Links for March 2025 (#2)

Insect welfare, why 9/11 ruined TV, and the long-overdue death of Yoda's passion project.

On Substack

1: Should you not use AI because it’s bad for the environment? Nope!¹

Sam Tucker-Davis

, who’s developing AI for animal advocacy, estimates that the entire training run of his Open Paws LLM only emitted one-third as much CO₂ equivalent as a single hamburger. Or, in other words, “[i]f this LLM convinces just one person to skip one burger, it’s already carbon-negative.” In fact, Open Paws is expected to reduce demand by far more than one burger. According to Tucker-Davis, “even if our AI only helped 10% of animal charities become 10% more effective, it would save an additional 10 million animals per year.” You can learn more about Open Paws by watching or reading their fundraising pitch.

2:

Amos Wollen

, a very failed Substacker and philosopher of lint, attempts to convince me that I should care if there’s a God or not. I ultimately find the argument persuasive but I think he overstates it. See the article and my response.

3: Last week’s national political scandal: Top U.S. defense and foreign policy officials discussed sensitive plans to bomb Yemen using the messaging app Signal, unaware that The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was in the chat. Daniel Larison says the real scandal is that the administration is killing dozens of people in Yemen without a strategic rationale or legal authorization. For a recent history of the war in Yemen, also see this article by friend of the blog

Theodore Yohalem Shouse 🔸

.

4: Peter Singer and Kasia de Lazari Radek interview David Duchovny (Fox Mulder on The X Files) for their podcast “Lives Well Lived.” Among other topics, they discuss Duchovny’s Ph.D. studies in English Literature at Yale, his novel Holy Cow — about a dairy cow who learns her fate and plots to escape to India — and his opinions about insect farming and cultivated meat. You can find the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Substack.

5: Some of you precocious lads and lasses might be interested in applying to become a research assistant for the lovely Garrison Lovely. He’s writing a book about AI risk, “focuse[d] on how commercial and great power competition shape the race to build increasingly powerful and autonomous AI systems.” See here for more info.

6: Bentham’s Bulldog, Connor Jennings, Aidan Alexander, Charles Amos, and Richard Hanania all suggest that people who care about animals but don’t want to go vegan should “offset” their consumption of animal products by donating to an effective animal charity. According to the FarmKind Compassion Calculator, it only takes $23 per month in donations to the top animal charities to reduce as much animal suffering as the average person causes by consuming an omnivorous diet.² I plan on adding my voice to the crowd in the coming days with an article detailing exactly what each animal charity needs your money for, as well as the reasons for and against giving to each of them. As always, anyone who makes a new recurring donation of at least $25 per month to the EA Animal Welfare Fund or a FarmKind or Animal Charity Evaluators recommended charity and sends me a receipt will get a free year-long paid subscription to the blog.

7: One of my favorite things about the offsetting trend is that most of the pushback appears to be from people who say the author should also have asked readers to go vegan. I agree that people should be vegan, of course, but I’m totally unconvinced that “asking people to go vegan” is a good use of my time. Still, I’m glad the commenters are there. Why? Because it juices the algorithm and drives more traffic to animal welfare articles. Because it makes offsetting look like the moderate thing to do, even though you can do a lot more for animals by donating than you can by going vegan. As Aidan put it:

Go vegan and you spare roughly 255 animals a year. Impressive! But donate enough and you could save 1,000 animals. Or 10,000. There’s no upper limit to how much good you can do, if your wallet is willing.

Also, if you donate, you can make up for past harms you’ve caused, but you can’t do that just by ceasing to cause more harm and going vegan.

8: This month’s farm animal welfare newsletter from Open Philanthropy is by

Martin Gould

, who’s commented on a few of my articles in the past. He shares five insights from animal welfare economics that should make animal advocates think more carefully about their strategy and activism. These include that blocking local factory farms can sometimes worsen the treatment of animals by driving industry to less regulated jurisdictions, that meat industry consolidation often reduces total animal farming, and that curbing wild-caught fishing sometimes results in more fish farming. I suspect you could make a similar criticism of farmer transition programs on the basis that supply disruptions are mostly going to be made up elsewhere in the economy.

An Abundance of Vagueries

9: Abundance is the word on everyone’s lips. The book, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, was published on March 18 to widespread acclaim and only slightly less widespread criticism. Unfortunately, one criticism I haven’t seen — and it strikes me as very important! — is that the Abundance Agenda is apparently fundamentally opposed to the interests of the Democratic coalition. To be clear, I wish Klein and Thompson the best of luck, but they probably face an uphill battle if they want to make the Democrats the party of YIMBY and supply deregulation when the biggest Democratic constituencies are affluent white liberals who don’t want their property values to go down and social justice interest groups and unions that want to impose onerous environmental, equity, and labor standards on everything. Even if the regulations in toto make everybody worse off, there’s still a collective action problem when you try to get rid of any one of them. The people they make worse off are only harmed a little bit by each rule, but the people they don’t make worse off have a huge incentive to fight you tooth and nail!

