I didn’t like this post very much despite being sympathetic to the underlying claims. This was a tricky comment for me to write as I do actually just have a lot of common ground with the op.
In general the post aimed to persuade people rather than inform or explain, often using overly emotive language. A lot of the examples were cherry picked, there was little discussions aimed at trying to get an accurate sense of the scale of moral harm caused by factory farming and it seemed pretty 1 dimensional and not very thoughtful. It also seemed adversarial and tribalist to me (e.g. saying things like
More horrors that those of you who eat meat pay for
).
I do (again despite being very sympathetic to the underlying claims) think that these issues are less clear cut than the post seems to imply—the post claims that factory farming is an atrocity is a no brainer from most moral views and that doesn’t seem obvious to me. I feel pretty empirically confused about the capacity for suffering of various nonhuman animal lives relative to each other. I don’t feel like I have time right now to point at concrete issues and I would ideally much prefer to bullet some concrete points I found problematic.
I know this was a cross post, I personally wouldn’t have taken issue if it had been more of a short form factor summary. I don’t think that was a poor post by my light relative to the median ea forum post, but I think it probably was epistemically much worse than I’d like for one with high karma.
I think reasonable people can disagree about the norms for EA Forum posts. Personally, I’m very happy that posts like this exist amidst the sea of hyperrational evaluation-focused posts. As said in one of my favorite posts:
Sidenote for the rigorous readers of this forum: I ask you to read this essay somewhat impressionistically. “The logic is incomplete, but let’s see if he’s still onto something,” is the attitude I’d suggest.
This post does not have complete logic by any means, but it’s onto something—in my view, it’s onto a moral intuition that we should pay more attention to than we often do. That’s not at odds with rationality, because rationality can only offer limited guidance on what morality should be, it can’t free us from relying on moral intuitions. So posts that are purely evaluative will miss a lot of ground on which people can (and do) make decisions. Put differently, moral intuitions and rational evaluation are complements, not substitutes.
I think the high karma of this post reflects the fact that for many people, including myself, it’s a reminder to keep alive the flame of trying to live ethically.
Fwiw I don’t think forum norms need be doomed to reasonable disagreement. I think someone probably has some vision for why the forum should exists by altruistic lights. It’s probably grounded in some model of the world that we can discuss here.
I don’t think that’s this post is presenting something new or trying to pin down a moral intuition. In fact I don’t think it talks about morality very much at all, it’s more of a list of reasons why the author dislikes factory farming. I think people are mostly upvoting because they agree with it rather than it being very insightful.
I have mixed feelings here. I generally don’t like emotionally-focused posts, but I think having some good ones, properly contextualized, can be pretty useful. They can show insight into certain perspectives that are hard to grasp for more epistemically-ideal posts.
Maybe we could eventually have norms to flag that posts like these should be treated and understood very different to most evaluation posts. There’s the “Inspiration” tag, which is doing some of this, but I assume there’s more that could be done.
My intuition is that it’s very easy for people to tell that this is very different from most evaluation posts, and a flag wouldn’t add any new information, but it’s probably not harmful either.
I think the policy that I am currently most in favour of is for the moderators to implement (certainly not limited to just this post) is to keep these as personal posts and not promote to the front page unless they reach some standard of epistemic rigour.
I didn’t like this post very much despite being sympathetic to the underlying claims. This was a tricky comment for me to write as I do actually just have a lot of common ground with the op.
In general the post aimed to persuade people rather than inform or explain, often using overly emotive language. A lot of the examples were cherry picked, there was little discussions aimed at trying to get an accurate sense of the scale of moral harm caused by factory farming and it seemed pretty 1 dimensional and not very thoughtful. It also seemed adversarial and tribalist to me (e.g. saying things like
I do (again despite being very sympathetic to the underlying claims) think that these issues are less clear cut than the post seems to imply—the post claims that factory farming is an atrocity is a no brainer from most moral views and that doesn’t seem obvious to me. I feel pretty empirically confused about the capacity for suffering of various nonhuman animal lives relative to each other. I don’t feel like I have time right now to point at concrete issues and I would ideally much prefer to bullet some concrete points I found problematic.
I know this was a cross post, I personally wouldn’t have taken issue if it had been more of a short form factor summary. I don’t think that was a poor post by my light relative to the median ea forum post, but I think it probably was epistemically much worse than I’d like for one with high karma.
I think reasonable people can disagree about the norms for EA Forum posts. Personally, I’m very happy that posts like this exist amidst the sea of hyperrational evaluation-focused posts. As said in one of my favorite posts:
This post does not have complete logic by any means, but it’s onto something—in my view, it’s onto a moral intuition that we should pay more attention to than we often do. That’s not at odds with rationality, because rationality can only offer limited guidance on what morality should be, it can’t free us from relying on moral intuitions. So posts that are purely evaluative will miss a lot of ground on which people can (and do) make decisions. Put differently, moral intuitions and rational evaluation are complements, not substitutes.
I think the high karma of this post reflects the fact that for many people, including myself, it’s a reminder to keep alive the flame of trying to live ethically.
Fwiw I don’t think forum norms need be doomed to reasonable disagreement. I think someone probably has some vision for why the forum should exists by altruistic lights. It’s probably grounded in some model of the world that we can discuss here.
I don’t think that’s this post is presenting something new or trying to pin down a moral intuition. In fact I don’t think it talks about morality very much at all, it’s more of a list of reasons why the author dislikes factory farming. I think people are mostly upvoting because they agree with it rather than it being very insightful.
Thanks for flagging this.
I have mixed feelings here. I generally don’t like emotionally-focused posts, but I think having some good ones, properly contextualized, can be pretty useful. They can show insight into certain perspectives that are hard to grasp for more epistemically-ideal posts.
Maybe we could eventually have norms to flag that posts like these should be treated and understood very different to most evaluation posts. There’s the “Inspiration” tag, which is doing some of this, but I assume there’s more that could be done.
My intuition is that it’s very easy for people to tell that this is very different from most evaluation posts, and a flag wouldn’t add any new information, but it’s probably not harmful either.
I think the policy that I am currently most in favour of is for the moderators to implement (certainly not limited to just this post) is to keep these as personal posts and not promote to the front page unless they reach some standard of epistemic rigour.