One thing that struck me reading your post was the number of times I wanted to say “no, you”. Issues where you see mistreatment of vegans or bad epistemics from omnivores, and I see the symmetric bad behavior from vegans[1]. My guess is we’re both accurately describing things we’ve seen, and we’re both activated and protective after engaging in a lot of interactions where the other party was acting in bad faith. And those situations just take a lot of time to wind backwards, even though I think we’ve both done admirable jobs of it here.
I few things I thing are important and could possibly be addressed in a quick response:
You’re worried my posts will lead more people to eat meat. AFAIK the practical effects have been dozens of vegans getting tested (with some portion of those starting vegan supplements), and one and a half people saying the posts were a component leading them to consider adding meat in once or twice a week (and those came much later, not as a result of the testing posts). People are more likely to report supplements than diet changes, but I also think my posts deserve more responsibility for the tests and supplements than for the dietary changes. It would mean a great deal to me to have this empirical fact either explicitly disagreed with or acknowledged.
But you’re right my posts probably weren’t optimal for maximizing the number of vegans in the world. Probably because I wasn’t optimizing for that, because I don’t think it’s as important as you or other vegan advocates do. I consider this a direct consequence of EA vegan advocacy’s failure to provide basic nutritional education to the vegans it created. If you don’t want omnivores running your vegan education, provide it yourself.
You bring up EA/rat optimization drive as the root cause of nutritional issues. I think your description is confused but there is some core vibe I agree with, and I agree people would be better off relaxing that cosntraint on themselves. But I have no idea how to fix it. Meanwhile, for most existing naive vegans there’s a $20 bill on the floor, in the form of some simple tests and supplements. I do write postsalong the lines of “chill out” and maybe they’re even helpful, but they have nowhere near the surgical problem-solving capacity of “hey here is a major problem you can fix with a pill.”
And yes, I do talk about $20 bills for omnivores (or justunrelated to diet) when I find them, but most of the problems with omnivorism are more complicated or involve giving up things people like, which is just much harder.
E.g. you see all the places not offering vegan meals. I see vegan meals at Lightcone and Constellation. EAG serves only vegan meals (even when the caterer is unequipped for this). My impression is CEA’s general policy is vegan-only. The upcoming Manifest conference explicitly promises vegetarian and vegan food. Atlas Fellowship workshops’ chefs would technically serve meat, but you could tell their focus was on the vegan food.
You see omnivores as having bad epistemics and not giving their real reasons. I see the omnivores I knew in 2016 who were actively pursuing information about animal suffering and reducitarianism/ameliatarianism, until bad vegan advocates ground that curiosity down. Advocates who wouldn’t acknowledge the existence of trade offs, or differences in ability to be vegan, or wouldn’t let the discussion be about anything except veganism and vegetarianism even when vegetarianism was higher net suffering than the complicated thing the omnivore was considering.
As I understand it, our main disagreements seem to be:
How many vegans, or more accurately how much general seriousness towards animal ethics, will be lost as a result of your kind of interventions.
How bad it is for this to happen.
Let me start with 1.
I also think my posts deserve more responsibility for the tests and supplements than for the dietary changes. It would mean a great deal to me to have this empirical fact either explicitly disagreed with or acknowledged.
While I acknowledge these observed benefits, I do want to challenge that these observations are nearly enough to be sure the effects are net-positive, because of the following: The negative effects of the kind “everyone treats veganism less seriously, and as a result less people transition or are vocal about it” will be much more diffused, hard-to-track, and not-observed, than the positive effects of the kind “this concrete individual started vegan supplements”. Indeed, I fear you might be down-playing how easy it is for people to arrive (more or less consciously) at these rationalized positions, and that’s of course based on my anecdotal experience both inside and outside this community. But I am even more worried about the harder-to-pin-down communal effects, “tone setting”, and the steering of very important sub-areas of the EA community into sub-optimal ethical seriousness (according to me), which is too swayed by intellectual fuzzies, instead of actual utilons.
Let me now turn to 2.
But you’re right my posts probably weren’t optimal for maximizing the number of vegans in the world.
