I am not a doctor, my most relevant credential is a BA in a different part of biology, the fact that I couldn’t find a decent resource and had to make it myself is a sign of civilizational inadequacy.
I am not sure what your definition of a decent resource is, but I googled “iron deficiency non anemic” and read the first result, Iron deficiency without anaemia: a diagnosis that matters (by a group of medical students and a haematology consultant, from 2021). It contains:
An explanation of how IDA (iron deficiency anaemia) and IDWA (iron deficiency without anaemia) differ, and how IDWA is an overlooked and important issue.
A more detailed and nicely diagrammed algorithm for diagnosing ID (IDA or IDWA) that also addresses people with chronic inflammation, who need a different testing approach
A nice, detailed explanation of the causes of iron deficiency and iron’s many roles in the body beyond haemoglobin and myoglobin synthesis. It contains jargon, but is about as accessible as a standard textbook, and I found it more readable than the average scientific paper.
A more comprehensive list of types of people who might suffer iron deficiency (also including growing children, pregnant women, athletes, those with chronic inflammation, bariatric surgery patients, those with autoimmune gastritis, consumption of coffee, tea or calcium, blood loss as in menorrhagia, etc).
Detailed explanation on how to manage iron deficiency, including a nicely diagrammed algorithm
What this source lacks that your post contains is a detailed and critical breakdown of specific studies. It contains more jargon and might be more detailed than a layperson would want to read. It also lacks a component of directly encouraging people to proactively get tested for iron deficiency, being addressed mainly at doctors rather than at patients. While I think it’s readable and motivating for a scientiifc paper, it’s not as galvanizing or readable as your blog post.
As you go about writing more research articles, I think it would be really helpful to be specific about what it is that you are missing in the resources you come across. I have shown a couple of your recent pieces to a medical student friend of mine, who’s particularly interested in exercise and nutrition and has also suffered severely from a missed diagnosis. He finds your writing interesting, but also somewhat offensive, oversimplified, and potentially steering patients toward ineffective self-testing that may actually cause false negatives and lead people to think they’ve tested themselves for iron deficiency and it’s not a problem, when they are in fact iron deficient.
Not being a doctor, I don’t really get offended by your writing, but I’ve been interested in the question of oversimplification or misdirection of patients. That is why I chose to look up this article and see what it has to offer. I am curious to know more about whether you came across it, and what if anything you think it lacks that your blog post addresses.
This could be read as a critical and contentious response to your piece, but I hope you will receive it in the spirit that it’s meant—me attempting to better understand your motivations as a writer and the larger objective of the medical research you are doing. Thanks.
This seems like a pretty good article for its goals (plus it immediately confirms my claim that existing infrastructure handles IDWA poorly “IDWA is poorly recognised by clinicians despite its high prevalence, probably because of suboptimal screening recommendations”, which is nice). I think it is borderline useless for my goal of getting readers, especially ethical vegans, to go from not caring about iron deficiency to taking action.
I did a fair amount of ~market research with the target audience; people are very lazy and there is a lot of competition for their attention. I spent an immense amount of time generating hard numbers and figuring out how to present them in a way as accessible and motivating as possible without misleading people or catching the wrong audience. This is extremely hard, and AFAICT the Al-Naseem paper isn’t even trying, because it is aimed at a different goal.
I only skimmed the article, and maybe I missed the part where it quantified the costs of IDWA or provided an algorithm for treatment (as opposed to diagnoses, which I do see). But since the entire point of this post was surviving skimming, I consider that a fair criticism of it for the purpose of motivating lay-readers.
It sounds like you and your doctor friend are treating the counterfactual to this post as “competent, thorough medical care”. I think this is incorrect; the counterfactual is nothing. I informally polled Lightcone vegans, and there was a variety of interactions with the medical system and nutrition, including “absolutely nothing”, “testing recommended but not done”, and “got tested but was missing tests that obviously should have been done”. This includes people who had obvious symptoms that could plausibly be caused by their vegan diet. Obviously, some people had seen doctors and gotten proper treatment, which is great and I wish happened more often. But this post is aimed at the people who hadn’t and weren’t going to.
