How to Not Be Manipulated by Viral Charts

Follow-up to yesterday, by Noah Smith:

How not to be fooled by viral charts

How not to be fooled by viral charts, Part 2

Please share those. TY.

PS, Works in Progress picks up one of the Unpopular Opinions from Losing: Just Bury Your Trash

Science Headline Linked to 70% Bullshit

tl;dr: When browsing online, don’t judge based on if you agree or if it sounds “true.” Ask how much the author (influencer) would benefit from making the headline more dramatic than the evidence warrants.

Nearly everyone is motivated to get clicks at any cost. That is not a path to truth. 

Here is one example from science “journalism” (but it applies to everything, including financial “advice” and especially politics):

Long-term melatonin use linked to 90% higher heart failure risk

Q’s analysis:

The first thing that jumped out at me is that ScienceDaily is presenting this on August 29, 2026 as though it were fresh. It isn’t. This is a repackaging of an American Heart Association conference abstract from November 2025. As of now, I can find the conference abstract and commentary about it, but not a full peer-reviewed paper reporting this analysis. The AHA itself explicitly says conference abstracts are not peer reviewed and should be considered preliminary.

The headline number is scary: “90% higher heart failure risk.” But the actual result was 4.6% versus 2.7% over five years, an absolute difference of 1.9 percentage points. That's worth investigating, certainly. But before deciding melatonin caused even part of that difference, there are some enormous problems.

The biggest problem is exposure classification. “Melatonin user” meant melatonin appeared in the medical record. “Nonuser” meant it didn't. But in the US, people buy melatonin at CVS, Costco, Amazon, etc., without telling their doctor. The authors didn't even know which countries individual patients came from. So some unknown fraction of their supposedly melatonin-free controls were almost certainly taking melatonin. The authors themselves acknowledge this.

More importantly, I think there is a massive confounding-by-indication problem here. Who gets melatonin formally entered in their medical chart and keeps taking it for a year? Probably not a random sample of people with mild occasional trouble sleeping. They're plausibly people with worse or more persistent insomnia, more medical contact, more psychiatric illness, more complicated health problems, or combinations thereof. Insomnia itself is associated with cardiovascular risk. The investigators did propensity-match on 40 measured variables, which is better than a crude observational comparison, but they did not know insomnia severity or psychiatric diagnoses sufficiently well. Even the study authors explicitly identify worse insomnia, depression, and anxiety as possible explanations.

And here's where my eyebrow goes way up: heart-failure hospitalization was supposedly 19.0% versus 6.6%, even though new heart-failure diagnosis was only 4.6% versus 2.7%. That's internally weird enough that the authors had to explain that the hospitalization endpoint captured a bunch of related billing codes rather than clean incident-heart-failure events. I would put very little weight on that spectacular “3.5× hospitalization” number.

Likewise, all-cause mortality was 7.8% versus 4.3%. If melatonin were genuinely causing something close to a doubling of five-year mortality in middle-aged people, that would be an absolutely gigantic pharmacologic effect. Given decades of widespread melatonin exposure, clinical trials, pharmacovigilance, and observational research, I'd expect some corroborating signal elsewhere. Instead, a 2026 Journal of Pineal Research commentary specifically criticizing this work points out that its result sits awkwardly against the broader melatonin safety literature.

There is also a particularly relevant piece of prior evidence: a 2024 prospective analysis of three US cohorts examined melatonin supplement use and cardiovascular disease/diabetes. That's a very different design and doesn't settle the question, but it is part of why I wouldn't update dramatically from one TriNetX database analysis.

So my rough Bayesian translation would be:

Before this study: I wouldn't have assumed chronic melatonin is perfectly harmless, because we really don't have superb decades-long randomized safety evidence.

After this study: I'd move slightly toward “worth studying; perhaps don't take it indefinitely for no reason.”

I would not move anywhere remotely close to “melatonin raises heart-failure risk by 90%.” That causal interpretation is unsupported.

And specifically for you, I wouldn't change anything on the basis of this article. Your diary mentions melatonin as an occasional part of various sleep experiments, rather than anything resembling the study's “documented chronic melatonin treatment for ≥365 days” exposure. Your recent cardiac stress test was also reassuring. [After 1+ year wearing the Google Watch, Google Health claims my VO2 Max is 55.9, at age 58.*] So this isn't setting off a personal alarm bell for me.

My bullshit-meter score: perhaps 3/10 for the underlying research question, 7/10 for the impression created by the headline. The study found a real correlation in a huge database. The leap from that to “long-term melatonin use linked to 90% higher heart failure risk” is mathematically true but medically much more dramatic than the evidence warrants.

And the funniest/most irritating part: ScienceDaily has resurrected a ten-month-old, non-peer-reviewed conference abstract as “news.” Your New Scientist klaxon may remain armed. 😜 

*

Not bad for someone w/o two full lungs.

