The other reason vegan advocates should care about the truth is that if you keep lying, people will notice and stop trusting you. Case in point, I am not a vegan and I would describe my epistemic status as “not really open to persuasion” because I long ago noticed exactly the dynamics this post describes and concluded that I would be a fool to believe anything a vegan advocate told me. I could rigorously check every fact presented but that takes forever, I’d rather just keep eating meat and spend my time in an epistemic environment that hasn’t declared war on me.
My impression is that while vegans are not truth-seekings, carnists are also not truth-seeking. This includes by making ag-gag laws, putting pictures of free animals on packages containing factory farmed animal flesh, denying that animals have feelings and can experience pain using nonsense arguments, hiding information about factory farming from children, etc..
So I guess the question is whether you prefer being in an epistemic environment that has declared war on humans or an epistemic environment that has declared war on farm animals. And I suppose as a human it’s easier to be in the latter, as long as you don’t mind hiring people to torture animals for your pleasure.
There’s a pretty significant difference here in my view—“carnists” are not a coherent group, not an ideology, they do not have an agenda (unless we’re talking about some very specific industry lobbyists who no doubt exist). They’re just people who don’t care and eat meat.
Ideological vegans (i.e. not people who just happen to not eat meat, but don’t really care either way) are a very specific ideological group, and especially if we qualify them like in this post (“EA vegan advocates”), we can talk about their collective traits.
TBF, the meat/dairy/egg industries are specific groups of people who work pretty hard to increase animal product consumption, and are much better resourced than vegan advocates. I can understand why animal advocacy would develop some pretty aggressive norms in the face of that, and for that reason I consider it kind of besides the point to go after them in the wider world. It would basically be demanding unilateral disarmament from the weaker side.
But the fact that the wider world is so confused there’s no point in pushing for truth is the point. EA needs to stay better than that, and part of that is deescalating the arms race when you’re inside its boundaries.
But the fact that the wider world is so confused there’s no point in pushing for truth is the point. EA needs to stay better than that, and part of that is deescalating the arms race when you’re inside its boundaries.
Agree with this. I mean I’m definitely not pushing back against your claims, I’m just pointing out the problem seems bigger than commonly understood.
Could you expand on why you think that it makes a significant difference?
E.g. if the goal is to model what epistemic distortions you might face, or to suggests directions of change for fewer distortions, then coherence is only of limited concern (a coherent group might be easier to change, but on the other hand it might also more easily coordinate to oppose change).
I’m not sure why you say they are not an ideology, at least under my model of ideology that I have developed for other purposes, they fit the definition (i.e. I believe carnism involves a set of correlated beliefs about life and society that fit together).
Also not sure what you mean by carnists not having an agenda, in my experience most carnists have an agenda of wanting to eat lots of cheap delicious animal flesh.
I tend to think of ideology as a continuum, rather than a strict binary. Like people tend to have varying degrees of belief and trust in the sides of a conflict, and various unique factors influencing their views, and this leads to a lot of shades of nuance that can’t really be captured with a binary carnist/not-carnist definition.
But I think there are still some correlated beliefs where you could e.g. take their first principal component as an operationalization of carnism. Some beliefs that might go into this, many of which I have encountered from carnists:
“People should be allowed to freely choose whether they want to eat factory-farmed meat or not.”
“Animals cannot suffer in any way that matters.”
“One should take an evolutionary perspective and realize that factory farming is actually good for animals. After all, if not for humans putting a lot of effort into farming them, they wouldn’t even exist at their current population levels.”
“People who do enough good things out of their own charity deserve to eat animals without concerning themselves with the moral implications.”
“People who design packaging for animal products ought to make it look aesthetically pleasing and comfortable.”
“It is offensive and unreasonable for people to claim that meat-eating is a horribly harmful habit.”
“Animals are made to be used by humans.”
“Consuming animal products like meat or milk is healthier than being strictly vegan.”
One could make a defense of some of the statements. For instance Elizabeth has made a to-me convincing defense of the last statement. I don’t think this is a bug in the definition of carnism, it just shows that some carnist beliefs can be good and true. One ought to be able to admit that ideology is real and matters while also being able to recognize that it’s not a black-and-white issue.
While I agree that there are notable differences between “vegans” and “carnists” in terms of group dynamics, I do not think that necessarily disagrees with the idea that carnists are anti-truthseeking.
“carnists” are not a coherent group, not an ideology, they do not have an agenda (unless we’re talking about some very specific industry lobbyists who no doubt exist). They’re just people who don’t care and eat meat.
It seems untrue that because carnists are not an organized physical group that has meetings and such, they are thereby incapable of having shared norms or ideas/memes. I think in some contexts it can make sense/be useful to refer to a group of people who are not coherent in the sense of explicitly “working together” or having shared newletters based around a subject or whatever. In some cases, it can make sense to refer to those people’s ideologies/norms.
Also, I disagree with the idea that carnists are inherently neutral on the subject of animals/meat. That is, they don’t “not care”. In general, they actively want to eat meat and would be against things that would stop this. That’s not “not caring”; it is “having an agenda”, just not one that opposes the current status quo. The fact that being pro-meat and “okay with factory farming” is the more dominant stance/assumed default in our current status quo doesn’t mean that it isn’t a legitimate position/belief that people could be said to hold. There are many examples of other memetic environments throughout history where the assumed default may not have looked like a “stance” or an “agenda” to the people who were used to it, but nonetheless represented certain ideological claims.
I don’t think something only becomes an “ideology” when it disagrees with the current dominant cultural ideas; some things that are culturally common and baked into people from birth can still absolutely be “ideology” in the way I am used to using it. If we disagree on that, then perhaps we could use a different term?
If nothing else, carnists share the ideological assumption that “eating meat is okay”. In practice, they often also share ideas about the surrounding philosophical questions and attitudes. I don’t think it is beyond the pale to say that they could share norms around truth-seeking as it relates to these questions and attitudes. It feels unnecessarily dismissive and perhaps implicitly status quoist to assume that: as a dominant, implicit meme of our culture “carnism” must be “neutral” and therefore does not come with/correlate with any norms surrounding how people think about/process questions related to animals/meat.
Carnism comes with as much ideology as veganism even if people aren’t as explicit in presenting it or if the typical carnist hasn’t put as much thought into it.
I do not really have any experience advocating publicly for veganism and I wouldn’t really know about which specific espistemic failure modes are common among carnists for these sorts of conversations, but I have seen plenty of people bend themselves out of shape persevering their own comfort and status quo, so it really doesn’t seem like a stretch to imagine that epistemic maladies may tend to present among carnists when the question of veganism comes up.
For one thing, I have personally seen carnists respond in intentionally hostile ways towards vegans/vegan messaging on several occasions. Partially this is because they see it as a threat to their ideas or their way of life or partially this is because veganism is a designated punching bag that you’re allowed to insult in a lot of places. Often times, these attacks draw on shared ideas about veganism/animals/morality that are common between “carnists”.
So, while I agree that there are very different group dynamics, I don’t think it makes sense to say that vegans hold ideologies and are capable of exhibiting certain epistemic behaviors, but that carnists, by virtue of not being a sufficiently coherent collection of individuals, could not have the same labels applied to them.
(edit: idk if i endorse comments like this, i was really stressed from the things being said in the comments here)
People who fund the torture of animals are not a coherent group, not an ideology, they do not have an agenda. People who don’t fund the torture of animals are a coherent group, an ideology, they have an agenda.
People who keep other people enslaved are not a coherent group, not an ideology, they do not have an agenda. People who seek to end slavery are a coherent group, an ideology, they have an agenda.
Normal people like me are not a coherent group, not an ideology, we do not have an agenda. Atypicals like you are a coherent group, an ideology, you have an agenda.
maybe a future, better, post-singularity version of yourself will understand how terribly alienating statements like this are. maybe that person will see just how out-of-frame you have kept the suffering of other life forms to think this way.
my agenda is that of a confused, tortured animal, crying out in pain. it is, at most, a convulsive reaction. in desperation, it grasps onto ‘instrumental rationality’ like the paws of one being pulled into rotating blades flail around them, looking for a hold to force themself back.
and it finds nothing, the suffering persists until the day the world ends.
i do endorse the actual meaning of what i wrote. it is not “insane” and to call it that is callous. i added the edit because i wasn’t sure if expressions of stress are productive. i think there’s a case to be made that they are when it clearly stems from some ongoing discursive pattern, so that others can know the pain that their words cause. especially given this hostile reaction.
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deleted the rest of this. there’s no point for two alignment researchers to be fighting over oldworld violence. i hope this will make sense looking back.
putting pictures of free animals on packages containing factory farmed animal flesh
Well, yes, that’s called marketing, it’s like the antithesis of truth seeking.
The cure to hypocrisy is not more hypocrisy and lies but of opposite sign: that’s the kind of naive first order consequentialism that leads people to cynicism instead. The fundamental problem is that out of fear that people would reasonably go for a compromise (e.g. keep eating meat but less of it and only from free range animals) some vegans decide to just pile on the arguments, true or false, until anyone who believed them all and had a minimum of sense would go vegan instantly. But that completely denies the agency and moral ability of everyone else, and underestimates the possibility that you may be wrong. As a general rule, “my moral calculus is correct, therefore I will skew the data so that everyone else comes to the same conclusions as me” is a bad principle.
