I have long provided daily lunches for my employees, and also provide lunches and dinners for anyone in the Lightcone Offices, so my current guess is that for a good chunk of the professional Berkeley community, ~half of meals are provided by other people.
Lunches on weekdays is 5 meals a week out of 21 meals total (3 meals per day * 7 days per week), so it’s still not half (though “so, so much smaller” is inaccurate for that setting). Still, many people don’t get daily lunches, or get daily lunches from non-EA sources / large companies where you have ~zero impact on food choices at the margin.
Lunches and dinners at Lightcone / Constellation seems like a relatively unusual setup but I agree there you might want to take “increased search costs for others” as a relevant consideration.
I do feel like given that we are already reasoning in a more deontological framework
I wasn’t doing that, and the OP only does that in one of their seven arguments. That being said, if I imagine what a deontologist would say about the matter, I mostly imagine them saying that there’s no rule about whether it’s good or bad to impose search costs on your employers. But I could easily be wrong about that; I’m not great at simulating deontology.
especially if we are implicitly enforcing a norm that you should eat vegan in EA contexts (which we are currently doing at EA events).
I was thinking about whether one should personally become a veg*n (which I thought was the main thrust of the OP), rather than this sort of community-wide norm. Most of the rest of your comment seems to be about the community-wide norm; I agree that norm seems complicated (for the reasons you mention). I was mostly just responding to the “increased search costs” point.
Lunches on weekdays is 5 meals a week out of 21 meals total (3 meals per day * 7 days per week), so it’s still not half (though “so, so much smaller” is inaccurate for that setting). Still, many people don’t get daily lunches, or get daily lunches from non-EA sources / large companies where you have ~zero impact on food choices at the margin.
Lunches and dinners at Lightcone / Constellation seems like a relatively unusual setup but I agree there you might want to take “increased search costs for others” as a relevant consideration.
I wasn’t doing that, and the OP only does that in one of their seven arguments. That being said, if I imagine what a deontologist would say about the matter, I mostly imagine them saying that there’s no rule about whether it’s good or bad to impose search costs on your employers. But I could easily be wrong about that; I’m not great at simulating deontology.
I was thinking about whether one should personally become a veg*n (which I thought was the main thrust of the OP), rather than this sort of community-wide norm. Most of the rest of your comment seems to be about the community-wide norm; I agree that norm seems complicated (for the reasons you mention). I was mostly just responding to the “increased search costs” point.