The Human Fetish

Display of cranes, Peace Park, Hiroshima

• Funny 'cuz it's not funny: The Expanding Circle? (SMBC)
• More in-the-weeds philosophy: Total Utilitarianism: an unethical ethical theory. (Overmuser)

Someone explained to me that AI writing is bad because there is not a “human thought process” behind it. 

You mean like these things a human thought through and said, “Oh, yeah, that”:

• Nazism
• Longtermism
• Baby beauty pageants
• Stalinism
• MILF Manor
• Cable news panels
• The transatlantic slave trade
• Gender-reveal parties involving explosives
• The Great Leap Forward
• Mormonism's magic underwear
• The Khmer Rouge
• The Bachelor 
• Jim Crow
• Transubstantiation [added by the former alter boy]
• Keeping Up with the Kardashians
• The Cultural Revolution
• The Holocaust
• Neom [seriously!]
• Belgian rule in the Congo
• Fox News
• “Bill Gates is controlling us with vaccines”
• Apartheid
• The National Enquirer
• The Armenian genocide
• Crypto bros 
• “Total utility”
• The Rwandan genocide
• Maoist famine policy
• The Jerry Springer Show
• Chattel slavery
• Forced sterilization programs
• UK famine policy in India
• Billionaires going to space for fun
• The Apprentice
• Ethnic cleansing
• The gulag
• “We’re a family here” workplaces [!!]
• “Consciousness is quantum”
• The Inquisition
• NFTs
• Witch trials
• Imperial conquest
• Lynching
• Algorithmic outrage farming
• Cats, the movie
• Eugenics
• People filming concerts on iPads
• Human sacrifice

(Q came up with ~75% of those.) 

AIs hallucinate less than humans; we just call it “Belief,” “Faith,” “Total Utility,” or “Priors.”

The more I think about it, the more laughable it is that basically everyone has an unquestioned fetish with humanity. I welcome our robot overlords, and you should too.

Not from me: Being right vs making a difference

Tucson sunrise, August 23.

From Carl V Phillips, PhD, commenting here on an anti-backyard-egg post:

I really have to wonder who this is directed at. Because I don't think it is net productive. I walked away from engaging with people who talked vegan stuff decades ago because I hated the obsession with identity, purity, and edge cases. Thanks to the much-maligned but actually quite remarkable Substack algorithm, I found myself happily engaging again with people who shared my values and didn't do offputting stuff like that. But this really triggered me again.

Ok, sure, there is value in explaining some inconvenient facts to someone who thinks "there is nothing harmful to animals about me buying my neighbor's backyard eggs even though I would never buy mass-produced eggs". However, I would start with a point that you seem to have missed: If you consume those eggs then someone else who might have chosen them instead of the grocery store can't get them, so they go the the grocery store. The backyard eggs are a finite resource that is not really affected by demand. So the net effect of you buying those eggs is the same as the effect of you buying grocery store eggs.

What you did say was a collection of things that seem almost designed to turn most readers off about veganism. Half of the points you made could be followed by "and that is why you should not have children". Many of them could be followed by "and that is why you should not have a dog". Several of them could be followed by "and that is why farm animal rescue operations are not actually good". Some of it pretty much says that therefore you should not engage in 99% of the commerce you participate in. Whether you really fully believe those points as you stated them or not (and I am not sure very many vegans would stick with such positions in the face of careful friendly-but-critical interlocution), saying something that flows naturally into conclusions that most people would balk at is not a wise tactic.

I expect that your reply to these observations would be "no, that is not it, it is only when ...something...something...exploitation...something...something., so it does not apply to children or pet dogs or whatever". I believe that you really see those lines in your mind. But most of us do not share your mind or your exact lines. If you deliberately restricted your message to being "this is why I don't..." or "before you think there are no arguments against backyard egg consumption..." (though, again, you left out the main clear argument against it), and included elements "not everyone who is motivated by vegan ethics will feel this way" and "that is not to say there are no upsides for the animals" and "this is certainly better than....", then this message could land with most people. As presented, though, it landed with me (and I expect would land with many other readers, though they may not be here) as "yep, vegans are still bright-line-ist, edge case obsessed, and uninterested in thinking through the full implications of their "rules" (in terms of what they demand that no one -- including themselves usually -- actually does, and in terms of whether they are likely to alienate potential fellow-travelers)".

It is not like I am going to be influenced negatively by this one encounter (though I am certainly not persuaded by the intended message either). But you only get so much of that with anyone before you do indeed cause them to walk away.

How Not To Be Popular

Few things lead to more people unsubscribing than pointing out that anti-meat / pro-veg advocacy generally hurts animals. 

If you'd like a new way to think about what is going on, here is a visualization from Andy Masley. 

