Nick Cooney who says that he's been reading studies that about 25% to 50% of people who say they are vegetarian actually are, though I don't yet have the citations. Thus, if we find out that an advertisement creates two meat reducers, we'd scale that down to one reducer if we're expecting a 50% desirability bias
This doesn't follow. The intervention is increasing the desirability bias, so the portion of purported vegetarians who are actually vegetarian is likely to change, in the direction of a lower proportion of true vegetarianism. It's plausible that 90%+ of the marginal purported vegetarians are bogus. Consider ethics and philosophy professors, who are significantly more likely to profess that eating meat is wrong:
...There is no statistically detectable difference between the ethicists and either group of non-ethicists. (The difference between non-ethicists philosophers and the comparison professors was significant to marginal, depending on the test.)
Conclusion? Ethicists condemn meat-eating more than the other groups, but actually eat meat at about the same rate. Perhaps also, they're more likely to misrepresent their meat-eating practices (on the meals-per-week question and
I think some weighting for the sophistication of a brain is appropriate, but I think the weighting should be sub-linear w.r.t. the number of neurones; I expect that in simpler organisms, a larger share of the brain will be dedicated to processing sensory data and generating experiences. I would love someone to look into this to check if I'm right.
A question at this point I might ask is how good does the final estimate have to be?
First, there are multiple applications of accurate estimates.
The unreasonably low estimates would suggest things like "I'm net reducing factory-farming suffering if I eat meat and donate a few bucks, so I should eat meat if it makes me happier or healthier sufficiently to earn and donate an extra indulgence of $5 ."
There are some people going around making the claim, based on the extreme low-ball cost estimates, that these veg ads would save human lives more cheaply than AMF by reducing food prices. With saner estimates, not so, I think.
Second, there's the question of flow-through effects, which presumably dominate in a total utilitarian calculation anyway, if that's what you're into. The animal experiences probably don't have much effect there, but people being vegetarian might have some, as could effects on human health, pollution, food prices, social movements, etc.
To address the total utilitarian question would require a different sort of evidence, at least in the realistic ranges.
You could also reduce meat consumption by advertising good vegetarian meal recipes.
(Generally, the idea is that you can reduce eating meat even without explicitly promoting not eating meat.)
Are you suggesting that one simply advertise the existence of good vegetarian recipes without mentioning surrounding reasons for reducing meat?
I agree with Viliam_Bur that this may be effective, and here's why.
I bake as a hobby (desserts — cakes, pies, etc.). I am not a vegetarian; I find moral arguments for vegetarianism utterly unconvincing and am not interesting in reducing the suffering of animals and so forth.
However, I often like to try new recipes, to expand my repertoire, hone my baking skills, try new things, etc. Sometimes I try out vegan dessert recipes, for the novelty and the challenge of making something that is delicious without containing eggs or dairy or white sugar or any of the usual things that go into making desserts taste good.[1]
More, and more readily available, high-quality vegan dessert recipes would mean that I substitute more vegan dessert dishes for non-vegan ones. This effect would be quite negated if the recipes came bundled with admonitions to become vegan, pro-vegan propaganda, comments about how many animals this recipe saves, etc.; I don't want to be preached to, which I think is a common attitude.
[1] My other (less salient) motivation for learning to make vegan baked goods is to be prepared if I ever have vegan/vegetarian friends who can't eat my usual stuff (hasn't ever been the case so far, but it could happen).
I like to take the firmest tofu I can find (this is usually vacuum-packed, not water-packed) and cut it into slices or little cubes, and then pan-fry it in olive oil with a splash of lemon juice added halfway through till it's golden-brown and chewy. Then I put it in pasta (cubes) or on sandwiches (slices) - the sandwich kind is especially nice with spinach sauteed with cheese and hummus.
I'm really curious why all of the major animal welfare/rights organizations seem to be putting more emphasis on vegan outreach than on in-vitro meat/genetic modification research. I have a hard time imagining a scenario where any arbitrary (but large) contribution toward vegan outreach leads to greater suffering reduction than the same amount put toward hastening a more efficient and cruelty-free system for producing meat.
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.)
I like Beyond Meat, but I think the praise for it has been overblown. For example, the Effective Animal Activism link you've provided says:
[Beyond Meat] mimics chicken to such a degree that renowned New York Times food journalist and author Mark Bittman claimed that it "fooled me badly in a blind tasting".
But reading Bittman's piece, the reader will quickly realize that the quote above is taken out of context:
It doesn’t taste much like chicken, but since most white meat chicken doesn’t taste like much anyway, that’s hardly a problem; both are about texture, chew and the ingredients you put on them or combine with them. When you take Brown’s product, cut it up and combine it with, say, chopped tomato and lettuce and mayonnaise with some seasoning in it, and wrap it in a burrito, you won’t know the difference between that and chicken.