Of course, I too don’t optimize for “number of vegans in the world”, but just a complex mixture including that as a small part. And as hinted above, if I care about that parameter it’s mainly because of the effects I think it has in the community. I think it’s a symptom (and also an especially actionable lever) of more general “not thinking about ethics / Sincerity in the ways that are correct”. As conscious as the members of this community try to be about many things, I think it’s especially easy (through social dynamics) to turn a blind eye on this, and I think that’s been happening too much.
If you don’t want omnivores running your vegan education, provide it yourself.
My experience is that vegans usually just have enough trouble fighting their way through people’s cognitive dissonance, so that doing “public stunts” remarking health aspects is not the best ethical use of their public resources, and actually focusing on animal ethics is more positive. I do agree, of course, that in private communications (or publicly available places which are not the focus of stunts), the health measures recommended when transitioning should be explicited.
And, to be honest, that’s what I’ve always experienced in private vegan circles, as I’ve mentioned before. For example, people are so conscious of B12, Iron and Omega-3 that they’ve just become a post-ironic meme. But it seems from your messages that this hasn’t been the case in some important private spaces of the community in the past. Unfortunately, even if that is the case, I don’t think it switches the balance so that “public interventions” start to be the ethically most positive. I think the most efficient way to repair those damages are still private interventions.
Meanwhile, for most existing naive vegans there’s a $20 bill on the floor
And I think the most ethically positive way of picking them up is not public interventions about veganism that have other negative side-effects (that I claim are larger), but a mix of private interventions about veganism (enacted through a more effective net of support and help, for example by having specialists available to decrease the activation barrier of getting these important health actions started), and public interventions about health and care more in general. I’d be super excited to see things like that happen, but of course I know they’re easier said than done, and I’m no expert in community health.
I see the omnivores I knew in 2016 who were actively pursuing information about animal suffering and reducitarianism/ameliatarianism, until bad vegan advocates ground that curiosity down.
Here I can only say “Wow, the difference in our reported experiences is big, and I don’t know exactly how to account for that”. My experience has been that I / friends have always had to “plant the idea” of animal exploitation maybe even being sometimes questionable. When someone comes at you having read stuff online about veganism, and interested in animal ethics, they have basically already gone past the first shallow arguments, they’re already taking animal ethics seriously, and you just counsel them on practical matters (like indeed health). And not only have I found “we have always had to bootstrap this curiosity” (on people who we knew actually don’t want to kill babies, so we just were presenting information or new perspectives to them), but also that vegan advocates correctly reward their way through the omnivores’ well-meant advances (like reducitarianism) (while still stating, of course, that veganism is the moral baseline for them whenever it is attainable, which in my experience has been almost always).
E.g. you see all the places not offering vegan meals. I see vegan meals at Lightcone and Constellation.
To be clear, I wasn’t complaining about places not serving vegan food. I was complaining about places serving meat. In my first long comment I give some thoughts on why I find this net-negative (“From the outside, I don’t understand...”).
I hypothesize that the distributional shift is due to properties of the social dynamics and individual mindspace that rat/EA circles inadvertently encourage, especially on wide-eyed newcomers. The same optimizing mindset leading to “burn-out / overwork / too much Huel / exotic unregulated diets / not taking care of your image / dangerous drug practices linked to work” around these spaces seems to me to be one of the central causes of these naive transitions.
I think I have a better understanding of what you mean by this now. I think you’re right that it’s present, but wrong that it’s the major cause of poor diet among vegans.
You describe vegan education happening informally in vegan-heavy spaces. EA is one of very few places where you can have a high density of vegans, but not have real vegan elders around to pass on the metis. I think that broke the chain of education, and left a lot of people bereft. And this is invisible to people in the established movement because if they were in those spaces, the spaces wouldn’t have that problem.
One reason I think this is that a friend tells me the exact same thing happened in straight edge punk, a movement that does not otherwise have a lot in common with EA. Another is that compulsive optimization doesn’t lead people to neglect something as simple as iron.
If the chain of education had been continued I think there would still be some problems caused by the optimization drive, and those would indeed have a fair amount in common with EA omnivore problems.