If the effort I spent writing this post could instead have gotten everyone reading it competent medical care, I would have done that.* And I will say for the record that no one should treat this as a substitute for medical treatment. But as an alternative to nothing, I think it holds up quite well.
*In fact I toyed with “find excellent doctors in the bay area” as a project, and decided against it because it would have been pretty costly for me, and I didn’t find enough people I expected to act on the information even if I succeeded. I think it’s plausible people underestimated their own demand once someone really great was found, but the most likely funder was FTXFF so I’m pretty happy I didn’t go through with it.
Thank you for this thorough response. Let me clarify that my med school friend and I have distinct angles on this post, neither of which, I think, is ‘the counterfactual to this post is competent, thorough medical care.’ We are both quite aware of the shortcomings of the medical system and we both know that patients aren’t always as proactive as they should be in treating real medical problems.
I won’t speak for him, but I mentioned in my comment above that your paper stands out from the al Naseem paper I linked in being more “galvanizing and readable,” as well as in breaking down specific studies. This helps me understand that your central objective is to motivate readers, especially ethical vegans, to get adequately tested for iron deficiency, and that you’ve crafted this article to appeal to your specific readership. That wasn’t entirely clear to me when I read your post, and I understand better where your posts are coming from now that I understand the legwork you’re doing behind the scenes. Thanks for sharing.
Can I ask, a year later, why you didn’t reply to the person who cited evidence that low iron is good?
Of the comments, that one seems by far the most productive for you to engage with, at least for me as an almost-zero-knowledge reader (and recently converted ethical vegan who is eager to mitigate any health tradeoff). But it’s the only upvoted comment you haven’t replied to! I’d be really interested in what you have to say about it.
I don’t know which comment you’re referring to, since the grandparent of yours isn’t about excess iron.
I can say (as I did many times in the post) that in general I believe excess iron is bad. I also believe that excess starts earlier than what the medical system recognizes as a problem, symmetrically to having too low a threshold for iron deficiency. I haven’t dug into where the threshold for excess lies, and suspect it varies a lot by individual. If someone gave more specifics on the line for excess I’m grateful, but probably wouldn’t have much to add because I’ve only looked at the low end.
It’s almost the only comment you haven’t replied to, aside from the downvoted ones at the bottom. Third one down if your comments are sorted by top scoring, which I assume is default? It’s by Alex K. Chen.
It honestly seems kind of hard to miss, and cites some interesting suggestive evidence that low iron levels could actually be healthy, which is why I asked.
Did you know you can link directly to comments on LW? It’s the timestamp/chainlink icon by the author’s name.
The provided evidence looked weak to me, and based on other conversations I’ve seen with Alex Chen I didn’t expect digging into it to be productive. If you’re concerned I encourage you to investigate the research yourself or just run some n=1 experiments.
I didn’t, thanks! I’m a fairly long-time visitor but sporadic-at-best commenter here, primarily because I feel I can learn much more than I can contribute (present case included).
I’d love to know why you think it’s weak. As I mentioned before, it doesn’t seem any more than suggestive to me (and to be fair Chen acknowledges as much), but it does seem quite suggestive, and it has introduced a hint of doubt in me.
I get the sense that I’ve gotten your back up slightly here, which is perhaps not without justification as I admit to having been a touch suspicious of your ignoring the comment and then coming across as a touch uncooperative when I pointed it out. Especially in the context of having noticed, long before converting to veganism myself, that your posts and engagement in subsequent comments struck me as being, in emphasis, framing and tone, somewhat adversarial to veganism.