I agree in principle, though someone has to actually create a community of people who track the truth in order for this to be effective and not be outcompeted by other communities. When working individually, people don’t have the resources to untangle the deception in society due to its scale.
The line about “carnists” strikes me as outgroup homogeneity, conceptual gerrymandering, The Worst Argument In The World—call it what you want, but it should be something rationalists should have antibodies against.
Specifically, equivocating between “carnists [meat industry lobbyists]” and “carnists [EA non-vegans]” seems to me like known anti-truthseeking behavior.
So the question, as I see you posing, is whether NinetyThree prefers being in an epistemic environment with people who care about epistemic truthseeking (EA non-vegans) or with people for whom your best defense is that they’re no worse than meat industry lobbyists.
I think my point would be empirically supported; we can try set up a survey and run a factor analysis if you doubt it.
Edit: just to clarify I’m not gonna run the factor analysis unless someone who doubts the validity of the category comes by to cooperate, because I’m busy and expect there’d be a lot of goalpost moving that I don’t have time to deal with if I did it without pre-approval from someone who doesn’t buy it.
Ok I’m getting downvoted to oblivion because of this, so let me clarify:
So I guess the question is whether you prefer being in an epistemic environment that has declared war on humans or an epistemic environment that has declared war on farm animals.
If, like NinetyThree, you decide to give up on untangling the question for yourself because of all the lying (“I would describe my epistemic status as “not really open to persuasion”″), then you still have to make decisions, which in practice means following some side in the conflict, and the most common side is the carnist side which has the problems I mention.
I don’t want to be in a situation where I have to give up on untangling the question (see my top-level comment proposing a research community), but if I’m being honest I can’t exactly say that it’s invalid for NinetyThree to do so.
I understood NinetyThree to be talking about vegans lying about issues of health (as Elizabeth was also focusing on), not about the facts of animal suffering. If you agree with the arguments on the animal cruelty side and your uncertainty is focused on the health effects on you of a vegan diet vs your current one (which you have 1st hand data on), it doesn’t really matter what the meat industry is saying as that wasn’t a factor in the first place
Maybe. I pattern-matched it this way because I had previously been discussing psychological sex differences with Ninety-Three on discord, where he adopted the HBD views on them due to a perception that psychologists were biased, but he wasn’t interested in making arguments or in me doing followup studies to test it. So I assumed a similar thing was going on here with respect to eating animals.
I don’t agree with the downvoting. The first paragraph sounds to me like a not only fair, but good point. The first sentence in the second paragraph doesn’t really seem true to me though.
Yeah, it still doesn’t seem true even given the followup clarification.
Well, depending on what you actually mean. In the original excerpt, you’re saying that the question is whether you want to be in epistemic environment A or epistemic environment B. But in your followup clarification, you talk about the need to decide on something. I agree that you do need to decide on something (~carnist or vegan). I don’t think that means you necessarily have to be in one of those two epistemic environments you mention. But I also charitably suspect that you don’t actually think that you necessarily have to be in one of those two specific epistemic environments and just misspoke.
In the followup, I admit you don’t have to choose as long as you don’t give up on untangling the question. So like I’m implying that there’s multiple options such as:
Try to figure it out (NinetyThree rejects this, “not really open to persuasion”)
Adopt the carnist side (I think NinetyThree probably broadly does this though likely with exceptions)
Adopt the vegan side (NinetyThree rejects this)
Though I suppose you are right that there are also lots of other nuanced options that I haven’t acknowledged, such as “decide you are uncertain between the sides, and e.g. use utility weights to manage risk while exploiting opportunities”, which isn’t really the same as “try to figure it out”. Not sure if that’s what you mean; another option would be that e.g. I have a broader view of what “try to figure it out” means than you do, or similar (though what really matters for the literal truth of my comment is what NinetyThree’s view is). Or maybe you mean that there are additional sides that could be adopted? (I meant to hint at that possibility with phrasings like “the most common side”, but I suppose that could also be interpreted to just be acknowledging the vegan side.) Or maybe it’s just “all of the above”?
I do genuinely think that there is value in thinking of it as a 2D space of tradeoffs for cheap epistemics <-> strong epistemics and pro animal <-> pro human (realistically one could also put in the environment too, and realistically on the cheap epistemics side it’s probably anti human <-> anti animal). I agree that my original comment lacked nuance wrt the ways one could exist within that tradeoff, though I am unsure to what extent your objection is about the tradeoff framing vs the nuance in the ways one can exist in it.
In general, committing to any stance as a personal constant (making it a “part of your identity”) is antithetical to truthseeking. It certainly imposes a constraint on truthseeking that makes the problem harder.
But, if you share that stance with someone else, you won’t tend to see it. You’ll just see the correctness of your own stance. Being able to correctly reason around this is a hard-mode problem.
While you can speak about specific spectra of stances (vegan-carnist, and others), in reality, there are multiple spectra in play at any given time (the one I see the most is liberal-radical but there are also others). This leads to truthseeking constraints or in a word biases in cross-cutting ways. This seems to play out in the interplay of all the different people committing all the different sins called out in the OP. I think this is not unique to veganism at all and in fact plays out in virtually all similar spaces and contests. You always have to average out the ideological bias from a community.
There is no such thing as an epistemic environment that has not declared war on you. There can be no peace. This is hard mode and I consider the OP here to be another restatement of the generally accepted principle that this kind of discussion is hard mode / mindkilling.
This is why I’m highly skeptical of claims like the comment-grandparent. Everyone is lying, and it doesn’t matter much whether the lying is intentional or implicit. There is no such thing as a political ideology that is fully truth-seeking. That is a contradiction in terms. There is also no such thing as a fully neutral political ideology or political/ethical stance; everyone has a point of view. I’m not sure whether the vegans are in fact worse than the carnists on this. One side certainly has a significant amount of status-quo bias behind it. The same can be said about many other things.
Just to be explicitly, my point of view as it relates to these issues is vegan/radical, I became vegan roughly at the same time I became aware of rationalism but for other reasons, and when I went vegan the requirement for b12 supplementation was commonly discussed (outside the rationalist community, which was not very widely vegan at the time) mostly because “you get it from supplements that get it from dirt” was the stock counterargument to “but no b12 when vegan.”
I don’t think this is right, or at least it doesn’t hit the crux.
People on a vegan diet should in a utopian society be the ones who are most interested in truth about the nutritional challenges on a vegan diet, as they are the ones who face the consequences. The fact that they aren’t reflects the fact that they are not optimizing for living their own life well, but instead for convincing others of veganism.
Marketing like this is the simplest (and thus most common?) way for ideologies to keep themselves alive. However, it’s not clear that it’s the only option. If an ideology is excellent at truthseeking, then this would presumably by itself be a reason to adopt it, as it would have a lot of potential to make you stronger.
Rationalism is in theory supposed to be this. In practice, rationalism kind of sucks at it, I think because it’s hard and people aren’t funding it much and maybe also all the best rationalists start working in AI safety or something.
There’s some complications to this story though. As you say, there is no such thing as an epistemic environment that has not (in a metaphorical sense) declared war on you. Everyone does marketing, and so everyone perceives full truthseeking as a threat, and so you’d make a lot of enemies through doing this. A compromise would be a conspiracy which does truthseeking in private to avoid punishment, but such a conspiracy is hardly an ideology, and also it feels pretty suspicious to organize at scale.
Doing things that are virtuous tends to lead to good outcomes. Doing things that aren’t virtuous tends to lead to bad outcomes. For you, and for others. It’s hard to predict what those outcomes—good and bad—actually are. If you were a perfect Bayesian with unlimited information, time and computing power, then yes, go ahead and do the consequentialist calculus. But for humans, we are lacking in those things. Enough so that consequentalist calculus frequently becomes challenging, and the good track record of virtue becomes a huge consideration.
So, I agree with you that “lying leads to mistrust” is one of the reasons why vegan advocates shouldn’t lie. But I think that the main reason they shouldn’t lie is simply that lying has a pretty bad track record.
And then another huge consideration is that people who come up with reasons why they, at least in this particular circumstance, are a special snowflake and are justified in lying, frequently are deluding themselves.[3]
Well, that post is about ethics. And I think the conversation we’re having isn’t really limited to ethics. It’s more about just, pragmatically, what should the EA community do if they want to win.
I understood the original comment to be making essentially the same point you’re making—that lying has a bad track record, where ‘lying has a bad track record of causing mistrust’ is a case of this. In what way do you see them as distinct reasons?
I see them as distinct because what I’m saying is that lying generally tends to lead to bad outcomes (for both the liar and society at large) whereas mistrust specifically is just one component of the bad outcomes.
Other components that come to my mind:
People don’t end up with accurate information.
Expectations that people will cooperate (different from “tell you the truth”) go down.
Expectations that people will do things because they are virtuous go down.
But a big thing here is that it’s difficult to know why exactly it will lead to bad outcomes. The gears are hard to model. However, I think there’s solid evidence that it leads to bad outcomes.
