Hi Elizabeth! Thanks for reaching out. Excuse my delay in response, and the length of this reply. It felt important to communicate the nuances in my views (and the anecdotal experiences, which in our past exchanges might not have come through.
you’d rather nutritional difficulties with veganism weren’t discussed, even when the discussion is truthful and focuses on mitigations within veganism
That’s not my position. To the extent the naive transition accounts are representative of what’s going on in rat/EA spheres, some intervention that reduces the number of transitions that are naive (while fixing the number of transitions) would be a Pareto-improvement. And an intervention that reduces the number of transitions that are naive, and decreases way less the number of transitions, would also be net-positive.
My worry, though, is that signaling out veganism for this is not the most efficient way to achieve this. I hypothesize that
Naive transitions are more correlated with social dynamics about insuficient self-care not exclusive (nor close to exclusive) to veganism in rat/EA spheres.
Independently of that, a message focused on veganism will turn out net-negative, because of the following aggregated collateral effects:
Decreasing the number of overall transitions too much. Or better said, incentivizing some thought-patterns and dynamics upstream of that decrease, that have even worse consequences than the decrease itself.
Relatedly, incentivizing a community that’s more prone to ignoring important parts of the holistic picture when that goes to the selfish benefit of individuals. (And that’s certainly something we don’t want to happen around the people taking important ethical decisions for the future.)
More on 2. below (On framing), but let me get into 1. first.
I was very surprised to hear those anecdotal stories of naive transitions, because in my anecdotal experience across many different vegan and animalist spaces, serious talk about nutrition, and a constant reminder to put health first, has been an ever-present norm. And, at the same time, a recognition that turning vegan, even with all these nutrition subtleties, is not nearly as difficult as people imagine it (certainly in part due to selection effects).[1]
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 this is also psychologically linked to the rational justification I’ve heard from some x-riskers: their work is just too important to care about anything else. Obviously that backfires.
Now, even given the above, it is coherent to believe that, despite this common root, veganism in particular is such a prominent example, with so many negative consequences, that a straightforward intervention pushing the motto that veganism presents tradeoffs and can be difficult or not for everyone, is net-positive. After all, this is kind of a quantitative question. I claim that’s not the case, and it’s related to collective blind spots we shouldn’t ignore, which brings me back to 2.
On framing:
One thing that might be happening here, is that we’re speaking at different simulacra levels. I’m not claiming you’re saying anything untrue, just that the consequences of pushing this line in this way are probably net-negative.
Now, I understand the benefits of adopting the general adoption of the policy “state transparently the true facts you know, and that other people seem not to know”. Unfortunately, my impression is this community is not yet in a position in which implementing this policy will be viable or generally beneficial for many topics. And indeed, on some priors it makes sense that a community suddenly receiving an influx of external attention will have to slowly work up to that, if it is at all possible.[2]
I believe one of the topics is veganism, because of the strong intuitive aversion individuals across the board feel towards changing their diet for ethical reasons (and, I claim, this aversion is irrational and should be counteracted and scrutinized accordingly). In my anecdotal experience (of many years discussing veganism with vegans and non-vegans), an almost-total fraction of the justifications for not transitioning to a vegan diet easily fall to “Is that your true rejection?” (even if the best route is not always to mention that explicitly, of course).
I expected to see that change in EA circles. Unfortunately, that has not been my anecdotal experience. The animalist part of EA, so to speak, is very strongly concentrated in a few individuals (or better said, sub-communities), who have taken this issue seriously enough, and many times are even directly working on animal welfare. But when you move slightly away from that space into neighboring sub-communities (say, a randomly sampled alignment researcher), defensive motivated reasoning on the topic seems to go up again.[3]
And there are instances in which I’ve obtained direct evidence that individuals in decisive positions are not reasoning correctly about the tradeoffs involved. As an example, consider that some offices / programs / retreats don’t offer (as the free lunch for their members) a completely vegetarian menu (let alone vegan).