I like soy meat alternatives just fine, but vegans and vegetarians are the market. People who enjoy the taste of meat and don't see the ethical problems with it don't want a relatively expensive alternative with a flavor they have to mask. There's demand for in-vitro meat because there's demand for meat. If you can make a product that t...
Something we should take into account that helps the case for this outreach rather than hurts it is the idea that conversions aren't binary -- someone can be pushed by the ad to be more likely to reduce their meat intake as opposed to fully converted.
Eh, don't forget that humans often hate other humans. Exposing an anti-vegetarian to vegetarian advertisements might induce them to increase their meat intake, and an annoying advocate may move someone from neutral to anti-vegetarian. This effect is very unlikely to be captured by surveys- and so while it's reasonable to expect the net effect to be positive, it seems reasonable to lower estimates by a bit.
(Most 'political' moves have polarizing effects; you should expect supporters to like you more, and detractors to like you less, afterwards, which seems like a better model than everyone slowly moving towards vegetarianism.)
Eh, don't forget that humans often hate other humans. Exposing an anti-vegetarian to vegetarian advertisements might induce them to increase their meat intake, and an annoying advocate may move someone from neutral to anti-vegetarian.
If you take a non-vegetarian and make them more non-vegetarian, I don't think much is lost, because you never would have captured them anyway. I suppose they might eat more meat or try and persuade other people to become anti-vegetarian, but my intuition is that this effect would be really small.
But you're right that it would need to be considered.
I agree. In addition, I think people who claim that they will eat more meat after seeing a pamphlet or some other promotion for vegetarianism just feel some anger in the moment, but they'll likely forget about it within an hour or so. I can't see someone several weeks later saying to eirself, "I'd better eat extra meat today because of that pamphlet I read three weeks ago."
If someone says that they are vegetarian for moral reasons, then it's an implicit (often explicit) claim that non-vegetarians are less moral, and therefore a status grab. If an omnivore doesn't want to become vegetarian nor to lose status, they need to aggressively deny the claim of vegetarianism being more moral.
Since all of my work output goes to effective altruism, I can't afford any optimization of my meals that isn't about health x productivity. This does sometimes make me feel worried about what happens if the ethical hidden variables turn out unfavorably. Assuming I go on eating one meat meal per day, how much vegetarian advocacy would I have to buy in order to offset all of my annual meat consumption? If it's on the order of $20, I'd pay $30 just to be able to say I'm 50% more ethical than an actual vegetarian.
Eliezer, is that the right way to do the maths? If a high-status opinion-former publicly signals that he's quitting meat because it's ethically indefensible, then others are more likely to follow suit - and the chain-reaction continues. For sure, studies purportedly showing longer lifespans, higher IQs etc of vegetarians aren't very impressive because there are too many possible confounding variables. But what such studies surely do illustrate is that any health-benefits of meat-eating vs vegetarianism, if they exist, must be exceedingly subtle. Either way, practising friendliness towards cognitively humble lifeforms might not strike AI researchers as an urgent challenge now. But isn't the task of ensuring that precisely such an outcome ensues from a hypothetical Intelligence Explosion right at the heart of MIRI's mission - as I understand it at any rate?
I think David is right. It is important that people who may have a big influence on the values of the future lead the way by publicly declaring and demonstrating that suffering (and pleasure) are important where-ever they occur, whether in humans or mice.
Needless to say, I think 1 is settled. As for the second point - Eliezer and his colleagues hope to exercise a lot of control over the future. If he is inadvertently promoting bad values to those around him (e.g. it's OK to harm the weak), he is increasing the chance that any influence they have will be directed towards bad outcomes.
I am also not aware of any Less Wrong post or sequence establishing (or really even arguing for) your view as the correct one.
I think we should be wary of reasoning that takes the form: "There is no good argument for x on Less Wrong, therefore there are likely no good arguments for x."
If it's on the order of $20, I'd pay $30 just to be able to say I'm 50% more ethical than an actual vegetarian.
That's not exactly true, since advocating vegetarianism has more effects than simply reducing the consumption of meat. For one thing, it alters how people think about and live their lives. If that $30 of spending produces a certain amount of human suffering (say, from self-induced guilt over eating meat), then your ethicalness isn't as high as calculated.
Several people have been attempting to reductio my pro-human point of view, so I'll do the same back to the pro-animal people here: how simple is the simplest animal you're willing to assign moral worth to? Are you taking into account meta-uncertainty about the moral worth of even very simple animals? (What about living organisms outside of the animal kingdom, like bacteria? Viruses?) If you don't care about organisms simple enough that they don't suffer, does it seem "arbitrary" to you to single out a particular mental behavior as being the mental behavior that signifies moral worth? Does it seem "mindist" to you to single out having a particular kind of mind as being the thing that signifies moral worth?
If you calculated that assigning even very small moral worth to a simple but sufficiently numerous organism leads to the conclusion that the moral worth of non-human organisms on Earth strongly outweighs, in aggregate, the moral worth of humans, would you act on it (e.g. by making the world a substantially better place for some bacterium by infecting many other animals, such as humans, with it)?