(Not an endorsement of the idea of donating to "offset" eating animals, or the claims of how many animals are saved with a donation.)

Will THIS make me popular???

Turns out very little has changed in the Vegan world in the last ~40 years, from the 'zine No Compromise! to today: 

This is the one of the most popular Substackers, saying what makes him famous, loved, and well-paid.

And, of course, these are the consequences of telling non-vegans that they are evil fucking monsters:

Last week, a long-time friend asked what I'd been up to. I refrained from answering, "Beating my head against a wall."

I did admit to just repeating myself....

But at least for the next few years, there is an alternative.

A better world comes from understanding, not from being “right” or silencing others

Operators are standing by.

Repetitive Preface (skip)

Until the day he died, Paul Ehrlich was convinced he was right. He wasn’t, of course. Each of his predictions weren’t just wrong, they were 180 degrees wrong. His apocalyptic misanthropic frenzy, loved by the Left and amplified in the “mainstream” media, called for and led to a variety of brutal, barbarous policies, such as tens of millions of forced sterilizations.

Right until the end, the liberal media fawned over Ehrlich. Even after he died, having been the most wrong human in history, many people (including Vox.com) still defended his savage insanity. Hardly anyone but segments of the right dared call him out while he was alive. (Although Hannah Ritchie did in her first book, as did some others.)

All of Ehrlich’s highly-educated fans were – and still are – utterly convinced they had the facts on their side.

Each and every one of us is utterly convinced we have the facts on our side. We are, each and every one of us, rationalizing beasts, not rational animals.

We don’t merely have biases – we’re remarkably good at constructing arguments that make our biases feel like careful reasoning. We each fully and passionately believe we are right.

Current Backstory

A number of things recently brought Ehrlich’s followers to mind (the last being the the point of this post):

1. A vegan contacted me with his new campaign: We all have to go vegan or else we have no future on earth; ecological collapse “is a matter of years, not decades.”
   (Isn’t it convenient that what we want just happens to be what is necessary for the very survival of humanity?)
2. Related to Ehrlich: Ten years ago, a number of vegans made very specific and very, very wrong 10-year predictions regarding plant-based and cultivated meat.(1) Those same people are still revered and promoted and showered with money.
   A huge percentage of vegans would rather be wrong than doubt the story of their “ultimate victory and vindication.”
3. AI is better at persuading people than human experts.
   This is in large part because LLMs take people seriously, rather than condescendingly judge them. Many people would rather be “right” and condescend to “the ignorant” than actually listen, understand, and persuade.
4. More Good Less Harm (4) noted that consequentialist reasoning is vulnerable to motivated reasoning (what an understatement!). Unconstrained cost-benefit reasoning can rationalize almost anything when assumptions are chosen favorably.
   Or as Hank Green says here: “You can philosophical-thought-experiment yourself into freakin’ anything.”
   Or, as someone else put it, we just pull Bayesian priors out of our asses and then act like we’re being totally rational.
5. Freakonomics did an excellent interview with the president of Vanderbilt, defending the idea of institutional neutrality and free speech.

It is the latter point that I’d like to expand on.

Free Speech and Solutions

I’ve spoken ad nauseum (example) against the rich-white-guy tendency to worship free speech and “conversation” as the greatest good. I don’t believe “conversation” is the greatest good. For example, I would not use my blog to have a conversation with Charles Murray or James Damore or Andrew Tate in the name of “open exchange of ideas.”

On the other hand, I would not say that Charles Murray or James Damore (3) should never be allowed to speak or publish.

I understand the argument that people should not be allowed to say false things. E.g., wanting Holocaust deniers to be de-platformed.

But nearly everyone (2) is absolutely sure that what they believe is factual. The Flat Earthers, the anti-vaxxers, the libertarians, the socialists, the climate fanatics, the only-veganism-will-prevent-the-end-of-Humanity, the anti-Semites, the AI-will-kill-us-all Doomers – they are all 100% sure they have the facts. They are highly educated and they have the links and they can show you The Truth.

Pragmatism, Not Ideology

Trying to silence people whose “facts” don’t agree with our own simply doesn’t do any good, at least today. There are platforms for everyone; there is literally no belief weird and crazy enough to be rejected by everyone.

It is better to know what is being said and to offer cogent and constructive counter-arguments. If it is unspeakable to allow others to speak, we are actually admitting that our position is not persuasive.

From a practical perspective: demonizing, dehumanizing, and deplatforming the other side simply doesn’t work. If we endorse the idea of silencing dissent, only allowing thoughts like our own to be expressed, we create a bubble, and the most extreme and militant voices come to dominate. This leads, for example, the Left to become so disconnected from the population as a whole that the median voter will re-elect the worst human being in the country.

As Mark Maron put it, “We annoyed the average American into fascism.”

