lab grown meat is a vaguely EA/rationalist/self IDed neolib meme. in theory it will save the environment (ok) and prevent suffering (yay) in a way that concentrates capital (double yay) and involves a lot of tech magic (triple yay).
hot luigi is a big fan apparently. seeing this discussed reminded me of this excellent article which shreds the concept of mass produced lab grown meat. I haven’t really seen this circulate much over the years, but it is really a masterwork of grift dissection. please enjoy
archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20241208141305/https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/
at least make a pretense of having read the article instead of very obviously reacting to the headline jfc
That’s the power of not saying anything interesting, you can’t contradict it
The article doesn’t say anything interesting in the first place.
“Start-ups optimistic about future of their product, wish for public investment, expert disagrees.”
That’s about it
The article itself does mention that creating cultured meat is already possible, just that the limits of the technology presently known for doing it make creating it at the same cost as regular meat infeasible. Which technically doesn’t contradict with what the person you replied to said, because the commenter didn’t exactly say how expensive or niche they expected it to be, so even something like a hundred dollar hamburger that doesn’t replace a significant fraction of food consumption but does exist as a novelty luxury for someone that had the money to spend on animal protein once in a blue moon, fits.
fwiw the post this is replying to originally didn’t have the phrase “instead of very obviously reacting to the headline,” I edited that in later. without the edit I think it does come across like I thought zweibel was contradicting some specific point in the article. not true, b/c they didn’t address the article at all
