The depths of the sea have been plumbed and surveyed, leaving no place for the sea monsters to dwell. Every river and every forest used to be believed to have a spirit living in it: but they have all been expelled by our advancing science and clonking civilization. Even the human soul has been given notice to vacate! Already we’ve had several pink slips delivered by psychology and neuroscience; and now the bailiff of AI is knocking sternly at the door with a warrant to take possession.
Deep Utopia
Nick Bostrom
People did in fact try to sound the alarm about poor statistical practices well before the replication crisis, and yet practices did not change,
This rings painfully true. As early as the late 1950s, at least one person was already raising a red flag about the risks that psychology[1] might veer into publishing a sea of false claims:
There is some evidence that in fields where statistical tests of significance are commonly used, research which yields nonsignificant results is not published. Such research being unknown to other investigators may be repeated independently until eventually by chance a significant result occurs—an 'error of the first kind'—and is published. Significant results published in these fields are seldom verified by independent replication. The possibility thus arises that the literature of such a field consists in substantial part of false conclusions resulting from errors of the first kind in statistical tests of significance.
Sterling isn't explicitly talking about psychology, but rather any field where significance tests are used.
I understand the claim you were making now and I hope the nitpicking isn't irritable.
This post seems to be arguing that veganism involves trade offs (I didn't read through the comments). I don't disagree with that claim[1] (and am grateful for you taking the time to write it up). The part I take issue with is that the two surveys you conducted were strong evidence, which I don't think they are.
Though I do lean towards thinking most people or even everyone should bite the bullet and accept the reduced health to spare the animals.
I agree with the claim you're making: that if FHI still existed and they applied for a grant from OP it would be rejected. This seems true to me.
I don't mean to nitpick, but it still feels misleading to claim "FHI could not get OP funding" when they did in fact get lots of funding from OP. It implies that FHI operated without any help from OP, which isn't true.
FHI could not get OP funding
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?
OP appears to have been one of FHI's biggest funders according to Sandberg:[1]
Eventually, Open Philanthropy became FHI’s most important funder, making two major grants: £1.6m in 2017, and £13.3m in 2018. Indeed, the donation behind this second grant was at the time the largest in the Faculty of Philosophy’s history (although, owing to limited faculty administrative capacity for hiring and the subsequent hiring freezes it imposed, a large part of this grant would remain unspent). With generous and unrestricted funding from a foundation that was aligned with FHI’s mission, we were free to expand our research in ways we thought would make the most difference.
The hiring (and fundraising) freeze imposed by Oxf began in 2020.
Nice! I really like that you did that work and am in agreement that too many vegans in general (not just EA vegans) suck at managing their diet. Of the four former vegans who I know/known personally, all of them stopped because of health reasons (though not necessarily health reasons induced by being vegan).
That said, I don't see round 1 or round 2 as being particularly strong evidence of anything. The sample sizes seem too small to draw much inference from. There's +7k people in the EA movement,[1] with around 46% of whom are vegan or vegetarian. Two surveys, one of six people from Lightcone, another of 20 people (also from Lightcone?) just don't have enough participants to make strong claims on ˜3000 people. You say as much in the second post:
So can we blame veganism for the deficiencies?
This study doesn’t say anything one way or the other, which means I still think yes but you shouldn’t change your opinion based on the results. The sample is too small and skewed to compare deficiency rates in vegans and nonvegans. There were energetic omnivores with deficiencies and tired vegans with perfect scores so it’s clearly not deterministic.
This seems at odds with what you claim in the podcast:[2]
So I got them nutritional testing. It showed roughly what I thought. And this was like a whole thing. I applied for a grant. I had to test a lot of people. It's a logistical nightmare. I found exactly what I thought I would. that there were serious nutritional issues, not in everyone, but enough that people should have been concerned.
From there I could prove that vegan advocates had been lying and this was causing harm, and from there I could prove that EA had failed in noticing these obvious lies that everyone knew, but had failed to push back on, and had thus, Let younger people who didn't know better fall victim to. Because it made the vegans too sad and angry to correct them
Separately, it's unclear to me how many people in the second survey actually are vegan / vegetarian rather than people with fatigue problems:
I should remind you here that the sample was a mix of 20 ethical EA vegans, vegetarians, people with fatigue issues, and people who happened to be in the office.
This was back in published back in 2021, so I expect the numbers to be even higher now.
A separate point/nitpick, this part of the transcript incorrectly attributes your words to Timothy:
[00:09:43] Timothy: From there I could prove that vegan advocates had been lying and this was causing harm, and from there I could prove that EA had failed in noticing these obvious lies that everyone knew, but had failed to push back on, and had thus, Let younger people who didn't know better fall victim to. Because it made the vegans too sad and angry to correct them
Elizabeth: So I got them nutritional testing. It showed roughly what I thought. And this was like a whole thing. I applied for a grant. I had to test a lot of people. It's a logistical nightmare. I found exactly what I thought I would. that there were serious nutritional issues, not in everyone, but enough that people should have been concerned.
How many people in total were tested? From the Interim report, it looks like only six people got tested, so I assume you're referencing something else.
small wins in the present make it easier to get bigger wins in the future.
Mildly interesting: In his biography of Deng Xiaoping, Vogel implies he believed the same:
For his civilian breakthrough in consolidation, Deng chose to focus on a project that would quickly both increase production and inspire others. Ever since his guerrilla days, he had believed in fighting small battles that he was sure to win, as a way of encouraging his troops as they prepared for larger battles. In 1975, many of the factories criticized for failing to meet production targets complained that they lacked adequate supplies. Transportation was an obvious bottleneck. Could a success in transportation provide an early victory that would both increase production and demonstrate possibilities for success in other areas?
I don't know.
If the aldehyde preservation method is as good as traditional cryopreservation, then this looks like a pretty glaring market inefficiency—someone should be able to swoop in and undercut the established cryo companies.
I just don't know enough about the object level arguments to say much with confidence, but I'm a bit skeptical such a gap in the market exists.
A field can be absolutely packed with dreadful research and still see virtually no one getting fired. Take, for instance, the moment a prominent psychologist dubbed peers who questioned methodological standards as “methodological terrorists.” It’s the kind of rhetoric that sends a clear message: questioning sloppy methods isn’t just unwelcome; it’s practically heretical.