But I’m well aware that I am probably excessively sensitive to that, having been astonished at the irrationality and extremity of the opposition to veganism online since I converted and before. I’m not sure there’s a single moral/political issue where the epistemic and discursive standards are so low (not confined to the omnivores by any means, although it doesn’t seem symmetrical to me either). On reflection that has probably clouded my impression (and I notice that I was completely wrong to claim Chen’s was the only upvoted comment you ignored, a claim I’ve struck above). So I want to explicitly withdraw any implied criticism, and simply reiterate my interest in your assessment, as someone with relevant knowledge of and engagement with these nutritional questions. You have previously (thanks again for the tip!) defended the value of expending significant resources on potentially preventing iron deficiency in some proportion of six vegans; for much less than a sixth of that same cost you could at least get one to be much more motivated to address potential iron deficiency. I’d be very grateful, although I’m sure you have other demands on your time.
I could generate evidence at least this good for every claim in human health, including mutually contradictory ones.
The book title “mindspan” pattern matches to “shitty science book”
the paragraphs quoted pattern match to jumping around between facts, without giving straightforward numbers you can hold in your own mind. Why give percentage of childbearing women below a threshold, but averages for the ultraold?
“adding tea to the diet reduces body iron and increases lifespan” really? this is what he thinks of as evidence?
“a study of people who ate a Mediterranean-style diet (characterized mainly by less meat and more fish) had larger brains and key brain structures and less atrophy than frequent meat eaters.” lots of potential reasons for this, many of which are areas of deep research
Data on the ultraold is useless because there’s a good chance most of them are lying about their age.
He didn’t cite the most relevant information I know of, that regular blood donation improves health in men. Which probably means Alex wasn’t done any investigation into this, he just read a few claims some time.
I’m about to give a lot of context. This is definitely a little unfair, and subjecting you to anger you are not responsible for. But I do feel like you’ve opened a can of worms, and it would be meaningful to me for you to put yourself in my shoes, which unfortunately requires a lot of context.
The context:
The mod team[1] and many authors believe that no one is owed a response,. Some people disagree (mostly people who comment much more than they post, but not exclusively). I think the latter is a minority, although it’s hard to tell without a proper poll and I don’t know how to weight answers.
Beyond that: because I write about medical stuff means I get a lot of demands for answers I don’t have and don’t owe people. On one hand, this is kind of inevitable so I don’t get mad at people for the first request. On the other hand, people sometimes get really aggressive about getting a definitive answer from me, which I neither owe them nor have the ability to give. One of the biggest predictors of this is how specific the question is. Someone coming in with a lot of gears in their model is usually fun to talk to. I’ll learn things, and I can trust that they’re treating me as one source of information among many, rather than trying to outsource their judgement. The vaguer a question the more likely it is being asked by someone who is desperate but not doing their own work on the subject, and answering is likely to be costly with benefit to anyone.
Your question patternmatched to the second type.
As you note, I not only had left many comments unresponded-to, but specifically the comments above and below the comment you were referring to (but made me do the work to find). As far as I’m concerned, telling you I couldn’t find the comment and giving an overall opinion was going above and beyond.
Which I do because sometimes on LW it pays off, and it looks like it did here, which is heartwarming.
You say that you find omnivores to be worse at epistemics and discourse. My experience is strongly the opposite. These aren’t incompatible- the loudest people on every side of every issue are usually the dumbest. But keep in mind that the critics of my work on vegan advocacy are drawn from that crowd.
You came in suspicious of me on a post where I gave vegans and vegetarians useful tests, with grant money I acquired for this purpose, and helped them find vegan supplements. One of my big frustrations with my vegan critics is that they’re treating me like a meat industry shill, when my major actions have been to help vegans stay healthily vegan. I don’t think means anyone has to agree with me, but I’ve barely been able to get critics to acknowledge this and explain why it doesn’t change anything for them.
one person did give a satisfying answer to this. It was educational and I appreciate his response a lot, although it did not ultimately change my mind. You can see our dialogue here.
I’ve gotten 10-30 emails and comments from vegans telling me I drove them to get tested and if merited go on supplements, and one comment from one vegan saying I was one factor among many in them restarting small amounts of fish. And in the course of getting his statistics help on this post, I talked my dad into a more ameliatarian diet. So from my perspective I have done considerably more for animals than many vegan advocates.
