wilkox

Karma: 347

wilkox 3 Jun 2023 2:52 UTC
29 points
15
on: Change my mind: Veganism entails trade-offs, and health is one of the axes
I’ve been trying to figure out why I feel like I disagree with this post, despite broadly agreeing with your cruxes. I think it’s because it in the act of writing and posting this there is an implicit claim along the lines of:
Subtle nutritional issues that are specific to veganism can cause significant health harms, to a degree that it is worth spending time and energy thinking about this as ‘a problem’.
For context, I am both vegan and a doctor. Nutrient deficiencies are common and can cause anything ranging from no symptoms to vague symptoms to life-threatening diseases. (For simplicity, I’m going to focus on deficiencies only, although of course there are other ways diet can affect health.) They are generally well-understood, can be detected with cheap laboratory tests, and have cheap and effective treatments.
Veganism is a known risk factor for some nutrient deficiencies, particularly B12 and iron. Many vegans, including myself, will routinely get blood tests to monitor for these deficiencies. If detected, they can be treated with diet changes, fortified foods, oral supplementation, or intramuscular/intravenous supplementation.
Some vegans don’t know about this, and they might end up with a nutrient deficiency. They might be asymptomatic, or they might develop symptoms, and if they go to a doctor with those symptoms the doctor will (hopefully) figure out the problem and recommend a solution. If they don’t go to a doctor, it could be either because the problem is minor enough that they can’t be bothered, or because they generally don’t seek medical help when they are seriously unwell, in which case the risk from something like B12 deficiency is negligible compared to e.g. the risk of an untreated heart attack. Many people don’t have good access to medical care, but this is a problem orthogonal to veganism, and for these people veganism is unlikely to be their most important health concern.
Beyond these well-known issues, is there any reason to expect veganism in particular to cause any health harms worth spending time worrying about? People have vague symptoms all the time, and perhaps some of these are related to veganism. They might also be related to microplastics, or pathogens, or antibiotics in the meat supply, or who knows what. As far as I’m aware, there is no mysterious syndrome or increased mortality rate among vegans that is currently going unexplained.
Let’s suppose that people do the exact opposite of what you recommend: proselytise for veganism without mentioning the risk of nutrient deficiencies; fail to suggest dietary issues when discussing health problems; make false claims about vegan nutrition. If you take out the references to veganism, this is just the current state of the world. People advertise their fast food restaurants and feed their children sugary breakfast cereals without caveats about the risk of heart disease or diabetes. People give each other folk medical advice and swap half-baked ideas about supplements and fad diets. Much of the work of public health and medicine is preventing, screening for, and fixing the problems caused by this. ‘People should have better health knowledge’ is broadly laudable and agreeable, but it’s not a claim about veganism.
In summary:
- The potential health harms associated with veganism are well understood, easily detected, and easily treated
- To the extent that vegans don’t know about them, this is not a problem specific to veganism nor is it one where veganism in particular is likely to be causing significant health harms
- There is no reason to suspect veganism in particular is causing as yet undiscovered harms
What links here?

wilkox 28 Mar 2024 5:10 UTC
22 points
38
in reply to: LGS’s comment on: My Interview With Cade Metz on His Reporting About Slate Star Codex
It seems like you think what Metz wrote was acceptable because it all adds up to presenting the truth in the end, even if the way it was presented was ‘unconvincing’ and the evidence ‘embarassing[ly]’ weak. I don’t buy the principle that ‘bad epistemology is fine if the outcome is true knowledge’, and I also don’t buy that this happened in this particular case, nor that this is what Metz intended.

If Metz’s goal was to inform his readers about Scott’s position, he failed. He didn’t give any facts other than that Scott ‘aligned himself with’ and quoted somebody who holds a politically unacceptable view. The majority of readers will glean from this nothing but a vague association between Scott and racism, as the author intended. More sophisticated readers will notice what Metz is doing, and assume that if there was substantial evidence that Scott held an unpalatable view Metz would have gladly published that instead of resorting to an oblique smear by association. Nobody ends up better informed about what Scott actually believes.

