Vegans need to eat just enough Meat - emperically evaluate the minimum ammount of meat that maximizes utility

post by Johannes C. Mayer (johannes-c-mayer) · 2024-12-22T22:08:31.971Z · LW · GW · 5 comments

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Once I talked to a person who said they were asexual. They were also heavily depressed and thought about committing suicide. I repeatedly told them to eat some meat, as they were vegan for many years. I myself had experienced veganism-induced depression. Finally, after many weeks they ate some chicken, and the next time we spoke, they said that they were no longer asexual, nor depressed.

I was vegan or vegetarian for many consecutive years. Vegetarianism was manageable, perhaps because of cheese. I never hit the extreme low points that I did with veganism. I remember once after not eating meat for a long time there was a period of maybe a weak, where I got extremely fatigued. I took 200mg of modafinil^[1], without having any build-up resistance. Usually, this would give me a lot of energy. But then I was barely able to enter some terminal commands to transcribe some of Rob Miles' videos with a whisper such that he could add better captions. Another day I took 30mg of lisdexamfetamine^[1:1] which would usually last the entire day and have a pretty strong effect, but this time I got so tired after 3 or 4 hours that I had to lay down and take a nap.

But then I ate some tuna. And felt a lot better the next day. Some time later I did a blood test that indicated iron deficiency as a probable cause.

But even when I take a lot of iron supplements and eat my soybeans (which contain a lot of iron) with bell peppers (which contain Vitamin C, which boosts iron absorption) I still notice a big difference when I eat meat after a long period of abstinence.

So here is my proposition. If you are working on AI alignment then what you think with your brain is very important. If don't usually eat meat you might be missing some important nutrients that would help you think significantly better. As somebody who didn't eat meat until my body screamed into my ear from 5 inches away, I think I understand why you don't want to eat meat. But if you do the expected utility computation is it actually worth it?

What if it makes you only 5% worse at thinking? Is whatever animal suffering you prevent worth the tradeoff in reduced probability of saving the world? What about 10%? What about 50%? Don't answer this question in the abstract. Instead, I recommend the following experiment:

Eat 7 days in a row a large amount of meat. E.g. 1kg of chicken every day. (Start with a lower quantity on the first day. My body sometimes does weird things when starting to eat meat after long abstinence.) The goal: Gather data. You want to eat too much meat (more than you likely end up needing) to make sure that if you are missing any nutrients, you'll definitely get them by the end of the week, such that you can notice an as large as possible difference. While doing this experiment write a journal (ideally starting at least a couple of days before you start to eat meat) in which you precisely document:

• Every 2 hours:
  • How you feel.
  • How much energy you have.
  • How easy is it to focus.
• How well did you slept.

For each point give a 0-9 score, plus prose comments where appropriate.

This generates a lot of data on how much of a positive impact eating meat has.

If meat didn't have a positive impact: Congratulations, you can continue not eating meat. And now you know that this is actually the correct thing to do, because you are not missing out cognitively.

If meat had a positive consider the following options:

1. Just start eating meat.
2. Research what exactly it was that was missing before from your diet such that you don't eat meat. You'll end up not eating meat, but eating meat was useful in noticing that something was wrong with your diet.
3. Combine the previous two approaches. Eat meat but try to minimize how much meat you eat by improving your diet over a longer duration. This way you don't need to fix it all at once. I still haven't managed to do fully do this after spending at least 20 hours on this (probably much more).

Important: Consider that you can minimize animal suffering by eating less meat. I'd guess usually people eat more than the optimal amount of meat (which I think is can even be unhealthy). If you eat 20% (this is a random guess) of what people eat on average it might be sufficient to avoid any negative nutritional side effects, while still reducing animal suffering.

It's much easier to be fundamentalist about not eating meat. It makes things simple. Saying "Never eat meat, it's evil" is quite simple, and an easy rule to follow. Saying "Animal farming is terrible, and how we treat "food animals" is one of the greatest moral failures of our time. But AI is gonna destroy the universe. You are trying to prevent this, and possibly not eating meat negatively effects how well you can utilize your brain. So you need to eat meat now first to figure out if there is a nutritional problem, and second to fix that nutritional problem if required. Because that is actually what maximizes the expected utility of getting a good future. But because animal farming is actually terrible you want to minimize the amount of meat that you eat." This is much harder to act upon. It boils down to "Hey, you don't know what's best! You'd better run a bunch of experiments to find out."

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1. I have/had a prescription. ↩︎ ↩︎

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