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 at philosophy functions) than the other groups.
A different frame: the claim here is that facebook ads for vegetarianism are unbelievably effective. We can decompose supporting arguments for that into “facebook ads are unbelievably effective” and “vegetarianism is incredibly easy to proselytize.”
For comparison, estimates from randomized trials of get-out-the-vote campaigns (where one can actually measure changes in turnout, as votes are counted) are in the tens to hundreds of dollars per marginal voter turned out (before adjustments for other biases, etc (quotes below)).
Some other differences between vegetarianism and voting:
There is a much stronger moral consensus about voting than vegetarianism
Vegetarianism is a sustained costly effort, whereas voting is a one-time event
There are more GOTV campaigns, so vegetarian ads may face lower-hanging fruit
Images of animals may or may not be more effective than GOTV reminders/arguments
One handy reference is Donald Green and Alan Gerber’s Get Out the Vote, which reviews dozens of experiments bearing on the cost-effectiveness of get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts.
The key results are summarized in a table on page 139 (viewable on the Google Books preview linked). The strongest well-confirmed effect is for door-to-door GOTV drives, which average 14 voters contacted to induce one vote (plus spillover effects), with a cost per vote of $29 (including spillover effects) assuming that staff time costs $16/hour for staff. Phone banks require more contacts per vote, but are cheaper per contact, with Green and Gerber estimating the cost per vote at $38 for campaign volunteer callers, and $90 for untrained commercial callers.
In recent years, the U.S. political parties have adjusted their GOTV strategy in line with these experiments, and turnout has increased. For instance, in 2004 Green and Gerber predicted predicted that the parties would increase GOTV spending by some $200 million using methods averaging $50 per vote, for an increase in turnout of 4 million, and the turnout data seems consistent with that. This money was concentrated in swing states, and in 2004 turnout increased 9% to 63% in the twelve most competitive states, while increasing 2% to 53% in the twelve least competitive states (while clearly leaving many potential voters home).
ETA:
Cattle have a bit less than 1/3rd the brain mass of humans, chickens hundreds of times less, and fishdown more than an additional order of magnitude relative to body size (moreso by cortex). If you weight expected value by neurons, which is made plausible by thinking about things like split-brain patients and local computations in nervous systems, that will drastically change the picture and reduce cost-effectiveness.
Personally, I would care more about a day’s experience for a cow than for a small feed fish with orders of magnitude less neural capacity.
Cattle have a bit less than 1/3rd the brain mass of humans, chickens about 1/40th, and fish are down more than an order of magnitude (moreso by cortex). If you weight expected value by neurons, which is made plausible by thinking about things like split-brain patients and local computations in nervous systems, that will drastically change the picture.
My quick back-of-the envelope (which didn’t take into account the small average size of the mostly feed fish involved, and thus reduced neural tissue) is that making this adjustment would cut the cost-effectiveness metric by a factor of at least 400 times, and plausibly 1000+ times. This reflects the fact that fish make up most of the life-days in the calculation, and also have comparatively tiny and simple nervous systems. Personally, I would pay more to ensure a painless death for a cow than for a small feed fish with orders of magnitude less neural capacity.
The bit about desirability bias, or the fact that the optimistic estimates involve claiming that vegetarian ads are vastly more effective than other kinds of moralized behavior-change ads with more accurate measurements of effect?
Both points. The question “why should vegetarianism advocacy be so much more effective than get out the vote advocacy?” is a good point. Since the study quality for get out the vote advocacy is so much higher, we should expect vegetarianism advocacy to end up about the same.
On the other hand, I do think vegetarianism advocacy is a lot more psychologically salient (pictures of suffering) than any case that can be made for voting. I’ve personally distributed some pro-voting pamphlets, and they’re not very compelling at all.
Good points, Carl! Jonah Sinick actually made the GOTV argument to me on a prior occasion, citing your essay on the topic.
One additional consideration is that nearly everyone knows about voting, but many people don’t know about the cruelty of factory farms. This goes along with the low-hanging-fruit point.
I would not be surprised if, after tempering the figures by this outside-view prior, it takes a few hundred dollars to create a new veg year. Even if so, that’s at most 1-2 orders of magnitude different from the naive conservative estimate.
This is something I’ve considered a lot, though chicken also dominate the calculations along with fish. I’m not currently sure if I value welfare in proportion to neuron count, though I might. I’d have to sort that out first.
A question at this point I might ask is how good does the final estimate have to be? If AMF can add about 30 years of healthy human life for $2000 by averting malaria and a human is worth 40x that of a chicken, then we’d need to pay less than $1.67 to avert a year of suffering for a chicken (assuming averting a year of suffering is the same as adding a year of healthy life, which is a messy assumption).
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.
I agree on that effect, I left out various complications. A flip side to that would be the number of cortex neurons (and equivalents). These decrease rapidly in simpler nervous systems.
We don’t object nearly as much to our own pains that we are not conscious of and don’t notice or know about, so weighting by consciousness of pain, rather than pain/nociception itself, is a possibility ( I think that Brian Tomasik is into this).
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.
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.
Correct. I make this claim. If vegetarianism is that cheap, it’s reasonable to bin it with other wastefully low-value virtues like recycling paper, taking shorter showers, turning off lights, voting, “staying informed”, volunteering at food banks, and commenting on less wrong.
