I have been vegan for years but this was the kick in the ass I needed to finally donate something to animal causes. Thank you for that, and I deeply appreciate the matching donation.
Dwarkesh, I got to tell you, as an American I find this man utterly repellant. He makes me want to eat a steak with an egg on top while reading Nietzsche. Vegans are annoying, but people who wish to use moral suasion to change people’s moral framework at least respect their fellow citizens as moral agents. This dude just wants to use state power to achieve his moral aims through coercion.
Rather than ad hominem attacks, can you provide reasoning for why animal welfare is not something we should care about? He provided plenty of info about interventions that allow you to continue eating cheap meat, but with much less harm to animals; why should I agree with you that that’s not worth caring about?
In general, I’m human. Bears and tigers don’t care about me. I only care about them on aesthetic grounds. I don’t care if cows, chickens, or pigs suffer. I reject utilitarianism.
You might not care about animals but others in society do. Government responding to things that you personally don’t care about but others do isn’t using state control to coerce people, it’s just other people having different interests than you. There are many things that government does that I’m sure you don’t care about.
That said, caring about animals doesn’t require utilitarian thinking. Plenty of people just think it’s morally wrong to make other living creatures suffer, regardless of utilitarian concerns. Others believe that, in fact, at least some animals do care about you - especially those that have owned pets in their life.
(If you listen to the guy’s prescriptions, at no point does he suggest forcefully preventing anyone from eating meat. Given your reaction, I’m guessing you didn’t really listen to what he was saying, but to spoil some of it, he talks extensively about how private companies, advocacy, advances in agricultural technology and public perception has already gone a long way to e.g. places in the EU largely electing on their own to switch to somewhat more expensive but dramatically less cruel methods of animal agriculture, without government coercion; and that entrepreneurs can in fact affect change regarding animal cruelty in factory farming within the private sector)
By default I am opposed to moral coercion by states, but in some cases it seems to have been justified. I'm glad it was used to end the slave trade, and I don't doubt you would have found abolitionists annoying too.
This seems to kinda undersell AI and ignore alignment.
Like they are talking about AGI in a world where it doesn't kill all humans, doesn't mind upload everyone into it's weird utopia. It just does some pretty easy lab meat biotech that humans are already doing.
These types of articles always remind me of the Douglas Adams Restaurant at the end of the Universe discussion. They are animals. Animal activists work to make sure animals are treated better than a homeless person.
[Ford] sat down.
The waiter approached.
"Would you like to see the menu?" he said, "or would you like meet the Dish of the Day?"
"Huh?" said Ford.
"Huh?" said Arthur.
"Huh?" said Trillian.
"That's cool," said Zaphod, "we'll meet the meat."
...
A large dairy animal approached Zaphod Beeblebrox's table, a large fat meaty quadruped of the bovine type with large watery eyes, small horns and what might almost have been an ingratiating smile on its lips.
"Good evening," it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, "I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in the parts of my body?"
It harrumphed and gurgled a bit, wriggled its hind quarters in to a more comfortable position and gazed peacefully at them.
Its gaze was met by looks of startled bewilderment from Arthur and Trillian, a resigned shrug from Ford Prefect and naked hunger from Zaphod Beeblebrox.
"Something off the shoulder perhaps?" suggested the animal, "braised in a white wine sauce?"
"Er, your shoulder?" said Arthur in a horrified whisper.
"But naturally my shoulder, sir," mooed the animal contentedly, "nobody else's is mine to offer."
Zaphod leapt to his feet and started prodding and feeling the animal's shoulder appreciatively.
"Or the rump is very good," murmured the animal. "I've been exercising it and eating plenty of grain, so there's a lot of good meat there."
It gave a mellow grunt, gurgled again and started to chew the cud. It swallowed the cud again.
"Or a casserole of me perhaps?" it added.
"You mean this animal actually wants us to eat it?" whispered Trillian to Ford.
"Me?" said Ford, with a glazed look in his eyes, "I don't mean anything."
"That's absolutely horrible," exclaimed Arthur, "the most revolting thing I've ever heard."
"What's the problem Earthman?" said Zaphod, now transferring his attention to the animal's enormous rump.
"I just don't want to eat an animal that's standing there inviting me to," said Arthur, "It's heartless."
"Better than eating an animal that doesn't want to be eaten," said Zaphod.
