Some thoughts on vegetarianism and veganism

I like how you explore all the angles available, including bringing in your own skepticism about your own process. It's nice to see this all laid out this way.

One oddball thought — I hope it's helpful, though it might instead be annoying:

There's a common and beloved line of thinking in this area that I've come to think of as broken. It goes something like:

1. "Social signal X is important to send."
2. "I can create social signal X by making myself behave in fashion Y."
3. "Therefore, I should do Y."

…where that "should" there is often an injection of motivation juice. It frequently acts like writing the conclusion [LW · GW] of what behavior the person in question needs to make themselves adopt one way or another. Differences between how they act now and Y can be a painful source of motivation to change, whether by force of will or through some kind of behavioral or psychological hacking.

But I think the problem is actually at step 1.

If you want to think of it in TDT terms: A culture that navigates social signals with this way of thinking engenders unending complexity in signaling arms races. Everything touched by this way of thinking becomes impossible to sort out in any simple way — not just because of computational complexity, but also (and I think primarily) because the focused attention will engender Goodhart drift. In practice this almost totally borks the ability to cooperate due to injecting a tragedy of the commons type dynamic.

Social signal analysis seems like a fine thing to do for systems you're not a part of, but when you're in them I think it's pretty important to let the signals take care of themselves [LW · GW]. Otherwise you feed powerfully coercive and rivalrous dynamics.

If you were to remove all the thinking about how your decisions impact others' perception of you, what's left? And what does that thinking conclude?

If you end up with a different answer than the one you get from adding in the epicycles of endless recursive signaling thinking, then that highlights exactly the degree to which signaling has decoupled from reality, which you encourage by choosing an option based on sending said decoupled signals.

So you can simplify your thinking and help replenish the epistemic commons by dropping all explicit thinking about what signals you are or aren't sending in your decision-making.

If veg*nism is really a moral frontier (to pick one of the angles you mentioned) and EA is really honestly into moral pioneering, and these two things match, it'll unfold that way on its own. And it'll unfold for the same reasons you, personally, for non-signaling reasons, choose to be veg*n. The signals will take care of themselves by virtue of the unstoppable pairing of truth and transparency.

Or, you can go the usual route I'm familiar with in these circles and focus on how to seem like a moral pioneer. This goes over about as well as working really hard to seem natural and at ease on a date. You might pull it off! But you'd be pulling off a deception — which ironically might in fact match reality, making the deception pointless. Or it doesn't, in which case you're trying to cause people to respect you and EA in ways that don't match your/their actual moral embodiment.

So, what I see after filtering out signaling thinking is:

• You don't buy the relevance of your direct impact from going veg*n.
• You're wondering whether you'd be a more moral person by adopting a deontological angle, which would imply becoming veg*n anyway.
• You're also concerned that you're privileging the hypothesis [LW · GW] of veg*nism and that this is warping your thinking.
• You want to strengthen your altruistic motivations — but you aren't sure whether going veg*n actually will do that.
• You're worried about possible negative health effects on yourself from going veg*n.

These considerations seem straightforward to me. No trickery or muddying the signaling commons. Just honest reflection for yourself about whether veg*nism makes sense for you.

For what that's worth! I know this kind of recursive reasoning can be fun and often seems super important and key — and maybe even downright insane to overlook. I don't mean to tell anyone that they can't do that. But I do mean to say that I see real costs to it, that I do in fact think it's basically never worth it, and I want to offer a snapshot of what I see in case it helps inspire some new and valuable insight for others.

Our aversion to making changes to lifestyle and habits is based on the initial, not long-term, difficulty. I went vegan about a decade ago after learning about factory farming, but it quickly stopped feeling like a sacrifice at all. My food bill is much lower, and even the most basic vegan cooking becomes delicious with the right amount of monosodium glutamate, which, contrary to debunked myths, isn't bad for you at all. It's just a sodium atom and a glutamate molecule, both of which are essential nutrients. 