You might think that people who start eating meat are less likely to tell me, but like you said, I’m detectably not likely to yell at them for it.
I think your implication is that I don’t care about animal suffering or don’t like vegans, and this drives me to attack them through any convenient vector. Neither is true. I care about nutrition because I care about nutrition and have for many years, as my blog will attest to. I also care about epistemics and truthseeking in full generality (and my blog will provide a paper trail for that as well). So from my perspective the story that is some people caused a lot of harm (to animals, human health, and truthseeking within EA) by being not only incorrect, but loudly using dishonest tricks to get their way, on an issue I already cared about.
AFAIK none of my vegan critics have acknowledged either of those points, which is also quite frustrating.
You might ask “doesn’t this imply you [Elizabeth] should be extra charitable to vegans?”. The answer is: I am. That’s one reason I’m willing to engage with bad commenters (for one round). I’m also careful to distinguish between vegans and vegan advocates when I complain. If anyone else was this epistemically and materially harmful, in EA or LW, on an issue I cared about, I’d be much harsher.
I find leaving a reply about comment A on comment B, which has nothing to do with comment A, to be bizarre at best and hostile at worst. Even if you didn’t know how to link to comments, just giving me the author’s name would have cut down on the effort demanded from me.
Telling Alex “naw man, that’s not meaningful evidence” seems like it will lead to less high quality disagreement with my posts, not more.
A detailed refutation is a lot of work.
I saw your question to Nina questioning her self-report before I saw this comment. It is in some sense a reasonable question, but in practice I get low quality versions of it all the time and it tends to come from incurious people. Additionally, I didn’t like that you were speaking as an authority on her life, when she’d given the appropriate caveats.
So the story from my perspective is: I put in a lot of work to help vegans stay healthy and to protect the epistemic commons of two communities explicitly dedicated to strong epistemics. I bent over backwards to acknowledge animal suffering while doing so. A subset of vegan advocates have responded to this work with with overt hostility and shitty epistemics, generating additional work for me that is of no benefit to anyone. I don’t know if those comments make up a majority of comments of all comments or comments from vegans, but they are definitely a supermajority of my emotional memories from those comments.
Now someone comes in demanding answers, without making the barest effort to reduce the work that answering requires. He makes a sinister claim that I’m ignoring criticism, citing evidence that takes seconds to disprove. I know I can’t give an answer with level of confidence he seems to want, and it doesn’t sound like he’s done any homework of his own. This[2] has historically created a lot of work for me with no benefit to anyone.
LW occasionally produces miracles, so I answer, in a way that leaves open the door to a productive exchange. But don’t put a ton of work into being nicer to the commenter than he was to me, because that’s an unreasonable burden and I have a lot of data that says no amount of work will help.
And then it turned out to be one of those LW stories where someone generally reconsiders their views and apologizes for past behavior, which is great. But I don’t regret my decision on a policy level.
I think much of this is quite unreasonable (and some very unreasonable- you “don’t like that I spoke as spoke as an authority on her life” because I wondered if what she observed was truly attributable to a causal effect?!), but I don’t see the value in going over it, especially as others have made the points I would make about your tone and framing elsewhere. I continue to find your contributions on this topic a little more combative and “soldier mindset” than is ideal, but clearly you strongly disagree. (Although it’s tempting to suggest that your admittedly “angry” and “unfair” reply, several times longer than your eventual response to the object level question, is evidence for the prosecution, not to mention that it somewhat calls into question your primary ‘it’s too much work’ defence for ignoring substantive criticisms such as Chen’s in the first place.) I don’t see the point in continuing to argue about whose team is more rational, in any case; all I wanted was your response to Chen’s objections to help inform my new dietary choices (something which, again, you concluded was worth dozens of hours and tens of thousands of dollars when multiplied by six, a matter of months ago).
With all that in mind, I have a few follow-up questions to your object-level response, but I will understand if you choose to ignore them, given that you don’t seem to enjoy or value the interaction and I’m finding it lower value than I’d hoped, myself.
