This seems like an inside view of the feelings that lead to using arguments as soldiers. The motivation is sympathetic and the reasoning is solid enough to weather low-effort attacks, but at the end of the day it is treating arguments as means to ends rather than attempts to discover ground level truth. And Effective Altruism and LessWrong have defined themselves as places where we operate on the object level and evaluate each argument on its own merit, not as a pawn in a war.
The systems can tolerate a certain amount of failure (which is good, because it’s going to happen). But the more people treat arguments as soldiers, the weaker the norm and aspiration to collaboratively truthseek, even when it’s inconvenient, becomes. Do it too much, and the norm will go away entirely.
You might argue that it’s good to destroy high-decoupling norms, because they’re innately bad or because animal welfare is so important it is worth ruining any institution that gets in its way. But AFAICT, the truthseeking norms of EA and LW have been extremely hospitable environments for animal welfare advocates[1], specifically because of the high decoupling. High decoupling is what let people consider the argument that factory farming was a moral atrocity even though it was very inconvenient for them.
So when vegan advocates operate using arguments as soldiers they are not only destroying truthseeking infrastructure that was valuable to many causes. They are destroying infrastructure that has already done a great deal of good for their cause in particular. They are using arguments as soldiers to destroy their own buildings.
relative to baseline. Evidence off the top of my head:
* EAs go vegan, vegetarian, and reducitarian at much higher than baseline rates. This is less true of rationalists, but I believe is still above baseline. I know many people who loathe most vegan advocacy and nonetheless reduce meat, or in rare cases go all the way to vegan, because they could decouple the suffering arguments from the people making them. * EA money has transformed farmed animal welfare and AFAIK is the ~only source of funding for things like insect suffering (couldn’t immediately find numbers, source is “a friend in EA animal welfare told me so”) * AFAIK, veganism’s biggest antagonist on LW and EAF over the last year has been me. And I’ve expressed that antagonism by… let me check my notes… getting dozens of vegans nutrition tested and on (AFAIK) vegan supplements. That project would have gone bigger if I’d been able to find a vegan collaborator, but I couldn’t find one (and I did actively look, although exhausted my options pretty quickly). My main posts in this sequence go out of their way to express deep respect for vegans’ moral convictions and recognize animal suffering as morally relevant.
Maybe there’s a poster who’s actively hostile to animal welfare that I didn’t notice, but if I didn’t hear about them they can’t possibly have done that much.
This seems like an inside view of the feelings that lead to using arguments as soldiers. The motivation is sympathetic and the reasoning is solid enough to weather low-effort attacks, but at the end of the day it is treating arguments as means to ends rather than attempts to discover ground level truth. And Effective Altruism and LessWrong have defined themselves as places where we operate on the object level and evaluate each argument on its own merit, not as a pawn in a war.
The systems can tolerate a certain amount of failure (which is good, because it’s going to happen). But the more people treat arguments as soldiers, the weaker the norm and aspiration to collaboratively truthseek, even when it’s inconvenient, becomes. Do it too much, and the norm will go away entirely.
You might argue that it’s good to destroy high-decoupling norms, because they’re innately bad or because animal welfare is so important it is worth ruining any institution that gets in its way. But AFAICT, the truthseeking norms of EA and LW have been extremely hospitable environments for animal welfare advocates[1], specifically because of the high decoupling. High decoupling is what let people consider the argument that factory farming was a moral atrocity even though it was very inconvenient for them.
So when vegan advocates operate using arguments as soldiers they are not only destroying truthseeking infrastructure that was valuable to many causes. They are destroying infrastructure that has already done a great deal of good for their cause in particular. They are using arguments as soldiers to destroy their own buildings.
relative to baseline. Evidence off the top of my head:
* EAs go vegan, vegetarian, and reducitarian at much higher than baseline rates. This is less true of rationalists, but I believe is still above baseline. I know many people who loathe most vegan advocacy and nonetheless reduce meat, or in rare cases go all the way to vegan, because they could decouple the suffering arguments from the people making them.
* EA money has transformed farmed animal welfare and AFAIK is the ~only source of funding for things like insect suffering (couldn’t immediately find numbers, source is “a friend in EA animal welfare told me so”)
* AFAIK, veganism’s biggest antagonist on LW and EAF over the last year has been me. And I’ve expressed that antagonism by… let me check my notes… getting dozens of vegans nutrition tested and on (AFAIK) vegan supplements. That project would have gone bigger if I’d been able to find a vegan collaborator, but I couldn’t find one (and I did actively look, although exhausted my options pretty quickly). My main posts in this sequence go out of their way to express deep respect for vegans’ moral convictions and recognize animal suffering as morally relevant.
Maybe there’s a poster who’s actively hostile to animal welfare that I didn’t notice, but if I didn’t hear about them they can’t possibly have done that much.