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Vaniver comments on Effective Altruism Through Advertising Vegetarianism? - LessWrong
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Comments (551)
Eh, don't forget that humans often hate other humans. Exposing an anti-vegetarian to vegetarian advertisements might induce them to increase their meat intake, and an annoying advocate may move someone from neutral to anti-vegetarian. This effect is very unlikely to be captured by surveys- and so while it's reasonable to expect the net effect to be positive, it seems reasonable to lower estimates by a bit.
(Most 'political' moves have polarizing effects; you should expect supporters to like you more, and detractors to like you less, afterwards, which seems like a better model than everyone slowly moving towards vegetarianism.)
If you take a non-vegetarian and make them more non-vegetarian, I don't think much is lost, because you never would have captured them anyway. I suppose they might eat more meat or try and persuade other people to become anti-vegetarian, but my intuition is that this effect would be really small.
But you're right that it would need to be considered.
I agree. In addition, I think people who claim that they will eat more meat after seeing a pamphlet or some other promotion for vegetarianism just feel some anger in the moment, but they'll likely forget about it within an hour or so. I can't see someone several weeks later saying to eirself, "I'd better eat extra meat today because of that pamphlet I read three weeks ago."
BTW, how comes certain omnivores dislike vegetarians so much? All other things being equal, one fewer person eating meat will reduce its price, about which a meat-eater should be glad. (Similarly, why do certain straight men dislike gay men that much?)
If someone says that they are vegetarian for moral reasons, then it's an implicit (often explicit) claim that non-vegetarians are less moral, and therefore a status grab. If an omnivore doesn't want to become vegetarian nor to lose status, they need to aggressively deny the claim of vegetarianism being more moral.
This has to do with the way gay sex interacts with status.
Vegetarianism generally includes moral claims as well as preference claims, and responding negatively to conflicting morals is fairly common. Even responding negatively to conflicting preference claims is common. This seems to happen for both tribal reasons (different tastes in music) and possibly practical reasons (drinkers disliking non-drinkers at a party, possibly because of the asymmetric lowering of boundaries).
Simple tribalism is one explanation. It also seems likely to me that homophobia is a fitness advantage for men in the presence of bisexual / homosexual men. There's also some evidence that, of men who claim to be straight, increased stated distaste for homosexuals is associated with increased sexual arousal by men, which fits neatly with the previous statement- someone at higher risk of pursuing infertile / socially costly relationships should be expected to spend more effort in avoiding them.
(Indeed, I was going to mention religion, but I forgot to. OTOH, I think I've met at least one otherwise quite contrarian person who was homophobic.)
How so? By encouraging other men to pursue heterosexual relationships, I would increase the demand of straight women and the supply of straight men, which (so long as I'm a straight man myself and the supply of straight women isn't much larger than that of straight men) doesn't sound (from a selfish point of view) like a good thing.
[The first time I wrote this paragraph it pattern-matched sexism because it talked about women as a commodity, so I've edited it so that it talks about both women and men as commodity, so if anything it now pattern-matches extreme cynicism; and I'm OK with that.]
I've heard that cliché, but I had assumed that it was (at least in part) something someone made up to take the piss out of homophobes. Any links?
I mean in the "revulsion to same sex attraction" sense, not the "opposed to gay rights" sense. If a man is receptive to the sexual interest of other men, that makes him less likely to have a relationship with a woman, and thus less likely to have children, and thus is a fitness penalty, and so a revulsion that protects against that seems like a fitness advantage.
Here's one.
I was thinking about straight men who dislike gay men whether or not they have been hit on by them.
Thanks for the link.
(Anyway... Is someone downvoting this entire subthread?)
Are you asking more broadly why people in unmarked cases dislike being treated as though they were a marked case? Or have I overgeneralized, here?
I'm asking more broadly why people dislike it when market demand for something they like decreases. (After reading the other replies, I guess that's at least partly because liking stuff with low market demand is considered low-status.)
In at least some cases, network effects come into play. For example, if I prefer a non-mainstream operating system or computer hardware, there will be less support for my platform of choice. For instance, I may like Windows Phone but I can't get the apps for it that I can for the iPhone or Android. Furthermore, my employer may give me a choice of iPhone or Android but not Windows. Thus someone who prefers Windows Phone would want demand for Windows Phone to increase.
Furthermore, supply is not always fixed. For products for which manufacturers can increase output to match demand, increasing demand may increase availability because more retailers will make them available. If economies of scale come into play, increasing demand may also decrease price.
Good point, though in this particular example, I guess meat eaters aren't anywhere near few enough for these effects to be relevant.
See also economies of scale.
OK.
I observe that both of the examples you provide (vegetarians and homosexuals) have a moral subtext in my culture that many other market-demand scenarios (say, a fondness for peanuts) lack. That might be relevant.
(None of the vegetarians I've met seemed to be particularly bothered when other people ate meat, but as far as I can remember none of them was from the US¹, and from reading other comments in this thread I'm assuming it's different for certain American vegetarians.)
Fair enough. If there isn't a moral subtext to vegeterianism in your culture, but omnivores there still dislike vegetarians, that's evidence against my suggestion.
What army said is not the same thing. Most of the vegetarians I know also don't seem particularly bothered when other people ate meat but will nonetheless give moral reasons if asked why they don't eat meat.
In isolation, I completely agree.
In context, though... well, I said that vegetarians have a moral subtext in my culture, and army1987 replied that vegetarians they've met weren't bothered by others eating meat. I interpreted that as a counterexample... that is, as suggesting vegetarians don't have a moral subtext.
If I misinterpreted, I of course apologize, but I can't come up with another interpretation that doesn't turn their comment into a complete nonsequitor, which seems an uncharitable assumption.
If you have a third option in mind for what they might have meant, I'd appreciate you elaborating it.
Army mistakenly believes that because the vegetarians he's met weren't bothered by others eating meat their vegetarianism does not have a moral subtext.
I have seen plenty of ‘jokes’ insulting vegetarians in Italian on Facebook; but then again, I've seen at least one about the metric system too, so maybe there are people who translate stuff from English no matter how little sense they make in the target cultural context.