Signpost transition examples free#

Whether that translates into progress toward the ultimate goal depends on whether our assumptions about the signposts are true. All they can really tell us is our progress toward the signposts themselves.

Signposts are only as useful as they are accurate. Reasons to be cautious when applying signposts thinking A shift to cage-free farming is a signpost for generally useful mechanisms for abolishing animal farming. Furthermore, the abolition of battery cages will generate momentum in the animal advocacy community, whereas a begrudging acceptance of them would not.

Signpost transition examples free#

In other words, it is only a local optimum rather than a global optimum: free range is a step on the way toward providing chickens with the freedom to express and act on their preferences, while battery cages are not. But if we examine the mechanisms of positive long-term development, it is unlikely that locking up chickens will constitute a step toward the end of animal farming and the suffering it causes ( Cotra 2017 see also this interview with Lewis Bollard for a thorough discussion of the long-term project of ending animal farming). If it turned out that free range were actually worse for chicken welfare, we could take this as an indication that we should not advocate for cage-free operations, and that when forced to choose between caged and cage-free, you should choose the caged chicken. There has been a debate, however, over whether the aggression between overcrowded free-roaming chickens will lead to even more suffering than is experienced in the battery cages ( Cotra 2017). For instance, chickens in battery cages on factory farms live in horrible conditions, and many animal advocates have pushed for a transition to cage-free operations. This kind of signpost can set us up to achieve a global optimum even if it means forsaking a local optimum. But increasing the number of people involved in the movement should be a reliable signpost for success, because most approaches to social change would benefit from a broader base of support.Īnother kind of signpost is the reinforcement of a generally useful mechanism of change. In the early days, it might not be clear exactly which strategies the movement should pursue. Or consider a new movement with ambitious goals for social change that could take decades to realize. Even if we don’t know exactly what scientific progress will look like, supporting more research will almost certainly help achieve it.

Thus, all else equal, increasing amounts of funding going toward the NSF can be thought of as a signpost for improving scientific progress.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) aims to promote the progress of science and relies on governmental funding to accomplish this mission. One kind of signpost is a proximate measure of a trajectory we expect to be positive in almost all cases. Signposts can aid our thinking by directing our focus towards clear intermediate objectives closer in time, about which it is easier to make predictions. Given uncertainty about what the best future will look like and how exactly to get there, it might not make sense to chart specific pathways to the endpoint - or it might not be possible to imagine those pathways at all. This post outlines my thoughts on the reliability of indicators of generally positive trajectories and proposes signposts for progress toward improving wild animal welfare over the long term. One way to partially circumvent this problem is to use indicators, or signposts ( Bostrom 2014), of near-term developments which look like they will lead to positive long-term outcomes (but see Tarsney 2019). This can make it very hard to figure out what actions will produce the best long-run consequences. Studies show that experts’ ability to predict important political events decreases noticeably just a few years into the future ( Tetlock 2005).