Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, if you look at actual impact instead of at moral judgement, then getting someone to reduce their consumption by x% gets you x% towards the same goal as complete abstinence.

Similar, if you can get a population to reduce their consumption by x%, it doesn't matter if that's because x% went totally without (and the rest didn't change anything), or whether you could a more uniform, mild change.

Convincing people to give up some meat is pretty straightforward: one proven way is for meat to become more expensive. People react to economic incentives on the margin after all. Other ways might be to make the alternatives more appealing.

(About the margins: meat would have to get extremely expensive for many people to completely give up on it. But if sometimes you are deciding between going to a steak place and a pasta place, and then price can sway your decision fairly easily. The meal at the pasta place can still have meat in it for this example to work, just less of it.)

If it's over a steak place or pasta place it will be steak every time, no matter the price.

I feel like shit after eating pasta, so I never eat it. I feel great after eating meat, so I always eat it.

But we don't eat out, that's more wasteful and expensive than anything else. fires up the grill

Well, I'm sure you can see that other people might eat pasta (as evidenced by pasta still being produced by profit-oriented companies), and I'm sure you also have some other opportunities in your life where you are deciding between different amounts of meat you could eat?

> But we don't eat out, that's more wasteful and expensive than anything else. fires up the grill

That might be true for you. But there are also people who eg want to eat stuff from the grill perhaps once a year, and storing their own idle grill the other 364 days would be wasteful.

That's totally fine, people can eat whatever they want, however they want.

And yes, I'm constantly deciding between different amounts of meat I can eat, it usually depends on how hungry I am.

I decide the amounts, what meat protein, then pick veggies that go with it, and add a small amount of carbs.

Btw, if you want to keep your habits, but for some reason feel guilty about your resource consumption, you could just pay two other people to go vegan (or four other people to cut back their meat consumption by half), and you would achieve twice as much as by changing your own diet.

In terms of overall utilitarian impact, I mean. Not in terms of some moral systems.

Is there an app for that?

I think people around here would charge too much to go vegan.

It might be cheaper use people on the West Coast.

It seems like you envision paying Americans to eat less meat?

In the grand scheme of things, Americans are very expensive people. For example, Argentinians both eat a lot of meat, and are currently in dire need for some hard currency.

I don't know if there's an app for this. However, you could do the next best thing and find a charity that works on promoting eating-less-meat in Argentina.

(Argentina is just an example, I have no clue whether it's the best value for money for this very specific. I'm just fairly sure that they are better value for money than spending money in the US.)

https://blog.givewell.org/2010/12/27/animal-welfare-charitie... might be an interesting read.

I was joking as you brought it up. I don't believe anyone needs to eat less meat.

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