Hey! My name’s Jared and I’m a senior in high school. I guess I started being a “rationalist” a couple months ago (or a bit more) when I started looking at the list of cognitive biases on Wikipedia. I’ve tried very hard to mitigate almost all of them as much as I can and I plan on furthering myself down this path. I’ve read a lot of the sequences on here and I like to read a lot of rationalwiki and I also try to get information from many different sources.
As for my views, I am first a rationalist and make sure I am open to changing my mind about ANYTHING because reality doesn’t change on your ability to stomach it.
As for labels, I’m vegan (or at least strict vegetarian), anarcho-communist (something around the range of left libertarian), agnostic (not in the sense that I’m on the fence but that I’m sure that we don’t know—so militant agnostic lol).
My main first question is, since you guy are rationalists, why aren’t you vegetarian or vegan? The percentage that is vegetarian on sites like lesswrong and rationalwiki is hardly higher than the public. I would think considering you are rationalists you would understand vegetarian or veganism and go for it for sure. Am I missing something because this actually blows my mind? If you oppose it, I really wanna hear some arguments because I’ve never heard a single even somewhat convincing argument and I’ve argued with oh so many people about it. Obviously goal of veganism is to lessen suffering not end it etc.
But yeah hey!
I’m extremely surprised that the percentage of vegans here is only slightly higher than the general public. I would consider myself an aspiring rationalist and I’ve had countless, countless arguments over the subject of animal rights and from everything I’ve found (which is a whole lot), the arguments side heavily towards veganism. I can literally play bingo with the responses I get from the average person, that’s how reoccurring the rationalizations are. I can go on in much, much greater extant as to why veganism is a good idea, and from posts and comments I’ve seen on here, it seems that most people on here don’t actually know too much about it, but for this I’m going to leave it at this.
Now, I’m not addressing those that say morality is subjective and those that live solely for themselves.
For those that DO think unnecessary suffering is wrong and have other altruistic tendencies, what is your perspective on veganism?