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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29676 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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Now you've got me wondering about the vegan bit 😁

How much was genuine conviction, and how much was copying others/agreeing with what they said but not meaning it (which he's been doing a lot of up to as far as I've read)?

Days after his arrival at MIT, for example, he’d met another freshman, Adam Yedidia — the friend whom Jane Street eventually hired. They’d fallen into a conversation about utilitarianism. Sam argued that it was life’s only sensible philosophy, and that the main reason people didn’t see this was a fear of where it would lead them. (“What scares people most about utilitarianism is that it encourages selflessness.”) Adam had listened to Sam go on about his beliefs until he finally said, If you really believed all that, you wouldn’t eat meat. At little cost to yourself you reduce a lot of suffering. Sam was serious about minimizing suffering. Sam also liked his fried chicken — but that wasn’t really an argument. “Whatever he said had been rattling around in my head, but I had been avoiding it because of a thought I did not want to have,” said Sam. “The thought was: I spend thirty minutes enjoying chicken and the chicken endures five weeks of torture.” There was nothing to do but overhaul his diet, and he did. “There are easy vegetarians and there are hard ones, and he was a hard one,” said Adam. “It’s unusual to change something like that when it’s difficult.”

...As classmates at Crystal Springs Uplands, Gabe [Sam's younger brother] and Nishad had gone vegan together

...Sam didn’t care about real animals. It had been an expected value calculation, rather than emotion, that had led him to go vegan.

So he started off vegetarian, but that might have been more 'easy' vegetarian than his friend assumed (e.g. would eat eggs/shrimp). The vegan part may simply have been that he was around a lot of vegans and it was just easier for him to do the "Yup, vegan too!" bit (then go out and eat whatever the hell he liked) than have discussions about it every time anyone ordered a meal.

I'd believe he was vegetarian, or semi-vegetarian, but as for the veganism - I think possibly just copying others/letting them assume, by his favourite trick of agreeing while interiorly not intending to keep his word, that he was all the way vegan.

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