I manage operations, research, publishing and grantwriting at Allied Scholars for Animal Protection, a startup nonprofit building a unified infrastructure for campus animal advocacy.
Philosophy and science fiction nerd.
Benny Smith
Karma: 347
Thanks Vasco!
Another finding I’ve seen is that widespread adoption of a plant-based diet would save ~3.3% of global GDP per year due to healthcare savings. That study also suggest a 6-10% reduction in global mortality, though I think these types of findings are necessarily pretty speculative and contingent on assumptions.
Environmental & health appeals are the most effective vegan outreach strategies
Animal Charity Evaluators estimates that a plant-based diet spares 105 vertebrates per year. So if you’re vegan for 50 years, that comes out to 5,250 animals saved. If you put even 10% credence in the ACE number, where the counterfactual is zero impact, you’d still be helping over 500 animals in expectation.
I’m donating 10% this year, probably all towards nonhuman animal welfare via the ACE Recommended Charity Fund.
Animal issues seem much more neglected than global health & poverty.
X-risk seems much less funding-constrained than animal stuff.
If there were an obvious way to support longermist animal stuff, I’d probably allocate something towards that. In particular, I think someone should be lobbying AI companies to take animal welfare more seriously and to get their models to not tacitly support factory farming. I also think digital sentience seems important and neglected, but I basically trust OpenPhil to do a good job funding that type of research.
Bioavailability stuff is pretty technical and I’m not an expert, but here’s the upshot according to me:
Bioavailability is sometimes slightly lower in plants but not enough to matter. For example, a recent review stated:
There is very little evidence at present regarding a marked difference in protein digestibility in humans. The more precise data collected so far in humans, assessing real (specific) oro-ileal nitrogen digestibility, has shown that the differences in the digestibility between plant and animal protein sources are only a few percent, contrary to historical findings in rats or determinations using less precise methods in humans. For soy protein isolate, pea protein flour or isolate, wheat flour and lupine flour, the figures were 89–92%, similar to those found for eggs (91%) or meat (90–94%), and slightly lower than those reported for milk protein (95%).
Additionally, combining multiple plant sources in one meal (e.g. soy and potato) often achieves bioavailability competitive with meat (I think this is one reason why many vegan protein powders combine multiple ingredients, e.g. rice & pea protein). So the generic vegan advice of “eat a variety of foods and supplement B12” has this covered.
In the rich world, we get way more protein than we need, so vegans are very unlikely to end up protein deficient due to bioavailability issues.
And if you’re an athlete or trying to bulk up, I think it’s generally advisable to err on the side of overshooting your protein intake targets, even if you’re eating meat. Slightly overshooting your protein target should more than compensate for any bioavailability gap.
We can also measure protein synthesis and muscle strength and mass directly instead of using bioavailability as a proxy, and such studies don’t find downsides to plant protein. Germany’s strongest man can confirm.
This is a common misconception!
Several plants, including soy and quinoa, are complete proteins.
Vegan protein powders contain all the amino acids in appropriate ratios – just check the label of any pea protein powder next time you’re at the store. Pea protein powder is nutritionally identical to whey for all intents and purposes.
If you eat enough calories and a variety of legumes and grains as a vegan, it’s basically impossible to be deficient in any amino acid. It’s true that plant foods have amino acids in varying amounts, but they complement each other such that you easily get all of the amino acids, unless you’re on a black beans-only diet or something. For example, a peanut butter sandwich is a complete protein. I’d encourage you to check out this article for more info on vegan protein.
Nutritionfacts.org, veganhealth.org, and the vegan.com guide are all great resources, I recommend looking into it!
I’ve been vegan for three years, and I’m in good health. Years ago I would have said that being vegan sounded impossible, but it’s much easier than I would have expected. Happy to set up a call to chat about vegan nutrition if you’re ever interested.
There’s nothing magical about “animal protein.” Plants and plant-based protein powders provide the same nutrients, minus the moral atrocity.
Insect sentience is debated, but I’m not sure why we’d take the risk when we can just go vegan.
I’m highly skeptical that farmed crickets would live “undisturbed” lives, given the historical track record of how animals are treated when we optimize their lives for meat production rather than their own welfare. Generally, we should treat sentient beings as an end in themselves, not as a means to an end.
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Yeah, I think this caveat is important.
At the same time, GiveWell will continue to work on global poverty regardless of what OP does, right?
if I could persuade just ten people either to become vegan or to donate to effective animal charities, I’d prioritize the latter
On the other hand, if I could persuade ten people to donate to effective animal charities or one to devote their career to helping animals, I’d probably prioritize the latter.