I personally became vegetarian after being annoyed that vegans weren’t truth-seeking (like most groups of people, tbc). But I can totally see why others would be turned off from veganism completely after being lied to (even if people spread nutrition misinformation about whatever meat-eating diet they are on too).
I became vegetarian even though I stopped trusting what vegans said about nutrition and did my own research. Luckily that’s something I was interested in because I wouldn’t expect others to bother reading papers and such for having healthy diet.
(Note: I’m now considering eating meat again, but only ethical farms and game meat because I now believe those lives are good, I’m really only against some forms of factory farming. But this kind of discussion is hard to have with other veg^ns.)
Yes and no. No because I figured most of the reduction in suffering came from not eating meat and eggs (I stopped eating eggs even tho most vegetarians do). So I felt it was a good spot to land and not be too much effort for me.
Ah okay cool, so you have a certain threshold for harm and just don’t consume anything above that. I’ve found this approach really interesting and have recommended others against because I’ve worried about it’s sustainability, but do you think it’s been a good path for you?
I’m not sure why you’d think it’s less sustainable than veganism. In my mind, it’s effective because it is sustainable and reduces most of the suffering. Just like how EA tries to be effective (and sustainable) by not telling people to donate massive amounts of their income (just a small-ish percentage that works for them to the most effective charities), I see my approach as the same. It’s the sweet-spot between reducing suffering and sustainability (for me).
See below if you’d like an in depth look at my way of thinking, but I defiantly see the analogy and suppose I just think of it a bit differently myself. Can I ask how long you’ve been vegetarian? And how you’ve come to the decision as to which animals lives you think are net positive?
5 and half years. Didn’t do it sooner because I was concerned about nutrition and don’t trust vegans/vegetarians to give truthful advice. I used various statistics on number of deaths, adjusted for sentience, and more. Looked at articles like this: https://www.vox.com/2015/7/31/9067651/eggs-chicken-effective-altruism
Yeah sure. I would need a full post to explain myself, but basically I think that what seems to be really important when going vegan is standing in a certain sort of loving relationship to animals, one that isn’t grounded in utility but instead a strong (but basic) appreciation and valuing of the other. But let me step back for a minute.
I guess the first time I thought about this was with my university EA group. We had a couple of hardcore utilitarians, and one of them brought up an interesting idea one night. He was a vegan, but he’d been offered some mac and cheese, and in similar thinking to above (that dairy generally involves less suffering than eggs or chicken for ex) he wondered if it might actually be better to take the mac and donate the money he would have spent to an animal welfare org. And when he roughed up the math, sure enough, taking the mac and donating was somewhat significantly the better option.
But he didn’t do it, nor do I think he changed how he acted in the future. Why? I think it’s really hard to draw a line in the sand that isn’t veganism that stays stable over time. For those who’ve reverted, I’ve seen time and again a slow path back, one where it starts with the less bad items, cheese is quite frequent, and then naturally over time one thing after another is added to the point that most wind up in some sort of reduceitarian state where they’re maybe 80% back to normal (I also want to note here, I’m so glad for any change, and I cast no stones at anyone trying their best to change). And I guess maybe at some point it stops being a moral thing, or becomes some really watered down moral thing like how much people consider the environment when booking a plane ticket.
I don’t know if this helps make it clear, but it’s like how most people feel about harm to younger kids. When it comes to just about any serious harm to younger kids, people are generally against it, like super against it, a feeling of deep caring that to me seems to be one of the strongest sentiments shared by humans universally. People will give you some reasons for this i.e. “they are helpless and we are in a position of responsibility to help them” but really it seems to ground pretty quickly in a sentiment of “it’s just bad”.
To have this sort of love, this commitment to preventing suffering, with animals to me means pretty much just drawing the line at sentient beings and trying to cultivate a basic sense that they matter and that “it’s just bad” to eat them. Sure, I’m not sure what to do about insects, and wild animal welfare is tricky, so it’s not nearly as easy as I’m making it seem. And it’s not that I don’t want to have any idea of some of the numbers and research behind it all, I know I need to stay up to date on debates on sentience, and I know that I reference relative measures of harm often when I’m trying to guide non-veg people away from the worst harms. But what I’d love to see one day is a posturing towards eating animals like our posturing towards child abuse, a very basic, loving expression that in some sense refuses the debate on what’s better or worse and just casts it all out as beyond the pale.
And to try to return to earlier, I guess I see taking this sort of position as likely to extend people’s time spent doing veg-related diets, and I think it’s just a lot trickier to have this sort of relationship when you are doing some sort of utilitarian calculus of what is and isn’t above the bar for you (again, much love to these people, something is always so much better than nothing). This is largely just a theory, I don’t have much to back it up, and it would seem to explain some cases of reversion I’ve seen but certainly not all, and I also feel like this is a bit sloppy because I’d really need a post to get at this hard to describe feeling I have. But hopefully this helps explain the viewpoint a bit better, happy to answer any questions :)
Thank you. This was educational for me, and also just beautifully put.
I have two responses, one on practicalities and one on moral philosophy. My guess is the practical issues aren’t your cruxes, so I’m going to put those aside for now to focus on the moral issue.
you say:
one that isn’t grounded in utility but instead a strong (but basic) appreciation and valuing of the other. But let me step back for a minute.
[...]
what I’d love to see one day is a posturing towards eating animals like our posturing towards child abuse, a very basic, loving expression that in some sense refuses the debate on what’s better or worse and just casts it all out as beyond the pale
This might be presumptuous, but I think I understand how you feel here, because it is I how I feel about truthseeking. That respect for the truth[1] isn’t just an instrumental tactic towards some greater good, it is the substrate that all good things grow from. If you start trading away truthseeking for short-term benefit you will end up with nothing but ashes, no matter how good the short-term trade looked. And it is scary to me that other people don’t get this, the way I imagine it is scary to you that other people can be surrounded by torture factories and think about them mostly as a source of useful and pleasurable molecules.
I don’t know how to resolve this, because “respect for life” and “respect for truth” are both pretty compelling substrates. I don’t actually know if I’d want to live in a world where truth had decisively won over life and anti-suffering. My gut feeling is that truth world can bootstrap to truth-and-life world easier than life world can, but if someone disagreed I wouldn’t have a good counterargument.
First thanks for your kind words, they were nice to receive :)
But I also think this is wonderfully put, and I think you’re right to point to your feelings on truth as similar. As truth for you, life to me is sacred, and I think I generally build a lot of my world out of that basic fact. I would note that I think one another’s values are likely important for us to, as truth is also really important to me and I value honestly and not lying more than most people I know. And on the flipside I imagine that you value life quite a bit.
But looking at the specific case you imagine, yeah it’s really hard to imagine either totally separate on their own because I find they often lead to one another. I guess one crux for me that might give me doubts on the goodness of the truth world is not being sure on the “whether humans are innately good” question. If they aren’t innately good, then everyone being honest about their intentions and what they want to do may mean places in the world where repression or some sort of suffering is common. I guess the way I imagine it going is having a hard time dealing with the people who honesty just want some version of the world that involves inflicting some sort of harm on others. I imagine that many would likely not want this, and they would make rules as such, but that they’d have a hard time critiquing others in the world far away from themselves if they’ve been perfectly straightforward and honest about where they stand with their values.
But I can easily imagine counterarguments here, and it’s not as if a life where reducing suffering were of utmost importance wouldn’t run the risk of some pretty large deviations from the truth that seem bad (i.e. a vegan government asserting there are zero potentials for negative health effects for going vegan). But then we could get into standard utilitarian responses like “oh well they really should have been going in for something like rule utilitarianism that would have told them this was an awful decision on net” and so on and so forth. Not sure where I come out either really.
Note: I’d love to know what practical response you have, it might not be my crux but could be insightful!
LessWrong is launching Dialogues pretty soon, would you be interested in doing one together? I’m most interested in high level “how do you navigate when two good principles conflict?” than object level vegan questions, but probably that would come up. An unnuanced teaser for this would be “I don’t think a world where humans are Bad as a whole makes sense”.
On a practical level:
I think you speak of veganism as the sustainable shelling point with more certainty than is warranted. How do you know it’s less sustainable, for everyone, than ameliatarianism or reducitarianism? How do you know that the highest EV is pushing veganism-as-ideal harder, rather than socially coordinate around “medical meat”?
I think “no animal products via the mouth” is a much more arbitrary line than is commonly considered, especially if you look at it on purely utilitarian grounds. What about sugar sifted through bones? Why isn’t “no vertebrates” sustainable? What about glue in shoes? What about products produced in factories that use rat poison?
Vegetarianism seems like a terrible compromise shelling point. My understanding is that most eggs are more suffering per calorie or nutrient than beef. But vegetarian is (currently) an easier line than milk-and-beef-but-not-eggs-or-chickens.
I knew a guy who went vegetarian for ethical reasons before learning all of the math. He chose to stay vegetarian after learning how bad eggs were, because he was worried that he couldn’t reconfigure himself a second time and if he tried he’d slide all the way back into eating meat.
