Good to see we agree on so much!
Show the public that they’re doing bad stuff?
Try to get politicians to take strong action on this?
Trying to get the public to take strong action on this?
Trying to reform the political system so that’s it’s less vulnerable to capture by private interests?
Doing a revolution to change the political system?
Anything else that has also been tried for decades?
I meant: Which thing are they doing which is illegal?
Oh, no, that’s the catch. They’re not doing anything which is illegal.
Well, technically there are a range of laws that do say that animals should not be hurt unnecessarily (I have more knowledge of what happens in France, so I’ll talk about that). For instance, the L-214 law of the french rural code says that “Tout animal étant un être sensible doit être placé par son propriétaire dans des conditions compatibles avec les impératifs biologiques de son espèce” : “Every animal which is a sensible being must be placed by its owner in conditions compatible with the biological imperatives of its species”.
Of course, these laws are routinely ignored and not enforced - it’s pretty well documented that factory farms are incompatible with the biological imperatives of these species.
The fact that such laws exist and can be used as leverage is not ignored by animal activists: the french main charity working on that topic is named L214.
There are some other laws saying that veterinaries must come and check the well-being of animals, but its routinely ignored as well: much of the footage showing the inside of factory farms comes from places supposedly approved by veterinaries. The government often seems not interested in animal welfare - there was a law proposition to ban cages, but the party in charge put a veto on it directly.
Of course, they sue regularly the incriminated companies - but the fees they obtain are often small (in the range of 5000-20000€).
Changing the law is also one of the thing they try to do, sometimes with success - but it’s hard and very, very incremental. There even been candidates with a strong focus on this - they obtained smal scores, but more than expected.
Of course, if you have any way of making change that has been ignored so far and would work, this would be welcome.
For these 2 things, I meant that people interested in animal welfare were doing that, like the L214 charity
Ah. Maybe we disagree about this. You mentioned the issue but not in detail, so I guess we see it differently.
I believe they are doing illegal stuff (which is actually similar in a lot of other industries).
I think there may be something important in how we see this differently. So before saying what illegal things they’re doing, I want to ask a question:
If they are doing something illegal, then do you agree that would (probably) be a good place for activism to focus?
Laws tend to have 80%+ consensus around them (except some new controversial laws or old obscure laws, or some picky/technical implications of laws that are seen as abuse of the legal system to use).
I regard (non-abusive) uses of the legal system as much better, and less like tribalist fighting than typical activism. Our society has rules set up, and methods of enforcement, and it’s perfectly reasonable to start there, and that can involve way less fighting with people (though there are some ways it can still turn into problematic fights, as it has with e.g. abortion in the U.S., where the recent anti-abortion supreme court ruling was part of a political fight).
So I think it broadly makes more sense to complain about illegal actions by companies you dislike (stuff society says shouldn’t be done) before complaining about their legal actions (stuff society in general thinks is OK to do). Does that make sense to you?
Maybe you will think it’s like putting the mafia in jail for tax evasion if you go after factory farms for something that is not directly about animal cruelty. Which you might potentially think is great, or might think is bad or unprincipled or missing the point because it’s not the main thing they’re doing wrong. (I would be unsurprised if some if their treatment of animals actually already is illegal, and you mentioned some stuff about that, but I have not researched that, and it’s not what I have in mind.)
I think this is a good place for activism to focus on, and activism is already focusing on it when it can.
It sues companies when there are laws specific enough on the topic.
However, the application of these laws has so far not been deterring enough for companies to change, with very low fees.
There are some laws but they are not specific enough.
Getting new laws more specific or ambitious is extremely hard without large public support. Even for topics that have some public support (80% of people agree that we should ban cages in France), regulatory capture is very strong on that topic, so these laws are not proposed, or voted, or debated. Someone did propose a law to ban cages - but the debate time was 2 hours between 10pm and 12pm, and as no agreement came it was put on hold indefinitely.
