My impression is that while vegans are not truth-seekings, carnists are also not truth-seeking. This includes by making ag-gag laws, putting pictures of free animals on packages containing factory farmed animal flesh, denying that animals have feelings and can experience pain using nonsense arguments, hiding information about factory farming from children, etc..
So I guess the question is whether you prefer being in an epistemic environment that has declared war on humans or an epistemic environment that has declared war on farm animals. And I suppose as a human it’s easier to be in the latter, as long as you don’t mind hiring people to torture animals for your pleasure.
putting pictures of free animals on packages containing factory farmed animal flesh
Well, yes, that’s called marketing, it’s like the antithesis of truth seeking.
The cure to hypocrisy is not more hypocrisy and lies but of opposite sign: that’s the kind of naive first order consequentialism that leads people to cynicism instead. The fundamental problem is that out of fear that people would reasonably go for a compromise (e.g. keep eating meat but less of it and only from free range animals) some vegans decide to just pile on the arguments, true or false, until anyone who believed them all and had a minimum of sense would go vegan instantly. But that completely denies the agency and moral ability of everyone else, and underestimates the possibility that you may be wrong. As a general rule, “my moral calculus is correct, therefore I will skew the data so that everyone else comes to the same conclusions as me” is a bad principle.
I agree in principle, though someone has to actually create a community of people who track the truth in order for this to be effective and not be outcompeted by other communities. When working individually, people don’t have the resources to untangle the deception in society due to its scale.
There’s a pretty significant difference here in my view—“carnists” are not a coherent group, not an ideology, they do not have an agenda (unless we’re talking about some very specific industry lobbyists who no doubt exist). They’re just people who don’t care and eat meat.
Ideological vegans (i.e. not people who just happen to not eat meat, but don’t really care either way) are a very specific ideological group, and especially if we qualify them like in this post (“EA vegan advocates”), we can talk about their collective traits.
TBF, the meat/dairy/egg industries are specific groups of people who work pretty hard to increase animal product consumption, and are much better resourced than vegan advocates. I can understand why animal advocacy would develop some pretty aggressive norms in the face of that, and for that reason I consider it kind of besides the point to go after them in the wider world. It would basically be demanding unilateral disarmament from the weaker side.
But the fact that the wider world is so confused there’s no point in pushing for truth is the point. EA needs to stay better than that, and part of that is deescalating the arms race when you’re inside its boundaries.
But the fact that the wider world is so confused there’s no point in pushing for truth is the point. EA needs to stay better than that, and part of that is deescalating the arms race when you’re inside its boundaries.
Agree with this. I mean I’m definitely not pushing back against your claims, I’m just pointing out the problem seems bigger than commonly understood.
Could you expand on why you think that it makes a significant difference?
E.g. if the goal is to model what epistemic distortions you might face, or to suggests directions of change for fewer distortions, then coherence is only of limited concern (a coherent group might be easier to change, but on the other hand it might also more easily coordinate to oppose change).
I’m not sure why you say they are not an ideology, at least under my model of ideology that I have developed for other purposes, they fit the definition (i.e. I believe carnism involves a set of correlated beliefs about life and society that fit together).
Also not sure what you mean by carnists not having an agenda, in my experience most carnists have an agenda of wanting to eat lots of cheap delicious animal flesh.
I tend to think of ideology as a continuum, rather than a strict binary. Like people tend to have varying degrees of belief and trust in the sides of a conflict, and various unique factors influencing their views, and this leads to a lot of shades of nuance that can’t really be captured with a binary carnist/not-carnist definition.
But I think there are still some correlated beliefs where you could e.g. take their first principal component as an operationalization of carnism. Some beliefs that might go into this, many of which I have encountered from carnists:
“People should be allowed to freely choose whether they want to eat factory-farmed meat or not.”
“Animals cannot suffer in any way that matters.”
“One should take an evolutionary perspective and realize that factory farming is actually good for animals. After all, if not for humans putting a lot of effort into farming them, they wouldn’t even exist at their current population levels.”
“People who do enough good things out of their own charity deserve to eat animals without concerning themselves with the moral implications.”
“People who design packaging for animal products ought to make it look aesthetically pleasing and comfortable.”