"That's not the point," Arthur protested. Then he thought about it for a moment. "Alright," he said, "maybe it is the point. I don't care, I'm not going to think about it now. I'll just... er [...] I think I'll just have a green salad," he muttered.
"May I urge you to consider my liver?" asked the animal, "it must be very rich and tender by now, I've been force-feeding myself for months."
"A green salad," said Arthur emphatically.
"A green salad?" said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly at Arthur.
"Are you going to tell me," said Arthur, "that I shouldn't have green salad?"
"Well," said the animal, "I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am."
It managed a very slight bow.
"Glass of water please," said Arthur.
"Look," said Zaphod, "we want to eat, we don't want to make a meal of the issues. Four rare stakes please, and hurry. We haven't eaten in five hundred and seventy-six thousand million years."
The animal staggered to its feet. It gave a mellow gurgle. "A very wise choice, sir, if I may say so. Very good," it said, "I'll just nip off and shoot myself."
He turned and gave a friendly wink to Arthur. "Don't worry, sir," he said, "I'll be very humane."
I just don’t see the point of FarmKind. A charity middleman, funded by charity, and using another charity (Animal Charity Evaluators) to help them decide who to support. Why not just point folks to ACE rather than being yet another animal charity that distributes money instead of actually working with farms?
Essentially animal welfare charity dollars are paying 2 salaries and building a website to promote giving where the money is then distributed based on information and work done by other charities. What??? Just tell them to go to the ACE website and donate then.
My second issue is with the bias of ACE. To be considered by ACE a charity has to have been around at least 3 years, have at least 3 paid full-time employees/equivalents and already have annual expenditures over $100k. We have brought in over $300k in donations for projects and are not quite at the $100k/year spend and currently are run by 100% volunteer energy and passion. We simply don’t rate when it comes to ACE.
Kinder Ground is a young (3 years in November) nonprofit that works DIRECTLY with farmers to improve welfare. Our entire theory of change addresses the issue brought up in this podcast, if it doesn’t make sense to the business, it is not going to get adopted. Kinder Ground is working with farms to help them see that better welfare makes sense for the business. Once we begin to demonstrate it again and again and on larger scales, farmers will adopt the practices, and companies can support the way forward.
Issue #3 is the magical math that they apply to try to calculate suffering adjusted days, “SADs”. I admire their spreadsheet tenacity. By we can’t create equations to answer moral questions. The reality is, not everything that counts can be counted.
If you limit your animal welfare giving to FarmKind, the money then goes to 1 of 6 organizations, only 2 of which work directly with farmers and animals, BOTH for aquatic animals only, fish or shrimp. Fish and shrimp are the only farmed animals that deserve your direct attention according to ACE and FarmKind. Everything else is policy, consumer and corporate behavior change that does nothing to help the animals currently living in the system.
I think the beef and dairy cattle, the pigs, pullets, chickens and goats living in the systems today and tomorrow deserve some direct help too. That’s why I started Kinder Ground.
On the switching from beef to chicken point, Matt Yglesias recently had Michael Grunwald on a chat where the claim is made that it is not just a marginal difference RE sustainability, but actually more like an order of magnitude difference. Bollard clearly understands the cruelty aspects but may be underselling the sustainability challenges.
There needs to be more coordination between people inventing welfare tech and people pushing for welfare-standard laws. Those laws won't get passed if implementation will be too expensive, and it will be so if there isn't good tech. Conversely, good tech won't get invented if there's no demand for it, and there won't be demand if there aren't ambitious welfare laws.
Plant-based meat does not taste as good as real meat. Impossible Burger is impressive, but on other kinds of meat, it's not close from what I've seen. Edit: I guess I haven't tried some of the latest products.
A related essay on the topic of factory farming that really moved me: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-dominion-by-matthew
It was fun to click this link and see it was my book review! Glad you enjoyed it :)
Thanks for writing, got me (and I'm sure many others) to care about this issue.
I have been vegan for years but this was the kick in the ass I needed to finally donate something to animal causes. Thank you for that, and I deeply appreciate the matching donation.
I try to shoot about four deer per month. That way I don’t have to eat any factory meat.