I actually have sympathy for the average American

For example (and again, something I've discussed ad nauseum), I can’t stand the exaggerations, lies, and unbelievable cruelty of the climate fanatics. Their literal “let people broil to death” carbon cult is deplorable, philosophically nihilistic, and political suicide.

That is one example; there are many others.

Another: racial politics in the U.S. has often descended into rage and vilification at the explicit expense of solutions.

More than a few voters flipped from Obama-to-Trump after being told they are inherently and irredeemably racist.

Not here to debate your facts…

I’m sure most climate fanatics believe they have the facts, as do team “all white people are racist.” I’m not here to debate that.

What am I saying is: Our personal facts don’t matter.

Winning elections – not going viral or being loved by our comrades – is the key to actually making things better.

We can’t protect the truly vulnerable if we can’t win elections. And we can’t win elections in a bubble. We can’t win elections by shouting down anyone who doesn’t toe the party line. We can’t win elections if we don’t understand what others are thinking.

Not Hypothetical, Not an Academic Exercise: The most unbelievable story of my lifetime

Please consider the most incredible, unexpected, mind-blowing societal advance of my lifetime.

Understandably, everyone tends to believe that the victimhood of their group is the worst. But I don’t think it is unreasonable to think that, in the U.S., in my lifetime, the worst-off humans were non-heterosexuals.

When I was growing up, you could be risking life and limb by coming out. A horrific death from AIDS was widely viewed as righteous “punishment” for being gay. Powerful and influential people said that death and destruction from hurricanes were God’s punishment for “acceptance” of homosexuality. Etc.

In 2004, the (then) Worst President Ever was up for re-election. Nixon was a creep and criminal, but in terms of policies and consequences, no one (then) topped W.

Turd Blossom won re-election for that terrible president by putting anti-gay measures on the ballot in swing states. Our child was more than a decade old when being cruelly anti-gay was the path to political success.

I never, ever thought I’d see equal marriage in my lifetime.

A decade after W started his second term, Obergefell made equal marriage the law of the land.

I honestly don’t think young people today realize what a BFD that was. It was unimaginable basically forever. Truly unbelievable to me, still.

This incredible advance did not happen because anti-equality voices were silenced or shamed. It isn’t because academia proclaimed that only pro-gay voices were allowed. It isn’t because pro-equality people vilified others as “evil” or their words were “violence” or they were promoting “genocide.”

Equal marriage came about because more and more people got to know gay people as people. Gay people stopped being the scary “other.” The TV show Will and Grace did far more to advance equality than any moral or intellectual argument.

Progress came from building understanding; acceptance came from constructive positivity.

Politics is the art of the possible. Better is good.

If – if – we want things to be better, there’s a lot to learn from that.

<fin>

Footnotes

(1) Hopefully it is obvious that I made many, many wrong predictions in the past 40 years. I wrote an entire book about it. I’m in favor of the free exchange of ideas in part because I have been so very wrong in the past.

It seems to me that we can only make real progress when we own up to our mistakes, rather than continue to tell our friends and allies what they want to hear. “We’re winning!” can get likes and donations, but these delusions don’t actually help.

(2) Not everyone believes what they say. Some people just want to get a rise out of the other side. The onus is on us to not rise to the bait and not to give the rabble-rousers attention and exposure. However, very few people seem able to resist rage-bait (either on their own side or the other).

(3) OTOH, it seems to me that if you are a rapist and human trafficker, you should be in jail, not speaking at Yale or on podcasts.

(4) From here:

A major problem is that a cost-benefit analysis is only as good as the assumptions used to anchor it, and the more unconstrained those are, the easier it is to go astray and fall into rationalizing what we already believed for other reasons. Holden Karnofsky has argued that EA’s maximization instinct creates constant temptations to rationalize, and that its track record owes more to the good judgment of the specific people involved than to anything in the framework itself. Vitalik Buterin makes a similar point, that act consequentialism suffers from what he calls “low galaxy brain resistance.” If your reasoning can justify any conclusion by constructing a sufficiently compelling calculation, it can take you to epistemically dangerous ground quite easily. One of Vitalik’s specific examples of a lower-stakes but pervasive failure mode is “bad excuses for banning things for personal aesthetic reasons.”

We are infinitely wealthy. I can prove it. For real.

Weather radar showing rain very specifically avoiding us.

How much would you need to be paid so that you (and everyone you love) permanently give up access to and can never benefit from each individual item listed below? 

Please come up with an actual dollar (or peso or euro) amount for each, then sum up the 30 numbers. 

• Modern grocery stores (e.g., since 1916)
  
  
• Legal interracial marriage
• Legal LGBTQ relationships 
• Legal gay marriage
• Ability to buy a house and have a credit card (denied to half the US until 1974)
  
  
• Smart phones  
• Streaming entertainment (movies & TV shows, audiobooks, eBooks, songs)
• Internet (online shopping, banking, comparisons, remote work, email, instant access to ~all knowledge, etc.)  
  
