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I don't see why you get downvoted.
I am strongly convinced by arguments for vegetarianism.
I mean, I still eat meat but that's just because of my moral decrepitude.
In response to
Link: Rob Bensinger on Less Wrong and vegetarianism
Exactly. I suspect a disproportionate share of people on LW agree that their eating habits are immoral, but eat the way they do anyway and are willing to indirectly be a part of "torturing puppies behind closed doors." That is, they are more likely to be honest to themselves about what they are doing, but aren't that much more likely to care enough to stop (which is different from being "morally indifferent").
Now I'm more curious. Potatoes are vitamin and mineral cornucopias, and peanuts are protein powerhouses. Why avoid those two?
Peanuts are not 'protein powerhouses' unless you are trying to measure protein/volume instead of protein/calorie. They give 7g protein per 164 calories. Compare that to tofu which provides 20g protein per 176 calories or salmon which provides about 20g for 183 calories.
In response to
Open thread, 3-8 June 2014
If you had four months to dedicate to working on a project, what would you work on?
Elliptical is very hard to do sprints on. Rowing is ideal IMO.
As for not getting injured, you shouldn't let the discussion of back injuries here make you think it is a common problem. Weightlifting has a lower injury rate than badminton or swimming. The most common injury in weightlifting is bench press injuries from not having a spotter or safety bars. The reason most other things rarely cause injury is that you almost always will simply strain a muscle and drop the weight before you injure anything permanent. Benchpress is an exception because you can drop it on yourself.
Still, I've had my own injury issues. Do you think body weight exercises are less likely to led to injury?
In response to
Optimal Exercise
What do you think is a good exercise routine for maximizing health and not getting injured? Ideally, there's some sort of weight-lifting in which you can't easily injure yourself with poor form that won't result in muscular imbalance and that still allow for incremental improvement.
As for cardio, maybe rowing and ellipticaling are ideal?
Claims of professional trainers of olympic level athletes and my own personal experience confirming what they say: ankle dorsiflexion impacts rounding of the lumbar spine in the bottom position of the squat. Rounding the lumbar spine under load is generally bad.
I low bar squat barefoot. Would I still benefit from getting weightlifting shoes?
Also, I suspect in reality you have a sliding scale of acceptance, that you would not be morally neutral about killing a stranger on the road and taking their money if you thought you could get away with it. But you certainly won't accord the stranger the full benefit of your concern, just a partial benefit.
Oh, there are definitely gradations. I probably wouldn't do this, even if I could get away with it. I don't care enough about strangers to go out of my way to save them, but neither do I want to kill them. On the other hand, if it was a person I had an active dislike for, I probably would. All of which is basically irrelevant, since it presupposes the incredibly unlikely "if I thought I could get away with it".
I used to think I thought that way, but then I had some opportunities to casually steal from people I didn't know (and easily get away with it), but I didn't. With that said, I pirate things all the time despite believing that doing so frequently harms the content owners a little.
I think BBC's "Hardtalk" is doing something like this, thought it is just doing interviews (I think).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HARDtalk
Basically, he's not letting politicians get away with all their usual BS. However, one could go much further than this - be more systematic, even tougher, etc. Moderating debates using the same principle is a logical next step (perhaps it has been done).
My understanding is that HARDtalk is quite succesful.
I think the idea of this post is very good (indeed I have similar ideas myself which I'll probably write something on later) and have a hard time understanding why it's being voted down.
Thanks for the recommendation. I've watched a couple Hardtalk interviews and they were great. Hardtalk definitely suffers the limitations of oral discussion that people talk about elsewhere in this thread, but, for what it is, it's great.
In response to
A Workflow with Spaced Repetition
In case people do as I do and interpret this as a suggestion box: I would find it interesting to be able to answer with a confidence value from 0% to 100%. The SRS should take this in account to decide when to show the card again. Wrong or unsure answers will be repeated very soon and wrong more often, very confident and correct answers get much longer resting time.
Note that I do not use Anki or other SRS as they have been some pain to work with for me. I'd like to use them on my Android phone but in the past it was just too much of a hassle to get it up and running and maintaining it.
Is that not what SRS like Anki does already? Granted they force you to pick one of 5 categories of difficulty rather than one of 100, but it's basically the same.
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I think RobbBB does not understand a typical omnivore's (me!) point of view. He also makes irrational conclusions about the ways to reduce the amount of suffering of (potentially somewhat sentient) animals.
Yes, cattle suffer, so do chickens, to a lesser degree. They likely do not suffer in the same way people do. Certainly eggs are not likely to suffer at all. Actually, even different people suffer differently, the blanket moral prohibition against cannibalism is just an obvious Schelling point.
So it would be preferable to not create, raise, slaughter and eat animals if there was an alternative source of meat with the same nutritional and taste properties omnivores are used to. Maybe some day. Until then we should strive to minimize needless suffering, at a marginal cost to the consumers.
So, if you are an effective altruist who includes cows and chickens in the potential list of the entities who should be protected from suffering what do you do? Write blogs aimed at an extremely limited audience who do not appear to be overly receptive, anyway? That's not very "effective", is it? How about working to develop and make feasible new alternatives to "torturing animals"? For example:
support/participate in the research to produce vat-grown meat
expose existing cattle/chicken abuse in farms and slaughterhouses
support/participate in the research to develop a species of farm animals who are physically unable to suffer.
Certainly if a headless chicken can survive for a while, it should be feasible to breed/genetically modify them to not have the brain structures responsible for suffering. Or maybe it's as easy as injecting eggs with some substance which stifles the formation of pain centers.
As SSC notes,
Yet I know of no effective animal altruists who spend majority of their efforts figuring out and working on the task which is likely to provide the greatest payoff. Pity.
It's typically the chickens laying the eggs that people are concerned about. And maybe to a lesser extent the male chickens of the chicken breed used for egg production. (Maybe you're already clear on that, but I have spoken to people who were confused by veganism's prohibition on eating animal products in addition to animals.)
It doesn't seem safe to assume that their suffering is subjectively less bad than our suffering. Maybe it's worse - maybe the experience of pain and fear is worse when you can only feel it and can't think about it. Either way, I don't see why you'd err on the side of 'It's an uncertain thing so lets keep doing what we're doing and diminish the potential harms when we can' rather than 'It's not that unlikely that we're torturing these things, we should stop in all ways that don't cost us much.'
But yes, creating vat-grown meat and/or pain-free animals should be a priority.