Yes, these vegans are as irrational as people who refuse to eat human meat. “Ethical implications”, or whatever irrational thing they say.

I just need one reason to do something: it feels good, that’s how you know you’re being rational.

On giving guesses: you could just give the strategy you think will be the most effective in helping and then pair the strategy with motivations if you think it’s still necessary. That way you can really help OP be the most effective. If you don’t do that, just sounds like you wanna critique and whine about OP’s motivations.

On the motivations behind the same actions having different consequences: you are correct, it really sounds like you’ve avoided the question. When people have read and understood books, they usually are able to bring the argument in themselves.

Here I’ll give you a simple counter-example of the exact same act with two different motivators and the same consequence:

Person A wants to help and asks person B in some specific way: “Do you wanna learn how to read?” The result is: Person B answers yes.

Person A wants to look good and asks person B in the same specific way: “Do you wanna learn how to read?”. The result is: Person B answers yes.

Even if the motivation behind the same exact act would change the consequences, you’d have to demonstrate that’s true instead of vaguely pointing at literature.

Just use your interpretation of best when you said “better” advice in your original comment. Seems like the metric towards “best” is “more likely to actually help”.

Also, you can give a few example of motivations that would end up with the strategies most likely to actually work. Maybe OP didn’t think of these motivations themselves, but they would adopt when you state them out loud for us.

But coming back to my main point, I still don’t see how the motivation could dictate strategies most likely to help.

Even with the “worst” motivation, why couldn’t OP apply the “best” strategy towards helping?

because that informs strategies for helping

I asked how so

Agreed, also recommend doing this completely in private so they don’t feel like there may be other people listening to your offer.

Why are you questioning the motivation behind someone trying to do a selfless act? An act that could even be described as altruistic. How does knowing OP’s motivation helps you and OP convince their relative?

I’m just asking questions so I can help you help OP.

To expand a bit on stubbornness: as I’ve said in another comment, invest your time on people who agree with the basic idea of your position but disagree with the conclusion.

When you go talk to those people, avoid telling your opinion. Use the Socratic method to make them walk step by step towards the conclusion (see this video, pay attention to how he poses open ended questions). This way, it’s the interlocutor arriving at their own conclusion instead of you pushing your ideas on them.

Keep in mind that whenever you start debating, you’ve lost the opportunity to make them see what you see. Debates are only useful if the target of your activism is someone listening to the debate.

There are some people that low hanging fruits and are much more prone to change. These will be the ones who already agree with some basic aspect of the view your trying to show them. For example, say you’re trying to show people veganism is the way to go. Then you try to outreach people who agree with the pillar of the idea: needlessly exploiting animals is wrong. If the person disagrees with the cornerstone of the idea you’re trying to instill, is worthless to continue the conversation. There will be plenty more agreeable people.

Investing your time on these targets will make much easier to change the Overton window and from there, with enough activists, some sort of snowball effect should start occurring. Like the civil rights movement or the suffragists in the US.

As I’ve said in the above comment, hand pollination is not the only alternative. Fixing this problem is a bridge we’ll cross when most people are on board with veganism.

Lower density only means lower production of the usable land remains the same. Which would not be the case if the world became vegan: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

Thanks for conceding. Now to your new point: once the majority of people are vegan, we can focus on those systems that can be improved. Currently the majority does not even care about animal exploitation, so there’s very little value in trying to change systems that don’t depend on animal exploitation.

Those two counter examples that I provided aren’t all possibilities to replace open pollination. Surely experts in the field can come up with better solutions once this problem actually becomes a worry in the minds of the majority.

Oh honey, I have no idea

Do those crops depend on transportation of pollinators? To me it seems like they don’t.

By your own admission, there are natural pollinators. We can also manually pollinate them, which reinforces my point that systems that *contain* exploitation should be improved.

Males are still killed at 1 day old.

Domesticated chickens were bred to lay about 1 egg a day when their wild counterpart lay about 1 egg per month. That’s a huge toll on their body.

You seem to care and go out of your way to avoid needless suffering. Fortunately it’s easy to stop supporting animal exploitation.

Animal manure as fertilizer in farming. We can use fertilizers that don’t depend on animals to be made.

Cows need to be impregnated by introducing an arm in their anus and holding their cervix so they can introduce a rod with semen in their uterus.

Male cows and chickens are useless to the industry so they usually get killed soon after birth.

Chickens usually are kept in cages the size of an A4 paper, cows also usually are very badly treated in order to be milked. Check out https://3minutes.wtf/ so you can see that even what the industry calls the “best animal treatment” is still very inhumane.

It’s a common viewpoint among vegans that systems that depend on animal exploitation should be abolished. On the other hand, systems that contain animal exploitation should be improved.

I’ll give two examples with human animals so it can be clear: Slavery? Should be abolished. People getting ran over and killed by cars? We should improve that.

There’s nothing stopping a malicious user from doing that right now. Be aware that anyone who wants can already see your votes.

We already depend on trusting instances for a lot of what’s going on here, I don’t see why we shouldn’t be able to defederate untrusted ones.