Thirdly, the question of whether going veg*n strengthens your altruistic motivations is an empirical one which I feel pretty uncertain about. There may well be a moral licensing effect where veg*ns feel (disproportionately) like they’ve done their fair share of altruistic action; or maybe parts of you will become resentful about these constraints. This probably varies a lot for different people. … I think probably the dominant factor is how your motivational structure works, in particular whether you’ll interpret the additional moral constraint more as a positive reinforcement of your identity as an altruist, or more as something which drains or stresses you.
Yeah for me I enjoy little reminders that I’m legit and not just a guy who likes writing takes about the community or selfishly wants license to do the kind of math/engineering demands of speculative projects in the epistemics and alignment spaces. Abstaining from meat is a costly self-signal, and is one source of these reminders, but at the same time it’s probably less effective than my AMF donations (which is also a source of these reminders) and at my income:donation ratio level more costly. It may not be rational at all, but I have enough uncertainty about some of the offsetting premises to mostly keep doing it.
Yeah for me I enjoy little reminders that I’m legit and not just a guy who likes writing takes about the community or selfishly wants license to do the kind of math/engineering demands of speculative projects in the epistemics and alignment spaces. Abstaining from meat is a costly self-signal, and is one source of these reminders, but at the same time it’s probably less effective than my AMF donations (which is also a source of these reminders) and at my income:donation ratio level more costly. It may not be rational at all, but I have enough uncertainty about some of the offsetting premises to mostly keep doing it.