Group Rationality Diary, August 1-15

therufs

Group Rationality Diary, August 1-15 — LessWrong

Comment Permalink

Updating towards many animals I eat being more similar to humans than I had previously thought, based mostly on this link from Why Eat Less Meat?. Still unsure what to do about it. Feeling guilty seems unproductive and so does rabid vegetarian advocacy.

Also, I conducted an informal poll on Facebook among my friends about how much they would have to be compensated for going vegetarian for a year, and I got answers generally hovering around $3,000 (I included instructions not to look at other people's answers first, although I don't know how well they were followed), although one respondent seriously answered $20,000. At the very least this reflects a general impression that vegetarianism is very inconvenient / unpleasant which could be the target of effective animal altruists. Although...

Showing 3 of 6 replies (Click to show all)

SoerenMind13y70

Wow at first I couldn't understand at all how someone would claim that much money just for not being vegetarian. I think there's two important biases here though.

"Willingness to pay vs. willingness to accept". This should decrease your actual figures a lot. For example consumers will ask much more money to accept a bad pixel on their computer screen than they would pay to have it repaired. "Willingness to accept" is not really interesting to economists. Basically ask how much they would pay to eat meat for a year if they had a vegeta

... (read more)

4MTGandP13y

You could try to eat fewer animal products (which doesn't require rabid advocacy), especially chicken, eggs, and fish; or you could donate to effective animal charities. I agree that "rabid vegetarian advocacy" is probably ineffective.

2vollmer13y

Not sure that's a good way of asking. The pain of being veg seems to be inversely correlated with knowing reasons for going veg, and there's a lot of loss aversion. I got anecdotal evidence from quite a few people telling me that going and staying veg is actually much easier than they anticipated. (It's important to take the time to learn about health effects, look at meat alternatives and find veggie restaurants). Reversal test: Imagine you're vegetarian and earn $3000 more than you currently do. Would you pay $3000 a year ($8 a day) to eat meat again? It's not only more ethical but also healthier to be veg. It makes me happy to see you and others taking action due to Peter's post. EDIT: Concerning the "although", I recommend to also read Brian's comment.

See in context