I think trevor is right to invoke the quokka analogy. Rationalists are tying ourselves in knots in a long comment thread debating if actually, technically, strictly, Metz was misleading. Meanwhile, Metz never cared about this in the first place, and is continuing to enjoy a successful career employing tabloid rhetorical tricks.

wilkox 3 Oct 2023 1:43 UTC
18 points
10
on: EA Vegan Advocacy is not truthseeking, and it’s everyone’s problem
For several of the examples you give, including my own comments, your description of what was said seems to misrepresent the source text.
Active suppression of inconvenient questions: Martín Soto
The charitable explanation here is that my post focuses on naive veganism, and Soto thinks that’s a made-up problem.
This is not a charitable or even plausible description of what Martín wrote, and Martín has described this as a ‘hyperbolic’ misrepresentation of their position. There is nowhere in the source comment thread that Martín claims or implies anything resembling the position that naïve veganism is ‘made-up’. The closest they come is to express that naïve transitions to veganism are not common in their personal experience (‘I was very surprised to hear those anecdotal stories of naive transitions, because in my anecdotal experience across many different vegan and animalist spaces, serious talk about nutrition, and a constant reminder to put health first, has been an ever-present norm.‘) Otherwise, they seem to take the idea of naïve transitions seriously while considering the effects of ‘signaling [sic] out veganism’ for discussion: ‘To the extent the naive transition accounts are representative of what’s going on...’, ‘seems to me to be one of the central causes of these naive transitions...‘, ‘...the single symptom of naive vegan transitions...’.
(Martín also objected to other ways in which they believe you misrepresented their position, and Slapstick agreed. I found it harder to evaluate whether they were misrepresented in these other ways, because like Stephen Bennett I found it hard to understand Martín’s position in detail.)
Active suppression of inconvenient questions: ‘midlist EA’
But what they actually did was name-check the idea that X is fine before focusing on the harm to animals caused by repeating the claim- which is exactly what you’d expect if the health claims were true but inconvenient. I don’t know what this author actually believes, but I do know focusing on the consequences when the facts are in question is not truthseeking.
The author is clear about what they actually believe. They say that the claims that plant foods are poisonous or responsible for Western diseases are ‘based on dubious evidence’ and are ‘dubious health claims’. They then make an argument proceeding from this: that these dubious claims increase the consumption of animal-based foods, which they believe to be unethical, with the evidence for animal suffering being much stronger than the evidence for the ‘dubious health claims’.
You may disagree with their assessment of the health claims about plant foods, and indeed they didn’t examine any evidence for or against these claims in the quoted post. This doesn’t change the fact that the source quotation doesn’t fit the pattern you describe. The author clearly does not believe that the health claims about plant foods are ‘true but inconvenient’, but that they are ‘dubious’. Their focus on the consequences of these health claims is not an attempt to ‘actively suppress inconvenient questions’, but to express what they believe to be true.
Active suppression of inconvenient questions: Rockwell
This comment more strongly emphasizes the claim that my beliefs are wrong, not just inconvenient.
Rockwell expresses, in passing, a broad concern with your posts (‘...why I find Elizabeth’s posts so troubling...‘), although as they don’t go into any further detail it’s not clear if they think your ‘beliefs are wrong’ or that they find your posts troubling for some other reason. It’s reasonable to criticise this as vague negativity without any argument or details to support it. However, it cannot serve as an example of ‘active suppression of an inconvenient question’ because it does not seem to engage with any question at all, and there’s certainly nowhere in the few words Rockwell wrote on ‘Elizabeth’s posts’ where they express or emphasise ‘the claim that [your] beliefs are wrong, not just inconvenient’. (This source could work as an example of ‘strong implications not defended’).
Active suppression of inconvenient questions: wilkox^[1]
...the top comment says that vegan advocacy is fine because it’s no worse than fast food or breakfast cereal ads...If I heard an ally described our shared movement as no worse than McDonalds, I would injure myself in my haste to repudiate them.
My comment does not claim ‘that vegan advocacy is fine because it’s no worse than fast food or breakfast cereal ads’, and does not describe veganism or vegan advocacy as ‘no worse than McDonalds’. It sets up a hypothetical scenario (‘Let’s suppose...‘) in which vegan advocates do the extreme opposite of what you recommend in the conclusions of the ‘My cruxes’ section of the Change My Mind post, then claims that even this hypothetical, extreme version of vegan advocacy would be no worse than the current discourse around diet and health in general. This was to illustrate my claim that health harms from misinformation are ‘not a problem specific to veganism’, nor one where ‘veganism in particular is likely to be causing significant health harms’.
