Benny Smith
Bio
Participation1
I'm a recent grad from Brown University interested in using my career to help animals. I currently work part time at Allied Scholars for Animal Protection, and I'm in the market for a full time job. My main focus is farmed animal welfare and alternative proteins, but I also did a lot of work on climate science and policy before I learned about factory farming. I'm broadly interested in philosophy and cause prioritization.
Posts 4
Comments23
This is a really cool resource! Thanks so much for doing this.
I would guess that more people will check out the website if you mention it in the first paragraph/sentence of the post, and rephrase the title to communicate that you have created a new resource aggregating EA-relevant volunteer opportunities.
Yeah!
- Faunalytics did an RCT comparing showing people 2D factory farming footage to 3D VR. They found that both led to lower pork consumption than the control group, and that the VR was not a meaningful improvement over 2D screens.
- Another Faunalytics study compared students' self-reported willingness to reduce consumption after viewing different videos.
- The Humane League did RCTs on showing people a documentary on health, environment, & animal welfare reasons for veganism and did not find a significant effect on meat consumption. Notably, in the conclusion the authors say that "Novel intervention strategies may be needed to meaningfully shift dietary consumption away from meat and animal products."
- On the other hand, THL also published a meta-analysis with encouraging implications for interventions that focus on animal welfare-related messaging.
THL lists a few other relevant studies here that I haven't looked at. There were also the leafletting studies by ACE and Faunalytics, both of which found leafletting to be ineffective.
With a lot of these studies, reliance on self report means that there are problems like social desirability bias.
I've also been thinking of writing up some kind of review, feel free to DM me if you want to collaborate :)
I don't think people who spoke to us were significantly turned off; the outreach volunteers weren't overly aggressive or pushy.
People who walked past without engaging may have thought it was weird, but it's hard to know what someone thinks if they don't stop to talk.
Unfortunately, the paucity of social science research on vegan outreach makes it hard to know what works and what doesn't. I imagine there's research on outreach for other causes that could be relevant, but I haven't looked into this.
By default I expect more engagement with pro-vegan arguments to be a good thing, and the dog meat stand got a lot more engagement than other outreach tactics I've tried.
Great questions!
Allied Scholars doesn't run the dog meat website, that's Molly Elwood. I'm not sure what kinds of metrics she has for that.
We haven't collected rigorous data on engagement, but I'm very enthusiastic about people doing that kind of thing. There have been a few studies over the years suggesting that leafletting doesn't really work (see ACE and Faunalytics), but I suspect there are lots of potential outreach tactics that work much better than leafletting. For example, Faunalytics found that showing people factory farming footage has a meaningful impact on behavior and attitudes around pork.
I'd love to see Faunalytics or other orgs study a broader variety of outreach tactics – I think there's a risk that people see a study saying "leafletting doesn't work" and conclude that vegan outreach in general is a lost cause. This is something I plan to write more about later this summer.
Anecdotally, when I've done standard vegan leafletting (with a sign that says "Why Aren't You Vegan Yet?") less than 1% of passerby engaged at all. With the dog meat stand, it felt more like 10%, though the number could easily be higher or lower and I'd have to actually keep track to know for sure.
There's always a risk of pushing people away, but IMO this can mostly be mitigated if the organizers are nice to people in conversation.
FWIW stimulus-response is far from the only evidence we have for insect sentience. Table 1 in Jason Schukraft's Invertebrate Sentience overview discusses some of the other criteria. The belief that some insects are sentient is pretty respectable in the scientific community; for example, Scientific American published an article on the subject this month.
Obviously the field is pretty speculative and I'm not an expert, but IMO the fact that many experts do take insect sentience seriously means we should probably put non-negligible credence in it.
Overall though, thanks for writing this post! It's an important point. I suspect many people, when faced with ethical arguments for veganism, decide not to care about animals at all simply because they aren't willing (or in a rare cases unable) to go vegan. Classic example of failing with abandon.
Animal and AI Consciousness in The Economist
A succinct discussion of the current state of our understanding of consciousness. I love seeing things like this in mainstream media.
Interestingly, there's also a reference to AI risk at the end:
As to conscious AI, Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal, a pioneer of the modern deep-learning approach to AI, told the meeting he believes it might be possible to achieve consciousness in a machine using the global-workspace approach. He explained the advantages this might bring, including being able to generalise results with fewer data than the present generation of enormous models require. His fear, though, is that someone will build a self-preservation instinct into a conscious AI, which could result in its running out of control.
This paragraph probably leaves readers with two misconceptions.
- The wording implies that Bengio's main worry is deliberate coding of a self-preservation instinct, whereas the more prevalent concern is instrumental convergence.
- Readers may conclude that consciousness is required for AI to be dangerous, which is not the case.
It also would have been nice for the article to mention the ethical implications for how we treat nonhuman minds, but that's usually too much to ask for.
Perhaps someone with better credentials than me could write them a letter.
Both of those funds are great; I intend to base my donations in part on their recommendations.
However, if you're highly risk-averse, it's worth noting that they will send some of your money to speculative work, such as basic research on wild animal welfare.
If you want the animal welfare equivalent of bednets, it's probably corporate campaigns run by The Humane League, Mercy For Animals, and Compassion in World Farming.[1] These campaigns have helped hundreds of millions of hens using single-digit millions of dollars. Independent cost-effectiveness analyses have generated extremely impressive estimates.[2][3]
Notably, though, these analyses sometimes have to make a lot of assumptions about animal sentience. Personally, I'm sympathetic to some of the points made here about the limitations of corporate campaigns, and I'm more bullish on vegan movement building that what I perceive to be the consensus of EAA. But if you're looking for something low-risk and independently vetted, corporate campaigns are probably your best bet.
Of these three, Animal Charity Evaluators thinks that THL has the most room for more funding (see these three spreadsheets)
Report from Rethink Priorities: Corporate campaigns affect 9 to 120 years of chicken life per dollar spent
Report by Vasco Grilo: Corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are almost 10,000 times as effective as Givewell's Maximum Impact Fund?