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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

To Eliminate Undesirable Behavior, You Have to Eliminate The Stimuli That Precedes It Summary: Self-control problems require structuring life to avoid stimuli that tempt bad behavior, similar to avoiding walking past a tavern if you're an alcoholic. Investors can improve mental hygiene by unfollowing negative sources and following those with a long-term perspective to reduce hyper reactivity to market fluctuations. Changing exposure helps in turning down the amplitude of emotions. Transcript: Speaker 1 But if you 're an alcoholic, you would be crazy to walk past the tavern and say, i will demonstrate the will power not to walk in. You can't do that, and you know you can't, so you walk on the other street. And that's the kind of governor that people need to put on their behavior. If you know that you have self control problems, you have to structure your life so that the things that tempt you into bad behavior don't get surfaced in your stimuli. And that's very easy for investors to do. If you, if you know you have a tendency toward hyper reactivity to, you know, red arrows pointing downward on stock market displays, then turn that web site off, un follow that person On twitter. Follow people who take a longer term perspective and aren't rattled by this kind of thing. Improve your mental hygiene. You can't turn yourself into someone who's unemotional, but you can turn down the amplitude of your own emotions if you change what your exposures are.

#4 Jason Zweig — Elevate Your Financial IQ

The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish

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

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