“It is offensive and unreasonable for people to claim that meat-eating is a horribly harmful habit.”
“Animals are made to be used by humans.”
“Consuming animal products like meat or milk is healthier than being strictly vegan.”
One could make a defense of some of the statements. For instance Elizabeth has made a to-me convincing defense of the last statement. I don’t think this is a bug in the definition of carnism, it just shows that some carnist beliefs can be good and true. One ought to be able to admit that ideology is real and matters while also being able to recognize that it’s not a black-and-white issue.
While I agree that there are notable differences between “vegans” and “carnists” in terms of group dynamics, I do not think that necessarily disagrees with the idea that carnists are anti-truthseeking.
“carnists” are not a coherent group, not an ideology, they do not have an agenda (unless we’re talking about some very specific industry lobbyists who no doubt exist). They’re just people who don’t care and eat meat.
It seems untrue that because carnists are not an organized physical group that has meetings and such, they are thereby incapable of having shared norms or ideas/memes. I think in some contexts it can make sense/be useful to refer to a group of people who are not coherent in the sense of explicitly “working together” or having shared newletters based around a subject or whatever. In some cases, it can make sense to refer to those people’s ideologies/norms.
Also, I disagree with the idea that carnists are inherently neutral on the subject of animals/meat. That is, they don’t “not care”. In general, they actively want to eat meat and would be against things that would stop this. That’s not “not caring”; it is “having an agenda”, just not one that opposes the current status quo. The fact that being pro-meat and “okay with factory farming” is the more dominant stance/assumed default in our current status quo doesn’t mean that it isn’t a legitimate position/belief that people could be said to hold. There are many examples of other memetic environments throughout history where the assumed default may not have looked like a “stance” or an “agenda” to the people who were used to it, but nonetheless represented certain ideological claims.
I don’t think something only becomes an “ideology” when it disagrees with the current dominant cultural ideas; some things that are culturally common and baked into people from birth can still absolutely be “ideology” in the way I am used to using it. If we disagree on that, then perhaps we could use a different term?
If nothing else, carnists share the ideological assumption that “eating meat is okay”. In practice, they often also share ideas about the surrounding philosophical questions and attitudes. I don’t think it is beyond the pale to say that they could share norms around truth-seeking as it relates to these questions and attitudes. It feels unnecessarily dismissive and perhaps implicitly status quoist to assume that: as a dominant, implicit meme of our culture “carnism” must be “neutral” and therefore does not come with/correlate with any norms surrounding how people think about/process questions related to animals/meat.
Carnism comes with as much ideology as veganism even if people aren’t as explicit in presenting it or if the typical carnist hasn’t put as much thought into it.
I do not really have any experience advocating publicly for veganism and I wouldn’t really know about which specific espistemic failure modes are common among carnists for these sorts of conversations, but I have seen plenty of people bend themselves out of shape persevering their own comfort and status quo, so it really doesn’t seem like a stretch to imagine that epistemic maladies may tend to present among carnists when the question of veganism comes up.
For one thing, I have personally seen carnists respond in intentionally hostile ways towards vegans/vegan messaging on several occasions. Partially this is because they see it as a threat to their ideas or their way of life or partially this is because veganism is a designated punching bag that you’re allowed to insult in a lot of places. Often times, these attacks draw on shared ideas about veganism/animals/morality that are common between “carnists”.
So, while I agree that there are very different group dynamics, I don’t think it makes sense to say that vegans hold ideologies and are capable of exhibiting certain epistemic behaviors, but that carnists, by virtue of not being a sufficiently coherent collection of individuals, could not have the same labels applied to them.
(edit: idk if i endorse comments like this, i was really stressed from the things being said in the comments here)
People who fund the torture of animals are not a coherent group, not an ideology, they do not have an agenda. People who don’t fund the torture of animals are a coherent group, an ideology, they have an agenda.
People who keep other people enslaved are not a coherent group, not an ideology, they do not have an agenda. People who seek to end slavery are a coherent group, an ideology, they have an agenda.
