PhD in physics (thermodynamics of ecosystems) and in moral philosophy (animal rights), master in economics, researcher in health and welfare economics at KULeuven, president of EABelgium, environmental footprint analyst at Ecolife
Stijn
Karma: 578
The deathprint of replacing beef by chicken and insect meat
The case against degrowth
Animal welfare certified meat is not a stepping stone to meat reduction or abolition
The harm cascade: why helping others is so hard
The extreme cost-effectiveness of cell-based meat R&D
Communicate your epistemic status shifts
Cost-effectiveness distributions, power laws and scale invariance
Towards zero harm: animal-free and land-free food
Clean technology innovation as the most cost-effective climate action
[Question] EA’s abstract moral epistemology
one point of criticism if this cost-effectiveness estimate: in high-income countries there is no substantial shortage of blood. In case of acute shortage, blood banks can easily recruit donors. So if you don’t donate and that results in a blood shortage of one unit, another donor is likely to step in. If you donate blood, you simply replace the donation: the other donor who would have donated in your place, will not be recruited. Your donation will not be an extra donation. Or in other words: blood donation has low additivity and blood supply is inelastic. The case for plasma might be different, as there is a global plasma undersupply. A plasma donation will not simply be a replacement of someone else’s donation. But I don’t know how many QALY’s you save by donating plasma.
Rational altruism and risk aversion
On the correspondence between AI-misalignment and cognitive dissonance using a behavioral economics model
I wrote a comment in a previous discussion about why I think cultivated meat can be expected to become at least as efficient/cheap as animal-based meat: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/y8jHKDkhPXApHp2gb/cultured-meat-a-comparison-of-techno-economic-analyses?commentId=MJtLFZya2WqdNADSy
The basic idea is that animals were not evolved to maximize meat production. Just like horses were not evolved to maximize transport efficiency and hence were replaced by cars, plants were not evolved to maximize turning solar energy into electricity and are replaced by more efficient solar panels, pigs were not evolved to maximize insulin production and were replaced by recombinant-DNA yeast,...
The crux of the cultivated meat feasibility debate
Probability estimate for wild animal welfare prioritization
It seems that you make nothing but a very trivial claim, that if you are used to A, a change from A to B is difficult. But then you frame it like B being difficult. But it is the transition which is difficult, not B itself. As an analogy, let’s discuss whether Chinese is difficult. You would say yes, because it is not your native language. It will take some effort for you to learn Chinese. But a Chinese person thinks Chinese is easy, and English is difficult. Who is right? In the end, once you have learned to speak Chinese, it is as easy as most other languages that you have learned. Some languages are objectively more difficult than others (like Dutch is probably more difficult than Afrikaans, and English is more difficult than Esperanto), and for the same reason, some diets are objectively more difficult than others. But you make it look like veganism is objectively more difficult than other diets. I disagree with that: just see how much you have to learn for a healthy diet with meat. I think a healthy vegan diet is as difficult as a healthy omnivorous diet, and an unhealthy vegan diet is as easy as an unhealthy omnivorous diet. Transitions may be difficult, but they involve one time transition costs, which become negligible in the long run. Once you have learned a foreign language, the cost of learning drops to zero, and the new language becomes easy for the rest of your life.
Thanks for the question, had to think a while. About infeasibility of cultivated meat, best counterevidence for me would be seeing a massive disinvestment in cultivated meat R&D, a consensus among researchers openly saying that it is too difficult to make progress.
Another crucial thing that would change my mind, is evidence about the feasibility of plant-based meat, that substitution towards plant-based is faster than I would expect (faster than cultivated meat innovation). This would mean seeing a fast increase in the number of vegans, and especially conservative male meat identifiers switching to plant-based meats.
