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The Bipartisan Consensus Against... Lab-Grown Meat?
This was not a tweet I expected to see today:
-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.
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.
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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.
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