📚 Quinn's Highlights

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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

Two Models of Searching for Truth: Unearthing the Truth v.s. Growing Into The Truth Summary: Science is like carving away everything that isn't truth, but I think it's more like an infinite vacuum with trees growing in all directions. The search for truth is complex and ever-expanding. It's like ecology, where species have multiple solutions to a problem, which continually changes. I believe in infinite diversity and combinations, and that complexity can emerge from simplicity. Instead of focusing on the core, we should expect to branch out. Transcript: Speaker 2 One metaphor I like is that I think some people have as their image of science. Imagine we're sitting on the surface of a sphere, and they think they're kind of digging down to the core of the truth. They're discarding the earth beneath them, the falsities, and they're going to hit the truth. Speaker 1 We're carving away everything that isn't science, you're saying? Speaker 2 Yeah. And I think that the image I have instead is there's an infinite vacuum outside of that sphere, and there are trees growing out from the surface of the sphere in all directions. And as they grow out, more space is available, and they branch and expand. And that just goes on, and it gets more and more complex the further you get out. And that's kind of how I think of the search for the truth. That strikes people maybe initially is a little bit weird. I guess that's how I interpret like beginning of infinity, David Deutsches' phrase. But another way to see that is ecology, the way the species were. Species are all after some abstracted fitness landscape, I guess is one way to conceive of it. But somehow we don't end up with one solution to that problem. In fact, we get a bunch of solutions to the problem, and as that problem gets solved, it actually changes the problem, because now for all the other species you've got to deal with, and There's other species that you can eat, there's all kinds of stuff going on. That's how I think about it. I eat reflecting infinite diversity and infinite combinations. I think that there's just a lot of things going on, and you can build a lot of complexity from a small set of ingredients. And you shouldn't expect to get down to the core, you should expect to branch out from the core.

Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

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

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