Consuming factory farmed animal products also indicates moral unseriousness much more strongly because it is so extremely cheap to reduce animal suffering by making slightly different choices .
The specific points being made in those quotations aren’t mutually exclusive. Onni Aarne is saying you can make very inexpensive adjustments to your diet that greatly reduce animal suffering, and Charles He is saying that EA events spend extra money on catering to satisfy the constraint of making it vegan. I think both claims are correct.
RE: adopting a vegan diet being low cost (vegan being key to ensuring ending of the worst practices) is probably objectively wrong.
The evidence of dietary change efforts failing seems large (decades of conventional efforts, resulting with a flatline in total diet), and is large objective evidence against conventional animal welfare work (I’m unable to be more specific or name the specific practices and organizations involved, for net EV, “moral maze” sort of reasons).
In the otherwise unrelated EA forum discussions about “vultures”/defecting because of money, a common idea/narrative has been that “being vegan” is a powerful signal for altruism. This can’t be true if it’s easy.
Note that this belief about dietary change has not just been wrong but very costly to the actual cause.
This concrete and specific realization has been a large update for me against all leftist causes (as opposed to for ideological or political reasons).
At the same time, very small changes in diet can reduce suffering enormously. This truth is probably a key part a “ruthless” critique against EA vegan diets being effective (critiques which I do not fully agree with).
Sorry, yes, didn’t mean to imply Charles He was only talking about catering. I was just using that as an example of EAs following vegan diets in a way that costs more money, as opposed to costlessly. This post by Jeff Kaufman is relevant, https://www.jefftk.com/p/two-kinds-of-vegan :
“Go vegan!”, you hear, “it’s cheaper, more environmentally sustainable, and just as healthy and delicious!” The problem is, these aren’t all true at the same time.
Fwiw, another commentator, Onni Aarne, actually says the opposite—that a vegan diet is motivated because in part because it’s not costly (I’m not hereby saying they’re right, or that you are).
The specific points being made in those quotations aren’t mutually exclusive. Onni Aarne is saying you can make very inexpensive adjustments to your diet that greatly reduce animal suffering, and Charles He is saying that EA events spend extra money on catering to satisfy the constraint of making it vegan. I think both claims are correct.
I didn’t interpret Charles He as talking about EA events spending extra money on catering, but about individuals adopting vegan diets.
Yes, that is what I meant.
RE: adopting a vegan diet being low cost (vegan being key to ensuring ending of the worst practices) is probably objectively wrong.
The evidence of dietary change efforts failing seems large (decades of conventional efforts, resulting with a flatline in total diet), and is large objective evidence against conventional animal welfare work (I’m unable to be more specific or name the specific practices and organizations involved, for net EV, “moral maze” sort of reasons).
In the otherwise unrelated EA forum discussions about “vultures”/defecting because of money, a common idea/narrative has been that “being vegan” is a powerful signal for altruism. This can’t be true if it’s easy.
Note that this belief about dietary change has not just been wrong but very costly to the actual cause.
This concrete and specific realization has been a large update for me against all leftist causes (as opposed to for ideological or political reasons).
At the same time, very small changes in diet can reduce suffering enormously. This truth is probably a key part a “ruthless” critique against EA vegan diets being effective (critiques which I do not fully agree with).
Sorry, yes, didn’t mean to imply Charles He was only talking about catering. I was just using that as an example of EAs following vegan diets in a way that costs more money, as opposed to costlessly. This post by Jeff Kaufman is relevant, https://www.jefftk.com/p/two-kinds-of-vegan :
This comment was at −3 before I strong upvoted.
Im not sure why that it is so but that is bad and may reflect some deterioration in norms (that maybe I’m contributing to?).
It’s think it’s good to argue ruthlessly but I avoid downvoting things I disagree with a lot of the time.