Wonderfully written and spot on. I wish more people would acknowledge this.
“No one wants to participate in animal activism because animal activism sucks. If I wanted to design the least rewarding experience possible, animal activism wouldn’t be far off from the result.”
I want veganism to seem like a worthwhile, rewarding project. I want people to be jealous of what a positive community vegans are. As you point out, with great clarity, most vegan activism feels from the inside and appears from the outside to be isolating and neurotic. Bad activism can do more harm than good.
Brilliant piece. And thanks for introducing me to the term “cupcake vegan,” a badge I didn’t know I could wear.
Credulous really is the right word. There is a strand of dialogue in EA circles that feels like “we called much of this many years ago” therefor “everything that transpires will mimic our thought experiments perfectly.” The marketing from frontier labs is the offspring of early EA/LW ideas. The potential for confirmation bias here is astronomical.
We should expect to get constantly nerdsniped by frontier labs. And we have. Most EAs I talk to think Claude Code has made (or nearly made) software engineering a closed loop or RSI. They see the METR graph as a direct line pointing to AGI. They see AI 2027 as a principled, ballpark estimate for encroaching doom.
More skepticism and more posts like this seem incredibly important.