Writing this as a separate comment to my earlier one, since it’s on a different tack.
A crux for me, which isn’t in the post, is the effect of a vegan diet on productivity.[1] (I imagine this effect routes through health.)
A not-unreasonable chain of reasoning, in my view: if one works in x-risk reduction, and one knows that consuming meat improves one’s productivity, then one could see oneself as morally permitted—obligated, even—to eat meat.
I’m aware that this argument is profoundly icky and arrogant, and that someone who employs it in their dietary choices may be falling foul of motivated reasoning. However, I also think there’s something true here which calls into question the strength of some claims, including above—currently the top comment—in this comments section: “The idea that the potential human health benefits of meat consumption could possibly be decisive on the question of whether it’s ethical to eat meat is a fantasy.” (To be clear, I do empathize with the emotion behind the claim.)
I’m a little worried that I’ll receive some backlash for this comment. Especially given how I expect those who self-select into reading this post, and engaging in the comments, will be disproportionately vegan, even by EA standards. Nevertheless, I think if nobody speaks up to surface this crux then that will be to the detriment of our community’s scout mindset. (Edited to add: A friend points out that I could have used an anonymous account. This did not occur to me. My friends are wiser than I.)
(The following example is not meant to “gotcha” you, but to illustrate an analogous situation where the other perspective hits closer to home for most people.)
Let’s say there was an AI safety researcher who de-stresses each morning by kicking a homeless person in the face. Kicking that homeless person each morning helps the researcher focus and be more productive in his day. Is the researcher then morally obligated to continue kicking the homeless person in the face each morning? (What a coincidence that the choice which is easy and convenient happened to be the morally obligatory one!)
Of course, it’s important to note the difference between this example and meat consumption. From a consequentialist perspective, eating meat on a typical day causes significantly more harm than kicking a homeless person in the face.
Under “normal” circumstances it is morally bad to kick homeless people, and monstrous to eat animals.
Even if AI alignment and deployment goes well, the value of the future will be very negative if factory farms continue to exist.
The premise in my parent comment is that, for at least some people, a diet that includes meat leads to higher productivity. This premise is an empirical claim which I believe to be true, though I imagine some might disagree and get off my chain of reasoning at this point.
The conclusion in my parent comment, that eating meat is morally permissible (and perhaps even obligatory) for at least some people, is animated by the distinct non-normality of the circumstances we may be in. Namely, that we appear to find ourselves at the hinge of history, where a major bottleneck is productive time spent by people trying to positively influence the long-term future. Nonetheless, “the hinge of history is now” is a big claim, and some might disagree and get off my chain of reasoning at this point.
For those still with me, there are now (various levels of) consequences to consider. My conception:
First order. Simply weigh up the disvalue of face-kicking or animal slaughtering against the expected value from more productive time spent on reducing x-risk. (Some may stop here. Those who stop here are most likely to view meat-eating as obligatory.)
Second order. Is the kind of world where people who may have an outsize influence on the future bite bullets like kicking people and eating sentient beings the kind of world we want to be living in? (Most who’ve stayed with me this far probably stop here.)
[Known unknowns. For example, which action—biting the bullet or not—puts me in a larger pool of evidentially cooperating agents across the multiverse? Also, if the simulation hypothesis is true, then our creators might turn us off once the hinge of history is over, which would mean that the near-term is what matters.[1]]
2 is hard to quantify, and 3 and 4 are deep in galaxy brain territory. The decision algorithm I employ at this point is: “If being vegan is not costly, then be vegan. If being vegan is costly, then don’t be vegan.[2]”
I’ve yet to see someone express a credence on us being in a simulation that doesn’t seem very arbitrary. And I think it’s not impossible that, after a lot of reflection, we could converge on a credence of ~1. (A credence of basically 1 is needed, in my view, to override the vast expected value—assuming one does not subscribe to a downside-focused value system—of the long-term future, if there is a long-term future.)
Unfortunately, in my case being vegan turned out to be costly. I look forward to mass-produced cultured meat (or, better still, to being a mind upload, whereupon I’d need only consume electricity).
Thanks for the breakdown of effects! It was helpful for identifying our cruxes. Ignoring unknowns[1], there are two uncertain quantities under consideration:
The expected value of veganism continually reminding you of the importance of caring about others.
Veganism has substantially increased my dedication to my altruistic work, and I think it’s increased the likelihood that I’ll stay altruistic and continue to contribute to the most important causes for the long term.