If you were the only human left on Earth and you couldn't find enough non-meat to survive on, would you kill yourself to avoid having to hunt to survive?
How do you resolve conflicts among organisms (e.g. predatorial or parasitic relationships)?
how simple is the simplest animal you're willing to assign moral worth to?
I don't value animals per se, it is their suffering I care about and want to prevent. If it turns out that even the tiniest animals can suffer, I will take this into consideration. I'm already taking insects or nematodes into consideration probabilistically; I think it is highly unlikely that they are sentient, and I think that even if they are sentient, their suffering might not be as intense as that of mammals, but since their numbers are so huge, the well-being of all those small creatures makes up a non-negligible term in my utility function.
If you don't care about organisms simple enough that they don't suffer, does it seem "arbitrary" to you to single out a particular mental behavior as being the mental behavior that signifies moral worth?
No, it seems completely non-arbitrary to me. Only sentient beings have a first-person point of view, only for them can states of the world be good or bad. A stone cannot be harmed in the same way a sentient being can be harmed. Introspectively, my suffering is bad because it is suffering, there is no other reason.
...If you calculated that assigning ev
I'm already taking insects or nematodes into consideration probabilistically; I think it is highly unlikely that they are sentient, and I think that even if they are sentient, their suffering might not be as intense as that of mammals, but since their numbers are so huge, the well-being of all those small creatures makes up a non-negligible term in my utility function.
A priori, it seems that the moral weight of insects would either be dominated by their massive numbers or by their tiny capacities. It's a narrow space where the two balance and you get a non-negligible but still-not-overwhelming weight for insects in a utility function. How did you decide that this was right?
I don't see the relevance of this question, but judging by the upvotes it received, it seems that I'm missing something.
I think suffering is suffering, no matter the substrate it is based on. Whether such a robot would be sentient is an empirical question (in my view anyway, it has recently come to my attention that some people disagree with this). Once we solve the problem of consciousness, it will turn out that such a robot is either conscious or that it isn't. If it is conscious, I will try to reduce its suffering. If the only way to do that would involve doing "weird" things, I would do weird things.
1) I am okay with humanely raised farm meat (I found a local butcher shop that sources from farms I consider ethical)
2) If I didn't have access to civilization, I would probably end up hunting to survive, although I'd try to do so as rarely and humanely as was possible given my circumstances. (I'm only like 5% altruist, I just try to direct that altruism as effectively as possible and if push comes to shove I'm a primal animal that needs to eat. I'm skeptical of people who claim otherwise)
3) I'm currently okay with eating insects, mussels, and similar simplish animals, where I can make pretty good guesses about the lack of sentience of. (If insects do turn out to have sentience, that's a pretty inconvenient world to have to live in, morally.)
4) I'm approximately average-preference-utilitarian. I value there being more creatures with more complex and interesting capacities for preference satisfaction (this is arbitrary and I'm fine with that). If I had to choose between humans and animals, I'd choose humans. But that's not the choice offered to humans RE vegetarianism - what's at stake is not humanity and complex relationships/art/intellectual-endeavors - it's pretty straightforward...
We're treading close to terminal values here. I will express some aesthetic preference for nature qua nature.
That strikes me as inconsistent, assuming that preventing suffering/minimizing disutility is also a terminal value. In those terms, nature is bad. Really, really bad.
I also recognize a libertarian attitude that we should allow other individuals to live the lives they choose in the environments they find themselves to the extent reasonably possible.
It seems arbitrary to exclude the environment from the cluster of factors that go into living "the lives they choose." I choose to not live in a hostile environment where things much larger than me are trying to flay me alive, and I don't think it's too much of a stretch to assume that most other conscious beings would choose the same if they knew they had the option.
Absent strong reasons otherwise, "do no harm" and "careful, limited action" should be the default position. The best we can do for animals that don't have several millennia of adaptation to human companionship (i.e. not dogs, cats, and horses) is to leave them alone and not destroy their natural habitat.
Taken with this...
...We n
That strikes me as inconsistent, assuming that preventing suffering/minimizing disutility is also a terminal value.
Two values being in conflict isn't necessarily inconsistent, it just mean that you have to make trade-offs.
I asked this before but don't remember if I got any good answers: I am still not convinced that I should care about animal suffering. Human suffering seems orders of magnitude more important. Also, meat is delicious and contains protein. What are the strongest arguments you can offer me in favor of caring about animal suffering to the point that I would be willing to incur the costs involved in becoming more vegetarian? Alternatively, how much would you be willing to pay me to stop eating meat?
What are the strongest arguments you can offer me in favor of caring about animal suffering to the point that I would be willing to incur the costs involved in becoming more vegetarian?
