Category Archives: life

The moral argument for rationality

Before you read this post, I want you to do something for me.

Find yourself a hammer. If there’s not one readily convenient, it doesn’t matter too much. Anything readily wieldable and fairly heavy will do. I have a butternut squash near me. You could use one of those. If you really don’t have anything to hand and can’t be bothered to go find one, you can just use your fist I suppose.

Now, place your left (right if you’re a lefty) hand on the table in front of you, take the hammer-like object in your other hand and bring it down really hard on the hand you’ve placed on the table.

Done? OK. Read on.

You of course didn’t do this. If you did, I’m really sorry. You should probably take that as a lesson not to trust advice without thinking about it for yourself, or maybe just a lesson that I’m a bit of a dick, but I owe you a cookie. Or a hug or something. My bad.

The rest of you, though, why didn’t you do it?

Well, because it would have hurt.

You don’t need some complicated theory of inferential reasoning to tell you that hitting your hand with a hammer hurts. You’ve got a straightforward feedback process in which your body goes “OW” when heavy things impact you at high velocity. This isn’t news.

The thing that makes making predictions about the world difficult is the quality and strength of the evidence you can gather.

We conduct complicated double blind trials around medicine because it’s really hard to gather accurate and informative evidence around drug effectiveness – effects are statistical, subtle, and prone to confounders like the placebo effect.

We do not conduct complicated double blind trials around whether it’s better to jump out of an airplane with or without a parachute, because it’s really not hard to gather accurate and informative evidence about this. People who fall from high places without a parachute tend to die. People who fall from high places with one tend not to.

Issues which affect you personally have a direct evidence gathering built into them. You generally know how you feel, and you experience the results of things directly. You also have a lot of data points, because you’re on the job being you 24/7 with no holiday time.

Issues which affect other people however are much murkier. Unless you possess secret telepathic powers, you don’t have a direct hotline into their brain and you don’t know how they’re feeling. They might tell you, but by and large people are pretty well conditioned to not do that because it makes them vulnerable and because right after you’ve hurt someone is not the time when they’re feeling most inclined to trust you. You see less of any given one of them than you do of yourself, and they’re all different and confusing.

So determining activities that harm or help yourself is relatively easy, and determining activities that harm or help other people is relatively hard. In order to do the former, some simple common sense reasoning and learning from experience is more than sufficient. In order to do the latter, you need to do a reasonable amount of careful study and control for a lot of confounders.

I’m going to let you in on a spoiler: You hurt other people. This is most likely not because you’re a bad person, it’s just a thing that happens. Sometimes you do it purely by accident. Sometimes you do it because we live in an unjust society and we all implicitly support it in one way or another. Sometimes you even do it with the best of intentions.

Most of this you don’t notice because you don’t have that direct feedback – you can’t feel what it’s like to be that other person, so you don’t get a direct experience of the consequences of your actions on them. Some of it you deliberately don’t notice because you don’t want to.

Hurting yourself though? You pretty much know when you’re doing that. It’s not that we don’t do it, and it’s not that we never lie to ourselves about the fact that we are doing it, but most of the time when we do things that hurt ourselves we do so not out of ignorance but because we’ve made a conscious decision to do something painful. This isn’t always a good idea, but it is at least one made in relatively full possession of the facts.

By and large, we don’t like pain, and we’re reasonably good at avoiding it. As a result, I think it’s fair to say that the majority of us hurt other people at least as much as we hurt ourselves.

I think it’s also fair to say we don’t generally want to be hurting other people (setting aside people who enjoy being hurt and explicitly consent to it as a special case). If that’s not the case for you then… well. I’m not really sure what to suggest.

How do we stop hurting people? Or, at least, reduce how much we are hurting people.

The first step to is to understand when you’re doing it. The second step is to be able to predict whether a set of actions will do it.

That is to say, these are the skills of gathering evidence about the world and making predictions on the basis of that.

These skills are often lumped under the heading of “rationality”, or “empiricism”.

They are useful for bettering your life, but as previously mentioned you’re already awash in a sea of evidence about what causes harm or good in your life. It’s not that these skills aren’t useful here, but you’re certainly a lot closer to the point of diminishing returns than you are in cases of scarcer evidence and more complicated situations. i.e. other people.