Normal people like me are not a coherent group, not an ideology, we do not have an agenda. Atypicals like you are a coherent group, an ideology, you have an agenda.
maybe a future, better, post-singularity version of yourself will understand how terribly alienating statements like this are. maybe that person will see just how out-of-frame you have kept the suffering of other life forms to think this way.
my agenda is that of a confused, tortured animal, crying out in pain. it is, at most, a convulsive reaction. in desperation, it grasps onto ‘instrumental rationality’ like the paws of one being pulled into rotating blades flail around them, looking for a hold to force themself back.
and it finds nothing, the suffering persists until the day the world ends.
i do endorse the actual meaning of what i wrote. it is not “insane” and to call it that is callous. i added the edit because i wasn’t sure if expressions of stress are productive. i think there’s a case to be made that they are when it clearly stems from some ongoing discursive pattern, so that others can know the pain that their words cause. especially given this hostile reaction.
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deleted the rest of this. there’s no point for two alignment researchers to be fighting over oldworld violence. i hope this will make sense looking back.
The line about “carnists” strikes me as outgroup homogeneity, conceptual gerrymandering, The Worst Argument In The World—call it what you want, but it should be something rationalists should have antibodies against.
Specifically, equivocating between “carnists [meat industry lobbyists]” and “carnists [EA non-vegans]” seems to me like known anti-truthseeking behavior.
So the question, as I see you posing, is whether NinetyThree prefers being in an epistemic environment with people who care about epistemic truthseeking (EA non-vegans) or with people for whom your best defense is that they’re no worse than meat industry lobbyists.
I think my point would be empirically supported; we can try set up a survey and run a factor analysis if you doubt it.
Edit: just to clarify I’m not gonna run the factor analysis unless someone who doubts the validity of the category comes by to cooperate, because I’m busy and expect there’d be a lot of goalpost moving that I don’t have time to deal with if I did it without pre-approval from someone who doesn’t buy it.
Ok I’m getting downvoted to oblivion because of this, so let me clarify:
So I guess the question is whether you prefer being in an epistemic environment that has declared war on humans or an epistemic environment that has declared war on farm animals.
If, like NinetyThree, you decide to give up on untangling the question for yourself because of all the lying (“I would describe my epistemic status as “not really open to persuasion”″), then you still have to make decisions, which in practice means following some side in the conflict, and the most common side is the carnist side which has the problems I mention.
I don’t want to be in a situation where I have to give up on untangling the question (see my top-level comment proposing a research community), but if I’m being honest I can’t exactly say that it’s invalid for NinetyThree to do so.
I understood NinetyThree to be talking about vegans lying about issues of health (as Elizabeth was also focusing on), not about the facts of animal suffering. If you agree with the arguments on the animal cruelty side and your uncertainty is focused on the health effects on you of a vegan diet vs your current one (which you have 1st hand data on), it doesn’t really matter what the meat industry is saying as that wasn’t a factor in the first place
Maybe. I pattern-matched it this way because I had previously been discussing psychological sex differences with Ninety-Three on discord, where he adopted the HBD views on them due to a perception that psychologists were biased, but he wasn’t interested in making arguments or in me doing followup studies to test it. So I assumed a similar thing was going on here with respect to eating animals.
I don’t agree with the downvoting. The first paragraph sounds to me like a not only fair, but good point. The first sentence in the second paragraph doesn’t really seem true to me though.
Yeah, it still doesn’t seem true even given the followup clarification.
Well, depending on what you actually mean. In the original excerpt, you’re saying that the question is whether you want to be in epistemic environment A or epistemic environment B. But in your followup clarification, you talk about the need to decide on something. I agree that you do need to decide on something (~carnist or vegan). I don’t think that means you necessarily have to be in one of those two epistemic environments you mention. But I also charitably suspect that you don’t actually think that you necessarily have to be in one of those two specific epistemic environments and just misspoke.