As far as going veg*n strengthening altruistic motivations, I can at least say for myself and several other people I know who have been veg*n a long time, that I am no longer able to look at a piece of meat and disconnect emotionally from the fact that it is someone's dead body. This can make staying veg*n highly self-reinforcing to the extent that it would cost me a huge amount of effort to stop. Furthermore, every time I see meat, I instantly feel a strong emotional reminder of just what it is we are all fighting for. Eating meat normalizes itself. If you stop long enough, it'll stop feeling normal. 

I was thinking yesterday that I'm surprised more EAs don't hunt or eat lots of mail-ordered hunted meat, like eg this. Regardless of whether you think nature should exist in the long term, as it stands the average deer, for example, has a pretty harsh life and death. Studies like this on American white-tailed deer enumerate the alternative modes of death, which I find universally unappealing.  You've got predation (which surprisingly to me is the number one cause of death for fawns), car accidents, disease, and starvation.  These all seem orders of magnitude worse than being killed by a hunter with a good shot. 

I'd assume human hunting basically trades off against predation and starvation, so the overall quantity of deer and deer consciousness isn't affected much by hunting.  The more humans kill, the fewer coyotes kill.

Edit: So it seems to me that buying hunted meat/encouraging hunting might have a better animal welfare profile than veganism, while also satisfying Richard's concerns about nutrition and satisfying meat cravings. That being said, it is not really scalable in the way veg*ism is.

An additional thought:

Having become veg*an before encountering EA is a very good indicator of your ability to independently come to moral conclusions, and act on them, often against outside pressure.

I don't insist on EAs being veg*an, but I trust them more if they decided to become veg*an at some point in their life.

[ I am neither an effective altruist nor a veg*n.  I comment not as a member of those groups, but just as an observer wondering about consistency and decision-making. ]

whether I, as an effective altruist, should be vegetarian/vegan

I think this is the wrong framing - you should instead ask whether you, as someone who cares about animal suffering and global warming more than your own personal convenience, should be vegetarian/vegan.  This would keep the discussion on the topics you want - whether it'll have any impact, and whether it'll have any costs.  Unless you donate to offset them, in which case it's the WRONG impact - your behavioral choices are now interfering with your donation budget (or you're not really offsetting - you'd have donated anyway).

my personal consumption decisions just have such a tiny effect compared to my career/donation decisions

Why are you making this comparison?  They seem like completely orthogonal points - your personal consumption activities don't reduce or increase your career/donation choices at all.  

The additional effects on group visibility and any sort of example you're setting for others, even unknowingly are real, but the fundamental truth is that if you think your marginal harm to farmed animals is a net bad, then you're making a utilitarian mistake by participating in it.

The fact that this is obvious, and yet you're still publicly debating it is an indicator to me that there are factors you'd rather not enumerate.  For me, I like the convenience, taste, and experience of eating meat.  I don't know if you feel similarly or not, but there have to be SOME reasons you even think "not being vegan" is an option worth considering.

There’s also timeless decision theory to consider. A rational agent should take other rational agents into consideration when choosing actions. If I choose to go vegan, it stands to reason that similarly acting moral agents would also choose that course. If many (but importantly not all) people want to be vegan, then demand for vegan foods goes up. If demand for vegan food goes up, then suppliers make more vegan food and have an incentive to make it cheaper and tastier. If vegan food is cheaper and tastier, than more people who were on the fence about veganism can make the switch. It’s a virtuous cycle. Just in the four years since I went vegan, I’ve noticed that packaged vegan food is much easier to find in the grocery store I’ve been using for 5 years. My demand contributed to that change.

I’m not sure whether there’s a moral case against animal suffering anymore, but I still think plant farming is net better than animal farming for other reasons. Mass antibiotic use risks super-bugs, energy use is much higher for non-chicken farming than for plants, and the meat-processing industry has more amputation in its worker base than I like. I would like to incentivize readily available plant based food.

