Fair enough. I think "too X to matter" is a complex concept, though.

Probably that fish don't seem to be hugely different from amphibians/reptiles, birds, and mammals in terms of the six substitute-indicators-for-feeling-pain, and so it's hard to say whether their pain experience is different.

I would agree that fish pain is less relevant than human pain (they have a central nervous system, yes, but less of one, and a huge part of what makes human pain bad is the psychological suffering associated with it).

But I'd like people to at least have animal suffering on the radar of "things I'd like to give a shit about, if I had the energy, and that if it became much more convenient to care about, I'd make small modifications to my lifestyle." So that when in-vitro meat becomes cheap and tasty, I think people should make the initial effort to switch over. (Possibly even while it's still a bit more expensive).

This is pretty much the case for me. I was vegetarian for a while in high school–oddly enough, less for reducing-suffering ethical reasons than for "it costs fewer resources to produce enough plants to feed the world population than to produce enough meat, as animals have to be fed plants and are a low-efficiency conversion of plant calories, so in order to better use the planet's resources, everyone should eat more plants and less meat." I consistently ended up with low iron and B12. It's possible to get enough iron, B12, and protein as a vegetarian, but you do have to plan your meals a bit more carefully (i.e. always have beans with rice so you get complete protein) and possibly eat foods that you don't like as much. Right now I cook about one dish with meat in it per week, and I haven't had any iron or B12 deficiency problems since graduating high school 4 years ago.

In general, I optimize food for low cost as well as health value and ethics, but if in-vitro meat became available, I think this is valuable enough in the long run that I would be willing to "subsidize" its production and commercialization by paying higher prices.

Wow. I learned something that I did not know before :)

White sugar has animal products in it?

There are two failure modes here. There's failure mode #1, where enthusiastic amateurs teach awful classes and cause some people to think less of 'rationality', and there's failure mode #2 where CFAR graduates want to do cool things and don't do them because they're scared of failure, and a community never materializes. I think #2 is the default, and more likely, and thus worth taking more effort to avoid.

Agreed with this x10!

The idea is to train these skills separately. CoZE training will be hard for introverts, but this doesn't mean they need to be constantly out of their comfort zone during all of the other classes.

There is a part of the workshop; CoZE training; that is meant to build social skills. If it feels hard, it's working. But if Bayes or Value of Information classes feel hard because participants are exhausted and want to lock themselves in the bathroom alone, that doesn't help with learning the specific skills. Exercise, for example, works well with intense training and rest periods, not 4 days of constant slow jogging.

I paid about $1000 total for workshop plus travel. The social confidence and "try new things" aspects led me to obtain a scary part-time job at the hospital that brought well over $1000 in income, plus networking and comfort zone expansion. I also started thinking about job options in terms of different salaries and world-changing leverage, which my brain had previously tagged as somehow immoral. This hasn't yet led to me, for example, moving to the USA where nursing salaries are higher or looking for startup opportunities, but it's explicitly on my mind and I've done a few rough value calculations. I expect the idea of "you don't need to do the same thing for 30 years" will lead to quite divergent events in the next 5 years of my life.