In the followup, I admit you don’t have to choose as long as you don’t give up on untangling the question. So like I’m implying that there’s multiple options such as:
Try to figure it out (NinetyThree rejects this, “not really open to persuasion”)
Adopt the carnist side (I think NinetyThree probably broadly does this though likely with exceptions)
Adopt the vegan side (NinetyThree rejects this)
Though I suppose you are right that there are also lots of other nuanced options that I haven’t acknowledged, such as “decide you are uncertain between the sides, and e.g. use utility weights to manage risk while exploiting opportunities”, which isn’t really the same as “try to figure it out”. Not sure if that’s what you mean; another option would be that e.g. I have a broader view of what “try to figure it out” means than you do, or similar (though what really matters for the literal truth of my comment is what NinetyThree’s view is). Or maybe you mean that there are additional sides that could be adopted? (I meant to hint at that possibility with phrasings like “the most common side”, but I suppose that could also be interpreted to just be acknowledging the vegan side.) Or maybe it’s just “all of the above”?
I do genuinely think that there is value in thinking of it as a 2D space of tradeoffs for cheap epistemics <-> strong epistemics and pro animal <-> pro human (realistically one could also put in the environment too, and realistically on the cheap epistemics side it’s probably anti human <-> anti animal). I agree that my original comment lacked nuance wrt the ways one could exist within that tradeoff, though I am unsure to what extent your objection is about the tradeoff framing vs the nuance in the ways one can exist in it.
In general, committing to any stance as a personal constant (making it a “part of your identity”) is antithetical to truthseeking. It certainly imposes a constraint on truthseeking that makes the problem harder.
But, if you share that stance with someone else, you won’t tend to see it. You’ll just see the correctness of your own stance. Being able to correctly reason around this is a hard-mode problem.
While you can speak about specific spectra of stances (vegan-carnist, and others), in reality, there are multiple spectra in play at any given time (the one I see the most is liberal-radical but there are also others). This leads to truthseeking constraints or in a word biases in cross-cutting ways. This seems to play out in the interplay of all the different people committing all the different sins called out in the OP. I think this is not unique to veganism at all and in fact plays out in virtually all similar spaces and contests. You always have to average out the ideological bias from a community.
There is no such thing as an epistemic environment that has not declared war on you. There can be no peace. This is hard mode and I consider the OP here to be another restatement of the generally accepted principle that this kind of discussion is hard mode / mindkilling.
This is why I’m highly skeptical of claims like the comment-grandparent. Everyone is lying, and it doesn’t matter much whether the lying is intentional or implicit. There is no such thing as a political ideology that is fully truth-seeking. That is a contradiction in terms. There is also no such thing as a fully neutral political ideology or political/ethical stance; everyone has a point of view. I’m not sure whether the vegans are in fact worse than the carnists on this. One side certainly has a significant amount of status-quo bias behind it. The same can be said about many other things.
Just to be explicitly, my point of view as it relates to these issues is vegan/radical, I became vegan roughly at the same time I became aware of rationalism but for other reasons, and when I went vegan the requirement for b12 supplementation was commonly discussed (outside the rationalist community, which was not very widely vegan at the time) mostly because “you get it from supplements that get it from dirt” was the stock counterargument to “but no b12 when vegan.”
I don’t think this is right, or at least it doesn’t hit the crux.
People on a vegan diet should in a utopian society be the ones who are most interested in truth about the nutritional challenges on a vegan diet, as they are the ones who face the consequences. The fact that they aren’t reflects the fact that they are not optimizing for living their own life well, but instead for convincing others of veganism.
Marketing like this is the simplest (and thus most common?) way for ideologies to keep themselves alive. However, it’s not clear that it’s the only option. If an ideology is excellent at truthseeking, then this would presumably by itself be a reason to adopt it, as it would have a lot of potential to make you stronger.
Rationalism is in theory supposed to be this. In practice, rationalism kind of sucks at it, I think because it’s hard and people aren’t funding it much and maybe also all the best rationalists start working in AI safety or something.
There’s some complications to this story though. As you say, there is no such thing as an epistemic environment that has not (in a metaphorical sense) declared war on you. Everyone does marketing, and so everyone perceives full truthseeking as a threat, and so you’d make a lot of enemies through doing this. A compromise would be a conspiracy which does truthseeking in private to avoid punishment, but such a conspiracy is hardly an ideology, and also it feels pretty suspicious to organize at scale.
My impression is that while vegans are not truth-seekings, carnists are also not truth-seeking. This includes by making ag-gag laws, putting pictures of free animals on packages containing factory farmed animal flesh, denying that animals have feelings and can experience pain using nonsense arguments, hiding information about factory farming from children, etc..