Just want to quickly flag that, based on my anecdotal experience, the vegan communities I was thinking of in which nutrition was thoroughly discussed didn’t involve learning from vegan elders either. They were mostly students, and had learned about nutrition from the internet, books, memes and visiting professionals, and in fact I recall them as being more heavy on the nutrition talk than the older vegans I’ve met (even if the elders also supplemented etc.). I feel like the adequate seriousness with which they treated nutrition came more from a place of positive and optimistic “let’s do things the right way” (to be a good example, to maintain some important boundaries that will allow us to help sustainably, etc.).
Another is that compulsive optimization doesn’t lead people to neglect something as simple as iron.
I disagree, I think unfortunately this and worse can happen in some environments and mental spaces.
One thing that struck me reading your post was the number of times I wanted to say “no, you”. Issues where you see mistreatment of vegans or bad epistemics from omnivores, and I see the symmetric bad behavior from vegans[1]. My guess is we’re both accurately describing things we’ve seen, and we’re both activated and protective after engaging in a lot of interactions where the other party was acting in bad faith. And those situations just take a lot of time to wind backwards, even though I think we’ve both done admirable jobs of it here.
I few things I thing are important and could possibly be addressed in a quick response:
You’re worried my posts will lead more people to eat meat. AFAIK the practical effects have been dozens of vegans getting tested (with some portion of those starting vegan supplements), and one and a half people saying the posts were a component leading them to consider adding meat in once or twice a week (and those came much later, not as a result of the testing posts). People are more likely to report supplements than diet changes, but I also think my posts deserve more responsibility for the tests and supplements than for the dietary changes. It would mean a great deal to me to have this empirical fact either explicitly disagreed with or acknowledged.
But you’re right my posts probably weren’t optimal for maximizing the number of vegans in the world. Probably because I wasn’t optimizing for that, because I don’t think it’s as important as you or other vegan advocates do. I consider this a direct consequence of EA vegan advocacy’s failure to provide basic nutritional education to the vegans it created. If you don’t want omnivores running your vegan education, provide it yourself.
You bring up EA/rat optimization drive as the root cause of nutritional issues. I think your description is confused but there is some core vibe I agree with, and I agree people would be better off relaxing that cosntraint on themselves. But I have no idea how to fix it. Meanwhile, for most existing naive vegans there’s a $20 bill on the floor, in the form of some simple tests and supplements. I do write posts along the lines of “chill out” and maybe they’re even helpful, but they have nowhere near the surgical problem-solving capacity of “hey here is a major problem you can fix with a pill.”
And yes, I do talk about $20 bills for omnivores (or just unrelated to diet) when I find them, but most of the problems with omnivorism are more complicated or involve giving up things people like, which is just much harder.
E.g. you see all the places not offering vegan meals. I see vegan meals at Lightcone and Constellation. EAG serves only vegan meals (even when the caterer is unequipped for this). My impression is CEA’s general policy is vegan-only. The upcoming Manifest conference explicitly promises vegetarian and vegan food. Atlas Fellowship workshops’ chefs would technically serve meat, but you could tell their focus was on the vegan food.
You see omnivores as having bad epistemics and not giving their real reasons. I see the omnivores I knew in 2016 who were actively pursuing information about animal suffering and reducitarianism/ameliatarianism, until bad vegan advocates ground that curiosity down. Advocates who wouldn’t acknowledge the existence of trade offs, or differences in ability to be vegan, or wouldn’t let the discussion be about anything except veganism and vegetarianism even when vegetarianism was higher net suffering than the complicated thing the omnivore was considering.
Thank you, and sorry again for my delay!
As I understand it, our main disagreements seem to be:
How many vegans, or more accurately how much general seriousness towards animal ethics, will be lost as a result of your kind of interventions.
How bad it is for this to happen.
Let me start with 1.
While I acknowledge these observed benefits, I do want to challenge that these observations are nearly enough to be sure the effects are net-positive, because of the following: The negative effects of the kind “everyone treats veganism less seriously, and as a result less people transition or are vocal about it” will be much more diffused, hard-to-track, and not-observed, than the positive effects of the kind “this concrete individual started vegan supplements”. Indeed, I fear you might be down-playing how easy it is for people to arrive (more or less consciously) at these rationalized positions, and that’s of course based on my anecdotal experience both inside and outside this community. But I am even more worried about the harder-to-pin-down communal effects, “tone setting”, and the steering of very important sub-areas of the EA community into sub-optimal ethical seriousness (according to me), which is too swayed by intellectual fuzzies, instead of actual utilons.