One very important element here is that for most causes, the victim can step up and show they’ve been harmed. No such thing for animals where other people have to step up in their stead.
So I don’t see the legal pathway as untried or neglected.
Yeah, that would be trying to change things a lot, and probably lead you into conflict with lots of people who don’t like your proposed changes.
Similarly, new laws or novel uses of existing laws is trying to change things in big, hard ways instead of using pre-existing consensus.
When they do this stuff, they commit fraud, including false advertising and lying to the public. You could theoretically do some of this stuff without fraud, but in practice they use lots of fraud when doing it. It’s the same in other major industries. It’s nothing to do with animals, farms or food specifically.
In some ways, anti-fraud laws are some of the oldest, best-established and least controversial laws we have, after e.g. anti-violence and anti-theft. They’re favored by non-anarchist libertarians who want a minimal government and see preventing fraud as one of the very few legitimate jobs of government, and they’re also favored by socialists, big government advocates, moderates, etc. A poll question like “Should fraud stay illegal or be legalized?” could easily get you over 90% saying keep fraud illegal.
I think you’re right that a lot of the public partly agrees with you. I think they’d buy less factory farmed meat if they understood the situation better.
So one thing you might consider is educating the public. But they’re passive, have other things to do, and there are a lot of people in the public. So that’s hard. (It’s good to have some unbiased, non-tribalist, non-propaganda information online for anyone who cares to go looking for it, which is different than actively trying to spread the information to people who weren’t seeking it out. IMO there isn’t enough of that, but that’s a tangent.)
But why does the public have the wrong idea about this stuff? They aren’t fully passive. They get some information from media, government, companies they buy from, etc.
The companies lie to them. If the companies had to stop lying, consumers would form different beliefs and change their meat purchasing behaviors.
The government is complicit in some of the fraud (e.g. it has a lot of control over ingredients lists and nutritional information on food packaging, and, at least in the US, makes some terrible rules that pretty egregiously lie to consumers). It’d probably be easier to start with fraud that the government is not complicit in. There’s plenty of both types.
Some fraud is kinda vague and debatable. Some isn’t. Factory farms do plenty of both types of fraud.
Does this, in broad outline, sound plausible to you? Like it might be true? And if it is true, it’d be important? And does it sound like a way of proceeding that involves way less tribalist fighting, and more consensus? Do you see the distinction there?
There are some difficulties, but I think it could be pursued in a productive rather than counter-productive way, and in more peaceful, less fighting-oriented way. Does that make sense to you?
Also, do you think this has already been tried?
I think this belief and attitude, by you and many other activists, is counter-productive. You’re legitimizing them and helping them. Even if you don’t emphasize it, it comes across to people that you don’t view or treat them like a bunch of lawbreakers.
Apparently, even their greatest enemies like you think they are innocent of lawbreaking. That is pretty convincing to people that they are in fact innocent. But they aren’t.
And I think it shows a broad lack of reasonable planning, research and analysis by many activists.
I said that more in the way that current laws are allowing some pretty immoral stuff (like the surface a chicken allowed to live on is equivalent to a sheet of paper).
The law also doesn’t ban imports from meat that comes from deforested areas.
But I showed some stuff where they break the law too - so you can consider that they do illegal stuff, then.
Educating the public is a very large part part of what animal activists do. Like undercover research and publishing videos of what happens in factory farms.
There is some unbiased info but it’s not of much importance - since people don’t see it and it has basically no impact (indeed, if there were such info, how would you find it? Why would you bother finding it?).
And you’re right that ignorance is a big problem here - because most people would change if they could see the impact of what they buy in supermarkets and restaurants when they make the choice of buying it.
Please stop dealing such broad judgements.
It’s pretty obvious from the above that you don’t know very well what tactics animal activists have tried - and where they succeeded and failed. That’s okay to not know what has been done or not in a movement - but the attitude to adopt is to admit you don’t know much, and to stop being judgemental when you’re not that knowledgeable.