This gives what I regard as the moral argument in favour of rationality:

It is easy to go through life being unable to accurately predict the consequences of your actions because you’ve got a rough and ready set of heuristics that mostly keep you out of harm’s way. To some degree you’re even actively encouraged to do so – ignorance really can be bliss, and understanding the world around you and being able to predict the effect of your actions will not necessarily make your life better. It may even make your life worse (more on that in another post). The prime reason to learn this skill is not to make you understand the consequences of your actions for yourself, but to understand the consequences of your actions for other people. It is a necessary skill if you want to understand how you affect the world and how to make it a better place for other people to live in.

Importantly, it also gives what I regard as the moral caveat to rationality:

You are causing at least as much harm to other people as you are to yourself.

You are developing skills which are more useful at understanding and predicting that harm for other people than they are for yourself.

Therefore, one of the consequences of improved rationality should be that you should be learning more about how your actions affect and hurt other people and how to make their lives better than you are about how to improve your own life.

If you find this is not the case, then what you are doing is not rationality, it is merely masturbation. It may feel good, and as long as it doesn’t become an unhealthy obsession there’s certainly nothing wrong with it, but it’s not exactly very productive is it?

On vegetarians who eat chicken

This is a chicken. What does it look like to you? Does it look like a vegetable? No. It looks like an animal. So how can you be a vegetarian who eats chicken? You’re lying to me when you say you’re a vegetarian, aren’t you?

Thus spake just about everyone ever presented with someone with a dietary preference more complicated than “I eat all the things” or “I’m vegetarian”. I’m sure I’ve said similar things in the past.

This post is not more of that. It’s a post about how calling yourself “vegetarian but I eat chicken” is entirely OK.

I am not vegetarian. If you ask me if I’m vegetarian I will say “kindof”. I might elaborate, but I probably won’t unless it clearly makes sense in context to do so. But if you say “Who here is vegetarian?” I will likely put my hand up.

Am I lying to you? Well, yes, technically I suppose. My dietary preferences are much more nuanced than “vegetarian”. But I’ll eat vegetarian food, and I probably won’t eat the non-vegetarian food, or will have a preference about it which goes sufficiently against the meat-eating members of the group’s preference that I will either a) End up eating the vegetarian option anyway or b) Annoy them by making them eat something they’d prefer not to eat. Does anyone really think that life would be improved by my going “Well, actually, I’m not vegetarian but I do have some very precise constraints about what sort of meat I think it is appropriate to eat. Here, let me tell you all about them”. I didn’t think so.

All communication is this sort of trade off. Many of the things we say are inaccurate, or at the very least imprecise.

In many cases you are simply much better off answering the question “Are you vegetarian?” with “Yes” than you are “No, but life will be much easier for all concerned if you just treat me like one”. Many people will still use the latter, and that’s fine, but many people will choose the former, and that’s fine too. It is no more “lying” than a thousand other social constructs we use every day.

Another reason why people will sometimes do this is that people can be real assholes about food. This isn’t something I’ve personally experienced much when I’ve been vegetarian (hypothesis: Because I’m male), but it’s something a lot of vegetarians encounter.

It is vastly more irritating when you do not neatly pigeon hole. People are mostly used to vegetarians now. Support for vegetarianism is pretty widespread – it might get you some funny looks, it might start a discussion, but it’s pretty normal and boring at this stage so it’s unlikely to create a big deal.

Try telling someone you can’t eat something specific. For me it was dairy – I spent a period of time with a dairy intolerance (yes, this is a thing that can go away). A literal quote from someone on hearing this: “I would sooner the sweet embrace of death than go without cheese”. Sure, it was funny, and it’s among the higher quality responses I received, but imagine how tiresome this gets when you get this sort of response every single fucking time you have to explain your dietary requirements to people.

Why is this? I think it’s because you’re in an unfamiliar category. You’re strange and different, and people don’t know how to react to you. Moreover, food is something that people seem to feel very strongly about because it’s such a big part of their life, so by refusing to eat things they love it feels like you are judging them for the fact that they do. So you’re a weird and unfamiliar thing which is attacking their way of life. What do they do? They attack back of course!

