📚 Quinn's Highlights

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The Power of Research in Informing Animal Advocacy Strategy: % of Veg People Who Abandon Diet Summary: The biggest finding was that 84% of vegans and vegetarians abandon their diet within two years, but follow-up studies found a lower overall number of around 46%. However, the overall number hides a more complicated reality depending on the demographic position of the person. Among certain demographics, the number is much higher, while among others, it's much lower. The study challenged the animal advocacy movement to reconsider strategy and sparked discussion and reflection on their approach. Transcript: Speaker 1 Yeah, so the sort of biggest finding, the one that gets quoted the most and the one that got us like all of the media attention was that 84% of vegans and vegetarians abandon their diet Within, I believe it was within two years. I didn't remember seeing that. Speaker 2 I didn't know it was Fonnalitix. Yeah. Speaker 1 And we've done follow-up studies that sort of, we actually released a series of follow-up studies over the course of late last year and early this year that did a much more sort of like Robust analysis of a follow-up survey and a much more robust analysis of the data that found considerably lower like overall numbers. So the more like current estimate that we have is around like, I believe it's 46% which is still high. Speaker 2 It's still not great. It's still 46% of people who are vegetarian or no longer vegetarian after two years. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. Cool. And that is still really high. That's almost one and two. But part of the reason that I mean, we learned a lot from that first study, right? We learned the power of what a particularly punchy data point, how quickly that can travel around the world and around the movement. Because the reality is it's much more complicated, right? Like in this current set of follow-up studies, we found a lower overall number in the 40 to 50% range. But the reality is that it totally depends. Like that overall number actually hides a much more complicated reality depending on the demographic position of the person, right? So among certain demographics, the number is like much higher. Among other demographics, it's like a lot lower. It's when we put out like an overall number or when you see an overall number on any study, it's usually hiding something that's like a lot more complicated once you start to break it down. Yeah, of course. But I just, you know, that project remains a favor for me because it really did challenge the animal advocacy movement to sort of take a look at what it was doing and reconsider strategy Or try and think of strategy in a different way. People were mad, but that's okay. They should, you know, in a lot of ways it means you're doing something right.

Karol Orzechowski on Animal Research and the Importance of Effectively Communicating Data to Support Your Goals.

How I Learned to Love Shrimp

The Expert Identification Problem and the Challenges of Democratic Decision-Making Key takeaways: • The expert identification problem is a major concern when it comes to trusting experts in a democracy. • Democracies aim to harness the intellectual power of diversity for better solutions. • The challenge lies in recognizing the best solutions when they require expertise that the democratic entity may not possess. • There is no clear solution to this problem, and democracy remains the best way to organize society according to the speaker. Transcript: Speaker 2 So for a long time I would say that the problem I've been most obsessed with is something I call the expert identification problem it's like how does the non-expert figure out which expert To trust if they don't have the expertise and one of the worries about a democracy is that it runs straight into the expert identification problem right like if we're democratically Voting on what to do we are aggregate non-experts I mean I'm not talking here about like oh we are the experts and you all are not even if you are the world expert in X you're a non-expert In a million other fields right so as an aggregate we are non-expert so here's the real worry for me if you have the right solution how would that get democratically approved Helen Landemore Is this a political theorist I really like she's part of a movement who are epistemic democrats and they think that democracies are the best way to harness the intellectual power of Diversity and the basic model is something like diverse people will come up with a better set of solutions and when you put them together the best solutions will rise to the top and my Worry is how will the democratic entity recognize which are the best solutions because if the best solution requires expertise to recognize and the democratic entity as an aggregate Is not an expert how will they figure it out and that's a problem I'm not sure there's a solution to and I also can't think of a better way to organize the world than democratically

Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

One misconception about highly successful cultures is that they are happy, lighthearted places. This is mostly not the case. They are energized and engaged, but at their core their members are oriented less around achieving happiness than around solving hard problems together. This task involves many moments of high-candor feedback, uncomfortable truth-telling, when they confront the gap between where the group is, and where it ought to be. Larry Page created one of these moments when he posted his “These ads suck” note in the Google kitchen. Popovich delivers such feedback to his players every day, usually at high volume.

The Culture Code

Daniel Coyle

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