High Impact Engineers
Technology + farmed animal welfare reading group #16
Replies: 12 comments 41 replies
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Great idea. Would love to attend this regularly (up to ~once a month)! I'd just pick a regular date (e.g., first Sunday of the month) rather than coordinating a new time for every discussion. Also might make sense to ask for topic suggestions but then just pick one from the list. This might avoid having these events stuck in organisation mode forever. We should make sure to cross-post events to the EA Forum and Hive (and maybe other places). Happy to help with that (and making event banners)! Maybe we could call the event series "Tech x FAW reading group"? |
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All makes sense. I definitely see the benefits to schedule regularity. My thought was that if there's someone who's critical to the conversation (e.g. if we manage to get a subject-matter expert to join for a meeting) we'd want to plan to make sure they can attend. "Tech x FAW reading group" sounds good to me! |
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sounds great! I would be interested in joining. |
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Could people who are interested please reply with your timezone? Would it work for people to meet, say, the first Sunday of every month? |
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@SumayyaAbukhalil, do first Sundays of the month work for you? |
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That's perfect! |
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Also on London time! |
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Ok -- I figured people's day jobs would interfere with weekdays, but it's probably worth doing a poll. Will post one shortly. Sorry all for the chaos! |
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EEST, Helsinki |
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Do people have discussion ideas to start throwing out there? Feel free to throw rough/silly ideas out there and we can refine later. |
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sea lice seem horrible - what to do about them? |
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open source tools for tamperproof, remote third-party validation of welfare measures/interventions |
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Gene drives to eradicate screwworms |
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Frog stunner |
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Solutions for discarded "Ghost Gear", like degradable/retrievable nets |
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@amanda-matthes, replying here to your comment about EA Connect, so I don't derail that thread.
Interesting! If we do plan to meet that day, do you think it'd be best to do our first full research chat, vs just have a kickoff call where we talk over discussion ideas/how to do this? I have a slight fear that our first research chat will be clunky, especially if soon, and people drawn to it in association with EA Connect will be discouraged. |
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You might be right! We could even go one step further and just do a general virtual kick-off for High Impact Engineers after the closing event on Sunday. It could be the virtual version of the London event (https://luma.com/bxvpbb1i) but a bit shorter and with more of a focus on figuring out what people want to see in the future. There could be a specific slot in the agenda for kicking off the Tech X FAW reading group. Let me know if this sounds cool or if you'd rather have a specific kick-off for this reading group. (I am also trying to get a general engineers meetup on the agenda on Friday or Saturday. But haven't heard back yet. Could be a great place to advertise this.) |
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Kick-off sounds great! And then we can get organized and plan our first real meeting for Jan 4. I'm not seeing much agenda info for EA Connect (and I'm probably not going to register because I have too much going on this month). I have to head to the airport ta 4:30 pm EST/9:30 pm UTC on Dec 7, but should be free to attend a kick-off until then. |
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Nice! How do you want to run the 15 minute Tech x FAW session? I'm happy to prep something for it or for you to drive if you prefer. |
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I think it'd be cool to have you host that! 15 min is probably a good length, but don't worry if you want to use a little more or less time. |
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would love to join! |
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What do you guys think about expaning scope to intervention which are more abolitionist. For example, creating alternate pet food to reduce factory farming income (I think they're making money off the animal byproducts), maybe alt-protein automation (plant-based, fermentation, cultuvated) and anything else that reduces profitability of / demand for factory famed products. |
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Yes I like it! |
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Take 2 on scheduling, to take into account day-of-the-week preferences... It seems like everyone is between UTC - 8 (USA west coast) and UTC + 1 (Central Europe), which leaves a few reasonable hours of the day. Let's still assume first week of the month for simplicity. |
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Filled out! It didn't switch to my local time zone, though and did not display which time zone I am voting in. |
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Thanks -- super frustrating about the timezones; a few places on the internet said this site was supposed to do that. In any case, with just three of us voting, the weekdays are already looking quite tricky, so I think we may end up doing Sundays after all. |
