## Promotional factory farming photos

180 words

Organizations like Mercy for Animals do undercover investigations of factory farms to expose the bad circumstances there. That results in photos like these, intended to make factory farms look bad.

TW: animal cruelty, continued below the fold.

## Abstinence-Only Education Criticism | Part 2

172 words

Due to recent events, here is a part 2 to my earlier post on abstinence “treatment”. Slightly more personal this time.

### Eating Disorders

Reddit just banned /r/ProED and /r/ProEDmemes. I’m not sure what to say, other than that it sucks.

I’ve never had an eating disorder. I’ve flirted with it and my eating has never been healthy, but it has never interfered with my day-to-day functioning.

I liked ProEDmemes. Many posts were relatable, and the community has helped me through some dark spots. The people were lovely and caring, it was a place to relate and to vent. It wasn’t a place where eating disorders were encouraged, but one where eating disorders were accepted and everyone could work it out on their own pace, sharing and receiving help along the way.

Reddit is really convenient. You can easily participate in many different communities at once, so any single community can survive even when little fresh content gets posted. But for vulnerable communities, it doesn’t work so well.

I miss the old internet.

## Veg*n dishes versus constrained optimization

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Mathematical optimization is concerned with  problems of the form $$\text{maximize~} f(x) \text{~ for ~} x \in X$$ for some set $X \subset Y$ and function $f : Y \to \mathbb{R}$. In this post, we’ll think of $Y$ as the set of possible restaurant dishes, $X\subset Y$ as the set of dishes satisfying certain constraints like being digestible, non-poisonous and not containing human flesh. The function $f$ to optimize is some combination of price, healthyness and taste.

A first observation is that for any $X' \subset X$ the maximum of $f(x)$ over $X'$ is no bigger than the maximum over $X$, for if $x \in X'$ attains the maximum of $f(x)$ over $X'$, then also $x \in X$, so the maximum of $f$ over $X$ is at least $f(x)$. In normal words, if you restrict your diet, you can miss out on good dishes, but never gain access to better dishes than on an unrestricted diet.

From this, we could deduce that you should never pick a vegan dish in a restaurant because the non-vegan dishes were made with fewer restrictions and hence can only be better than the vegan dish. Same for choosing recipes to cook yourself. Before I was vegan, this was my conscious reason for always choosing dishes with meat.

But is the deduction true? I don’t think so. Because, unbeknownst to many, the meat dishes are actually constrained to contain meat. I don’t know why, but my two prime suspects are Goodhart’s law impacting the reasoning above, or meat-eaters being scared of vegetables.

As it turns out, making a good vegetarian meal takes non-zero skill, contrary to making a good meal with meat. In my experience, this causes chefs to put actual thought into their vegetarian dishes, causing these to actually be tastier than most dishes with meat. So the argument from mathematical optimization actually gives the wrong answer here!