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CAE_Jones comments on Effective Altruism Through Advertising Vegetarianism? - LessWrong
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There seems to be, based just on my non-rigorous observations, significant overlap between the Vegan/Vegetarian communities and the "Genetically Modified Foods and big Pharma will turn your babies into money-forging cancer" theorists. Obviously not all Vegans are "chemicals=bad because nature" conspiracy theorists, and not all such conspiracy theorists are vegan, but the overlap seems significant. That vocal overlap group strikes me as likely to oppose lab-grown meat because it's unnatural, and then the conspiracy theories will begin. And the animal rights groups probably don't want to divide up their base any further.
(This comment felt harsh to me as I was writing it, even after I cut out other bits. The feeling I'm getting is very similar to political indignation. If this looks as mind-killd to anyone else, please please correct me.)
That seems plausible, though PETA already has a million-dollar prize for anyone who can mass-market an in-vitro meat product. Given their annual revenues (~$30 million) and the cost associated with that kind of project, it seems like they're going about it the wrong way.
From a utilitarian perspective, wireheading livestock might be an even better option - though that probably would be perceived by most animal activists (and people in general) as vaguely dystopian.
Does the technology to reliably and cheaply wirehead farmed animals now exist at all? Without claiming expertise, I find that unlikely.
Opium in the feed? Cut their nerves? Some sort of computerised gamma-ray brain surgery? I'm certain that if there were a tiny financial incentive for agribusiness to do it then a way would swiftly be found.
It's not so hard to turn humans into living vegetables. Some sorts of head trauma seem to do it. How hard can it be to make that reliable (or at least reasonably reliable) for cows?
Least convenient world and all that: If we could prevent animal suffering by skilfully whacking calves over the head with a claw hammer, would that be a goal to which the rational vegan would aspire? It would be just as good as killing them, plus pleasure for the meat eaters. Also it would probably be possible to find people who'd enjoy doing it, so that's another plus.
Probably not that hard. Doing it without ruining the meat or at least reducing yields sounds harder to me, though -- muscles atrophy if they don't get used, and they don't get used if nothing's giving them commands. I'd also expect force-feeding a braindead animal to be more expensive and probably more conducive to health problems than letting it feed itself.
To continue the 'living vegetables' approach, one could point out that to keep a human in a coma alive and (somewhat) well will cost you somewhere from $500-$3k+. Per day.
Even assuming that animals are much cheaper by taking the bottom of the range and then cutting it by an entire order of magnitude, the 1.5-3 year aging of standard cattles being butchered means 50 * 1.5 * 365 = >$27.4k extra expenses.
That's some expensive meat.
So just kill all the farm animals painlessly now? Sure that sounds good. But if there will still be farm animal being raised then it seems there still is a problem. Or if you are just talking about ways of making slaughter painless for continuing to factory farm, that sounds better than nothing.
I find this interesting, because it seems to imply that people have an intuitive sense that eudaimonia applies to animals. I'll have to think about the consequences of this.
Do you know of any sources for this? In my also non-rigorous experience this is a totally unfounded misperception of veg*nism that people seem to have, founded on nothing but a few quack websites/anti-science blogs.
Consider for instance /r/vegan over at reddit, which is in fact overwhelmingly pro-GMO and ethics rather than health focused. Of course, it is certainly true that the demographics of reddit or that subreddit are much different from that of veg*ns as a whole (or people as a whole). Lesswrong is an even more extreme case of such a limited demographic.