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@amanda-matthes, what do you think about organizing communication going forward? e.g., do you envision that the High-Impact-Engineers discussion forum serves as a long-term platform for running groups like this, or do you think it would it make sense to branch out into, for example, a group chat on Whatsapp/Signal or the Hive slack, for example? |
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Here's what I would do: For each event (at least a week, ideally a month in advance):
I'd number the events and call them something like *I think I can get you a Google Meet link that doesn't have limits on time and number of attendees - shoot me an email if that's helpful! |
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Thanks for the thoughts. I think all this makes sense, but would you worry about not having enough ongoing connectivity/space for minor discussion? e.g., a place to notify everyone who's expressed interest in the group when we're planning a meeting, or a place for someone to ask a question about scheduling etc. I'm open to whatever structure seems most organized, but am most accustomed to doing something like a group chat. |
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For maintaining the list of ideas that haven't been discussed yet, my go-to would be a google doc that everyone can edit, but would you favor something more integrated with the forum, like the style of BOLOHIP? |
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Do set up a group chat if you think it would be useful! I just really like the idea of any interesting discussions and surfaced resources to be available in the future - GitHub Discussions is great for that. But it might be nice to additionally have a more informal chat for ephemeral interactions like "will be late to this one". I would only share the link at events to keep bots at bay. |
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My personal choice for keeping track of ideas would also be a pinned post here, where one comment = one suggestion. That let's people upvote which makes prioritising easier. And once a topic has been discussed, you can link to the relevant event discussion in the comment, which seems cool. But do whatever makes sense to you! I worry an anyone-can-edit Google Doc could get messy. Maybe Padlet would also work? It let's you make it so people can add (and edit their own entries) but not delete things. Also has upvotes/reactions and you could mark topics as "discussed", I think. But would add a log-in barrier and you would have to maintain that a little. |
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In case people didn't see it buried in a thread above: Amanda is hosting virtual kick-off for the High-Impact Engineers community this coming Sunday, and 15 minutes of it will be kicking off our reading group. Would be a great initial time for us to see each other's faces and briefly throw around some ideas if you can join :) https://github.com/orgs/High-Impact-Engineers/discussions/18 |
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Let's get a group chat going, to centralize a place for minor chat/questions, and to make sure people get notifications for things (though we'll keep more organized discussions on the High-Impact Engineers forum). Preferences? Please react with 🎉 for Signal, and 🚀 for WhatsApp. Comment if for some reason you have a hard constraint/can't use one of these, or have an alternative pitch. |
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Started a WhatsApp chat to make communication smoother -- we'll still communicate about ideas etc on the forum, but the group chat will make it easier to casually discuss logistics, ask questions, and make sure people get notifications for things. To avoid spam, I won't post the link here. I will reach out to people inidividually. Please reach out to me if you don't end up in the group chat. |
Please do add me to your WA group chat. I am not yet clear if I will be able to fully attend regularly, but we will see. |
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Hi @fabian-loves-ducks, I don't have your contact info -- are you on Hive? If so, can you message me your WhatsApp information (to Rebecca Jiang)? |
Hi @rhjiang, thanks for organizing this! I'd love to be added to the WhatsApp. Just messaged you my contact info on the Hive Slack. |
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I want to start a discussion on organizing a reading/research group to investigate feasibility of various technological solutions to issues in farmed animal welfare. Here's an example of what I think the lead-up to a meeting could look like:
After the discussion, we should create some type of written summary.
I do think that many of the questions that will come up are things that are already known/investigated by some people in the animal welfare community. It's worth bringing that knowledge/insight before a group of interested people who don't know the answers!
Very open to iterating on the above proposed structure! Thoughts? Are people interested? Do people have topics in mind that they'd like to lead discussions on?
To disclose my personal interest in this group:
I'm close to finishing a PhD in robotics and I'd love to make my career about reducing suffering for farmed animals. However, animal agriculture and the food system in general are incredibly complex; finding leverage points takes multiple minds coming together, doing research, and pooling knowledge. The best-case scenario for me would be to actually carry out one of these ideas, ideally in collaboration with some of you. But, even if this doesn't happen for me, I would still love if this group could give any of its attendees clearer thoughts about how to create change.
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