I am not sure what your definition of a decent resource is, but I googled “iron deficiency non anemic” and read the first result, Iron deficiency without anaemia: a diagnosis that matters (by a group of medical students and a haematology consultant, from 2021). It contains:
An explanation of how IDA (iron deficiency anaemia) and IDWA (iron deficiency without anaemia) differ, and how IDWA is an overlooked and important issue.
A more detailed and nicely diagrammed algorithm for diagnosing ID (IDA or IDWA) that also addresses people with chronic inflammation, who need a different testing approach
A nice, detailed explanation of the causes of iron deficiency and iron’s many roles in the body beyond haemoglobin and myoglobin synthesis. It contains jargon, but is about as accessible as a standard textbook, and I found it more readable than the average scientific paper.
A more comprehensive list of types of people who might suffer iron deficiency (also including growing children, pregnant women, athletes, those with chronic inflammation, bariatric surgery patients, those with autoimmune gastritis, consumption of coffee, tea or calcium, blood loss as in menorrhagia, etc).
Detailed explanation on how to manage iron deficiency, including a nicely diagrammed algorithm
What this source lacks that your post contains is a detailed and critical breakdown of specific studies. It contains more jargon and might be more detailed than a layperson would want to read. It also lacks a component of directly encouraging people to proactively get tested for iron deficiency, being addressed mainly at doctors rather than at patients. While I think it’s readable and motivating for a scientiifc paper, it’s not as galvanizing or readable as your blog post.
As you go about writing more research articles, I think it would be really helpful to be specific about what it is that you are missing in the resources you come across. I have shown a couple of your recent pieces to a medical student friend of mine, who’s particularly interested in exercise and nutrition and has also suffered severely from a missed diagnosis. He finds your writing interesting, but also somewhat offensive, oversimplified, and potentially steering patients toward ineffective self-testing that may actually cause false negatives and lead people to think they’ve tested themselves for iron deficiency and it’s not a problem, when they are in fact iron deficient.
Not being a doctor, I don’t really get offended by your writing, but I’ve been interested in the question of oversimplification or misdirection of patients. That is why I chose to look up this article and see what it has to offer. I am curious to know more about whether you came across it, and what if anything you think it lacks that your blog post addresses.
This could be read as a critical and contentious response to your piece, but I hope you will receive it in the spirit that it’s meant—me attempting to better understand your motivations as a writer and the larger objective of the medical research you are doing. Thanks.
This seems like a pretty good article for its goals (plus it immediately confirms my claim that existing infrastructure handles IDWA poorly “IDWA is poorly recognised by clinicians despite its high prevalence, probably because of suboptimal screening recommendations”, which is nice). I think it is borderline useless for my goal of getting readers, especially ethical vegans, to go from not caring about iron deficiency to taking action.
I did a fair amount of ~market research with the target audience; people are very lazy and there is a lot of competition for their attention. I spent an immense amount of time generating hard numbers and figuring out how to present them in a way as accessible and motivating as possible without misleading people or catching the wrong audience. This is extremely hard, and AFAICT the Al-Naseem paper isn’t even trying, because it is aimed at a different goal.
I only skimmed the article, and maybe I missed the part where it quantified the costs of IDWA or provided an algorithm for treatment (as opposed to diagnoses, which I do see). But since the entire point of this post was surviving skimming, I consider that a fair criticism of it for the purpose of motivating lay-readers.
It sounds like you and your doctor friend are treating the counterfactual to this post as “competent, thorough medical care”. I think this is incorrect; the counterfactual is nothing. I informally polled Lightcone vegans, and there was a variety of interactions with the medical system and nutrition, including “absolutely nothing”, “testing recommended but not done”, and “got tested but was missing tests that obviously should have been done”. This includes people who had obvious symptoms that could plausibly be caused by their vegan diet. Obviously, some people had seen doctors and gotten proper treatment, which is great and I wish happened more often. But this post is aimed at the people who hadn’t and weren’t going to.