When I’ve asked other people about this they answer based on the vegans they knew. But that’s inherently a biased group. It includes current vegans who socialize in animal-focused spaces. Assuming that’s true, why should that apply to vegans who don’t hang out in those spaces, much less omnivores considering reducitarianism?
It’s not obvious to me our protect-at-all-costs attitude towards young children is optimal. I can track a number of costs to society, parents, and the children themselves. And a bunch of harms that still aren’t being prevented.
I suspect you are underestimating the costs of veganism for some people. It sounds like that one guy didn’t value mac and cheese that much, and it was reasonable for him to forego it even if it also would have been easy to buy an offset. But for some people that bowl of mac and cheese is really important, and if you want society as a whole to shift then the default rules need to accommodate that.
Have no idea what it entails but I enjoy conversing and learning more about the world, so I’d happy do a dialogue! Happy to keep it in the clouds too.
But yeah you make a good point. I mean, I’m not convinced what the proper schelling point is, and would eagerly eat up any research on this. Maybe what I think is that for a specific group of people like me (no idea what exactly defines that group) it makes sense, but that generally what’s going to make sense for a person has to be quite tailored to their own situation and traits.
I would push back on the no animal products through the mouth bit. Sure, it happens to include lesser forms of suffering that might be less important than changing other things in the world (and if you assumed that this was zero sum that may be a problem, but I don’t think it is). But generally it focuses on avoiding suffering that you are in control of, in a way that updates in light of new evidence. Vegetarianism in India is great because it leads to less meat consumption, but because it involves specific things to avoid instead of setting a basis as suffering it becomes much harder to convincingly explain why they should update to avoid eggs for example. So yeah, protesting rat poison factories may not be a mainstream vegan thing, but I’d be willing to bet vegans are less apt to use it. And sure, vegans may be divided on what to do about sugar, but I’d be surprised if any said “it doesn’t involved an animal going in my mouth so it’s okay with me”. I don’t think it’s arbitrary but find it rather intentional.
I could continue on here but I’m also realizing some part of you wanted to avoid debates about vegan stuffs, so I’ll let this suffice and explicitly say if you don’t want to respond I fully understand (but would be happy to hear if you do!).
I think an issue is that you are imagining a general factor of truth-seeking which applies regardless of domain, whereas in practice most of the variation you see in truth-seeking is instrumental or ideological and so limited to the specific areas where people draw utility or political interest from truth-seeking.
I think it is possible to create a community that more generally values truth-seeking and that doing so could be very valuable, bootstrapping a great deal more caring and ability by more clearly seeing what’s going on.
However I think by-default it’s not what happens when criticizing others for lack of truth-seeking, and also by-default not what happens among people who pride themselves on truth-seeking and rationality. Instead, my experience is that when I’ve written corrections to one side in a conflict, I’ve gotten support from the opposing side, but when I’ve then turned around and criticized the opposing side, they’ve rapidly turned on me.
Truth-seeking with respect to instrumentally valuable things can gain support from others who desire instrumentally valuable things, and truth-seeking with respect to politically valuable things can gain support from others who have shared political goals. However creating a generally truth-seeking community that extends beyond this requires a bunch of work and research to extend the truth-seeking to other questions. In particular, one has to proactively recognize the associated conflicts and the overlooked questions and make sure one seeks truth in those areas too. (Which sucks! It’s not your specialty, can’t other people do it?? Ideally yes, but they’re not going to do it automatically, so in order for other people to do it, you have to create a community that actually recognizes that it has to be done, and delegates the work of doing it to specific people who will go on and do it.)
I’ve worried about it’s sustainability, but do you think it’s been a good path for you?
Cutting out bird and seafood products (ameliatarianism) is definitely more sustainable for me. I’m very confused why you would think it’s less sustainable than, uh, ‘cold turkey’ veganism. “Just avoid chicken/eggs” (since I don’t like seafood or the other types of bird meat products) is way easier than “avoid all meat, also milk, also cheese”.
My sense is that different people struggle with staying on a suffering-reducing diet for different reasons, and they have different solutions. Some people do need a commitment to a greater principle to make it work, and they typical mind that other people can’t (but aren’t wrong that people tend to overestimate themselves). Some people really need a little bit of animal nutrition but stop when that need is filled, and it’s not a slippery slope for them[1]and maybe miss that other people can’t stop where they can, although this group tends to be less evangelical so it causes fewer problems..
If the general conversation around ethics and nutrition were in a better place, I think it would be useful to look at how much of “veganism as a hard line” is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and what new equilibriums could be created. Does telling people “if you cross this line once you’ll inevitably slide into full blow carnism” make it more likely? Could advocates create a new hard line that gave people strength but had space for people for whom the trade-offs of total abstention are too hard? Or maybe not-even-once is the best line to hold, and does more good on net even if it drives some people away.
I don’t feel like I can be in that conversation, for a lot of reasons. But I hope it happens
I think the first paragraph is well put, and do agree that my camp is likely more apt to be evangelical. But I also want to say that I don’t think the second paragraph is quite representative. I know approximately 0 vegans that support the “cross the line once” philosophy. I think the current status quo is something much closer to what you imagine in the second to last sentence, where the recommendation that’s most often come to me is “look, as long as you are really thinking about it and trying to do what’s best not just for you but for the animals as well, that’s all it takes. We all have weak moments and veganism doesn’t mean perfection, it’s just doing the best with what you’ve got”[1]
Sure, there are some obvious caveats here like you can’t be a vegan if you haven’t significantly reduced your consumption of animals/animal products. Joe, who eats steak every night and starts every morning with eggs and cheese and a nice hearty glass of dairy milk won’t really be a vegan even if he claims the title. But I don’t see the average vegan casting stones at and of the various partial reduction diets, generally I think they’re happy to just have some more people on board.
I don’t see the average vegan casting stones at and of the various partial reduction diets,
I have seen a lot of stones cast about this. I’d believe that the 50th percentile vegan doesn’t, but in practice the ones who care a lot are the ones potential reducitarians hear from.
Sure, sure. I’m not saying there isn’t perhaps an extreme wing, I just think it’s quite important to say this isn’t the average, and highlight that the majority of vegans have a view more like the one I mentioned above.
I think this is a distinction worth making, because when you collapse everyone into one camp, you begin to alienate the majority that actually more or less agrees with you. I don’t know what the term for the group you’re talking about is, but maybe evangelical vegans isn’t a bad term to use for now.
While I think the environmental sustainability angle is also an active thing to think about here (because beef potentially involves less suffering for the animals, but relatively more harm to the environment), I did actually intend sustainability in the spirit of “able to stick with it for a long period of time” or something like that. Probably could have been clearer.
What Elizabeth had to say here is broadly right. See my comment above, for some more in depth reasoning as to why I think the opposite may be true, but basically I think that the sort of loving relationship formed with other animals that I imagine as the thing that holds together commitment over a long period of time, over a large range of hard circumstances, is tricky to create when you don’t go full on. I have no idea what’s sustainable for you though, and want to emphasize that whatever works to reduce is something I’m happy with, so I’m quite glad for your ameliatarian addition.
I’m also trying to update my views here, so can I ask for how long you’ve been on a veg diet? And if you predict any changes in the near future?
Is this just acknowledging some sort of monkey brain thing, or endorsing it as well? (If part of it is acknowledging it, then kudos. I appreciate the honesty and bravery. I also think the data point is relevant to what is discussed in the post.)
I ask because it strikes me as a Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence sort of thing. If Hitler thinks the sky is green, well, he’s wrong, but it isn’t really relevant to the question of what color the sky actually is.
The first paragraph doesn’t include jacquesthibs’s original state before becoming vegetarian, leaving some ambiguity. I think you’re parsing it as “I went from vegan to vegetarian because I stopped trusting vegans”. The other parsing is “I went from omnivore to vegetarian, despite not trusting vegans, because I did my own research.” The rest of the comment makes me fairly confident that the second parsing is correct; but certainly it would be easier to follow if it were stated upfront.
Sorry, I assumed it was obvious we were talking about omnivore to vegan given that Ninety-Three was talking about not being open to becoming vegan if vegans tried to convince them. I do see the ambiguity though.
I mean, to a point; if vegans are your main source of information on veganism and its costs, and you find out a pattern of vegans being untrustworthy, this means you’re left to navigate veganism alone, which is itself a cost and a risk. Having a supportive community that you can trust makes a big difference in how easy it is to stick to big lifestyle decisions.
Do you think that the attitude you’re presenting here is the attitude one ought to have in matters of moral disagreement?
Surely there’s various examples of moral progress (which have happened or are happening) that you would align yourself with. Surely some or all of these examples include people who lack perfect honesty/truth seeking on par with veganism.
If long ago you noticed some people speaking out against racism/sexism/slavery/etc Had imperfect epistemics and truth seeking, would you condone willfully disregarding all attempts to persuade you on those topics?
The other reason vegan advocates should care about the truth is that if you keep lying, people will notice and stop trusting you. Case in point, I am not a vegan and I would describe my epistemic status as “not really open to persuasion” because I long ago noticed exactly the dynamics this post describes and concluded that I would be a fool to believe anything a vegan advocate told me. I could rigorously check every fact presented but that takes forever, I’d rather just keep eating meat and spend my time in an epistemic environment that hasn’t declared war on me.
