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Comment by pyre | Hacker News Reader

As long as we can all agree not to get complacent, it's a step in the right direction. Arguing that people need to go form 0 to 60 in under a second isn't going to get us anywhere.

For example, if you want to convince someone to become a vegan, which path is more likely to succeed:

  Omnivore => Vegan

or:

  Omnivore => Vegetarian => Vegan

or even:

  Omnivore => No red meat => Only fish => Vegetarian => Vegan

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On the other hand.. what's easier, convincing someone to change a habit once, or convincing them four times?

Some diet habits are harder to persuade, and many won't stick with them. So anything is something.

anything is something

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_optimum

pyre assumes (and I agree with him) that the difficulty (D) of convincing someone to change the habit satisfies:

D(Omnivore => Vegan) > D(Omnivore => No red meat) + D(No red meat => Only fish) + D(Only fish => Vegetarian) + D(Vegetarian => Vegan)

Often intermediate steps are significantly easier to implement than just implementing the end result. It's the same reason for which people tend to break big scary tasks into sequence of many easier ones.

That's a fascinating question! Do you know many vegans? I know a lot of them, and I'd say on the order of 75% of them went directly from omnivore to vegan.

They hadn't thought about the ethics of meat before, when they did, they chose to be vegan.

So it turns out (in my experience) telling rational people "do the thing that makes sense, even if it's a little extreme" is much more likely to result in the most extreme change of behavior. But we're deep into anecdotal/psychological theory land here, so I claim no authority beyond N=30 vegans.

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