I’ve ignored elasticities (which would reduce the amount of animal suffering dietary change would avert),
Good: as long as you’re comparing apples to apples, keep it that way. It applies equally to reduction in meat demand whether from personal choice or advocacy.
I’ve assumed that all animals saved would live for a year
… that doesn’t seem to make sense… we’re trying to prevent animals from existing, right? The relevant time factor is lifespan prior to slaughter, which was factored by Peter into his analysis (and by Brian Tomasik into his own).
The second that this analysis only tries to model ‘first order’ impacts. Being vegetarian or vegan might have a larger impact in terms of persuading others to become vegetarian or vegan, and generally act to signal dismay at animal agriculture.
Ah, but the same will occur for anyone who has been persuaded by vegan advocacy efforts to go vegetarian or vegan, so as long as we’re still comparing apples to apples, this should also be excluded from the analysis.
One might say “but we’re effective altruists, our advocacy and role-modeling is much more important than random other people’s role modeling.” But the opposite may be the case: creating role models and signalling in new communities and new groups of people may be much more important per person converted than creating role models and signalling in a highly rationalist and self-reflective community where all these ideas have already been exposed and discussed.
The first is that unlike donation targets, veganism and giving money to THL are not mutually exclusive, so there is no trade-off – just do both! Yet although veganism may not draw directly on our donation budget, it may plausibly draw on our budgets of self-sacrifice and self-control. There are other unpleasant actions we could take which are independent of donations (having cold showers to reduce energy expenditure and thus climate change), which most of us intuit probably aren’t worth it in terms of indirect costs due to their limited impact. I aver that for most people changing their diet, given the extremely low monetary value of an offsetting donation, falls below this threshold. (For those for whom it doesn’t, go vegan!)
This is the big question and it comes down to people’s psychology.
Some people really try to maximize their total productivity and contributions, and do so quite rationally. For them this sort of thinking really makes sense. However, I think the majority of people in effective altruism still spend significant amounts of time and money on non-optimal items and activities. Therefore, the right decision in such a case is more nebulous.
I’m sure many people will raise objections to your calculations and numbers and make different claims about whether or not EAs ought to be vegan/vegetarian. However, the key takeaway will probably stand regardless: when it comes to improving the lifestyle of the EA community to be more ethical, diet change is clearly not a low-hanging fruit. If we want to apportion praise and blame to people on the basis of the consequences of their decisions, then career and financial decisions are much more significant than diet choices. I don’t mean to say that we should be aggressive about people’s career and financial decisions, nor do I mean to say that it’s wrong to make claims about what diets EA folks should adopt, but we need to put things in perspective before people get flustered based on these kinds of issues (which, I recall, happened a little bit when Katja Grace posted a blog article about this issue).
Good: as long as you’re comparing apples to apples, keep it that way. It applies equally to reduction in meat demand whether from personal choice or advocacy.
… that doesn’t seem to make sense… we’re trying to prevent animals from existing, right? The relevant time factor is lifespan prior to slaughter, which was factored by Peter into his analysis (and by Brian Tomasik into his own).
Ah, but the same will occur for anyone who has been persuaded by vegan advocacy efforts to go vegetarian or vegan, so as long as we’re still comparing apples to apples, this should also be excluded from the analysis.
One might say “but we’re effective altruists, our advocacy and role-modeling is much more important than random other people’s role modeling.” But the opposite may be the case: creating role models and signalling in new communities and new groups of people may be much more important per person converted than creating role models and signalling in a highly rationalist and self-reflective community where all these ideas have already been exposed and discussed.
This is the big question and it comes down to people’s psychology.
Some people really try to maximize their total productivity and contributions, and do so quite rationally. For them this sort of thinking really makes sense. However, I think the majority of people in effective altruism still spend significant amounts of time and money on non-optimal items and activities. Therefore, the right decision in such a case is more nebulous.
I’m sure many people will raise objections to your calculations and numbers and make different claims about whether or not EAs ought to be vegan/vegetarian. However, the key takeaway will probably stand regardless: when it comes to improving the lifestyle of the EA community to be more ethical, diet change is clearly not a low-hanging fruit. If we want to apportion praise and blame to people on the basis of the consequences of their decisions, then career and financial decisions are much more significant than diet choices. I don’t mean to say that we should be aggressive about people’s career and financial decisions, nor do I mean to say that it’s wrong to make claims about what diets EA folks should adopt, but we need to put things in perspective before people get flustered based on these kinds of issues (which, I recall, happened a little bit when Katja Grace posted a blog article about this issue).