emre kaplan🔸

• emre kaplan🔸 16 Jan 2026 0:14 UTC

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Aidan Kankyoku’s comment on: Should an­i­mal ad­vo­cates treat ve­g­anism as a su­pereroga­tory com­mit­ment or a moral baseline?

  I agree that veganism is the strongest identity in the animal movement at the moment. It’s a powerful meme, a very salient identity for many. I don’t think any other animal advocacy related identity has more mentions in Twitter bios. Plant-based people or vegetarians don’t tend to refer to that in their social media profiles.

  I disagree that vegans are 2% in the US. 2% is the figure you get when you lump plant-based and vegan together. When you ask specifically for “vegan”, only 1% identify as vegan in 2023 Gallup survey. I think plant-based people are also around 1% in the US. Google searches for veganism have also been globally declining since 2020. And I think the leadership of major animal advocacy organisations are amenable to the idea that we should stop mentioning veganism. So I think there is some possibility for change.

• emre kaplan🔸 14 Jan 2026 16:14 UTC

  34 points

  7 ∶ 0

  on: Should an­i­mal ad­vo­cates treat ve­g­anism as a su­pereroga­tory com­mit­ment or a moral baseline?

  I will write a few more posts on this. But my current, still uncertain, thoughts are:

  -The main identity we promote in animal advocacy should be “animal advocate”.

  -”Animal advocate” should be more vaguely defined and primarily refer to a political commitment similarly to “feminist” and “socialist”.

  -We should abandon veganism as an identity and stop promoting it.

  -We should separately push for different norms for animal advocates. Eating plant-based, avoiding animal-tested products etc. should each be advocated as separate norms.

  -Priesthood(people working in animal advocacy) and laymen(mere members of the “animal advocate” identity) should be subject to different expectations.

  -We should strongly push for norms against eating meat. Individual diet change should still be pursued.

  -Consuming animal products shouldn’t disqualify someone from identifying as an animal advocate. I’m not sure what the status of meat should be. I suspect a few countries like Germany might get to 10% vegetarian within my lifetime so I believe restricting our base to vegetarians might be viable in some places.

• emre kaplan🔸 3 Dec 2025 13:02 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: JessMasterson’s comment on: 3 doubts about veganism

  I agree!

• emre kaplan🔸 2 Dec 2025 14:09 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: JessMasterson’s comment on: 3 doubts about veganism

  I believe the situation is similar for harms to others. Acts that make you a non-Muslim are a much narrower set compared to sinful actions. A thief still remains a Muslim/​Christian/​Jew as far as I know. Even murderers are still considered as believers depending on the denomination.

3 doubts about veganism

• emre kaplan🔸 13 Nov 2025 14:00 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Effec­tive Altru­ists Should Pro­mote Fru­gal­ity More

  I keep thinking about this. Even though I’m super sceptical about causal inferences that back into the past, one explanation for the decline of Mohism in China is that their insistence on frugality wasn’t popular among elites and they lost elite support.

• emre kaplan🔸 25 Sep 2025 14:22 UTC

  3 points

  5 ∶ 0

  on: Why you should eat meat—even if you hate fac­tory farming

  I agree that nutrition science is not robust enough, but I have never been convinced by arguments against healthiness of a fully plant-based diet.

  As you note, vegans live longer in observational studies.

  Furthermore, trans fats and heavy metals are very likely to be bad for health. Consuming animal products exposes you to these. (A lot of) Saturated fat might also be bad for you and animal products have more of that. I agree that vegans might be missing out on some beneficial nutrients but there are also some harms avoided. I’m not sure which effect dominates.

• emre kaplan🔸 23 Jul 2025 21:56 UTC

  10 points

  4 ∶ 0

  on: De­bate: Are enough EAs earn­ing to give?

  I’m not sure what the right proportion of E2Gers should be. But I tend to think having thoughtful people who put their money where their mouth is and do not depend on EA financially is valuable for community epistemics. I’d like having more of them around.

• emre kaplan🔸 24 Jun 2025 7:28 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Ve­gan Challenges Are An Un­der­rated Lever For Diet Change

  Thank you, very interesting and much needed. Are any of the RCTs used in this meta-analysis public? What are their designs like?