If the effort I spent writing this post could instead have gotten everyone reading it competent medical care, I would have done that.* And I will say for the record that no one should treat this as a substitute for medical treatment. But as an alternative to nothing, I think it holds up quite well.
*In fact I toyed with “find excellent doctors in the bay area” as a project, and decided against it because it would have been pretty costly for me, and I didn’t find enough people I expected to act on the information even if I succeeded. I think it’s plausible people underestimated their own demand once someone really great was found, but the most likely funder was FTXFF so I’m pretty happy I didn’t go through with it.
Thank you for this thorough response. Let me clarify that my med school friend and I have distinct angles on this post, neither of which, I think, is ‘the counterfactual to this post is competent, thorough medical care.’ We are both quite aware of the shortcomings of the medical system and we both know that patients aren’t always as proactive as they should be in treating real medical problems.
I won’t speak for him, but I mentioned in my comment above that your paper stands out from the al Naseem paper I linked in being more “galvanizing and readable,” as well as in breaking down specific studies. This helps me understand that your central objective is to motivate readers, especially ethical vegans, to get adequately tested for iron deficiency, and that you’ve crafted this article to appeal to your specific readership. That wasn’t entirely clear to me when I read your post, and I understand better where your posts are coming from now that I understand the legwork you’re doing behind the scenes. Thanks for sharing.
Can I ask, a year later, why you didn’t reply to the person who cited evidence that low iron is good?
Of the comments, that one seems by far the most productive for you to engage with, at least for me as an almost-zero-knowledge reader (and recently converted ethical vegan who is eager to mitigate any health tradeoff). But it’s the only upvoted comment you haven’t replied to! I’d be really interested in what you have to say about it.
I don’t know which comment you’re referring to, since the grandparent of yours isn’t about excess iron.
I can say (as I did many times in the post) that in general I believe excess iron is bad. I also believe that excess starts earlier than what the medical system recognizes as a problem, symmetrically to having too low a threshold for iron deficiency. I haven’t dug into where the threshold for excess lies, and suspect it varies a lot by individual. If someone gave more specifics on the line for excess I’m grateful, but probably wouldn’t have much to add because I’ve only looked at the low end.
It’s almost the only comment you haven’t replied to, aside from the downvoted ones at the bottom. Third one down if your comments are sorted by top scoring, which I assume is default? It’s by Alex K. Chen.It honestly seems kind of hard to miss, and cites some interesting suggestive evidence that low iron levels could actually be healthy, which is why I asked.
Did you know you can link directly to comments on LW? It’s the timestamp/chainlink icon by the author’s name.
The provided evidence looked weak to me, and based on other conversations I’ve seen with Alex Chen I didn’t expect digging into it to be productive. If you’re concerned I encourage you to investigate the research yourself or just run some n=1 experiments.
I didn’t, thanks! I’m a fairly long-time visitor but sporadic-at-best commenter here, primarily because I feel I can learn much more than I can contribute (present case included).
I’d love to know why you think it’s weak. As I mentioned before, it doesn’t seem any more than suggestive to me (and to be fair Chen acknowledges as much), but it does seem quite suggestive, and it has introduced a hint of doubt in me.
I get the sense that I’ve gotten your back up slightly here, which is perhaps not without justification as I admit to having been a touch suspicious of your ignoring the comment and then coming across as a touch uncooperative when I pointed it out. Especially in the context of having noticed, long before converting to veganism myself, that your posts and engagement in subsequent comments struck me as being, in emphasis, framing and tone, somewhat adversarial to veganism.
But I’m well aware that I am probably excessively sensitive to that, having been astonished at the irrationality and extremity of the opposition to veganism online since I converted and before. I’m not sure there’s a single moral/political issue where the epistemic and discursive standards are so low (not confined to the omnivores by any means, although it doesn’t seem symmetrical to me either). On reflection that has probably clouded my impression (and I notice that I was completely wrong to claim Chen’s was the only upvoted comment you ignored, a claim I’ve struck above). So I want to explicitly withdraw any implied criticism, and simply reiterate my interest in your assessment, as someone with relevant knowledge of and engagement with these nutritional questions. You have previously (thanks again for the tip!) defended the value of expending significant resources on potentially preventing iron deficiency in some proportion of six vegans; for much less than a sixth of that same cost you could at least get one to be much more motivated to address potential iron deficiency. I’d be very grateful, although I’m sure you have other demands on your time.