Our entire way of life is full of negative externalities that cause massive amounts of direct or indirect suffering and harm. Nearly all forms of production and transportation require large amounts of energy, which is often generated in a way that at minimum harms the climate. Your smartphone was probably assembled in a Chinese factory full of third world workers with a barely tolerable existence. It might have passed through an Amazon warehouse where workers have long mind-numbing shifts that also cause physical problems, contributing to the opioid epidemic. Plant-based diets also require lots of intense agriculture, which destroys local ecosystems and inadvertently kills millions of mice, other small vertebrates and insects. 

It doesn't seem correct to disregard all of these as "massively outweighed by career/donation choices". Nor does it seem wise to pick one of these areas (animal suffering in meat production) and treat it as the one and only lifestyle choice a True Rational ought to make. 

The problems mentioned above are gigantic. How do we provide everybody with comfortable, affordable existences without destroying the climate or exploiting workers anywhere? How do we produce food for billions of humans without destroying ecosystems and harming other living beings, even indirectly and inadvertently? We'll get there eventually, and we're improving every year. But converting to vegetarianism for purposes of virtue signalling, doesn't seem to be very helpful there. 

Of course, if you truly reduce or stop your meat consumption for legitimate reasons of harm reduction, that's awesome and I'll applaud anybody for that. Just as reducing your energy consumption and looking for products produced by companies that treat their employees responsibly are probably also virtuous actions. But they shouldn't become litmus tests.

As others have mentioned, it's basically a virtue argument: are you the sort of person who, given a nearly equal choice, would avoid consuming slaughtered animals (vegetarian) or all products of animal farming (vegan). The exact utility is not easy to calculate, and deontology is virtue ethics or utilitarianism codified into easy-to-digest (hah) rules, anyway. 

Then there’s a community-level argument about what we want EA to look like. Norms about veg*nism within the community help build a high-trust environment (since veg*nism is a costly signal), and increase internal cohesion, especially between different cause areas. At the very least, these arguments justify not serving animal products at EA conferences.
... 
I expect that veg*nism will become much more mainstream than it currently is; insofar as EA is a disproportionately veg*n community, this will likely bolster our moral authority.

To the contrary, to me this violates cause neutrality, and risks EA becoming increasingly politicized. And politicization is really bad! For instance, in 2020, a local EA chapter (EA Munich) made the utterly inane choice of disinviting Robin Hanson [EA · GW].

Secondly, on a community level, EA is the one group that is most focused on doing really large amounts of good. And so actually doing cost-benefit analyses to figure out that most personal consumption decisions aren’t worth worrying about seems like the type of thing we want to reinforce in our community. Perhaps what’s most important to protect is this laser-focus on doing the most good without trying to optimise too hard for the approval of the rest of society - because that's how we can keep our edge, and avoid dissolving into mainstream thinking.

Yes! Why would we even want a community norm of emphasizing costly signals, or treating personal veganism as a litmus test, in a movement based on cause effectiveness? That would be like saying "I don't care what's effective, what matters is what my (EA) peers think".

Hi! I just wrote a full post in reply to this on the EA forum. (because it's long, and it's a while after this post). I probably won't post the full post on this forum so here's a link to the EA forum post. [EA · GW]

Yes you should be vegetarian. Not only is this ethically fucking epic, its also epically healthy. I am also trying to go vegetarian. Most people in my culture go vegetarian in late 20s early 30s due to health and morality. While in the encompassing culture, most people are vegetarian from birth. It is truly an epic and admirable thing to do to go from eating meat to saying you do not need the killing of animals to exist or to live comfortably. It's also not a new concept like other concepts debated here. It has a very healthy history of practice and debate and is engrained in theological systems as well. Some people think animals are here for us to consume and others think you do not need to harm other creatures to have a successful existence. Both can be correct.