From the outside, I don’t understand how this decision can make sense for any rat/EA space. Even if it were true that veganism requires some more efforts, it would be because of the complications related to health tracking or food planning. Those are not present in this case. The food is served, for free. Organizers can put the extra effort to make sure that the offer is nutritionally complete each day, or across the week (as also happens with omnivore menus). But whoever is not vegan need not worry that hard about all that, since they’ll be eating omnivore outside the office. And whoever’s vegan should worry about that, just because they’re vegan. Having meat in this menu doesn’t directly improve anyone’s health.
And the few times I’ve seen this “from the inside”, that is, I’ve heard organisers’ reasoning about this decision, they really didn’t seem to have meaningful arguments, and appealed to a general notion of individual freedom which I think is not a good ethical proxy, and if translated to other domains would lead to bad “not taking side-effects seriously”, or “not taking the dangers of social dynamics seriously”.
I have, of course, heard the obvious argument (although not from organizers) that x-risk research is so important that, if having a vegan menu might slightly turn off a single valuable researcher, it’s not worth it. This of course resonates a lot with the optimizy mindspace referenced above. And here I’ll just say that I don’t think this is the kind of desperate community we want to build. That this can just the same turn off ethically conscious people, who we do want in our community. And that this mindset is very correlated with the “unconstrained obsession with talent” that has led the community to being partly captured by ML community, weird epistemic areas incentivizing bad elitism and power dynamics, etc. In simpler words, I think this blows past some healthy and necessary deontological fences (more in the next section).
I also cannot help but feel suspicious that these practices are so comfortably presented as the default, and alarmed (in some precautionary sense) that grant money is being used to finance something as horrible, and vast, and openly debated, as animal exploitation (more in the next section).
Let me also note that I don’t agree that your posts (and the ensuing comments and conversations) were focused on mitigations within veganism, due to their framing. Even if you truthfully discussed these mitigations, the general tone skeptical of the viability and importance of veganism was very clear, and it is obvious which message most people will get out of this post. I’d love to live in a world were I can trust your readers to Bayesian update and ignore framings, but it’d be self-delusional to think this will be the case in this situation, given the obvious strong pulls everyone has towards motivated ignorance of veganism (and the evidence I’ve obtained about that also inside this community), and how the framing / headliners / first-order updates from your posts resonate with those repeated one-dimensional rationalizations.
A background ethical disagreement:
One thing that might also be happening is just that we disagree ethically. After all, if I didn’t care at all about veganism (or related individual ethical practices), I wouldn’t care about how many vegans are lost, as long as naive vegans are decrease (ignoring second-order effects on community epistemics, as discussed above). And indeed, it is popular amongst some rationalists to doubt the possibility that animals can suffer, something I strongly ethically disagree with.[4]
But I’m not sure that’s the main driver of our disagreement. If we disagree about how hard to push veganism, or how deeply to consider the negative consequences of having a less vegan community, it might be because of a disagreement about where the utilitarianism / deontology line should be in this topic. (After all, you could very strongly worry about animal suffering, and nonetheless bet absolutely all your efforts on x-risk research, because of being a naive Expected Value Maximizer.) Or equivalently, about how bad the consequences for community dynamics can be, and whether it’s better to resort to rule utilitarianism on this one.
As an extreme example, I very strongly feel like financing the worst moral disaster of current times so that “a few more x-risk researchers are not slightly put off from working in our office” is way past the deontological failsafes. As a less extreme example, I strongly feel like sending a message that will predictably be integrated by most people as “I can put even less mental weight on this one ethical issue that sometimes slightly annoyed me” also is. And in both cases, especially because of what they signal, and the kind of community they incentivize.