While there is a lot of fraud, there is a difference between fraud and fraud specifically prohibited in the law. Most of what factory farms falls in the former.
As you said, advertisement contains a lot of lying (fraud) - it’s a very basic thing in marketing. Most advertisement, however, is absolutely legal, as long as you make broad and non-specific statements.
The goal of advertising is to picture yourself as positive and ignore negative stuff you do.
Picture yourself positively is easy - just make good musics, pictures of fields and how great you taste.
And you can’t force companies to disclose in advertising the bad stuff they do.
So I don’t see a good pathway here.
Overall, I think that what can be done (like suing companies for specific stuff they did bad) has already been done. So yeah, it’s been tried.
You can see a very large outline of what’s been tried or not here : Sentience Institute | A Summary of Evidence for Foundational Questions in Effective Animal Advocacy
It’s hard to get answers to direct questions from you. Do you consider it plausible that they might actually be breaking fraud laws, or do you consider that implausible?
It’s hard to talk to you when I try to share my perspective and share what I think is useful information about how I see the world, and you get offended and defensive instead of listening and trying to understand the intended usefulness of what I’m saying.
Oh, that was the question? It wasn’t formulated that way in the post above, so I didn’t catch that.
I find implausible that they are directly breaking fraud laws. They are in doing things in ways where they won’t get sued.
When they are doing specific things considered fraud (like getting a veterinarian to approve the living conditions of their animals when it clearly shouldn’t), and there is proof (usually from an insider investigation by animal activists), they get sued.
I though it would be useful to point out that the sentence you used, “I think it shows a broad lack of reasonable planning, research and analysis by many activists”, is the fastest way to get disliked and written off as someone annoying you shouldn’t talk to. If you want to speedrun to an abrupt end to the conversation, fine, but I don’t think it is your goal.
For someone so focused on the value of being non-confrontational and of harmony, I find that odd.
Sharing your perspective is fine, but I’m sure you are well aware that there are ways to convey such information in a much better way.
For instance, using questions to rephrase that, or being more specific (“maybe XXX could benefit from doing XXX, what do you think of that”). But your statement is so broad here that it’s really easy to read as "you didn’t do research or reasonable planning ".
To be precise, what I didn’t like isn’t that you made a judgement on me or other people. If it’s justified, I like feedback. I also got the intended usefulness of what you ried to convey. I actually think that there are many activists that do not do a lot of research, it’s pretty common.
What I didn’t like is that you made such a judgement when the rest of the conversation made it pretty clear that you don’t know very well what animal activists are doing. Especially when the ones in EA spend a lot of time on research !
So I’d refrain from such statements in the future - I suggest this might benefit you.
The way I formulated it above was:
The text prior to that was about the factory farms committing fraud.
Suppose hypothetically that you’re wrong about that. Then would it have been counter-productive for you and many others like you to incorrectly believe in the innocence of the factory farm executives?
I do not believe in the innocence of factory farms executives. I think they commit a large array of immoral acts.
Their entire business model is based around breeding animals in a way that harms them, and the workers in factory farms have pretty poor working conditions. The environmental toll is horrendous, and it competes with human food.
However, there’s a pretty broad mismatch between “not committing immoral acts” and “doing legal things”. Being hard to sue does not mean it’s innocent.
I can right now go into a store and buy stuff made by a children working in terrible conditions, or which imply a lot of mining pollution - all of which perfectly legal.
My whole point was that the law has very law moral standards when it comes to this topic (as I said, chicken are legally allowed the surface of a sheet of paper to live on). There’s also some strong cognitive dissonance - all of that would be forbidden for cats and dogs.
Moreover, a worrying point is that when what factory farms go against the law and there is proof, that requires a lot of investigation work by animal activists, so it takes time. And in many cases, the fees are small and there is no strong political reaction to improve things.