Dwarkesh, I got to tell you, as an American I find this man utterly repellant. He makes me want to eat a steak with an egg on top while reading Nietzsche. Vegans are annoying, but people who wish to use moral suasion to change people’s moral framework at least respect their fellow citizens as moral agents. This dude just wants to use state power to achieve his moral aims through coercion.
Rather than ad hominem attacks, can you provide reasoning for why animal welfare is not something we should care about? He provided plenty of info about interventions that allow you to continue eating cheap meat, but with much less harm to animals; why should I agree with you that that’s not worth caring about?
In general, I’m human. Bears and tigers don’t care about me. I only care about them on aesthetic grounds. I don’t care if cows, chickens, or pigs suffer. I reject utilitarianism.
You might not care about animals but others in society do. Government responding to things that you personally don’t care about but others do isn’t using state control to coerce people, it’s just other people having different interests than you. There are many things that government does that I’m sure you don’t care about.
That said, caring about animals doesn’t require utilitarian thinking. Plenty of people just think it’s morally wrong to make other living creatures suffer, regardless of utilitarian concerns. Others believe that, in fact, at least some animals do care about you - especially those that have owned pets in their life.
(If you listen to the guy’s prescriptions, at no point does he suggest forcefully preventing anyone from eating meat. Given your reaction, I’m guessing you didn’t really listen to what he was saying, but to spoil some of it, he talks extensively about how private companies, advocacy, advances in agricultural technology and public perception has already gone a long way to e.g. places in the EU largely electing on their own to switch to somewhat more expensive but dramatically less cruel methods of animal agriculture, without government coercion; and that entrepreneurs can in fact affect change regarding animal cruelty in factory farming within the private sector)
By default I am opposed to moral coercion by states, but in some cases it seems to have been justified. I'm glad it was used to end the slave trade, and I don't doubt you would have found abolitionists annoying too.
You’re a sick monster, and I hope you lose and that meat is banned. You’re welcome for the moral clarity :)
Great podcast! Just donated
This seems to kinda undersell AI and ignore alignment.
Like they are talking about AGI in a world where it doesn't kill all humans, doesn't mind upload everyone into it's weird utopia. It just does some pretty easy lab meat biotech that humans are already doing.
Chickens are abhorrent creatures. You think that's going to pull my heartstrings? LMAO Have you been around chickens?
And there it is. Climate grift and Gates.
Fuck right off with this shit.
These types of articles always remind me of the Douglas Adams Restaurant at the end of the Universe discussion. They are animals. Animal activists work to make sure animals are treated better than a homeless person.
[Ford] sat down.
The waiter approached.
"Would you like to see the menu?" he said, "or would you like meet the Dish of the Day?"
"Huh?" said Ford.
"Huh?" said Arthur.
"Huh?" said Trillian.
"That's cool," said Zaphod, "we'll meet the meat."
...
A large dairy animal approached Zaphod Beeblebrox's table, a large fat meaty quadruped of the bovine type with large watery eyes, small horns and what might almost have been an ingratiating smile on its lips.
"Good evening," it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, "I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in the parts of my body?"
It harrumphed and gurgled a bit, wriggled its hind quarters in to a more comfortable position and gazed peacefully at them.
Its gaze was met by looks of startled bewilderment from Arthur and Trillian, a resigned shrug from Ford Prefect and naked hunger from Zaphod Beeblebrox.
"Something off the shoulder perhaps?" suggested the animal, "braised in a white wine sauce?"
"Er, your shoulder?" said Arthur in a horrified whisper.
"But naturally my shoulder, sir," mooed the animal contentedly, "nobody else's is mine to offer."
Zaphod leapt to his feet and started prodding and feeling the animal's shoulder appreciatively.
"Or the rump is very good," murmured the animal. "I've been exercising it and eating plenty of grain, so there's a lot of good meat there."
It gave a mellow grunt, gurgled again and started to chew the cud. It swallowed the cud again.
"Or a casserole of me perhaps?" it added.
"You mean this animal actually wants us to eat it?" whispered Trillian to Ford.
"Me?" said Ford, with a glazed look in his eyes, "I don't mean anything."
"That's absolutely horrible," exclaimed Arthur, "the most revolting thing I've ever heard."
"What's the problem Earthman?" said Zaphod, now transferring his attention to the animal's enormous rump.
"I just don't want to eat an animal that's standing there inviting me to," said Arthur, "It's heartless."
