I’d appreciate greatly if I could fill in the second part of the form at a later date, maybe ~3 months prior to the weekend.
vollmer
Karma: 51
Great! I’m in for this one.
I took the survey, was fun!
Okay, now I see what you meant. I assumed that since you’d optimize for financial benefit you want to start with a reduction of the most expensive meat options and thus get more than 3⁄7 of the financial benefit when adopting it three days a week.
You should read the results of the first study you posted more carefully:
Good point, thanks. My statement is not exactly wrong, but I should have written “healthier than average diets”.
The other links don’t contradict this study and only look at deaths from specific causes, and not general mortality.
That’s quite wrong, examples:
Key 1999:
Total mortality and longevity also differed according to vegetarian status in California Seventh-day Adventists. After adjusting for age and sex, Seventh-day Adventist vegetarians had a relative risk for total mortality of 0.80 (95% CI: 0.74, 0.87) compared with those who ate any meat products. Using a multivariate, multiple-decrement-lifetable approach (19), we showed that vegetarian Seventh-day Adventist women live 2.52 y longer than their nonvegetarian (meat ≥ 1 time/wk) counterparts (P < 0.001), and a similar comparison in men showed a 3.21-y difference in longevity (P < 0.001).
McEvoy 2011 (review):
Overall, vegetarians tend to be slimmer, appear to be in better health, with reduced risk of chronic diseases and greater longevity when compared with omnivores
In that analysis, no significant differences were observed for stroke mortality or overall mortality between vegetarians and non-vegetarians(12).
(...) but no significant differences were observed for overall mortality rates between vegetarians and omnivores in these cohorts. One possible explanation may be that overall mortality was low in the cohort populations compared with the general Western population.
I deliberately only quoted very conservative and reliable sources, and although the effects are not really large, they are statistically significant and positive.
If the part-time vegetarian still eats significant amounts of meat and eggs, then yes, there will also be a significant ethical difference.
If you’re just interested in cutting down the cost of your diet, you also might switch to different products such as cage eggs. The cheapest production often is also the most cruel. But I assume that’s not what you meant (and it’s not what I meant either).
Agreed. Do you have an idea how to go about this?
Protein deficiency is very rare even among long-term vegans and it’s pretty hard to miss out on essential amino acids. As for “healthy fats, creatine, etc...”, those can be easily supplemented, which is particularly important for vegans. Also note that meat eaters usually don’t get enough healthy fats either.
Vegetarians have higher life expectancies (1-9 years), as also stated here.
Yes, except the benefit of not hurting sentient beings, I’d say. And probably except the benefit of not being biased towards hurting animals.
I’m a Swiss medical student. I’ve read HPMoR and a large part of the core sequences. I’ve attended LW meetups in several US cities and met quite a few of you in the Bay Area and/or at the Effective Altruism Summit. I’ve interned for Leverage Research. I co-founded giordano-bruno-stiftung.ch (outreach organisation with German translations of some LessWrong blog posts, and other posts about rationality). Looking forward to participating in the comment section more often.
Welcome Denise! :)
$1000 seems pretty high/optimistic to me. Sometimes vegetarian meals are more expensive due to lack of options. Also, preparing veggie food usually takes more time. As a result (after having improved my cooking / food preparing speed) I still get a small monetary benefit though, maybe $500 a year.
Not sure that’s a good way of asking. The pain of being veg seems to be inversely correlated with knowing reasons for going veg, and there’s a lot of loss aversion. I got anecdotal evidence from quite a few people telling me that going and staying veg is actually much easier than they anticipated. (It’s important to take the time to learn about health effects, look at meat alternatives and find veggie restaurants). Reversal test: Imagine you’re vegetarian and earn $3000 more than you currently do. Would you pay $3000 a year ($8 a day) to eat meat again?
It’s not only more ethical but also healthier to be veg.
It makes me happy to see you and others taking action due to Peter’s post.
EDIT: Concerning the “although”, I recommend to also read Brian’s comment.
How to beat procastination, by Luke, on the CFAR blog. http://rationality.org/2013/05/30/how-to-beat-procrastination/
For me, this is not working for some of the posts,
e.g. http://lesswrong.com/lw/kd/pascals_mugging_tiny_probabilities_of_vast/?sort=top