The right way to discuss these challenges:
As must be clear, I’d be very happy with treating the root causes, related to the internalized optimizy and obsessive mindset, instead of the single symptom of naive vegan transitions. This is an enormously complex issue, but I a prior think available health and wellbeing resources, and their continuous establishment as a resource that should be used by most people (as an easy route to having that part of life under control and not spiraling, similar to how “food on weekdays” is solved for us by our employers), would provide the individualization and nuance that these problems require. Something like “hey, from now on, those of you that follow any slightly unconventional diet, or have this other thing, or suffer that other thing, can go talk to these people, and they will help you do blah” would sound pretty good, and possibly a welfare multiplier for some people. It certainly sounds better to me than just broadcasting the message “veganism is hard, consider the tradeoffs and either search for help, or drop veganism”. Additionally, “hard” is very variable, and the nuance of it and your observations will get lost.
Something like running small group analytics on some naive vegans as an excuse for them to start thinking more seriously about their health? Yes, nice! That’s individualized, that’s immediately useful. But additionally extracting some low-confidence conclusions and using them to broadcast the above message (or a message that will get first-order approximated to that by 75%) seems negative.
It feels weird for me to think about solutions to this community problem, since in my other spheres it hasn’t arisen. But thinking about which things that happened in those spheres could have contributed positively, the first things that come to mind are: talks / events / activities about sports and health (or even explicitly nutrition), memes about nutrition (post-ironic B12 slander, etc.), communal environments where this knowledge is likely to be shared (like literal cooking).
I also observe that the more individualized approach might work better for a more close-knit community, and that might be especially unattainable now. Maybe there’s some other way to bootstrap this habit. Relatedly, I’d feel safer about some more oversight with regards to some health practices in general (especially drugs, and especially newcomers). But I observe that anything looking like policing is complicated.
In any event, I’m no expert in community health, and my separate point stands that I think broadcasting that message is net-negative right now, because of the obvious bottom-line people would extract from it.
Thanks for reading all of that. Next weeks are busy so I might again take a bit long to reply. Nonetheless, I saw in your last post that you’re thinking about vegan epistemics. Just in case you’d find that valuable, I’d be willing to discuss those thoughts as well, or provide opinions on concrete topics, or just talk about my experience. But of course, no problem if you don’t.
And, to be fair, I have even observed this health consciousness in the few EAs I know who are very vocal about their veganism and animalism (they are few because inside EA I’ve been closer to AI safety than animal welfare).
I could also note that this situation is slightly different from a straightforward “these people believe this false fact”. More accurately, the truth value of this fact hasn’t been brought to their attention, because of a complex web of learned emotional and mental habits. I’m talking here about focusing on those habits, as opposed to the practice of veganism in particular.
It’s obviously hard to draw the boundary of motivated reasoning. I have observed pretty clear-cut cases, but let me just leave it at “these intelligent people are not thinking about / taking seriously / maintaining up to their epistemic standards this aspect of their life as much as they should according to some of their own stated preferences or revealed preferences (and as clearly they are able to)”.
Due to my views on consciousness and moral antirealism, I think deciding which physical systems count as suffering is an ethical choice (equivalent to saying “I care about this process not happening”), and not a purely descriptive one.
Hi Martin- I really appreciate the thought and detail that went into this post, it was well worth the wait.
I have a lot of things I want to clarify, but suspect it just doesn’t make sense to do so in this format. One option would be to try out LW’s new Dialogue format. However I’d need to start this week, and it sounds like that’s not an option for you. If this is a thing where money can help, I have some grant money and a good dialogue would be a good use of it, but I understand it probably can’t. In which case hopefully you’ll see my next post when things clear up and we can talk then.
I’d be down for a Dialogue, but indeed I cannot engage in that too soon (maybe only mid October).
But as explained in my message, I remain slightly worried about the memetic effect of your possibly publishing posts within the same framing. I completely understand you have no need to delay any publication, but because of that I’d be especially interested in ensuring that views like mine are correctly represented, and thus answering your clarifying questions seems important.
Would something like “you write the list of clarifying questions, and I write up my first-pass responses by this Saturday (even if not as deep as a Dialogue)” work for you? Completely understandable if it doesn’t.
Also, I’m interested in hearing where you think the disagreement lies (out of the possibilities I’ve outlined above).