Had I actually compared McDonalds to real-world vegan advocacy rather than this hypothetical worst-case vegan advocacy, I would have said McDonalds is much worse. You know this, because you asked me and I told you. (This also doesn’t seem to be an example of ‘active suppression of inconvenient questions’.)
Frame control, etc.: wilkox
Over a very long exchange I attempt to nail down his position:
- Does he think micronutrient deficiencies don’t exist? No, he agrees they do.
- Does he think that they can’t cause health issues? No, he agrees they do.
This did not happen. You did not ask or otherwise attempt to nail down whether I believe micronutrient deficiencies exist, and I gave my position on that in the opening comment (‘Veganism is a known risk factor for some nutrient deficiencies...’). Likewise, you did not ask or attempt to nail down whether I believe micronutrient deficiencies can cause health issues, and I gave my position on that in the opening comment (‘Nutrient deficiencies are common and can cause anything ranging from no symptoms to vague symptoms to life-threatening diseases’).
- Does he think this just doesn’t happen very often, or is always caught? No, if anything he thinks the Faunalytics underestimates the veg*n attrition due to medical issues.
You did ask me what I thought about the Faunalytics data (‘Do you disagree with their data...or not consider that important...?’).
So what exactly does he disagree with me on?
This is answered by the opening sentences of my first comment: ‘I feel like I disagree with this post, despite broadly agreeing with your cruxes’, because I interpreted your post as making ‘an implicit claim’ that there are ‘significant health harms’ of veganism beyond the well-known nutritional deficiencies. I went on to ask whether you actually were making this claim: ‘Beyond these well-known issues, is there any reason to expect veganism in particular to cause any health harms worth spending time worrying about?’ Over two exchanges on the ‘importance’ of nutrient deficiencies in veganism, I asked again and then again whether you believe that there are health harms of veganism that are more serious and/or less well-known than nutrient deficiencies, and you clarified that you do not, and provided some useful context that helped me to understand why you wrote the post the way you did.
My account of the conversation is that I misread an implicit claim into your post, and you clarified what you were actually claiming and provided context that helped me to understand why the post had been written in the way it was. We did identify a disagreement over the ‘importance’ of nutrient deficiencies in veganism, but this also seemed explicit and legible. It’s hard to construe this as an example where the nature of the disagreement was unclear, or otherwise of ‘nailing jello to the wall’.
Wilkox acknowledges that B12 and iron deficiencies can cause fatigue, and veganism can cause these deficiencies, but it’s fine because if people get tired they can go to a doctor
I did not claim that fatigue due to B12 or iron deficiencies, or any other health issue secondary to veganism, is ‘fine because if people get tired they can go to a doctor’. I claimed that to the extent that people don’t see a doctor because of these symptoms, the health harms of veganism are unlikely to be their most important medical problem, because the symptoms are ‘minor enough that they can’t be bothered’, they ‘generally don’t seek medical help when they are seriously unwell, in which case the risk from something like B12 deficiency is negligible compared to e.g. the risk of an untreated heart attack’, or they ‘don’t have good access to medical care...[in which case] veganism is unlikely to be their most important health concern’. I did not say that every vegan who has symptoms due to nutritional deficiencies can or will go to a doctor (I explicitly said the opposite), nor that this situation is ‘fine’.
But it’s irrelevant when the conversation is “can we count on veganism-induced fatigue being caught?”
‘Can we count on veganism-induced fatigue being caught?’ is not a question raised in my original comment, nor in Lukas Finnveden’s reply. I claimed that it would not always be caught, and gave some reasons why it might not be caught (symptoms too minor to bother seeing a doctor, generally avoid seeking medical care for major issues, poor access to medical care). Lukas Finnveden’s comment added reasons that people with significant symptoms may not seek medical care: they might not notice issues that are nonetheless significant to them, or they might have executive function problems that create a barrier to accessing medical care. There’s nowhere in our brief discussion where ‘can we count on veganism-induced fatigue being caught?’ is under debate.
Bad sources, badly handled: wilkox
Wilkox’s comment on the LW version of the post, where he eventually agrees that veganism requires testing and supplementation for many people (although most of that exchange hadn’t happened at the time of linking).
I did not ‘eventually agree’ to these points, and we did not discuss them at all in the exchange. In my first comment, I said ‘Many vegans, including myself, will routinely get blood tests to monitor for these deficiencies. If detected, they can be treated with diet changes, fortified foods, oral supplementation, or intramuscular/intravenous supplementation.’
1. ^
  I am not an EA, have only passing familiarity with the EA movement, and have never knowingly met an EA in real life. I don’t think anything I have written can stand as an example of ‘EA vegan advocacy’, and actual EAs might reasonably object to being tarred with the same brush. ↩︎