"Better than eating an animal that doesn't want to be eaten," said Zaphod.
"That's not the point," Arthur protested. Then he thought about it for a moment. "Alright," he said, "maybe it is the point. I don't care, I'm not going to think about it now. I'll just... er [...] I think I'll just have a green salad," he muttered.
"May I urge you to consider my liver?" asked the animal, "it must be very rich and tender by now, I've been force-feeding myself for months."
"A green salad," said Arthur emphatically.
"A green salad?" said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly at Arthur.
"Are you going to tell me," said Arthur, "that I shouldn't have green salad?"
"Well," said the animal, "I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am."
It managed a very slight bow.
"Glass of water please," said Arthur.
"Look," said Zaphod, "we want to eat, we don't want to make a meal of the issues. Four rare stakes please, and hurry. We haven't eaten in five hundred and seventy-six thousand million years."
The animal staggered to its feet. It gave a mellow gurgle. "A very wise choice, sir, if I may say so. Very good," it said, "I'll just nip off and shoot myself."
He turned and gave a friendly wink to Arthur. "Don't worry, sir," he said, "I'll be very humane."
It waddled unhurriedly off to the kitchen.
While I am 100% behind anyone who wants to try and make the lives of farmed animals better, I take issue with several points.
First, I should admit I have a dog in this fight: https://kinderground.org/
I just don’t see the point of FarmKind. A charity middleman, funded by charity, and using another charity (Animal Charity Evaluators) to help them decide who to support. Why not just point folks to ACE rather than being yet another animal charity that distributes money instead of actually working with farms?
Essentially animal welfare charity dollars are paying 2 salaries and building a website to promote giving where the money is then distributed based on information and work done by other charities. What??? Just tell them to go to the ACE website and donate then.
My second issue is with the bias of ACE. To be considered by ACE a charity has to have been around at least 3 years, have at least 3 paid full-time employees/equivalents and already have annual expenditures over $100k. We have brought in over $300k in donations for projects and are not quite at the $100k/year spend and currently are run by 100% volunteer energy and passion. We simply don’t rate when it comes to ACE.
Kinder Ground is a young (3 years in November) nonprofit that works DIRECTLY with farmers to improve welfare. Our entire theory of change addresses the issue brought up in this podcast, if it doesn’t make sense to the business, it is not going to get adopted. Kinder Ground is working with farms to help them see that better welfare makes sense for the business. Once we begin to demonstrate it again and again and on larger scales, farmers will adopt the practices, and companies can support the way forward.
Issue #3 is the magical math that they apply to try to calculate suffering adjusted days, “SADs”. I admire their spreadsheet tenacity. By we can’t create equations to answer moral questions. The reality is, not everything that counts can be counted.
If you limit your animal welfare giving to FarmKind, the money then goes to 1 of 6 organizations, only 2 of which work directly with farmers and animals, BOTH for aquatic animals only, fish or shrimp. Fish and shrimp are the only farmed animals that deserve your direct attention according to ACE and FarmKind. Everything else is policy, consumer and corporate behavior change that does nothing to help the animals currently living in the system.
I think the beef and dairy cattle, the pigs, pullets, chickens and goats living in the systems today and tomorrow deserve some direct help too. That’s why I started Kinder Ground.
On the switching from beef to chicken point, Matt Yglesias recently had Michael Grunwald on a chat where the claim is made that it is not just a marginal difference RE sustainability, but actually more like an order of magnitude difference. Bollard clearly understands the cruelty aspects but may be underselling the sustainability challenges.
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/real-talk-about-agriculture-and-climate
There needs to be more coordination between people inventing welfare tech and people pushing for welfare-standard laws. Those laws won't get passed if implementation will be too expensive, and it will be so if there isn't good tech. Conversely, good tech won't get invented if there's no demand for it, and there won't be demand if there aren't ambitious welfare laws.
Plant-based meat does not taste as good as real meat. Impossible Burger is impressive, but on other kinds of meat, it's not close from what I've seen. Edit: I guess I haven't tried some of the latest products.
I think the impossible sausages are pretty good.
That said apparently chicken nuggets vs plant based nuggets have gotten there. But maybe that says more about chicken nuggets, than chicken itself 😂
Admittedly, I haven't tried those.
Oh, man. I'm about to head back to work at PETA here.