Btw, I think I should warn you that I will soon opt out of this discussion - I’ll have a strong schedule next year, and I feel I am learning less on this topic than in the previous one. Hope this is okay with you! 
You believe in the legal innocence of these companies and their executives. I don’t. If you’re wrong, you’ve been counter-productive.
I’m trying to understand why your views are so much more favorable to big companies than mine (when my views are much more favorable to capitalism than yours). Do you also believe in the legal innocence and fraud avoidance of large companies and their executives in other industries, too? Like in tech, finance, pharma, food (e.g. Kraft, Nestle, Pepsi which is separate than farming), cigarettes, retail, media, mattresses or clothing? (Those are all industries where I believe I have pre-existing familiarity with widespread, ongoing fraud.)
Could you define “fraud” without looking it up? Do you think that we disagree about what actions the companies do? Or would we take the same action and disagree about whether it’s fraud?
It’s not OK with me that, as far as I can determine, no one on your side wants to talk enough to resolve much of anything, and there’s little interest in seriously trying. But that’s nothing personal about you.
Purpose: Say some of my thoughts about the legal system, controversy, and effective activism.
I think what’s controversial about uncontroversial laws is their enforcement. This isn’t just for fraud - it applies to ~all laws though in varying degrees.
The most steelman example I can think of is murder. There is nominally a super broad consensus of no murder, if you murder we’ll try really hard to catch you and prosecute you and put you in jail for a long time so you can’t murder any more people cuz we really disapprove of murder.
Except if the victim is unknown, especially if they’re from a low social class and the cops are busy we won’t try so hard to investigate so lots of murders will very predictably remain unsolved. Serial murderers can go for years and many victims without being caught if they target victims people care about less.
Or if the murderer is smart and patient they can figure out ways to do murder that are hard to detect and prosecute, and get away with murders for years. That includes things like setting up systems that get other people to do the physical murdering on your orders and take all the punishment if they’re caught. Lots of murderers are caught only because they did something dumb but if you are the type of murderer who can avoid doing something dumb your chances of not getting caught go way up.
And even when a murderer is caught, the system is overloaded enough that we often let the murderer plead down to something less than full murder, like manslaughter / negligent homicide that lets them get out of jail relatively soon.
Or if the murderer is rich and can hire good lawyers and jury consultants they may get off on a technicality or through skilled jury selection and presentation.
And if they do go to jail the jails are run in such a way that murderers can and often do still murder other inmates or guards. Or if they’re connected to crime organizations they can and often do still issue orders that result in murders outside the jail.
I think all other laws have much bigger enforcement problems than murder. Including fraud.
These enforcement problems exist for reasons lots of people think are good like: due process, preventing abuse of power, personal privacy, keeping taxes low, letting accused people put on the best defense they can, and humane treatment of prisoners. The balance between the things people like which cause enforcement problems and effectively enforcing laws people also like is controversial both in general and in most specific cases.
CAVEAT: I don’t think animals can suffer or that fraud is OK. I’m not trying to argue for either of those positions.
Often it takes lots of people caring enough to push the system to actually effectively enforce particular laws. Especially if the targets for enforcement are rich and well connected. The practical problem here isn’t figuring out that some companies broke the law (in this case, committed fraud), but getting enough people to care enough to push the system hard enough to overcome the enforcement problems and get effective enforcement done.
People have lots of things to care about. Getting their attention and care is hard. It’s also controversial. Other people will oppose you and say people should care about their thing rather than your thing. Even given very widespread anti-fraud consensus I don’t think simply convincing people that some fraud has been committed is anywhere near enough.
So to sum up so far: I don’t see a way to avoid the controversies about legal system tradeoffs required for effective enforcement of fraud laws, and I don’t see a way to avoid the controversy about what laws & cases people ought to spend their limited time and attention caring about enough to ensure adequate enforcement.