So I guess the question is whether you prefer being in an epistemic environment that has declared war on humans or an epistemic environment that has declared war on farm animals. And I suppose as a human it’s easier to be in the latter, as long as you don’t mind hiring people to torture animals for your pleasure.
Edit/clarification: I don’t mean that you can’t choose to figure it out in more detail, only that if you do give up on figuring it out in more detail, you’re more constrained.
Well, yes, that’s called marketing, it’s like the antithesis of truth seeking.
The cure to hypocrisy is not more hypocrisy and lies but of opposite sign: that’s the kind of naive first order consequentialism that leads people to cynicism instead. The fundamental problem is that out of fear that people would reasonably go for a compromise (e.g. keep eating meat but less of it and only from free range animals) some vegans decide to just pile on the arguments, true or false, until anyone who believed them all and had a minimum of sense would go vegan instantly. But that completely denies the agency and moral ability of everyone else, and underestimates the possibility that you may be wrong. As a general rule, “my moral calculus is correct, therefore I will skew the data so that everyone else comes to the same conclusions as me” is a bad principle.
I agree in principle, though someone has to actually create a community of people who track the truth in order for this to be effective and not be outcompeted by other communities. When working individually, people don’t have the resources to untangle the deception in society due to its scale.
There’s a pretty significant difference here in my view—“carnists” are not a coherent group, not an ideology, they do not have an agenda (unless we’re talking about some very specific industry lobbyists who no doubt exist). They’re just people who don’t care and eat meat.
Ideological vegans (i.e. not people who just happen to not eat meat, but don’t really care either way) are a very specific ideological group, and especially if we qualify them like in this post (“EA vegan advocates”), we can talk about their collective traits.
TBF, the meat/dairy/egg industries are specific groups of people who work pretty hard to increase animal product consumption, and are much better resourced than vegan advocates. I can understand why animal advocacy would develop some pretty aggressive norms in the face of that, and for that reason I consider it kind of besides the point to go after them in the wider world. It would basically be demanding unilateral disarmament from the weaker side.
But the fact that the wider world is so confused there’s no point in pushing for truth is the point. EA needs to stay better than that, and part of that is deescalating the arms race when you’re inside its boundaries.
Agree with this. I mean I’m definitely not pushing back against your claims, I’m just pointing out the problem seems bigger than commonly understood.
Could you expand on why you think that it makes a significant difference?
E.g. if the goal is to model what epistemic distortions you might face, or to suggests directions of change for fewer distortions, then coherence is only of limited concern (a coherent group might be easier to change, but on the other hand it might also more easily coordinate to oppose change).
I’m not sure why you say they are not an ideology, at least under my model of ideology that I have developed for other purposes, they fit the definition (i.e. I believe carnism involves a set of correlated beliefs about life and society that fit together).
Also not sure what you mean by carnists not having an agenda, in my experience most carnists have an agenda of wanting to eat lots of cheap delicious animal flesh.
Could you clarify who you are defining as carnists?
I tend to think of ideology as a continuum, rather than a strict binary. Like people tend to have varying degrees of belief and trust in the sides of a conflict, and various unique factors influencing their views, and this leads to a lot of shades of nuance that can’t really be captured with a binary carnist/not-carnist definition.
But I think there are still some correlated beliefs where you could e.g. take their first principal component as an operationalization of carnism. Some beliefs that might go into this, many of which I have encountered from carnists:
“People should be allowed to freely choose whether they want to eat factory-farmed meat or not.”
“Animals cannot suffer in any way that matters.”
“One should take an evolutionary perspective and realize that factory farming is actually good for animals. After all, if not for humans putting a lot of effort into farming them, they wouldn’t even exist at their current population levels.”
“People who do enough good things out of their own charity deserve to eat animals without concerning themselves with the moral implications.”
“People who design packaging for animal products ought to make it look aesthetically pleasing and comfortable.”
“It is offensive and unreasonable for people to claim that meat-eating is a horribly harmful habit.”
“Animals are made to be used by humans.”
“Consuming animal products like meat or milk is healthier than being strictly vegan.”
