Hey! My name’s Jared and I’m a senior in high school. I guess I started being a “rationalist” a couple months ago (or a bit more) when I started looking at the list of cognitive biases on Wikipedia. I’ve tried very hard to mitigate almost all of them as much as I can and I plan on furthering myself down this path. I’ve read a lot of the sequences on here and I like to read a lot of rationalwiki and I also try to get information from many different sources.
As for my views, I am first a rationalist and make sure I am open to changing my mind about ANYTHING because reality doesn’t change on your ability to stomach it.
As for labels, I’m vegan (or at least strict vegetarian), anarcho-communist (something around the range of left libertarian), agnostic (not in the sense that I’m on the fence but that I’m sure that we don’t know—so militant agnostic lol).
My main first question is, since you guy are rationalists, why aren’t you vegetarian or vegan? The percentage that is vegetarian on sites like lesswrong and rationalwiki is hardly higher than the public. I would think considering you are rationalists you would understand vegetarian or veganism and go for it for sure. Am I missing something because this actually blows my mind? If you oppose it, I really wanna hear some arguments because I’ve never heard a single even somewhat convincing argument and I’ve argued with oh so many people about it. Obviously goal of veganism is to lessen suffering not end it etc.
Hi Jared,
Your question about vegetarianism is an interesting one, and I’ll give a couple of responses because I’m not sure exactly what direction you’re coming from.
I think there’s a strong rationalist argument in favor of limiting consumption of meat, especially red meat, on both health and environmental grounds. These issues get more mixed when you look at moderate consumption of chicken or fish. Fish especially is the best available source of healthy fats, so leaving it out entirely is a big trade-off, and the environmental impact of fishing varies a great deal by species, wild vs. farmed, and even the fishing method. Veganism gives relatively small environmental gains over vegetarianism, and is generally considered a loss in terms of health.
When you look at animal suffering, things get a lot more speculative. Clearly you can’t treat a chicken’s suffering the same as a human’s, but how many chickens does it take to be equivalent to a human? At what point is a chicken’s life not worth living? This quickly bogs down in questions of the repugnant conclusion, a standard paradox in utilitarianism. Although I have seen no thorough analysis of the topic, my sense is that
1) Scaling of moral value is probably more-than-linear with brain mass (that is, you are worth more than the ~300 chickens it would take to equal your gray matter) but I can’t be much more precise than that
2) Most of the world’s neurons are in wild inverterbrates: http://reflectivedisequilibrium.blogspot.com/2013/09/how-is-brain-mass-distributed-among.html which argues against focusing specially on domesticated vertebrates
3) Effort expended to reduce animal suffering is largely self-contained—that is, if you choose not to eat a chicken, you probably reduce the number of factory-farmed chickens by about one, with no longer-term effects. Effort to help humans, on the other hand, often has a difficult-to-estimate multiplier from follow-on effects. See here for more on this argument:
http://globalprioritiesproject.org/2014/06/human-and-animal-interventions/
The upshot is that when you make any significant investment in animal welfare, including vegetarianism and especially veganism, you should consider the opportunity costs. If it makes your life more difficult and reduces the amount of good you can do in other ways, it may not be worth it.
Personally, I used to be a pescetarian and would consider doing so again, depending on the people around me. Trying to do it in my current circumstances would cause more hassle than I think it’s worth (having to ask people for separate meals, not participating in group activities, etc). If you know a lot of other vegetarians, there may be no social cost or even some social benefit. But don’t assume that’s the case for everyone.
Thank you for the polite and formal response! I understand what you’re saying about the chicken and fish. Pescetarian is much better than just eating all the red meat you can get your hands on.