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.
Hi Elizabeth! Thanks for reaching out. Excuse my delay in response, and the length of this reply. It felt important to communicate the nuances in my views (and the anecdotal experiences, which in our past exchanges might not have come through.
That’s not my position. To the extent the naive transition accounts are representative of what’s going on in rat/EA spheres, some intervention that reduces the number of transitions that are naive (while fixing the number of transitions) would be a Pareto-improvement. And an intervention that reduces the number of transitions that are naive, and decreases way less the number of transitions, would also be net-positive.
My worry, though, is that signaling out veganism for this is not the most efficient way to achieve this. I hypothesize that
Naive transitions are more correlated with social dynamics about insuficient self-care not exclusive (nor close to exclusive) to veganism in rat/EA spheres.
Independently of that, a message focused on veganism will turn out net-negative, because of the following aggregated collateral effects:
Decreasing the number of overall transitions too much. Or better said, incentivizing some thought-patterns and dynamics upstream of that decrease, that have even worse consequences than the decrease itself.
Relatedly, incentivizing a community that’s more prone to ignoring important parts of the holistic picture when that goes to the selfish benefit of individuals. (And that’s certainly something we don’t want to happen around the people taking important ethical decisions for the future.)
More on 2. below (On framing), but let me get into 1. first.
I was very surprised to hear those anecdotal stories of naive transitions, because in my anecdotal experience across many different vegan and animalist spaces, serious talk about nutrition, and a constant reminder to put health first, has been an ever-present norm. And, at the same time, a recognition that turning vegan, even with all these nutrition subtleties, is not nearly as difficult as people imagine it (certainly in part due to selection effects).[1]
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 this is also psychologically linked to the rational justification I’ve heard from some x-riskers: their work is just too important to care about anything else. Obviously that backfires.
Now, even given the above, it is coherent to believe that, despite this common root, veganism in particular is such a prominent example, with so many negative consequences, that a straightforward intervention pushing the motto that veganism presents tradeoffs and can be difficult or not for everyone, is net-positive. After all, this is kind of a quantitative question. I claim that’s not the case, and it’s related to collective blind spots we shouldn’t ignore, which brings me back to 2.
On framing:
One thing that might be happening here, is that we’re speaking at different simulacra levels. I’m not claiming you’re saying anything untrue, just that the consequences of pushing this line in this way are probably net-negative.
Now, I understand the benefits of adopting the general adoption of the policy “state transparently the true facts you know, and that other people seem not to know”. Unfortunately, my impression is this community is not yet in a position in which implementing this policy will be viable or generally beneficial for many topics. And indeed, on some priors it makes sense that a community suddenly receiving an influx of external attention will have to slowly work up to that, if it is at all possible.[2]
I believe one of the topics is veganism, because of the strong intuitive aversion individuals across the board feel towards changing their diet for ethical reasons (and, I claim, this aversion is irrational and should be counteracted and scrutinized accordingly). In my anecdotal experience (of many years discussing veganism with vegans and non-vegans), an almost-total fraction of the justifications for not transitioning to a vegan diet easily fall to “Is that your true rejection?” (even if the best route is not always to mention that explicitly, of course).
I expected to see that change in EA circles. Unfortunately, that has not been my anecdotal experience. The animalist part of EA, so to speak, is very strongly concentrated in a few individuals (or better said, sub-communities), who have taken this issue seriously enough, and many times are even directly working on animal welfare. But when you move slightly away from that space into neighboring sub-communities (say, a randomly sampled alignment researcher), defensive motivated reasoning on the topic seems to go up again.[3]
And there are instances in which I’ve obtained direct evidence that individuals in decisive positions are not reasoning correctly about the tradeoffs involved. As an example, consider that some offices / programs / retreats don’t offer (as the free lunch for their members) a completely vegetarian menu (let alone vegan).