My impression is that while vegans are not truth-seekings, carnists are also not truth-seeking. This includes by making ag-gag laws, putting pictures of free animals on packages containing factory farmed animal flesh, denying that animals have feelings and can experience pain using nonsense arguments, hiding information about factory farming from children, etc..
So I guess the question is whether you prefer being in an epistemic environment that has declared war on humans or an epistemic environment that has declared war on farm animals. And I suppose as a human it’s easier to be in the latter, as long as you don’t mind hiring people to torture animals for your pleasure.
Edit/clarification: I don’t mean that you can’t choose to figure it out in more detail, only that if you do give up on figuring it out in more detail, you’re more constrained.
There’s a pretty significant difference here in my view—“carnists” are not a coherent group, not an ideology, they do not have an agenda (unless we’re talking about some very specific industry lobbyists who no doubt exist). They’re just people who don’t care and eat meat.
Ideological vegans (i.e. not people who just happen to not eat meat, but don’t really care either way) are a very specific ideological group, and especially if we qualify them like in this post (“EA vegan advocates”), we can talk about their collective traits.
TBF, the meat/dairy/egg industries are specific groups of people who work pretty hard to increase animal product consumption, and are much better resourced than vegan advocates. I can understand why animal advocacy would develop some pretty aggressive norms in the face of that, and for that reason I consider it kind of besides the point to go after them in the wider world. It would basically be demanding unilateral disarmament from the weaker side.
But the fact that the wider world is so confused there’s no point in pushing for truth is the point. EA needs to stay better than that, and part of that is deescalating the arms race when you’re inside its boundaries.
Agree with this. I mean I’m definitely not pushing back against your claims, I’m just pointing out the problem seems bigger than commonly understood.
Could you expand on why you think that it makes a significant difference?
E.g. if the goal is to model what epistemic distortions you might face, or to suggests directions of change for fewer distortions, then coherence is only of limited concern (a coherent group might be easier to change, but on the other hand it might also more easily coordinate to oppose change).
I’m not sure why you say they are not an ideology, at least under my model of ideology that I have developed for other purposes, they fit the definition (i.e. I believe carnism involves a set of correlated beliefs about life and society that fit together).
Also not sure what you mean by carnists not having an agenda, in my experience most carnists have an agenda of wanting to eat lots of cheap delicious animal flesh.
Could you clarify who you are defining as carnists?
I tend to think of ideology as a continuum, rather than a strict binary. Like people tend to have varying degrees of belief and trust in the sides of a conflict, and various unique factors influencing their views, and this leads to a lot of shades of nuance that can’t really be captured with a binary carnist/not-carnist definition.
But I think there are still some correlated beliefs where you could e.g. take their first principal component as an operationalization of carnism. Some beliefs that might go into this, many of which I have encountered from carnists:
“People should be allowed to freely choose whether they want to eat factory-farmed meat or not.”
“Animals cannot suffer in any way that matters.”
“One should take an evolutionary perspective and realize that factory farming is actually good for animals. After all, if not for humans putting a lot of effort into farming them, they wouldn’t even exist at their current population levels.”
“People who do enough good things out of their own charity deserve to eat animals without concerning themselves with the moral implications.”
“People who design packaging for animal products ought to make it look aesthetically pleasing and comfortable.”
“It is offensive and unreasonable for people to claim that meat-eating is a horribly harmful habit.”
“Animals are made to be used by humans.”
“Consuming animal products like meat or milk is healthier than being strictly vegan.”
One could make a defense of some of the statements. For instance Elizabeth has made a to-me convincing defense of the last statement. I don’t think this is a bug in the definition of carnism, it just shows that some carnist beliefs can be good and true. One ought to be able to admit that ideology is real and matters while also being able to recognize that it’s not a black-and-white issue.
While I agree that there are notable differences between “vegans” and “carnists” in terms of group dynamics, I do not think that necessarily disagrees with the idea that carnists are anti-truthseeking.
It seems untrue that because carnists are not an organized physical group that has meetings and such, they are thereby incapable of having shared norms or ideas/memes. I think in some contexts it can make sense/be useful to refer to a group of people who are not coherent in the sense of explicitly “working together” or having shared newletters based around a subject or whatever. In some cases, it can make sense to refer to those people’s ideologies/norms.
Also, I disagree with the idea that carnists are inherently neutral on the subject of animals/meat. That is, they don’t “not care”. In general, they actively want to eat meat and would be against things that would stop this. That’s not “not caring”; it is “having an agenda”, just not one that opposes the current status quo. The fact that being pro-meat and “okay with factory farming” is the more dominant stance/assumed default in our current status quo doesn’t mean that it isn’t a legitimate position/belief that people could be said to hold. There are many examples of other memetic environments throughout history where the assumed default may not have looked like a “stance” or an “agenda” to the people who were used to it, but nonetheless represented certain ideological claims.
I don’t think something only becomes an “ideology” when it disagrees with the current dominant cultural ideas; some things that are culturally common and baked into people from birth can still absolutely be “ideology” in the way I am used to using it. If we disagree on that, then perhaps we could use a different term?
If nothing else, carnists share the ideological assumption that “eating meat is okay”. In practice, they often also share ideas about the surrounding philosophical questions and attitudes. I don’t think it is beyond the pale to say that they could share norms around truth-seeking as it relates to these questions and attitudes. It feels unnecessarily dismissive and perhaps implicitly status quoist to assume that: as a dominant, implicit meme of our culture “carnism” must be “neutral” and therefore does not come with/correlate with any norms surrounding how people think about/process questions related to animals/meat.
Carnism comes with as much ideology as veganism even if people aren’t as explicit in presenting it or if the typical carnist hasn’t put as much thought into it.
I do not really have any experience advocating publicly for veganism and I wouldn’t really know about which specific espistemic failure modes are common among carnists for these sorts of conversations, but I have seen plenty of people bend themselves out of shape persevering their own comfort and status quo, so it really doesn’t seem like a stretch to imagine that epistemic maladies may tend to present among carnists when the question of veganism comes up.
For one thing, I have personally seen carnists respond in intentionally hostile ways towards vegans/vegan messaging on several occasions. Partially this is because they see it as a threat to their ideas or their way of life or partially this is because veganism is a designated punching bag that you’re allowed to insult in a lot of places. Often times, these attacks draw on shared ideas about veganism/animals/morality that are common between “carnists”.
So, while I agree that there are very different group dynamics, I don’t think it makes sense to say that vegans hold ideologies and are capable of exhibiting certain epistemic behaviors, but that carnists, by virtue of not being a sufficiently coherent collection of individuals, could not have the same labels applied to them.
(edit: idk if i endorse comments like this, i was really stressed from the things being said in the comments here)
People who fund the torture of animals are not a coherent group, not an ideology, they do not have an agenda. People who don’t fund the torture of animals are a coherent group, an ideology, they have an agenda.
People who keep other people enslaved are not a coherent group, not an ideology, they do not have an agenda. People who seek to end slavery are a coherent group, an ideology, they have an agenda.
Normal people like me are not a coherent group, not an ideology, we do not have an agenda.
Atypicals like you are a coherent group, an ideology, you have an agenda.
maybe a future, better, post-singularity version of yourself will understand how terribly alienating statements like this are. maybe that person will see just how out-of-frame you have kept the suffering of other life forms to think this way.
my agenda is that of a confused, tortured animal, crying out in pain. it is, at most, a convulsive reaction. in desperation, it grasps onto ‘instrumental rationality’ like the paws of one being pulled into rotating blades flail around them, looking for a hold to force themself back.
and it finds nothing, the suffering persists until the day the world ends.
Jesus christ, chill. I don’t like playing into the meme of “that’s why people don’t like vegans”, but that’s exactly why.
And posting something insane followed by an edit of “idk if I endorse comments like this” has got to be the most online rationalist thing ever.
i do endorse the actual meaning of what i wrote. it is not “insane” and to call it that is callous. i added the edit because i wasn’t sure if expressions of stress are productive. i think there’s a case to be made that they are when it clearly stems from some ongoing discursive pattern, so that others can know the pain that their words cause. especially given this hostile reaction.
---
deleted the rest of this. there’s no point for two alignment researchers to be fighting over oldworld violence. i hope this will make sense looking back.
Well, yes, that’s called marketing, it’s like the antithesis of truth seeking.
The cure to hypocrisy is not more hypocrisy and lies but of opposite sign: that’s the kind of naive first order consequentialism that leads people to cynicism instead. The fundamental problem is that out of fear that people would reasonably go for a compromise (e.g. keep eating meat but less of it and only from free range animals) some vegans decide to just pile on the arguments, true or false, until anyone who believed them all and had a minimum of sense would go vegan instantly. But that completely denies the agency and moral ability of everyone else, and underestimates the possibility that you may be wrong. As a general rule, “my moral calculus is correct, therefore I will skew the data so that everyone else comes to the same conclusions as me” is a bad principle.
I agree in principle, though someone has to actually create a community of people who track the truth in order for this to be effective and not be outcompeted by other communities. When working individually, people don’t have the resources to untangle the deception in society due to its scale.
