Hacker News Reader

Comment by fnovd | Hacker News Reader

The title seems misleading to me. According to the article:

>A third-of people abandoned their animal-free diets in three months or less, and more than half abandoned it within the first year.

Are you really a vegan or vegetarian if you break in 3 months? In 1 year? Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that 1 in 5 people who attempt to go vegan/vegetarian succeed?

I'm a vegan and I'm active in my local vegan/vegetarian community. There are two camps: people who do it for ethical reasons and people who do it for for health. People who do it for health usually give up and move on to whatever fad diet becomes popular. People who subscribe to the ethics rarely quit. We have a saying: there's no such thing as a former vegan. Just someone who tried the diet.

View on HN

Long time vegan here. While I think that saying has some truth to it, there are also those that sympathize with the ethics, try it out for a short while, but find the pressure of social backlash too costly. The biggest problem isn't nutrition; It's ingroup/outgroup policing (predominantly by the vast majority of non-vegans).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQUo53o6QXg#t=0m30s (strawman opening skipiped) is clearly an exaggeration, but highlights the uncomfortable reality of being "the different one" at the dinner table.

This isn't limited solely to vegetarians/vegans. Any diet that goes against your social group is difficult. Take keto/low-carb diets. It's amazing how snacks and foods I've been offered from friends and family that are just pure sugar.

I think that's true, but the same statistics of people on diet can be found, and I think (without any statistics of my own) that culture and group mentality plays a role there as well.

I can believe that the social piece is harder. I am not even vegetarian, but I eat less meat than I did growing up. Yet, I have had my meat-and-potatoes family of origin label me vegetarian because not all meals contain meat these days.

However, I do think one reason vegetarians, especially vegans, get so much social flack is because they typically position themselves as morally superior to meat eaters. I know one incredibly toxic vegan whom I wish would just make the world a better place by kindly dropping dead. In addition to being high handed, she is inconsistent, hypocritical and generally assholish to the max. She is the vegan version of the hellfire-and-brimstone Christians I knew growing up in the Bible Belt who made me feel like "If my choice is to sit next to you in church or go to hell, I will take hell." On top of all her other BS, she isn't even a committed vegan. She is a convenient vegan who promptly adds cheese to her diet periodically for REASONS, all while looking down her morally superior nose at everyone around her.

If you want to be vegan, cool beans. Good for you. But you might get less social flack as a group if you took a different approach (as a group) to how you talk about that choice and how you treat other people who aren't vegan.

I totally hear you on that, though I'd add that the overly zealous are invariably new to it. In-group policing among vegans tends to moderate that vitriol within a few months.

I wonder (now that I'm thinking back on instances of "the new and the loud" I've known in my decades) whether some adopt veganism /specifically/ to have an issue to be loud about. When that behaviour is rejected from both the in and out groups, they move on to some other issue. Certainly lines up with some I've seen... I dunno, just spit-balling here.

Maybe not specifically to be loud about, but I do think it appeals to some people specifically to be able to claim or feel a sense of moral superiority. I was molested as a child and spent some years wanting to be vegetarian in part due to wanting to find some means to feel "pure." I am hardly unique in having grown up with a lot of emotional baggage. Most people are raised with either a shame or a guilt model. I think trying to find some resolution for having had that hung on them is a big motivator for a great many life choices in the world.

I'm a vegetarian and have found the "policing" isn't bad, but that's because vegetarianism is comparatively easy for everybody to accommodate through horrifying amounts of cheese.

This is a text-book example of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Is it, though? I mean, I can see the similarity, but ethical veg*nism does exist outside of the dietary practice. You don't need to subscribe to the ethics to partake in the diet. We lack the words to distinguish between and ethical vegan and a for-health vegan, but that doesn't mean they aren't distinct groups.

Does it matter?

What difference does it make if someone who's been a vegan for 3 months calls themself a vegan? Are they "harming the movement" by doing so? If partaking in the diet doesn't require you to subscribe to the ethics, as you say, then the label should just be a label: someone who doesn't eat animal products. No time frame or reasoning attached.

It's like the difference between a long-term member and someone on a trial membership. There is a difference.

When does someone become a true Scotsman then?

When they are past a typical dropout date.

It does matter. It's the same with Jews, for example. You can be religiously Jewish but not ethnically, or ethnically Jewish but atheist, or you can be both. But they remain distinct concepts.

And yet you managed to convey that information with just one extra qualifying word. Unless you consider one of them isn't really a Jew, shouldn't both share the title equally? If more information is required, use more words.

Exactly. I've been a vegan for thirty minutes. In fact, I'm vegan almost all the time, with the exception of a few minutes per day!

I honestly think it's reasonable to attach a minimum time frame to a word like this, otherwise it gets a bit hard to know what people mean when they speak. Whether one year is a good choice I don't know, but a minimum is required.

