Scott Alexander, curated
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Vegetarianism for Meat-Eaters

Quality
69
Strong
Claude Shift
50
Moderate
RWI
3
of 10

Summary

Practical EA/animal-welfare essay with two ideas (credited to Galef/Tomasik/Grace). (1) Eat beef, not chicken: a cow yields ~405k calories and a chicken ~3k, so switching a 50-50 meat diet to all-beef cuts animals-killed ~98% (and ~99% weighting chickens' worse suffering) -- a genuinely influential, exported insight. (2) Ethics offsets: donate to effective animal charities to be 'animal-neutral' for cents/year, with an economic argument that the offset price already prices in people preferring to donate rather than convert. **PARTIAL RETRACTION**: section 2 carries an EDIT flag ('SERIOUS PROBLEMS WITH THIS SECTION, SEE MISTAKES PAGE') -- Scott later disavowed the ethics-offsets argument. Scored on merit for the still-sound, influential beef-not-chicken half, docked for the disavowed offsets half + Med conf.

Why this score

Quality 69 · Strong. The beef-not-chicken argument is a genuinely useful, widely-exported EA insight that has plausibly changed real consumption; but the substantial ethics-offsets section is disavowed. On-merit Strong, docked to high-Solid/low-Strong + Med conf for the partial retraction.

Claude’s paradigm shift 50 · Moderate. Moderate. The beef-not-chicken framing and the offset-pricing economics were fresh, exported applications in 2015, though the core ideas are credited to others.

Real-world impact 3 · Moderate. The 'eat beef not chicken' argument became a widely-exported EA/animal-welfare heuristic that plausibly shifted some real consumption choices — modest but genuine material reach tied to a consequential topic, beyond pure discourse → RWI 3.