When you look at animal suffering, things get a lot more speculative. Clearly you can’t treat a chicken’s suffering the same as a human’s, but how many chickens does it take to be equivalent to a human? At what point is a chicken’s life not worth living? This quickly bogs down in questions of the repugnant conclusion, a standard paradox in utilitarianism. Although I have seen no thorough analysis of the topic, my sense is that 1) Scaling of moral value is probably more-than-linear with brain mass (that is, you are worth more than the ~300 chickens it would take to equal your gray matter) but I can’t be much more precise than that 2) Most of the world’s neurons are in wild inverterbrates: http://reflectivedisequilibrium.blogspot.com/2013/09/how-is-brain-mass-distributed-among.html which argues against focusing specially on domesticated vertebrates 3) Effort expended to reduce animal suffering is largely self-contained—that is, if you choose not to eat a chicken, you probably reduce the number of factory-farmed chickens by about one, with no longer-term effects. Effort to help humans, on the other hand, often has a difficult-to-estimate multiplier from follow-on effects. See here for more on this argument: http://globalprioritiesproject.org/2014/06/human-and-animal-interventions/
Now I understand what you’re saying about the animal suffering, but I’d like to add some things. If you don’t eat many chickens or many cows than you can save more than one because you’re consistently abstaining from meat consumption. Its also not about making the long term effects on your own; its contributing so that something like factory farming can be changed into something more sustainable, more environmentally friendly, and more addressing animal concerns once more people boycott meat. Even if you were to choose to compare gray matter, you have to compare that its the animal’s death vs the human’s quite minor pleasure that could have been just as pleasurable eating/doing something else.
If it makes your life more difficult and reduces the amount of good you can do in other ways, it may not be worth it.
For you, does it really make life more difficult? From my personal experience and hearing about others, the only hard part is the changing process. Its only difficult in certain situations because of society, and the point of boycotting is to change the society so its easier as well the other benefits.
Hi Jared! I don’t remember the statistics, but here are a few hypotheses:
There is usually a distribution of a few “hardcore” members, and many lukewarm ones. In a statistics that includes all of them, the behavior of the hardcore members can easily disappear.
Many people eat some kind of paleo diet, which (if we ignore the animal suffering, and look at health benefits of eating lot of vegetables) is almost as good as vegetarianism. Possibly, a paleo person eating meat with mostly unprocessed vegetables has a more healthy diet than a vegan who gets most of their food cooked. For some people, vegetarianism or veganism may seem low status, and paleo high status (simply because it is relatively new).
Or maybe it’s just that food doesn’t get as high priority as e.g. education, making money, or exercise, so people focus their attention on the other things.
Or, most obviously—just because people know something is the right thing to do, it doesn’t mean they will automatically start doing it! Not even if they identify as “rationalists”.
In my bubble of local hardcore aspiring rationalists, vegetarianism or veganism is almost the norm. (Generally, I would suspect that the hardcore ones go either vegetarian or vegan or paleo.)
There is usually a distribution of a few “hardcore” members, and many lukewarm ones. In a statistics that includes all of them, the behavior of the hardcore members can easily disappear.
Could you explain this more in depth; I’m failing to grasp this completely. I apologize.
if we ignore the animal suffering
Why would we do that?
Or maybe it’s just that food doesn’t get as high priority as e.g. education, making money, or exercise, so people focus their attention on the other things.
I guess, but you can usually focus on multiple things at once, and most people have certain causes they ascribe to.
Or, most obviously—just because people know something is the right thing to do, it doesn’t mean they will automatically start doing it! Not even if they identify as “rationalists”.
Really? Why not though? All humans, excluding sociopaths, have empathy. I’ll admit I see this a bit though.
In my bubble of local hardcore aspiring rationalists, vegetarianism or veganism is almost the norm.
Oh, hmm I guess I just missed it.
Thank you for your response and your hypotheses! These responses are great compared to the usual yelling match … anywhere else.
In general, imagine that you have a website about “X” (whether X is rationality or StarCraft; the mechanism is the same). Quite likely, a distribution of people who visit the website (let’s assume the days of highest glory of Less Wrong) will be something like this:
10 people who are quite obsessed about “X” (people who dramatically changed their lives after doing some strategic thinking; or people who participate successfully in StarCraft competitions).
100 people who are moderately interested in “X” (people who read some parts of the Sequences and perhaps changed a habit or two; or people who once in a while play StarCraft with their friends).
1000 people who are merely interested in “X” as a topic of conversation (people who read Dan Ariely and Malcolm Gladwell, and mostly read Less Wrong to find cool things they could mention in a debate on similar topics; people who sometimes watch a StarCraft video on YouTube, but actually didn’t play it for months).
