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The Small Animal Replacement Problem in Animal Advocacy Summary: Choosing a meat tax as a form of advocacy may seem logical, but it can actually lead to a shift in consumption from red meat to white meat like chicken and fish. This shift increases the number of animals farmed overall, which is known as the small animal replacement problem. Transcript: Speaker 2 The vast difference in choosing one campaign over another and how much difference you can have between the two. But actually, not only that, just highlighting the damage you can do. That was so enlightening for me. I think I've never thought about it like that before. I think specifically we were working with an organisation on whether doing a meat tax would be an effective form of advocacy. On the surface, you're like, oh, meat tax, yeah, it makes sense. It's the same as cigarette, alcohol or other kind of syntaxes that we have in the UK. It's just put a tax on me and then less consumption, less demand, etc. Then just kind of flippantly thinking about it in that sense and then the team did an in-depth report and actually kind of long story short. I would recommend going and reading the report if you're interested. But essentially consumption moves generally from the red meat from an environmental or health perspective and that's what in the UK, that's the only way that could be passed is through An environmental or health committee. Yeah, like a carbon tax on food products, that kind of thing. Right, exactly. And actually all that does is move consumption from red meat cows to white meat, like chicken and fish. And so actually for looking at numbers, comparatively farming one cow versus 50 chickens that it would take to be comparable, the numbers are huge and even more so for fish and probably Shrimp as we were talking about before. So actually just that shifting consumption was going to increase the amount of animals that were farmed. And so all of a sudden within a short space of time, we've gone from, or I certainly did, I feel like the team have more experienced some more skeptical and it's called the small animal Replacement problem. And we've been talking about this for a long time.

Introducing — How I Learned to Love Shrimp

How I Learned to Love Shrimp

Explore v.s. Exploit: Finding Solutions Quickly Can Get You Stuck in a Local Optimum Transcript: Speaker 1 So when I started doing the work in AI, one of the really, very, very general ideas that comes across again and again in computer science is this idea of the explore, exploit trade on. And the idea is that you can't get a system that is simultaneously going to optimize for actually being able to do things effectively. That's the exploit part. And being able to figure out, search through all the possibilities. So let me try to describe it this way. I guess we're a podcast. So you're going to have to imagine this usually I wave my arms around a lot here. So imagine that you have some problem you want to solve or some hypothesis that you want to discover. And you can think about it as if there's a big box full of all the possible hypotheses and all the possible solutions to your problem or possible policies that you could have, for instance, Your reinforcement learning context. And now you're in a particular space in that box. That's what you know now. That's the hypotheses you have now. That's the policies you have now. Now what you want to do is get somewhere else. You want to be able to find a new idea, a new solution. And the question is how do you do that? And the idea is that there are actually two different kinds of strategies you could use. One of them is you could just search for solutions that are very similar to the ones you already have. And you could just make small changes in what you already think to accommodate new evidence or a new problem. And that has the advantage that you're going to be able to find a pretty good solution pretty quickly. But it has a disadvantage. And the disadvantage is that there might be a much better solution that's much further away in that high dimensional space. And any interesting space is going to be too large to just search completely systematically. You're always going to have to choose which kinds of possibilities you want to consider. So it could be that there's a really good solution, but it's much more different from where you currently are. And the trouble is that if you just do something like what's called hill climbing, you just look locally, you're likely to get stuck in what's called a local optimum.

Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I.

