Co-founder of Nonlinear, Charity Entrepreneurship, Charity Science Health, and Charity Science.
Kat Woods 🔶 ⏸️
Karma: 5,207
The x-risk case for exercise: to have the most impact, the world needs you at your best
Don’t stop being an EA because you dislike EAs. You don’t have to interact with most EAs. Just the ones you like.
Burnout, depression, and AI safety: some concrete mental health strategies
ASI Already Knows About Torture—In Defense of Talking Openly About S-Risks
“humans evolved eating a variety of diets in different places”
Yes, but none of them were ever vegan. I think this is important. It makes it much more likely that our bodies are not evolved for veganism.
Ooh, thanks for tracking this down!
It looks like creatine supplementation does mildly affect cognitive performance but it doesn’t help vegetarians more than omnivores.
But isn’t creatine really hard or impossible to get with a vegan diet? So presumably then it would be affecting their regular cognitive performances?
This study shows that supplementing causes a similar increase of cognitive abilities compared to omnivores, but it could be that they’re starting from a worse spot than they would have been had they been omnivores?
It’ll be hard to figure that out because vegetarians tend to have baseline higher IQs, from what I recall. But that is quite likely a selection effect.
vegans live longer in observational studies.
Vegetarians (not vegans), but then if you find a comparison group that also doesn’t drink/smoke but isn’t vegetarian, the non-vegetarians live longer.
Also this larger study shows that meat consumption predicts longer lifespan.
I’m sure I’m healthier than the majority of the population too. So if you’re willing to put in this amount of work, I don’t think the argument applies.
If you can control your diet enough to be vegan, you can probably control it enough to eat healthier with a non-vegan diet as well.
The important thing isn’t that you’re healthier compared to a SAD diet. Pretty much anything is better than a SAD diet. The important thing is whether you’re healthier than your realistic alternative.
If you eat in the way I describe you still get the signalling benefits and you don’t have to do expected value calculations with every decision.
In fact, you might have better signalling effects because it shows you’re not just blindly virtue signalling but actually trying to solve the problem.
Also, if you look and are healthier, people will find that more persuasive.
Ozempic seems potentially good. Also, many other diets also cause weight loss (e.g. Mediterranean, paleo, etc). As I understand it, most diets lead to weight loss as long as you can keep them up. So just pick a diet that you can maintain long term.
I think if you have enough control over your diet to be a vegan, you have enough control to do one of the other diets that has the weight effects without health side effects.
Thanks! And I totally agree, cultivated meat seems like a good solution.
Why you should eat meat—even if you hate factory farming
Love this. For others curious about trying to understand conservative values and thinking more, I recommend Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
I also recommend Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt
Aw, that’s so good to hear! Glad you’ve been finding it beneficial.
The most common mistakes people make starting EA orgs
Thanks! You mean the Israel/Gaza one?
How about now? I tried changing something.
Should you start a for-profit AI safety org?
How to get ChatGPT to really thoroughly research something
I’ve known a few people who say this.
And there are some people online who promote this, but I think for most of them they had kids for the usual reasons (they wanted them) and then post hoc came up with reasons for why it’s actually the best thing for the world.
You can tell because they don’t actually do cause prioritization like they do with the other causes. There are no cost-effectiveness analyzes comparing having children to mentorship etc.
It usually feels more like how most people talk about ordinary charities. Exaggerated claims of impact and no attempt to do genuine cause comparison and feeling offended if you try to bring up alternatives and do a systematic comparison of the options.
Mostly this show’s up as people saying it is unethical to not have children even if the person is an EA and they know that that time and money would be coming out of donations to effective charities, so they are making the claim that it is more effective to have children than it is to donate more.
Yeah, I’ve already spoken privately to a bunch of people about this and haven’t heard any arguments that have changed my mind.
I’d love to hear counterarguments though! Perhaps there are ones I haven’t heard that would change my mind.