I think Elizabeth is correct here, and also that vegan advocates would be considerably more effective with higher epistemic standards:
I think veganism comes with trade-offs, health is one of the axes, and that the health issues are often but not always solvable. This is orthogonal to the moral issue of animal suffering. If I’m right, animal EAs need to change their messaging around vegan diets, and start self-policing misinformation. If I’m wrong, I need to write some retractions and/or shut the hell up.
The post unfortunately suffers for its length, detailed explanations, and rebuttal of many motivated misreadings—many of which can be found in the comments, so it’s unclear whether this helped. It’s also well-researched and cited, well organized, offers cruxes and anticipates objections—vegan advocates are fortunate to have such high-quality criticism.
This could have been a shorter post, which was about rather than engaged in epistemics and advocacy around veganism, with less charitable assumptions. I’d have shared that shorter post more often, but I don’t think it would be better.
I think it might have been important to the process for this post to exist (so you can tell Elizabeth did the work), but for there still to be a shorter post that just gets the point across.
I think Elizabeth is correct here, and also that vegan advocates would be considerably more effective with higher epistemic standards:
The post unfortunately suffers for its length, detailed explanations, and rebuttal of many motivated misreadings—many of which can be found in the comments, so it’s unclear whether this helped. It’s also well-researched and cited, well organized, offers cruxes and anticipates objections—vegan advocates are fortunate to have such high-quality criticism.
This could have been a shorter post, which was about rather than engaged in epistemics and advocacy around veganism, with less charitable assumptions. I’d have shared that shorter post more often, but I don’t think it would be better.
I think it might have been important to the process for this post to exist (so you can tell Elizabeth did the work), but for there still to be a shorter post that just gets the point across.