  
• Online maps
• GPS
• Modern weather forecasts / satellite imagery / hurricane predictions
  
  
• Air conditioning (see Europe for counter-example)
• Non-fireplace central heating
  
  
• Washing machines
• Safe and reliable lighting
• Safe and unlimited access to clean water
• Indoor plumbing (especially flush toilets)
• Modern sewage systems
• Electricity 
• Refrigeration
  
  
• Blood transfusions
• Contraception
• Very low chance of maternal and child mortality  
• Vaccines
• Current average lifespan (e.g., living 6+ years less than you would today)  
• Modern dentistry
• Antibiotics
• Morphine / modern pain relief
• Emergency medicine
• General anesthesia 

Nearly everyone we know has access to these priceless miracles. The ubiquity of these miracles makes them invisible. 

We don’t feel rich because evolution has programmed us to judge our lives against the lives of others. Our underlying nature is to always want more. 

But everyone reading this has won a lottery beyond imagining. Our wealth is far beyond every king and queen and emperor and titan throughout history.  

Recognizing how much modernity has given us should not make us complacent about those who are suffering. Just the opposite: Having won the lottery should make the cruelty and deprivation others face even less acceptable. 

Morally and practically, we need to overcome our programming. It doesn’t matter that others have more. Every single day, we should thank our lucky stars for our infinite net worth. 

And then we should focus our efforts on helping the many who, right now, don’t have access to these incredible everyday miracles. Specifically, the countless sentient beings needlessly experiencing extreme suffering.  

We already know how to produce extraordinary abundance, safety, and freedom. The issue isn’t that some have more than we do. The issue is that many can’t access the priceless everyday miracles we take for granted. 

It is immoral to waste our time on jealousy and envy. We can each use our infinite wealth to make the world better for those who haven’t won the lottery we have. 

Housing Prices

More here. 

This is not to say: If you are in the U.S., you should be happy because it is worse elsewhere.

Two points:

1. It could be worse. It could get much, much worse.
   
   
2. Housing affordability is not an inditement of the United States or "late-stage capitalism."
   
   Except for South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and North Korea, housing affordability is worse in every country. Communist, socialist, social democratic, dictatorships - every political system is worse than the U.S. everywhere. 
   
   Things are significantly better in the U.S. in terms of housing affordability than basically anywhere else. 

There is no quick fix. There is no easy fix. People can't have everything. 

Things get worse when we condemn everything if we can't have what we want where we want when we want.

Things get worse when we pursue fantasies. Things get worse when we judge our lives against everyone else. Thing get worse when we only believe memes and don't recognize reality (e.g., How to Make Life Better). 

Life is trade-offs. Life is choosing between possible alternatives. 

Bitterness is a choice. 

Turning Our Back on Torture

“Hello, human? Anyone home?”

The below is not the biggest problem in ethics / effective altruism. The biggest problem is the solipsistic illusion that suffering (or utility) sums across individuals. 

Humans see minds everywhere. 

Evolutionarily, this wasn’t a bug – it was a feature. Our ancestors were able to successfully reproduce because of their ability to see minds in others. Theory of mind allows for both successful cooperation (non-zero sum gains) and competition (for mates and resources). By allowing for prediction, projecting minds onto other animals – prey and predators – also increasing reproductive success. 

So it is understandable that we humans see minds in anything animated – it served our evolutionary success.

Projecting minds onto beings in motion (e-motion) is also well documented. We see sensing and cybernetics and inevitably assign consciousness and suffering. Humans attribute conscious intention even to shapes moving on a computer screen. 

While understandable and almost inevitable, this factual error (“anything animated is conscious”) leads to significant moral mistakes.

What makes our motion=mind even worse is our inability to imagine a mind unlike our own. 

We not only simply assume anything with “behavior” is conscious, we project our particular level of consciousness onto every animated being (ani-mals).

You can see this everywhere, even in our dealings with other humans – from a parent trying to reason with a screaming toddler to adults trying to reason with an autistic child. 

This behavior=consciousness category error can be particularly pronounced in individuals with great empathy. Years ago, a long-time fellow animal advocate read about a “jailbreak” by a robot, and wrote to me that he couldn’t help but “root” for the robot to get “free.” 

A light doesn’t go on.

But even where there is consciousness – the ability to have the subjective experiences of pleasure and pain – the type and level of consciousness is not and cannot be uniform.

The philosophical consequences of this reality are, at best, exceedingly difficult (as I discuss in the chapter “Biting the Philosophical Bullet” in Losing My Religions). However, reality itself is simple and straightforward:

Consciousness isn’t binary. It can’t be.