Being vegan shows others that you take altruism seriously, and makes you more likely to inspire others to take altruistic steps in their own lives, possibly including transitioning to direct work in x-risk reduction. This can be especially impactful if you’re well-positioned to influence the long-term future.
The expected loss in productivity from veganism.
I find quantity 1 >> quantity 2, and I think you find quantity 2 > quantity 1.
As a completely separate point, I also think that there are far lower-hanging fruit for maximizing productivity than eating meat, and the fact that some people pick the meat-eating fruit rather than the lower-hanging fruit is evidence of motivated reasoning.
I think being vegan makes me lose 5 minutes of productivity per week. That’s 30 seconds of taking supplements each morning * 7 days per week = 3.5 minutes, plus 90 seconds of reading grocery labels to make sure they don’t contain animal ingredients.
If I wanted the same productivity gain, I could spend 5 fewer minutes playing online chess, or watching videos about future megastructures, or reading Wikipedia. So if I were hyperfocused on optimizing productivity and cared about nothing else, it’d still be pretty weird for me to conclude that eating meat should be the first change to make.
I’ll close with a relevant quote:
What we find important can be fickle and more dependent on environmental cues than we might think. As a result, we may want to embed ourselves in physical and social environments that can best foster our altrustic work. While productivity is important, we also need to keep our lives balanced, both for our long-term sustainability and because of the benefits of learning about many fields. Sometimes we do selfish things, and it’s better to admit this and move on than distort our beliefs to try to justify it.
I think the unknowns you listed are quite important, though I feel quite clueless when speculating on them. If we knew for certain that our simulators would turn us off once the hinge of history was over, I think our priority would shift to reducing as much present-day suffering as possible, which I think in practice means prioritizing animal welfare. On the other hand, I think being a simulation should increase your credence in theories where only you and perhaps those close to you are actually conscious, and others are low-fidelity constructs which have much less expected moral importance.
I think being vegan makes me lose 5 minutes of productivity per week.
Okay, it looks like this is where we’ve been talking past each other. I agree with you that if being vegan costs only a few minutes per week, then switching to eat meat would be a bizarre thing to do.
For me, when I spent a year being vegan, I felt near-constantly unsatiated and low on energy, irritable and mentally slow.[1] My guess was that this was costing me as much as 30% of my productivity, or ~18 hours per week. The internal experience for me was something like, “Okay, I’ve already changed jobs to try to do good directly, which involved life sacrifices, and I already donate. Adding this being-hungry-and-irritable-the-whole-time thing on top is a step further than I’m willing to go. In fact, if I take this step, I might be more likely to burn out and become disillusioned with all this altruism business.”
It may well be that I’m unusually ill-suited to a vegan diet,[2] and that my original comment reflects typical mind fallacy on my part. When I wrote that comment, I was non-consciously assuming that: 1) for a nontrivial number of people working directly in x-risk reduction, being vegan would, or does, incur a cost on the order of a few hours (as opposed to a few minutes) of productive work per week; 2) struggles like mine are common enough stories[3] in vegan and vegan-adjacent circles that readers would understand 1, or something close to 1, to be my background assumption.
And I did try hard to make the vegan diet work. I was tracking all my vitamins and nutrients and consuming ample calories. I’d also put in an “upfront” effort of at least 10 hours of reading about vegan diet pitfalls (and how to avoid them), researching supplements, and experimenting with vegan foods and recipes.
(Possibly also worth mentioning: 1| Nowadays, I’m reducetarian, at 60% meat consumption relative to before my failed vegan conversion. 2| I expect my non-vegan diet, both now and before, is 99th percentile for healthfulness (i.e., it’s nothing close to the average British or American diet; I was an athlete in college and received substantial nutrition coaching). I mention this to acknowledge that my vegan diet was up against a very high—perhaps unfairly high—baseline.)
I remember coming across a large (~20k members) Reddit community at the time—I think it might have been r/AntiVegan—which, as best I could tell, was partially (mostly?) made up of former vegans. These former vegans would recount the negative health effects they’d experienced while being vegan. I took this as pretty strong evidence that (plenty of) other people out there had had as rough a time trying to be vegan as I did.
Yep, in retrospect, my “5 minutes” remark didn’t sufficiently account for the adjustment period. I went through a similar adjustment to yours, and spent several months constantly hungry and low energy. (The mental slowness sounds like a symptom of B12 deficiency, which I had at first, but stopped once I started supplementing.) By a year’s end, I was back to normal. I can see how my comment could have been understood as diminishing what you went through, which wasn’t my intention :)
I agree that burnout is important to stave, and being dedicated to sufficiently altruistic pursuits can help you accomplish a lot more good than your dietary choices.
