While I think the meat-eating-for-productivity justification can be very perilous, I still strong downvoted this for what I perceive as an uncharitable tone toward those who report significant adverse effects from a vegan diet. I don’t think it is appropriate to summarily dismiss everyone who reports that they are significantly more productive when eating meat as guilty of “motivated reasoning,” along with “a bad character, or a weakness of will . . . .”
As relevant here, Will reported a significant loss of productivity that seems strongly suggestive of health problems, despite trying “very hard to do the vegan thing properly.” As far as I know, neither of us are a physician or a psychologist who have examined the people making similar claims and given them the proverbial million-dollar workup. Nutritional research is hard, and we’d need a significantly stronger body of research (e.g., random assignment, very large samples) to say that a vegan diet is maximally healthful for everyone at an individual level (as opposed to healthier on the a population average). Unless and until the data get to that level, we should err on the side of not diagnosing and condemning people via Internet forum who are reporting their own lived experiences.
Someone who is highly productive in reducing X-risks, is first highly intelligent, which means intelligent enough to know how to eat a healthy vegan diet, and second, most likely living in a wealthy environment with good access of healthy vegan food, which means able to follow the knowledge about healthy vegan diets. So that means if a person still has adverse health effects from the vegan diet, while following all knowledge about healthy vegan diets, it must be because of unknown reasons. And that seems very unlikely to me. We know so much about healthy food...
While I think the meat-eating-for-productivity justification can be very perilous, I still strong downvoted this for what I perceive as an uncharitable tone toward those who report significant adverse effects from a vegan diet. I don’t think it is appropriate to summarily dismiss everyone who reports that they are significantly more productive when eating meat as guilty of “motivated reasoning,” along with “a bad character, or a weakness of will . . . .”
As relevant here, Will reported a significant loss of productivity that seems strongly suggestive of health problems, despite trying “very hard to do the vegan thing properly.” As far as I know, neither of us are a physician or a psychologist who have examined the people making similar claims and given them the proverbial million-dollar workup. Nutritional research is hard, and we’d need a significantly stronger body of research (e.g., random assignment, very large samples) to say that a vegan diet is maximally healthful for everyone at an individual level (as opposed to healthier on the a population average). Unless and until the data get to that level, we should err on the side of not diagnosing and condemning people via Internet forum who are reporting their own lived experiences.
Someone who is highly productive in reducing X-risks, is first highly intelligent, which means intelligent enough to know how to eat a healthy vegan diet, and second, most likely living in a wealthy environment with good access of healthy vegan food, which means able to follow the knowledge about healthy vegan diets. So that means if a person still has adverse health effects from the vegan diet, while following all knowledge about healthy vegan diets, it must be because of unknown reasons. And that seems very unlikely to me. We know so much about healthy food...