Huh. I'm drawing a similar blank as if someone asked me to provide an argument for why the suffering of red-haired people should count equally to the suffering of black-haired people. Why would the suffering of one species be more important than the suffering of another? Yes, it is plausible that once your nervous system becomes simple enough, you no longer experience anything that we would classify as suffering, but then you said "human suffering is more important", not "there are some classes of animals that suffer less". I'm not sure I can offer a good argument against "human suffering is more important", because it strikes me as so completely arbitrary and unjustified that I'm not sure what the arguments for it would be.
Would you also say that they were all morally confused and that we have made a great deal of moral progress from most of history until now?
Yes! We know stuff that our ancestors didn't know; we have capabilities that they didn't have. If pain and suffering are bad when implemented in my skull, then they also have to be bad when implemented elsewhere. Yes, given bounded resources, I'm going to protect me and my friends and other humans before worrying about other creatures, but that's not because nonhumans don't matter, but because in this horribly, monstrously unfair universe, we are forced to make tradeoffs. We do what we must, but that doesn't make it okay.
Human suffering might be orders of magnitude more important. (Though: what reason do you have in mind for this?) But non-human animal suffering is likely to be orders of magnitude more common. Some non-human animals are probably capable of suffering, and we care a great deal about suffering in the case of humans (as, presumably, we would in the case of intelligent aliens). So it seems arbitrary to exclude non-human animal suffering from our concerns completely. Moreover, if you're uncertain about whether animals suffer, you should err on the side of assuming that they do because this is the safer assumption. Mistakenly killing thousands of suffering moral patients over your lifetime is plausibly a much bigger worry than mistakenly sparing thousands of unconscious zombies and missing out on some mouth-pleasures.
I'm not a vegetarian myself, but I do think vegetarianism is a morally superior option. I also think vegetarians should adopt a general policy of not paying people to become vegetarians (except perhaps as a short-term experiment, to incentivize trying out the lifestyle).
I'm a human and I care about humans.
You are many things: a physical object, a living being, a mammal, a member of the species Homo sapiens, an East Asian (I believe), etc. What's so special about the particular category you picked?
Presumably mammals also exhibit more psychological similarity than non-mammals, and the same is probably true about East Asians relative to members of other races. What makes the psychological unity of mankind special?
Moreover, it seems that insofar as you care about humans because they have certain psychological traits, you should care about any creature that has those traits. Since many animals have many of the traits that humans have, and some animals have those traits to a greater degree than some humans do, it seems you should care about at least some nonhuman animals.
Also, do you really not value animals? I think if you were to see someone torturing an animal in front of you for fun, you would have some sort of negative reaction.
Some interesting things about this example:
Distance seems to have a huge impact when it comes to the bystander effect, and it's not clear that it's irrational. If you are the person who is clearly best situated to save a puppy from torture, that seems different from the fact that dogs are routinely farmed for meat in other parts of the world, by armies of people you could not hope to personally defeat or control.
Someone who is willing to be sadistic to animals might be sadistic towards humans as well, and so they may be a poor choice to associate with (and possibly a good choice to anti-associate with).
Many first world countries have some sort of law against bestiality. (In the US, this varies by state.) However, any justification for these laws based on the rights of the animals would also rule out related behavior in agribusiness, which is generally legal. There seems to be a difference between what people are allowed to do for fun and what they're allowed to do for profit; this makes sense in light of viewing the laws as not against actions, but kinds of people.
-
Introduction
I start with the claim that it's good for people to eat less meat, whether they become vegetarian -- or, better yet, vegan -- because this means less nonhuman animals are being painfully factory farmed. I've defended this claim previously in my essay "Why Eat Less Meat?". I recognize that some people, even those who consider themselves effective altruists, do not value the well-being of nonhuman animals. For them, I hope this essay is interesting, but I admit it will be a lot less relevant.
The second idea is that it shouldn't matter who is eating less meat. As long as less meat is being eaten, less animals will be farmed, and this is a good thing. Therefore, we should try to get other people to also try and eat less meat.
The third idea is that it also doesn't matter who is doing the convincing. Therefore, instead of convincing our own friends and family, we can pay other people to convince people to eat less meat. And this is exactly what organizations like Vegan Outreach and The Humane League are doing. With a certain amount of money, one can hire someone to distribute pamphlets to other people or put advertisements on the internet, and some percentage of people who receive the pamphlets or see the ads will go on to eat less meat. This idea and the previous one should be uncontroversial for consequentialists.
But the fourth idea is the complication. I want my philanthropic dollars to go as far as possible, so as to help as much as possible. Therefore, it becomes very important to try and figure out how much money it takes to get people to eat less meat, so I can compare this to other estimations and see what gets me the best "bang for my buck".
Other Estimations
I have seen other estimates floating around the internet that try to estimate the cost of distributing pamphlets, how many conversions each pamphlet produces, and how much less meat is ate via each conversion. Brian Tomasik calculates $0.02 to $3.65 [PDF] per year of nonhuman animal suffering prevented, later $2.97 per year, and then later $0.55 to $3.65 per year.