Let me now turn to 2.
Of course, I too don’t optimize for “number of vegans in the world”, but just a complex mixture including that as a small part. And as hinted above, if I care about that parameter it’s mainly because of the effects I think it has in the community. I think it’s a symptom (and also an especially actionable lever) of more general “not thinking about ethics / Sincerity in the ways that are correct”. As conscious as the members of this community try to be about many things, I think it’s especially easy (through social dynamics) to turn a blind eye on this, and I think that’s been happening too much.
My experience is that vegans usually just have enough trouble fighting their way through people’s cognitive dissonance, so that doing “public stunts” remarking health aspects is not the best ethical use of their public resources, and actually focusing on animal ethics is more positive. I do agree, of course, that in private communications (or publicly available places which are not the focus of stunts), the health measures recommended when transitioning should be explicited.
And, to be honest, that’s what I’ve always experienced in private vegan circles, as I’ve mentioned before. For example, people are so conscious of B12, Iron and Omega-3 that they’ve just become a post-ironic meme. But it seems from your messages that this hasn’t been the case in some important private spaces of the community in the past. Unfortunately, even if that is the case, I don’t think it switches the balance so that “public interventions” start to be the ethically most positive. I think the most efficient way to repair those damages are still private interventions.
And I think the most ethically positive way of picking them up is not public interventions about veganism that have other negative side-effects (that I claim are larger), but a mix of private interventions about veganism (enacted through a more effective net of support and help, for example by having specialists available to decrease the activation barrier of getting these important health actions started), and public interventions about health and care more in general. I’d be super excited to see things like that happen, but of course I know they’re easier said than done, and I’m no expert in community health.
Here I can only say “Wow, the difference in our reported experiences is big, and I don’t know exactly how to account for that”. My experience has been that I / friends have always had to “plant the idea” of animal exploitation maybe even being sometimes questionable. When someone comes at you having read stuff online about veganism, and interested in animal ethics, they have basically already gone past the first shallow arguments, they’re already taking animal ethics seriously, and you just counsel them on practical matters (like indeed health). And not only have I found “we have always had to bootstrap this curiosity” (on people who we knew actually don’t want to kill babies, so we just were presenting information or new perspectives to them), but also that vegan advocates correctly reward their way through the omnivores’ well-meant advances (like reducitarianism) (while still stating, of course, that veganism is the moral baseline for them whenever it is attainable, which in my experience has been almost always).
To be clear, I wasn’t complaining about places not serving vegan food. I was complaining about places serving meat. In my first long comment I give some thoughts on why I find this net-negative (“From the outside, I don’t understand...”).
I think I have a better understanding of what you mean by this now. I think you’re right that it’s present, but wrong that it’s the major cause of poor diet among vegans.
You describe vegan education happening informally in vegan-heavy spaces. EA is one of very few places where you can have a high density of vegans, but not have real vegan elders around to pass on the metis. I think that broke the chain of education, and left a lot of people bereft. And this is invisible to people in the established movement because if they were in those spaces, the spaces wouldn’t have that problem.
One reason I think this is that a friend tells me the exact same thing happened in straight edge punk, a movement that does not otherwise have a lot in common with EA. Another is that compulsive optimization doesn’t lead people to neglect something as simple as iron.
If the chain of education had been continued I think there would still be some problems caused by the optimization drive, and those would indeed have a fair amount in common with EA omnivore problems.
Just want to quickly flag that, based on my anecdotal experience, the vegan communities I was thinking of in which nutrition was thoroughly discussed didn’t involve learning from vegan elders either. They were mostly students, and had learned about nutrition from the internet, books, memes and visiting professionals, and in fact I recall them as being more heavy on the nutrition talk than the older vegans I’ve met (even if the elders also supplemented etc.). I feel like the adequate seriousness with which they treated nutrition came more from a place of positive and optimistic “let’s do things the right way” (to be a good example, to maintain some important boundaries that will allow us to help sustainably, etc.).
I disagree, I think unfortunately this and worse can happen in some environments and mental spaces.
Thank you. I’d want to investigate more before fully updating, but this does speak directly to my crux, and your position makes more sense now.