I’ve found lots of examples of outstanding physical performance under a vegan diet, but I’ve been unable to find examples of bold theoretical breakthroughs being made under a vegan diet (the closest example I could find was Ramanujan, but there were other things about Ramanujan that suggest that there’s absolutely no way most of us could live the same life and then end up in the same place), and my own experience has been really discouraging. After about 10 days on a vegan diet, regardless of my energy levels or legible performance metrics, I’ll pretty reliably stop being able to, or stop being interested in progressing original ideas.
There are lots of possible exits here: Vegans and inventors were rare until very recent history, we shouldn’t expect to have many records of people who were both, we might end up with none, even if there’s no relationship between those things. It’s also fairly likely that the effect would just be a result of a creatine deficiency, or a choline deficiency, or something like that, which can be fixed with a supplement (although Dr Gregger doesn’t recommend it due to the incidence rate of high contamination in creatine supplements, but maybe you can find a brand you trust.)
(Anecdote on choline: I have a vegetarian friend who, at some point, stopped thinking in the sort of focused/precise/fluid/driven way that our project needed. They speculated that it might have been because they were on choline initially, then stopped. So I said yeah, I noticed a change, try getting back onto the choline? I don’t think they ever got around to it. The lack of concern that they showed is actually one of the things that bugs me about this, because I also experience that, when I’m low: It kinda seems like we have be on the supplement to hold onto an understanding of why we need to stay on the supplement, and as soon as we lapse we forget what it was like, and how important it was? (Depression also seems to work this way. A depressed person often cannot imagine or remember not being depressed.))
There does seem to be a consistently replicated finding that supplementing creatine enhances memory and intelligence in vegans. (and doesn’t for omnivores) (baseline cognitive performance in vegans is similar to omnivores, but personally I’m kind of expecting it to turn out that to be a result of vegan-leaning demographics starting on a higher base, then being lowered)
But even if it can be fixed with a supplement, I don’t think most of us are taking creatine and choline! We probably need to have a conversation about that.
Previous discussion of health and veganism, when they touched on concerns about cognitive impacts, generally failed to allay them.
You could check https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vegans and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vegetarians
I see Brian Greene (theoretical physicist), Douglas Hofstadter (cognitive scientist and physicist), George Church (geneticist) and Christine Korsgaard (philosopher) on the list of vegans, although you could check if they were producing good work while vegan. I haven’t checked the list of vegetarians, but there are probably plenty of famous examples there. Edward Witten (Fields Medalist mathematical/theoretical physicist) is/was vegetarian.
There are also plenty of famous vegan artists and entrepreneurs, and their work often takes originality or novelty.
[just having a quick look at George Church]. Said there he’s “off and on vegan” which suggests to me that he was having difficulty getting it to work. But I checked his twitter and he said he was vegan as of 2018. He studies healthspan, so his voice counts. His page on his personal site unfortunately doesn’t discuss his approach to dieting or supplements but maybe he’d link something from someone else if someone asked.
I’d be pretty cautious about putting much weight on those experiences of yourself or your friend that you’ve mentioned. Doctors see people everyday who swear that crystals cured their arthritis or that medication A works for them but not medication B (when B is just A with a different brand name). I’ve learnt to become very skeptical of the patterns I recognise in my own health. I’ve had experiences where I could have sworn that A was causing B that later turned out to be wrong.
As it is I don’t see why your prior would be “vegan diets make thinking worse” rather than “vegan diets don’t affect thinking” (my own suspicion) or even “vegan diets make thinking better” (I’m sure someone out there has their own anecdotes supporting this)
It wasn’t my prior at all. It was a response to observations that took many years to arrive at, it is also a response to some empirical evidence, which I mentioned.
Agree with other commenters that we shouldn’t put too much weight on anecdotes, but just to provide a counter-anecdote to yours I’ve been ~99% vegan for over 3 years and it seems like my thinking ability and intellectual output has if anything improved during that time.
My best guess is that it varies based on the person and situation, but for the majority of people (including probably me) a decently planned vegan diet has ~no effect on thinking ability.
Could you say more about what “decently planned” means to you? I think this is where a lot of the dragons live.
Having been on a “close to vegan” diet for many years with quite catastrophic results I would like to point out a couple of subtleties in this sphere.
The deficiencies associated with any diet can take years to appear. For example in a zero B12 diet it can take 6 years for a deficiency to appear. During this time the body is in effect “eating itself” i.e. sunstituting one form of animal food (oneself) for food eaten.
Often, as in my case, the initial switch in diet was associated with an improved sense of well-being due to not eating junk food any more. This is sometimes referred to as the vegan honeymoon.