The line about “carnists” strikes me as outgroup homogeneity, conceptual gerrymandering, The Worst Argument In The World—call it what you want, but it should be something rationalists should have antibodies against.
Specifically, equivocating between “carnists [meat industry lobbyists]” and “carnists [EA non-vegans]” seems to me like known anti-truthseeking behavior.
So the question, as I see you posing, is whether NinetyThree prefers being in an epistemic environment with people who care about epistemic truthseeking (EA non-vegans) or with people for whom your best defense is that they’re no worse than meat industry lobbyists.
I think my point would be empirically supported; we can try set up a survey and run a factor analysis if you doubt it.
Edit: just to clarify I’m not gonna run the factor analysis unless someone who doubts the validity of the category comes by to cooperate, because I’m busy and expect there’d be a lot of goalpost moving that I don’t have time to deal with if I did it without pre-approval from someone who doesn’t buy it.
Ok I’m getting downvoted to oblivion because of this, so let me clarify:
If, like NinetyThree, you decide to give up on untangling the question for yourself because of all the lying (“I would describe my epistemic status as “not really open to persuasion”″), then you still have to make decisions, which in practice means following some side in the conflict, and the most common side is the carnist side which has the problems I mention.
I don’t want to be in a situation where I have to give up on untangling the question (see my top-level comment proposing a research community), but if I’m being honest I can’t exactly say that it’s invalid for NinetyThree to do so.
I understood NinetyThree to be talking about vegans lying about issues of health (as Elizabeth was also focusing on), not about the facts of animal suffering. If you agree with the arguments on the animal cruelty side and your uncertainty is focused on the health effects on you of a vegan diet vs your current one (which you have 1st hand data on), it doesn’t really matter what the meat industry is saying as that wasn’t a factor in the first place
Maybe. I pattern-matched it this way because I had previously been discussing psychological sex differences with Ninety-Three on discord, where he adopted the HBD views on them due to a perception that psychologists were biased, but he wasn’t interested in making arguments or in me doing followup studies to test it. So I assumed a similar thing was going on here with respect to eating animals.
I don’t agree with the downvoting. The first paragraph sounds to me like a not only fair, but good point. The first sentence in the second paragraph doesn’t really seem true to me though.
Does it also not seem true in the context of my followup clarification?
Yeah, it still doesn’t seem true even given the followup clarification.
Well, depending on what you actually mean. In the original excerpt, you’re saying that the question is whether you want to be in epistemic environment A or epistemic environment B. But in your followup clarification, you talk about the need to decide on something. I agree that you do need to decide on something (~carnist or vegan). I don’t think that means you necessarily have to be in one of those two epistemic environments you mention. But I also charitably suspect that you don’t actually think that you necessarily have to be in one of those two specific epistemic environments and just misspoke.
In the followup, I admit you don’t have to choose as long as you don’t give up on untangling the question. So like I’m implying that there’s multiple options such as:
Try to figure it out (NinetyThree rejects this, “not really open to persuasion”)
Adopt the carnist side (I think NinetyThree probably broadly does this though likely with exceptions)
Adopt the vegan side (NinetyThree rejects this)
Though I suppose you are right that there are also lots of other nuanced options that I haven’t acknowledged, such as “decide you are uncertain between the sides, and e.g. use utility weights to manage risk while exploiting opportunities”, which isn’t really the same as “try to figure it out”. Not sure if that’s what you mean; another option would be that e.g. I have a broader view of what “try to figure it out” means than you do, or similar (though what really matters for the literal truth of my comment is what NinetyThree’s view is). Or maybe you mean that there are additional sides that could be adopted? (I meant to hint at that possibility with phrasings like “the most common side”, but I suppose that could also be interpreted to just be acknowledging the vegan side.) Or maybe it’s just “all of the above”?
I do genuinely think that there is value in thinking of it as a 2D space of tradeoffs for cheap epistemics <-> strong epistemics and pro animal <-> pro human (realistically one could also put in the environment too, and realistically on the cheap epistemics side it’s probably anti human <-> anti animal). I agree that my original comment lacked nuance wrt the ways one could exist within that tradeoff, though I am unsure to what extent your objection is about the tradeoff framing vs the nuance in the ways one can exist in it.
Ah, I kinda overlooked this. My bad.
In general my position is now that:
I’m a little confused.
I think what you wrote is probably fine.
Think you probably could have been more clear about what you initially wrote.
Think it’s totally fine to not be perfect in what you originally wrote.
Feel pretty charitable. I’m sure that what you truly meant is something pretty reasonable.
Think downvoters were probably triggered and were being uncharitable.
Am not interested in spending much more time on this.
In general, committing to any stance as a personal constant (making it a “part of your identity”) is antithetical to truthseeking. It certainly imposes a constraint on truthseeking that makes the problem harder.
But, if you share that stance with someone else, you won’t tend to see it. You’ll just see the correctness of your own stance. Being able to correctly reason around this is a hard-mode problem.
While you can speak about specific spectra of stances (vegan-carnist, and others), in reality, there are multiple spectra in play at any given time (the one I see the most is liberal-radical but there are also others). This leads to truthseeking constraints or in a word biases in cross-cutting ways. This seems to play out in the interplay of all the different people committing all the different sins called out in the OP. I think this is not unique to veganism at all and in fact plays out in virtually all similar spaces and contests. You always have to average out the ideological bias from a community.
There is no such thing as an epistemic environment that has not declared war on you. There can be no peace. This is hard mode and I consider the OP here to be another restatement of the generally accepted principle that this kind of discussion is hard mode / mindkilling.
This is why I’m highly skeptical of claims like the comment-grandparent. Everyone is lying, and it doesn’t matter much whether the lying is intentional or implicit. There is no such thing as a political ideology that is fully truth-seeking. That is a contradiction in terms. There is also no such thing as a fully neutral political ideology or political/ethical stance; everyone has a point of view. I’m not sure whether the vegans are in fact worse than the carnists on this. One side certainly has a significant amount of status-quo bias behind it. The same can be said about many other things.
Just to be explicitly, my point of view as it relates to these issues is vegan/radical, I became vegan roughly at the same time I became aware of rationalism but for other reasons, and when I went vegan the requirement for b12 supplementation was commonly discussed (outside the rationalist community, which was not very widely vegan at the time) mostly because “you get it from supplements that get it from dirt” was the stock counterargument to “but no b12 when vegan.”
I don’t think this is right, or at least it doesn’t hit the crux.
People on a vegan diet should in a utopian society be the ones who are most interested in truth about the nutritional challenges on a vegan diet, as they are the ones who face the consequences. The fact that they aren’t reflects the fact that they are not optimizing for living their own life well, but instead for convincing others of veganism.
Marketing like this is the simplest (and thus most common?) way for ideologies to keep themselves alive. However, it’s not clear that it’s the only option. If an ideology is excellent at truthseeking, then this would presumably by itself be a reason to adopt it, as it would have a lot of potential to make you stronger.
Rationalism is in theory supposed to be this. In practice, rationalism kind of sucks at it, I think because it’s hard and people aren’t funding it much and maybe also all the best rationalists start working in AI safety or something.
There’s some complications to this story though. As you say, there is no such thing as an epistemic environment that has not (in a metaphorical sense) declared war on you. Everyone does marketing, and so everyone perceives full truthseeking as a threat, and so you’d make a lot of enemies through doing this. A compromise would be a conspiracy which does truthseeking in private to avoid punishment, but such a conspiracy is hardly an ideology, and also it feels pretty suspicious to organize at scale.
I hear ya, but I think this is missing something important. Basically, I’m thinking of the post Ends Don’t Justify Means (Among Humans).[1][2]
Doing things that are virtuous tends to lead to good outcomes. Doing things that aren’t virtuous tends to lead to bad outcomes. For you, and for others. It’s hard to predict what those outcomes—good and bad—actually are. If you were a perfect Bayesian with unlimited information, time and computing power, then yes, go ahead and do the consequentialist calculus. But for humans, we are lacking in those things. Enough so that consequentalist calculus frequently becomes challenging, and the good track record of virtue becomes a huge consideration.
So, I agree with you that “lying leads to mistrust” is one of the reasons why vegan advocates shouldn’t lie. But I think that the main reason they shouldn’t lie is simply that lying has a pretty bad track record.
And then another huge consideration is that people who come up with reasons why they, at least in this particular circumstance, are a special snowflake and are justified in lying, frequently are deluding themselves.[3]
Well, that post is about ethics. And I think the conversation we’re having isn’t really limited to ethics. It’s more about just, pragmatically, what should the EA community do if they want to win.
Here’s my slightly different(?) take, if anyone’s interested: Reflective Consequentialism.
I cringe at how applause light-y this comment is. Please don’t upvote if you feel like you might be non-trivially reacting to an applause light.
I understood the original comment to be making essentially the same point you’re making—that lying has a bad track record, where ‘lying has a bad track record of causing mistrust’ is a case of this. In what way do you see them as distinct reasons?
I see them as distinct because what I’m saying is that lying generally tends to lead to bad outcomes (for both the liar and society at large) whereas mistrust specifically is just one component of the bad outcomes.