Jess Whittlestone provides statistics that reveal an estimate of less than a penny per year[1].
Effective Animal Activism, a non-profit evaluator for animal welfare charities, came up with an estimate [Excel Document] of $0.04 to $16.60 per year of suffering averted, that also takes into account a variety of additional variables, like product elasticity.
Jeff Kaufman uses a different line of reasoning, by estimating how many vegetarians there are and guessing how many of them came via pamphlets, estimates it would take $4.29 to $536 to make someone vegetarian for one year. Extrapolating from that using at a rate of 255 animals saved per year and a weighted average of 329.6 days lived per animal (see below for justification of both assumptions), would give $0.02 to $1.90 per year of suffering averted[2].
A third line of reasoning, also by Jeff Kaufman, was to measure the amount of comments on the pro-vegetarian websites advertised in these campaigns and found that 2-22% of them were about an intended behavior change (eating less meat, going vegetarian, or going vegan), depending on the website. I don't think we can draw any conclusions from this, but it's interesting.
To make my calculations, I decided to make a calculator. Unfortunately, I can't embed it here, so you'd have to open it in a new tab as a companion piece.
I'm going to start by using the following formula: Years of Suffering Averted per Dollar = (Pamphlets / dollar) * (Conversions / pamphlet) * (Veg years / conversion) * (Animals saved / veg year) * (Days lived / animal)
Now, to get estimations for these variables.
Pamphlets Per Dollar
How much does it cost to place the advertisement, whether it be the paper pamphlet or a Facebook advertisement? Nick Cooney, head of the Humane League, says the cost-per-click of Facebook ads is 20 cents.
But what about the cost per pamphlet? This is more of a guess, but I'm going to go with <a href="">Vegan Outreach's suggested donation of $0.13 per "Compassionate choices" booklet.
However, it's important to note that this cost must also include opportunity cost -- leafleters must forego the ability to use that time to work a job. This means I must include an opportunity cost of say $8/hr on top of that, making the actual cost $0.27 assuming a pamphlet is given out each minute of volunteer time, meaning 3.7 people are reached per dollar from pamphlets. For Facebook advertisements, the opportunity cost is trivial.
Conversions Per Pamphlet
This is the estimate with the biggest target on it's head, so to speak. How many people do we get to actually change their behavior with a simple pamphlet or Facebook advertisement? Right now, we have three lines of evidence:
Facebook Study
Humane League did A $5000 Facebook advertisement campaign. They bought ads that look like this...
...and sent people to websites (like this one or this one) with auto-playing videos that start playing and show the horrors of factory farming.
Afterward, there was another advertisement run to people who "liked" the video page, offering a 1 in 10 chance of winning a free movie ticket in order to take a survey. Everyone who emailed in asking for a free vegetarian starter kit were also emailed a survey. 104 people took the survey and there were 32 reported vegetarians[3] and 45 people reported, for example, that their chicken consumption decreased "slightly" or "significantly".
7% of visitors liked the page and 1.5% of visitors ordered a starter kit. Assuming all the other people went away from the video not changing their consumption, this survey would lead us to (very tenuously) think about 2.6% of people seeing the video will become a vegetarian[4].
(Here's the results of the survey in PDF.)
Pamphlet Study
A second study discussed in "The Powerful Impact of College Leafleting (Part 1)" and "The Powerful Impact of College Leafleting: Additional Findings and Details (Part 2)" looked specifically at pamphlets.
Here, Humane League staff visited two large East Coast state schools and distributed leaflets. They then returned two months later and surveyed people walking by. Those who remember receiving a leaflet earlier were counted. They found about 2% of those receiving a pamphlet went vegetarian.
Vegetarian Years Per Conversion
But once a pamphlet or Facebook advertisement captures someone, how long will they stay vegetarian? One survey showed vegetarians refrain from eating meat for an average of 6 years or more. Another study I found says 93% of vegetarians stay vegetarian for at least three years.
Animals Saved Per Vegetarian Year
And once you have a vegetarian, how many animals do they save per year? CountingAnimals says 406 animals saved per year.
The Humane League suggests 28 chickens, 2 egg industry hens, 1/8 beef cow, 1/2 pig, 1 turkey, and 1/30 dairy cow per year (total = 31.66 animals), and does not provide statistics on fish. This agrees with CountingAnimals on non-fish totals.
Days Lived Per Animal
One problem, however, is that saving a cow that could suffer for years is different from saving a chicken that suffers for only about a month. Using data from Farm Sanctuary plus World Society for the Protection of Animals data on fish [PDF], I get this table:
This makes the weighted average 329.6 days[5].
Accounting For Biases
As I said before, our formula was Years of Suffering Averted = (Pamphlets / dollar) * (Conversions / pamphlet) * (Veg years / conversion) * (Animals saved / veg year) * (Days lived / animal).