Sure, it’s entirely possible that they are a lovely person who would never attack you like this, but if you don’t know them very well then you have little way of knowing that, and if you do know them very well then they probably already know about your dietary preferences so what’s the issue?

So here are your options: You can apply a label which people are familiar with and might be a bit dickish about, but are probably basically going to be fine with, or you can give the more accurate truth which has a non-zero chance of getting you put on the spot and asked to defend your life choices. You encounter this every time you engage in a common social activity. Which one are you more likely to choose?

So this is where the motivation to tell people you are vegetarian when you’re not comes from.

Know where the motivation to tell people you are vegetarian but you eat chicken comes from? Well, it might come from the fact that you just really like chicken. I’m sure for many people it does. But another place it comes from? Consideration. You are giving people options to make their lives easier. It sure is nice when they use that as a reason to judge you, isn’t it?

Finally, from a language point of view, the construct “I am vegetarian but I eat chicken” is totally OK. People use it, you understand what it means, what’s the problem? It’s functionally equivalent to “I keep a mostly vegetarian diet but I eat chicken” or “I’m like a vegetarian but I eat chicken”, so it gets shortened. You wouldn’t object to the sentence “I am a vegetarian, with some exceptions”.

There are two ways to parse the sentence: One is “(I am a vegetarian) and (I eat chicken)”, which is a logical contradiction and so probably not what was meant. Another is “I am a (vegetarian with the exception that I eat chicken)”. One of these is the obviously intended parse of the sentence. The other is the parse you are insisting on out of a misguided sense of linguistic prescriptivism which you are using to police someone else’s life choices. Please stop it.

Edit: An update in response to some feedback from friends who are strict vegetarians.

An important thing to note here is that this is not the same thing as people who say “I’m vegetarian” whilst chowing down on a steak. Descriptive linguistics is a powerful tool, and with great power comes great responsibility. One of these responsibilities is this: Don’t ruin words for people who need them. One of the ways you can ruin the word “vegetarian” is by making people think that all vegetarians eat chicken.

Social lies are OK, but when you tell them you have a responsibility to exhibit behaviour consistent with what you are describing it as. If you describe yourself as “I’m vegetarian but I eat chicken”, this is fine. If anything it reinforces the idea that eating chicken is an exceptional behaviour for people who describe themselves as vegetarian. If you simply say “I’m vegetarian” whilst eating chicken, you are reinforcing the idea that vegetarians eat chicken and you are making other peoples’ lives worse. If you say “I’m vegetarian” and go on to eat vegetarian food, that’s fine. You’ve not hurt peoples’ perception of the world, and you probably have a perfectly good reason for having preferred to eat vegetarian right now even if the reality is more complicated.

There is a large gray area in the middle here as to what’s acceptable behaviour, and I’m not going to try to take a stand on where the dividing line is. All I’m saying is that there is a wide range of acceptable behaviour, and that the way people react to some of it is very unhelpful.

An announcement and a brief retrospective

You may have noticed that I rapidly went quiet about the whole interviewing companies thing. This is actually because I found a new job rather than just because I got bored of writing about it.

I will be starting at Lumi on Monday. It’s not quite the job I claimed I was looking for, but it’s an opportunity to work on interesting research problems at scale with a great team who have done a successful startup before. How could I say no?

I mean, I totally could have said no if they’d failed my interview. It’s inappropriate for me to comment on specific questions, but suffice it to say they did OK. There were a few problems, but they were largely of the “We know this is a problem, but we’re either in the process of fixing it” or “If you feel very strongly this is a problem and want to take fixing it in hand, we’d be very up for that”, which I felt was a good enough response.

In general I’m not sure how useful the questions actually turned out to be. It was much harder to fit them into the interview than I expected it to be, and I’m not sure it really changed my mind about any of the companies I interviewed at – no one did amazingly, and the companies that did badly were companies I was already worried about. I think part of the problem is that the questions focused more on eliciting whether I should run away very fast rather than whether it would be a great place to work, and in general companies which are dysfunctional enough to be worth avoiding are so obviously so that the questions are maybe not needed.

I still think they’re useful to have, but I think maybe next time I find I’m looking for work I’ll throw out about half of them (I have no idea which half) and add in a few ones that probe whether it’s somewhere I should actually be excited about working at.