Now you are doing a survey about whether the readers of the website somehow differ from the general population. I would expect that those 10 obsessed ones do, but those 1000 recreational readers don’t. If you put them both in the same category, the obsessed ones make only 1% in the category, so whatever are their special traits, they will disappear in the whole.
For example (completely made up numbers here), let’s assume that an average person has a 1% probability of becoming a vegetarian, those 1000 recreational LW readers also have a 1% probability, the 100 moderate LW readers have probability 2%, and the hardcore ones have a probability of 20% (that would be a huge difference compared with the average population). Add them all together, you have 1110 people, of whom 0.01 × 1000 + 0.02 × 100 + 0.2 × 10 = 14 vegetarians; that means 1.26% of the LW readers—almost the same as the 1% of the general population.
This is further complicated by the fact that you can more easily select professional StarCraft players (e.g. by asking whether they participated in some competition, and what is their ranking), but it’s more difficult to tell who is a “hardcore rationalist”. Just spending a lot of time debating on LW (which pretty much guarantees high karma), or having read the whole Sequences doesn’t necessarily mean anything. But this now feels like talking about “true Scotsmen”. Also, there are various status reasons why people may or may not want to identify as “rationalists”.
just because people know something is the right thing to do, it doesn’t mean they will automatically start doing it!
Really? Why not though?
That’s kinda one of the central points of this website. Humans are not automatically strategic, because evolution merely made us execute adaptations, some of which were designed to impress other people rather than to actually change things.
People are stupid, including the smartest ones. Including you and me. Research this thoroughly and cry in despair… then realize you have something to protect, stand up and become stronger. (If these links are new for you, you may want to read the LW Sequences.)
Just look at yourself—are you doing the literally best thing you could do (with the resources you have)? If not, how large is the difference between what you are actually doing, and the literally best thing you could do? For myself, the answer to this is quite depressing. Considering this, why should I expect other people to do better?
In my bubble of local
I guess I just missed it.
Statistically you are quite likely to be at a different part of the planet, so it’s quite easy to miss my local group. ;) Maybe finding a LW meetup nearest to your place could help you find someone like that. (But even within the meetup I would expect that only a few people really try to improve their reasoning, and most are there mostly for social reasons. That’s okay, as long as you can identify the hardcore ones.)
These responses are great compared to the usual yelling match … anywhere else.
Or, most obviously—just because people know something is the right thing to do, it doesn’t mean they will automatically start doing it! Not even if they identify as “rationalists”.
If my worldview was, “animals are inferior and their suffering is irrelevant”.
Wouldn’t that be an irrational ‘axiom’ to start from though? Maybe the inferior part works, but you can’t just say their suffering is irrelevant. If you go off the basis that humans matter just because than that’s a case of special pleading saying humans are better because they are human. There suffering may be less but it isn’t irrelevant because they can suffer.
Hey! My name’s Jared and I’m a senior in high school. I guess I started being a “rationalist” a couple months ago (or a bit more) when I started looking at the list of cognitive biases on Wikipedia. I’ve tried very hard to mitigate almost all of them as much as I can and I plan on furthering myself down this path. I’ve read a lot of the sequences on here and I like to read a lot of rationalwiki and I also try to get information from many different sources.
As for my views, I am first a rationalist and make sure I am open to changing my mind about ANYTHING because reality doesn’t change on your ability to stomach it.
As for labels, I’m vegan (or at least strict vegetarian), anarcho-communist (something around the range of left libertarian), agnostic (not in the sense that I’m on the fence but that I’m sure that we don’t know—so militant agnostic lol).
My main first question is, since you guy are rationalists, why aren’t you vegetarian or vegan? The percentage that is vegetarian on sites like lesswrong and rationalwiki is hardly higher than the public. I would think considering you are rationalists you would understand vegetarian or veganism and go for it for sure. Am I missing something because this actually blows my mind? If you oppose it, I really wanna hear some arguments because I’ve never heard a single even somewhat convincing argument and I’ve argued with oh so many people about it. Obviously goal of veganism is to lessen suffering not end it etc.