Let's plug these values in... Years of Suffering Averted per Dollar = 5 * 0.02 * 3 * 255.16 * 329.6/365 = 69.12.
Or, assuming all this is right (and that's a big assumption), it would cost less than 2 cents to prevent a year of suffering on a factory farm by buying vegetarians.
I don't want to make it sound like I'm beholden to this cost estimate or that this estimate is the "end all, be all" of vegan outreach. Indeed, I share many of the skepticisms that have been expressed by others. The simple calculation is... well... simple, and it needs some "beefing up", no pun intended. Therefore, I also built a "complex calculator" that works on a much more complex formula[6] that is hopefully correct[7] and will provide a more accurate estimation.
The big, big deal for the surveys is concern for bias. The most frequently mentioned bias is social desirability bias, or people who say they reduced meat just because they want to please the surveyor or look like a good person, which actually happens a lot more on surveys than we'd like.
To account for this, we'll have to figure out how inflated answers are because of this bias and then scale the answers down by that amount. Nick Cooney who says that he's been reading studies that about 25% to 50% of people who say they are vegetarian actually are, though I don't yet have the citations. Thus, if we find out that an advertisement creates two meat reducers, we'd scale that down to one reducer if we're expecting a 50% desirability bias.
The second bias that will be a problem for us is non-response bias, as those who don't reduce their diet are less likely to take the survey and therefore less likely to be counted. This is especially true in the Facebook study, which only measures people who "liked" or requested a starter kit, showing some pro-vegetarian affiliation.
We can balance this out by assuming everyone who didn't take the survey went on to have no behavior change whatsoever. Nick Cooney's Facebook Ad Survey is for the 7% of people who liked the page (and then responded to the survey), and obviously those who liked the page are more likely to reduce their consumption. I chose an optimistic value of 90% to consider the survey completely representative of the 7% who liked the page, and then a bit more for those who reduced their consumption but did not like the page. My pessimistic value was 95%, assuming everyone who did not like the survey went unchanged and assuming a small response bias among those who liked the page but chose not to take the survey.
For the pamphlets, however, there should be no response bias since the entire population of college students was surveyed from randomly, and no one was said to reject taking the survey.
Additional People Are Being Reached
In the Facebook survey, those who said they reduced their meat consumption were also asked if they influenced any of their friends and family to also reduce eating meat, and found that they usually produced 0.86 additional reducers.
This figure seems very high, but I do strongly expect the figure to be positive -- people who reduce eating meat will talk about it sometimes, essentially becoming free advertisements. I'd be very surprised if they ended up being a net negative.
Accounting for Product Elasticity
Another way to boost the effectiveness of the estimate is to be more accurate about what happens when someone stops eating meat. The change isn't from the actual refusal to eat, but rather from the reduced demand for meat, which leads to a reduced supply. Following the laws of economics, however, this reduction won't necessarially be one-for-one, but rather depend on the elasticity of product demand and supply. By getting this number, we can find out how much meat is reduced for every meat not demanded.
My guesses in the calculator come from the following sources, some of which are PDFs: Beef #1, Beef #2, Dairy #1, Dairy #2, Pork #1, Pork #2, Egg #1, Egg #2, Poultry, Salmon, and for all fish.
Putting It All Together
Implementing the formula on the calculator, we end up with an estimate of $0.03 to $36.52 to reduce one year of suffering on a factory farm based on the Facebook ad data and an estimate of $0.02 to $65.92 based on the pamphlet data.
Of course, many people are skeptical of these figures. Perhaps surprisingly, so am I. I'm trying to strike a balance between being an advocate of vegan outreach as a very promising path for making the world a better place, while not losing sight of the methodological hurdles that have not yet been met, and open to the possibility that I'm wrong about this.
The big methodological elephant in the room is that my entire cost estimate depends on having a plausible guess for how likely someone is to change their behavior based on seeing an advertisement.
I feel slightly reassured because:
That said, the possibility for desirability bias in the survey is a large concern as long as the surveys continue to be from overt animal welfare groups and continue to clearly state that they're looking for reductions in meat consumption.
Also, so long as surveys are only given to people that remember the leaflet or advertisement, there will be a strong possibility of response bias, as those who remember the ad are more likely to be the ones who changed their behavior. We can attempt to compensate for these things, but we can only do so much.
Furthermore, and more worrying, there's a concern that the surveys are just measuring normal drift in vegetarianism, without any changes being attributable to the ads themselves. For example, imagine that every year, 2% of people become vegetarians and 2% quit. Surveying these people at random and not capturing those who quit will end up finding a 2% conversion rate.
How can we address these? I think all three problems can be solved with a decent control group, whether it be a group of people that receive a leaflet not about vegetarianism, or no leaflet at all. Luckily, Kikauka and Savoie's survey intend to do just that.
Jeff Kaufman has a good proposal for a survey design I'd like to see implemented in this area.
Market Saturation and Diminishing Marginal Returns?