Some ill thought out musings about identity

Up front warning: Please read this post carefully. I am exploring viewpoints, not espousing them.

Second up front warning: All of this is very amateurish thoughts on the subject. Other people have no doubt thought more deeply and more sensibly on the subject than I am.

Let me tell you about something that happened to me as a kid.

I was playing by myself in the garden. Running around, jumping, etc. Energetic “I’m too young to know about getting tired” kid stuff.

One of my jumps was… surprisingly high. Not like “Leaps tall buildings in a single bound” high, but still unreasonably so: Maybe a few times my height.

That was pretty cool, so clearly I needed to try it again.

After some practice, I found I could basically “push” off the ground, and it would give me a huge boost to my jump. It was an action that felt a little bit like extending your hands downwards and shoving, but not quite. I couldn’t get it to work reliably, and it had an annoying tendency to fail to work when I was nervous about it (e.g. when trying to show it to other people), but I could get it to work about one time in 5 normally.

Then something really cool happened. I was doing a particularly high jump, and at the top of it it felt like something in my push just caught, and rather than coming back down to earth I just kept going up. I found I could use the push to control my height and direction pretty easily, and pretty soon I was merrily flying around. This was exactly as awesome as you’d expect.

Obviously, none of this actually happened.

Or rather, it did happen, but I was asleep at the time. I got this dream a lot, it felt incredibly real, and it had extremely consistent rules and mechanisms for how it worked. It even came with its own built in explanation for why I couldn’t seem to do it when awake (that I couldn’t make it work reliably in the first place).

It’s not like I actually believed I could fly when I was awake. I knew the difference between dreams and reality. But you know that thing where you have an incredibly vivid dream about a mundane thing and you wake up and you’re not 100% sure if you’re remembering a dream or a reality until you’ve been awake for a bit longer and sorted the details out? It was a lot like that. There were a lot of mornings where I had to think hard to remember whether or not I could fly.

And, at some fundamental level, I still kinda believe that I can.

I mean, I know, physics. Also biology. Science in general is basically conspiring to ruin my fun here. I know with 100% certainty that I do not possess the ability to fly, but there’s still that nagging feeling that it’s there.

This feels fundamentally different from just fantasizing about being able to fly. I’d love to be able to teleport, or to read minds, or any one of a million super powers that comics have told us are totally a thing people can do, but there’s no sense that I should be able to (actually I have much the same feeling that I should be able to move things about with my mind, for much the same reasons. I similarily have no actual belief that I can do this). It’s not that I want to be able to fly, it’s that it feels like I should be able to fly.

Why do I bring this up?

Well, this all started with a discussion the other night with my friend, Kat Matfield (who is very good at forcing me to think about things).

I like to form mental models of how people I disagree with could think by seeing if I can imagine a way to adjust my beliefs to agree with them. This is not really intended to produce accurate mental models – I don’t need to make predictions off them, and I don’t expect predictions made off them to be correct. Their goal is to take a position that I cannot imagine a reasonable person holding and turn it into one I can imagine a reasonable person holding. It forces me to take them seriously, and thus means that if I need to engage with their beliefs there’s a better chance that I’ll actually try to understand where they’re coming from rather than just dismiss them out of hand.

The subject of Otherkin came up (I’ll get to how later), so naturally I felt the need to come up with a way in which their beliefs were plausible.

What are their beliefs? Well. It’s a collective term for people who believe they’re not actually human. Examples include people who believe they are elves and people who believe they are animals. Other related believes are multiples (who believe they are multiple people), fictives (who believe they are specific fictional characters) and factives (who believe they are specific other real people).

I can’t really figure out what would cause me to believe one of these things. However the flying thing feels analogous: It is (sortof) a belief about myself that does not correspond to physical reality.

This feels like a good starting point. If I can justify claiming that flying is part of my identity, I feel like otherkin and their ilk become plausible even without sharing their specific belief. Are flyingkin a thing? I don’t know. I don’t really care. The goal is a working analogy, not true versimilitude.

So let’s see where we can go with this.

I have this innate feeling that I can fly. Is it thus reasonable to say that being able to fly is part of my identity?

