Elise Andrew and the annoying vegans

I think that it's a really good thing that "I Fucking Love Science" exists.

One of the most important things to understand about the human psyche is that people are playing identity games all the time. To humans, things like facts are secondary compared to our need to identify with the people and the things that we consider socially good. Socially, we want to be on the winning side, and in most cases, we want to be normal. When we don't want to be normal, we want to be one of the cool dissidents. More than anything else, we want to be a part of a group that we consider socially better than the other groups.

Therefore it's great that we now have a popular Facebook page presenting science as something neat. "Loving science" has become a "cool" thing to do. "Geekiness" is something that people want to identify themselves with. This is nice, because it means that there are more people than ever before interested in scientific progress.

But there's one quite problematic thing about IFLS that many have started to notice over the past months.

One thing is that in the IFLS universe, things like factory farming simply don't exist. They do publish important articles like this one, but all in all, the animal industry is never mentioned. They write about climate change, but they systematically ignore the meat industry's role in it.

The fact that other animals are conscious like us is scientific reality, so it would make sense to at least mention that we currently have an industry that's producing and, well, torturing hundreds of billions of them when we could, well, simply eat something else.

This is happening and it would make sense to say something about it.

I mean: you have the power to really educate people about these things and make things better.

Still, the silence is understandable. You know, you can just sincerely forget to mention things. The more alarming thing is that, over the past months, IFLS has actually published a couple of really shaky anti-vegan articles. They've either been silly pseudoscience easy to debunk, or the article has presented actual scientific findings in a way that turns the whole thing into something that the scientists never said. You can't justify this by later explaining that you were just kind of joking. You know that people are reading it as factual information.

The person behind the page is Elise Andrew. People – vegans and omnivores alike – have asked her to explain why I Fucking Love Science is publishing such unscientific stuff when it comes to the subject of veganism. This is where we get to the most alarming thing: Andrew's reaction.

I saw a guy ask Andrew to explain her motives, and very elegantly and appropriately reminding her that with IFLS, she really has the power to make a difference in terms of animal welfare. Elise Andrew's response? "Fuck off."

When people discussed the matter on Andrew's personal Facebook page, she actually deleted the comments that disagreed with her viewpoint. Deleted. For example, someone named Michael Fry-White commented:

"Not vegan, but admirable of them. They make a pretty large sacrifice for their beliefs. How about letting them be? Eventually we will live in an animal-meat free world and you people will sound like my South African friend's racist grandparents, only your comments immortalized on the internet."

A very good comment... Deleted.

Considering that Richard Dawkins is one of Andrew's heroes, it would be interesting to know what she thinks of the fact that Dawkins' opinion on meat-eating is pretty similar to the view expressed by Michael in the comments section:

"I would like everybody to be a vegetarian", says Richard. "In 100 or 200 years time, we may look back on the way we treated animals today as something like we today look back on the way our forefathers treated slaves."

I think that this is rather inevitable. It's only a question of when. The job of activists is to make the change as easy and fast as possible.

As for Andrew, the question is why. Why the... hmm, emotionally charged response to the topic of veganism? The cynical answer is that she's apparently working for a company that profits from animal testing. Another possibility is that she's simply annoyed by vegans. A lot of people are. Really, when the whole society is kicking dogs in the head, the person who refuses to kick dogs in the head is annoying; they're making you question your own actions. More importantly, they're making you question your own identity. You identify as a "good person", and it's like they're saying that they're better than you. That is uncomfortable, and uncomfortable easily turns into annoying.

In any case, it is dangerous when one person's human irrationalities affect the way a page this popular presents scientific information. As humans we are full of irrationalities, all of us, but in this case we're talking about a page that reaches millions and millions of people every day. You can't escape the huge responsibility by simply telling people to fuck off.

I don't, however, think that posting a couple of silly articles is that dangerous. All in all, IFLS are doing a great job. They're educating people about many extremely important issues. They're making science cool. I just really, really, really hope that the future is brighter and that posting a couple of silly articles wasn't just a start for something that could actually harm the planet and its animals.

I believe in Elise Andrew. She's smart as hell, and I'm pretty sure she's good too. So I'm not actually expecting things to get worse... It's just that you can never know.

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P.S.

Andrew says that vegans have "threatened to kill her". Now, I don't know if this is true, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was. There are lunatics in every social movement, and I'm painfully aware of the fact that there are quite a lot of people in the animal rights movement acting in idiotic ways. Calling people murderers and just generally being stupid.

Acting idiotically is understandable in this case. You realize what's going on, and you realize that most people are actively ignoring what's going on and mocking you when you try to speak up. When things are this fucked up, it's easy to respond with aggression.

But the aggression isn't helping the animals at all. Jesus, how I wish that animal rights activists stopped behaving in ways that only make the situation worse for the animals. Activists should

1) realize that their own irrational human psyche is sometimes making them behave in ways that make effective activism impossible,

2) realize that understanding the mechanisms of the human psyche is the key to making the animal rights movement mainstream.

What we're doing now isn't working. -> Let's do something else.

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P.P.S.

I hope that activists realize how important it is to get the pop science people on our side. Maybe 20-30 years from now I Fucking Love Science won't exist anymore, but there'll at least be something similar, and we'll probably live in a world where cultured meat has become a reality. With cultured meat it will be, socially and psychologically, a LOT easier to get people on our side. Popular science media could play an important role in introducing the product to the public and countering the pseudoscience of the animal industry. The animal industry will be frightened, and they will be aggressive, and we need someone to stand up for the facts.

So. Let's not be stupid now.