“So there’s not an analogous situation to help other people understand this from an animal advocate’s perspective, but to put it mildly, when other people eat animals at EA events, it feels as if some people at that event gathered in a circle and began writing hate articles against the Centre for Effective Altruism or cutting up malaria nets that the Against Malaria Foundation was planning to distribute. It feels like a slap in the face to our work, and worse, like a dismissal of the plight of the billions of suffering farmed animals.”
I think that it is important for EA to be a pluralistic movement. That is, there may be some EAs who are completely onboard with animal rights and global poverty reduction, but think existential risk due to AI is silly. There may be some EAs who think that the figures are such that existential risk outweighs every other cause and that the people working on other causes are silly. I don’t see this as problematic. On one hand, I can see that having all events being vegetarian makes it easier to recruit animal rights activists into the movement. On the other hand, it can create a situation where non-vegetarians feel out of place, which could be very bad if it reduces the eventual size of the movement.
“So there’s not an analogous situation to help other people understand this from an animal advocate’s perspective, but to put it mildly, when other people eat animals at EA events, it feels as if some people at that event gathered in a circle and began writing hate articles against the Centre for Effective Altruism or cutting up malaria nets that the Against Malaria Foundation was planning to distribute. It feels like a slap in the face to our work, and worse, like a dismissal of the plight of the billions of suffering farmed animals.”
I think that it is important for EA to be a pluralistic movement. That is, there may be some EAs who are completely onboard with animal rights and global poverty reduction, but think existential risk due to AI is silly. There may be some EAs who think that the figures are such that existential risk outweighs every other cause and that the people working on other causes are silly. I don’t see this as problematic. On one hand, I can see that having all events being vegetarian makes it easier to recruit animal rights activists into the movement. On the other hand, it can create a situation where non-vegetarians feel out of place, which could be very bad if it reduces the eventual size of the movement.