wilkox 2 May 2011 8:29 UTC
18 points
on: SIAI—An Examination
Thank you very much for doing this. You’ve clearly put a lot of effort into making it both thorough and readable.

Formulate methods of validating the SIAI’s execution of goals.

Seconded. Being able to measure the effectiveness of the institute is important both for maintaining the confidence of their donors, and for making progress towards their long-term goals.

wilkox 5 Jun 2023 23:35 UTC
17 points
10
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Change my mind: Veganism entails trade-offs, and health is one of the axes
I don’t doubt the Faunalytics data. If anything the number seems surprisingly low, considering it comes from self-reporting among people who went on to quit veganism.
I’m not sure how to weigh ‘importance’ other than subjectively, but I’ll attempt to at least put bounds on it. As a floor, some number of people experience health issues that are important enough to them that they are motivated to quit veganism. As a ceiling, the health risks of veganism are less important than those of other harms related to diet – for example, dyslipidaemia or diabetes – that increase mortality, given that veganism doesn’t seem to increase mortality and may reduce it.
My stance at the moment is still more ‘generally confused about what you’re trying to communicate/achieve’ than ‘disagreeing with a particular claim you’re making’. I’d like to close the inferential distance if possible, but feel free to ignore this comment if you don’t think it’s leading anywhere useful.
I still don’t understand which of the following (if any) you would endorse:
- Many vegans don’t know about the risk of nutrient deficiencies and would benefit from this knowledge (in which case I’m still confused why you wrote this post instead of just presenting this information)
- The health harms of nutrient deficiencies in veganism are more serious than is widely recognised
- There are serious health harms of veganism other than the risk of nutrient deficiencies that are known but this knowledge is not widespread, or that we don’t know about yet but have good reason to suspect exist
What links here?
- wilkox's comment on EA Vegan Advocacy is not truthseeking, and it’s everyone’s problem by Elizabeth (3 Oct 2023 1:43 UTC; 18 points)
- Elizabeth's comment on EA Vegan Advocacy is not truthseeking, and it’s everyone’s problem by Elizabeth (3 Oct 2023 1:56 UTC; 4 points)

wilkox 10 May 2012 7:51 UTC
16 points
in reply to: Ghatanathoah’s comment on: If epistemic and instrumental rationality strongly conflict
This is like saying “if evolution wants a frog to appear poisonous, the most efficient way to accomplish that is to actually make it poisonous”. Evolution has a long history of faking signals when it can get away with it. If evolution “wants” you to signal that you care about the truth, it will do so by causing you to actually care about the truth if and only if causing you to actually care about the truth has a lower fitness cost than the array of other potential dishonest signals on offer.

wilkox 26 Apr 2012 4:25 UTC
14 points
in reply to: jumandtonic’s comment on: A Kick in the Rationals: What hurts you in your LessWrong Parts?
I’ve noticed many people who practise meditation have a strong belief in meditation and the more ‘rational’ core of Buddhist practices, but only belief in belief about the new age-y aspects. My meditation teacher, for example, consistently prefaces the new age stuff with “in Buddhist teachings” or “Buddhists believe” (“Buddhists believe we will be reincarnated”) while making other claims as simple statements of fact (“mindfulness meditation is a useful relaxation technique”).