Well, no, because I don’t actually believe I can fly.

I can more or less imagine coming up with plausible excuses for that. Like maybe technology has stolen all the magic from the world or something, and that’s what’s stopping me from flying. But I don’t really believe that either, and I’ve trained myself well enough and know what belief in belief likes that I don’t have any real way of imagining believing that that current-me wouldn’t just label that belief “And then I became stupid”, which rather defeats the object of this experiment.

So instead I’m going to take a different tack and question the nature of identity.

Now lets talk about gender.

Suppose, for the moment, that gender reassignment surgery was physically impossible (or, less drastically, someone has a medical condition that prevents them from having it). Suppose they nevertheless consider themselves as being a different gender than the sex they were assigned at birth. Do we consider this valid?

Well, yes.

Trans* is not dependent on gender reassignment. We (well, many of us) have accepted that gender is a social construct distinct from sex, and that your gender is a matter of personal choice. Many people who identify as a gender which is distinct from the sex they were assigned at birth have not and will never have reassignment surgery, and that’s fine.

I’m treading on eggshells a little bit here, so I just want to remind you to read carefully again. The above is what I believe. Nothing that follows should be taken to mean otherwise (even the later bits where I start to explore how one might disagree with this point of view).

Now… here’s the thing. The fact that we have decided that gender and sex are distinct things is itself a social construct. Neither “gender” nor “sex” are real things. They are fairly fuzzy and complicated labels for things, and historically they are labels which have had the same meaning.

When we decided to split “gender” from “sex” we took a label that included a mix of roughly correlated social, mental and physical traits and split it into two labels. One covered the mental and social traits (who you are and how you present), one covering the physical one (the implementation details of your body).

And not everyone is on board with this split. Many people just don’t understand that it’s a thing, many people actively disagree with it (more on the latter later).

The result is that if you talk to one of these people and say “I am male”, they hear a much larger set of implications (including “I have a penis”) than you might have intended to convey.

Is it possible that we’re in the same boat as this person? That if I were to say “I am a flying person” and you were to hear this as “I can literally fly. Wheee!” it would be the same as if I were to say “I am male” and you were to hear this as “I have a penis”? (It happens that you would have reached a correct conclusion in the latter case, but that doesn’t make the inference valid).

If the ability to fly in some way feels part of me, and we have already accepted that identity is a concept that is only loosely connected to the physical concepts from which it appears to originate, is it unreasonable of me to say “I identify as a flying person”? Or it is unreasonable of you to reject that?

To be honest, I don’t know. In practice, I can’t shake the feeling that anyone who tells me that being able to fly is part of their identity is just making shit up. But I’m aware that “making shit up” is also what many trans people are accused of, so I feel like I should at the very least treat that reaction as a warning sign to be questioned.

In the interests of disclosure: I have met someone in the past who believed she was a fairy. I don’t know if she identified as otherkin or had come to the conclusion independently. I (think I) stopped short of being a complete asshole about it, but I was certainly rather less charitable than I might have been about it.

I should also say that I rather expect all this beautiful theorising to be ruined by the arrival of actual otherkin telling me that no they literally believe that elves are a real thing and they have magical powers. I draw the line at seeing empirically false viewpoints.

I actually came at this line of reasoning from the other side: Trying to get inside the heads of people who do not accept the validity of trans people.

To a certain extent, all of the above can be regarded as a reductio ad absurdum for transgender. It’s very easy to see how (possibly just by finding myriad actual examples of people doing this. I haven’t actually looked, but I’m sure someone has done it for real) someone could make the slippery slope argument “If you accept that gender identity is a different thing from physical sex, it’s only a few short steps from allowing people to believe they’re elves!”

I don’t buy this argument. As I’m fond of saying, the problem with slippery slope arguments is that once you start accepting them you open yourself up to accepting all sorts of other fallacies too.

But it’s easy to perceive this as a sort of sliding scale, where at the one end you’ve got people who don’t acknowledge that identity is fluid enough to support your gender being a distinct thing from your physical sex and at the other end you have people who believe thinking you’re an elf is totally OK.