To answer your object level question:
I could generate evidence at least this good for every claim in human health, including mutually contradictory ones.
The book title “mindspan” pattern matches to “shitty science book”
the paragraphs quoted pattern match to jumping around between facts, without giving straightforward numbers you can hold in your own mind. Why give percentage of childbearing women below a threshold, but averages for the ultraold?
“adding tea to the diet reduces body iron and increases lifespan” really? this is what he thinks of as evidence?
“a study of people who ate a Mediterranean-style diet (characterized mainly by less meat and more fish) had larger brains and key brain structures and less atrophy than frequent meat eaters.” lots of potential reasons for this, many of which are areas of deep research
Data on the ultraold is useless because there’s a good chance most of them are lying about their age.
He didn’t cite the most relevant information I know of, that regular blood donation improves health in men. Which probably means Alex wasn’t done any investigation into this, he just read a few claims some time.
Thank you, I appreciate that.
I’m about to give a lot of context. This is definitely a little unfair, and subjecting you to anger you are not responsible for. But I do feel like you’ve opened a can of worms, and it would be meaningful to me for you to put yourself in my shoes, which unfortunately requires a lot of context.
The context:
The mod team[1] and many authors believe that no one is owed a response,. Some people disagree (mostly people who comment much more than they post, but not exclusively). I think the latter is a minority, although it’s hard to tell without a proper poll and I don’t know how to weight answers.
Beyond that: because I write about medical stuff means I get a lot of demands for answers I don’t have and don’t owe people. On one hand, this is kind of inevitable so I don’t get mad at people for the first request. On the other hand, people sometimes get really aggressive about getting a definitive answer from me, which I neither owe them nor have the ability to give. One of the biggest predictors of this is how specific the question is. Someone coming in with a lot of gears in their model is usually fun to talk to. I’ll learn things, and I can trust that they’re treating me as one source of information among many, rather than trying to outsource their judgement. The vaguer a question the more likely it is being asked by someone who is desperate but not doing their own work on the subject, and answering is likely to be costly with benefit to anyone.
Your question patternmatched to the second type.
As you note, I not only had left many comments unresponded-to, but specifically the comments above and below the comment you were referring to (but made me do the work to find). As far as I’m concerned, telling you I couldn’t find the comment and giving an overall opinion was going above and beyond.
Which I do because sometimes on LW it pays off, and it looks like it did here, which is heartwarming.
You say that you find omnivores to be worse at epistemics and discourse. My experience is strongly the opposite. These aren’t incompatible- the loudest people on every side of every issue are usually the dumbest. But keep in mind that the critics of my work on vegan advocacy are drawn from that crowd.
You came in suspicious of me on a post where I gave vegans and vegetarians useful tests, with grant money I acquired for this purpose, and helped them find vegan supplements. One of my big frustrations with my vegan critics is that they’re treating me like a meat industry shill, when my major actions have been to help vegans stay healthily vegan. I don’t think means anyone has to agree with me, but I’ve barely been able to get critics to acknowledge this and explain why it doesn’t change anything for them.
one person did give a satisfying answer to this. It was educational and I appreciate his response a lot, although it did not ultimately change my mind. You can see our dialogue here.
I’ve gotten 10-30 emails and comments from vegans telling me I drove them to get tested and if merited go on supplements, and one comment from one vegan saying I was one factor among many in them restarting small amounts of fish. And in the course of getting his statistics help on this post, I talked my dad into a more ameliatarian diet. So from my perspective I have done considerably more for animals than many vegan advocates.
You might think that people who start eating meat are less likely to tell me, but like you said, I’m detectably not likely to yell at them for it.