wilkox 9 Aug 2011 23:09 UTC
11 points
on: Leveling IRL—level 1
This sounds a lot like the Scouting merit system, in a good way. I learned more life skills from Scouts then I ever did from public education.

wilkox 9 May 2011 23:25 UTC
11 points
in reply to: Morendil’s comment on: [HPMoR] Celebratory Trailer
This was what confirmed Eliezer’s skill as a writer in my mind. He resisted the (typical nerdish) impulse to vomit out pages of obsessively detailed explanations, instead leading the reader on with tantalising hints spaced far apart. It probably accounts for a lot of the book’s notorious addictiveness.

wilkox 1 May 2024 0:08 UTC
10 points
0
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Open Thread Spring 2024
Katelyn Jetelina has been providing some useful information on this. Her conclusion at this point seems to be ‘more data needed’.

wilkox 4 Jun 2023 0:41 UTC
10 points
0
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Change my mind: Veganism entails trade-offs, and health is one of the axes
I’m confused- the issues you mention seem both important and, in most cases, extremely easy to fix. If there’s a large population that is going vegan without the steps you mention (and my informal survey says there is), it seems high value to alert them to the necessity.

I suspect we have different intuitions as a matter of degree for ‘important’, ‘high value’, and ‘necessity’ here. Despite that, I think we would probably agree on a statement like ‘vegans who are not aware that their diet increases the risk of nutrient deficiencies would benefit from learning about this’.
If you had posted something like ‘PSA: if you are vegan, you might not know you are at increased risk of certain nutrient deficiencies; read (this link) to find out more and see your doctor if you have (list of symptoms) or want to get tested’, I would have thought this was a good idea. What confuses me is why you wrote the post you did instead, which seems to be gesturing at a larger problem. As a specific example, in ‘Evidence I’m looking for’, you wrote:
The ideal study is a longitudinal RCT […] I’ve spent several hours looking for good studies on vegan nutrition.
While more high-quality evidence on veganism would be valuable in general, I’m confused by what you expect to learn from such an RCT or study. Do you think there is reason to believe there are significant health harms of veganism that we don’t know about yet? If so, why?
What links here?

wilkox 10 May 2011 6:41 UTC
10 points
in reply to: waveman’s comment on: Building rationalist communities: lessons from the Latter-day Saints

Missionary work, including LDS, has a phenomenally low success rate. I don’t recall it, but from memory a missionary might convert 1-2 people per year based on cold calls.

A one year doubling or tripling time doesn’t strike me as “phenomenally low”.

wilkox 5 May 2011 9:13 UTC
10 points
in reply to: PlaidX’s comment on: Hollow Adjectives
This bothered me too. If ‘omnipotent’ is defined as ‘able to do things which can be done’, we’re all gods.