10: There’s a brief passage in Abundance about the meat industry, framed in opposition to degrowth advocate Jason Hickel’s book Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. The degrowth plan, say Klein and Thompson, “is to shut off or scale down areas of production it deems destructive, like military investment, meat and dairy production, advertising, and fast fashion.” They agree that shutting down meat and dairy would be a good thing, but it’s obviously not going to happen. In fact:

For all the radicalism of his book, even Hickel inches from the task he sets for himself. He does not suggest anything akin to ridding the world of the factory farms that produce most of our beef. Instead, he proposes “to end the subsidies high-income countries give to beef farmers” and notes that “researchers are also testing proposals for a tax on red meat.” Fine proposals. But not the revolutionary upheaval that will cut our emissions rapidly enough to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. And that is even assuming you could pass a global or multinational tax on meat. Which you could not.

Klein and Thompson’s implied solution is to subsidize alternative proteins, especially efforts to scale up cultivated meat. However, they’re very cagey about policy prescriptions and cultivated meat never receives more than fleeting mention throughout the book.

11: In 2021, Klein wrote a New York Times column suggesting that President Biden and Congressional Democrats should add a $2 billion “moonshot for meatless meat” to the Build Back Better plan, as recommended by the Good Food Institute. That’s of course a pittance in government spending terms — at the time, the legislation had a price tag of $2.3 trillion — and Klein, to his credit, said it wasn’t nearly abundant enough. In fact, according to the Good Food Institute, “to unlock the full potential of alternative proteins, it is estimated that $10 billion per year in global public spending on R&D and commercialization is needed.”

12: An Abundance-adjacent journalist, Michael Grunwald, writes in the New York Times that DOGE should take an axe to farm subsidies. Does that fit with the Abundance Agenda? Probably not, but it’s still a good idea. From Grunwald:

Mr. Musk’s minions inside the USDA have most prominently targeted its nobler activities, including efforts to prevent wildfires and food contamination, respond to the avian flu, improve animal welfare and study methods to make agriculture more productive and less environmentally damaging. […] But the real problem with the USDA is that its subsidy programs redistribute well over $20 billion a year from taxpayers to predominantly well-off farmers. Many of those same farmers also benefit from subsidized and guaranteed loans with few strings attached, price supports and import quotas that boost food prices, lavish ad hoc aid packages after weather disasters and market downturns as well as mandates to spur production of unsustainable biofuels. A little reform to this kind of welfare could go a long way toward reassuring skeptics that the administration’s efficiency crusade isn’t only about defunding its opponents and enriching its supporters.

13: Tyler Cowen interviewed Klein about the book and they got into a discussion about whether DOGE is mass firing government employees to prepare for AGI. Earlier, Klein interviewed Biden White House AI advisor Ben Buchanan, who says AGI is coming and the government knows it. If that’s true, it doesn’t seem ridiculous to think DOGE-style headcount reductions are soon coming to the private sector. That sounds very bad, at least in the short term!

14: On the topic of DOGE and AGI, Henry Farrell writes:

After the announcement of DOGE, but before it properly got going, I talked to someone who was not formally affiliated, but was very definitely DOGE adjacent. I put it to this individual that tearing out the decision making capacities of government would not be good for America’s ability to do things in the world. Their response (paraphrased slightly) was: so what? We’ll have AGI by late 2026. And indeed, one of DOGE’s major ambitions, as described in a new article in WIRED, appears to have been to pull as much government information as possible into a large model that could then provide useful information across the totality of government.

Getting High on Low Culture

15: Due to my ongoing obsession with the bizarre 2001–2009 ABC sitcom According to Jim, I’ve recently become interested in the depiction of masturbation in American screen culture. There’s a monograph on the subject by an Australian academic, Lauren Rosewarne, titled Masturbation in Pop Culture: Screen, Society, Self. According to the introduction:

Through the exploration of over 600 scenes from film and television, I present the case that masturbation has a very strong presence on screen. From sitcoms to horror movies, teen comedies to erotic thrillers, autoeroticism is easily detected.

The portrayal, however, is not simple.

