Yesterday, I wrote a post about the Regression to the Mean Diet. The biggest impact knowing about the Regression to the Mean Diet has had for me is on my interpretations of studies, where it’s a lens that reveals what would otherwise be the best studies to be mostly useless, and of anecdotes, where it makes me heavily discount claims about a new diet working unless I’ve gotten to ask a lot of questions about the old diet, too. But there’s one other implication, which I left out of the original post, because it’s kind of unfortunate and is a little difficult to talk about.
I’m not interested in nutrition because I care about weight, or body aesthetics, or athletic performance. I care about nutrition because I believe it has a very large, very underappreciated impact on individual productivity. Low quality diets make people tired and depressed, so they don’t get anything done.
The Regression to the Mean Diet predicts that if you reroll the eating habits of someone whose diet-related health is unusually bad, then their new diet will probably be an improvement. This has a converse: if you reroll the eating habits of someone whose diet-related health is good, especially if that person is a peak performer in some way, then their new diet will be worse.
Under this model, one of the most destructive things you could do would be to identify top performers in important areas, people in good health with no nutritional problems, and convince them they need to change their diet.
Which brings me to vegan outreach within the Effective Altruism movement.
I don’t think an animal’s suffering is anywhere close to as bad as a similar amount of suffering in a human, but I do think it matters, and that this makes modern factory farming quite bad. While I have qualms about the quality of vegan diets in practice, I think that if you convince an average person from the general public to switch from an omnivorous diet they haven’t thought much about to a vegan diet with any thought at all put into it, this will on average be an improvement. I think externally-facing vegan outreach is good, and while I wouldn’t prioritize it over AI alignment or anti-aging research, I am in favor of it.
But inward-facing vegan outreach scares me. Because EA is in fact seeking out top performers in important areas, and introducing them to its memes. Under the current social equilibrium, those people feel some pressure to reduce their meat consumption, but not many make large dietary changes; most of the people who are vegetarian or vegan within EA where vegetarian or vegan beforehand. It’s easy to imagine a different equilibrium, in which the majority of omnivores who get involved in EA go vegan.
I worry that in that world, what would be the top-percentile people are no longer top percentile, and no one notices the absence or makes the connection.
These nutrition posts are great. Will there be a way for me to link to all (and only) this series, in chronological order, at some point? I want these discussed as a group on social media and the EA Forum too.
Does it solve your use case if I edit prev/next links into all of them?
(For now I’m focused on keeping a writing cadence going, and not thinking too much about publication format. There’s a decent chance that, after I’ve depleted the backlog of unpublished ideas I’ve had, I’ll do a second pass of some sort and make it more polished; but I don’t think that’s certain enough that you should count on it.)
Yesterday, I wrote a post about the Regression to the Mean Diet. The biggest impact knowing about the Regression to the Mean Diet has had for me is on my interpretations of studies, where it’s a lens that reveals what would otherwise be the best studies to be mostly useless, and of anecdotes, where it makes me heavily discount claims about a new diet working unless I’ve gotten to ask a lot of questions about the old diet, too. But there’s one other implication, which I left out of the original post, because it’s kind of unfortunate and is a little difficult to talk about.
I’m not interested in nutrition because I care about weight, or body aesthetics, or athletic performance. I care about nutrition because I believe it has a very large, very underappreciated impact on individual productivity. Low quality diets make people tired and depressed, so they don’t get anything done.
The Regression to the Mean Diet predicts that if you reroll the eating habits of someone whose diet-related health is unusually bad, then their new diet will probably be an improvement. This has a converse: if you reroll the eating habits of someone whose diet-related health is good, especially if that person is a peak performer in some way, then their new diet will be worse.
Under this model, one of the most destructive things you could do would be to identify top performers in important areas, people in good health with no nutritional problems, and convince them they need to change their diet.
Which brings me to vegan outreach within the Effective Altruism movement.
I don’t think an animal’s suffering is anywhere close to as bad as a similar amount of suffering in a human, but I do think it matters, and that this makes modern factory farming quite bad. While I have qualms about the quality of vegan diets in practice, I think that if you convince an average person from the general public to switch from an omnivorous diet they haven’t thought much about to a vegan diet with any thought at all put into it, this will on average be an improvement. I think externally-facing vegan outreach is good, and while I wouldn’t prioritize it over AI alignment or anti-aging research, I am in favor of it.
But inward-facing vegan outreach scares me. Because EA is in fact seeking out top performers in important areas, and introducing them to its memes. Under the current social equilibrium, those people feel some pressure to reduce their meat consumption, but not many make large dietary changes; most of the people who are vegetarian or vegan within EA where vegetarian or vegan beforehand. It’s easy to imagine a different equilibrium, in which the majority of omnivores who get involved in EA go vegan.
I worry that in that world, what would be the top-percentile people are no longer top percentile, and no one notices the absence or makes the connection.
(Crossposted on Facebook)
These nutrition posts are great. Will there be a way for me to link to all (and only) this series, in chronological order, at some point? I want these discussed as a group on social media and the EA Forum too.
Does it solve your use case if I edit prev/next links into all of them?
(For now I’m focused on keeping a writing cadence going, and not thinking too much about publication format. There’s a decent chance that, after I’ve depleted the backlog of unpublished ideas I’ve had, I’ll do a second pass of some sort and make it more polished; but I don’t think that’s certain enough that you should count on it.)
If you would publish them as regular posts it would be easy to put them in a sequence.
Prev/next is probably good enough.
IMO this is a prime candidate for curation/editing work, which I might be happy to do if no one else does.