40 hot takes

Published on October 5, 2026 6:04 PM GMT Note: This post was crossposted from the Coefficient Giving Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post. Subtitle: On vegan advocacy, effective altruism, and FIFA I turn 40 today. Here are some hot takes. On factory farming 1. Our biggest challenge is salience. If factory farming led the evening news, it wouldn’t last long. This low salience is self-reinforcing: even people who care deeply about it seldom bring it up. Yuval Noah Harari thinks “the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history” — and almost never talks about it. 2. Our main opponent isn't the meat industry; it's inertia. If battery cages and gestation crates had always been illegal, the industry could never have gotten them legalized. Defending the status quo is just far easier than changing it. 3. The meat industry isn't the omnipotent Bond villain some activists imagine, forever scheming to win the grand battle over the future of meat. It's a bunch of middle managers in Tyson fleeces in a business park in Springdale, Arkansas, trying to hit their Q3 targets. 4. Factory farming is like tax havens, multi-level marketing schemes, and FIFA. Most people oppose it — but they care far less than the small minority who profit enormously from it. 5. None of us can truly internalize the vastness of the suffering factory farming causes. That’s a good thing. If we did, we’d go mad. The future of farming 6. Every major technological revolution so far has hurt animals. The Agricultural Revolution confined them. The Scientific Revolution incubated animal testing. The Industrial Revolution put animals to work in mills and mines. Together, all three enabled factory farming. Will the AI Revolution be different? 7. Some assume cultivated meat will win once it's more efficient than farming animals. But when humanity was poor, it ate the most efficient foods: grains, roots, berries, scavenged meat. When it got richer, it could afford the luxury of inefficient foods it preferred — like meat. If it keeps getting richer, efficiency may matter even less. 8. Technology has no moral direction of its own. For the last century it mostly made animals' lives worse: denser cages, crueler genetics, and drugs to keep them alive in squalor. But it could just as easily make them better, through alternative proteins and humane farming tech. Which way it goes is partly up to us. 9. A post-factory-farming future will likely involve both alternative proteins and pasture-based meat. This prospect sometimes seems to distress the evangelists of each solution more than factory farming itself does. 10. We don’t lack the land to replace factory farming with pasture-based farms. We could pasture-raise every broiler chicken, egg-laying hen, and pig in America on an area about half the size of West Virginia. (Growing their feed would take another 35M acres — roughly the cropland we devote to corn for ethanol.) 11. The main problem with pasture-raised meat is that it costs more. But much of that premium is labor costs, which is to say jobs for farmers. If AGI brings both widespread wealth and mass unemployment, the price may stop mattering, and creating farm jobs may become popular enough to attract government subsidies. Welfare reforms 12. We’ve already curtailed many bad practices, at least in the US and Europe: tethering sows, face branding cows, forced molting (starving) of hens, veal crates, docking cows’ tails, slaughtering mammals without effective stunning, and live-plucking birds. In every case, the industry insisted the practice was essential right up until it was stopped — then adapted within a few years at trivial cost. 13. Companies adopt animal welfare reforms when reform becomes the path of least resistance. We can make it that path in two ways: by raising the resistance to continuing cruel practices (the purpose of corporate campaigns) and by lowering the resistance to more humane alternatives (the purpose of humane tech innovation). 14. “Abolitionist vs. welfarist” was always a silly framing. Some abolitionist goals, like banning foie gras, mostly shift people to eating other animals with better welfare. And some welfarist goals, like replacing chick culling with in-ovo sexing, abolish entire parts of the system. 15. Horseshoe theory applies to the most anti-welfare animal activists and factory farm lobbyists. Both dismiss cage-free as a marketing gimmick. Both insist factory farming is the only way to produce meat at scale. Both spend more time attacking welfare advocates than each other. Unsolicited dietary advice 16. Michael Pollan’s dietary advice is “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” My equally catchy version is “Eat plants. If you also eat animals, eat large ruminants like cows, not chickens or fish. Choose the lowest-value cuts, like organs. And ask an LLM to find the hi