One could make a defense of some of the statements. For instance Elizabeth has made a to-me convincing defense of the last statement. I don’t think this is a bug in the definition of carnism, it just shows that some carnist beliefs can be good and true. One ought to be able to admit that ideology is real and matters while also being able to recognize that it’s not a black-and-white issue.
While I agree that there are notable differences between “vegans” and “carnists” in terms of group dynamics, I do not think that necessarily disagrees with the idea that carnists are anti-truthseeking.
It seems untrue that because carnists are not an organized physical group that has meetings and such, they are thereby incapable of having shared norms or ideas/memes. I think in some contexts it can make sense/be useful to refer to a group of people who are not coherent in the sense of explicitly “working together” or having shared newletters based around a subject or whatever. In some cases, it can make sense to refer to those people’s ideologies/norms.
Also, I disagree with the idea that carnists are inherently neutral on the subject of animals/meat. That is, they don’t “not care”. In general, they actively want to eat meat and would be against things that would stop this. That’s not “not caring”; it is “having an agenda”, just not one that opposes the current status quo. The fact that being pro-meat and “okay with factory farming” is the more dominant stance/assumed default in our current status quo doesn’t mean that it isn’t a legitimate position/belief that people could be said to hold. There are many examples of other memetic environments throughout history where the assumed default may not have looked like a “stance” or an “agenda” to the people who were used to it, but nonetheless represented certain ideological claims.
I don’t think something only becomes an “ideology” when it disagrees with the current dominant cultural ideas; some things that are culturally common and baked into people from birth can still absolutely be “ideology” in the way I am used to using it. If we disagree on that, then perhaps we could use a different term?
If nothing else, carnists share the ideological assumption that “eating meat is okay”. In practice, they often also share ideas about the surrounding philosophical questions and attitudes. I don’t think it is beyond the pale to say that they could share norms around truth-seeking as it relates to these questions and attitudes. It feels unnecessarily dismissive and perhaps implicitly status quoist to assume that: as a dominant, implicit meme of our culture “carnism” must be “neutral” and therefore does not come with/correlate with any norms surrounding how people think about/process questions related to animals/meat.
Carnism comes with as much ideology as veganism even if people aren’t as explicit in presenting it or if the typical carnist hasn’t put as much thought into it.
I do not really have any experience advocating publicly for veganism and I wouldn’t really know about which specific espistemic failure modes are common among carnists for these sorts of conversations, but I have seen plenty of people bend themselves out of shape persevering their own comfort and status quo, so it really doesn’t seem like a stretch to imagine that epistemic maladies may tend to present among carnists when the question of veganism comes up.
For one thing, I have personally seen carnists respond in intentionally hostile ways towards vegans/vegan messaging on several occasions. Partially this is because they see it as a threat to their ideas or their way of life or partially this is because veganism is a designated punching bag that you’re allowed to insult in a lot of places. Often times, these attacks draw on shared ideas about veganism/animals/morality that are common between “carnists”.
So, while I agree that there are very different group dynamics, I don’t think it makes sense to say that vegans hold ideologies and are capable of exhibiting certain epistemic behaviors, but that carnists, by virtue of not being a sufficiently coherent collection of individuals, could not have the same labels applied to them.
(edit: idk if i endorse comments like this, i was really stressed from the things being said in the comments here)
People who fund the torture of animals are not a coherent group, not an ideology, they do not have an agenda. People who don’t fund the torture of animals are a coherent group, an ideology, they have an agenda.
People who keep other people enslaved are not a coherent group, not an ideology, they do not have an agenda. People who seek to end slavery are a coherent group, an ideology, they have an agenda.
Normal people like me are not a coherent group, not an ideology, we do not have an agenda.
Atypicals like you are a coherent group, an ideology, you have an agenda.
maybe a future, better, post-singularity version of yourself will understand how terribly alienating statements like this are. maybe that person will see just how out-of-frame you have kept the suffering of other life forms to think this way.
my agenda is that of a confused, tortured animal, crying out in pain. it is, at most, a convulsive reaction. in desperation, it grasps onto ‘instrumental rationality’ like the paws of one being pulled into rotating blades flail around them, looking for a hold to force themself back.
and it finds nothing, the suffering persists until the day the world ends.
