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/
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
As awful.systems is a spinoff, of reddits sneerclub, there is a bit of lingo some of the old timers have taken with, these tend to go a bit nerdy. In this case the nerd being pushed into the lockers by the jocks. This is because the people sneerclub sneered about had a trauma of the nerd/jock thing from highschool and tended to see a lot of things via that lens. (So anybody who was their detractor was obviously a jock). This has created a bit of a tradition where you see a annoyingly dumb reply, esp when it does things in an annoying way that also often applies to the LessWrong Rationalists, like for example ignoring written and unwritten context (steelmanning nonsense is also a good point), to say you are putting the poster into a locker, or saying they should be shoved in one (of course, we are just as nerdy as the Rationalists, so if jocks were real we would also be in a locker just like them.). So here is a bit of initial context, we all want subconsciously be shoved into a locker by Henry Cavill.
Now how does this apply to our current situation? Well the first reaction here is a bit nonsensical and mentions things already mentioned, and argued against in the article. For example how the upper middle class of the western world eating a bit of vat grown meat every now and then is not going to solve the problems which vat grown meat should solve. It actually also makes the problems worse because money can only be spend once. As mentioned in the article. So sc_griffith, the OP rightfully replies with ‘read the article please’. Which is fine, as it is a bit of a dumb reaction to all the myriads of problems shown in the article.
Then you come along, having reinvented Rationalist ways of discourse from first principles, or that Futurama episode, and you end up defending the person missing the point of the article, why it was posted here (ow look unwritten context, as foreshadowed), and you react with a somewhat annoying post going basically ‘technically he is correct, if you squint, and steelman’. Ergo, into the locker you go.
Holy shit, why am I talking to a locker? Is it because I’m taking a bit of perverse glee too type out all the context both written and unwritten way, in a sick way to make myself feel superior to end with weak bad meme reference? Nah, it must be the kids who are wrong (I say from my own locker (in reality I have to do some things irl and im procrastinating)).
tl;dr: I was saying you were a bit annoying and you shouldn’t steelman posts of other people like that.
