Sam Bankman-Fried: preference

Transcript context

…Eat Swiss cows. Isn’t that a moral imperative? First answer is, I have no problem with people eating happy meat. If it really is net happy, that is fine with me. I don’t personally do it. The reason I don’t personally do it is, basically, it’s too confusing for me — the cognitive load. When I was first trying to go vegetarian and then vegan, it took me six months to make any progress. It was really unpleasant. I made no progress at all for six months. Basically, each day, I’d go to the cafeteria and be like, “What good vegetarian thing do I want to eat?” Think for four minutes, and then get a steak and cheese sandwich. That didn’t go so well. Then, finally, one day I was with my friend who had just gone vegetarian. A mutual friend said, “Oh, hey, are you vegetarian now?” To them they said, “Yes.” I was eating tofu that night, and she said, “Oh, you’re a vegetarian, too?” I said, “Yes. ” I’d had a burger for lunch that day, so “yes” was not a factually supported answer at that time, but I have not eaten meat since. It was way easier for me once I went cold turkey than it was for me to try to wean myself off it because the cognitive load of every time that I went to eat, having to decide what I could and couldn’t eat and should and shouldn’t eat was just overwhelming me. It’s way easier to say, “Yeah, I don’t eat meat.” It’s a similar thing here. I don’t want to have to sit down at the dinner table and think for 30 minutes about what life a particular animal lived and whether it was net positive or net negative. For me, in particular, that’s a big cost. I would prefer just not to eat meat than to have to go through that process. But I don’t, in principle, have a problem with that. The other thing I will say is that — and this is specific to the environment today; this needn’t be true — but today, almost all meat is inhumane meat. If you look by count, a very, very tiny fraction of it is actually happy. Again, that doesn’t need to be true necessarily. You could imagine a world where most meat was happy meat. We just don’t happen to live in it. That’s another reason that, right now, it just wouldn’t buy you that much. That might change in 20 years. I think there are real interesting questions like, between humanely raised meat, synthetic meat, and fake meat products — what the race between those three will look like. Should a Benthamite be risk-neutral with regard to social welfare?…

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