wilkox 3 Jul 2023 6:29 UTC
9 points
2
on: Why it’s so hard to talk about Consciousness
This is a clear and convincing account of the intuitions that lead to people either accepting or denying the existence of the Hard Problem. I’m squarely in Camp #1, and while I think the broad strokes are correct there are two places where I think this account gets Camp #1 a little wrong on the details.
According to Camp #1, the correct explanandum is still “I claim to have experienced X” (where X is the apparent experience). After all, if we can explain exactly why you, as a physical system, uttered the words “I experienced X”, then there’s nothing else to explain. […] In other words, the two camps disagree about the epistemic status of apparently perceived experiences: for Camp #2, they’re epistemic bedrock, whereas for Camp #1, they’re model outputs of your brain, and like all model outputs of your brain, they can be wrong.
I think this is conflating two difference senses of ‘claim’. The first sense is the interpersonal or speech sense: John makes a claim to you about his internal experience, in the form of speech. In this sense, ‘John claims to have a headache’ is the correct explanandum, in the Camp #1 view, of John telling you he has a headache, because it’s the closest thing to John’s actual experience that you have access to.
However, there is something different going on in the case where you yourself seem to have had an experience. You can believe you have had a certain experience without telling anybody about it, or without even uttering the words ‘I experienced X’ into an empty room, so the interpersonal or speech sense of ‘claim’ doesn’t really seem to apply. This only leaves us with the sense of ‘making a claim to yourself’, which might more precisely be called ‘thinking’ or ‘believing’.
Even in the Camp #1 view, there really is something different about a claim you make to yourself. You have privileged access to the contents of your own mind that you don’t have to contents of other people’s minds, by virtue of the mundane physical fact that the neurones in your brain are connected to the other neurones in your brain but not to the neurones in other people’s brains. Even if you don’t utter the words ‘I experienced X’, there is still something to be explained that lies between ‘actually experiencing X’ and ‘claiming in speech to have experienced X: why did you have the thought or belief ‘I experienced X’, instead of ‘I didn’t experience X but it would be useful for me to lie about it’? The explanandum in the case of your own experience is located a little deeper than it is in the case of the experiences of others. You can still be wrong about the underlying reality of your experiences – perhaps the memory of having a headache was falsely implanted with nefarious technology – but you have access to a type of evidence about it that John does not.
(I’ve never been able to figure out if Thomas Nagel, in ‘What is it like to be a bat?’, believes that the mere existence of this sort of privileged evidence about one’s own experiences tells us something about the nature of qualia/subjectivity. He says ‘The point of view in question is not one accessible only to a single individual. Rather it is a type.’ But, from my Camp #1 perspective, he never seems to explain what the difference is.)
So consciousness will be a densely connected part of this network – no more, no less – and it will have fuzzy boundaries because there is, ultimately, no ground truth as to what does or doesn’t constitute consciousness.
Perhaps this overly nit-picky, but I don’t believe Camp #1 intuitions imply that consciousness is or arises from a particular ‘part’ of the brain, in the sense that you could say ‘it comes from the neurones in this region’ or ‘it comes from the subset of neurones lighting up on this fMRI’, even allowing fuzzy boundaries. There’s no reason to expect the physical substrate of the brain, or even the network topology of the its connections, to always map straightforwardly to some feature or property of the mind, and particularly not for more abstract and higher-level properties. Sometimes there is such an obvious mapping (e.g. visual pathways), but there’s no more reason to expect that there is a ‘consciousness part of the brain’ than a ‘reasoning part of the brain’ or an ‘optimising part of the brain’; it might just be a thing that the whole brain is or does. By analogy, you might be able to point to a particular bit of circuitry in a computer that processes raw data from a camera sensor, but you can’t point to any one part and say ‘this is where the operating system comes from’.
The upshot is the same: Camp #1 will view consciousness as an ‘inherently fuzzy phenomenon’. We might just find it to be even fuzzier than you suggest here.
What links here?
- Why it’s so hard to talk about Consciousness by Rafael Harth (2 Jul 2023 15:56 UTC; 87 points)

wilkox 15 May 2011 23:45 UTC
9 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: You’ll die if you do that
From the linked McDonald’s coffee case article:

In addition, they awarded her $2.7 million in punitive damages. The jurors apparently arrived at this figure from [the burn victim’s lawyer’s] suggestion to penalize McDonald’s for one or two days’ worth of coffee revenues, which were about $1.35 million per day.

Talk about a brilliant use of anchoring...

wilkox 30 Apr 2011 6:32 UTC
9 points
on: How hard do we really want to sell cryonics?
I have an intuition that most people would find it less weird to hear a pro-cryonics advertisment from an actual cryonics company than a “Public Service Announcement” from a third party. The former would be processed more like a normal advertisement, to be judged on its merits, while the latter could invite suspicion of the creators’ motives. I might be wrong—anyone from marketing or advertising have something to say here?

wilkox 28 Mar 2024 9:07 UTC
8 points
5
in reply to: LGS’s comment on: My Interview With Cade Metz on His Reporting About Slate Star Codex

The epistemology was not bad behind the scenes, it was just not presented to the readers. That is unfortunate but it is hard to write a NYT article (there are limits on how many receipts you can put in an article and some of the sources may have been off the record).