The two main levers I can think of to get people to care enough about the case of factory farm fraud are either that they were personally harmed a lot by the fraud, or that animals are suffering a lot by the fraud.
There are two problems I can think of with using personal harm as a lever. The first is it’s hard to prove harm in the amounts people will care about. I’m convinced enough that it’s possible to keep looking into it, but still not convinced it’s significant, and I think I know more about it than most people. I think the hurdle is pretty big.
The second is people who you do manage to prove it to will often just defect: become non-users of the fraudulent product. That’s a good and recommended strategy for minimizing personal harm but one that removes a lot of incentive to care much about the legal cases going forward which in turn makes building a broad public consensus to care a lot pretty difficult.
A good example is cigarettes. People knew they were bad & the tobacco companies were fraudsters for years (I think, but don’t know, maybe decades?) with nothing much being done about it. The people who cared enough about harm to themselves just stopped smoking or never started and then cared about other things rather than cigarettes. The people who didn’t care that much about harm to themselves kept smoking and called them cancer sticks or coffin nails or whatever. My personal opinion is that we only really developed any sort of consensus around smoking and tobacco companies when second-hand smoke became a widespread consideration. Second-hand smoke is a personal harm it was a lot harder to just personally defect out of, so a lot of non-smokers cared. And still it was pretty controversial! And it’s still not fully over. I don’t know details but I think the cigarette companies and vape companies are still doing some bad things.
I don’t know of a direct equivalent to second-hand smoke for food. If you personally stop eating factory farmed meat it’s hard to see a non-controversial way that someone else eating factory farmed meat cases you harm.
On the other hand, if you believe animals can suffer, then stopping eating factory farmed meat yourself doesn’t fix that. So from an activist’s perspective I think it’d be a better lever for consensus building.
If I was an activist, and thought animals could actually suffer and factory farms commited fraud, then suffering would be a more effective lever to get enough people to care about the fraud and get it stopped. Not because animal suffering is uncontroversial, but because controversy seems unavoidable and someone who is convinced of animal suffering will find it much harder to defect from the cause than someone who is convinced of personal harm.
After a few years of taking holiday joy away from poor workers who were formerly oppressed by the USSR, these fish activists decided their campaign was counter-productive.
They didn’t and still don’t care that they were fighting with people, causing people to dislike them and their case, making enemies. They also didn’t and don’t care that I could have told them their campaign was a bad idea before they started; they wouldn’t have listened then or now, and they aren’t changing how they listen.
They only care about how their campaign was bad for animals, not how it was bad for people:
we are now concerned … net negative result for the lives of animals
In addition to not following my idea of rationality, they hadn’t followed their own:
The real mistake, of course, would be to never investigate our impact in the first place.
They just assumed they were doing good without investigating. Now they’ve realized they didn’t even consider: if we take this away from people, what will they do instead? One of the answers is buy and eat different fish instead.
So looking only at the effect on fish, they’re now worried their actions were counter-productive. So they’re stopping.
They still aren’t recognizing and factoring in negative effects on humans from their campaign.
The world is full of poorly thought out activism – on both sides, leading to tons of fighting between people – and empty of effective intellectuals.
There are things these companies do which is often illegal. I provided examples.
I’d define fraud as “not respecting the legal rules, through secrecy, disinformation, cheating, getting unfair advantages”. Examples include tax avoidance.
Not sure we define fraud the same way (especially as I have the French version of the word in mind).
There is also fraud that is very hard to actually sanction, that factory farms do. For instance, “68% of all investigated foreign capital to nine focal companies in the soy and beef sectors in the Brazilian Amazon was transferred through one, or several, known tax havens”. But fighting tax heavens is very hard.
I’d say that factory farms fraud about as much as in other sectors, through lobbying or marketing or regulatory capture.
I certainly wouldn’t say that the large companies you quoted are avoiding fraud. I’d rather argue that’s it’s very hard to sanction them for fraud, which is different
We probably differ about definitions here.
