peter_hurford comments on Effective Altruism Through Advertising Vegetarianism? - LessWrong

20 Post author: peter_hurford 12 June 2013 06:50PM

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Comment author: peter_hurford 13 June 2013 01:55:50AM 8 points [-]

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.

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.

Comment author: MTGandP 15 June 2013 10:28:25PM 8 points [-]

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."