IMO one Karen Davis, Bruce Friedrich, or Khaled Alwaleed is probably >>10x more valuable than one person donating 10 percent. So I think there’s a solid hits-based argument for vegan outreach, especially in communities where people tend to be unusually agentic & capable (e.g. EA).
There’s no Wikipedia article on Leah Garcés. This problem seems pretty tractable.
If the vegan movement is insufficiently truthseeking, the dominant cost is torture and murder on factory farms that could have otherwise been prevented.
Note that OP’s mom is not an omnivore, but rather a vegetarian considering becoming an omnivore. Specifically, OP said that his mom only wants to start eating meat if she can offset it. Pointing out the flaws and limitations of offsets seems like a reasonable response to this.
Much of the value of veg*nism may come from influencing cultural norms and those around you, rather than directly reducing demand. Social effects are hard to measure, so I doubt you’ll find reliable offsetting metrics.
For donation recommendations, I’d recommend checking out Animal Charity Evaluators’ top charities! But I’d encourage your mother to donate and stay vegetarian (and go vegan!).
Interestingly enough, C.S. Lewis (sort of) agrees:
Carnivorousness, with all that it entails, is older than humanity. Now it is impossible at this point not to remember...that man was not the first creature to rebel against the Creator, but that some older and mightier being long since became apostate and is now the emperor of darkness and (significantly) the Lord of this world...
...It seems to me, therefore, a reasonable supposition, that some mighty created power had already been at work for ill on the material universe...The intrinsic evil of the animal world lies in the fact that animals, or some animals, live by destroying each other...
....It is, of course, true that the immense mortality occasioned by the fact that many beasts live on beasts is balanced, in nature, by an immense birthrate, and it might seem, that if all animals had been herbivorous and healthy, they would mostly starve as a result of their own multiplication. But I take the fecundity and the death rate to be correlative phenomena. There was, perhaps, no necessity for such an excess of the sexual impulse: the Lord of this world thought of it as a response to carnivorousness – a double scheme for securing the maximum amount of torture...
...It may have been one of man’s functions to restore peace to the animal world, and if he had not joined the enemy he might have succeeded in doing so to an extent now hardly imaginable.
- The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis, Chapter 9 on “Animal Pain”
Lewis’ animal ethics are pretty silly in some ways, but when I read this chapter, I was shocked by how many of Brian Tomasik’s points were recognized by a Christian writing in the 1940s.
Just as AI, like ChatGPT, has learned to intepret human languages, it has the potential to help decode animal language, which can finally give animals their own voice to advocate for themselves.
This seems like a huge deal if it eventually works! I’m surprised there hasn’t been more discussion of it.
Super important point! Thanks for posting.
Thanks for writing this, these are important critiques. I think it can be healthy to disengage from EA in order to sort through some of the weird ideas for yourself, without all the social pressures.
A few comments:
Being paid to run a college club is weird. All other college students volunteer to run their clubs.
I actually don’t think it’s that weird to pay organizers. I know PETA has a student program that pays organizers, and The Humane League once did this too. I’d imagine you can find similar programs in other movements, though I don’t know for sure.
I suspect the amount that EA pays organizers is unusual though, and I strongly agree with you that paying a lot for university organizing introduces weird and epistemically corrosive incentives. The PETA program pays students $60 per event they run, so at most ~$600 per semester. Idk exactly how much EA group leaders are paid, but I think it’s a lot more than that.
I definitely share your sense that EA’s message of “think critically about how to do the most good” can sometimes feel like code for “figure out that we’re right about longtermism so you can work on AI risk.” The free money, retreats etc. can wind up feeling more like bribery than support, even if the intentions are good. I do expect the post-FTX funding crash to help solve some of these problems though.
Every highly engaged EA I know has converged on AI safety as the most pressing problem. Whether or not they have a background in AI, they have converged on AI safety. The notable exceptions are those who were already deeply committed to animal welfare or those who have a strong background in biology. The pre-EA animal welfare folks pursue careers in animal welfare, and the pre-EA biology folks pursue careers in biosecurity.
FWIW I did not care about animals before engaging with EA, and I work on animal welfare now. I take AI risk pretty seriously but have a lot of uncertainty around it.
Nice! I definitely agree with you on the precautionary principle.
Rethink Priorities has also done a lot of cool work on animal sentience, e.g. their welfare range and invertebrate sentience reports, and this one on philosophical difficulties.
Yeah I think this is a good point! Donor-advised funds seem like a good way to benefit from compound interest (and tax deductions) while avoiding the risk of value drift.