When trying to model your disagreement with Martin and his position, I think the best sort of analogy I can think of is that of tobacco companies employing ‘fear, uncertainty, and doubt’ tactics in order to prevent people from seriously considering quitting smoking.
Smokers experience cognitive dissonance when they have strong desires to smoke, coupled with knowledge that smoking is likely not in their best interest. They can supress this cognitive dissonance by changing their behaviour and quitting smoking, or by finding something that introduces sufficient doubt about whether that behavior is in their self interest, the latter being much easier. They only need a marginal amount of uncertainty and doubt in order to suppress the dissonance, because their reasoning is heavily motivated, and that’s all tobacco companies needed to offer.
I think Martin is essentially trying to make a case that your post(s) about veganism are functionally providing sufficient marginal ‘uncertainty and doubt’ for non-vegans to suppress any inclination that they ought to reconsider their behaviour. Even if that isn’t at all the intention of the post(s), or a reasonable takeaway (for meat eaters).
I think this explains much or most of the confusing friction which came up around your posts involving veganism. Vegans have certain intuitions regarding the kinds of things that non-vegans will use to maintain the sufficient ‘uncertainty and doubt’ required to suppress the mental toll of their cognitive dissonance. So even though it was hard to find explicit disagreement, it also felt clear to a lot of people that the framing, rhetorical approach, and data selection entailed in the post(s) would mostly have the effect of readers permitting themselves license to forgo reckoning with the case for veganism.
So I think it’s relevant whether one affords animals a higher magnitude of moral consideration, or internalized an attitude which places animals in the in-group, However I don’t think that accounts for everything here.
Some public endeavors in truth seeking can satisfy the motivated anti-truth seeking of people encountering it. I interpret the top comment of this post as evidence of that.
I’m not sure if I conveyed everything I meant to here, but I think I should make sure the main point here makes sense before expanding.
This seems like an inside view of the feelings that lead to using arguments as soldiers. The motivation is sympathetic and the reasoning is solid enough to weather low-effort attacks, but at the end of the day it is treating arguments as means to ends rather than attempts to discover ground level truth. And Effective Altruism and LessWrong have defined themselves as places where we operate on the object level and evaluate each argument on its own merit, not as a pawn in a war.
The systems can tolerate a certain amount of failure (which is good, because it’s going to happen). But the more people treat arguments as soldiers, the weaker the norm and aspiration to collaboratively truthseek, even when it’s inconvenient, becomes. Do it too much, and the norm will go away entirely.
You might argue that it’s good to destroy high-decoupling norms, because they’re innately bad or because animal welfare is so important it is worth ruining any institution that gets in its way. But AFAICT, the truthseeking norms of EA and LW have been extremely hospitable environments for animal welfare advocates[1], specifically because of the high decoupling. High decoupling is what let people consider the argument that factory farming was a moral atrocity even though it was very inconvenient for them.
So when vegan advocates operate using arguments as soldiers they are not only destroying truthseeking infrastructure that was valuable to many causes. They are destroying infrastructure that has already done a great deal of good for their cause in particular. They are using arguments as soldiers to destroy their own buildings.
relative to baseline. Evidence off the top of my head:
* EAs go vegan, vegetarian, and reducitarian at much higher than baseline rates. This is less true of rationalists, but I believe is still above baseline. I know many people who loathe most vegan advocacy and nonetheless reduce meat, or in rare cases go all the way to vegan, because they could decouple the suffering arguments from the people making them. * EA money has transformed farmed animal welfare and AFAIK is the ~only source of funding for things like insect suffering (couldn’t immediately find numbers, source is “a friend in EA animal welfare told me so”) * AFAIK, veganism’s biggest antagonist on LW and EAF over the last year has been me. And I’ve expressed that antagonism by… let me check my notes… getting dozens of vegans nutrition tested and on (AFAIK) vegan supplements. That project would have gone bigger if I’d been able to find a vegan collaborator, but I couldn’t find one (and I did actively look, although exhausted my options pretty quickly). My main posts in this sequence go out of their way to express deep respect for vegans’ moral convictions and recognize animal suffering as morally relevant.
Maybe there’s a poster who’s actively hostile to animal welfare that I didn’t notice, but if I didn’t hear about them they can’t possibly have done that much.