There is often a large gap between the level of supply of nutrients that will avert frank deficiency and an optimal supply. But it is often assumed for example that if you don’t have scurvy that you have plenty of vitamin C.
I learned the hard way that much of the scientific literature is worthless or worse (anti-knowledge). In particular you cannot learn anything reliable from reading only abstracts. This may be obvious to some but is not obvious to many. Financial and ideological biases loom large and a lot of research is only published because of the “publish or perish” mandate. Purely observational studies are almost all useless, and “corrections for confounders” are not reliable.
No idea how to go about finding information on this, but by my personal priors I would weight various kinds of evidence as follows:
~0 weight on any anecdotal evidence,
low weight on studies and clinical trials,
moderate weight on arguments by biological plausibility.
Being related to diet, my prior is that people are usually over thinking it. However I have always agreed that it seems unlikely that a fully vegan diet has no nutritional downsides without supplementation.
I’ve done a cursory search, just wikipedia, here are my thoughts on the biological plausibility of deficiencies among vegans in your two suggestions, creatine and choline:
creatine
is only found in animal tissue
is absorbed in digestion
is also metabolized from amino acids found in plants
->
seems like it could plausibly be something that vegans are deficient in
choline
is an essential dietary component, not being metabolized sufficiently in enough quantity
deficiency is rare in humans
is found in the same quantity per gram in wheat as in chicken
->
seems unlikely that it is something that vegans are deficient in
You should only put approximately zero weight on anecdotes that got to you through a sensationalism-maximizing curation system with biases you don’t understand, which I hope this wasn’t? Regardless, the anecdotes are mostly just meant to be clarifying examples of the kind of thing effect that I am trying to ask about, I don’t expect people to pass them along or anything.
I decided not to talk about biological plausibility, because I don’t get the impression pharmacology or nutrition follows reductive enough rules that anyone can reason a-priori about it very well. It will surprise us, it will do things that don’t make sense. I actually wrote out a list of evolutionary stories that end up producing this effect, some of them are quite interesting, but I decided not to post them, because it seemed like a distraction.
I guess I’ll post some theories now though:
- This sort of phantasic creativity was not useful in pre-industrial societies, because there was no way to go far beyond the social consensus reality and prove that you were right and do anything with it (that’s only the case today because of, basically, the investment cycle, and science and technology, which took hundreds of years to start functioning after it was initially proposed). The body needed an excuse to waste creatine, so in sapiens, it only did it when we ate an abnormal amount of meat, but sudden gluts of meat would occur frequently enough for the adaptation to be maintained.
- Or maybe eating lots of meat/fish was kind of the norm for millions of years for dominant populations (I can cite this if you’re that interested). And maybe there’s a limit to how fast the body can replenish brain-creatine (investigate this assumption, Gregger seemed implicitly sus about it). In that case, we might have an effect where the brain implements creatine frugality by lowering our motivation to think in phosphocreatine-burning ways, which then may lead to a glorification of that frugality, which then becomes sticky. This could be a recurring class of motivation disorder that might even generalize to early AI, so I’d find it super interesting.
The note about choline in wheat is interesting. I wonder if it’s bioavailable? I think I can remember situations where I’ve craved meat/eggs and thought “but some good bread would also do”.
Oh, but, I went and dug a little bit (because I take my immediate close friends’ reports seriously) and it turns out that the “choline” in wheat is a pretty different molecule? betaine? https://veganhealth.org/choline/#rec Looking at it, I don’t think it would be a big stretch to say that the resemblence between betaine and choline is only a little bit closer than the resemblence between phytoestrogen and estrogen… but maybe they mean that they’ve been observed to actually have similar effects?
Regardless, that page also says that you’re probably not naturally going to get the AI from what you’re eating (although you personally eat a lot of bean burritos, right? So maybe you actually are (and btw, I think you’re very high in pragmatic-creativity! (You’re the only person aside from me who ever designed a puzzle for crycog, and you did it immediately verbally after playing it. Your distributed computing stuff also seemed pretty great.))). This is the case for a lot of nutrients, but for choline it might actually matter quite a bit to be below AI.
Is your standard “genius-level”, or even “genius-level technical work”? Or being highly productive in intellectual work? I think plenty of philosophers and EAs who have done good research, including at prominent EA orgs, have been vegan or at least vegetarian and will probably meet the last standard.
Some who (I think) have been veg (not sure if vegan specifically or if they’re still veg): Peter Singer (~vegan), Will MacAskill, Brian Tomasik (lacto-veg), multiple research staff at Rethink Priorities (where I work) even outside animal welfare, Sam Bankman-Fried (vegan), Rob Wiblin and Howie Lempel (and others?) at 80,000 Hours, I’d guess some research staff at Open Phil and not just those focused on animal welfare. Vegetarianism and veganism are very common in EA (https://rethinkpriorities.org/publications/eas2019-community-demographics-characteristics), so we shouldn’t be surprised to find good examples (but not necessarily geniuses), and if we didn’t, that could be a bad sign.