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

Having Grace For the Present Time and Letting Go of a Bleak Future That Has Not Yet Happened Summary: The weight of urgent responsibility and the fear of a bleak future can lead to burnout, but imagining a terminal diagnosis can bring about a sense of freedom and courage. Despite the potential for a bleak future, there are still beautiful moments to be cherished in the present. It is essential to celebrate life, bear witness to the beauty of existence, and keep the world in balance through small yet profound actions. Leaving space for grace and dreaming a way through the unknown are crucial. The Stockdale paradox highlights the importance of being ruthlessly realistic about short-term realities while remaining relentlessly optimistic about long-term possibilities. Although the current global situation is complex and challenging, maintaining a thread of hope and resilience is crucial as we navigate an uncertain future. Transcript: Speaker 1 I've noticed this in a lot of our colleagues and friends that the people I know that are sort of quote unquote fighting the good fight, right? They're out there in the front and in the public. They're out there drawing attention to critical issues, those kinds of things. They're often getting kind of spun up and burned out themselves, right? It's a lot to hold and to hold the urgency and the responsibility is more than most of our psyches and nervous systems can handle, right? And I thought, good Lord, if I had a terminal diagnosis, right? Like if I knew I had a year to live the classic kind of thought experiment, how would I act? And then the simple answer is that for most of us, we would be more free, we would be more courageous, we would be more truthful, we'd be more heartfelt, we'd be more adventurous, we'd Do all the things, right? Yeah, it's hard more. Yeah, it's hard to have lots and bucket lists and you name it, right? And I thought, okay, well, let's say that 30 years from now, we really are in that totally bleak wheels off situation. But I look out my window today and it's actually pretty beautiful. The sun is still coming up, the moon is setting, there's waves to be surf, there's powder skiing to be had, there's music to listen to or share, there's people, there's loved ones in our Lives. If we pissed away these days, ringing our hands about what might yet be but isn't, I mean, it's the old Mark Twain thing, it's like an old man and I've experienced a great many sorrows, Only some of which actually ever happened, you know, we're kind of in that neck of the woods and I sort of felt like, okay, so the simplest is for me, it's almost the hospice tour of the world And life, like about six months ago, I just kind of sat down the super intense urgency that I had been feeling for several years, including the writing of that last book where I was, you Know, like always looking for the solution, always looking for the way through, right? Where was the gap? Where was the seam and the clean, you know, climbing that crazy mountain that would go and that we can make it through? Because every single one of them that I tracked pinched out and it was almost always maulic, right? It was like, you basically, his fingerprints are everywhere where you're like, oh, fuck, that's hypothetically possible, but we're just not going to do it, are we? We're not going to do it because of a perverse incentives, we're not going to do it because if greed or, you know, all of the things, you're just like, fucking goddamn, why? We could, right? We absolutely could, but the statistically my gut sense on are we going to incredibly low given current conditions. So step one was like feed the holy, like celebrate life, shame on us while there is still goodness, truth and beauty in abundance, right? Not to be sucking the matter out of life and not to be putting those memories in the bank. And at the same time, we can never give up hoping because if we give up hope, then that adjacent possibility can never happen, like for certainness, nails in the coffin, if we just go into Despair and cynicism or even just hedonism, like fuck it while the room burns, you know, while room burns, I'm just going to party. Like those are unconscionable decisions. So can we use our feeding of the holy, the idea of like, I'm going to bear witness to the glory of creation, right? And the absolute heart-rending poinency of this human experience. Can I use that, right? In some tiny, small, you know, insignificant, but profound way, rich, really keep the world on its on its axis, right? As most indigenous cultures did, we pray, we make these offerings, we do these things so that the sun keeps rising, right? So that the rain keeps falling so that the crops grow, like can we participate in the wonder of that creative cycle while we are fortunate enough to still have that opportunity and choice. And then oh, by the way, leave space for grace, right? Because it has always happened that way. And funnily enough, this is this was also you've all just mentioned he type something maybe just about AI like a month ago. And he said, we have forever, all of human history, all of human civilization and culture is living in someone else's dream. You know, free markets was a concept, you know, like the democracy, civil rights, everything that we take as the mimetic norms of our reality someone dreamed them first. So the leaving space for grace is and how can we dream a way through that we cannot see from here? We cannot, because I at least I can't, I've looked, right? And most of the people I look up to have been looking. And if you really behind closed doors sit down with most of those folks, it's far grimmer than even the headlines encapsulate, right? But the reality is, is we are still amazingly adaptive, cunning little monkeys with opposable thumbs and brilliant prefrontal cortexes. So, so we can't see from here, what adaptations, what permutations, what mutations will happen around the bend. And this goes back to, you know, Jim Stockdale is Admiral Stockdale. He was the highest ranking POW in Vietnam. And he actually went on to be a vice presidential candidate at one point. But his the Stockdale paradox was he noticed that in those North Vietnamese POW camps that the pessimists didn't live, because they were like, ah, I'm fucked. You know, sure enough, they snuffed it. But the really interesting insight was the optimist didn't live either. Because what happened is they'd be like, we're going to get the boys home for Christmas or Easter or July the 4th. And those dates would come and go. And then they would just collapse, that they would lose all ability to maintain hope after their hope redemption came and went. And he said the paradox was the people who survived were ruthlessly realistic about short-term realities, while remaining relentlessly optimistic about the long-term possibility. I don't know when we're going to get out, but we're going to go home. Right. And that is to me, it's sort of all of us right now. We don't like would like we are in a massive, intersecting, chaotic and complex, tight spot. Right. And it's it's it's the confluence of every intentional and unintentional quality of our civilization to date. And we're just huddling off the cliff. No skid marks. Now, whether or not we can figure out how to turn into chitty, chitty bang bang, you know, and sprout wings or turn into a boat or do something else we can't see from here. And I wouldn't give it super long odds. We may just get subject into the trash compactor of history. Right. But it is on us. It's incumbent on us to maintain a thread of hope and resilience.

#11 - Jamie Wheal — Tackling the Meaning Crisis

Win-Win with Liv Boeree

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