And if the elf example doesn’t do it for you, it’s likely that some more extreme example does. Consider someone who is a factive (they believe they are another real person) who tells you that they really identify as being you. Yes, you personally. They just feel such a connection, it’s as if you’re one person. I don’t know about you, but my answer would pretty much be “No, you’re not. Fuck right off and don’t come back”. Or imagine a cis straight white guy telling you that sure they’ve got all this privilege and all, but they really identify as being a trans black lesbian. It’s hard not to react to that by thinking the person in question is a bit of an asshole.

The point I’m making is that there’s a line to draw. This line is probably fuzzy and movable, and there are going to be some massive gray areas but you’re probably drawing it somewhere. Once you’ve accepted that it’s not so hard to imagine how you might draw the line in some different place.

A thing to note is that “a different place” does not necessary mean that there is a single linear scale. One person might think that multiples are fine, but fictives and people who think they’re elves are just way too out there, but anything where you’re identifying as a real thing is OK. Another person might go “Well, I don’t get it, but if it makes you happy that’s cool” to fictives and otherkin but go “No, sorry. You are not transracial. You’re just being an asshole”. The space of identities is murky and complicated and a lot more than a single scale from more extreme to less extreme.

For me the boundary is basically defined by three things, in order of decreasing importance:

Are you causing harm to you or others?
Do you believe things which are empirically false?
Can I take your claim seriously? (I’m not proud of this one and don’t really think it should be a factor, but in practice it ends up being one anyway)

The empirically false thing requires some further refinement.

“I believe I should be able to fly” is not an empirically false statement, regardless of whether it is impossible for me to acquire the ability to do so. “I believe I can fly” is one, and is likely to be dangerous. Similarly “I believe I have a penis” may be an empirically false statement (though is probably none of your business if we’re having an argument about it! Also, it’s been pointed out to me that due to deformities and intersex conditions, it literally may be a matter of debate as to whether or not what a given person has counts as a penis), but “I believe I should have a penis” is not one.

This then leads to the interesting consequence that you may hear a statement as an empirical prediction when it is not one. If you hear “I am a man” as “I have a penis”, you may be hearing a statement you believe to be empirically false but which is in fact not because you are using a different definition of terms from the person making the claim. Care is required.

That aside, there is a single overarching thing which trumps all of these:

Is this a situation in which it’s OK for me to express an opinion on this?

This doesn’t affect what my opinion is, but it may affect how I express it. I am not the identity police. I am an opinionated know-it-all, so I probably err on the side of expressing an opinion where I shouldn’t, but if it’s someone I don’t know very well then making a judgment about whether they’re causing harm to themselves or others is rather tricky. For all I know their beliefs about their identity are a coping mechanism that is preventing them from doing far more destructive things and simply blundering in, flailing around and going “I know you believe you’re an elf, but have you considered science?” is going to cause far more harm than good. I may also be a poor judge of harm. Some people think trans people cause themselves harm by not accepting their “real” (i.e. assigned) gender. I know they’re wrong, but how do I know I don’t have similar misconceptions?

At the same time, seeing obvious harm and going “Nope, none of my business”, is not cool either. Sometimes interventions are needed, and sometimes people close to the situation are too close to see it, so this is another grey area.

I like to end my articles on solid, punchy, conclusions, but I don’t really have one here. Identity is complicated, and these were some of my thoughts on the subject. Please don’t shout at me, but please do correct me if I’ve got something horribly wrong or am deeply misguided.

My personal dietary policy

Let me start this by saying something: I eat both fish and meat. I do not have a problem with this. I have personally bought into the idea that it is OK to kill and eat animals for no other reason than that they are tasty.

Animal suffering? I’m broadly against it. If you give me a choice between two equally tasty steaks, one of which has been factory farmed in horrible conditions and the other of which has been lovingly reared in wide grassy fields, with regular massages and a fulfilling spiritual life before it died peacefully, but this steak costs twice as much, I’d definitely go for the pricier steak. If it cost 10 times as much I might ask if you had somewhere something in between where maybe it was pretty OK with its life, but it wasn’t really fulfilled, ya know? And maybe it had a bit of a headache when it finally got turned into burger. So call it a more than mild preference but not an overarching moral commandment. I feel like I buy into worse things than animal suffering on a daily basis just by being part of the modern world, and that once I’ve agreed that it’s OK to kill them it’s a bit hypocritical to go “As long as you do it without any suffering!”. Other people might set the mark there differently, and that’s fine. This is a personal preference.

