EA into animal advocacy since 2016
AndeanCondor
Karma: 53
(Crossposted from my LessWrong comment.)
If you personally feel safer eating animals products, fine.
If you don’t want to follow a well-planned diet, also fine to eat omnivorously.
But before encouraging others to feel unsafe about following a well-planned vegan diet, it’s probably a good idea consider that the US Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics published in 2025 a peer-reviewed position paper that reiterates what they’ve been publishing for decades now, that well-planned vegan diets are healthy, and to explain why and how they would do that if, as you claim, the weight of the evidence pointed to expecting well-planned vegan diets to be a bad idea for health.
How would the world’s largest organization of food and nutrition professionals manage to push through the peer review process, decade after decade, position papers that INCORRECTLY claim well-planned vegan diets are healthy?
“It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that, in adults, appropriately planned vegetarian and vegan dietary patterns can be nutritionally adequate and can offer long-term health benefits such as improving several health outcomes associated with cardiometabolic diseases.”
From https://www.jandonline.org/article/S2212-2672(25)00042-5/fulltext
If the AND should be expected to be biased in any direction with respect to vegan diets, we should expect it to be biased against veganism. Consider that it’s very likely that most members of the AND are not vegan (just like in the general population), and the AND is partly funded by animal products industries:
American Egg Board’s Egg Nutrition Center
National Dairy Council
As for your opening sentence on the health section, “you need to take medicine to not die—B12”, I don’t think a B12 supplement is medicine. Factory farmed animals are routinely fed B12 supplements and people don’t consider meat medicine. Salt is supplemented with iodine to prevent deficiencies, also not medicine.
Discussing -as you do- what happens to vegans that forgo B12 supplements is besides the point (as would be to discuss what happens to people who go on a fast-food only diet). I can attest to the prevalence of a worrying number of non-rationalist vegans don’t supplement B12 (In my experience something like a third or half of vegans don’t supplement B12). However, everyone here on the EA forum likely agrees that if you are vegan you should follow good nutritional advice. And B12 supplements are inexpensive and convenient.
As a native Spanish speaker I’m disappointed you didn’t include even just one page to summarize the plight of factory farmed animals and what EAA is doing for them. You say that including topics like animals would have made your book “lose strength”, but the argument doesn’t seem to hold up if what’s at stake is just one page about a topic like animals.
I was motivated by watching the 2019 movie The Red Sea Diving Resort, very loosely based on true events. Kind of similar to Schindler’s List in that it shows people saving lives at great personal risk.
Thank you very much for responding on behalf of ACE.
I completely agree with you that ACE should do everything that you said:
“we affirm in our guiding principles the importance of treating all people—regardless of gender identity, race, sexuality, or political beliefs—with empathy and respect, just as we show non-human animals compassion. We strive to ensure that our practices support high-performing, mission-driven teams and reflect our commitment to fairness and respect—without prescribing any particular ideology.
People across the political spectrum care about animals, and our goal is to welcome that broad support.”
However, I disagree that this has been ACE’s position in the past. If ACE has changed its position and you no longer support what people on the right would describe as woke ideology, I encourage you to do some editing of the material that is still on your website.
Does ACE still stand by its 2021 post “Apply for funding from ACE movement grants”, which states that ACE is not able to fund “groups or projects that do not support ACE’s views on diversity, equity, and inclusion”? That 2017 blog post endorsed in 2021 is clearly “prescribing a particular ideology” (woke), the type that I argue is at least off-putting to about half of the general population.
From the 2017 blog post:
“If you work for an animal charity, your organization may wish to consider the following options:
State explicitly that your organization opposes all systems of oppression;21″
The footnote says:
“For an example, read about Collectively Free.”
And that Collectively Free page says:
“Non-participation in oppressive systems means complacency with them as it does nothing to dismantle them. Therefore, we commit to unapologetically base our actions on:
anti-speciesism, anti-racism, anti-colorism, anti-ableism, anti-sexism, anti-cissexism, anti-heterosexism, anti-binarism, anti-classism, anti-nationalism, anti-fascism, anti-xenophobia, anti-ageism, anti-sizeism, anti-nativism, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, anti-zionism, anti-totalitarianism, anti-ethnocentrism.”
Note that anti-semitism is conspicuously absent from the list of 20 “anti-s”, but anti-zionism is present. Apparently they think that Israeli Jews should pack up their bags and leave behind the one state where they can be free from the persecution they’ve endured for millenia, and that this view is morally obligatory. I disagree, and I have no conection to Judaism or Israel.
In a blog post titled “20 ways the violence of the oppressed isn’t the same as the violence of the oppressors” Collectively Free claims:
‘White vegans have no problem saying “kill all humans” in response to speciesism. But when women say “kill all men” in response to patriarchy, or when people of color say “kill all white people” in response to racist oppression, suddenly it’s “violence.” Hypocrisy.’
