EA - [Draft Amnesty] Early unfinished draft on the case for a first principles, systematic scoping of meat alternatives by Linch

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: [Draft Amnesty] Early unfinished draft on the case for a first principles, systematic scoping of meat alternatives, published by Linch on December 19, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Epistemic status: Was revealed to me in a dream.More seriously, this is a post (actually, stringing together two posts) I wrote based very loosely on research I did in late 2021. I do not necessarily stand by all the claims in the current post, but hope that it can still be moderately helpful to at least some readers. I think this post has some structural issues. It was not cleaned up sufficiently for my personal standards of publication. It is also in a more conversational style than I endorse, and I’ve grown to be less confident in the core metaphors. Earlier drafts also have critiques that I did not get around to addressing. I also expect it to be more generally false. However in the spirit of draft amnesty day, I am publishing it rather than leave it languishing forever in my Google Drive (and my conscience).This is a Draft Amnesty Day draft. That means it’s not polished, it’s probably not up to my standards, the ideas are not thought out, and I haven’t checked everything. I was explicitly encouraged to post something unfinished! Commenting and feedback guidelines: I’m going with the default — please be nice. But constructive feedback is appreciated; please let me know what you think is wrong. Feedback on the structure of the argument is also appreciated.I think among effective animal advocates who are techno-optimists, the arguments for alternatives to factory farming are too narrow in scope, eg, plant-based meat vs cultured meat, or plant-based meat vs cultured meat vs non-food investments (eg corporate campaigns), or occasional considerations of other meat alternatives like yeast or mushrooms. I think this is too narrow in scope. I instead think we should have first-principles evaluation of strategies to sate people's desire for meat while avoiding animal suffering:Carefully considering all the desired criteria of what people value in conventional meatEnumerating all of the existing strategies, including the lesser-known onesBrainstorming/exploring entirely new strategiesCarefully analyze the feasibility of each strategyI believe a significant fraction of this work can be done through armchair thinking by smart generalists, but we will eventually need empirical data, computational modeling, actual experimentation and varied domain expertise.In the post, I explore why I believe this is the correct strategy, using the motivating example of an extremely scientifically literate person in the 1800s trying to figure out flight. Birds are an existence proof that heavier-than-air flight is possible, but not a guarantee that we can get heavier-than-air flight quickly, and certainly not a proof that our existing attempts to get heavier-than-air flight is the right approach.While I am more optimistic about the general framework than any operational details, I would like to sketch out a path forwards for what a research agenda/plan might look like:Getting private feedback and carefully evaluating the quality of this initial plan, attracting funders and researchers as necessary