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Kevin comments on Essay-Question Poll: Dietary Choices - Less Wrong
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I guess the inconsistency that I still can't resolve is:
We agree that animal suffering is bad and I accept the point about the expected utility of one person becoming a vegetarian.
Why is animal suffering just bad enough that you are willing to settle for the expected utility of saving the lives of the number of animals you yourself do not eat? I think my problem is that I have convinced myself that the animal suffering problem is bad enough that I should be an animal rights campaigner or something. I'm not going to do that, and the marginal impact of me becoming a vegetarian still just seems so marginal compared to the impact I could have if I actually focused my energy on activism.
Or, if I become a vegetarian for reasons mostly related to animal suffering, I would want to judge others more harshly for not being vegetarians, which is very poor form in conventional social interactions.
If a shift away from factory farming does occur, I don't think it's going to come from more people like me becoming vegetarians. Cheap, delicious meat grown in vats will have a much greater social effect. Once that happens, I'll become a vegetarian, maybe an annual or semi-annual eater of premium, non-factory farmed meat.
Consistency is what we build into FAIs, not what we require of ourselves before changing what we would do. If animal suffering is bad enough that we should be an animal rights campaigner, but we nevertheless unethically choose to not become a campaigner, that does not make the decision to eat exactly as much meat as always suddenly an ethical decision.
Is it futile to eat a side of asparagus with your steak rather than a side of calamari? Not at all, we have still saved expected squid equivalent to one side of calamari. Would it be better to not have the steak? Sure, maybe, but the squid doesn't actually care about our inconsistency.
I recently (gradually over the last half-year or so) became a fair-weather vegetarian. I ate pepperoni pizza today, and it would have been more than negligible cost to do otherwise. But the last time I bought groceries I did not purchase any meat. I find that I can forgo something like 90% of the meat I used to eat with positive marginal happiness, since most of the time it's fairly trivial to switch to a non-meat idea instead and I still get more pleasure from the decision to switch than unpleasantness from the switching costs.
This is... an interesting approach. I wonder how many opportunities for marginal improvement we miss, because to admit there's a problem at all would seem to demand complete action by the bright lines of morality and guilt.
There is definitely a cost in cycles which I glossed over. My guess is there are tons of missed opportunities for marginal improvement, but that there's just no way we have enough brain time to focus on each of them and figure out they're marginal improvements and figure out how to implement them without taking undue effort.
It's difficult to do because in the absence of a bright clear line, we experience preference reversals when close up to the decision, which we rationalize.
Alicorn's "not all therefore not some" is definitely along the right lines as a name for this failing.
Is that a named bias?
False dilemma, specifically black-and-white thinking.
Seems a bit more than False Dilemma, though. More like Can't Admit Any Problem Exists Because The Minimum "Morally" Acceptable Response Would Be Too High.
That's rather clunky; how about "blame denial" or whatever Latin is for "not all, therefore not some"? ("Non omnes, ergo non aliquot"? I have almost no Latin and filled in the gaps with an online dictionary; I probably needed to decline something.)
Found it! Perfect solution fallacy. And you'll never guess what site linked me to it...
For anyone wondering how this turned out, I haven't bought meat at the grocery store in the last two and a half months. I still order meat at restaurants.
My original analysis still holds. I just don't care (in the aggregate) about the life of one or two or ten animals. I don't think my marginal impact as a fair weather vegetarian is meaningful. Regardless, I have lost much of my taste for meat. I still have a lot of meat sitting in my freezer.
It might be easier to simply stop caring altogether than to take half-measures.
This is exactly where I'm at with regards to SIAI and singularity issues in general. I haven't been able to convince myself to devote my life to the cause, despite thinking it unethical not to do so, nonetheless I've decided to at least start donating, even if it is inconsistent.
Your mental calculus on that issue is probably different from mine assuming you make more money than I do. I'm 23, just graduated from college, and make subsistence wages via a small business, but I'm somewhat confident that my income is going to rise rapidly -- so this year I donated $10, but I hope to make enough money that it really will be like I have dedicated my life to the cause of existential risk. Or at least as much as Peter Thiel has done.
If you're a programmer, your greatest expected value for earnings is biting the bullet and starting a startup...
Similar calculus.
I just turned 24. I'm a graduate student and make subsistence wages. I'm moonlighting as an indie game developer. If my studio takes off I'll be able to donate much more to SIAI. But, even if I knew I'd be a millionaire next year, I'd still forgo some small luxuries (by subsistence standards) to make a donation this year.
We definitely need more programmers with enough chutzpah to found a startup, and who are willing to donate substantially if they make it big.
Both voted up for making small donations this year. I am much more optimistic about someone who says that they plan to do a startup and donate some of the money to SIAI if they have previously donated $10 rather than $0.
For what it's worth, the best returns right now for game development are on Facebook. It's something of a secret; developing games for the iPhone is almost a trap compared to developing games for Facebook. That's what I'm working on right now. Happy to discuss this via PM/email...
Thank you, "eat less meat" was the obvious answer I was missing.
I know it's been pointed out elsewhere, but it's also possible to make a commitment to only eat meat that has been raised humanely. This is what I do. I only buy grass-fed beef and cage-free chickens and eggs. "Organic" labels on meat include some animal welfare protections as well (for example, ruminants must be allowed access to pasture in order to be labeled organic) so this is a good thing to look for.
This kind of meat is more expensive, which means I eat less of it, but I can still have a hamburger if I really want it and enjoy it pretty much guilt-free. An animal has still died, but I'm okay with that.
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Conditional on the fact that you will never become an animal rights campaigner, the largest impact you can make would be to simply become a vegetarian yourself. Neglecting that because another, in-practice unavailable behavior would be dramatically superior is foolish.
Yes, it is advisable not to be a jerk about it. I manage this temptation by making liberal allowances for the fact that people in general do not have the force of personality to make an unconventional self-restricting choice. By ought-implies-can, those people do not in fact have a moral obligation to become vegetarians.
You can also make a big impact by donating to animal-welfare causes like Vegan Outreach. In fact, if you think the numbers in this piece are within an order of magnitude of correct, then you could prevent the 3 or 4 life-years of animal suffering that your meat-eating would cause this year by donating at most $15 to Vegan Outreach. For many people, it's probably a lot easier to offset their personal contribution to animal suffering by donating than by going vegetarian.
Of course, the idea of "offsetting your personal contribution" is a very non-utilitarian one, because if it's good to donate at all, then you should have been doing that already and should almost certainly do so at an amount higher than $15. But from the perspective of behavior hacks that motivate people in the real world, this may not be a bad strategy.
By the way, Vegan Outreach -- despite the organization's name -- is a big advocate of the "flexitarian" approach. One of their booklets is called, "Even if You Like Meat."
I wish they would make editions available without the horrible pictures; I'm already aware conditions are bad, and I neither want the pictures to hijack my decision making process while reading, nor to experience the neg-utils from seeing them.
Judging others is about making predictions on their future actions in morally challenging situations. If they eat meat, it's a good predictor that they will eat meat in future, but it doesn't say much about whether they'll jump into the canal to save a drowning child.
That's true as far as it goes, but it seems to me that jumping into a canal to rescue a drowning child is as morally easy as it gets: your explicit beliefs are nicely lining up with your intuitions and emotions.
Eating ethically is much harder; it involves the ability to make some sacrifices without the benefit of strong emotional spurs. Vegetarianism/veganism, assuming it's based on essentially consequentialist reasoning (not all of it is), is basically a real-world application of "shut up & multiply," which I find admirable.