So I’m OK with eating meat.

But not, you know, a lot of it.

I think, culturally, our relationship with meat is very dysfunctional. We eat far too much of it – I believe more than we have at any point in history (that may not be true right at this minute – I believe it’s gone down a bit, especially since the recession, but this is certainly true if you count the last 50 years or so). Meat used to be a luxury item, and now it’s a staple.

That being said, we do a lot of things differently than we did historically. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I state this merely as evidence that we don’t necessarily need to be eating this much meat.

So why do I care?

The main reasons I care are ecological ones: Meat production is polluting and energetically expensive. It’s by no means our worst crime of this sort, but it’s a pretty significant one. Fish is even worse. We are literally driving the fish supply to extinction by our fish addiction (I haven’t formed a very coherent opinion on farmed fish. I’m broadly pro it, but think it is usually ecologically worse than farmed meat. This may not be true. I haven’t done the research as well as I should)

Additionally, I think our current expectations around meat are the source of a lot of the worst excesses of the meat industry: We expect a lot of it and we expect it cheaply. What did we think farmers were going to do achieve this? Plant more cow-trees? When you’re dealing with something where the overwhelming majority of the costs are from living creatures, the obvious way to cost-cut is to treat those living creatures worse. This is true with animals, and it’s also true with humans. Why do you think sweatshops exist?

How do I propose to fix this?

Well. Were I in charge, I would probably fix this by increasing taxes on meat production and using the proceeds to subsidise suitable vegetarian alternatives. It’s a blunt tool, but an effective one. Sadly, my plans to become supreme world leader have been delayed slightly, so in the mean time I’m limited to following my personal plan (and trying to convince you to do so as well).

It’s a pretty radical proposition, which you probably wouldn’t have thought of as a solution to the “People eat too much meat” problem.

Are you ready for it?

Eat less meat.

Shocking, right?

This is, of course, completely fucking useless advice.

The problem with advice like this is that it’s not quantifiable. How much is less meat? It’s easy to slip, and to let boundaries shift. I should know: I tried to live by this nebulous advice for a year or two after stopping being vegetarian. One day I woke up and realised something: I was eating a hell of a lot of meat.

Which is why I imposed my current set of rules. I have meat quotas. My rules are as follows:

Eat meat no more than once a week (exception: If I cooked it myself, I’m allowed to eat leftovers)
Eat fish no more than once a month
Given the option, prefer ethically sourced meat
Given the option, prefer less energetically intensive meat (in practice this means “If there’s a tasty chicken based option, take the tasty chicken based option. Otherwise don’t worry about it”)

These are stricter quotas than I expect most people to follow. I was vegetarian for 5 years and pescatarian for another 5 after that, so I know well how to live without meat and fish. It forms the core idea of how I think this should work though: Hard and fast numbers, flexibility about how you implement them.

If you are currently a meat eater but agree that you should be eating less meat, this is the strategy I would propose following:

Think about how often you eat meat (or whatever you’re trying to adjust your intake of) in a given week. Take the median, or maybe a value slightly above median but well below the maximum
Impose that as your starting quota
Once a month (say on the first Monday of a month), consider how hard your meat quota has been to stick to. If the answer is “easy”, adjust it down slightly
Stop tinkering when you hit a point you are ethically and practically comfortable with

You start off at more or less your usual habits, and gradually adjust downwards. The quotas give you a specific, measurable, goal and makes you generally aware of how much meat you’re eating. You do have to adjust your lifestyle but, well, that’s the point, and you have a real sense of progress whilst doing so.

As an aside, this is quite distinct from approaches like Meatless Monday, which anecdotally seems not to help. I’ve seen a few people do it, and all that happens is that they eat more meat on the surrounding days. Additionally, the lack of flexibility makes them really resent it because often they’ll get invited out on that day.

The nice thing about the quotas is that they are strict but flexible – you impose hard limits about how much you can eat, but allow flexibility in terms of when you do it. It’s worked very well for me, and I think with some experimentation to find boundaries it should work very well for everyone.