Jesus christ, chill. I don’t like playing into the meme of “that’s why people don’t like vegans”, but that’s exactly why.
And posting something insane followed by an edit of “idk if I endorse comments like this” has got to be the most online rationalist thing ever.
i do endorse the actual meaning of what i wrote. it is not “insane” and to call it that is callous. i added the edit because i wasn’t sure if expressions of stress are productive. i think there’s a case to be made that they are when it clearly stems from some ongoing discursive pattern, so that others can know the pain that their words cause. especially given this hostile reaction.
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deleted the rest of this. there’s no point for two alignment researchers to be fighting over oldworld violence. i hope this will make sense looking back.
The line about “carnists” strikes me as outgroup homogeneity, conceptual gerrymandering, The Worst Argument In The World—call it what you want, but it should be something rationalists should have antibodies against.
Specifically, equivocating between “carnists [meat industry lobbyists]” and “carnists [EA non-vegans]” seems to me like known anti-truthseeking behavior.
So the question, as I see you posing, is whether NinetyThree prefers being in an epistemic environment with people who care about epistemic truthseeking (EA non-vegans) or with people for whom your best defense is that they’re no worse than meat industry lobbyists.
I think my point would be empirically supported; we can try set up a survey and run a factor analysis if you doubt it.
Edit: just to clarify I’m not gonna run the factor analysis unless someone who doubts the validity of the category comes by to cooperate, because I’m busy and expect there’d be a lot of goalpost moving that I don’t have time to deal with if I did it without pre-approval from someone who doesn’t buy it.
Ok I’m getting downvoted to oblivion because of this, so let me clarify:
If, like NinetyThree, you decide to give up on untangling the question for yourself because of all the lying (“I would describe my epistemic status as “not really open to persuasion”″), then you still have to make decisions, which in practice means following some side in the conflict, and the most common side is the carnist side which has the problems I mention.
I don’t want to be in a situation where I have to give up on untangling the question (see my top-level comment proposing a research community), but if I’m being honest I can’t exactly say that it’s invalid for NinetyThree to do so.
I understood NinetyThree to be talking about vegans lying about issues of health (as Elizabeth was also focusing on), not about the facts of animal suffering. If you agree with the arguments on the animal cruelty side and your uncertainty is focused on the health effects on you of a vegan diet vs your current one (which you have 1st hand data on), it doesn’t really matter what the meat industry is saying as that wasn’t a factor in the first place
Maybe. I pattern-matched it this way because I had previously been discussing psychological sex differences with Ninety-Three on discord, where he adopted the HBD views on them due to a perception that psychologists were biased, but he wasn’t interested in making arguments or in me doing followup studies to test it. So I assumed a similar thing was going on here with respect to eating animals.
I don’t agree with the downvoting. The first paragraph sounds to me like a not only fair, but good point. The first sentence in the second paragraph doesn’t really seem true to me though.
Does it also not seem true in the context of my followup clarification?
Yeah, it still doesn’t seem true even given the followup clarification.
Well, depending on what you actually mean. In the original excerpt, you’re saying that the question is whether you want to be in epistemic environment A or epistemic environment B. But in your followup clarification, you talk about the need to decide on something. I agree that you do need to decide on something (~carnist or vegan). I don’t think that means you necessarily have to be in one of those two epistemic environments you mention. But I also charitably suspect that you don’t actually think that you necessarily have to be in one of those two specific epistemic environments and just misspoke.
In the followup, I admit you don’t have to choose as long as you don’t give up on untangling the question. So like I’m implying that there’s multiple options such as:
Try to figure it out (NinetyThree rejects this, “not really open to persuasion”)
Adopt the carnist side (I think NinetyThree probably broadly does this though likely with exceptions)
Adopt the vegan side (NinetyThree rejects this)
Though I suppose you are right that there are also lots of other nuanced options that I haven’t acknowledged, such as “decide you are uncertain between the sides, and e.g. use utility weights to manage risk while exploiting opportunities”, which isn’t really the same as “try to figure it out”. Not sure if that’s what you mean; another option would be that e.g. I have a broader view of what “try to figure it out” means than you do, or similar (though what really matters for the literal truth of my comment is what NinetyThree’s view is). Or maybe you mean that there are additional sides that could be adopted? (I meant to hint at that possibility with phrasings like “the most common side”, but I suppose that could also be interpreted to just be acknowledging the vegan side.) Or maybe it’s just “all of the above”?