As a compromise, what do you think about choosing beef when it’s an option rather than other meat choices (chicken or pork)? In terms of suffering reduction, a non-vegan diet where beef is the only meat consumed is perhaps 90% of the way there.
(Also, this is very tangential to the main thread, but I spotted in your footnote:
I think being a simulation should increase your credence in theories where only you and perhaps those close to you are actually conscious, and others are low-fidelity constructs which have much less expected moral importance.
This is likely incorrect, I believe, for the reasons Bostrom gives:
In addition to ancestor-simulations, one may also consider the possibility of more selective simulations that include only a small group of humans or a single individual. The rest of humanity would then be zombies or “shadow-people” – humans simulated only at a level sufficient for the fully simulated people not to notice anything suspicious. It is not clear how much cheaper shadow-people would be to simulate than real people. It is not even obvious that it is possible for an entity to behave indistinguishably from a real human and yet lack conscious experience. Even if there are such selective simulations, you should not think that you are in one of them unless you think they are much more numerous than complete simulations. There would have to be about 100 billion times as many “me-simulations” (simulations of the life of only a single mind) as there are ancestor-simulations in order for most simulated persons to be in me-simulations.
Nonetheless, I do agree with the other point you make:
If we knew for certain that our simulators would turn us off once the hinge of history was over, I think our priority would shift to reducing as much present-day suffering as possible, which I think in practice means prioritizing animal welfare.
I don’t have links on hand but this gets brought up fairly often, or at least it used to. One reason I wrote that is that some of the responses to that concern were really dismissive, and the discussions were too complicated and heated to debate it on the object level.
You might also be interested in this post of mine, examining the cognitive effects of iron deficiency (not vegan specific)
@Will Aldred , @Ariel Simnegar—I should have shut this down at the beginning. “Is it morally bad but worth it?” is an argument that has happened several times on EAF already, and I ask you to not rehash here. This post is for quantifying the health effects (in both directions).
If you really want to, please feel free to link to a different post or shortform
I think this kind of reasoning (the justification for eating meat) is very dangerous and leads to atrocities like Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraudulent behavior. I am very confident that such justifications for meat eating are motivated reasoning. I can’t imagine someone is really that more productive and good at saving the future, by eating meat. If someone says that he eats meat because of being more productive in saving the future, for me it is a clear sign of having a bad character, or a weakness of will, and I don’t think people with such a weakness of will are good in doing much good.
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...
This comment is breaking Forum norms. It is too harsh. I would like to see more appreciation for the human on the other side of the screen and a collaborative mindset. You can do that while still maintaining a strong stance against the reasoning you don’t like.
Writing this as a separate comment to my earlier one, since it’s on a different tack.
A crux for me, which isn’t in the post, is the effect of a vegan diet on productivity.[1] (I imagine this effect routes through health.)
A not-unreasonable chain of reasoning, in my view: if one works in x-risk reduction, and one knows that consuming meat improves one’s productivity, then one could see oneself as morally permitted—obligated, even—to eat meat.
I’m aware that this argument is profoundly icky and arrogant, and that someone who employs it in their dietary choices may be falling foul of motivated reasoning. However, I also think there’s something true here which calls into question the strength of some claims, including above—currently the top comment—in this comments section: “The idea that the potential human health benefits of meat consumption could possibly be decisive on the question of whether it’s ethical to eat meat is a fantasy.” (To be clear, I do empathize with the emotion behind the claim.)
I’m a little worried that I’ll receive some backlash for this comment. Especially given how I expect those who self-select into reading this post, and engaging in the comments, will be disproportionately vegan, even by EA standards. Nevertheless, I think if nobody speaks up to surface this crux then that will be to the detriment of our community’s scout mindset. (Edited to add: A friend points out that I could have used an anonymous account. This did not occur to me. My friends are wiser than I.)
(The following example is not meant to “gotcha” you, but to illustrate an analogous situation where the other perspective hits closer to home for most people.)
Let’s say there was an AI safety researcher who de-stresses each morning by kicking a homeless person in the face. Kicking that homeless person each morning helps the researcher focus and be more productive in his day. Is the researcher then morally obligated to continue kicking the homeless person in the face each morning? (What a coincidence that the choice which is easy and convenient happened to be the morally obligatory one!)