Another concern is that there are diminishing marginal returns to these ads. As the critique goes, there are only so many people that will be easily swayed by the advertisement, and once all of them are quickly reached by Facebook ads and pamphlets, things will dry up.
Unlike the others, I don't think this criticism works well. After all, even if it were true, it still would be worthwhile to take the market as far as it will go, and we can keep monitoring for saturation and find the point where it's no longer cost-effective.
However, I don't think the market has been tapped up yet at all. According to Nick Cooney [PDF], there are still many opportunities in foreign markets and outside the young, college kid demographic.
The Conjunction Fallacy?
The conjunction fallacy is a classic fallacy that reminds us that no matter what, the chance of event A happening can never be smaller than the chance of event A happening, followed by event B. For example, the probability that Linda is a bank teller will always be larger than (or equal to) the probability that Linda is a bank teller and a feminist.
What does this mean for vegetarian outreach? Well, for the simple calculator, we're estimating five factors. In the complex calculator, we're estimating 90 factors. Even if each factor is 99% likely to be correct, the chance that all five are right is 95%, and the chance that all 50 are right is only 60%. If each factor is only 90% likely to be correct, the complex calculator will be right with a probability of 0.5%!
This is a cause for concern, but I don't think there's any way around this. It's just an inherent problem with estimation. Hopefully we'll be balanced by (1) using the different bounds and (2) hoping underestimates and overestimates will cancel each other out.
Conversion and The 100 Yard Line
Something we should take into account that helps the case for this outreach rather than hurts it is the idea that conversions aren't binary -- someone can be pushed by the ad to be more likely to reduce their meat intake as opposed to fully converted. As Brian Tomasik puts it:
This would be either very difficult or outright impossible to capture in a survey, but is something to take into account.
Three Places I Might Donate Before Donating to Vegan Outreach
When all is said and done, I like the case for funding this outreach. However, I think there are three other possibilities along these lines that I find more promising:
Funding the research of vegan outreach: There needs to be more and higher-quality studies of this before one can feel confident enough in the cost-effectiveness of this outreach. However, initial results are very promising, and the value of information of more studies is therefore very high. Studies can also find ways to advertise more effectively, increasing the impact of each dollar spent. Right now, however, it looks like all ongoing studies are fully funded, but if there were opportunities to fund more, I would jump on it.
Funding Effective Animal Activism: EAA is an organization pushing for more cost-effectiveness in the domain of nonhuman animal welfare and is working to further evaluate what opportunities are the best, Givewell-style. Giving them more money can potentially attract a lot more attention to this outreach, and get it more scrutiny, research, and money down the line.
Funding Centre for Effective Altruism: Overall, it might just be better to get more people involved in the idea of giving effectively, and then getting them interested in vegan outreach, among other things.
Conclusion
Vegan outreach is a promising, though not fully studied, method of outreach that deserves both excitement and skepticism. Should one put money into it? Overall, I'd take a guarded approach of putting in just enough money to help the organizations learn, develop better cost-effective measurements and transparency, and become more effective. It shouldn't be too long before this area will become studied well enough to have good confidence in how things are doing.
More studies should be developed that explore advertising vegetarianism in a wide variety of media in a wide variety of ways, with decent control groups.
I look forward to seeing how this develops. Don't forget to play around with my calculator.
-
Footnotes
[1]: Cost effectiveness in years of suffering prevented per dollar = (Pamphlets / dollar) * (Conversions / pamphlet) * (Veg years / conversion) * (Animals saved / veg year) * (Years lived / animal).
Plugging in 80K's values... Cost effectiveness = (Pamphlets / dollar) * 0.01 to 0.03 * 25 * 100 * (Years lived / animal)
Filling in the gaps with my best guesses... Cost effectiveness = 5 * 0.01 to 0.03 * 25 * 100 * 0.90 = 112.5 to 337.5 years of suffering averted per dollar
I personally think 25 veg-years per conversion on average is possible but too high; I personally err from 4 to 7.
[2]: I feel like there's an error in this calculation or that Kaufman might disagree with my assumptions of number of animals or days per animal, because I've been told before that these estimates with this method are supposed to be about an order of magnitude higher than other estimates. However, I emailed Kaufman and he seemed to not find any fault with the calculation, though he does think the methodology is bad and the calculation should not be taken at face value.
[3]: I calculated the number of vegetarians by eyeballing about how many people said they no longer eat fish, which I'd guess only a vegetarian would be willing to give up.
[4]: 32 vegetarians / 104 people = 30.7%. That population is 8.5% (7% for likes + 1.5% for the starter kit) of the overall population, leading to 2.61% (30.7% * 8.5%).