“genius” doesn’t seem usefully precise to me? (Is a genius even still a genius once they’ve found their way into a part of the world where their level of pragmatic creativity is ordinary?)
I’m looking for a sort of… ability to go for extended, rapid, complicated traversals of broad unfamiliar territories in your head, alone, without getting lost, and to find something of demonstrable value that no one has ever seen before. That kind of thing.
That list might be a good start, but I don’t know. Can you show us examples of divergent, multi-stage, needle in a haystack breakthroughs that those people made while they were years into a vegan diet? I haven’t looked closely at really any of these peoples’ work, and there’s a kind of relevant reason for that. A lot of them (Singer, MacAskill) are mostly apologists. They work mainly with familiar premises in highly legible ways. The reason most people read them is the reason I don’t read them, and the reason I am concerned that a vegan diet tends to limit the ways people can think.
Tomasik is an interesting example though, I’ve gotten the sense that he has that character, but haven’t seen any intense output from him. Recommend some?
Examples of EA-adjacent people who I’d consider to have this quality include Yudkowsky, Wei Dai, Vanessa Kosoy, Robin Hanson (none were vegan during their breakthroughs afaict?).
It might be worth asking which way the causality’s running here. A very EA-charitable answer might say something like: “Being humble and accountable (which leads to doing less risky, more legible, and more approachable work) probably raises a person’s inclination to become vegan.” (It’s kind of interesting that, as far as I can tell, long time vegans, the Brahmins, would argue the opposite causality: “Being vegan decreases the mode of passion, but that’s good for your spiritual path.”)
Maybe Derek Parfit (vegetarian), Chris Olah (vegan), Mark Xu (vegan until this year https://markxu.com/transitioning-vegan), Rohin Shah (~vegan) are other examples?
I think there’s been some impressive technical work out of GPI, and generally in population ethics and decision theory, and I have specific authors in mind, but I can’t tell if they’ve been vegetarian through Google. If you’re really invested in this, I can share names and papers, and you can ask them directly if they’ve been veg.
I’d say people working in population ethics are reasonably likely to be veg.
Do you have specific works by EAs or EA-adjacent people involving “divergent, multi-stage, needle in a haystack breakthroughs” in mind? And are multi-stage (sequentially dependant?) breakthroughs more impressive than a similar number of breakthroughs that aren’t sequentially dependant or that happen far apart in time from each other? Or are you thinking of something where a single breakthrough isn’t enough on its own for useful or interesting conclusions, and more are needed until something valuable can be produced produced?
Yes, because… it means they couldn’t have been finding low-hanging fruit. When one problem leads to another, you don’t get to wander off and look for easier ones, you have to keep going down one of these few avenues of this particular cave system. So if someone solved a contiguous chain of problems you can be sure that some of those were probably genuinely really hard. It also requires them to develop their own understanding of something that nobody could help them with, and to internalize that deeply enough to keep going.
Sequences like this occur naturally in real-world projects, so if they’re avoiding them it’s kinda telling.
?. More are needed before we can make a judgement. I’d believe that lots of value can be produced without any of these big leaps.
But you can also just judge each breakthrough separately, conditional on what they had access to. If they’re deep into a problem past where anyone has been and then go further, that might be more impressive, but it may not be, in case it’s easy to identify the next (possibly hard) subproblem after solving the last subproblem. So you can approach it locally/greedily, without thinking ahead much to where you need to go, only about where you are now and the next step. I think upper-year and grad-level pure math and theoretical computer science problems can be like this, although maybe not as hard as you’re asking for.
Something harder I have in mind would be something like having a non-local/non-greedy approach to solving a problem, where you have a major breakthrough just to get a sketch of a proof or to come up with possible lemmas, and then it takes further breakthroughs to close things up. If your sketch is wrong, then all the work can become basically useless, and you don’t progress things for the next people to try (except by ruling out a dead end).
It’s like thinking more moves ahead in chess with multiple hard moves to identify, compared to just making the same number of hard moves to identify in the same game, but never part of the same sequence simulation in your head. Both are multi-stage, but the second one is local/greedy and isn’t more impressive than making the same number of hard to identify moves across games, fixing the total number of games played.
Also, breakthroughs across very different areas rather than all concentrated in the same area demonstrates greater flexibility and generalizability of their strengths.
SBF is vegan, and while his day job isn’t “intellectual” in the conventional sense, it takes a lot of intellect