hi Everyone! |
Project Idea: The cost of Coccidiosis on Chicken farming and if AI can help; Many of those who see the value in corporate campaigns that compel public-facing companies to demand higher animal welfare standards from their suppliers believe an effective end goal for these efforts is to enshrine such standards into... |
How Honey Bees Think; If you are aligned with making data-driven decisions and positively impacting a large number of animals in factory farming, you will have a unique opportunity to best use your skills to help found Equalia's first Board of... |
Animal Rights, The Singularity, and Astronomical Suffering; Advances in neuroscience are at last giving us insight into what it might be like to think like a bee. The honey bee has evolved as the consummate generalist pollinator,... |
Social Movement Lessons from the Fair Trade Movement; A few weeks ago I was protesting outside a pig slaughterhouse. I thought about GPT-3 a bit. I am afraid of a bad singularity, but the bad singularity has already come for the pigs with the explosion... |
Animal Welfare & Alternative Proteins in the United Arab Emirates; This report aims to assess (1) the extent to which the international Fair Trade movement, especially from 1964 to the present, can be said to have successfully achieved its goals, (2) what factors caused the various successes... |
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