[5]: Formula is [(Number Meat Chickens)(Days Alive) + (Number Egg Chickens)(Days Alive) + (Number Beef Cows)(Days Alive) + (Number Milk Cows)(Days Alive) + (Number Fish)(Days Alive)] / (Total Number Animals). ...Plugging things in: [(28)(42) + (2)(365) + (0.125)(365) + (0.033)(1460) + (225)(365)] / 255.16] = 329.6 days
[6]: Cost effectiveness in amount of days prevented per dollar = (People Reached / Dollar + (People Reached / Dollar * Additional People Reached / Direct Reach * Response Bias * Desirability Bias)) * Years Spent Reducing * (((Percent Increasing Beef * Increase Value) + (Percent Staying Same with Beef * Staying Same Value) + (Percent Decreasing Beef Slightly * Decrease Slightly Value) + (Percent Decreasing Beef Significantly * Decrease Significantly Value) + (Percent Eliminating Beef * Elimination Value) + (Percent Never Ate Beef * Never Ate Value)) * Normal Beef Consumption * Beef Elasticity * (Average Beef Lifespan + Days of Suffering from Beef Slaughter)) + (((Percent Increasing Dairy * Increase Value) + (Percent Staying Same with Dairy * Staying Same Value) + (Percent Decreasing Dairy Slightly * Decrease Slightly Value) + (Percent Decreasing Dairy Significantly * Decrease Significantly Value) + (Percent Eliminating Dairy * Elimination Value) + (Percent Never Ate Dairy * Never Ate Value)) * Normal Dairy Consumption * Dairy Elasticity * (Average Dairy Lifespan + Days of Suffering from Dairy Slaughter)) + (((Percent Increasing Pig * Increase Value) + (Percent Staying Same with Pig * Staying Same Value) + (Percent Decreasing Pig Slightly * Decrease Slightly Value) + (Percent Decreasing Pig Significantly * Decrease Significantly Value) + (Percent Eliminating Pig * Elimination Value) + (Percent Never Ate Pig * Never Ate Value)) * Normal Pig Consumption * Pig Elasticity * (Average Pig Lifespan + Days of Suffering from Pig Slaughter)) + (((Percent Increasing Broiler Chicken * Increase Value) + (Percent Staying Same with Broiler Chicken * Staying Same Value) + (Percent Decreasing Broiler Chicken Slightly * Decrease Slightly Value) + (Percent Decreasing Broiler Chicken Significantly * Decrease Significantly Value) + (Percent Eliminating Broiler Chicken * Elimination Value) + (Percent Never Ate Broiler Chicken * Never Ate Value)) * Normal Broiler Chicken Consumption * Broiler Chicken Elasticity * (Average Broiler Chicken Lifespan + Days of Suffering from Broiler Chicken Slaughter)) + (((Percent Increasing Egg * Increase Value) + (Percent Staying Same with Egg * Staying Same Value) + (Percent Decreasing Egg Slightly * Decrease Slightly Value) + (Percent Decreasing Egg Significantly * Decrease Significantly Value) + (Percent Eliminating Egg * Elimination Value) + (Percent Never Ate Egg * Never Ate Value)) * Normal Egg Consumption * Egg Elasticity * (Average Egg Lifespan + Days of Suffering from Egg Slaughter)) + (((Percent Increasing Turkey * Increase Value) + (Percent Staying Same with Turkey * Staying Same Value) + (Percent Decreasing Turkey Slightly * Decrease Slightly Value) + (Percent Decreasing Turkey Significantly * Decrease Significantly Value) + (Percent Eliminating Turkey * Elimination Value) + (Percent Never Ate Turkey * Never Ate Value)) * Normal Turkey Consumption * Turkey Elasticity * (Average Turkey Lifespan + Days of Suffering from Turkey Slaughter)) + (((Percent Increasing Farmed Fish * Increase Value) + (Percent Staying Same with Farmed Fish * Staying Same Value) + (Percent Decreasing Farmed Fish Slightly * Decrease Slightly Value) + (Percent Decreasing Farmed Fish Significantly * Decrease Significantly Value) + (Percent Eliminating Farmed Fish * Elimination Value) + (Percent Never Ate Farmed Fish * Never Ate Value)) * Normal Farmed Fish Consumption * Farmed Fish Elasticity * (Average Farmed Fish Lifespan + Days of Suffering from Farmed Fish Slaughter)) + (((Percent Increasing Sea Fish * Increase Value) + (Percent Staying Same with Sea Fish * Staying Same Value) + (Percent Decreasing Sea Fish Slightly * Decrease Slightly Value) + (Percent Decreasing Sea Fish Significantly * Decrease Significantly Value) + (Percent Eliminating Sea Fish * Elimination Value) + (Percent Never Ate Sea Fish * Never Ate Value)) * Normal Sea Fish Consumption * Sea Fish Elasticity * Days of Suffering from Sea Fish Slaughter) * Response Bias * Desirability Bias
[7]: Feel free to check the formula for accuracy and also check to make sure the calculator implements the formula correctly. I worry that the added accuracy from the complex calculator is outweighed by the risk that the formula is wrong.
-
Edited 18 June to correct two typos and update footnote #2.Also cross-posted on my blog.