# Vegans need to eat just enough Meat - emperically evaluate the minimum ammount of meat that maximizes utility

Once I talked to a person who said they were asexual. They were also
heavily depressed and thought about committing suicide. I repeatedly
told them to eat some meat, as they were vegan for many years. I myself
had experienced veganism-induced depression. Finally, after many weeks
they ate some chicken, and the next time we spoke, they said that they
were no longer asexual (they never were), nor depressed.

I was vegan or vegetarian for many consecutive years. Vegetarianism was
manageable, perhaps because of cheese. I never hit the extreme low
points that I did with veganism. I remember once after not eating meat
for a long time there was a period of maybe a weak, where I got
extremely fatigued. I took 200mg of modafinil[^reference], without having any
build-up resistance. Usually, this would give me a lot of energy. But
then I was barely able to enter some terminal commands to transcribe
some of Rob Miles\' videos with a whisper such that he could add better
captions. Another day I took 30mg of lisdexamfetamine[^reference] which would
usually last the entire day and have a pretty strong effect, but this
time I got so tired after 3 or 4 hours that I had to lay down and take a
nap.

But then I ate some tuna. And felt a lot better the next day. Some time
later I did a blood test that indicated iron deficiency as a probable
cause.

But even when I take a lot of iron supplements and eat my soybeans
(which contain a lot of iron) with bell peppers (which contain Vitamin
C, which boosts iron absorption) I still notice a big difference when I
eat meat after a long period of abstinence.

So here is my proposition. If you are working on AI alignment then what
you think with your brain is very important. If don\'t usually eat meat
you might be missing some important nutrients that would help you think
significantly better. As somebody who didn\'t eat meat until my body
screamed into my ear from 5 inches away, I think I understand why you
don\'t want to eat meat. But if you do the expected utility computation
is it actually worth it?

What if it makes you only 5% worse at thinking? Is whatever animal
suffering you prevent worth the tradeoff in reduced probability of
saving the world? What about 10%? What about 50%? Don\'t answer this
question in the abstract. Instead, I recommend the following experiment:

Eat 7 days in a row a large amount of meat. E.g. 1kg of chicken every
day. (Start with a lower quantity on the first day. My body sometimes
does weird things when starting to eat meat after long abstinence.) The
goal: Gather data. You want to eat too much meat (more than you likely
end up needing) to make sure that if you are missing any nutrients,
you\'ll definitely get them by the end of the week, such that you can
notice an as large as possible difference. While doing this experiment
write a journal (ideally starting at least a couple of days before you
start to eat meat) in which you precisely document:

-   Every 2 hours:
    -   How you feel.
    -   How much energy you have.
    -   How easy is it to focus.
-   How well did you slept.

For each point give a 0-9 score, plus prose comments where appropriate.

This generates a lot of data on how much of a positive impact eating
meat has.

If meat didn\'t have a positive impact: Congratulations, you can
continue not eating meat. And now you know that this is actually the
correct thing to do, because you are not missing out cognitively.

If meat had a positive consider the following options:

1.  Just start eating meat.
2.  Research what exactly it was that was missing before from your diet
    such that you don\'t eat meat. You\'ll end up not eating meat, but
    eating meat was useful in noticing that something was wrong with
    your diet.
3.  Combine the previous two approaches. Eat meat but try to minimize
    how much meat you eat by improving your diet over a longer duration.
    This way you don\'t need to fix it all at once. I still haven\'t
    managed to do fully do this after spending at least 20 hours on this
    (probably much more).

Important: Consider that you can minimize animal suffering by eating
less meat. I\'d guess usually people eat more than the optimal amount of
meat (which I think is can even be unhealthy). If you eat 20% (this is a
random guess) of what people eat on average it might be sufficient to
avoid any negative nutritional side effects, while still reducing animal
suffering.

It\'s much easier to be fundamentalist about not eating meat. It makes
things simple. Saying \"Never eat meat, it\'s evil\" is quite simple,
and an easy rule to follow. Saying \"Animal farming is terrible, and how
we treat \"food animals\" is one of the greatest moral failures of our
time. But AI is gonna destroy the universe. You are trying to prevent
this, and possibly not eating meat negatively effects how well you can
utilize your brain. So you need to eat meat now first to figure out if
there is a nutritional problem, and second to fix that nutritional
problem if required. Because that is actually what maximizes the
expected utility of getting a good future. But because animal farming is
actually terrible you want to minimize the amount of meat that you
eat.\" This is much harder to act upon. It boils down to \"Hey, you
don\'t know what\'s best! You\'d better run a bunch of experiments to
find out.\"

[^reference]: I have/had a prescription.