But yeah hey!
Hi Jared, Your question about vegetarianism is an interesting one, and I’ll give a couple of responses because I’m not sure exactly what direction you’re coming from.
I think there’s a strong rationalist argument in favor of limiting consumption of meat, especially red meat, on both health and environmental grounds. These issues get more mixed when you look at moderate consumption of chicken or fish. Fish especially is the best available source of healthy fats, so leaving it out entirely is a big trade-off, and the environmental impact of fishing varies a great deal by species, wild vs. farmed, and even the fishing method. Veganism gives relatively small environmental gains over vegetarianism, and is generally considered a loss in terms of health.
When you look at animal suffering, things get a lot more speculative. Clearly you can’t treat a chicken’s suffering the same as a human’s, but how many chickens does it take to be equivalent to a human? At what point is a chicken’s life not worth living? This quickly bogs down in questions of the repugnant conclusion, a standard paradox in utilitarianism. Although I have seen no thorough analysis of the topic, my sense is that 1) Scaling of moral value is probably more-than-linear with brain mass (that is, you are worth more than the ~300 chickens it would take to equal your gray matter) but I can’t be much more precise than that 2) Most of the world’s neurons are in wild inverterbrates: http://reflectivedisequilibrium.blogspot.com/2013/09/how-is-brain-mass-distributed-among.html which argues against focusing specially on domesticated vertebrates 3) Effort expended to reduce animal suffering is largely self-contained—that is, if you choose not to eat a chicken, you probably reduce the number of factory-farmed chickens by about one, with no longer-term effects. Effort to help humans, on the other hand, often has a difficult-to-estimate multiplier from follow-on effects. See here for more on this argument: http://globalprioritiesproject.org/2014/06/human-and-animal-interventions/
The upshot is that when you make any significant investment in animal welfare, including vegetarianism and especially veganism, you should consider the opportunity costs. If it makes your life more difficult and reduces the amount of good you can do in other ways, it may not be worth it.
Personally, I used to be a pescetarian and would consider doing so again, depending on the people around me. Trying to do it in my current circumstances would cause more hassle than I think it’s worth (having to ask people for separate meals, not participating in group activities, etc). If you know a lot of other vegetarians, there may be no social cost or even some social benefit. But don’t assume that’s the case for everyone.
Thank you for the polite and formal response! I understand what you’re saying about the chicken and fish. Pescetarian is much better than just eating all the red meat you can get your hands on.
Now I understand what you’re saying about the animal suffering, but I’d like to add some things. If you don’t eat many chickens or many cows than you can save more than one because you’re consistently abstaining from meat consumption. Its also not about making the long term effects on your own; its contributing so that something like factory farming can be changed into something more sustainable, more environmentally friendly, and more addressing animal concerns once more people boycott meat. Even if you were to choose to compare gray matter, you have to compare that its the animal’s death vs the human’s quite minor pleasure that could have been just as pleasurable eating/doing something else.
For you, does it really make life more difficult? From my personal experience and hearing about others, the only hard part is the changing process. Its only difficult in certain situations because of society, and the point of boycotting is to change the society so its easier as well the other benefits.
Thanks again for responding!
It’s sustainable in the sense that we can keep doing it for a very long time.
This may be more what you were talking about.
Hi Jared! I don’t remember the statistics, but here are a few hypotheses:
There is usually a distribution of a few “hardcore” members, and many lukewarm ones. In a statistics that includes all of them, the behavior of the hardcore members can easily disappear.
Many people eat some kind of paleo diet, which (if we ignore the animal suffering, and look at health benefits of eating lot of vegetables) is almost as good as vegetarianism. Possibly, a paleo person eating meat with mostly unprocessed vegetables has a more healthy diet than a vegan who gets most of their food cooked. For some people, vegetarianism or veganism may seem low status, and paleo high status (simply because it is relatively new).
Or maybe it’s just that food doesn’t get as high priority as e.g. education, making money, or exercise, so people focus their attention on the other things.
Or, most obviously—just because people know something is the right thing to do, it doesn’t mean they will automatically start doing it! Not even if they identify as “rationalists”.