Of course, it’s important to note the difference between this example and meat consumption. From a consequentialist perspective, eating meat on a typical day causes significantly more harm than kicking a homeless person in the face.
Firstly, on where I think you and I agree:
Under “normal” circumstances it is morally bad to kick homeless people, and monstrous to eat animals.
Even if AI alignment and deployment goes well, the value of the future will be very negative if factory farms continue to exist.
The premise in my parent comment is that, for at least some people, a diet that includes meat leads to higher productivity. This premise is an empirical claim which I believe to be true, though I imagine some might disagree and get off my chain of reasoning at this point.
The conclusion in my parent comment, that eating meat is morally permissible (and perhaps even obligatory) for at least some people, is animated by the distinct non-normality of the circumstances we may be in. Namely, that we appear to find ourselves at the hinge of history, where a major bottleneck is productive time spent by people trying to positively influence the long-term future. Nonetheless, “the hinge of history is now” is a big claim, and some might disagree and get off my chain of reasoning at this point.
For those still with me, there are now (various levels of) consequences to consider. My conception:
First order. Simply weigh up the disvalue of face-kicking or animal slaughtering against the expected value from more productive time spent on reducing x-risk. (Some may stop here. Those who stop here are most likely to view meat-eating as obligatory.)
Second order. Is the kind of world where people who may have an outsize influence on the future bite bullets like kicking people and eating sentient beings the kind of world we want to be living in? (Most who’ve stayed with me this far probably stop here.)
[Known unknowns. For example, which action—biting the bullet or not—puts me in a larger pool of evidentially cooperating agents across the multiverse? Also, if the simulation hypothesis is true, then our creators might turn us off once the hinge of history is over, which would mean that the near-term is what matters.[1]]
[Unknown unknowns. See “Cluelessness”.]
2 is hard to quantify, and 3 and 4 are deep in galaxy brain territory. The decision algorithm I employ at this point is: “If being vegan is not costly, then be vegan. If being vegan is costly, then don’t be vegan.[2]”
I’ve yet to see someone express a credence on us being in a simulation that doesn’t seem very arbitrary. And I think it’s not impossible that, after a lot of reflection, we could converge on a credence of ~1. (A credence of basically 1 is needed, in my view, to override the vast expected value—assuming one does not subscribe to a downside-focused value system—of the long-term future, if there is a long-term future.)
Unfortunately, in my case being vegan turned out to be costly. I look forward to mass-produced cultured meat (or, better still, to being a mind upload, whereupon I’d need only consume electricity).
Thanks for the breakdown of effects! It was helpful for identifying our cruxes. Ignoring unknowns[1], there are two uncertain quantities under consideration:
The expected value of veganism continually reminding you of the importance of caring about others.
Veganism has substantially increased my dedication to my altruistic work, and I think it’s increased the likelihood that I’ll stay altruistic and continue to contribute to the most important causes for the long term.
Being vegan shows others that you take altruism seriously, and makes you more likely to inspire others to take altruistic steps in their own lives, possibly including transitioning to direct work in x-risk reduction. This can be especially impactful if you’re well-positioned to influence the long-term future.
The expected loss in productivity from veganism.
I find quantity 1 >> quantity 2, and I think you find quantity 2 > quantity 1.
As a completely separate point, I also think that there are far lower-hanging fruit for maximizing productivity than eating meat, and the fact that some people pick the meat-eating fruit rather than the lower-hanging fruit is evidence of motivated reasoning.
I think being vegan makes me lose 5 minutes of productivity per week. That’s 30 seconds of taking supplements each morning * 7 days per week = 3.5 minutes, plus 90 seconds of reading grocery labels to make sure they don’t contain animal ingredients.
If I wanted the same productivity gain, I could spend 5 fewer minutes playing online chess, or watching videos about future megastructures, or reading Wikipedia. So if I were hyperfocused on optimizing productivity and cared about nothing else, it’d still be pretty weird for me to conclude that eating meat should be the first change to make.
I’ll close with a relevant quote:
Brian Tomasik, “Staying Altruistic for the Long Term”
I think the unknowns you listed are quite important, though I feel quite clueless when speculating on them. If we knew for certain that our simulators would turn us off once the hinge of history was over, I think our priority would shift to reducing as much present-day suffering as possible, which I think in practice means prioritizing animal welfare. On the other hand, I think being a simulation should increase your credence in theories where only you and perhaps those close to you are actually conscious, and others are low-fidelity constructs which have much less expected moral importance.