I do genuinely think that there is value in thinking of it as a 2D space of tradeoffs for cheap epistemics <-> strong epistemics and pro animal <-> pro human (realistically one could also put in the environment too, and realistically on the cheap epistemics side it’s probably anti human <-> anti animal). I agree that my original comment lacked nuance wrt the ways one could exist within that tradeoff, though I am unsure to what extent your objection is about the tradeoff framing vs the nuance in the ways one can exist in it.
Ah, I kinda overlooked this. My bad.
In general my position is now that:
I’m a little confused.
I think what you wrote is probably fine.
Think you probably could have been more clear about what you initially wrote.
Think it’s totally fine to not be perfect in what you originally wrote.
Feel pretty charitable. I’m sure that what you truly meant is something pretty reasonable.
Think downvoters were probably triggered and were being uncharitable.
Am not interested in spending much more time on this.
In general, committing to any stance as a personal constant (making it a “part of your identity”) is antithetical to truthseeking. It certainly imposes a constraint on truthseeking that makes the problem harder.
But, if you share that stance with someone else, you won’t tend to see it. You’ll just see the correctness of your own stance. Being able to correctly reason around this is a hard-mode problem.
While you can speak about specific spectra of stances (vegan-carnist, and others), in reality, there are multiple spectra in play at any given time (the one I see the most is liberal-radical but there are also others). This leads to truthseeking constraints or in a word biases in cross-cutting ways. This seems to play out in the interplay of all the different people committing all the different sins called out in the OP. I think this is not unique to veganism at all and in fact plays out in virtually all similar spaces and contests. You always have to average out the ideological bias from a community.
There is no such thing as an epistemic environment that has not declared war on you. There can be no peace. This is hard mode and I consider the OP here to be another restatement of the generally accepted principle that this kind of discussion is hard mode / mindkilling.
This is why I’m highly skeptical of claims like the comment-grandparent. Everyone is lying, and it doesn’t matter much whether the lying is intentional or implicit. There is no such thing as a political ideology that is fully truth-seeking. That is a contradiction in terms. There is also no such thing as a fully neutral political ideology or political/ethical stance; everyone has a point of view. I’m not sure whether the vegans are in fact worse than the carnists on this. One side certainly has a significant amount of status-quo bias behind it. The same can be said about many other things.
Just to be explicitly, my point of view as it relates to these issues is vegan/radical, I became vegan roughly at the same time I became aware of rationalism but for other reasons, and when I went vegan the requirement for b12 supplementation was commonly discussed (outside the rationalist community, which was not very widely vegan at the time) mostly because “you get it from supplements that get it from dirt” was the stock counterargument to “but no b12 when vegan.”
I don’t think this is right, or at least it doesn’t hit the crux.
People on a vegan diet should in a utopian society be the ones who are most interested in truth about the nutritional challenges on a vegan diet, as they are the ones who face the consequences. The fact that they aren’t reflects the fact that they are not optimizing for living their own life well, but instead for convincing others of veganism.
Marketing like this is the simplest (and thus most common?) way for ideologies to keep themselves alive. However, it’s not clear that it’s the only option. If an ideology is excellent at truthseeking, then this would presumably by itself be a reason to adopt it, as it would have a lot of potential to make you stronger.
Rationalism is in theory supposed to be this. In practice, rationalism kind of sucks at it, I think because it’s hard and people aren’t funding it much and maybe also all the best rationalists start working in AI safety or something.
There’s some complications to this story though. As you say, there is no such thing as an epistemic environment that has not (in a metaphorical sense) declared war on you. Everyone does marketing, and so everyone perceives full truthseeking as a threat, and so you’d make a lot of enemies through doing this. A compromise would be a conspiracy which does truthseeking in private to avoid punishment, but such a conspiracy is hardly an ideology, and also it feels pretty suspicious to organize at scale.