Just as in real life a paradox exists where most of us masturbate and accept it as normal and natural, there simultaneously exists a silence about it; that we do it, but we don’t talk about it; that we enjoy it but we laugh about it. The screen reflects this conflicted relationship. It is there — hundreds and hundreds of times — but it is routinely whispered about, mocked, presented as a punchline, and is inevitably portrayed as controversial at the very least

I haven’t read much more than the introduction and I don’t plan to, but the author also wrote a short article about more ordinary and impartial screen depictions of autoeroticism.

16: Does it matter, though? I think so! Popular screen culture may have less influence than prestige media proportional to the number of viewers, but it’s likely much more relevant in absolute terms because it has a wider reach. One of the reasons Americans became more accepting of homosexuality, for example, is that millions of people were exposed to positive depictions of gay men through the NBC sitcom Will & Grace. In fact, survey data at the time showed that “increased viewing frequency [of Will & Grace] and parasocial interaction were found to correlate with lower levels of sexual prejudice — a relationship that was most pronounced for those with the least amount of social contact with lesbians and gay men.”

17: In 2012, then-Vice President Joe Biden became the first national political candidate in the United States to openly support gay marriage. He told David Gregory on Meet the Press that he thought Will & Grace “probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody’s ever done so far.” Obama staffers were reportedly furious that Biden invoked the program and “ruined what should have been Obama’s historic moment because he can’t control his loud mouth.”

18: Did 9/11 ruin TV by chilling dissent? Yeah, probably. I assembled a spreadsheet of the 10 top-rated U.S. television programs for each year between 1991 and 2018, using data from Wikipedia. Then, I coded each show for its genre (Drama, News, Procedural, Reality TV, Sitcom, Sports, or Miscellaneous) and whether I consider it slop or not. I had ChatGPT help me operationalize “slop,” and it came up with this:

A TV show is considered “slop” if it lacks intellectual, cultural, or societal value, offering little beyond basic entertainment. This includes shows that are purely for entertainment purposes, including but not limited to sports and reality shows, where there is no meaningful exploration of societal issues, norms, or ethics. These shows may be vulgar or simplistic but fail to challenge, question, or reflect societal changes in a meaningful way.

On the other hand, a show is not “slop” if it engages with cultural or societal issues, challenges prevailing norms, or offers intellectual or aesthetic value. This includes shows that portray controversial topics or marginalized groups in a nuanced way, provoke thought, or contribute to social change. These shows push the boundaries of what’s typical and provide a deeper reflection on culture, society, or human nature.

Using four different ChatGPT accounts, plus one trial where I wasn’t logged in, I then had it perform an analysis to decide whether each show in the dataset is slop according to the above criteria. If it considered a show “slop” at least three out of five times, I coded it as slop, and if it didn’t, I coded it as not slop. In total, 50 shows were considered slop and 23 were not slop. (I expect an apology from

Bentham's Bulldog

, as this exercise scientifically proves that Young Sheldon, at 5/5, is pure unmitigated slop.)

Here’s how each TV show is coded:

And here’s how sloppy each genre is:

If you look at the breakdown of the top 10 programs by year according to genre, it doesn’t look like 9/11 had much of an impact. Sitcoms had already fallen out of favor by 2000, and reality TV, sports, and procedurals were already on the rise. It’s possible that this trend would have reversed if not for 9/11, but it’s not obvious why. Survivor and CSI were instant hits when they premiered in 2000, and the downward trend in sitcoms was at least a decade old.

However, if you look at the sloppiness of top programs over time, there’s a clearer correlation with 9/11. The Simple Slop Score is the share of the top 10 programs considered slop, while the Weighted Slop Score is the share of viewers that sloppy programs had out of the total viewership of all the top programs. Before 9/11, the mean Simple and Weighted Slop Scores were 0.57 and 0.56, respectively. Afterward, they were 0.87 and 0.88, or an increase of 52% and 58%. These differences are both statistically significant, with p = 0.021 for the Simple Slop Score and p = 0.018 for the Weighted Slop Score. Ipso facto, TV did in fact become worse after 9/11, and there’s a plausible case that it became worse because of 9/11: The repressive environment of the so-called “war on terror” made it harder to air and market media that pushes back on societal norms.

The Drunk Sex Pest in Charge of the Pentagon Accidentally Did Something Right

19: Maybe you remember a month ago when New Cold War fanatics like Noah Smith were saying Trump and Pete Hegseth are isolationist surrender monkeys who secretly work for China because they were talking about cutting the military budget by 8%. Actually, it was clear at the time that Trump supports a massive increase in military spending and the 8% “cut” was just supposed to be a shift in the budget from certain priorities to other, stupider ones. Of course, a month later, even the pretense of fiscal responsibility has been dropped. According to Responsible Statecraft, the total gross budget cuts announced by Hegseth so far amount to $580 million, or less than 0.07% of the budget.