From the outside, I don’t understand how this decision can make sense for any rat/EA space. Even if it were true that veganism requires some more efforts, it would be because of the complications related to health tracking or food planning. Those are not present in this case. The food is served, for free. Organizers can put the extra effort to make sure that the offer is nutritionally complete each day, or across the week (as also happens with omnivore menus). But whoever is not vegan need not worry that hard about all that, since they’ll be eating omnivore outside the office. And whoever’s vegan should worry about that, just because they’re vegan. Having meat in this menu doesn’t directly improve anyone’s health.
And the few times I’ve seen this “from the inside”, that is, I’ve heard organisers’ reasoning about this decision, they really didn’t seem to have meaningful arguments, and appealed to a general notion of individual freedom which I think is not a good ethical proxy, and if translated to other domains would lead to bad “not taking side-effects seriously”, or “not taking the dangers of social dynamics seriously”.
I have, of course, heard the obvious argument (although not from organizers) that x-risk research is so important that, if having a vegan menu might slightly turn off a single valuable researcher, it’s not worth it. This of course resonates a lot with the optimizy mindspace referenced above. And here I’ll just say that I don’t think this is the kind of desperate community we want to build. That this can just the same turn off ethically conscious people, who we do want in our community. And that this mindset is very correlated with the “unconstrained obsession with talent” that has led the community to being partly captured by ML community, weird epistemic areas incentivizing bad elitism and power dynamics, etc. In simpler words, I think this blows past some healthy and necessary deontological fences (more in the next section).
I also cannot help but feel suspicious that these practices are so comfortably presented as the default, and alarmed (in some precautionary sense) that grant money is being used to finance something as horrible, and vast, and openly debated, as animal exploitation (more in the next section).
Let me also note that I don’t agree that your posts (and the ensuing comments and conversations) were focused on mitigations within veganism, due to their framing. Even if you truthfully discussed these mitigations, the general tone skeptical of the viability and importance of veganism was very clear, and it is obvious which message most people will get out of this post. I’d love to live in a world were I can trust your readers to Bayesian update and ignore framings, but it’d be self-delusional to think this will be the case in this situation, given the obvious strong pulls everyone has towards motivated ignorance of veganism (and the evidence I’ve obtained about that also inside this community), and how the framing / headliners / first-order updates from your posts resonate with those repeated one-dimensional rationalizations.
A background ethical disagreement:
One thing that might also be happening is just that we disagree ethically. After all, if I didn’t care at all about veganism (or related individual ethical practices), I wouldn’t care about how many vegans are lost, as long as naive vegans are decrease (ignoring second-order effects on community epistemics, as discussed above). And indeed, it is popular amongst some rationalists to doubt the possibility that animals can suffer, something I strongly ethically disagree with.[4]
But I’m not sure that’s the main driver of our disagreement. If we disagree about how hard to push veganism, or how deeply to consider the negative consequences of having a less vegan community, it might be because of a disagreement about where the utilitarianism / deontology line should be in this topic. (After all, you could very strongly worry about animal suffering, and nonetheless bet absolutely all your efforts on x-risk research, because of being a naive Expected Value Maximizer.) Or equivalently, about how bad the consequences for community dynamics can be, and whether it’s better to resort to rule utilitarianism on this one.
As an extreme example, I very strongly feel like financing the worst moral disaster of current times so that “a few more x-risk researchers are not slightly put off from working in our office” is way past the deontological failsafes. As a less extreme example, I strongly feel like sending a message that will predictably be integrated by most people as “I can put even less mental weight on this one ethical issue that sometimes slightly annoyed me” also is. And in both cases, especially because of what they signal, and the kind of community they incentivize.
