We’re launching the Cultured Meat Tournament, developed in partnership with Rethink Priorities.

Is it worth the effective altruism (EA) community trying to accelerate the growth of cultured meat production? Should EA just let market forces move it forward? Should EA invest directly in cultured meat R&D or identify high-leverage ways to increase funding? Can we see some ways to use targeted grants to increase the probability that at least 5% of meat and seafood production in 2050 (an arbitrary but significant threshold we estimate to be 50M metric tons) will come from cultured meat?

This tournament is part of Rethink Priorities’ work to inform those decisions - forecasts, comments, and essays produced for this tournament will inform and in some cases be featured within Rethink Priorities’ other research, and some will be packaged for and directly shared with some key decision-makers. It aims to provide more accurate cultured meat production timelines for philanthropic funders, biotech researchers, and farmed animal advocates.

This tournament features question groups, allowing for more efficient, more consistent forecasting. Learn more about question groups here.

The three questions ask what volume of cultured meat will be produced and sold in a 12-month period globally between 2022 and 2050, with five year intervals. The questions iterate on product type (≥51% or ≥20% cultured meat, by weight) and price (any price or <$10 per kilogram wholesale on average).

This tournament makes use of the updated Metaculus Tournament Scoring System. This means that forecasters will not be able to see the community median when a question opens. This hidden period will last for 10 days and participation during this time will completely determine 10% of a forecaster’s coverage. (We have set c_weight = 10%.) To see the questions you haven’t made forecasts on, use the filter to set the Question Status to Open and My Participation to Not Predicted.

Thank you to everyone who has participated so far! There is still plenty of time to participate.

Happy forecasting!