I’d have more trust in the writing of a journalist who presents what they believe to be the actual facts in support of a claim, than one who publishes vague insinuations because writing articles is hard.

Cade correctly informed the readers that Scott is aligned with Murray on race and IQ.

He really didn’t. Firstly, in the literal sense that Metz carefully avoided making this claim (he stated that Scott aligned himself with Murray, and that Murray holds views on race and IQ, but not that Scott aligns himself with Murray on these views). Secondly, and more importantly, even if I accept the implied claim I still don’t know what Scott supposedly believes about race and IQ. I don’t know what ‘is aligned with Murray on race and IQ’ actually means beyond connotatively ‘is racist’. If this paragraph of Metz’s article was intended to be informative (it was not), I am not informed.

wilkox 13 Jun 2023 11:17 UTC
8 points
6
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Change my mind: Veganism entails trade-offs, and health is one of the axes
Thoughts on why the post gave (me) the impression it did, in no particular order:
- ‘Trade-offs’ is broad and vague, and the post didn’t make a lot of detailed claims about vegan nutrition. This makes sense in the context of you trying to communicate the detailed facts previously, but coming to the post without that context made it hard to tell if you were just making an unobjectionable claim or trying to imply something broader.
- Some statements struck me as technically true but hyperbolic. Examples:
You can get a bit of all known nutrients from plants and fortified products, and you can find a vegan food that’s at least pretty good for every nutrient, but getting enough of all of them is a serious logic puzzle unless you have good genes.
[...]
Some people are already struggling to feed themselves on an omnivore diet, and have nothing to replace meat if you take it away.
[...]
If vegans are equally healthy but are spending twice as much time and money on food, that’s important to know.
[...]
If there are three vegan sources and you’re allergic to all of them, you need animal products.
- I was very confused by what you were hoping to learn from an RCT or ‘good study’, and my impression of your in-office nutritional testing was that you were trying to gather new primary data about vegan nutrition. Because the basic facts about the risk of nutrient deficiencies in veganism seemed uncontroversial, my interpretation of that was that you thought there were other and potentially more significant ‘trade-offs’ that might exist at the level-of-evidence gap between an RCT or in-office testing and e.g. the introduction to the Wikipedia article on veganism.
- The implied model for the relationship between diet and health felt...off, or at least different from my own. I tend to think of diet as an input to a set of homeostatic processes, which are generally robust but can be slowly pushed off-balance by sustained problems and usually fixed with gentle correction. This post seemed to model diet as an all-or-nothing ‘logic puzzle’ to be either solved or, more likely, failed.
...what you think could be done to convey the important, true points with as little animosity-due-to-misreading as possible
Beyond the points above, I genuinely don’t know. I’m probably not the intended audience anyway, since that seems to be vegans or potential vegans who don’t already know about the risks of nutrient deficiencies. The only thing I can think to contribute here is: if you’ve tried presenting the basic facts of the matter, and experienced pushback for it, does that necessarily mean that just presenting the facts is the wrong strategy? It’s a charged topic with a polluted local memespace, so some level of malicious or confused pushback is guaranteed; it’s what you would expect to see even when you are communicating well.

wilkox 8 May 2011 12:37 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Cayenne’s comment on: The 5-Second Level

In any case there really isn’t any reason to be offended and especially there is no reason to allow the other person to provoke you to anger or acting without thought.

It seems really, really difficult to convey to people who don’t understand it already that becoming offended is a choice, and it’s possible to not allow someone to control you in that way. Maybe “offendibility” is linked to a fundamental personality trait.

wilkox 1 May 2011 2:04 UTC
8 points
on: Mitigating Social Awkwardness

Always wait for someone else to laugh at your joke before you join in.

This is generally good advice, but can backfire if you show no signs that you are conscious of making a joke. Making people laugh while remaining deadpan yourself is a high-level humour skill. Listeners who are not sure whether or not to laugh will look for cues from other listeners and from you, and if you’re not laughing they may just go along with that.

Often it’s better to make it obvious that you’ve amused yourself with your own joke, with a smile or small chuckle, but not react to whether others laugh or not. That displays confidence, and gives others the social room to laugh if they want.