This is a pretty good post—check out Politics is the Mindkiller to see if you think it’s appropriate for the main page. My guess is that people have avoided vegetarian posts in the past in order to avoid the controversy...we tend not to advocate for specific lifestyles on LW unless it’s necessary to teach some more general, underlying point about rationality.
Still pondering this. I understand why the politics taboo is necessary, but the definition of “politics” is rather hazy. I consider this approximately in the same boat as cryonics in terms of “lifestyle choice,” and cryonics is a very popular topic here, but I don’t know if that’s a reference on what topics are acceptable or if cryonics is an exception made because there are few places on the internet where you can have frank discussions of it, period.
I’m pondering the nature of a hypothetical top level post I might make. If I do it, the crux of my argument will not be “you should all be vegetarian,” but rather “I want you all to look seriously at your moral system, think about how the following three points relate to it, decide how much value an animal life has, and then, if your behavior does not line up with your actual morals, make an honest effort to change your behavior. Which might not mean becoming a full fledged vegetarian (as I said, I haven’t even been successful at that myself). But I suspect that most of us, for one reason or another, are consuming far more meat than is actually rational given our respective worldviews.
A fair litmus test is to show it to a non-vegetarian friend without comment and see if she thinks it’s about vegetarianism or rationality. Alternatively, if you can identify the flaw in people’s rationality that is apparently leading them to act inconsistently with their morals, and that flaw is something more generally applicable than “failure to take my 3 arguments seriously,” then you’ve got a winner.
It counts as political because you’re talking about the deservedness of rights for a social group (animals) that would be costly for another social group (humans) to recognize. As a question of “who deserves what social status/share of the pie”, it’s about politics.
Second, a lot of problems you point to necessitate discussion of political issues. Specifically, when you talk about animal farming methods being bad because of the negative environmental costs they impose on other humans (“negative externalities”) (which I completely agree should be internalized), you’re on a topic that necessarily involves discussing a political solution—i.e., who deserves compensation for these acts, what can rightfully be done to prevent it, etc. (To get the environmental benefits you describe, you need massive action an enforcement, not a few people’s personal abstinence.)
So, other than the personal health benefits and personal moral choicemaking you discuss, I have to conclude that your post counts as politics, but that could be fixed by removing the problematic issues I mentioned in the preceding paragraphs.
This is a pretty good post—check out Politics is the Mindkiller to see if you think it’s appropriate for the main page. My guess is that people have avoided vegetarian posts in the past in order to avoid the controversy...we tend not to advocate for specific lifestyles on LW unless it’s necessary to teach some more general, underlying point about rationality.
Still pondering this. I understand why the politics taboo is necessary, but the definition of “politics” is rather hazy. I consider this approximately in the same boat as cryonics in terms of “lifestyle choice,” and cryonics is a very popular topic here, but I don’t know if that’s a reference on what topics are acceptable or if cryonics is an exception made because there are few places on the internet where you can have frank discussions of it, period.
I’m pondering the nature of a hypothetical top level post I might make. If I do it, the crux of my argument will not be “you should all be vegetarian,” but rather “I want you all to look seriously at your moral system, think about how the following three points relate to it, decide how much value an animal life has, and then, if your behavior does not line up with your actual morals, make an honest effort to change your behavior. Which might not mean becoming a full fledged vegetarian (as I said, I haven’t even been successful at that myself). But I suspect that most of us, for one reason or another, are consuming far more meat than is actually rational given our respective worldviews.
Sounds promising.
A fair litmus test is to show it to a non-vegetarian friend without comment and see if she thinks it’s about vegetarianism or rationality. Alternatively, if you can identify the flaw in people’s rationality that is apparently leading them to act inconsistently with their morals, and that flaw is something more generally applicable than “failure to take my 3 arguments seriously,” then you’ve got a winner.
It counts as political because you’re talking about the deservedness of rights for a social group (animals) that would be costly for another social group (humans) to recognize. As a question of “who deserves what social status/share of the pie”, it’s about politics.
Second, a lot of problems you point to necessitate discussion of political issues. Specifically, when you talk about animal farming methods being bad because of the negative environmental costs they impose on other humans (“negative externalities”) (which I completely agree should be internalized), you’re on a topic that necessarily involves discussing a political solution—i.e., who deserves compensation for these acts, what can rightfully be done to prevent it, etc. (To get the environmental benefits you describe, you need massive action an enforcement, not a few people’s personal abstinence.)
So, other than the personal health benefits and personal moral choicemaking you discuss, I have to conclude that your post counts as politics, but that could be fixed by removing the problematic issues I mentioned in the preceding paragraphs.
(Just found this discussion.)