Other components that come to my mind:
People don’t end up with accurate information.
Expectations that people will cooperate (different from “tell you the truth”) go down.
Expectations that people will do things because they are virtuous go down.
But a big thing here is that it’s difficult to know why exactly it will lead to bad outcomes. The gears are hard to model. However, I think there’s solid evidence that it leads to bad outcomes.
I personally became vegetarian after being annoyed that vegans weren’t truth-seeking (like most groups of people, tbc). But I can totally see why others would be turned off from veganism completely after being lied to (even if people spread nutrition misinformation about whatever meat-eating diet they are on too).
I became vegetarian even though I stopped trusting what vegans said about nutrition and did my own research. Luckily that’s something I was interested in because I wouldn’t expect others to bother reading papers and such for having healthy diet.
(Note: I’m now considering eating meat again, but only ethical farms and game meat because I now believe those lives are good, I’m really only against some forms of factory farming. But this kind of discussion is hard to have with other veg^ns.)
Did you go vegetarian because you thought it was specifically healthier than going vegan?
Yes and no. No because I figured most of the reduction in suffering came from not eating meat and eggs (I stopped eating eggs even tho most vegetarians do). So I felt it was a good spot to land and not be too much effort for me.
Ah okay cool, so you have a certain threshold for harm and just don’t consume anything above that. I’ve found this approach really interesting and have recommended others against because I’ve worried about it’s sustainability, but do you think it’s been a good path for you?
I’m not sure why you’d think it’s less sustainable than veganism. In my mind, it’s effective because it is sustainable and reduces most of the suffering. Just like how EA tries to be effective (and sustainable) by not telling people to donate massive amounts of their income (just a small-ish percentage that works for them to the most effective charities), I see my approach as the same. It’s the sweet-spot between reducing suffering and sustainability (for me).
See below if you’d like an in depth look at my way of thinking, but I defiantly see the analogy and suppose I just think of it a bit differently myself. Can I ask how long you’ve been vegetarian? And how you’ve come to the decision as to which animals lives you think are net positive?
5 and half years. Didn’t do it sooner because I was concerned about nutrition and don’t trust vegans/vegetarians to give truthful advice. I used various statistics on number of deaths, adjusted for sentience, and more. Looked at articles like this: https://www.vox.com/2015/7/31/9067651/eggs-chicken-effective-altruism
This argument came up a lot during the facebook debate days, could you say more about why you believe it?
Yeah sure. I would need a full post to explain myself, but basically I think that what seems to be really important when going vegan is standing in a certain sort of loving relationship to animals, one that isn’t grounded in utility but instead a strong (but basic) appreciation and valuing of the other. But let me step back for a minute.
I guess the first time I thought about this was with my university EA group. We had a couple of hardcore utilitarians, and one of them brought up an interesting idea one night. He was a vegan, but he’d been offered some mac and cheese, and in similar thinking to above (that dairy generally involves less suffering than eggs or chicken for ex) he wondered if it might actually be better to take the mac and donate the money he would have spent to an animal welfare org. And when he roughed up the math, sure enough, taking the mac and donating was somewhat significantly the better option.
But he didn’t do it, nor do I think he changed how he acted in the future. Why? I think it’s really hard to draw a line in the sand that isn’t veganism that stays stable over time. For those who’ve reverted, I’ve seen time and again a slow path back, one where it starts with the less bad items, cheese is quite frequent, and then naturally over time one thing after another is added to the point that most wind up in some sort of reduceitarian state where they’re maybe 80% back to normal (I also want to note here, I’m so glad for any change, and I cast no stones at anyone trying their best to change). And I guess maybe at some point it stops being a moral thing, or becomes some really watered down moral thing like how much people consider the environment when booking a plane ticket.
I don’t know if this helps make it clear, but it’s like how most people feel about harm to younger kids. When it comes to just about any serious harm to younger kids, people are generally against it, like super against it, a feeling of deep caring that to me seems to be one of the strongest sentiments shared by humans universally. People will give you some reasons for this i.e. “they are helpless and we are in a position of responsibility to help them” but really it seems to ground pretty quickly in a sentiment of “it’s just bad”.
To have this sort of love, this commitment to preventing suffering, with animals to me means pretty much just drawing the line at sentient beings and trying to cultivate a basic sense that they matter and that “it’s just bad” to eat them. Sure, I’m not sure what to do about insects, and wild animal welfare is tricky, so it’s not nearly as easy as I’m making it seem. And it’s not that I don’t want to have any idea of some of the numbers and research behind it all, I know I need to stay up to date on debates on sentience, and I know that I reference relative measures of harm often when I’m trying to guide non-veg people away from the worst harms. But what I’d love to see one day is a posturing towards eating animals like our posturing towards child abuse, a very basic, loving expression that in some sense refuses the debate on what’s better or worse and just casts it all out as beyond the pale.
And to try to return to earlier, I guess I see taking this sort of position as likely to extend people’s time spent doing veg-related diets, and I think it’s just a lot trickier to have this sort of relationship when you are doing some sort of utilitarian calculus of what is and isn’t above the bar for you (again, much love to these people, something is always so much better than nothing). This is largely just a theory, I don’t have much to back it up, and it would seem to explain some cases of reversion I’ve seen but certainly not all, and I also feel like this is a bit sloppy because I’d really need a post to get at this hard to describe feeling I have. But hopefully this helps explain the viewpoint a bit better, happy to answer any questions :)
Thank you. This was educational for me, and also just beautifully put.
I have two responses, one on practicalities and one on moral philosophy. My guess is the practical issues aren’t your cruxes, so I’m going to put those aside for now to focus on the moral issue.
you say:
This might be presumptuous, but I think I understand how you feel here, because it is I how I feel about truthseeking. That respect for the truth[1] isn’t just an instrumental tactic towards some greater good, it is the substrate that all good things grow from. If you start trading away truthseeking for short-term benefit you will end up with nothing but ashes, no matter how good the short-term trade looked. And it is scary to me that other people don’t get this, the way I imagine it is scary to you that other people can be surrounded by torture factories and think about them mostly as a source of useful and pleasurable molecules.
I don’t know how to resolve this, because “respect for life” and “respect for truth” are both pretty compelling substrates. I don’t actually know if I’d want to live in a world where truth had decisively won over life and anti-suffering. My gut feeling is that truth world can bootstrap to truth-and-life world easier than life world can, but if someone disagreed I wouldn’t have a good counterargument.
except with explicit enemies
First thanks for your kind words, they were nice to receive :)
But I also think this is wonderfully put, and I think you’re right to point to your feelings on truth as similar. As truth for you, life to me is sacred, and I think I generally build a lot of my world out of that basic fact. I would note that I think one another’s values are likely important for us to, as truth is also really important to me and I value honestly and not lying more than most people I know. And on the flipside I imagine that you value life quite a bit.
But looking at the specific case you imagine, yeah it’s really hard to imagine either totally separate on their own because I find they often lead to one another. I guess one crux for me that might give me doubts on the goodness of the truth world is not being sure on the “whether humans are innately good” question. If they aren’t innately good, then everyone being honest about their intentions and what they want to do may mean places in the world where repression or some sort of suffering is common. I guess the way I imagine it going is having a hard time dealing with the people who honesty just want some version of the world that involves inflicting some sort of harm on others. I imagine that many would likely not want this, and they would make rules as such, but that they’d have a hard time critiquing others in the world far away from themselves if they’ve been perfectly straightforward and honest about where they stand with their values.
But I can easily imagine counterarguments here, and it’s not as if a life where reducing suffering were of utmost importance wouldn’t run the risk of some pretty large deviations from the truth that seem bad (i.e. a vegan government asserting there are zero potentials for negative health effects for going vegan). But then we could get into standard utilitarian responses like “oh well they really should have been going in for something like rule utilitarianism that would have told them this was an awful decision on net” and so on and so forth. Not sure where I come out either really.
Note: I’d love to know what practical response you have, it might not be my crux but could be insightful!
LessWrong is launching Dialogues pretty soon, would you be interested in doing one together? I’m most interested in high level “how do you navigate when two good principles conflict?” than object level vegan questions, but probably that would come up. An unnuanced teaser for this would be “I don’t think a world where humans are Bad as a whole makes sense”.
On a practical level:
I think you speak of veganism as the sustainable shelling point with more certainty than is warranted. How do you know it’s less sustainable, for everyone, than ameliatarianism or reducitarianism? How do you know that the highest EV is pushing veganism-as-ideal harder, rather than socially coordinate around “medical meat”?
I think “no animal products via the mouth” is a much more arbitrary line than is commonly considered, especially if you look at it on purely utilitarian grounds. What about sugar sifted through bones? Why isn’t “no vertebrates” sustainable? What about glue in shoes? What about products produced in factories that use rat poison?
Vegetarianism seems like a terrible compromise shelling point. My understanding is that most eggs are more suffering per calorie or nutrient than beef. But vegetarian is (currently) an easier line than milk-and-beef-but-not-eggs-or-chickens.
