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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   24778 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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The Bipartisan Consensus Against... Lab-Grown Meat?

This was not a tweet I expected to see today:

Pains me deeply to agree with Crash-and-Burn Ron [DeSantis], but I co-sign this.

As a member of @SenateAgDems and as some dude who would never serve that slop to my kids, I stand with our American ranchers and farmers.

-Senator John Fetterman

Lol. LMAO even.

I am not a person that cares much about the suffering of animals, especially not the ones that taste good. Still, strictly speaking, the suffering is not an integral part of the process. If it could be removed, all else being equal, that would not decrease my utility in any way. I am agnostic on lab-grown meat. If it tastes good, is cheap, and is of comparable healthiness to legacy meat, I will eat it.

I can't help but be reminded of the law of undignified failure. Cultured meat has been a staple of the tech-futurist utopian memeplex for years, if not decades. Gallons of digital ink have been spilled discussing the feasibility and/or inevitability (or lack thereof) of cultured meat on places like the Effective Altruism Forum. Skimming through the top results, I don't see, "what if the proles hate our guts so much that they ban cultured meat out of spite?" on anyone's "factors to consider". It's also a harsh lesson that even the most positive-seeming improvements have to face-off against reliance interests who want things to stay the same. There is a lobby for everything.

I mean, if the lab meat was literally identical in every way to real meat, then sure, I’d eat it. In practice though, I’d imagine it’s more like AI-generated media: the difference in quality is noticeable, but certain factions downplay the differences for political reasons.

It's premature to talk about differences in quality before it's even on the market.

For that matter, if it's so much worse, there's no need to ban it.

There's a few vendors that passed USDA clearance last year, though they've had production and funding problems that have kept its products from having too much of an impact on the store shelves, and it's not clear the tech is going to get there very soon.

On the other hand, when or if the tech does get there, there's not much trust that it's gonna be left for people to choose. Whether for environmental, animal suffering, or macroeconomic reasons, there's going to be a massive push to 'regulate the unpriced externalities' of conventional meat, and many routes for that, like restricting grazing permits, will be near-invisible to normal people.

Unless do-gooders tax or otherwise restrict real meat "for our own good".

If we are assuming do-gooders puppeteering the state then a state ban is just a distraction anyway.

There is no need for a conspiracy of puppeteers - the public health people really do have some very stupid ideas about what's good for the public, they've displayed it repeatedly, and taking options away from them preemptively has value.

Or alternatively preemptively use state coercion to force your way before they do. Ban their stuff before they ban ours.

And for the many people who seem to view the state as a club meant to smash the heads of people with different preferences, that's generally their apparent goal.

Ban their stuff before they ban ours.

I don't see why the do gooders couldn't undo this ban and ban real meat anyway if they have the kind of influence to enact a ban on real meat in the first place. "Get them before they get us" doesn't apply if you are not, in fact, getting them.

I don't really believe in first mover advantage for laws, laws get overturned all the time. What appears as first mover advantage is likely just durable public sentiment.

Sure, but by the same logic the current ban is no big deal either, because if lab meat turns out to be highly demanded, the law will probably be repealed anyways.

Precisely. The government's one and only legitimate role in this would be to mandate that it has to be labeled correctly and can't be falsely advertised as ordinary meat. Other than that, they need to stay out of it and let the people make up their own minds on what they choose to purchase.

Meanwhile the other side already uses government money to publish anti-meat propaganda. The reasonable answer is to grab the gun of state power and dump the mag before they get their hands on it, because they won't hesitate for a second once they have it pointed at you.

"Destroy your opponent before they can destroy you" does not at all sound like the "reasonable answer". Especially since this won't literally destroy them, they'll still exist and be even more ravenous to seize the reins of power. It seems like the actually reasonable answer is to de-escalate and decrease the power and influence of the government so people can make their own choices about their own personal lives.

I don't even get why there are "sides". I don't care whether the meat I eat comes from a "farm" or a "lab", I just care whether it's cheap, tasty, and nutritious. Let them both try their best and we can judge them and eat them according to our own preferences. I'm on team freedom, and that means nobody gets shut down pointlessly just to "own" the other side.

It seems like the actually reasonable answer is to de-escalate and decrease the power and influence of the government so people can make their own choices about their own personal lives.

The experience of the past few years clearly shows that that would make them more ravenous to seize the reins of power.

I don't think anyone has meaningfully decreased the power of the government in decades. Maybe a couple overreaching laws here or there got repealed, but plenty more came along, and the government just keeps doing whatever it wants with whatever justification they can make up ad hoc to justify the thing they already decided to do.

I think they’d be equally ravenous to seize the reins of power regardless. They’re just authoritarians. It’s like asking if the early Nazis would have been more zealous if they were up against a strict communist government instead of the relatively liberal Weimar one. I think their zeal would have been undiminished either way. Same goes for the fervent anti-meat crowd.

The groups pushing lab grown meat are already talking about banning real meat, so it seems both fair and sensible to do unto them first.

This is only true in the sense that groups pushing gun rights are already talking about establishing a white ethnostate.