From When we believe absurdities, we commit atrocities:

A fertilized human egg does not have a mind, nor the capacity to have a Day-30-level “torturous” experience (p. 521). 

At some point, the fertilized egg can become a conscious being capable of experiencing a Day 30 torturous experience. 

Does this developing blastocyst (embryo, fetus, baby, toddler) go from having zero subjective experience directly to the capacity for full horrific experience? Would this happen with the development of the first neuron? The 1,000th? The 100,000th? The 10,000,000th? The 86 billionth? 

The ability to have subjective experiences – specifically the ability to experience intense suffering – is not binary. It can’t be. It goes from nothing to torturous gradually over the course of the development of a human. 

This also happened over the course of evolution. The ability to suffer increases with the development of more complex brains. 

There’s simply no other way it could be.

It is absurd to think that a rock or a plant or a fertilized egg or an embryo or a fetus or even a newborn or dog has the exact same capacity to suffer that a normal human adult has.** 

Sure, some people believe things like this, just as some believe the earth is flat, god likes certain people best, nature is good, we have the ability to change the course of the cosmos, etc. 

But I also think that many people who say everything with nerves can experience “torture” make these claims as a way to be provocative and / or to show how “smart” and “open minded” they are. [An idea expanded in A Mind So Open, It Contains Nothing.] Others think in binary in order to have a simple view of the world. [Understandable for many reasons.]

** This is not to say that other animals are just dimmed versions of normal adult humans. We don't even understand the diversity of human consciousness (e.g., try to imagine what it was like to be Rainman) let alone what it is like to be a bat or a dolphin. Many people have explored this in thoughtful ways, such as Ed Yong's magisterial An Immense World.

And yes, there very well could be entities capable of much worse suffering than a neuro-typical adult human.

All suffering matters.
But only actual suffering.
And the priority is severe suffering.

To be clear: Suffering less than Day-30-level torture is not morally irrelevant.

And I’m not claiming to have all the answers. I don’t know how to ethically think about differing capacities for suffering. But to basically project adult human capacity for suffering onto every creature with any possibility of any level of consciousness is just factually wrong and morally atrocious. (see: Walter Veit) 

If we take suffering seriously, we need to do the hard thing, leave the binary world, and admit uncertainty and shades of grey. 

The Precautionary Principle

“But Creature X (bees, shrimps, nematodes, face mites, oysters) might suffer. So we need to work for Creature X’s welfare.”

At first glance, this seems reasonable. If I had to bet, I’d say this is probably why some shrimpers overtly lie. (Others, though, when called out on the lies, just continue on – it is good for business (e.g., clicks and subscriptions). I think most shrimpers, though, just believe what the liars say.)

However, the real-world consequences of the precautionary principle are significant and cruel. 

Giving every animal equal moral weight (or, worse, expected-valuing the sum of possible suffering) leads directly and inevitably towards more actual severe suffering. Example: one advocate has argued against welfare reforms for chickens. In a world where chickens are not as severely tortured on factory farms, more nematodes “suffer.” 

That is the simple mathematical “truth” that comes from assuming consciousness is binary, projecting our mind on everything animated, and then giving all motion equal moral weight (and/or expected valuing morality). 

More importantly and more subtly sinister: There is a finite pool of resources and attention committed to addressing the severe suffering in the world. Every minute and every dollar spent on, say, The Shrimp Bet (to use Rob’s phrase) is a minute and dollar not spent alleviating actual, unquestioned, unnecessary severe suffering. 

Turning our back on torture.

In our world, we can’t truly take suffering seriously and also throw time and money at creatures that science says probably don’t suffer (again: Rob), and, even if conscious, are physiologically incapable of anything resembling 86-billion-neuron suffering. 

(We also insult those who are suffering when we believe and/ or promote provocateurs who knowingly lie and “morally” bully others; footnote here.)

Despite our various disagreements, I’ll give Rob the last word:

A final friction is practical: shrimp welfare is, unavoidably, a bet. If penaeid shrimp turn out not to be sentient, which I think is a plausible read given current evidence, the direct welfare impact collapses to near zero (leaving only indirect spillovers like better standards). That’s a different kind of intervention from high-certainty cases, where the same dollars almost certainly reduce felt suffering, and such funding is desperately needed. That trade-off matters.

More

• The Shrimp Bet (Rob Velzeboer)
• Confidence Levels or Degrees of Sentience? (Walter Veit)
• What Is Consciousness? With Many Links (Part 1)
• Consciousness Part 2: Where I Part Ways with Most of My Readers + My Doubts

Sunday Funny: You are my everything

 From Dave Barry's latest*:

The blame must be placed squarely on the same phenomenon that is also causing virtually every other major problem humanity is dealing with these days, including droughts, floods, heat waves, hurricanes, blizzards, El Niño (Spanish for “The Nino”), tornados, earthquakes, inflation, the housing shortage, influencers, TV-lawyer ads, two-factor authentication and explosive diarrhea. I am referring, of course, to Global Climate Change™.