Thoughts on sin­gle is­sue vs. multi is­sue positioning

• emre kaplan🔸 17 May 2025 18:54 UTC

  7 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Do prim­i­tive sen­tient or­ganisms feel ex­treme pain? dis­en­tan­gling in­ten­sity range and re­s­olu­tion

  This is a very important research area. Thank you. I especially liked the empirical testing approaches section.

Psy­chol­ogy re­search iden­ti­fy­ing a bias against harm reduction

• emre kaplan🔸 14 May 2025 10:56 UTC

  19 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: emre ka­plan’s Quick takes

  The UK offers better access as a conference location for international participants compared to the US or the EU.

  I’m being invited to conferences in different parts of the world as a Turkish citizen, and visa processes for the US and the EU have gotten a lot more difficult lately. I’m unable to even get a visa appointment for several European countries, and my appointment for the US visa was scheduled 16 months out. I believe the situation is similar for visa applicants from other countries. The UK currently offers the smoothest process with timelines of only a few weeks. Conference organizers that seek applications from all over the world could choose the UK over other options.

• emre kaplan🔸 8 May 2025 21:28 UTC

  34 points

  12 ∶ 1

  on: emre ka­plan’s Quick takes

  I wonder what can be done to make people more comfortable praising powerful people in EA without feeling like sycophants.

  A while ago I saw Dustin Moskovitz commenting on the EA Forum. I thought about expressing my positive impressions of his presence and how incredible it was that he even engaged. I didn’t do that because it felt like sycophancy. The next day he deleted his account. I don’t think my comment would have changed anything in that instance, but I still regretted not commenting.

  In general, writing criticism feels more virtuous than writing praise. I used to avoid praising people who had power over me, but now that attitude seems misguided to me. While I’m glad that EA provided an environment where I could feel comfortable criticising the leadership, I’m unhappy about ending up in a situation where occupying leadership positions in EA feels like a curse to potential candidates.

  Many community members agree that there is a leadership vacuum in EA. That should lead us to believe people in leadership positions should be rewarded more than they currently are. Part of that reward could be encouragement and I am personally committing to comment on things I like about EA more often.

• emre kaplan🔸 8 May 2025 8:50 UTC

  7 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Our bet on whether the AI mar­ket will crash

  I’m confused how the following scenario is consistent with meeting the resolution criteria. The resolution criteria imply at least 50% decrease in AI company revenues:

  Remmelt thinks there will likely be a crash by 2029, since AI companies are burning too much cash on data centers to run products undergoing commodification. He thinks it’s most plausible though that the crash happens on the investment side, and that model subscription revenues could end up being mostly maintained.

• emre kaplan🔸 29 Apr 2025 19:52 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: calebp’s comment on: Three polls: on timelines and cause prio

  I don’t think the current systems are able to pass the Turing test yet. Quoting from Metaculus admins:

  “Given evidence from previous Loebner prize transcripts – specifically that the chatbots were asked Winograd schema questions – we interpret the Loebner silver criteria to be an adversarial test conducted by reasonably well informed judges, as opposed to one featuring judges with no or very little domain knowledge.”

• emre kaplan🔸 24 Apr 2025 16:29 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ethan Spencer’s comment on: In­sects Are Not Moder­ately Important

  Thank you for the detailed reply. I’m personally not satisfied by moral theories that attribute intrinsic moral significance to species-membership but I won’t be available for further discussion.

• emre kaplan🔸 24 Apr 2025 13:29 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ethan Spencer’s comment on: In­sects Are Not Moder­ately Important

  Utilitarianism is one of the more “moderate” views in the field because at the very least it admits that individual insects have less welfare capacity than typical humans. Unitarian rights-based theories claim that right to life is equally strong for all sentient beings, which make insects an even bigger priority. What is your view on moral patienthood?

Mea­sura­bil­ity is Dou­bly Im­por­tant in An­i­mal Advocacy

• emre kaplan🔸 9 Apr 2025 20:06 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Antonia Gefahrt’s comment on: Ex­per­i­ment test­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion styles of Me­lanie Joy vs. Gary Francione

  Thank you for your research!