The right way to discuss these challenges:
As must be clear, I’d be very happy with treating the root causes, related to the internalized optimizy and obsessive mindset, instead of the single symptom of naive vegan transitions. This is an enormously complex issue, but I a prior think available health and wellbeing resources, and their continuous establishment as a resource that should be used by most people (as an easy route to having that part of life under control and not spiraling, similar to how “food on weekdays” is solved for us by our employers), would provide the individualization and nuance that these problems require. Something like “hey, from now on, those of you that follow any slightly unconventional diet, or have this other thing, or suffer that other thing, can go talk to these people, and they will help you do blah” would sound pretty good, and possibly a welfare multiplier for some people. It certainly sounds better to me than just broadcasting the message “veganism is hard, consider the tradeoffs and either search for help, or drop veganism”. Additionally, “hard” is very variable, and the nuance of it and your observations will get lost.
Something like running small group analytics on some naive vegans as an excuse for them to start thinking more seriously about their health? Yes, nice! That’s individualized, that’s immediately useful. But additionally extracting some low-confidence conclusions and using them to broadcast the above message (or a message that will get first-order approximated to that by 75%) seems negative.
It feels weird for me to think about solutions to this community problem, since in my other spheres it hasn’t arisen. But thinking about which things that happened in those spheres could have contributed positively, the first things that come to mind are: talks / events / activities about sports and health (or even explicitly nutrition), memes about nutrition (post-ironic B12 slander, etc.), communal environments where this knowledge is likely to be shared (like literal cooking).
I also observe that the more individualized approach might work better for a more close-knit community, and that might be especially unattainable now. Maybe there’s some other way to bootstrap this habit. Relatedly, I’d feel safer about some more oversight with regards to some health practices in general (especially drugs, and especially newcomers). But I observe that anything looking like policing is complicated.
In any event, I’m no expert in community health, and my separate point stands that I think broadcasting that message is net-negative right now, because of the obvious bottom-line people would extract from it.
Thanks for reading all of that. Next weeks are busy so I might again take a bit long to reply. Nonetheless, I saw in your last post that you’re thinking about vegan epistemics. Just in case you’d find that valuable, I’d be willing to discuss those thoughts as well, or provide opinions on concrete topics, or just talk about my experience. But of course, no problem if you don’t.
And, to be fair, I have even observed this health consciousness in the few EAs I know who are very vocal about their veganism and animalism (they are few because inside EA I’ve been closer to AI safety than animal welfare).
I could also note that this situation is slightly different from a straightforward “these people believe this false fact”. More accurately, the truth value of this fact hasn’t been brought to their attention, because of a complex web of learned emotional and mental habits. I’m talking here about focusing on those habits, as opposed to the practice of veganism in particular.
It’s obviously hard to draw the boundary of motivated reasoning. I have observed pretty clear-cut cases, but let me just leave it at “these intelligent people are not thinking about / taking seriously / maintaining up to their epistemic standards this aspect of their life as much as they should according to some of their own stated preferences or revealed preferences (and as clearly they are able to)”.
Due to my views on consciousness and moral antirealism, I think deciding which physical systems count as suffering is an ethical choice (equivalent to saying “I care about this process not happening”), and not a purely descriptive one.
Hi Martin- I really appreciate the thought and detail that went into this post, it was well worth the wait.
I have a lot of things I want to clarify, but suspect it just doesn’t make sense to do so in this format. One option would be to try out LW’s new Dialogue format. However I’d need to start this week, and it sounds like that’s not an option for you. If this is a thing where money can help, I have some grant money and a good dialogue would be a good use of it, but I understand it probably can’t. In which case hopefully you’ll see my next post when things clear up and we can talk then.
Thank your for your words.
I’d be down for a Dialogue, but indeed I cannot engage in that too soon (maybe only mid October).
But as explained in my message, I remain slightly worried about the memetic effect of your possibly publishing posts within the same framing. I completely understand you have no need to delay any publication, but because of that I’d be especially interested in ensuring that views like mine are correctly represented, and thus answering your clarifying questions seems important.
Would something like “you write the list of clarifying questions, and I write up my first-pass responses by this Saturday (even if not as deep as a Dialogue)” work for you? Completely understandable if it doesn’t.
Also, I’m interested in hearing where you think the disagreement lies (out of the possibilities I’ve outlined above).
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.