I knew a guy who went vegetarian for ethical reasons before learning all of the math. He chose to stay vegetarian after learning how bad eggs were, because he was worried that he couldn’t reconfigure himself a second time and if he tried he’d slide all the way back into eating meat.
When I’ve asked other people about this they answer based on the vegans they knew. But that’s inherently a biased group. It includes current vegans who socialize in animal-focused spaces. Assuming that’s true, why should that apply to vegans who don’t hang out in those spaces, much less omnivores considering reducitarianism?
It’s not obvious to me our protect-at-all-costs attitude towards young children is optimal. I can track a number of costs to society, parents, and the children themselves. And a bunch of harms that still aren’t being prevented.
I suspect you are underestimating the costs of veganism for some people. It sounds like that one guy didn’t value mac and cheese that much, and it was reasonable for him to forego it even if it also would have been easy to buy an offset. But for some people that bowl of mac and cheese is really important, and if you want society as a whole to shift then the default rules need to accommodate that.
Dialogues are launched now!
Have no idea what it entails but I enjoy conversing and learning more about the world, so I’d happy do a dialogue! Happy to keep it in the clouds too.
But yeah you make a good point. I mean, I’m not convinced what the proper schelling point is, and would eagerly eat up any research on this. Maybe what I think is that for a specific group of people like me (no idea what exactly defines that group) it makes sense, but that generally what’s going to make sense for a person has to be quite tailored to their own situation and traits.
I would push back on the no animal products through the mouth bit. Sure, it happens to include lesser forms of suffering that might be less important than changing other things in the world (and if you assumed that this was zero sum that may be a problem, but I don’t think it is). But generally it focuses on avoiding suffering that you are in control of, in a way that updates in light of new evidence. Vegetarianism in India is great because it leads to less meat consumption, but because it involves specific things to avoid instead of setting a basis as suffering it becomes much harder to convincingly explain why they should update to avoid eggs for example. So yeah, protesting rat poison factories may not be a mainstream vegan thing, but I’d be willing to bet vegans are less apt to use it. And sure, vegans may be divided on what to do about sugar, but I’d be surprised if any said “it doesn’t involved an animal going in my mouth so it’s okay with me”. I don’t think it’s arbitrary but find it rather intentional.
I could continue on here but I’m also realizing some part of you wanted to avoid debates about vegan stuffs, so I’ll let this suffice and explicitly say if you don’t want to respond I fully understand (but would be happy to hear if you do!).
I’d be happy to join a dialogue about this.
I think an issue is that you are imagining a general factor of truth-seeking which applies regardless of domain, whereas in practice most of the variation you see in truth-seeking is instrumental or ideological and so limited to the specific areas where people draw utility or political interest from truth-seeking.
I think it is possible to create a community that more generally values truth-seeking and that doing so could be very valuable, bootstrapping a great deal more caring and ability by more clearly seeing what’s going on.
However I think by-default it’s not what happens when criticizing others for lack of truth-seeking, and also by-default not what happens among people who pride themselves on truth-seeking and rationality. Instead, my experience is that when I’ve written corrections to one side in a conflict, I’ve gotten support from the opposing side, but when I’ve then turned around and criticized the opposing side, they’ve rapidly turned on me.
Truth-seeking with respect to instrumentally valuable things can gain support from others who desire instrumentally valuable things, and truth-seeking with respect to politically valuable things can gain support from others who have shared political goals. However creating a generally truth-seeking community that extends beyond this requires a bunch of work and research to extend the truth-seeking to other questions. In particular, one has to proactively recognize the associated conflicts and the overlooked questions and make sure one seeks truth in those areas too. (Which sucks! It’s not your specialty, can’t other people do it?? Ideally yes, but they’re not going to do it automatically, so in order for other people to do it, you have to create a community that actually recognizes that it has to be done, and delegates the work of doing it to specific people who will go on and do it.)
Cutting out bird and seafood products (ameliatarianism) is definitely more sustainable for me. I’m very confused why you would think it’s less sustainable than, uh, ‘cold turkey’ veganism. “Just avoid chicken/eggs” (since I don’t like seafood or the other types of bird meat products) is way easier than “avoid all meat, also milk, also cheese”.
My sense is that different people struggle with staying on a suffering-reducing diet for different reasons, and they have different solutions. Some people do need a commitment to a greater principle to make it work, and they typical mind that other people can’t (but aren’t wrong that people tend to overestimate themselves). Some people really need a little bit of animal nutrition but stop when that need is filled, and it’s not a slippery slope for them[1]and maybe miss that other people can’t stop where they can, although this group tends to be less evangelical so it causes fewer problems..
If the general conversation around ethics and nutrition were in a better place, I think it would be useful to look at how much of “veganism as a hard line” is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and what new equilibriums could be created. Does telling people “if you cross this line once you’ll inevitably slide into full blow carnism” make it more likely? Could advocates create a new hard line that gave people strength but had space for people for whom the trade-offs of total abstention are too hard? Or maybe not-even-once is the best line to hold, and does more good on net even if it drives some people away.
I don’t feel like I can be in that conversation, for a lot of reasons. But I hope it happens
and maybe miss that other people can’t stop where they can, although this group tends to be less evangelical so it causes fewer problems.
I think the first paragraph is well put, and do agree that my camp is likely more apt to be evangelical. But I also want to say that I don’t think the second paragraph is quite representative. I know approximately 0 vegans that support the “cross the line once” philosophy. I think the current status quo is something much closer to what you imagine in the second to last sentence, where the recommendation that’s most often come to me is “look, as long as you are really thinking about it and trying to do what’s best not just for you but for the animals as well, that’s all it takes. We all have weak moments and veganism doesn’t mean perfection, it’s just doing the best with what you’ve got”[1]
Sure, there are some obvious caveats here like you can’t be a vegan if you haven’t significantly reduced your consumption of animals/animal products. Joe, who eats steak every night and starts every morning with eggs and cheese and a nice hearty glass of dairy milk won’t really be a vegan even if he claims the title. But I don’t see the average vegan casting stones at and of the various partial reduction diets, generally I think they’re happy to just have some more people on board.
I have seen a lot of stones cast about this. I’d believe that the 50th percentile vegan doesn’t, but in practice the ones who care a lot are the ones potential reducitarians hear from.
Sure, sure. I’m not saying there isn’t perhaps an extreme wing, I just think it’s quite important to say this isn’t the average, and highlight that the majority of vegans have a view more like the one I mentioned above.
I think this is a distinction worth making, because when you collapse everyone into one camp, you begin to alienate the majority that actually more or less agrees with you. I don’t know what the term for the group you’re talking about is, but maybe evangelical vegans isn’t a bad term to use for now.
I took Tristan to be using “sustainability” in the sense of “lessened environmental impact”, not “requiring little willpower”
While I think the environmental sustainability angle is also an active thing to think about here (because beef potentially involves less suffering for the animals, but relatively more harm to the environment), I did actually intend sustainability in the spirit of “able to stick with it for a long period of time” or something like that. Probably could have been clearer.
What Elizabeth had to say here is broadly right. See my comment above, for some more in depth reasoning as to why I think the opposite may be true, but basically I think that the sort of loving relationship formed with other animals that I imagine as the thing that holds together commitment over a long period of time, over a large range of hard circumstances, is tricky to create when you don’t go full on. I have no idea what’s sustainable for you though, and want to emphasize that whatever works to reduce is something I’m happy with, so I’m quite glad for your ameliatarian addition.
I’m also trying to update my views here, so can I ask for how long you’ve been on a veg diet? And if you predict any changes in the near future?
Is this just acknowledging some sort of monkey brain thing, or endorsing it as well? (If part of it is acknowledging it, then kudos. I appreciate the honesty and bravery. I also think the data point is relevant to what is discussed in the post.)
I ask because it strikes me as a Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence sort of thing. If Hitler thinks the sky is green, well, he’s wrong, but it isn’t really relevant to the question of what color the sky actually is.
The first paragraph doesn’t include jacquesthibs’s original state before becoming vegetarian, leaving some ambiguity. I think you’re parsing it as “I went from vegan to vegetarian because I stopped trusting vegans”. The other parsing is “I went from omnivore to vegetarian, despite not trusting vegans, because I did my own research.” The rest of the comment makes me fairly confident that the second parsing is correct; but certainly it would be easier to follow if it were stated upfront.
Sorry, I assumed it was obvious we were talking about omnivore to vegan given that Ninety-Three was talking about not being open to becoming vegan if vegans tried to convince them. I do see the ambiguity though.
I mean, to a point; if vegans are your main source of information on veganism and its costs, and you find out a pattern of vegans being untrustworthy, this means you’re left to navigate veganism alone, which is itself a cost and a risk. Having a supportive community that you can trust makes a big difference in how easy it is to stick to big lifestyle decisions.
Do you think that the attitude you’re presenting here is the attitude one ought to have in matters of moral disagreement?
Surely there’s various examples of moral progress (which have happened or are happening) that you would align yourself with. Surely some or all of these examples include people who lack perfect honesty/truth seeking on par with veganism.
If long ago you noticed some people speaking out against racism/sexism/slavery/etc Had imperfect epistemics and truth seeking, would you condone willfully disregarding all attempts to persuade you on those topics?