Co-founder of Nonlinear, Charity Entrepreneurship, Charity Science Health, and Charity Science.
Kat Woods 🔶 ⏸️
Karma: 5,202
“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.
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.
Thanks! You mean the Israel/Gaza one?
How about now? I tried changing 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.
I can’t figure out how to hand over authoriship to you entirely, so let’s just leave it as is.
Ah great! I added you as a co-author. Wondering if I can then remove myself and then you can just be the author?
Not sure if you can edit it from there or not now.
People often neglect to compare the costs/risks to the benefits (which I think this post largely does).
In the case of alcohol, I think the benefits of alcohol are smaller than most people believe.
I think in the majority of cases, the feelings of happiness from alcohol are not actually coming from alcohol, but from socializing, then being misattributed to the alcohol.
One easy way to verify this: try drinking alone. You’ll find it doesn’t make you happy. It just accentuates existing feelings.
Then, try talking to people for awhile without drinking. You’ll find once you get past the initial awkwardness, you start feeling good.
Some added nuance: I think alcohol is short term beneficial for getting into social situations, by decreasing fear. However, I think this usually becomes a crutch. It’s better to simply learn how to get into conversations without alcohol. It’s possible to develop this skill without having to ingest a neurotoxin.
Seems hard to prevent s-risks if nobody knows they’re a potential problem.
Reminds me of this argument I made awhile back.
Maybe ;)
I remember excessively looking into this and it’s quite complicated. Depends on where they are (e.g. if they’re urban, they’re more likely to buy factory farmed animals)
Also, in rural areas, they still sometimes actually often do what is essentially small scale factory farming of hens. For example, the Rwandan family I stayed with in a rural village had previously been running a small scale factory farm (~30 hens) who were kept in pretty similar conditions to large scale factory farms.
Also, their pigs were kept in stalls just slightly larger than gestation crates.
I don’t know exactly how much they made a day, but they were definitely extremely poor (e.g. all dirt floors, only one bed in a family of >12 [most slept on the ground], ate almost entirely yams and sorghum, no running water, etc)
Well reasoned post!
I wonder how this compares to eating mussels and oysters
On the one hand I think oysters are much less likely to be conscious.
On the other hand, they are also farmed, which tends to lead to worse well-being than if they’re in their natural habitat.
When I look at the farming practices for oysters and mussels they look to be pretty similar to their natural habitat but I have not investigated super thoroughly.
Thanks for writing this! Changed my mind.
I do wonder if there are certain brands or sources where the bees are treated well. I imagine ones that go outside to find natural food sources. My grandparents kept a couple of bee hives and they seemed pretty good. The vast majority of the time they’re just living a natural lifestyle, which is most likely what they’ve evolved to enjoy.
On that note, I’ve found that o3 is really good for researching the welfare of various animal products. Here’s what I just did for the honey at my house (TLDR; I won’t be buying it again).
You can find a map of the funders in the space here
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.