This seems like a non-sequitur. We aren't talking about things that are vaguely politically associated, but rather things that exist within the same particular moral niche.

In much of Europe, meat is almost banned in public institutions.

City canteens rarely serve it, university canteens the same. E.g. in Berlin, the limit is one dish with meat per day on 4 different days.

Much of Europe? I think is something that is common only in the most lib part of Berlin where all the americanized women and foreign expats gathers. Here vegetarianism is almost unknown, and also in big cities like Bruxelles I have seen meat everywhere, also in èlites institutions canteens.

There's a Europe-wide initiative to ban meat in large cities in public institutions. Forgot what it's called.

I also saw a Dutch academic complain that his uni also barely serves meat. So it's probably not just Berlin. Go look at I dunno, Hamburg unis.

There's a Europe-wide initiative to ban meat in large cities in public institutions. Forgot what it's called.

You're not talking about one of these WEF-adjacent things (C-40 Cities, etc)? They tend to be aspirational. A lot of cities signed on, but it'll take a while before they get implemented.

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Very little of Europe - probably just Berlin, which is the crunchiest city in Continental Europe, driven by some combination of the west Germans who moved there during the Cold War to dodge the draft and the hippies who moved there to take advantage of cheap rents immediately after the Wall came down.

In formerly-Catholic Europe (I have personal experience with France, Spain, Italy and Poland) vegetarianism is seen as a weird Anglosphere perversion (veganism even more so) and the only decent vegetarian food is traditional cuisine-of-the-poor which typically uses cheese as the main protein. A fond memory of my trip to Naples was seeing a solo American female who appeared to be EPLing being shown the door after bothering the only English-speaking waiter about her "intolerances" and being told that there were only three vegetarian items on the menu (two of which were the margherita pizza and the arrabbiata pasta) and she could take or leave them.

Don't know much about German city canteens (??) but Germany has the fourth highest meat consumption per capita in Europe, so I am not convinced that meat consumption is endangered there. Per capita consumption in 2020 was actually higher than in 2017.

For that matter, if it's so much worse, there's no need to ban it.

Off the top of my head I can think of several things that were worse but ended up being mandated by the government. It's not hard to imagine this happening with lab-grown meat.

In this thread we're talking about a government action. It doesn't really make sense to say that the government banned something so that the government wouldn't mandate it.

It doesn't really make sense to say that the government banned something so that the government wouldn't mandate it.

Makes perfect sense to me. It's not like 'the government' is a person with a coherent agenda. Governments do things all the time with the intention of constraining their future iterations.

This doesn't constrain their future actions. It's just as easy to repeal this law and ban real meat as it was before the ban. Maybe if it were a constitutional amendment or something you'd have a point.

It's just as easy to repeal this law and ban real meat as it was before the ban.

No, there can be a huge amount of institutional inertia. Governments generally do not turn on a dime. And that's just looking at the legal side. Scaling up a fake-meat industry would take a huge amount of time and investment and it can't even get started if there's a ban.

To be clear I'm low-key enthusiastic about lab-grown meat (though I also don't trust food scientists farther than I can throw them). I just took issue with your statement that

if it's so much worse, there's no need to ban it.

No, it's easier to ban meat if there is already an alternative. If there is no substitute then passing a ban is a much higher barrier. Lab grown meat is from the electric car playbook: make an inferior substitute to something people like, gaslight theme into thinking it's just as good and then ban the authentic version.

Thankfully, Florida is not the only polity on the planet, and lab grown meat can still be marketed elsewhere when and if it becomes commercially viable. So this ban doesn't prevent the development of an alternative.

The light-bulb playbook as well.

I suppose this is the same logic as smart-gun legislation in places like New Jersey?

There's an argument that we have to stop the slippery slope to banning real meat as soon as possible. I'm not sure how well it holds up.

In some vague sense we'd be on the slope. Vegans aren't shy about describing how horrific any form of raising animals is. There'd be a push to ban the real thing once an alternative existed.

It's gonna be California first.

For that matter, if it's so much worse, there's no need to ban it.

Except that it steals a march on those who would ban the real animal stuff in favor of it.

"Those", being the same government that just banned it?

There's an obvious point that various contrary factions are pushing and pulling the government. So push to get the laws you want or be stuck with the laws they want. Whoever "they" are in any context.

And laws are very sticky, so there's a huge first mover advantage.

Please don't do this pretending not to know who he's talking about thing. It's embarrassing.
He can link you a dozen lesswrong-ea-bay-area-forum posts that you're already familiar with, so all this does is waste everyone's time for a low effort sneer.

Feel free to elaborate. It's not the EAs that are able to ban meat, lab grown or otherwise. It's the state, which has just now banned lab grown meat apparently in order to "steal a march" and prevent itself from banning real meat.

I imagine that depends on what kind of lab grown meat you’re talking about. Ground beef grown in a vat is obviously of much more comparable quality to the real deal than filet mignon.

Finally, the ability to enjoy steak tartare without guilt or worrying about tapeworms.

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