Thanks for your constructive reply.
Okay, it looks like this is where we’ve been talking past each other. I agree with you that if being vegan costs only a few minutes per week, then switching to eat meat would be a bizarre thing to do.
For me, when I spent a year being vegan, I felt near-constantly unsatiated and low on energy, irritable and mentally slow.[1] My guess was that this was costing me as much as 30% of my productivity, or ~18 hours per week. The internal experience for me was something like, “Okay, I’ve already changed jobs to try to do good directly, which involved life sacrifices, and I already donate. Adding this being-hungry-and-irritable-the-whole-time thing on top is a step further than I’m willing to go. In fact, if I take this step, I might be more likely to burn out and become disillusioned with all this altruism business.”
It may well be that I’m unusually ill-suited to a vegan diet,[2] and that my original comment reflects typical mind fallacy on my part. When I wrote that comment, I was non-consciously assuming that: 1) for a nontrivial number of people working directly in x-risk reduction, being vegan would, or does, incur a cost on the order of a few hours (as opposed to a few minutes) of productive work per week; 2) struggles like mine are common enough stories[3] in vegan and vegan-adjacent circles that readers would understand 1, or something close to 1, to be my background assumption.
And I did try hard to make the vegan diet work. I was tracking all my vitamins and nutrients and consuming ample calories. I’d also put in an “upfront” effort of at least 10 hours of reading about vegan diet pitfalls (and how to avoid them), researching supplements, and experimenting with vegan foods and recipes.
(Possibly also worth mentioning: 1| Nowadays, I’m reducetarian, at 60% meat consumption relative to before my failed vegan conversion. 2| I expect my non-vegan diet, both now and before, is 99th percentile for healthfulness (i.e., it’s nothing close to the average British or American diet; I was an athlete in college and received substantial nutrition coaching). I mention this to acknowledge that my vegan diet was up against a very high—perhaps unfairly high—baseline.)
In moral trade terms, being vegan is probably far from my comparative advantage.
I remember coming across a large (~20k members) Reddit community at the time—I think it might have been r/AntiVegan—which, as best I could tell, was partially (mostly?) made up of former vegans. These former vegans would recount the negative health effects they’d experienced while being vegan. I took this as pretty strong evidence that (plenty of) other people out there had had as rough a time trying to be vegan as I did.
Yep, in retrospect, my “5 minutes” remark didn’t sufficiently account for the adjustment period. I went through a similar adjustment to yours, and spent several months constantly hungry and low energy. (The mental slowness sounds like a symptom of B12 deficiency, which I had at first, but stopped once I started supplementing.) By a year’s end, I was back to normal. I can see how my comment could have been understood as diminishing what you went through, which wasn’t my intention :)
I agree that burnout is important to stave, and being dedicated to sufficiently altruistic pursuits can help you accomplish a lot more good than your dietary choices.
As a compromise, what do you think about choosing beef when it’s an option rather than other meat choices (chicken or pork)? In terms of suffering reduction, a non-vegan diet where beef is the only meat consumed is perhaps 90% of the way there.
(Also, this is very tangential to the main thread, but I spotted in your footnote:
This is likely incorrect, I believe, for the reasons Bostrom gives:
Nonetheless, I do agree with the other point you make:
)
I don’t have links on hand but this gets brought up fairly often, or at least it used to. One reason I wrote that is that some of the responses to that concern were really dismissive, and the discussions were too complicated and heated to debate it on the object level.
You might also be interested in this post of mine, examining the cognitive effects of iron deficiency (not vegan specific)
@Will Aldred , @Ariel Simnegar—I should have shut this down at the beginning. “Is it morally bad but worth it?” is an argument that has happened several times on EAF already, and I ask you to not rehash here. This post is for quantifying the health effects (in both directions).
If you really want to, please feel free to link to a different post or shortform
I think this kind of reasoning (the justification for eating meat) is very dangerous and leads to atrocities like Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraudulent behavior. I am very confident that such justifications for meat eating are motivated reasoning. I can’t imagine someone is really that more productive and good at saving the future, by eating meat. If someone says that he eats meat because of being more productive in saving the future, for me it is a clear sign of having a bad character, or a weakness of will, and I don’t think people with such a weakness of will are good in doing much good.
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...
[Speaking as a mod.]
This comment is breaking Forum norms. It is too harsh. I would like to see more appreciation for the human on the other side of the screen and a collaborative mindset. You can do that while still maintaining a strong stance against the reasoning you don’t like.