When trying to model your disagreement with Martin and his position, I think the best sort of analogy I can think of is that of tobacco companies employing ‘fear, uncertainty, and doubt’ tactics in order to prevent people from seriously considering quitting smoking.
Smokers experience cognitive dissonance when they have strong desires to smoke, coupled with knowledge that smoking is likely not in their best interest. They can supress this cognitive dissonance by changing their behaviour and quitting smoking, or by finding something that introduces sufficient doubt about whether that behavior is in their self interest, the latter being much easier. They only need a marginal amount of uncertainty and doubt in order to suppress the dissonance, because their reasoning is heavily motivated, and that’s all tobacco companies needed to offer.
I think Martin is essentially trying to make a case that your post(s) about veganism are functionally providing sufficient marginal ‘uncertainty and doubt’ for non-vegans to suppress any inclination that they ought to reconsider their behaviour. Even if that isn’t at all the intention of the post(s), or a reasonable takeaway (for meat eaters).
I think this explains much or most of the confusing friction which came up around your posts involving veganism. Vegans have certain intuitions regarding the kinds of things that non-vegans will use to maintain the sufficient ‘uncertainty and doubt’ required to suppress the mental toll of their cognitive dissonance. So even though it was hard to find explicit disagreement, it also felt clear to a lot of people that the framing, rhetorical approach, and data selection entailed in the post(s) would mostly have the effect of readers permitting themselves license to forgo reckoning with the case for veganism.
So I think it’s relevant whether one affords animals a higher magnitude of moral consideration, or internalized an attitude which places animals in the in-group, However I don’t think that accounts for everything here.
Some public endeavors in truth seeking can satisfy the motivated anti-truth seeking of people encountering it. I interpret the top comment of this post as evidence of that.
I’m not sure if I conveyed everything I meant to here, but I think I should make sure the main point here makes sense before expanding.
This seems like an inside view of the feelings that lead to using arguments as soldiers. The motivation is sympathetic and the reasoning is solid enough to weather low-effort attacks, but at the end of the day it is treating arguments as means to ends rather than attempts to discover ground level truth. And Effective Altruism and LessWrong have defined themselves as places where we operate on the object level and evaluate each argument on its own merit, not as a pawn in a war.
The systems can tolerate a certain amount of failure (which is good, because it’s going to happen). But the more people treat arguments as soldiers, the weaker the norm and aspiration to collaboratively truthseek, even when it’s inconvenient, becomes. Do it too much, and the norm will go away entirely.
You might argue that it’s good to destroy high-decoupling norms, because they’re innately bad or because animal welfare is so important it is worth ruining any institution that gets in its way. But AFAICT, the truthseeking norms of EA and LW have been extremely hospitable environments for animal welfare advocates[1], specifically because of the high decoupling. High decoupling is what let people consider the argument that factory farming was a moral atrocity even though it was very inconvenient for them.
So when vegan advocates operate using arguments as soldiers they are not only destroying truthseeking infrastructure that was valuable to many causes. They are destroying infrastructure that has already done a great deal of good for their cause in particular. They are using arguments as soldiers to destroy their own buildings.
relative to baseline. Evidence off the top of my head:
* EAs go vegan, vegetarian, and reducitarian at much higher than baseline rates. This is less true of rationalists, but I believe is still above baseline. I know many people who loathe most vegan advocacy and nonetheless reduce meat, or in rare cases go all the way to vegan, because they could decouple the suffering arguments from the people making them.
* EA money has transformed farmed animal welfare and AFAIK is the ~only source of funding for things like insect suffering (couldn’t immediately find numbers, source is “a friend in EA animal welfare told me so”)
* AFAIK, veganism’s biggest antagonist on LW and EAF over the last year has been me. And I’ve expressed that antagonism by… let me check my notes… getting dozens of vegans nutrition tested and on (AFAIK) vegan supplements. That project would have gone bigger if I’d been able to find a vegan collaborator, but I couldn’t find one (and I did actively look, although exhausted my options pretty quickly). My main posts in this sequence go out of their way to express deep respect for vegans’ moral convictions and recognize animal suffering as morally relevant.
Maybe there’s a poster who’s actively hostile to animal welfare that I didn’t notice, but if I didn’t hear about them they can’t possibly have done that much.