Except, of course, the one thing that actually is being driven in part by increased levels of carbon dioxide. From Hannah Ritchie's newsletter that appeared at the same time as Barry's, there is more food because of the evil carbon:

Yes, I'm guilty of a lot. But I don't claim every ill in the world could be solved by veganism. Just the opposite.

*Barry's linked column is about smoke from Canada's wildfires. From Vox's Bryan Walsh:

Burned area worldwide during the 2025-26 fire season came in 18 percent below the 2002-2024 average, and as the [below] chart shows, carbon emissions from fires globally in the first half of 2026 were the lowest since satellites started measuring nearly a quarter century ago, coming in at roughly half their early-2000s level.

Weekend Reading: The Monkey's Paw, Chernobyl, Quantum

• Be careful what you wish for (Ben Carlson, re: the economy)
  
  
• Few people know how much medicine has progressed in their lifetimes. Fewer know how much faster it could be progressing. (Saloni Dattani, Works in Progress)
  
  
• The Lie We Told Ourselves About Chernobyl (Scott Grout)
  
  
• You Are Wrong About Negative Utilitarianism (Overmuser, quite in-the-weeds philosophy, but if you loved Biting the Philosophical Bullet...)

And this is funny 'cuz its true:

“You know you’re admitting failure, right?”

There is a constructive point to this first section, I promise. It isn’t just “cranky old man shakes fist at cloud.” There is an actionable, not-entirely-self-serving conclusion.

Objective Reality

“You know you’re admitting failure, right?”
-Feedback on the post How Hard Is It to Actually Help Farmed Animals? 

Yes. 100% true.

That is why the subtitle of Losing My Religions is “A half-failed life...” 

I’m not fishing for compliments. I’m stating a simple fact. In the ~40 years since I stopped eating animals, the 35 years since I was arrested at a protest, the 33 years since I co-founded an animal advocacy organization, 23 years since the first version of “A Meaningful Life,” and the 12 years since we formed One Step for Animals, things have gotten objectively and significantly worse for non-human animals by any reasonable measure. 

Yet every single year, animal advocates send fundraising pleas proclaiming, “We’re winning!” I wrote many of those.* 

“Why are you telling me this?”

To answer that, it is important to understand that I am always in pain. 

The serious suffering I’ve experienced has, as discussed elsewhere, stripped away the hypotheticals and abstractions that used to be my motivations. My experiences with pain have provided clarity, showing me what really matters.** 

My bottom line – that is, what I get when I ask “Why?” all the way down – is that serious suffering sucks. 

Not veganism. Not animal liberation. Not utilitarianism. Just:

Serious suffering sucks. 

At least when it comes to other animals, I don’t believe we can really reduce serious suffering unless and until:

• Reducing serious suffering is our singular priority.
  
• We are honest about the state of the world.

We need to face facts if we want to have any chance at changing them.

One Step’s Failure, and My Broader Failure

One Step has failed to move the needle since 2014. This was inevitable. A few hundred dollars a day has no chance of creating a signal. 

However, over the past 30+ years, I’ve been a part of three multi-multi-million-dollar per year organizations:

1. Every dollar I raised for the first organization made the world a worse place, on net, for the reasons outlined here. 
   
   
2. Every dollar I helped raise for the second was, at best, wasted. For all intents and purposes, that group exists to raise money so it can raise more money. 
   
   
3. The third organization has made very specific “In five years” and “In ten years” promises and predictions since they were founded. I was never in a leadership position in my years there. However, I was the group’s public face on a number of occasions, and I made (and believed) those promises. Every single prediction has failed to materialize; things are actually significantly worse than when I made those promises. 

“WTF is your point?”

Three things:

1. It is incredibly hard to actually help farmed animals. Passion and outrage aren’t enough.
   
   
2. Most things we animal advocates say and do end up causing more serious suffering.
   That post was originally published in 2014, picking up on points we originally made in the 1990s. (That link was sent to me a few days ago.***)
   It remains true today that what we say and do generally leads to more serious suffering.
   That is why the first of One Step’s two guiding principles is: “Avoid advocacy that has any possibility of leading individuals to replace red meat with chickens.”
   
   
3. To date, only welfare reforms have actually made a real difference in reducing the most severe suffering.  

The clearest take-away is that, at the very least, we should not spend our time attacking those pursuing welfare reforms. [Duh.] In addition, all things being equal, the pursuit of welfare reforms should be the focus of our time and resources.

Possible self-delusion warning.

However, I’m not 100% sure that all things are equal at the moment. Many, many tens of millions of dollars are flowing into the most effective groups pursuing welfare reforms. Several of the key people in this space are expecting many more millions.