Their core business, like the part about breeding animals in cramped spaces without sunlight or access to outside, is mostly legal.
Which would mean that the law authorizes very immoral things. No contradiction here.
Well, you require high standards to even have a conversation with you (I mean that not just by talking with you, but exchanging in a way that you think would be enough to change your mind). For animal suffering, you require a lot of stuff (knowledge of programming, knowledge on Popper, knowledge on how to refute abstract philosophical arguments… None of ). To simplify, you require other people to fight you on your ground (with a lot of philosophy, programming, abstract concepts…).
So I expect few people to really debate with you, in general (at least in a way you’d find satisfying).This means few people can talk to you in a way that would allow you to change your mind. Worryingly, I fear this would be the case no matter whether you are right or wrong on the topic at hand.
If my discussion standards were so high, I’d be worried, because it would cut me off from a lot of stuff I could learn from.
Anyway, if you want people from effective activism to listen to you, you need a track record. A published paper approved by peers, an history of having done stuff that works in the field, something like that.
So far, I feel like I haven’t seen much more than abstract concepts - but it’s easy to talk with abstract concepts (even if they can make logical sense). I have no way of knowing if your abstract concepts are better than the next guy - at least not unless there is actual data to back that up.
Thanks, this is spot on 
Even if there is fraud, it’s hard to get a change out of that.
People won’t be convinced that they get harmed by factory farming - although arguments that meat is bad for the environment and can have adverse health effects (vegetarians live about 3-4 more years in the US) can be useful, and are already used.
I agree with that. This why showing how animals suffer is often used as a lever.
As you know, I don’t require that and am perfectly willing to talk with people who don’t know all that stuff, such as you. You’re being unfair to me and saying untrue things that make me look/sound bad.
If people are missing some relevant knowledge, how to handle that can be discussed. If they disagree about what’s objectively relevant (not what is my ground), that can also be discussed.
Track records are interpreted by theories. People who disagree about ideas often disagree about what results are impressive or even positive. You interpret success differently than I do, and that’s true even when we agree on goals or values.
Evaluating people by track records in this way is irrational, turns the world into social hierarchies, and perpetuates many of the problems that EA fights against.
But you did say that. You claimed that my belief that they’re committing fraud is implausible to you. I was going to talk about what fraud they do, with examples, but I never got a chance because you denied what I was saying before listening.
You’re now drastically changing your story and contradicting yourself. This kind of behavior is one of the reasons it’s hard to have productive, quick discussions. This discussion isn’t hopeless or stuck, but your behaviors slow it down to the point that you get bored, get impatient, think the value per time is low, etc. You don’t seem to accurately keep track of what either of us said earlier in the discussion. To reiterate:
But now, contradicting all that, it’s:
You seem to have changed your story because you didn’t want to defend all industries as fraud-free, and also realized that calling the meat industry particularly good at avoiding fraud would be unreasonable. So you were wrong and lost the argument. Then you contradicted yourself without admitting it.
This kind of irrational, biased behavior means you’re potentially vulnerable to being tricked by charismatic leaders or ineffective causes. That wouldn’t concern me much if you donated normal amounts, but it’s a big deal when the donating is very unusual and drastic, and the motive for such large donations is basically high confidence that you’re right. Your discussion behaviors show many signs that you shouldn’t be so confident.
You also apparently made claims about fraud before disclosing your belief that:
We probably differ about definitions here.
You’re seeking excuses to defend what you said. Also the definition you gave for (legal) fraud is wrong (but you made the preemptive excuse that it’s French). You appear to simply not know what fraud means legally, and instead of finding out you’ve been dismissive of an opportunity (that you know little about) to improve animal activism, and help both animals and people simultaneously. The biased motive appears to be that you want to defend activists as having already tried every good idea, or at least every good idea that an enemy critic (as you see me) could think of.