Recently I became active in EA (effective altruism) movement but I’m kind of stuck on the issue of animal welfare. While I agree that Animals deserve ethical treatment and that the world would be a better place if we found a way to completely eliminate animal suffering I do have some questions about some practical aspects.
Is there any realistic scenario where we could expect entire world population to convert to non-meat diet , considering cultural, agricultural and economic factors?
Would it be better if instead trying to convert billions of people to become vegetarians/vegans we invest more in synthetic meat research and other ways to make meat eating non-dependent on animals?
How highly should we prioritize animal welfare in comparison to other EA issues like world poverty and existential risks?
How does EA community view meat-eaters in general, is there strong bias against them? Is this a big issue inside the movement?
Disclosure: I am (still) a meat-eater , and at this point it would be really difficult for me to make consistent changes to my eating habits. I was raised in meat-eating culture and there are almost no cheap and convenient vegetarian/vegan food options where I live . Also my current workload prevents me in trying to spend more time on cooking.
I do feel kind of bad though, and maybe I’m not trying hard enough . If you have some good suggestions how I can make some common-sense changes towards less animal dependent-diet that might be helpful.
One possibility is to implement the design which will makes agent strongly sensitive to the negative utility when he invests more time and resources on unnecessary actions after he ,with high-enough probability , achieved its original goal.
In the paperclip example : wasting time an resources in order to build more paperclips or building more sensors/cameras for analyzing the result should create enough negative utility to the agent compared to alternative actions.