In my bubble of local hardcore aspiring rationalists, vegetarianism or veganism is almost the norm. (Generally, I would suspect that the hardcore ones go either vegetarian or vegan or paleo.)
Could you explain this more in depth; I’m failing to grasp this completely. I apologize.
Why would we do that?
I guess, but you can usually focus on multiple things at once, and most people have certain causes they ascribe to.
Really? Why not though? All humans, excluding sociopaths, have empathy. I’ll admit I see this a bit though.
Oh, hmm I guess I just missed it.
Thank you for your response and your hypotheses! These responses are great compared to the usual yelling match … anywhere else.
In general, imagine that you have a website about “X” (whether X is rationality or StarCraft; the mechanism is the same). Quite likely, a distribution of people who visit the website (let’s assume the days of highest glory of Less Wrong) will be something like this:
10 people who are quite obsessed about “X” (people who dramatically changed their lives after doing some strategic thinking; or people who participate successfully in StarCraft competitions).
100 people who are moderately interested in “X” (people who read some parts of the Sequences and perhaps changed a habit or two; or people who once in a while play StarCraft with their friends).
1000 people who are merely interested in “X” as a topic of conversation (people who read Dan Ariely and Malcolm Gladwell, and mostly read Less Wrong to find cool things they could mention in a debate on similar topics; people who sometimes watch a StarCraft video on YouTube, but actually didn’t play it for months).
Now you are doing a survey about whether the readers of the website somehow differ from the general population. I would expect that those 10 obsessed ones do, but those 1000 recreational readers don’t. If you put them both in the same category, the obsessed ones make only 1% in the category, so whatever are their special traits, they will disappear in the whole.
For example (completely made up numbers here), let’s assume that an average person has a 1% probability of becoming a vegetarian, those 1000 recreational LW readers also have a 1% probability, the 100 moderate LW readers have probability 2%, and the hardcore ones have a probability of 20% (that would be a huge difference compared with the average population). Add them all together, you have 1110 people, of whom 0.01 × 1000 + 0.02 × 100 + 0.2 × 10 = 14 vegetarians; that means 1.26% of the LW readers—almost the same as the 1% of the general population.
This is further complicated by the fact that you can more easily select professional StarCraft players (e.g. by asking whether they participated in some competition, and what is their ranking), but it’s more difficult to tell who is a “hardcore rationalist”. Just spending a lot of time debating on LW (which pretty much guarantees high karma), or having read the whole Sequences doesn’t necessarily mean anything. But this now feels like talking about “true Scotsmen”. Also, there are various status reasons why people may or may not want to identify as “rationalists”.
That’s kinda one of the central points of this website. Humans are not automatically strategic, because evolution merely made us execute adaptations, some of which were designed to impress other people rather than to actually change things.
People are stupid, including the smartest ones. Including you and me. Research this thoroughly and cry in despair… then realize you have something to protect, stand up and become stronger. (If these links are new for you, you may want to read the LW Sequences.)
Just look at yourself—are you doing the literally best thing you could do (with the resources you have)? If not, how large is the difference between what you are actually doing, and the literally best thing you could do? For myself, the answer to this is quite depressing. Considering this, why should I expect other people to do better?
Statistically you are quite likely to be at a different part of the planet, so it’s quite easy to miss my local group. ;) Maybe finding a LW meetup nearest to your place could help you find someone like that. (But even within the meetup I would expect that only a few people really try to improve their reasoning, and most are there mostly for social reasons. That’s okay, as long as you can identify the hardcore ones.)
Oh, I remember this feeling when I found LW!
Thank you for such a clear response and the additional info! :) I have read most of the sequences but some of those links are new to me.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2p5/humans_are_not_automatically_strategic/
Welcome!
If my worldview was, “animals are inferior and their suffering is irrelevant”.
Wouldn’t that be an irrational ‘axiom’ to start from though? Maybe the inferior part works, but you can’t just say their suffering is irrelevant. If you go off the basis that humans matter just because than that’s a case of special pleading saying humans are better because they are human. There suffering may be less but it isn’t irrelevant because they can suffer.
Why?
Do humans matter? Why do humans matter? I think you might be leaping a conclusion or a few here.