>minimum is required

Can you expand on this? If there are two people in front of you, one who has been a vegan for 20 years, the other for 2 weeks, what is the real difference between them, how does that time difference change your interaction with them?

To put it another way, why does one word have to apply to one and not the other because of some inherent time requirement? English, in particular, as a language is inherently vague, and we rarely make this time requirement distinction for other words that describe people.

If I just graduated from the police academy I'm a "cop", just like how the 30 year veteran detective sergeant is a "cop". No, we aren't the same, since the latter has far more experience, but that doesn't mean that only one deserves the title. It just means we use additional qualifiers ("30 year veteran detective sergeant") to elaborate on what type of cop he or she is.

The difference is, becoming a chip takes certification by an institution. Very unlike being vegan.

Personally I'd set a minimum of a year.

So then what do vegans call themselves before that point? "Vegan in training"? "Vegan junior"? "Planning to be a vegan"? "I don't eat meat or animal products, but I'm not a vegan because I haven't put in the hours yet"?

I'm being pedantic on purpose here because the idea of some minimum time requirement to call yourself a vegan is one of the most pedantic things I've ever heard, and supports the stereotypical characterization of vegans being overall pains in the ass.

I'm inclined to agree with you regarding this not necessarily being a no-true-Scotsman fallacy. I think there is a meaningful difference between proclaiming to be veg*n, and proclaiming to be trying it.

I wonder what proportion of the cohort here were in each group.

Only in that no true Scotsman would change their citizenship to a different country

I think I agree with your diagnosis. A counterpoint: when I went to Singapore I heard that the Chinese community distinguished "temporary" vegetarianism from "full-time" vegetarianism, both normally for religious reasons. (I imagine these are translations of Chinese terms.)

From what I understand, many people may make a religious vow or commitment to eat vegetarian for a specific period of time (for good luck or out of gratitude for a benefit they received) and then commonly eat meat again after that period of time has expired. I wouldn't be inclined to say that these people "are vegetarians" in my western sense, any more than I would say Eastern Orthodox Christians "are vegetarians" when meeting them during their fasting days or seasons.

I disagree. It would be, if one got Scottish nationality upon declaration (and then half abandoned it within 6 months).

Many vegans/vegetarians would accept you to their "club" only after being on probation for a year or two.

It's analogous to saying "most martial artists quit in less than a year". For some definition of "martial artist" that may well be true, but it wouldn't be a definition acceptable to those who actually practice.

> Many vegans/vegetarians would accept you to their "club" only after being on probation for a year or two.

So, gatekeeping instead? "You're not a real X unless Y," where "Y" changes to keep out the undesirables.

"You're not a real programmer unless you can do Dijkstra's on a whiteboard from memory."

"You're not a real vegetarian unless you don't eat meat for at least as long as I have."

Surely there's some definition that's reasonable.

You will not be accepted as a programmer until you've written some code; or as an athlete until you've done some nontrivial athletic stuff. Why should othe categories be different?

The Scotsman fallacy would apply if we considered a guy who tried to emigrate to Scotland but then couldn't get citizenship and then went home to be a Scotsman.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gatekeeping/ might fit even better.

No, it's not. Vegetarianism describes a specific set of well-defined behaviors. If you don't adhere to the schedule of those behaviors, then you're not a vegetarian. "No true Scotsman" is about "changing the definition in an ad hoc fashion to exclude the counterexample."

That doesn't apply here.

We're starting and ending with the same definition.

I did a MMA class once, so I must be a MMA fighter.

You left out a third camp - people who know how meat is manufactured, and won't touch what comes out of that process with a hundred foot pole.

That's one kind of ethical reason.

It can be, but I would assume from the organic movement that for others it is a belief in healthiness of unprocessed food.

and the 4th camp - minimalists. I find making what I call "healthy cutbacks" incredibly empowering. 2 years ago I stopped eating fish and meat and it was surprisingly easy, so I had to find another challenge. Then I heard about Wim Hof, (the Ice man) and I stopped having warm showers. I have to admit, I don't look forward to those icey blasts every morning but I feel great after I get out and have a coffee. A few months ago, I stopped having lunch during the week, despite regularly running and swimming during the day. I often eat nothing for 12 hours and feel much more alert and in control. Instead of having a couple of beers after work, I now only drink one glass of wine (a fine one). But god help me if I don't get that one glass after a hard day of self imposed deprivation! Recently I decided to learn a new cross-platform programming language, perhaps no surprise - I chose ANSI C.

Quitting smoking has an incredibly high failure rate, but the overall smoking rate has declined massively. Most smokers repeatedly relapse before eventually quitting for good. I'm not suggesting that meat is addictive, but I think it's dangerous to assume that relapse is a sign of failure rather than simply an intermediate stage on the path of behavioural change.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com