20: One of the programs Hegseth has cut is the Office of Net Assessment, the Pentagon’s internal think tank tasked with analyzing and extrapolating long-term national security trends. From its establishment in 1973 until 2015, ONA was run by military futurist Andrew Marshall — known as the “Yoda of the Pentagon” because his protégés include Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz — who didn’t retire until age 93. According to the Washington Post in 2012:

While Marshall’s backers praise his office as a place where officials take the long view, ignoring passing Pentagon fads, critics see a dangerous tendency toward alarmism that is exaggerating the China threat to drive up defense spending.

“The old joke about the Office of Net Assessment is that it should be called the Office of Threat Inflation,” said Barry Posen, director of the MIT Security Studies Program. “They go well beyond exploring the worst cases. […] They convince others to act as if the worst cases are inevitable.”

21: ONA’s main accomplishment was developing the utterly insane AirSea Battle concept, which involves the United States spending an extraordinary amount of money to develop and procure long-range strike aircraft so that if war breaks out in the Western Pacific, it can strike deep in Chinese territory to destroy Chinese missiles and radar that might prevent it from deploying naval assets to defend its allies along China’s periphery (except those systems probably wouldn’t even do that). As Caitlin Talmadge has pointed out, this would involve the United States attacking Chinese military bases where nuclear and conventional missiles and nuclear command and control infrastructure are co-located, which might make China fear the United States is preparing to conduct a conventional counterforce attack on its nuclear capabilities and believe that it would have to launch its nuclear weapons first or else open itself up to a U.S. first strike. It’s unclear why anyone would think this is a good idea, since you could probably defend states in China’s region just by giving them a lot of defensive weapons (and thereby neutralize the threat that war would break out in the first place).

22: ONA was joined at the hip with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, perhaps the most nefarious of the D.C. think tanks, formerly run by Marshall’s closest protégé Andrew Krepinevich, who’s also the co-author of Marshall’s biography The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy. As of 2012, ONA furnished approximately 40% of CSBA’s budget, or around $3 million per year. Today, CSBA counts among its contributors at least 15 U.S. and eight foreign government entities, 20 defense contractors, and three influential conservative policy foundations.

23: Of course, the reason Hegseth got rid of ONA is the dumbest possible reason you could come up with.

Yet Another Insect Welfare Post

24: Tomorrow is your last chance to help insects in the United Kingdom! The U.K. government is consulting until April 1 about whether to allow insects to be used in feed for farmed pigs and chickens, which would result in an extraordinary amount of insect suffering in expectation. It takes about 5 minutes to fill out the consultation form to discourage the government from allowing this to happen. You don’t have to be a U.K. citizen to complete the form, and you can use the U.K. Voters for Animals GPT to write your responses for you. For more details, see this EA Forum post from February and this one from yesterday.

25: Animal Ethics, consistently one of the most forward-thinking organizations in the animal protection movement, has a short post on insect farming and several posts on invertebrate sentience that I recently discovered and think might be a good place to start for a skeptical layperson.

26: Insect Institute researchers recently published a paper calling out three erroneous assumptions in the insect farming literature that make insect farming look more viable than it really is. These are:

• that a handful of old studies can be relied upon for accurate data about environmental impacts;

• that insect farms can be expected to use food waste as feed (they actually use higher-quality feeds like those already used for livestock); and

• that insect farming is cost-effective (the researchers have already shown elsewhere that insect meal is three to four times more expensive than fishmeal and ten times more expensive than soybean meal).

The authors describe these assumptions as “bugs in the system” of insect farming research and include the following diagram:

27: Dustin Crummett also published a Reuters op-ed about the article, “Why insect farming is no silver bullet in drive to wean the world off meat.”

28: In 2018, there was an effort in Congress to prohibit federal funding for insect farming (although basically zero funding goes to insect farming anyway). It seems like it would be an easy victory in the current environment to get this attached to the next Farm Bill — whenever that’s getting passed — as long as it’s not lumped together with restrictions on plant-based and cultivated proteins. In fact, the conservative Washington Examiner ran an op-ed in January titled “Why is the government pushing bugs onto our plates?” by a senior fellow at a pro-animal think tank, The Wilberforce Institute.

---

1. As in: “Nope, you shouldn’t not.” And there’s no part of me that doesn’t think I don’t need more negatives to get the point across.

2. See here for more information about this estimate, especially the “caveats” section.