All of JMeans's Comments + Replies

If 'veg*n' isn't a word that everyone uses yet, I think there should be a different one. It's hard to not read it as a misspelling of 'vegan.'

It seems kind of weird that things recede after seven years. Like, if it were a willpower thing I'd expect it to be shorter. I'm not just going to decide after a few years that my eating habits are too hard to keep up.

Did you see anything about people saying why they started eating animal stuff again?

0
PeterMcCluskey
9y
An average of seven years is consistent with the hypothesis that the problem is vitamin B12 deficiency. Our bodies store enough B12 that it takes anywhere from months to decades for symptoms of a severely deficient diet to become clear.
1
DavidNash
9y
I suspect that veganism is also done at the same time as organic/local/raw and other things that drain willpower and might be unhealthy and expensive and more socially awkward. You would need to tease out the different types of veganism to see the respective growth and recidivism rates.
4
AGB
9y
"Like, if it were a willpower thing I'd expect it to be shorter. I'm not just going to decide after a few years that my eating habits are too hard to keep up." This seems reasonable, but the reasons given were health issues followed by hassles, and only then uncontrollable cravings. Health issues would probably take a while to develop and then a while more to respond to by switching back. Re. hassles, I can imagine someone switching to a vegan diet when it is relatively more convenient and then switching back when it stops being so because your environment changes, e.g you switch when you're near stores that stock a good selection of vegan products, and then stop when you move to a different area.
2
xccf
9y
Seven years is an average; the distribution seems pretty skewed. Yes, see the text right under the "Why is veg*n recidivism so high" heading.

I have a degree in computer science and experience with explosives. I am not brilliant at research and poor at interacting with people. My current COA is to become a software engineer for the money. Do I appear to be making some dumb oversight.

0
Benjamin_Todd
9y
From that short info, it sounds like a sensible decision. I'd also recommend doing a thorough review of how your career is going once a year. And try to meet people in the effective altruism community and ask them if there's something you've overlooked.

Thanks for replying. Have you run into much issues with underage members not being allowed in pubs?

0
weeatquince
9y
Even when our events are not in pubs we do not really attract many (if any) under 18s so I suspect the negative impacts of people not being able to turn up because of age are minimal. (But we do have a few 18-21 year olds so if the UK had a higher drinking age that could be problematic.)
1
DavidNash
9y
Most of the pubs in London are happy to have families with young kids come in, and I haven't seen anyone have their age checked despite being a young looking group.

Minor complaint: It felt like you spent most of the space going over obvious (to me, at least) things like how to use Facebook/Meetup. The only reason I've not started a group in my area is because I have no idea what would happen at events. This article did not do much to clarify.

Unrelated: Question: Why do you recommend Facebook, specifically, to start with?

0
weeatquince
9y
Hi. Thanks for the feedback. EVENTS - To clarify, most of our events are just social events. People turn up at a pub and discuss whatever takes their fancy often including effective altruism. This is low effort but seems to be working. FACEBOOK - My cop out answer to this is just - this is what I did and it worked for me. (This post is an awkward mix of writing up what I did in a way that could be posted to the EA wiki so that others could edit it and add their advice.) That said the "copy event" feature does make it very very easy to create repeat events with minimal effort until you get round to starting an actual facebook group.
1
Ben Kuhn
9y
Not the OP, but I've run a bunch of events with a college group and we consistently got higher turnout when we used Facebook invites than other methods. I suspect it's a good way to reach people because everyone checks Facebook all the time and people can see that their friends are going.

I have trouble imagining this working. I would expect that people interested in EA would generally be behind the same sort of political candidates. I'm not sure how easily you could pursuade someone not already interested in EA in the benefit of this scheme. The most generous of my coworkers seem to think of donating as something you just do, rather than an effort to improve the world. (I once had someone seriously try to convince me to donate to an organization that would help send people like [specific disabled veteran] to a water park.) I would expect most people to see campaign donation as a sort of personal support, and not get behind arguments about usefulness and such. Who exactly would you be targetting with this?

1
Andrew_SB
9y
I envision this targeting the general public. I suppose I have a higher credence in a wide audience finding this really appealing. By spending X dollars, you're canceling out X dollars of the other side while simultaneously sending 2*X dollars to an actual charity. Nobody likes the negative ads in the US - plenty of people donate in order to 'prevent the other side from winning' more than supporting their own candidate.

Does anyone have any experience with fundraising? When I search Google, I just find sites about buying their stuff and reselling it, which doesn't seem like it would be very useful for just one person.

One thing I've considered is simply begging for donations, getting permission to stand outside a store and pass out flyers on the weekend. If printing 1 flyer costs $0.50, it wouldn't be that hard to make back my costs. I'm told I look a lot younger than I am, so there's a chance I could get mistaken for a high schooler, and get the 'oh, that's adoralbe' eff... (read more)

0
Nekoinentr
9y
There are likely good resources online about how to do sponsored runs. These can raise a lot.

So in other words, prefer activities that help more people with less work?

Very helpful, thanks! I'd not heard of the OPP before.

I'm a bit confused on the last bullet, though. What would making a difference in the for-profit world look like? I mainly don't understand why scalability is important, or really what it is.

0
Austen_Forrester
9y
Paul Polak is the guru for for-profit solutions to poverty and the importance of focusing on scalability. He has a couple books and a website and lots of videos on Youtube -- I highly recommend him. Scalability means how easily/financially-sustainably something can be spread. Charities are limited with their interventions because every person they help costs them, but socially-beneficial businesses that make profit (ie Nokero) are unlimited because they can keep on growing and spreading to help more and more people through selling their products or services. And then there's charities like One Acre Fund that are mostly but not fully compensated by their own clients, putting them in between the two.
3
Ben Kuhn
9y
Scalability means how strongly you are limited by your available resources, as opposed to e.g. demand for your service. Websites are very scalable because it takes very few resources to serve an extra person. Making houses is not very scalable (currently).

I'm Jon. Working on a degree in computer science, and trying to figure out what I can do besides earning to give. Basically just spending my time/energy figuring out how to study harder/better so I can get a better-paying job when the time comes.

I'm considering using National Novel Writing Month to try fundraising for SCI, but I'm not sure how well I'd be able to pull it off without having any friends.