If AMF can add about 30 years of healthy human life for $2000 by averting malaria and a human is worth 40x that of a chicken, then we’d need to pay less than $1.67 to avert a year of suffering for a chicken (assuming averting a year of suffering is the same as adding a year of healthy life, which is a messy assumption).
This might be a minor point, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a given that one year of healthy, average-quality life offsets one year of factory farm-style confinement. If we were only discussing humans, I don’t think anyone would consider a year under those conditions to be offset by a healthy year.
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:
A different frame: the claim here is that facebook ads for vegetarianism are unbelievably effective. We can decompose supporting arguments for that into “facebook ads are unbelievably effective” and “vegetarianism is incredibly easy to proselytize.”
For comparison, estimates from randomized trials of get-out-the-vote campaigns (where one can actually measure changes in turnout, as votes are counted) are in the tens to hundreds of dollars per marginal voter turned out (before adjustments for other biases, etc (quotes below)).
Some other differences between vegetarianism and voting:
There is a much stronger moral consensus about voting than vegetarianism
Vegetarianism is a sustained costly effort, whereas voting is a one-time event
There are more GOTV campaigns, so vegetarian ads may face lower-hanging fruit
Images of animals may or may not be more effective than GOTV reminders/arguments
ETA:
Cattle have a bit less than 1/3rd the brain mass of humans, chickens hundreds of times less, and fish down more than an additional order of magnitude relative to body size (moreso by cortex). If you weight expected value by neurons, which is made plausible by thinking about things like split-brain patients and local computations in nervous systems, that will drastically change the picture and reduce cost-effectiveness.
Personally, I would care more about a day’s experience for a cow than for a small feed fish with orders of magnitude less neural capacity.
This is actually a really good point that makes me less confident in the effectiveness of vegetarianism advocacy.
An additional point:
Cattle have a bit less than 1/3rd the brain mass of humans, chickens about 1/40th, and fish are down more than an order of magnitude (moreso by cortex). If you weight expected value by neurons, which is made plausible by thinking about things like split-brain patients and local computations in nervous systems, that will drastically change the picture.
My quick back-of-the envelope (which didn’t take into account the small average size of the mostly feed fish involved, and thus reduced neural tissue) is that making this adjustment would cut the cost-effectiveness metric by a factor of at least 400 times, and plausibly 1000+ times. This reflects the fact that fish make up most of the life-days in the calculation, and also have comparatively tiny and simple nervous systems. Personally, I would pay more to ensure a painless death for a cow than for a small feed fish with orders of magnitude less neural capacity.
Ah, but now I can turn myself into a utility monster by artificially enlarging my brain! Game over.
We’re trying to work out how to make progress on moral questions today, not trying to lay down a rule for all eternity that future agents can’t game.
It was a joke.
Oops, sorry!
Or by having kids. Or copying your uploaded self. Or re-engineering your nervous system in other ways...
The bit about desirability bias, or the fact that the optimistic estimates involve claiming that vegetarian ads are vastly more effective than other kinds of moralized behavior-change ads with more accurate measurements of effect?
Both points. The question “why should vegetarianism advocacy be so much more effective than get out the vote advocacy?” is a good point. Since the study quality for get out the vote advocacy is so much higher, we should expect vegetarianism advocacy to end up about the same.
On the other hand, I do think vegetarianism advocacy is a lot more psychologically salient (pictures of suffering) than any case that can be made for voting. I’ve personally distributed some pro-voting pamphlets, and they’re not very compelling at all.
Good points, Carl! Jonah Sinick actually made the GOTV argument to me on a prior occasion, citing your essay on the topic.
One additional consideration is that nearly everyone knows about voting, but many people don’t know about the cruelty of factory farms. This goes along with the low-hanging-fruit point.
I would not be surprised if, after tempering the figures by this outside-view prior, it takes a few hundred dollars to create a new veg year. Even if so, that’s at most 1-2 orders of magnitude different from the naive conservative estimate.
This is something I’ve considered a lot, though chicken also dominate the calculations along with fish. I’m not currently sure if I value welfare in proportion to neuron count, though I might. I’d have to sort that out first.
A question at this point I might ask is how good does the final estimate have to be? If AMF can add about 30 years of healthy human life for $2000 by averting malaria and a human is worth 40x that of a chicken, then we’d need to pay less than $1.67 to avert a year of suffering for a chicken (assuming averting a year of suffering is the same as adding a year of healthy life, which is a messy assumption).
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.
I agree on that effect, I left out various complications. A flip side to that would be the number of cortex neurons (and equivalents). These decrease rapidly in simpler nervous systems.
We don’t object nearly as much to our own pains that we are not conscious of and don’t notice or know about, so weighting by consciousness of pain, rather than pain/nociception itself, is a possibility ( I think that Brian Tomasik is into this).
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.
Correct. I make this claim. If vegetarianism is that cheap, it’s reasonable to bin it with other wastefully low-value virtues like recycling paper, taking shorter showers, turning off lights, voting, “staying informed”, volunteering at food banks, and commenting on less wrong.
This might be a minor point, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a given that one year of healthy, average-quality life offsets one year of factory farm-style confinement. If we were only discussing humans, I don’t think anyone would consider a year under those conditions to be offset by a healthy year.