Fingers crossed. 

The Impact of a Marginal Dollar, 2026

Given the current and probable future distribution of resources, I think it is at least plausible that a marginal dollar to One Step for Animals could perhaps do more good than another marginal dollar to welfare reforms. It could be that a marginal dollar making the #teamchicken harm-reduction message to more people is worth consideration. 

I don’t have any evidence I expect you to believe. The evidence we have was gathered was to see if our message might be driving the shift to eating smaller animals. “First, do no harm.” The data are at least directionally positive; the same is true of this year’s Spanish survey. 

Over the decades, I’ve seen many organizations make many claims of efficacy and impact. Again, I made many of these claims. Sorry.

If any of those claims were remotely true, the many millions of dollars donated to veg advocacy would have made a positive impact.* Yet the bottom-line data shows just the opposite.

Trust me: No one is more skeptical of veg advocacy claims than I am. 

But if we are ever to lower the number of sentient beings being factory farmed, we will need to do more than welfare reforms. At the moment, I don’t currently know a better way to try to bend the curve than One Step’s “do no harm” harm-reduction message.

* p. 299

If promoting veganism worked – if the next leaflet, book, video, movie, website was really going to make a difference – we would have seen it by now.

How do I know? Because I did the projections. Decades ago, I calculated what would happen if every vegan converted just one other person every five years. Have we seen anything like that? 

No.

When Animal Charity Evaluators did the most thorough metastudy of surveys about vegetarianism and veganism, they found: “Around 1% of adults both self-identify as vegetarians and report never consuming meat. [This is important because many people call themselves “vegetarian” but still eat meat.] It seems that this percentage has not changed substantially since the mid-1990s.”

** Example 1, from 2016:

Once, I was in so much pain that I slowly passed out. Other times, I've actually wanted to die. Several times, the pain was so much and had gone on for so long that I experienced a breakdown.

This acute suffering seems to me to be different in kind to my back pain, which can fade into the background at times. In contrast, I can't be distracted from or acclimate to the acute pain – it breaks me down.

I think about chickens on modern factory farms in the same way. They have been selectively bred to grow absurdly fast and large. As Professor of Veterinary Medicine John Webster has written, “Broilers are the only livestock that are in chronic pain for the last 20 percent of their lives. They don’t move around, not because they are overstocked, but because it hurts their joints so much.” 

Example 2, from Letter to a Young Matt in The Accidental Activist:

The single most important lesson I’ve learned in the past twenty years is that the irreducible heart of what matters is suffering. Back then, even though I was absolutely sure I knew everything, I really didn’t know anything about suffering. Since then, though, I’ve developed a chronic disease and experienced times when I thought I was going to die, times when I wished I would die. Back then, I worried about abstractions and words and principles; I argued about exploitation, oppression, liberation. I didn’t take suffering seriously. Now, knowing what suffering really is, and knowing how much there is in the world, all my previous concerns seem, well ... to put it kindly ... ridiculous.

I don’t know how I could convey this to my younger self, who had never really known suffering. Yet it seems clear to me now that when we make a decision, we should decide based on what leads to the least amount of suffering. This is the bottom line: that something is good and right and ethical if it causes less suffering than the alternatives.

***A message via Substack, Aug. 8, 2026:

I am doing a small research project on moral cluelessness and as part of that I'm investigating the origins of the Small Animal Replacement Problem [SARP]. The earliest mention of it that I can find is this article [from] 1999. [We made that point before. I actually was worried about that in the 80s, as discussed on p. 266 here.]

I'm curious:

1. Was this argument original to the three of you? Do you know if there was any discussion of it before 1999?

2. Do you have a sense for how surprising it is that it took so long to discover SARP? For example if there were a bunch of careful deliberative researchers thinking about animal advocacy strategies, it might be pretty surprising that the first mention of this problem is 20 years after Animal Liberation was published. But if the animal advocacy movement consisted of people who were very passionate but not particularly reflective about tactics then it is perhaps not so surprising that it took a while for SARP to be discovered.

Some Chicken Stuff + Song, August 2026

Austin Meyer and We Animals, a wonderful 19-minute documentary: The Chicken Whisperer.
Please share with anyone you know who eats chickens but might be willing to watch at least a little bit of this. 

Lewis Bollard: The [potential] AI Windfall: New AI money could bring a step-change for factory-farmed animals - if we spend it well
Lewis' piece is not entirely about chickens, but an optimistic take about a possible future. I'll have more to say about this Wednesday. 

Finally, a very beautiful song about nostalgia by Mary Chapin Carpenter: Chasing What's Already Gone.

The Simpsons Tried to Warn Us, part 47

Happy preface: This week's Good New from Vox. 

From 30 years ago:

The more things change....