I think the beatpath method to avoid intransitivity still results in a sadistic repugnant conclusion. Consider three situations. In situation 1, one person exist with high welfare 100. In situation 2, that person gets welfare 400, and 1000 additional people are added with welfare 0. In situation 3, those thousand people will have welfare 1, i.e. small but positive (lives barely worth living), and the first person now gets a negative welfare of −100. Total utilitarianism says that situation 3 is best, with total welfare 900. But comparing situations 1 and 3, I would strongly prefer situation 1, with one happy person. Choosing situation 3 is both sadistic (the one person gets a negative welfare) and repugnant (this welfare loss is compensated by a huge number of lives barely worth living). Looking at harms, in situation 1, the one person has 300 units of harm (400 welfare in situation 2 compared to 100 in situation 1). In situation 2, the 1000 additional people each have one unit of harm, which totals 1000 units. In situation 3, the first person has 200 units of harm (-100 in situation 3 compared to +100 in situation 1). According to person-affecting views, we have an intransitivity. But Schulze’s beatpath method, Tideman’s ranked pairs method, minimax Condorcet method, and other selection methods to avoid intransitivity, select situation 3 if situation 2 were an option (and would select situation 1 if situation 2 was not an available option, violating independence of irrelevant alternatives).
Perhaps we can solve this issue by considering complaints instead of harms. In each situation X, a person can complain against choosing that situation X over another situation Y. That complaint is a value between zero and the harm that the person has in situation X compared to situation Y. A person can choose how much to complain. For example, if the first person would fully complain in situation 1, then situation 3 will be selected, and in that situation the first person is worse-off. Hence, learning about this sadistic repugnant conclusion, the first person can decide not to complain in situation 1, as if that person is not harmed in that situation. Without the complaint, situation 1 will be selected. We have to let people freely choose how much they want to complain in the different situations.
My major concern is that this article is too one-sided: it mentions the difficulties/trade-offs of vegan diets, without mentioning difficulties/trade-offs of non-vegan diets. Eating a non-vegan diet is also not easy. Some examples of what you have to tell to people who want to eat animal products:
Don’t eat too much meat, that is unhealthy. You can look on some websites how much gram per day is too much, according to your age and bodily needs.
Fry the meat well enough, because (almost all) meat can contain harmful bacteria. Also wash well enough all the cutlery, the knife, the chopping board and everything that was in contact with the meat, because of contamination risks.
But don’t fry your meat too much. Frying meat can produce carcinogenic substances. Especially when there is a dark or black crust visible, the meat was fried too much. For the same reason, avoid barbeque and flambé. Heating up meat in the microwave oven is not good enough to kill the bacteria. If you don’t know how to cook your meals properly, you can eat vegan meat alternatives: they can be safely eaten even uncooked (or used in the microwave oven).
Don’t drink unpasteurized milk.
Animal products don’t contain dietary fiber, so make sure to eat a proper source of dietary fiber.
Meat doesn’t contain vitamin C, so make sure to eat a proper source of vitamin C. There are websites that tell you which products contain vitamin C.
Avoid processed meat: that is unhealthy. You can look on some websites what counts as processed meat. I think bacon and ham also count as processed.
Many meat products, especially fresh products, don’t show an expiration date on the package. You can look for some information on the internet how to learn to detect when your meat is expired. If you don’t know how to smell expired meat, don’t keep your meat too long in the fridge, or eat plant-based meat alternatives as they show a best before date on the package.
In many cases, cheaper meat products may be unhealthier than more expensive meat products. There is often a trade-off between price and health/quality of the meat product. Consult a nutritionist to figure out the best diet according to your budget.
Almost none of the meat eaters had a recent blood test to check if they have for example too much bad cholesterol that could be the result of eating too much animal products. They also don’t know if their bodies can properly absorb for example the iron in the meat. It is recommended to visit a nutritionist and ask for a blood test.
Some people are allergic to milk, fish, and other animal products. You can consult your doctor if you don’t know about your potential allergies.
These examples should be enough to show that eating animal products is equally difficult as eating vegan. My worry is that focusing too much on vegan nutrition issues (telling people a lot about how to eat a healthy vegan diet), might give people the impression that veganism is difficult, and then they continue eating animal products and causing harm to animals. But focusing too little might be counterproductive as well, because then people don’t eat enough healthy vegan diets, they become ill and revert back to animal products.
So I recommend that when you tell potential vegans how to eat a healthy vegan diet, you also mention the health concerns related to animal products, to make clear that eating a healthy non-vegan diet is equally difficult or easy.