Well, I’m a white vegan and I have a big problem with people who say “kill all humans”, as I have with anyone who says “kill all men” or “kill all white people”. No one should be defending people who say “kill all (insert indiscriminate group of people)”! But it’s certainly not the first time that a woke activist has defended such a statement. It’s not an isolated incident.
Endorsing an organization that promotes this rhetoric seems to be a clear example of ‘prescribing a particular ideology’ that is not universally shared and is in direct opposition to the stated goal of ‘treating all people with empathy and respect’.
As an aside, I would like to offer some thoughts on why I think woke ideology is bad. I’m all for treating all people with empathy and respect. I’m against racism but not anti-racist. A lot of innocent people have had their carreers and life ruined by anti-racist and woke activists for expressing perfectly defensible opinions. I highly recommend John McWhorter’s book “Woke Racism: How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America”, which among other things, has many examples of victims of woke activism.
I would like to end on this question:
Does ACE still stand by the part of their 2021 post “Apply for funding from ACE movement grants” that states that ACE is not able to fund “groups or projects that do not support ACE’s views on diversity, equity, and inclusion”?
I agree with Hugh White’s 80k podcast. Unfortunately, Taiwan doesn’t stand much of a chance.
China’s best option is to declare a complete blockade/seige on Taiwan: no ship or aircraft allowed to reach Taiwan, not even food, with the goal of starving Taiwan into submission. If they do this before Trump leaves office, the cost-benefit analysis for Trump is so badly against going to war with China, that the US seems unlikely to go to war, and Taiwan would have no choice but to fold.
China would still have to deal with massive sanctions, and maybe even a US blockade of ships going to China through the Straight of Malacca, but Xi seems very determined and he can credibly threaten nuclear strikes on US cities.
(China would not get to keep TSMC’s chip fabs, they would be electronically destroyed as mentioned in the podcast.)
‘I don’t think a “diversity survey” is egregious side-taking. Just going off the title, seems pretty normal and (at least) mildly good.’
If the title diversity survey doesn’t get to someone who thinks woke ideology is bad, the first sentence of the report might:
“In June 2024, ACE’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice (DEIJ) Committee conducted(...)”
Just 12 months ago they had an active Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice (DEIJ) Committee, that of course was completely unconcerned with viewpoint diversity, as in having at least one right-leaning member.
But since I no longer stand by my original post, I’m just nitpicking at this point.
I find the Big Think article surprisingly nasty towards EA. Does Bregman see it as “a misguided movement that sought to weaponize the country’s capitalist engines to protect the planet and the human race”?
I was also not aware that EA’s “demise” has apparently already occurred: “Bregman saw EA’s demise long before the downfall of the movement’s poster child, Sam Bankman-Fried (...)”
EA still seems to have a pulse and much more.
Thank you for your response, Larks. It floored me. I no longer stand by my original post.
Years ago I read the forum post by Hypatia that you linked to. I was aghast back then, but going though that post again this morning made me realize that my post asking ACE to be “a little quiet” about being woke is LOL ridiculous, in no small part because it’s asking them to be less transparent about who they are and what posture they want the EAA movement to have with respect to woke ideology (as detailed in the blog post “Apply for funding from ACE movement grants”, which you quoted).
Sadly, as the only meta charity in the EAA space, they are in a good place to force their ideology onto EAA charities.
It suggests a strategy for individual EAA donors: look for EAA charities like Anima International who had their ACE recommendations downgraded due to insufficient woke alignment, and consider whether they could deserve your funding to the extent that ACE downgraded them for bad reasons.
A less than half-baked idea: Maybe Charity Entrepreneurship could consider incubating an EAA meta charity for the half of the population who dislike (or worse) woke ideology? It could be just a 1-2 people gig who try to imperfectly correct for ACE’s bias in recommending charities, looking for good EAA charities left behind for ideological reasons. But they could only get so far without duplicating part of ACE’s research efforts.
Replacing egg protein is not hard and it’s not going to hurt your sport performance or future academic prospects.
Go see a nutritionist who specializes in vegan nutrition. Don’t get 100% of your nutrition advice from the internet, just like you should not get 100% of your medical advice from the internet.
My level of ambition is lower than it could be and I like it that way, because I value my happiness and not in an instrumental way. In my first few years as an EA I tried valuing my happiness only as instrumental to doing more good and it was a disaster.
Reading your quote about Lyndon B. Johnson made me imagine ways in which idealistic people who recently got into EA could be lured into thinking that they should increase their ambition and ignore how that pursuit could damage relationships and other key pillars of a good life.
Unfortunately, your glorification of unbalanced lives continues, for example with this later passage:
‘In his first technology jobs, Huang found collaborators who “shared a readiness to sacrifice their personal lives and their sanity” to solve technical problems. His eventual cofounder remarked that back then, “there was no notion of weekends,” only days that started at 7:00am and ended with calls from their girlfriends to please come home at 9:00pm.’
(I didn’t read the entire post.)