At what price point, relative to the cost of farmed meat, would you switch to an otherwise identical cultured alternative (i.e. this was grown from cell culture or some other mechanism that doesn't involve raising an animal and killing it)?
(To be clear, >2x means "I'd pay at least $10 for cultured steak that would cost $5 if it came from a cow.")
If you wouldn't eat lab-grown meat at any price point (even free), then I guess answer <1x, or don't answer.
If you are a vegan or vegetarian but *would* eat lab-grown meat, then answer >2x, since you wouldn't accept farmed meat even if it were free.
@pganssle The word 'identical' carries a *lot* of water in all of these discussions.
I'm highly skeptical of our ability to achieve something lab-cultured that is *actually* identical across all nutritionally-relevant axes. (Further--I'm skeptical of our ability to identify, much less *measure*, all nutritionally-relevant axes.)
@btskinn I mean, it doesn't carry any water in this case, since I'm asking about how meat being cultured affects people's willingness to eat it at all.
If you are in the "I'd pay 10x for identical" group, you're probably in a group that would pay 2x for a "close enough" simulacrum. If you're in the <1x group, you might be convinced with extra enticements (e.g. "it's not exactly the same, but you can get a close simulacrum of this ultra-rare and expensive delicacy for the same price as beef").
@pganssle Oh, sorry - that was meant to be an explanation for why I voted "<1", not to poke at anything deeper or make a broader argument about how people *should* feel about it.
@pganssle I hadn't even been thinking about it from the "low cost replica of a rare/unique experience" angle. That would probably change my answer.
@btskinn Well, "low cost replica of a rare/unique experience" is another way of saying, "I'd only take it if were cheaper."
Since if you're like, "I'd eat a cultured version of that $1000 fish if I could get it for $20", that's a price difference of 0.02x.
@btskinn If you voted <1 because you aren't convinced that it would be identical, you are answering a different question than the one I asked, but like I said, people are terrible at decoupling these things, so I assumed the data would be noisy in this regard.
It's actually good to have some confirmation that at least some of the "only if it's cheaper" folks are just answering a different question.
@pganssle Yeah, I'm not able to get past the questions begged by the "otherwise identical" assertion.
@btskinn It's an explicitly stated premise.
If I said, "A genie comes out and is willing to offer you $200,000 a year for life, or $2M lump sum right now" it would be very weird to say, "I dunno, genies don't exist, and why would he want to give me money?"
@btskinn I recognize that people don't actually respect the premises of hypotheticals when they answer questions, but it feels... cognitively dissonant to me to explicitly recognize that you are doing it and to be unwilling to engage the question otherwise.
Then again, I am a high [decoupler](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7cAsBPGh98pGyrhz9/decoupling-vs-contextualising-norms), so it is very natural for me to think this way.
@pganssle Huh, <nod>, I see your point.
What happened here was that I was in enough of a hurry, and feel strongly enough about the matter, that I didn't take the time/effort to push through my rejection of the premise and seat myself into the actual hypothetical.
And then reacted/voted/replied without noticing that that's what I'd done.
So... Yeah, apologies for that. :-/
@btskinn I do recognize that it's a problem, though, that people are simply *terrible* at evaluating hypothetical situations. Their brains sort of pattern match to something else and use heuristics that don't apply, so you can't really trust them to decouple the things that you are explicitly asking them to decouple.