I think your implication is that I don’t care about animal suffering or don’t like vegans, and this drives me to attack them through any convenient vector. Neither is true. I care about nutrition because I care about nutrition and have for many years, as my blog will attest to. I also care about epistemics and truthseeking in full generality (and my blog will provide a paper trail for that as well). So from my perspective the story that is some people caused a lot of harm (to animals, human health, and truthseeking within EA) by being not only incorrect, but loudly using dishonest tricks to get their way, on an issue I already cared about.
AFAIK none of my vegan critics have acknowledged either of those points, which is also quite frustrating.
You might ask “doesn’t this imply you [Elizabeth] should be extra charitable to vegans?”. The answer is: I am. That’s one reason I’m willing to engage with bad commenters (for one round). I’m also careful to distinguish between vegans and vegan advocates when I complain. If anyone else was this epistemically and materially harmful, in EA or LW, on an issue I cared about, I’d be much harsher.
I find leaving a reply about comment A on comment B, which has nothing to do with comment A, to be bizarre at best and hostile at worst. Even if you didn’t know how to link to comments, just giving me the author’s name would have cut down on the effort demanded from me.
Telling Alex “naw man, that’s not meaningful evidence” seems like it will lead to less high quality disagreement with my posts, not more.
A detailed refutation is a lot of work.
I saw your question to Nina questioning her self-report before I saw this comment. It is in some sense a reasonable question, but in practice I get low quality versions of it all the time and it tends to come from incurious people. Additionally, I didn’t like that you were speaking as an authority on her life, when she’d given the appropriate caveats.
So the story from my perspective is: I put in a lot of work to help vegans stay healthy and to protect the epistemic commons of two communities explicitly dedicated to strong epistemics. I bent over backwards to acknowledge animal suffering while doing so. A subset of vegan advocates have responded to this work with with overt hostility and shitty epistemics, generating additional work for me that is of no benefit to anyone. I don’t know if those comments make up a majority of comments of all comments or comments from vegans, but they are definitely a supermajority of my emotional memories from those comments.
Now someone comes in demanding answers, without making the barest effort to reduce the work that answering requires. He makes a sinister claim that I’m ignoring criticism, citing evidence that takes seconds to disprove. I know I can’t give an answer with level of confidence he seems to want, and it doesn’t sound like he’s done any homework of his own. This[2] has historically created a lot of work for me with no benefit to anyone.
LW occasionally produces miracles, so I answer, in a way that leaves open the door to a productive exchange. But don’t put a ton of work into being nicer to the commenter than he was to me, because that’s an unreasonable burden and I have a lot of data that says no amount of work will help.
And then it turned out to be one of those LW stories where someone generally reconsiders their views and apologizes for past behavior, which is great. But I don’t regret my decision on a policy level.
which technically I’m on, but in practice it means I occasionally give an opinion in private or curate something. I have 0 power on a policy level
by which I mean “demanding sure answers w/o homework”. It happens about all kinds of topics, not just veganism.
I think much of this is quite unreasonable (and some very unreasonable- you “don’t like that I spoke as spoke as an authority on her life” because I wondered if what she observed was truly attributable to a causal effect?!), but I don’t see the value in going over it, especially as others have made the points I would make about your tone and framing elsewhere. I continue to find your contributions on this topic a little more combative and “soldier mindset” than is ideal, but clearly you strongly disagree. (Although it’s tempting to suggest that your admittedly “angry” and “unfair” reply, several times longer than your eventual response to the object level question, is evidence for the prosecution, not to mention that it somewhat calls into question your primary ‘it’s too much work’ defence for ignoring substantive criticisms such as Chen’s in the first place.) I don’t see the point in continuing to argue about whose team is more rational, in any case; all I wanted was your response to Chen’s objections to help inform my new dietary choices (something which, again, you concluded was worth dozens of hours and tens of thousands of dollars when multiplied by six, a matter of months ago).
With all that in mind, I have a few follow-up questions to your object-level response, but I will understand if you choose to ignore them, given that you don’t seem to enjoy or value the interaction and I’m finding it lower value than I’d hoped, myself.