Dwarkesh Patel: prediction

Transcript context

…It's a puzzle. It seems so obvious that you can have far larger-scale change at the level of governmental change and corporate change. Instead, we get fixated about whether someone is completely vegan or vegetarian. I think what happened is that when people started learning about this issue initially, it was just a few people and they felt totally powerless to achieve larger-scale change. They understandably focused on themselves. Then it started to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It started to become an end in itself, where it was about personal purity as much as about the impact you're having on the issue. It's much easier to measure your own personal purity than it is to measure your total impact on reforming factory farming. It just became this kind of inward focus. The good news is, that has changed tremendously in the last decade. The movement has gone from being one that was obsessed with personal purity, obsessed with dietary choices, to one that is much more obsessed with impact. This is why I really wanted to do this episode. I think people will be aware that there's a general problem here, but the actual politics, the actual economics, the actual state of the technology landscape here… there might be interventions which are stupendously effective, which we overlook just because people are not aware of what's actually happening in this space. On that point, to use an analogy from global health and poverty. The Against Malaria Foundation estimates that it saved on the order of 180,000 lives, which is a lot. But then you compare it to China liberalizing, which brought a billion people out of poverty. That's just a many, many orders of magnitude bigger impact. In animal welfare, do you have some big take about what the “China-liberalizing” equivalent in this space is? There have been three large-scale drivers of progress so far. The first has been government policy. Advocates got the European Union to set basic animal welfare standards. That is billions of animals every year, billions every year. Then there’s corporate reforms. We see the same thing. There's this incredible scale across these corporate supply chains. McDonald's just implemented its pledge to go cage-free in the US. That alone is seven million hens every year out of cages, just in the McDonald's supply chain. The third lever is technology. One example would be in-ovo sexing as a new technology that can get rid of the need to kill male chicks. In the egg industry, the unwanted chicks are killed at birth. In-ovo sexing has already spared about 200 million chicks from that fate. So there are these giant drivers. The good news is we're just getting started with them. There is the potential, I think, to help tens of billions of animals through these drivers.…

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