On the other hand, I suspect that "bringing my behaviour in line with my values" would call, if I really cared, for something more than only a change in my own dietary preferences. If I carefully worked out all the actions available to me that might have an effect on the situation, and ranked them by effectiveness, I'd be surprised if a change of diet came first.
This action would do good. But maybe there's an action that would do even more good! Therefore I'll do nothing.
Even granting that it has some positive effect on the suffering of animals (which I've said I'm skeptical of), eliminating meat from my diet is not an unalloyed benefit to the world: it has a cost to me (inconvenience, social stigma, and so on).
So, it's possible that the net benefit of that change in my diet is negative (very small positive effect on the rest of the world, noticeable negative effect on me).
It's more like, "this action does not obviously do good, but I won't rule out that there is a bundle of actions including it that does good in aggr...
I have noticed that among philosophers, vegetarianism of one form or another is quite common. In fact, I became a vegetarian (technically a pescetarian) myself partly out of respect for an undergraduate philosophy professor. I am interested in finding out if there is a similar disproportion in the Less Wrong community.
I didn't request that this go into Yvain's survey because I want more information than just what animal products you do or don't eat; I'd also like to see nuances of the reasons behind your diet. There are a lot more shades than carnivore/vegetarian/vegan - if you want to be a vegetarian but are allergic to soy and gluten, that's a compelling reason to diversify protein sources, for instance. I'd also like to hear about if you avoid any plant foods (if you think they're farmed in a way that's environmentally destructive or that hurts people or if you have warm fuzzy feelings for plants, maybe). Here are some questions that come to mind: