in my personal experience people who care about animals and want to help them but eat animal products often show a lot of cognitive dissonance and motivated reasoning
This sounds plausible to me, though fwiw I also think that this stereotype is another that makes it hard for omnivores to feel fine in animal welfare spaces. I kind of hate people assuming simply from my diet that probably I’m making epistemic mistakes that I refuse to acknowledge, or that I’m pretending to care about animals when I actually don’t. Obv I agree there’s a strong desire not to turn to the cruelty of your own diet. I think figuring out how to allow ourselves and help each other to live with the terrible suffering in the world we’re not doing things about is one of the big challenges of effective altruism.
Thanks for raising this. I should clarify that the generalisation I’ve made largely applies outside of EA spaces, and the reverse tends to be true in EA spaces, where I find most people, vegan or otherwise, take the suffering of farmed animals pretty seriously.
I agree this is a challenge in EA, and I’m sure its gone well and poorly at different points in time. FWIW my experience over the last few years has been pretty positive where I have felt supported by friends and collaborators who are not vegan in my work as an animal advocate and personally as a vegan. Compared to other spaces I think overall we handle what is a tough dynamic fairly well.
This sounds plausible to me, though fwiw I also think that this stereotype is another that makes it hard for omnivores to feel fine in animal welfare spaces. I kind of hate people assuming simply from my diet that probably I’m making epistemic mistakes that I refuse to acknowledge, or that I’m pretending to care about animals when I actually don’t.
Obv I agree there’s a strong desire not to turn to the cruelty of your own diet. I think figuring out how to allow ourselves and help each other to live with the terrible suffering in the world we’re not doing things about is one of the big challenges of effective altruism.
Thanks for raising this. I should clarify that the generalisation I’ve made largely applies outside of EA spaces, and the reverse tends to be true in EA spaces, where I find most people, vegan or otherwise, take the suffering of farmed animals pretty seriously.
I agree this is a challenge in EA, and I’m sure its gone well and poorly at different points in time. FWIW my experience over the last few years has been pretty positive where I have felt supported by friends and collaborators who are not vegan in my work as an animal advocate and personally as a vegan. Compared to other spaces I think overall we handle what is a tough dynamic fairly well.